Ghost CMS Ecommerce: How to Actually Sell on Ghost

Ghost is the best blogging platform on the internet, and it will not sell a t-shirt to save its life. Here is every honest way to add a real shop to Ghost in 2026, what each one quietly costs you, and how to keep all of it on your own Stripe.

Last updated 29 June 2026

Does Ghost have ecommerce built in?

No, and Ghost is refreshingly honest about it. Their own help docs say, more or less, that Ghost is a publishing platform and not really an ecommerce store: no inventory, no cart, no shipping. What Ghost does brilliantly is memberships. You can charge for a monthly subscription, run free and paid tiers, and gate posts behind them, all on your own Stripe account with a 0% platform fee. That is genuinely best-in-class.

The gap is everything that is not a subscription. A one-off product. A physical thing that needs posting. A digital file someone pays for once and downloads. A mug. Ghost has no answer for any of that, which is why its docs send you off to integrations. This guide is about which integration to actually pick.

The five ways to add ecommerce to Ghost

There is no official Ghost cart, so every option is something you bolt on. They fall into three camps: dead-simple-but-limited (Stripe Payment Links), powerful-but-from-another-world (Shopify, Gumroad), and built-for-Ghost (Snipcart and Mytho). Here is the honest table, then the detail.

One honest footnote: everyone in that table also pays Stripe (or their card processor) roughly 2.9% plus 30p per sale. That is unavoidable and it is not a take-rate. The take-rate column is the cut the platform skims on top of that. Mytho takes none of it.

The bit nobody puts on the pricing page: the maths

Take-rates look tiny on a landing page and enormous on a bank statement. Say you do £3,000 a month selling digital products and merch, which is a healthy little Ghost shop. Here is what each option skims off the top in a year, before Stripe takes its standard cut from all of them:

• Gumroad at ~10%: about £3,600 a year, gone.
• Snipcart at 2%: about £720 a year, plus the $20 monthly floor on slow months.
• Shopify Buy Button: the plan fee plus up to 2% if you do not use Shopify Payments.
• Mytho at 0%: £180 a year. Flat. That is the whole bill.

The percentage tools cost you more precisely as you succeed, which is a strange thing to sign up for. A flat fee is a flat fee whether you sell ten things or ten thousand. That single idea is most of why Mytho exists, and it is the same pitch Ghost itself makes about memberships.

The options, in detail

1. Stripe Payment Links (free, fine for one or two things)

Stripe lets you create a hosted checkout link for a single product in about a minute, paste it into a Ghost post or button, and take money. No monthly fee, no platform cut, just Stripe processing. It is the right answer if you sell one ebook or take the odd donation. It is the wrong answer the moment you want a cart, variants, stock, shipping or more than a couple of products, because every link is an island and nothing adds up into an order.

2. Shopify Buy Button (powerful, but you are running two sites)

Shopify will give you an embeddable buy button from as little as $5 a month on the Starter plan. It is a real cart with real inventory. The catch is that you now run two platforms: Ghost for your words and Shopify for your products, with separate dashboards, separate logins and a checkout that does not look like your blog. If you already live in Shopify, fine. If you came to Ghost to get away from that kind of sprawl, this puts it back.

3. Snipcart (the classic Ghost bolt-on)

Snipcart is the cart the Ghost tutorials have pointed at for years. Two script tags, some data-item attributes on your buttons, done. It genuinely works and the setup is fast. The trade-offs: your products live as HTML attributes rather than real records, there is a 2% transaction fee with a $20 monthly minimum, no awareness of Ghost membership tiers, and checkout happens on snipcart.com rather than your domain. Great for three stickers, strained by thirty products. There is a fuller breakdown in Snipcart vs Mytho.

4. Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy (digital-first, and they leave Ghost)

Gumroad is a lovely place to sell a digital product and a painful place to watch 10% of every sale disappear. Lemon Squeezy is gentler at around 5% and acts as merchant of record, which is genuinely useful for cross-border tax. Both host the product on their own pages, though, so your buyer leaves your Ghost site to pay, and neither knows your Ghost members exist. If you sell purely digital and want a built-in marketplace, Gumroad has a real edge. If you want the sale to happen on your site, it does not.

5. Mytho (the Ghost-native one, and yes, it is mine)

I built Mytho because none of the above let me run a proper shop inside Ghost without either a percentage or a second platform. Mytho is one embed script and a dashboard. You create products with images, variants, weights, tax rules and shipping zones, and Mytho auto-publishes a real Ghost page for each one through the Admin API, so your shop looks like your blog because it is your blog. Checkout runs on your own Stripe at pay.yourdomain.com. Digital downloads get secure expiring links emailed automatically. Physical, digital and print-on-demand all share one cart. And it reads your Ghost membership tiers, so you can gate products and a whole content library to paying members with no second login.

The price is $15 a month, flat, with a 0% take-rate and a 7-day free trial. That is the entire pitch: your store, your domain, your Stripe, your members, none of your revenue.

The thing only Ghost-native tools can do: one cart for everything

Here is the part the comparison table cannot quite show. A creator on Ghost usually is not just a shop or just a membership. They are a newsletter with a paid tier, a few digital downloads, some merch, and maybe a members-only resource library. Stitch that together from Gumroad plus Snipcart plus a separate members plugin and you are maintaining four tools and four logins.

Because Mytho is built on top of Ghost rather than beside it, a single customer can buy a physical mug, a digital preset pack and unlock a member-gated download in one checkout, while their Ghost membership tier decides what they are allowed to see. Nobody else does all three in one Ghost-native cart. That is the category Mytho is trying to own, and it is the honest reason to pick it over a stack of bolt-ons.

How to add a real shop to Ghost in about five minutes

The Mytho version of setup looks like this:

1. Start a free Mytho trial and connect your own Stripe account in a couple of clicks.
2. Paste your Ghost Admin API key so Mytho can publish product pages onto your site.
3. Add a product: title, price, images, variants, weight and shipping zone.
4. Drop the one-line embed script into your Ghost theme, or let Mytho publish the product pages for you.
5. Make a test purchase. The money is in your Stripe, the order is in your dashboard, done.

There is a step-by-step in adding a shop to a Ghost site and the full setup walkthrough lives in the docs.

So which should you pick?

If you sell one or two things and never plan to grow that, use a Stripe Payment Link and pay nobody a monthly fee. If you are purely digital and want a marketplace to find you, Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy are reasonable as long as you accept the percentage. If you already run Shopify, the Buy Button is the path of least resistance. If you want a real, Ghost-native shop on your own domain and Stripe, that handles physical and digital and members together without skimming your revenue, that is exactly what Mytho is for.

Frequently asked questions

Does Ghost have a built-in shopping cart?

No. Ghost handles paid memberships and subscriptions natively, but it has no cart, no products, no inventory and no shipping out of the box. To sell anything other than a subscription you add a commerce layer on top, such as Mytho, Snipcart or a Stripe Payment Link.

Can I sell physical products on Ghost?

Not with Ghost on its own. Ghost has no concept of a physical product, a variant, stock or shipping. A Ghost-native tool like Mytho adds all of that and publishes each product as a real Ghost page, so your shop looks like the rest of your site.

Can I sell digital downloads on Ghost?

Yes, with a commerce layer, because Ghost itself does not deliver files. Mytho generates secure, expiring download links and emails them automatically after payment, and it can gate those downloads behind your Ghost membership tiers.

What is the cheapest way to start selling on Ghost?

A Stripe Payment Link is free and you only pay Stripe processing. It is fine for one or two products with no real cart. Once you have a handful of products, variants or shipping, a flat tool like Mytho at $15 a month with no take-rate works out cheaper than any percentage-based option.

Does Ghost integrate with Stripe?

Yes. Ghost uses Stripe for memberships, and Ghost-native commerce tools use Stripe too. With Mytho the money lands in your own Stripe account directly, with no platform sitting in the middle taking a cut.

Can I use PayPal instead of Stripe on Ghost?

Ghost memberships are Stripe-only, and most Ghost commerce tools, Mytho included, are built on Stripe. If PayPal is a hard requirement you would need a separate gateway, which adds a second system to manage.

How do I gate a product or download behind a Ghost membership?

Ghost gates posts by tier but not products. Mytho reads your Ghost membership tiers and can gate products, downloads and an entire content library to specific tiers using the member token Ghost already issues, so there is no second login for your readers.

Can I use WooCommerce with Ghost?

No. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin and does not run on Ghost. The Ghost equivalents are an embedded cart such as Snipcart or a Ghost-native shop such as Mytho.

What take-rate does selling on Ghost cost?

Ghost charges 0% on memberships; you only pay Stripe processing. For products the take-rate is set by whichever tool you add: Gumroad takes about 10%, Snipcart 2% with a $20 monthly floor, and Mytho takes 0% for a flat $15 a month.

Can I sell memberships and one-off products at the same time?

Yes, and this is where a Ghost-native tool earns its keep. Mytho supports mixed carts of physical, digital and print-on-demand items alongside the membership tiers you already run in Ghost.

Will adding a shop slow my Ghost site down?

Not meaningfully if it loads as a single async script. Mytho is one embed tag, and your product pages are real Ghost pages, so they are as fast as the rest of your blog.

Do I need Ghost(Pro), or does this work on self-hosted Ghost?

Either. Any tool that talks to the Ghost Admin API, Mytho included, works the same on Ghost(Pro) and on a self-hosted Ghost install.

Is there print on demand for Ghost?

Yes, through Mytho's built-in Printful integration. You design in Printful, import the product into Mytho, and any order containing it is submitted to Printful for production and shipping automatically.

Related reading Snipcart vs Mytho. Sell digital downloads on Ghost without losing 10% to Gumroad. Adding a shop to a Ghost site. Ghost vs WordPress. Everything Mytho does.