Self-Hosting for E-Commerce Businesses: A Complete Stack

E-commerce businesses pay for Shopify, a CRM, email marketing, analytics, and helpdesk. Every one of these has a per-transaction or per-user cost that grows with your business. A self-hosted stack replaces all of them at a fixed cost.

The Stack

At five users, this SaaS stack costs roughly 200 to 300 US dollars per month. The self-hosted stack costs whatever your server costs (40 to 80 dollars per month). The saving is immediate and compounds as you grow.

Why WooCommerce Over Shopify

Shopify charges transaction fees on top of your subscription unless you use Shopify Payments (which is not available in every country, including Brunei). WooCommerce charges zero transaction fees beyond what your payment processor charges. On 100,000 dollars in annual sales, Shopify's 2 percent transaction fee alone costs 2,000 dollars. WooCommerce charges nothing.

WooCommerce runs on WordPress, which you self-host. You control the theme, the plugins, the checkout flow, and the performance. No platform restrictions, no app store approval, no arbitrary limitations on product variants or custom fields.

Email Marketing That Does Not Cost Per Contact

Mailchimp charges based on contact count. 2,000 contacts is free. 5,000 contacts costs 75 dollars per month. 10,000 costs 100 dollars. Listmonk, self-hosted on your server, handles 50,000 contacts without additional costs. It supports campaigns, automation, and transactional emails. The only cost is the SMTP relay for delivery (Amazon SES charges roughly 10 cents per 1,000 emails).

Analytics You Own

Google Analytics is free because you are the product. Your e-commerce data feeds Google's advertising machine. Plausible Analytics, self-hosted, gives you the same dashboards (traffic, conversions, bounce rates) without sending your data to Google. GDPR-compliant by default. No cookie consent banner required.

Putting It Together

A single server with 8GB RAM and 200GB SSD runs this entire stack for an e-commerce business doing up to a few hundred orders per day. The monthly cost is the server plus optional management. Compare that to 300 dollars in SaaS subscriptions and 2,000 dollars in transaction fees, and the business case for self-hosting writes itself.

VPS1 builds complete e-commerce stacks. Storefront, CRM, email, analytics, helpdesk. One server, one bill, no transaction fees.