What approach would you recommend for a simple foundry site: coding in HTML/CSS from scratch, CMS like WordPress, website builders, or something else?
A simple foundry site showcasing fonts with the usual type sampler and a few classic pages & functions (blog, about us, FAQ, licensing, newsletter subscription .etc)
Option A: Using external payment processing like Gumroad
Option B: Selling fonts directly from the site
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Not as pretty as Fontdue and lacking some options for sure, but only ~$250/year + stripe/paypal fee. Works decently. Will probably upgrade to Fontdue or lttrshop or something similar at some point, when my library contents justify the fees.
For TheFontDetective.com (non font sales) site I went with an Elementor-based theme on top of WordPress. If I had it to do over again, I would avoid Elementor, which is an easy-to-use design-focused thing that lives on top of WordPress; most of the cool design stuff it did was substantially added into later versions of WordPress, and it made some things more difficult to customize and maintain. The site does look slick, though, and I did most of it myself.
Fontdue seems like the most popular option these days, but LttrShop and FoundryCore look great, too.
See also: https://typedesignresources.com/#e-commerce-platforms
Fontdue can be paired with pretty much anything that allows you to inject some JS. You could probably add it to Squarespace, Cargo, etc.
To more directly answer your question: I would say to start with what ever you are most comfortable with. The lower the barrier of entry, the easier it’ll be to get things off the ground.
Grilli Type started with a Wordpress site and manual Paypal links back in 2009. After we got a payment we manually sent out the fonts whenever we were back at the computer. That might not be acceptable anymore in 2023, but worked for us back then.
Long story short: just launch. Figure out how to grow the features that are most needed over time.