It has taxes and configurable shipping costs by region. I was going to use Shopify or Squarespace until I found saleor. I definitely agree with using Etsy first though to gain traction before trying to get higher margins by rolling your own.
What other magic is out there?
You basically get all the benefits of Shopify's excellent, easy to use admin/backend area while building a custom frontend on top of it.
Could you explain what you mean by this? I've always wanted to create a simple store as a side project to learn some new tech, so I'm curious what the issues are with putting that side project live.
Depending on how your payment process works and how many transactions you make in a year there's a sliding scale of progressively more stringent guidelines. Using a gateway like Stripe which has a hosted payment form reduces the PCI risk but doesn't remove it entirely. And the PCI guidelines make GDPR look like a model of clarity and straightforwardness.
Last time I looked into it, there was a debate as to whether Stripe fell into PCI DSS Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) A or SAQ A-EP. A is pretty simple to meet, but A-EP is not. Even Stripe seemed to hedge on this. If anyone more knowledgeable than me can weigh in, I'd appreciate it!
As for tax, depending on what you're selling you have to add the correct tax for your customer's country. For example as I understand it, the EU VAT MOSS rules mean that when selling digital downloads you have to apply the correct sales tax for every country people are buying from. You not only have to build a system for changing the tax depending on the address, but also understand the tax situation of every country you want to do business in. (Again, if I'm wrong or making it too complicated, I'd like to know).
Thankfully there are platforms like Etsy or Gumroad for selling digital downloads that do all that stuff for you. The fees may be high compared to a DIY solution, but it's worth it for a small merchant.
Shopify/Squarespace/Sellfy etc. are much cheaper and lower risk, at least to start with. From experience PCI compliance and tax rules are pains you do not want to deal with.
I’d only ever recommend custom coding if you have some extremely specific requirements. Even WooCommerce on Wordpress would be a better starting point.
If you want to tinker, you could build a store using a static site generator like Jekyll combined with a Google Docs spreadsheet to manage the inventory and something like Snipcart [0] for e-commerce functionality (I’m working on a site that does this).
[0] https://snipcart.com