We build the store. You own the business.
VolIoT builds commerce sites for small operators — the storefront, the payment wiring, the admin behind it, and the pipeline that keeps shipping it. The prices are published on this page. The share we take is marginal, and it starts at zero.
You have stock, and you want to sell it yourself
This is for the maker, the small shop, the weekend operation that outgrew a booth — anyone holding physical goods who is tired of renting a storefront from a platform that takes a cut of every sale forever and keeps the customer list.
You get a real store on your own domain, running on the same stack VolIoT has already shipped and maintains. We build it, we host it, we keep it running. The shop is yours; the customers are yours; the money lands in your account.
The storefront
A product catalog, a cart, and a checkout on your own domain — built on the proven stack that already runs this site, exported static and served from a CDN so it stays fast without a server to babysit.
Payments, wired to your account
Stripe or Helcim, connected to an account in your name. The money goes from your customer to you. VolIoT never holds it, and processing fees are charged by the processor at their published rate, paid by you.
The admin portal
Dashboard metrics, order management — including partial shipments with a carrier and a tracking number — and full product create, edit and delete. It is the same portal every VolIoT merchant runs on, and the screens below are it.
The deploy pipeline
Infrastructure as code, a staging environment, and an automated deploy on every change. Updates go out the same way ours do — reviewed on staging first, then pushed to production.
It starts at $15 a month. The base then moves with what the store actually sells online in a month: under $5,000 it stays at $15; from $5,000 to $10,000 it drops to $9.99; over $10,000 it goes to $0.
On top of the base we take 1.5% — and only of the sales above $5,000 in a month, never of the first $5,000. A slow month costs you almost nothing and earns us almost nothing. That is the deal working as intended: we get paid properly when the store does well, not before.
Card processing is separate and is charged by Stripe or Helcim at their own published rate, direct to you. We take no margin on it and we never touch the funds.
Every order from the storefront lands in the same admin portal, and this is it — real screens from a running deploy, not drawings of one.
You do the work in person, and you need to be found
This is for the crew that shows up — the power washer, the painter, the mobile detailer, the landscaper, the contractor who books by word of mouth and a decal on the truck. Nothing is sold on the site.
The site exists to do two things: get the work found, and get the job to you before the caller gives up and tries the next name on the list. That is the whole product, and it is priced like the whole product rather than like a preview of one.
A site built to be found
Real pages about the work you actually do, written and structured so a search engine can read them — titles and descriptions that match what people type, a sitemap, and the local signals that put you in the results for your own town. Static pages off a CDN, so they load fast enough not to be penalised for it.
A contact form that reaches your phone
When someone fills in the form, a text lands on your own mobile — sent over a 10DLC long code, an ordinary ten-digit business number, so it arrives looking like every other text you get. An email copy goes out at the same moment. Nothing to install, no inbox you have to remember to open.
Pages you can add as the work changes
Start with the pages the business needs today. Add a page for a service you picked up, a town you started covering, or a job worth showing off — each one written and built by us, priced the same as the last one, forever.
Hosting, deploys and the domain
We host it, we deploy it, we keep it up. We set the domain up and we renew it each year, and the name is yours — the address stays with you whatever happens to us.
There is no store in here. No e-commerce, no cart, no checkout, no inventory. Nobody buys anything on this site — they find you, and then they contact you.
If you need to sell goods online, one of the other two products on this page is the one that does that, at its own price. It is a different build for a different business, not a bigger version of this one.
$29.99 a month covers the site, the hosting, the deploys and the contact-to-text notification. Additional pages are $4.99 a month each, so a site that grows costs a little more and nothing else about the arrangement changes.
This product carries no sales share. Not a percentage, not a bracket, not a floor — nothing is sold through the site, so there is nothing for us to take a cut of. What is printed above is the bill, every month.
We have already built this one. DW Pro Wash is a power-washing crew running exactly this arrangement — a site that gets found, and a form that puts the job on the owner's phone. It was the first deployment of the notification described above. Bluemoon Painting LLC is another one — a painting crew whose site we built.
You sell the design, and somebody else holds the stock
This is for the artist, the small label, the show with a following, the cause that needs merch and nowhere to put a pallet of it. You have the designs and you have the audience. What you do not have — and do not want — is a spare room full of shirts in the wrong sizes.
You get a real store on your own domain with printing and fulfilment handled by Printful. An order comes in, the money lands in your account, and the item is made and shipped without you touching a box.
The same storefront
The same store the inventory build runs: a product catalog, a cart and a checkout on your own domain, exported static and served from a CDN. Not a cut-down copy of it — the same build, pointed at a different kind of stock.
The Printful connection
Your designs and products come through from Printful into the storefront. When an order is paid it goes out for printing and fulfilment, and the order state comes back — so what the buyer sees, what you see, and what is actually happening in the print queue stay in agreement.
Printful is what is wired today, and it is not meant to be the only one. Connecting other print-on-demand services is work we have taken on. We will name one on this page when it is actually connected and an order has run through it end to end — not before, and with no date attached, because a date we print here is a promise you get to hold us to. Until one appears, what this page describes is Printful.
Payments, wired to your account
Stripe or Helcim, connected to an account in your name. The buyer pays you, you pay for the item that gets printed, and VolIoT never holds the money. Card processing is charged by the processor at their own published rate, direct to you.
The same admin portal, pointed at a print queue
Orders, products and dashboard metrics in the same admin portal every VolIoT merchant runs on — the screens shown further up this page are the ones you get, not a separate edition of them. What differs is the work behind the order screens: a paid order goes out for printing and the print queue reports back, where an inventory build moves stock off a shelf and splits a shipment. Same product, same screens, different job underneath. Infrastructure as code, a staging environment, and an automated deploy on every change, exactly as above.
It starts at $15 a month, on the same brackets the store carries: under $5,000 in monthly online sales it stays at $15; from $5,000 to $10,000 it drops to $9.99; over $10,000 it goes to $0.
On top of the base we take 2% — and only of the sales above $5,000 in a month, never of the first $5,000.
That is half a point above the 1.5% the inventory build carries, and the reason is specific rather than decorative: the Printful integration, the webhook handling, and the order-state sync are code VolIoT keeps running against somebody else's API, and keeps correct when that API changes. The half point pays for that work.
We have already built this one. Chaotically Caffinated is a print-on-demand shop running this exact arrangement — its own domain, its own payment account, and the printing handled behind the checkout.
The share is marginal, and the base falls as you grow
Two of the three products above carry a share of online sales. It is marginal, which means it applies only to the sales above $5,000 in a month — never to the first $5,000, and never to the month's total. For merchants with inventory the rate is 1.5%. For print-on-demand sellers it is 2%. Service businesses sell nothing on the site and carry no share at all.
The same month for both, so the half point reads as one visible difference rather than two unrelated sums.
- A merchant with inventory doing $7,000 in a month pays the $9.99 base plus 1.5% of the $2,000 above the line — $9.99 + $30.00 = $39.99.
- A print-on-demand seller doing $7,000 in that same month pays the $9.99 base plus 2% of the same $2,000 — $9.99 + $40.00 = $49.99.
Not the rate on $7,000. Only the part above the line.
The base moves with the same monthly online sales figure, for the two products that carry sales:
- Under $5,000 in a month — $15
- $5,000 to $10,000 — $9.99
- Over $10,000 — $0
Read the brackets and the marginal rule together and a property falls out that is worth saying plainly: crossing a bracket line always bends the bill downward, never upward. The month you first reach $5,000, the base drops from $15 to $9.99 and your total for that month is lower than it was the dollar before. The month you pass $10,000, the base goes to $0 and the total drops again. Growing never costs you a jump.
Card processing is separate, and it is not ours. Stripe or Helcim charge their own processing fee on each sale, at their own published rate, paid by you and taken direct. VolIoT adds no margin to it and never holds the funds.
Their rate lives on their own page, where it stays current: Stripe's pricing and Helcim's pricing. A number copied onto this page would go stale and quietly become a false claim, so this page does not carry one.
Search work beyond what a build already includes is available through abbySEO, a partner we bring in when a client wants it. It is passed through at cost — VolIoT takes no margin on it whatsoever.
We publish no price for it, and that is deliberate rather than coy: the cost moves with how much work a given site needs, so anything printed here would be wrong more often than it was right. You get the partner's actual cost, and you see it before any work starts.
Base fees move once a year, in January. They move with published CPI-U inflation and with documented changes in what hosting actually costs us — in both directions, so a year when our costs fall is a year the fee falls.
When it moves, you get the arithmetic in writing: the index we used, the hosting change we applied, and the fee that comes out of it. No inflation rate is printed on this page, because the promise is the mechanism and the arithmetic being shown — not a rate that will be out of date by the time you read this.
If a site's traffic drives hosting costs beyond the normal range, the difference passes through at cost with the arithmetic shown, no markup — and you hear about it from us before it reaches the bill.
What is yours, and what is ours
The question worth asking any company that builds your store is what you are left holding if you walk away from them. Here is our answer, in the order it matters. Five things are yours from the first day and stay yours whatever happens between us.
- The storefront. The site itself — the pages, the catalog, the cart, the checkout, and the code underneath them. It is yours, and it leaves with you.
- The domain. The address people type to reach you. We set it up and we renew it each year, so it is one less thing you have to keep track of. The name is yours, and it leaves with you.
- The customer list. The people who bought from you, and how to reach them again. It is yours, and it leaves with you.
- The payment account. The Stripe or Helcim account is opened in your name and the money lands in it without passing through us. It is yours, and it leaves with you.
- The data. Orders, products, inventory, and the history behind the numbers. It is yours, you can take a copy of it at any time, and it leaves with you.
The admin portal is not on that list. It is VolIoT's product. It is the same portal every VolIoT merchant runs on, and it stays with VolIoT. If you leave, you leave the portal behind — you do not get to take the software with you, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What you do take is everything above it, including every record the portal was holding on your behalf.
You do, we do
You do
- Add the products, write the descriptions, set the prices.
- Pack and ship the orders, and mark them shipped.
- Hold the payment account and the money that lands in it.
- Answer your own customers.
We do
- Build the site, and wire the payments to your account.
- Host it and deploy it.
- Run the portal and the integrations behind it.
- Fix what breaks, including when somebody else's API is what changed.
The difference is where it stops
Most platforms take a percentage of every sale a merchant ever makes, for as long as the store is open, and it does not matter how big the store gets. Ours stops: it applies only to the sales above the line, and at the top bracket the base goes to zero. The customer list and the domain belong to the merchant, not to the place the store is hosted. Payments land in the merchant's own Stripe or Helcim account, and VolIoT never holds the money.
If that sounds like your shop
Tell us what you sell and where you are selling it now. We will tell you what building it actually looks like — including the times the honest answer is that you do not need us yet.
Talk to us →