The Countryside Store marketplace launched in August 2020
Why do we charge?
Building, promoting, hosting, maintaining and developing The Countryside Store marketplace naturally incurs costs. The Countryside Store is a self-funded project designed to support rural businesses while creating a central hub for all 12 million countryside community members.
The Build
The Countryside Store was designed, built, and funded by Nick & Jess Palmer. Nick runs a small business in North Yorkshire while Jess worked for the NHS. Both have worked tirelessly to get this incredible marketplace off the ground with little experience and limited funds.
The Countryside Store is NOT an international money-maker like many marketplaces, it is a small family run platform built and maintained by two passionate supporters of the countryside.
Neither Nick nor Jess have taken a wage from The Countryside Store in the last 12 months as 100% of all subscription fees and commissions are reinvested back into getting our members more sales and developing The Countryside Store.
Hosting
Building a marketplace does not come cheap! Firstly, we have the initial development of the site, The Countryside Store is created on a WordPress system which requires several plugins to ensure all parts of the site talk to one another. Hosting the site and system plugins all incur a monthly cost but is an instrumental part of the site and without these, The Countryside Store would not function.
Servers
All websites and e-commerce platforms run on servers. The more visitors, traffic and data used will require bigger servers with a more powerful output. The Countryside Store marketplace receives over 90,000 monthly visitors and stores the images and data of more than 450 retailers, this requires an incredible amount of server capacity to ensure the website loads and runs smoothly.
Advertising
The cost of advertising and driving consumers to the marketplace is a key element to any e-commerce website. If The Countryside Store did not charge a subscription fee we would be unable to promote the site to countryside consumers. The Countryside Store creates special campaigns to target the right type of consumers on both social media and search engine platforms.
Maintenance
The Countryside Store has already become a huge vehicle for countryside retail, like any vehicle it requires constant maintenance and repairs to ensure the smooth running of the site. This maintenance is carried out by specialist website developers who spend hours per week tweaking and making sure everything is up to date.
PAYPAL commissions
Every time one of our sellers makes a sale they are charged 7% + 30p.
As we are a marketplace we require a payment gateway to manage all transactions securely. PayPal charge 5% + 30p out of the above commission while The Countryside Store keeps 2%. Our 2% commission goes into our “every sale plants a sapling scheme” meaning we as The Countryside Store make no commission on any sales.
YOU AS A SELLER ARE ONLY CHARGES THIS COMMISSION ONCE PER SALE.
Summary
The Countryside Store is an incredible platform.
By charging a subscription fee allows us to maintain this high level of quality. Your subscription fee is not a donation, your subscription fee provides you with a fully functional e-commerce shop, access to membership benefits, a directory listing, your products added to GOOGLE and so much more.
The Countryside Store is no different from any other small British businesses. As small business owners, we are all used to long days, late-night, passion, and commitment.
The Countryside Store has facilitated thousands of sales for our retailers that otherwise would not have been made, our marketplace is growing month on month with more visitors, more purchases, and more activity.
Being a member of The Countryside Store costs just 23p a day.
sales@thecountrysidestore.co.uk
