Canned type shop options

James Puckett

I see hosted type retail options: LTTRSHOP, FoundryCore, Fontdue, and Elefont. Does anybody who uses these products care to comment on the experience of using one?

Craig Eliason

I'm in the middle of building a shop with Fontdue now. Haven't gone live so it'd be premature to give final judgments, but I would say:

• There's a lot of cleverness in the setup and it really does tackle the considerably complicated parts of font-license e-commerce well. 
• I'm a little frustrated that uploading font-family updates is not easy, and that the interface is not geared to variable fonts, but there's some indication that both of these may be improved in time.
• The developer has been very generous in extending my trial period, guiding me to other sitebuilding resources, fast-tracking his tutorials to address my circumstances, and helping me to troubleshoot. 

I'm excited for my relaunch and don't have any regrets so far about hooking up with Fontdue.

Jasper de Waard

@Craig Eliason Thanks, that's useful information! What made you go for fontdue in the first place? 

Craig Eliason

Jasper de Waard said:

@Craig Eliason Thanks, that's useful information! What made you go for fontdue in the first place? 

This TypeDrawers post was encouraging, especially since it wasn't easy to find actual examples of some of the other solutions in use. 

Raphaël Ronot

I've only been testing Fontdue so far but it is indeed a very well built solution. 

As Craig previously stated: the setup of licenses (with multiple combinations of prices according to license type, license size, etc...) is surprisingly simple — compared to the efforts it would require on a generalist e-commerce solution like Shopify. And Tom is very helpful and reactive.

A feature I like is the built-in subsetting of glyphsets for trial fonts. You don't have to upload multiple versions of the same font. You just upload the full version and tell Fontdue to create a trial versions based on the glyphsets or your choosing. 

Also, the fact that you can embed "portable" pieces of your shop (ie. the type tester) with just a few lines of code anywhere on an external website is useful if you're not very tech-savy. If you wanted to, you could just copy paste the type tester, the buy button and the shopping cart code on a Jekyll page and you'd be done. Fontdue also provides a sort of boilerplate website upon which you can customize your shop rather easily (knowledge of Python will be required).

Overall, it's probably not as flexible as a 100% bespoke e-shop, but for the pain and time it saves you, I think it's definitely worth considering.

Matthew Smith

Raphaël Ronot said:

If you wanted to, you could just copy paste the type tester, the buy button and the shopping cart code on a Jekyll page and you'd be done.

This is exactly what I’m doing right now haha