eCommerce

We support a diverse range of businesses that sell their products, events and services online. areas of expertise include publishing, wellness products, artwork, retreats, clothing, trainings, and merchandise.

WooCommerce & Shopify Customization

While Shopify maintains a slight lead over WooCommerce in percentage of total eCommerce websites (26% vs 20%), WordPress is still far in the lead as the most used Content Management System (at 62% vs Shopify at 7%*).

If you are developing a website that focused is on eCommerce, we recommend going with Shopify due to its straightforward pricing structure and a strong support system for online sales. However, if you are planning a website that requires both eCommerce and features like an expansive blog, integrations with third party software, we have found WordPress to be more flexible and cost-effective.

Contact us about your project and we can provide you with an initial recommendation on the best direction for your website development strategy. Also, if you are experiencing limitations with your WooCommerce store, we can provide recommendations for how to improve it, or a plan for how to migrate to Shopify.

* Mobiloud Article, with stats current as of March 2025

Payment Processing

Stripe appears to be the simplest payment processor. However, we understand that clients have differing needs for payment processors, based on their type of product or service, their business entity setup and their customer audiences (e.g. primarily international sales). Golden Stupa Media has worked with many clients to offer multiple payment methods, including PayPal, CashApp, Venmo, Apple Pay, ACH secure bank transfer (by various methods), SEPA, cryptocurrency payments, and more. Contact us about your payment processing needs and we are happy to craft a strategy with you.

Subscriptions

Offering products and services using subscription or recurring payment methods has become a helpful way for small to medium sized businesses and organizations create to better revenue planning and gain followings of engaged customers. We provide solutions for recurring payment and subscription models for podcasts, health and beauty product sellers, online training providers, artists, and others. There are multiple ways that these recurring payments can be set up, including connection with your accounting software. Contact us if you are either planning to roll out a subscription payment system, or wish to improve an existing system.

Partial Payments / Deposits / Payment Plans

Making products, services or events accessible to a wider audience including those who are experiencing economic hardship or strain is a noble one, though can be accompanied with complexity! Increased complexity and costs associated with accounting, cancellation and late payment policies, can also become a headache for admin staff. That said, when conducted with good planning and the proper software and integration, implementing a partial payment, deposits or payment plan option for your customers can make the difference between selling out an event or missing your minimum targets. Contact us to discuss your product, service or event sales plans and we would be happy to review them with you and craft a plan that reduces overhead and generates more sales!

Shipping

For small businesses, shipping can be a delight when you are excitedly making sales and experiencing the joy of sending off products to a happy customer. However, shipping can also cut into your economic margins, cause checkout complexity for customers, and waste precious time. It can also be challenging to compete with big online sellers like Amazon who offer cheap shipping rates and have their own logistics and distribution systems.

Making a plan that is both practical for you and your staff to handle (especially when a rush of orders come in) and one that is competitive and customer friendly is key. We have worked with many clients to craft such plans, from simple flat rate tiered shipping for domestic and international for small products, to automated live rate and volume-based shipping calculations for international shipping. Contact us if you are planning to roll out a new product or store and require a smart shipping strategy. If your existing shipping strategy is not working for you, we would be happy to evaluate it and provide strategies for improvement.

Affiliate Marketing

Having a good network of business associates and friends who can help your business grow is essential! Many people ask about affiliate marketing, whether they have a solid customer base or are in the early growth phase. In our experience the key factors to assess include: are the margins on my product or service high enough / are the volume of potential sales high enough for my affiliates to have enough incentive to promote our products? Additionally, is the overhead necessitated by implementing and maintaining the affiliate system more than the return on investment? Sometimes it is simply not possible to assess this without experimenting. Creating a strong strategy for testing the waters of affiliate marketing is wise. We recommend starting with a handful of affiliates using a simpler system, making sure that these affiliates and their marketing base have sufficient resonance with your products, and that their subscriber followings are large enough to see some results for both parties. If you do not have such affiliates yet, then it may be best to wait until you develop those relationships. The expense of rolling out an affiliate marketing system that is not properly planned can turn you off to the entire notion!

Custom Checkout Experiences

While having a standardized, predictable user experience for eCommerce checkout is often smart for most simple product and service sales, there are many examples for which collecting additional customer information, preferences and other data during the checkout experience is important for your eCommerce strategy. This is especially true for selling event registration, custom made creative products, professional services, and more. We have broad ranging experience with both the user experience and interface design, testing and rollout of custom checkout experiences, with the proper integration of the added fields and data collected into customer relationship management databases, accounting, email marketing, and other cloud systems.

Scientific & Technical Industries

We provide website and marketing solutions to various consulting firms and organizations who work within scientific and technical industries, including archaeology, environmental consulting, construction, environmental policy, aerospace, ecology, engineering, geospatial and remote sensing.

Project Portfolios

Presenting the range of your services and unique position within your industry and target markets is obviously very important for consultants and technical service providers. To do this, often the most critical parts are properly categorizing your service hierarchy and project types, how those may overlap and associate with one another, and how you convey information about past projects and clients in ways that honor your relationship with those existing customers and their privacy. Golden Stupa Media has a long history of assisting our clients with this planning and creating project portfolios. Contact us if you would like us to review your existing website for an initial assessment.

Data Visualization

Communicating scientific and technical data in ways that are accessible, but still accurate and precise, is always important. Even when you anticipate your target audiences to primarily be conversant with your technical jargon, your symbols and industry standard visual representations, it may still be wise to consider the accessibility of your presentation to others. At times, this may mean providing the more industry standard technical representations of data via PDF or similar downloadable files, while maintaining a more interactive and accessible presentation on your website.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

We have 20 years of experience with GIS systems. This includes the creation of databases, importing of data, mapping to the implementation of enterprise GIS roll-outs and public facing map user interfaces under regulatory oversight. While we have had training and have used ESRI ArcGIS products going back to 2006, we have also used alternatives like Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, and other geospatial mapping web platforms. Contact us about your existing or planned GIS project needs, and we would be happy to provide initial scoping and strategy.

Interactive Charts and Tables

The benefit of presenting charts, graphs and tables on the internet is that you can make keep them visually simple and communicate the key data points and relationships, while also making more data accessible. This is a powerful way of communicating complex scientific data with the ability to provide context, citations, and relationships between datasets using interactivity.

Animated Data Representation

Do you want to animate your data in a way that tells a story? Contact us about options for both making datasets attractively represented, and depicting change across time, region or other relationships.

Document Managers

Golden Stupa Media provides solutions for private document management, which can be accessed via your website, or via secure server level access (a separate database and file structure that is segregated from your website). We offer multiple software options and user interfaces, and we can also implement 2-factor authentication to further protect your data.

Not every industry can use the common cloud-based document management platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Certain industries, whether due to regulatory requirements or for legal reasons, tare required to store their documents on private servers with heightened security.

Database Integration

Does your website require connectivity with public facing or private access databases? Golden Stupa Media offers well-defined options for making technical and scientific data accessible, synchronized and compliant with regulations.

Healthcare & HIPAA

The proper management of Protected Health Information (PHI) is a critical function of any medical clinic, healthcare or medical research organization. One of our specialties has been providing HIPAA-compliant forms, patient data management, payment solutions, and integrated online medical services to many clients. These have included small to medium sized clinics, hospital systems, medical and pharmaceutical research organizations, and medically adjacent training programs that also collect PHI.

Medical Intake Forms

We provide an alternative to expensive large system solutions for small clinics and healthcare providers to create and maintain HIPAA-compliant patient intake, medical history and other PHI-gathering forms. We can guide you through the appropriate scaling of your HIPAA form implementation and work with you to find the most cost-effective plan. In addition, we are skilled at making user-friendly multi-step forms, with appropriate applications of conditional logic.

Appointment Booking and Scheduling

Another common component of healthcare websites is to offer an appointment booking and scheduling system. We have vetted many of these systems and are happy to guide you through the selection, implementation and integration process.

Clinical Trials

We also provide website and cloud systems strategy, design, development and maintenance for clinical trials and medical research. Since these projects are generally have specific completion dates, and specific requirements for limiting administrative access, they are often best developed as standalone or multi-site websites with access controls and logging. Golden Stupa Media has worked with multiple organizations to develop recruitment websites and are familiar with regulatory requirements for the collection, storage and logging of access. This covers entities conducting research in the United States, Canada, portions of Europe, and Israel.

Patient Dashboards

Do you need to provide secure patient account login and information management? Golden Stupa Media offers options for both box software solutions that can plugin to your website or also custom options for patient dashboards.

Encrypted & HIPAA-Compliant Email

We offer encrypted email by default but can also install premium SSL certificates and enforce strict email security and encryption. We also offer solutions for HIPAA-compliant email, which is segregated from your shared or private hosting account. Contact us if this is something you require.

Nonprofits

We have had the pleasure of working for many non-profit organizations, including educational, advocacy, and public works. Golden Stupa Media is uniquely capable at addressing the needs of non-profits information technology and online needs.

Donation Platforms

Implementing a functional donation system and integrating it into your website, email and social media campaigns, is only part of what creates successful online fundraising for non-profits. The rest of the picture involves crafting the story, rationale, urgency and impact of the donations being requested.

Golden Stupa Media offers guidance and development for non-profits seeking to improve their online fundraising operations. Recurring donations are a popular means for creating a sustaining membership or supporter base.

Integration with CRM, Communications

Do you need to embark on the path of rolling out and integrating cloud services like CRM, email marketing, donations and fundraising, accounting with your website? Golden Stupa Media helps organizations like yours with creating and implementing tailored web and cloud service integration and management plans.

Wellness & Healing

Another industry that we support is wellness and healing. This includes therapists, massage therapists, herbalists, alternative healers, acupuncturists, retreat organizers, and more.

Booking and Scheduling

Offering an appointment booking and scheduling system through your website provides seamless scheduling and client contact information. While there are many systems to choose from, we have vetted most and are happy to guide you through the selection, implementation and integration process.

Product Development

If you are looking for help in creating a professional, consistent way of presenting your wellness products or healing service packages, let us know! We have assisted clients with product photography, graphic design, marketing pages, online stores and more.

Retreats & Events

If you are a small business, retreat center, conference center, or non-profit organization that plans, coordinates and promotes retreats and special events, we would love to speak with you about your web development, cloud service integration and marketing needs.

Event Registration and Ticketing

Event registration, admission, and follow-up data collection requires a significant amount of planning, accommodation of people’s needs and correspondence. From dietary restrictions to medical accommodations and the need for inclusivity — event planning and coordination takes a village! Wouldn’t it be nice if the automated website registration process reduced this complexity and collected enough participant information upfront? To the extent possible, Golden Stupa Media works with clients who sell events and retreats to streamline the registration, screening, admission and participant follow-up process. Contact us if you are looking to implement event registration for the first time, or if you have questions about your current registration process and would like an assessment.

Integration with CRM, Scheduling, and Email Marketing

Golden Stupa Media provides extensive tools to integrate services, these include the migration of databases from one platform to another, integration and bidirectional synchronization of data between your website, accounting, marketing, CRM and other cloud platforms.

Creatives & Content Creators

We have provided web development, design and marketing solutions for a broad range of creatives and content creators. These include content for podcasts, artists, photographers, videographers, filmmakers, musicians, galleries and museums. This is a fun process, since we too are creatives!