How to Sell Digital Products on a Hugo Site?

[Nonbeardedman]

I don't know if this is the right thread to post this but, I was wondering that since I switched my site to Hugo, how do I implement a system for selling digital products?

I saw a few tutorials online and they seem to be pointing towards a service called snipcart. Most of the people I've seen built sites with snipcart either aren't using Hugo or don't really show the functionality nor give any details of the features so I was wondering if anyone here has experience with integrating e-commerce like features on a Hugo site?

I have very limited developer experience, I've gotten pretty good at html, css and Hugo but nothing much beyond that.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[jelf]

To sell products when you're not a developer you'll most likely want to embed or link to a cart/checkout service.
I use thrivecart, but there is also:
samcart
lots of "creators" use gumroad (their fees are large, but people seem to like them)

you may also need some platform to hold your product (depending on what you are selling).
Some of these also come with checkout/cart setups.
Also samcart and thrivecart have membership platforms to house your product.
I have no experience with snipcart, but it may well be OK.

Check out reviews / user groups on Facebook, etc.

 

[BrandEngineer]

Hugo sites are static (no backend) so for complete control over the frontend you would need a headless ecommerce solution (Snipcart being the most popular that is headless only). Headless is basically a backend service that expects you to "bring your own frontend". Then you make API calls with JavaScript to integrate your Hugo site with the service and control the checkout process. But lots of hosted solutions also offer headless commerce via an API such as Shopify's Storefront API.

The other option is, as @jelf pointed out, using a hosted or embedded checkout with something like Gumroad or even Stripe Checkout. It entirely depends on the features you need, the level of customization desired, fees you're willing to pay, checkout experience, etc. Fully hosted checkout would direct users to a separate server (or domain if you don't point it to your DNS) hosted by the service, while embedding would keep users on your site for the partial or full checkout process.

I also know of a guy using Hugo with headless Woocommerce to sell digital products (gomakethings.com and its sister sites).