Question 1

How quickly can I get my store online?

Accepted Answer

Most shops are live within an hour. Sign up, add your products, count your stock in, connect Stripe, and share your store link. No technical skills required — if you can use a smartphone, you can set up UniShopping.

Question 2

What does it cost?

Accepted Answer

There's no monthly subscription and no setup fee. In-store and cash sales are completely free, however many you take. Online card orders are 2.5% + 30c, and that already includes Stripe's online payment processing fees — you won't get a separate processing bill, and nothing is added on top. The rate shown is for standard Australian cards; Amex and overseas cards are processed at Stripe's own higher rates.

Question 3

How do payments work?

Accepted Answer

Customers pay via Stripe (credit/debit cards) or cash on pickup and at the counter. Card payments are direct charges on your own Stripe account — funds land in your bank, not ours, on your own payout schedule. The 2.5% + 30c is deducted from the payment as it settles and covers both Stripe's processing and our platform fee together, so there is only ever one deduction to reconcile.

Question 4

Can customers pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay, Klarna or Zip?

Accepted Answer

Yes. You choose which methods your storefront offers in Settings → Payments, and each one appears once Stripe has switched on that capability for your account — if Stripe is still reviewing one, it is simply left off the checkout rather than breaking it. Buy-now-pay-later is charged at your own Stripe rate on your own account, and our platform share is exactly the same whichever method the customer picks. Wallet buttons also appear on the product page and cart, and they go through the same stock check and the same pricing as any other checkout.

Question 5

Can I take card payments at the counter?

Accepted Answer

Yes, three ways. Tap to Pay on a supported phone, a Stripe countertop reader bound to that location, or the machine you already have — keyed in and recorded as a manual payment, kept in its own column so an unreconciled figure is never mistaken for a reconciled one. Counter sales carry no platform fee from us at all; a card tap is charged at Stripe's own card-present rate on your account. At the end of the day the register closes with opening float, cash sales and refunds, expected drawer, counted drawer and the variance by name.

Question 6

Are there plans or tiers to choose between?

Accepted Answer

No. There's a single offering and every feature is included from day one — online store, inventory across locations, shipping and pickup, discounts, returns, in-store POS, printing, custom domain and reports. Nothing is locked behind an upgrade, so there's nothing to switch between.

Question 7

Is the in-store POS really free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. We only ever charge on orders paid online through your storefront. Counter and phone sales you ring up on the in-store POS — and anything paid in cash — carry no fee at all, no matter how many you take. That includes the full POS: barcode scanning, receipt and label printing, live stock counts, sales reports and CSV export. Plenty of shops start with us purely as a free POS and switch on the online store later.

Question 8

Why does Stripe ask me to verify my identity?

Accepted Answer

Australian law requires Stripe to confirm who is behind every business accepting card payments, so before it switches them on it asks for your legal name and date of birth, your residential address, your ABN or company details, a photo of your ID (driver licence or passport), and the bank account you want payouts sent to. It all goes to Stripe directly — we never see or store your ID. Press Continue Setup in Settings and Stripe reopens its form where you left off; the account is a full Stripe account of your own, so you can also sign in at dashboard.stripe.com with the email you used when connecting to check progress. Approval usually takes minutes, occasionally 1-2 business days. Until it's done your dashboard shows 'Setup Incomplete' and lists exactly what Stripe is still waiting for; cash and in-store sales keep working the whole time.

Question 9

Stripe wouldn't connect and I got an error — what now?

Accepted Answer

The dialog that appears tells you which kind of problem it is and what to do. If Stripe is waiting on your identity documents or bank details, press Try again and complete the form Stripe reopens. If the message says payment setup is temporarily unavailable, the issue is on our side — nothing in your Stripe account needs fixing and we'll clear it, usually the same business day. Either way, open 'Show technical details' for a reference number and email contact@unishopping.com.au with it; that lets us look up the exact request in Stripe's logs. Cash and in-store sales are never affected.

Question 10

How does shipping work?

Accepted Answer

You set shipping rates by destination — by weight, by order value, or a flat rate per zone. You can also offer local delivery inside the postcodes you serve, and free in-store pickup. Customers see the real cost at checkout rather than an estimate. If you configure no rates for a destination, checkout tells the customer plainly rather than guessing a price.

Question 11

Do my customers need to create an account?

Accepted Answer

No. Checkout is fully guest-based — no login, no app download. Customers add items, enter their delivery address, and pay. They track their order via a unique link. Accounts are optional, and a customer who does create one keeps their order history.

Question 12

Can I temporarily stop accepting orders?

Accepted Answer

Yes. One toggle on your dashboard pauses checkout. Your catalog stays visible and browsable, but customers see a 'temporarily not accepting orders' message instead of a buy button — useful over a holiday break or while you stocktake.

Question 13

Is UniShopping a Shopify alternative?

Accepted Answer

For a shop that sells across a counter as well as online, yes — that is who it is built for. You get the operational core in one system: products and variants, stock across locations that checkout cannot oversell, shipping quoted at checkout, discounts that combine predictably, and returns that put stock back — with a free in-store POS and receipt printers attached, and no monthly subscription. The trade is breadth: there is no app store and no third-party plugins, so every integration is one we build ourselves. If your shop depends on a particular app, check before you move.

Question 14

Can I move my shop across from Shopify?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The product importer reads Shopify's own export columns, so you can bring your catalog across with the file you already have, and customer exports import to one record per email. Every import runs as a dry run first — created, updated and skipped counts, with per-row errors — before anything is written. Past orders import as read-only history so your reports don't start empty; they can't be fulfilled or refunded, because there is no stock or payment behind them. Your old product links can be pointed at the new ones, and changing a product's web address later creates that redirect for you automatically.

Question 15

Do you sell gift cards?

Accepted Answer

No — we do store credit instead. You can refund a return to store credit rather than to the card, and the customer spends it online or at the counter as a tender applied after tax, in full or alongside a card. Every issue, redemption and expiry is a ledger row, so the outstanding balance report reconciles to the cent and you always know what you owe. Store credit belongs to one customer at one shop and can't be transferred, which is what keeps it clear of the rules gift cards sit under.

Question 16

Can my staff have their own logins?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Staff are scoped to one shop and only the areas you grant — catalog, orders, inventory, discounts, customers, finance, settings, POS — each as read or write, and that's enforced on every action, not just hidden in the menu. Two-factor authentication is available to everyone and can be required company-wide on password sign-in, with single-use recovery codes shown once and a code that stops working the moment it is used. Every change a staff member makes is written to an activity log you can read as the owner: who, what, when and from where.

Question 17

Do order emails come from my shop or from you?

Accepted Answer

From your shop, once you've verified your own sending domain — we show you the exact SPF and DKIM records to add and re-check them on demand. Until that's done, emails still go out from our sender rather than not going out at all. You can write your own subject line and intro for each template, preview it with sample data, and send yourself a test before a customer ever sees it. Order confirmations can't be switched off; the optional ones can.

Question 18

Can I connect Google Analytics or a Meta pixel?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Add your GA4 measurement id and your Meta pixel details in Settings → Analytics and the storefront sends product views, add-to-carts, checkouts and purchases. Purchases are also sent server-side, so ad blockers don't quietly under-report the one event your advertising is judged on. Browser events only fire where the customer has consented to marketing, and no customer name, email, address or phone leaves the system in any analytics event. There's no box to paste arbitrary scripts into — that's an attack surface we won't open on your customers' behalf.

Question 19

Can my bookkeeper or my warehouse get at the data?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Invoices, payments, refunds and payouts export in a shape Xero and MYOB will import, with tax split out and our platform fee as its own line, and a payout report that shows exactly which orders, fees and refunds add up to each Stripe deposit. For systems that need to react rather than read, register a webhook for order created, paid, fulfilled or refunded, or issue a read-only API token scoped to one shop and revocable the moment you want it gone.

Question 20

Do you handle exchanges?

Accepted Answer

Not as a single step. You refund the return — to the card or to store credit — and the customer places a new order for what they wanted instead. It's one more step at the counter, and it keeps the stock and the money honest rather than approximately right.

Question 21

What doesn't UniShopping do?

Accepted Answer

A short list, on purpose. No gift cards (store credit instead), no one-step exchanges, no editing an order after it is placed, domestic selling in one currency, no live carrier rates, no subscriptions or wholesale payment terms, and no app store. Storefront search suits catalogs of up to roughly 2,000 products. Each is a deliberate trade so that money and stock stay correct, and 'What UniShopping does not do' in the docs sets out what to do instead.

Question 22

How is the fee collected, and can I cancel?

Accepted Answer

It's deducted automatically as part of each online payment, before the rest of the money is paid out to you — there's no invoice to pay and nothing to remember. If an order is refunded to the customer's card, our share of the fee on the refunded amount is returned too; a refund to store credit moves no money, so there is no fee on it to return. There's no contract and no lock-in: stop taking online orders and you stop paying us.

Free in-store & cash orders. 2.5% + 30c online, Stripe fees included.

Pay as you go

2.5% + 30c per online order, Stripe fees included. Every feature included. No monthly fee, no lock-in.

Frequently asked questions

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UniShopping Pricing — free in-store POS, 2.5% + 30c on online orders