If you have ever tried to build a store you will be familiar with the problem of needing to work within restrictive templates, complicated checkout flows that customers abandon, and design decisions made for you by the provider of that software.
Perch Shop will be a breath of fresh air.
This is powerful e-commerce functionality, coupled with the ground-breaking content management of Perch CMS. If you’re not familiar, Perch is a self-hosted content management system that uses PHP and MySQL. You can find out more about Perch and its hosting requirements.
Perch Shop makes it easy to sell products, digital downloads and website subscriptions without needing to chain together multiple subscription services or plugins.
Perch Shop comes with all the features you would expect from an e-commerce solution. Here are some highlights.
With Perch Shop you can add any custom fields to your product template, and remain in full control of the design of your store. Traditional ecommerce or something truly creative? That’s up to you!
Need to comply with VATMOSS, or US Sales Tax only in certain States. No problem! Perch Shop can deal with complex tax scenarios - including different tax rules for products in the same basket at checkout.
Set up Shipping Groups and Locations ensuring that you can offer competitive shipping prices and options worldwide.
Use Perch Shop to sell an e-book, downloadable software or access to content, videos or a membership section.
A product can have digital and shippable components, and products of different types can be combined into one cart.
Like everything else in Perch Shop we leave the checkout flow down to you. Customer accounts or not, simple “buy now” buttons through to a full cart - you get to choose.
Take a look at the rest of the features you can take advantage of when using Perch Shop.
Most e-commerce tools are very opinionated about everything from how you present your products through to the checkout experience. They force you into traditional templates, and give no flexibility in terms of the additional fields you add to your products. While there are things a store needs to capture in order to function, this is Perch. We won’t force you to display these things on your site - and you can add additional template fields wherever you like.
We know how small tweaks to checkout flow can make a huge difference in conversions, and feel that designers and store owners should be able to make their own decisions, A/B Test different things and build what works best.
You won’t need to buy expensive plugins to sell digital downloads, membership sections or setup things such as complex shipping rules. Furthermore, this is just the start. We’ll be adding to Perch Shop as we see the requirements of the people who use it.
To check out some of the Shop features for yourself we’ve created a demo. Sign up and take a look - and then see all of the page and template code on GitHub.
We’ve had almost 100 beta testers work with Perch Shop during development. Many of them now have sites live that use Shop. Here are some of the things they told us.
I have used Shopify, and struggled with the theme creation and templating. Perch bypasses this by allowing any layout and structure, just providing the back end system.
Perch Shop will finally allow my business to expand into a self-serve type automated e-commerce site with more membership offerings and digital delivery of products.
[Stand out features of Perch Shop are] the control I have over the layouts; the complete customizability of not only the look, but also the flow. The range of page functions. Limitless creativity while covering all of the essentials. And one of the strongest features is the phenomenal support.