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Sticker Buying Preferences
🕑 Added 2025-03-13 15:42:38 +0000 UTCTL;DR: I wanna sell titty stickers. Do you wanna order through Bigcartel or are you fine with a heavily-censored Google Form where you're already aware of what the products look like but the form itself has to be kind of sneaky?
Alright, I'm at a huge fucking impasse and I could really use some opinions from the people who this would actually impact.
I want to sell stickers. I'd do a sticker club on here but I just don't have the knives to design and send a different sticker each and every month unless it were to become a significant proportion of my income.
Right now, I sell my SFW stickers on Ko-fi and it works fine. I don't hate it. But their anti-NSFW policies are super, super draconian and I kind of fear losing access to my account even if I post a censored version of my NSFW stickers.
I'm just using an emoji for now. Sometime I'll figure out a more unique way to censor things but you get the picture.
I'm too busy and too stressed out to figure Shopify out right now, so that's absolutely not an option until I've got a car and I'm moved out of my current place, and life in general is a lot less whatever the fuck this is.
That leaves me with two immediate options:
1. Bigcartel.
They're a little grey but they seem generally friendlier to things of a less-than-wholesome nature as long as you bother to censor things and it's not outright illegal. I've already set up a pseudonymous shop that you can check out: purpleprincessclub.bigcartel.com
Pros:
Automatic. It's a hands-off process. You buy the thing, I package and send it, no juggling of paperwork.
Tax compliance. Bigcartel collects and remits sales tax and VAT for me, I don't have to touch that shit and that's frankly the way I prefer it.
Storefront. I don't have to work as hard to advertise that I'm selling stuff. I can just post the link and people can see what I've got going.
Cons:
Costly. If I want to post more than 5 products at a time, or be able to do something as simple as put a limit on available stock, I have to cough up $15 a month. Not much if I'm selling consistently. Actually very much if I don't keep up sales momentum. I'll end up having to take my store down whenever I don't have new stock to sell and that kind of limits the passivity of that income.
Hidden pro: It would force me to actually keep up momentum on making stickers and prints.
Too many sales venues. I keep my SFW and NSFW stuff separate for a lot of reasons, mostly to keep google moms from finding my dirt too easily if they search up my SFW pseud. It's not foolproof but it's at least something. But I also have to keep my items separated from one another. Which creates a little bit of a headache if someone wants to, say, buy a little bit of each but there's no place to really do that unless I want to just create a custom order for them. Not super impossible, just a lot of work if I have to do it too often.
2. Order Form
Ah, yes, the good old mail order form. Basically a menu I throw together on Google Forms complete with censored images of whatever I'm looking to sell. Nothing but silhouettes and purposely obtuse descriptions for days. People already know what this shit looks like from the ads. They tell me what they want, I assemble a PayPal invoice. They pay, I package and send. Really not the worst way to operate.
I wouldn't even have to collect address info on the form since all I have to do is mark a box on the PP that the order is to be shipped and that's where customers will have to provide all of that.
Pros:
Harder to backtrace the smut. We all know gooble and poo-pal and we know how puritanical they are. At least with an order form, the two worlds never touch each other and I can be as excessively vague as I want when I'm putting together invoices. I feel a little safer doing things this way.
Easier to combine products. If I want to offer my SFW wares I can just stick them on the form and people can order them that way instead of having to ask about a custom order.
Cons:
Cumbersome. It's a lot of paperwork to have to juggle, and a lot of having to babysit my account to make sure payments come through. I'll have to double-check numbers to make sure that what I'm actually charging and what the customer thinks I'm supposed to be charging line up.
Extremely hands-on. There's some comfort behind being able to just click a button and order something versus submitting an actual form and dealing directly with someone who is essentially selling you smutty stickers. I don't even like getting on the phone to order takeout when there's an online option to just do it as anonymously as possible.
Less discoverable. I'll have to spend a lot more time actually flogging my items instead of just putting them in a storefront and letting people find them naturally from my social profiles.
Then again, there's nothing about Purple Princess Club that screams "THIS IS NOZ!" either.
Less Compliant. I still pay income tax on literally everything I make, draw, or sell anyway. PP keeps track of all of that and sends me a 1099-K every year. It's the little things like VAT and sales tax and shit that I'm worried about. Though at this point in time I'm such fucking small potatoes that it probably doesn't even matter and I'm thinking way too hard about this.
That's all I can really think of. I have been stressed the fuck out about this for several days, now, and just sitting on it hasn't helped me. Writing everything out has helped me kind of lean toward one option over the other but I don't want to taint the results so I'm just gonna let you all tell me what works best for you and I'll weigh that along with everything else and come back with a solution in a few days.
Fuck why couldn't I just be one of those people who draws cute birds instead of boobs.
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Fusspot
I should note: VGen.co has shops in their product roadmap. Initially they're going to be for digital products only but it looks like they're going to expand that to physical products as well. I won't count my chickens immediately but depending on their policies it might be a viable option in the distant future. What I'm concerned with is right now.
