Recently it has been reported by Reuters that Shopify, one of the largest hosted e-commerce platforms available on the market is cracking down on vape products being sold on the platform by many of it’s merchants. This comes from pressure from the US authorities to crack down on the sale of illegal vapes which are dangerous and should not be sold at all.

However, with it being incredibly difficult to ensure a shop is only selling legal vapes, it seems Shopify is taking the stance of just banning the industry outright instead of taking the difficult steps to police the merchants using the platform. This means for legitimate and legal business, Shopify has just decided it doesn’t want the trouble of ensuring you are adhering to the law.

Our advice for Online Vape Shops

Our advice, is always to own your own platform. This allows you to de-risk your business from international companies deciding for you if your business is something they wish to accept with a snap of the fingers.

Firstly, we always like to pick smaller companies to work with for various elements such as payment processing and web hosting, many of whom may choose in the future to change who they allow onto their platforms but will give adequate notice before any major change and allow for you to change supplier for one component of your e-commerce website without changing the whole stack.

Additionally, many of the components we use are open-source. We use WooCommerce for our e-commerce platform of choice for our customers. One large advantage in the context of this is, if Automattic who are behind WooCommerce decide they no longer wish to deal with vape shops, they can’t realistically affect many of them running apart from those using their own hosting offering directly. This means even with major changes, a plan can be put into place and worked through to ensure business continuity.

High risk Businesses Online

In general, the vaping industry gets classed as high risk due to the legal implications with age restricted products being sold online. While you can use Shopify with their own merchant offering, you can use it with a number of other merchants – if an integration is available. This allows high risk businesses to continue operating, even if Shopify’s main method of operating does not work.

The flip-side of this comes down to cost, which with high risk business online the cost of running the service can climb exponentially with additional checks and legal hoops to jump through. To add into this, using a third party payment provider on Shopify adds additional cost onto every transaction, as much as 2%!

With WooCommerce, our preferred option, that additional percentage is 0.0%. There is nothing additional to pay for each transaction, and your running costs are a generally fixed hosting host, and any additional support costs you need from a WooCommerce specialist such as Invisible Dragon.

While the downside includes an initial cost to build a website, this becomes tailored to your brand and allows for human decisions around the correct options for postage, payments and more across your website, allowing for an overall result that becomes more of an asset to your business.

Conclusion for Vape Businesses on Shopify

Our conclusion, which is likely bias due to the platform we choose to use and offer to our customers, is to consider if Shopify is worth the cost and risk to your business. Is having your business all in a singular place worth the ability for management at Shopify to decide your business type is too much work to ensure everyone is operating legally?

If so, you may wish to look into the cost to move to WooCommerce. Keeping your e-commerce platform within control of your business, and crucially with people who care more about your business succeeding.