What a bullion dealer website costs, and why the fee model matters more than the fee.

Building means a team, not a developer: a lead who designs it and runs the project, a back-end engineer for the pricing feed, the payment rails and every third-party integration, a front-end engineer for the storefront and the console, someone to run the infrastructure and carry the pager, and someone to write the tests that try to break it. Then a designer and a compliance advisor on contract. It takes months before the first sale, and it carries something the other two do not, which is the chance that the store never opens at all, because any one of those pieces can stall the rest. The upkeep does not end at launch. It is the right answer for a dealer that already has that team, and the wrong one for everybody else.

Renting a general platform means a monthly subscription, payment processing, and on many plans a percentage of every order. The percentage is charged on the ticket. On a gold coin the ticket is almost entirely metal you bought at nearly the same price, so the fee is charged on money that was never yours. The fee is also not the hard part. A general platform stores one number as the price of each product, and a bullion price is not a number: it is a formula over a spot price that moves all day. Making a static-price platform carry a moving one is the work that never ends, and it is the reason a general platform costs a dealer more than the bill says.

Sharing the margin is how Ophir Markets works. No setup fee and no monthly fee. The platform takes 7% of the premium on each order, and the premium is the part of the price that is actually yours. A minimum of $0.50 keeps a single silver round from being free to process, and a cap of $15.00 means that above roughly $215 of premium the fee stops climbing.

Metal values below are illustrative and held still so the page reads the same every day. The order-based column is a general platform charging two percent of the ticket, which is the shape of the fee, not a quote for any particular vendor.

The gold coin is where the two models part company. Two percent of the ticket is more than half the premium on that sale. A fee on the premium stays in proportion to the premium, so what the platform takes tracks what you made rather than what the metal cost. At the small end the minimum is what a single round pays; at the large end the cap is what a ten-coin order pays, and it does not grow from there.

Your payment processor bills you directly, and Ophir Markets does not mark it up or take a piece of it. A bank transfer runs about 25 cents. A card runs whatever your card processor charges, which is why the platform lets you show a lower price to buyers who pay by bank. If you use the automated sales tax option, that service bills you directly too. Shipping, and any insurance you put on a parcel, is yours, as it would be on any platform.

The live version of this arithmetic, updating as the metal moves, is on the home page. How this compares to building on a general platform is worked through here.