Firstly, we would like to highlight the fact that ShopFactory has a fair and reasonable pricing model based on a “pay for what is needed and used” basis instead of only offering a monthly fee / subscription method.
Since we started back in 1995 the client-based ShopFactory software has been available on a one off fee basis with no on-going fees. This has been one of our main differentiation factors compared  to our competitors.

Having said that, the technical, security, technological, merchants, shoppers, financial intuitions, and legal demands and requirements have been growing steadily over the years.

For us, this meant continuous development, maintenance and investment into large secure and up to date server farms around the world since 1995.  These large and secure server farms around the world simply cannot be financed by a simple one off license fee.

This becomes very clear when considering that some customers have been with us since 1995 and are still using the ShopFactory software they bought many years ago.

Therefore, we started to introduce monthly fees for the provision of extra ecommerce services since 1999. We structured our pricing such that the ShopFactory software pricing covers the development of the actual software with its basic ecommerce functionalities as it has been when we started back in 1995. This is basically an online shop where a shopper can place an order and the merchant receives an order via email without any special server dependent ecommerce functionalities, security, back-end requirements.

A lot of our customers have been happy with just the basic ecommerce functionalities and still are to this day – they just wanted the store builder.

However, some of our customers wanted to or needed to use the more secure and advanced server dependent ecommerce functionalities such as secure online order management , order exporting / connections to other back-ends systems, various marketing tools, reseller tracking, voucher discounts, member management, etc.

So, there was and still is only one fair and reasonable way of offering the ShopFactory Software on a one off fixed fee basis which was that only the customers who needed the extra more secure and advanced ecommerce functionalities would pay for this subscription service.

The provision of these  more secure and advanced ecommerce services attract ongoing regular costs and fees to us which we have to pass onto the merchants who take advantage of these more secure and advanced ecommerce services for their own businesses when they use them for as long as they want which could be simply for just one month or for many years.

However, they only pay for these services when they need them and use them.

This is simply the economic reality and a fair and reasonable way of providing the complete spectrum of ecommerce functionalities and services which  our merchants need for the successful running of their businesses and giving them full flexibility.

Any suggestions that we are dealing in a dishonest or morally dubious manner is simply untrue and we will defend ourselves vigorously against such unfounded allegations based on the facts outlined above.

The above statement hopefully clarifies our pricing policy and why the provision of the SF Cloud / Total care services attract an extra monthly charge.