Choosing a platform
Precious metals ecommerce software: what a bullion store needs that a general platform does not have.
Shopify and WooCommerce are good at selling things with a fixed price and a comfortable margin. A bullion dealer has neither. This page lays out the six places that difference shows up, and what it costs to close each gap on a general platform versus a platform built for the trade.
The core problem
Your price is not a number. It is a formula that moves all day.
A general ecommerce platform stores a price on each product, while you have a premium over a metal price that changes continuously while the market is open. To sell on a general platform you need a script that rewrites every product price as frequently as possible.
That layer is prone to break when the platform updates or your spot feed drops. When it breaks, the store keeps selling at the last price written until someone notices. Fixing it can mean significant downtime.
A platform built for bullion turns this around. The premium is what you set, the metal price comes from a live feed, and the price on the page is computed from both while the buyer is looking at it. There is no stored price to go stale. And the feed matters as much as the formula: on Ophir Markets the metal price is CNT's spot feed, a wholesale price a dealer can actually trade product against, not a number derived from an exchange-traded fund or a paper index that cannot be turned into metal.
Six gaps, side by side
Where a general platform needs help, and where a bullion platform does not.
| What you need | Shopify or WooCommerce | Ophir Markets |
|---|---|---|
| Live pricing | A spot feed subscription plus a plugin that rewrites prices on a timer. Two more vendors, and a stale price when either one fails. | Bid and ask for gold, silver, platinum and palladium streamed to the page. Every listing recomputes from your premium while the buyer is looking at it. |
| Catalog | Empty. You photograph every coin and bar, write the weight, fineness, mint and year, and keep it current. | About 150 products arrive photographed and described, from the US Mint, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Perth Mint, the Royal Mint, the Austrian Mint, the South African Mint and CNT. Add your own alongside them. |
| Payment rails | Card is the default. Both ship a manual bank-transfer method, where the buyer sends the money and you mark the order paid by hand. A bank rail with the account verified at checkout is an add-on. Some platform-native payment options treat bullion as restricted; read the acceptable-use terms before you build. | Bank transfer and card both built in, with a per-rail price so buyers who pay by bank see the lower price. Your processor bills you directly and we do not mark it up. |
| Fee model | A monthly subscription, and on many plans a percentage of every order. On a $2,500 gold coin that percentage is charged on the metal, not on your margin. | No setup fee and no monthly fee. 7% of the premium on each order, floored at 50 cents and capped at $15 per order. |
| Identity and screening | Not part of the platform. You bolt on an identity provider, a sanctions list check and your own volume tracking, and reconcile them by hand. | Identity verification, sanctions screening at sign-up and at transaction time, rolling purchase volume per customer, risk signals on every order and holds you can pull, all in the console. |
| Sales tax on metal | General tax apps know about clothing and food. Bullion exemptions vary by state and by product, and you configure them yourself. | Per-state rules and product categories you maintain, or an automated tax service, computed at checkout. |
Where a general platform wins
Be honest about what you would give up.
Shopify has a theme store, an app store with thousands of entries, and a support line that answers at three in the morning. WooCommerce is open source and can be bent into any shape by any developer you can hire. If your shop sells a lot of things that are not bullion, or you already have a developer who lives in one of these platforms, that weight counts for something.
The trade-off is that every one of those apps and themes was built for a store with a fixed price. The pricing layer, the compliance layer and the payment rules are all yours to assemble and yours to keep working, on top of the subscription. A dealer who sells mostly metal ends up paying for a general platform and then paying again, in money and in attention, to make it behave like a bullion platform.
What you keep
Your name on the door, your domain, your customers.
The obvious worry about a platform built for one trade is that it looks like everybody else on it. It does not. Each store has its own domain, logo, colours, fonts and pages, and nothing on the page says Ophir Markets built it. Your orders, customers and transactions are yours to export whenever you want them, and a dealer API connects spot prices, orders and customers to your own systems.
Read this part carefully
These are tools. Ophir Markets is not your compliance officer, not your anti-money-laundering officer and not your lawyer, and using this platform moves no legal responsibility off your business and onto ours. The Bank Secrecy Act, sanctions screening, your state dealer licence, your sales tax, your federal reporting and your own anti-money-laundering program are yours, exactly as they are today. What we can do is give you good instruments and put the evidence where you can see it. Judging whether they are enough for your program is your call, and your counsel's.
The shortest way to judge any of this is to look at a store that is running. The console behind it is listed screen by screen here, and what a sale costs you is worked through with sample orders here.
Get started
Bring your premiums. Everything else is already here.
Three fields and a confirmation email, and we will show you Ophir Markets running under your shop. No setup fee, no monthly fee.