Selling personalised PoD products

Seventh post in “Tools I build with.” Every online store has one small box where the customer types a card number. The company behind that box takes a cut, handles (or doesn’t handle) tax, and decides how your payouts arrive. But the choice of which box to use depends less on country or processor features and more on a single question: are the products fixed, or are they personalised per order? Fixed SKUs fit Shopify in minutes. Unique-per-order artwork fits a custom site. This post is the map of that split.

Decide the direction first

Three questions shape the answer far more than any single provider’s feature list.

• Where is your business registered? Your own country’s rules determine what counts as revenue, what needs to be declared, and what you can legally charge. A French sole trader and a UK limited company will pick different stacks even if they are selling the same poster.
• Where are your customers? Selling only in the EU is one setup. Selling globally introduces VAT rules for each country you deliver to, which most providers can either handle or hand back to you.
• Are you selling physical goods, digital goods, or services, and are they personalised? Physical prints are treated differently from digital downloads, which are treated differently from subscriptions. Personalised items add another layer: the buyer’s input changes the SKU at checkout, which shapes the storefront more than the tax rules. Tax rules still diverge per type; some providers specialise in one of the three.

If the answer to any of these is “I don’t know yet”, start with the smallest legal setup in your own country, pick the simplest provider, and grow from there. Do not optimise for scale you do not have.

Build your own, or run on Shopify?

Before picking a payment provider, there is a bigger question: is the shop running on your own site, or on a platform like Shopify? The answer changes the payment math entirely.

Shopify Payments is the integrated processor inside Shopify. Using it is the cheapest option on that platform; using Stripe or anyone else on Shopify adds an extra platform fee on top of the processor’s own cut, around 2% extra per sale.

Custom site + direct Stripe (or Mollie) means you own the stack. You pay a VPS (episode 02), a domain (episode 11), the processor’s cut, and nothing else recurring.

The 2026 price comparison for a European seller looks like this.

The custom stack is cheaper on money at every volume. Shopify’s fixed cost runs about €23 per month higher (€33 platform fee vs a ~€10 VPS). Shopify’s EU-card fee also runs about 0.5% higher per sale (2% on Shopify Payments vs 1.5% on Stripe direct). The two stack, they do not cancel.

In exchange for those fees, Shopify lays the land out clearly: it communicates with the PoD provider, lets you pick from a library of free templates, and is built to work from the first click. A self-build site asks for more confidence and more responsibility, but is entirely feasible for anyone selling a limited number of products.

Where custom actually wins, regardless of volume:

• Personalised products driven by a generator. Anything where the buyer’s input produces a unique SKU at checkout (birth-chart embroidery, knockout phone cases, any configurator). Shopify handles fixed variants well and generative products poorly.
• Custom checkout flow. A designer widget embedded in the product page, a live preview, any non-standard buying ritual.
• Full code control. If the stack already runs on a VPS, custom adds one more container rather than a new platform dependency.

Where Shopify wins, regardless of ambition:

• Standard catalogue. Fixed SKUs (posters, totes, apparel blanks) are what Shopify was built for. The Printful app hooks straight into Shopify’s product system in minutes.
• Platform upkeep. Security patches, VAT engine, checkout accessibility, fraud detection all handled by Shopify.

For the brands in this journal: a Lowphi-style poster catalogue is genuinely the Shopify case. A Lunaire-style generator-driven hoodie or knockout-wordmark phone case is the custom case. The series builds custom throughout because the process is teachable, not because custom is always the right call.

The main options

Stripe

The default for most technical builders. Good API, clean developer documentation, payouts in most major currencies, works in almost every country.

• Fees: roughly 1.5% + €0.25 for EU cards, 3%+ for non-EU cards. Check the current page before pricing anything.
• Good for: anyone selling cards directly from their own site, physical or digital, in multiple currencies.
• Weak on: Stripe does not collect VAT for you by default. As the seller, you are responsible for charging and remitting the right VAT for every country you deliver to. Stripe Tax is an add-on that helps, at extra cost.

Mollie

European-first. Strong across the EU and UK. Clean interface, generous free tier.

• Fees: broadly similar to Stripe for EU cards, sometimes cheaper.
• Good for: European sellers with European customers.
• Weak on: less strong outside Europe.

Paddle (or Lemon Squeezy)

These are merchant-of-record providers. That means the provider, not you, is the official seller on paper. They collect VAT in every country, file the paperwork, and deposit your earnings net of tax. You never touch the tax complexity.

• Fees: higher (around 5% + a transaction fee). In exchange: zero VAT work for you.
• Good for: digital products (software, downloads, subscriptions) sold globally without a tax accountant.
• Weak on: physical goods. Most merchant-of-record setups are built for digital.

PayPal

Still used by a meaningful minority of customers, especially in countries where card trust is low. Worth offering as a secondary option, rarely as the primary.

• Fees: high, around 3.4% + fixed fee in Europe.
• Good for: offering a familiar button alongside Stripe or Mollie, not as the only option.
• Weak on: the fees, and customer-service disputes (PayPal tends to side with buyers by default).

Fixed vs personalised products

The same store can use different payment stacks for different products, and should, if the products are genuinely different in shape.

• Standard physical goods (posters, totes, apparel SKUs). Shopify Payments or Stripe direct, both fit. Pick on build-vs-platform, not on processor.
• Personalised physical goods (the Lunaire birth-chart hoodie, the knockout phone case, any configurator-driven apparel). Custom site + Stripe direct. The generator and the non-standard checkout rule out Shopify’s product model.
• Digital downloads (software, files, ebooks). Paddle or Lemon Squeezy as merchant-of-record. The extra 2 to 3 points of fee buy out the global VAT paperwork, which otherwise eats weekends.
• Subscriptions (memberships, recurring content). Stripe Billing handles this natively. Paddle if the subscribers are global enough that the VAT-per-country work is real.
• Services (commissions, consulting, custom work). A billing-first tool (Stripe Invoicing, Wave, or a local equivalent) usually fits better than a full storefront.

Country-specific notes

• France (as the seller). A sole trader (micro-entrepreneur) has a turnover threshold above which VAT registration becomes required. Stripe and Mollie both handle French payouts natively. URSSAF declarations are your responsibility; the payment provider will not do them for you.
• UK (as a customer market). Since Brexit, orders delivered into the UK above a threshold are subject to UK VAT, which must be paid at the border unless the seller has registered for UK VAT. Merchant-of-record setups handle this automatically; direct Stripe/Mollie setups make this your problem.
• US (as a customer market). Sales tax is handled at state level, and the threshold for registration (“economic nexus”) varies by state. For a small EU-based seller delivering a few prints a month, this is usually below the threshold and not an issue; worth re-checking as volume grows.

The quiet tax reality

A €30 poster sold to a UK customer from a French shop does not keep €30. After the card processing fee (~€1.20 via Stripe on an EU-to-UK transaction), any VAT owed (20% of the relevant portion), and the PoD-provider cost (~€12), the retained margin might be €6 to €10.

This is not an argument against selling; it is the numbers to know before pricing. Any pricing decision made without the tax layer included is half a decision.

What to be aware of

• Currency conversion fees are hidden. Accepting a payment in USD when your business is in EUR means a conversion happens somewhere in the chain. Stripe charges a currency conversion fee (usually around 1%). Price in the customer’s currency where possible.
• Payout schedules matter for cash flow. Some providers pay out daily, some weekly, some with a minimum balance. For a very small shop, a 7-day delay can be the difference between paying a PoD invoice on time and not.
• Chargebacks cost money, even when you win. A chargeback is when a customer disputes a payment with their bank rather than contacting you. A disputed charge costs around €15 in fees on top of the lost sale. Photos of orders, proof of delivery and clear return policies all reduce the chance of a dispute landing badly.
• The payment system is deeply integrated with the storefront. Changing provider later means reconfiguring the checkout, migrating subscriptions, and re-testing every flow. Pick with the long view.

What’s next in the series

• Defining price points and a small SEO name check. Benchmarking what similar prints sell for, and a quick script that checks a brand name’s availability across domains, social handles and search results.
• …and more tools ahead, each tied to a real project as its receipt.

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