Get an online shop built without getting lost in platform debates

Getting an online shop built sounds like a single decision, but it is a chain of many small ones. Platform, payment provider, shipping rules, tax logic, design, hosting, legal pages. Each choice affects the next, and if you get the order wrong, you build it twice.

The most common mistake is starting with the design. Design matters, but it is the consequence of your product range, audience, and processes, not the starting point. If you know what is being sold, to whom, how it ships, and how it gets paid for, you have already done half the work. The rest is craft.

Choosing a platform: WooCommerce, Shopify, or something else

The platform determines how flexible you are and how much you pay long term. There is no universal right answer, only the right answer for your business.

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress and therefore open source. You host it yourself, have full control over code and data, and can customize almost anything. The price for that: you are responsible for updates, security, and performance. For shops with special cases in taxes, B2B pricing, complex product variants, or integrations with inventory systems, WooCommerce is often the more pragmatic choice. If you already have a WordPress site, you also save yourself a second stack.

Shopify is the opposite philosophy. You pay monthly and get a hosted system with high reliability, an app store, and a fast start. For classic DTC brands with a clear product range, that is often the fastest path to a first sale. Once requirements get more exotic, like invoice payment, tiered B2B discounts, or unusual tax situations, Shopify either gets expensive through apps or becomes impractical.

Systems like Shopware or JTL are relevant for German SMBs when inventory management, point of sale, and the shop need to be tightly linked. For small to mid-sized projects, the overhead is usually too big. In most cases the decision comes down to WooCommerce or Shopify, and the right answer depends on your product range, your processes, and how much you want to manage yourself.

Payment providers and shipping: the underrated work

Payment providers and shipping are not a side issue, they decide conversion and operating costs. It pays to look closely at this before implementation.

In German-speaking markets, buyers expect certain payment methods: PayPal, credit card, SEPA direct debit, often Klarna or invoice payment too. If you only offer credit card, you lose measurable conversion. Providers like Stripe and Mollie cover the common methods in a single integration and save you multiple contract relationships. On fees, do the math: 1.4 to 2.9 percent plus a fixed amount per transaction is typical. With an average cart of 30 euros and a low margin, that is no longer a minor detail.

Shipping is the second area where shops often start too simply. Realistically you need shipping zones (Germany, EU, rest of world), weight- or value-based pricing, clear rules for free shipping above a threshold, and a returns process. If you sell into the rest of the EU, you cannot avoid the OSS scheme. VAT becomes due in the destination country once you cross the EU-wide threshold of 10,000 euros net revenue per year. The shop has to reflect that correctly, or you end up paying for it later.

Process: from the first conversation to launch

A good process is linear but not rigid. There is an order in which decisions make sense, because each phase builds on the previous one.

It starts with a conversation about the business: what is being sold, to whom, how often, at what margin, which processes already exist, and which need to be created. Then comes a platform and architecture decision, then wireframes and design, then implementation and data entry, then testing and launch. How fast a mid-sized shop goes live depends almost entirely on how quickly product images, copy, and legal clarifications arrive, not on the technology.

Before launch comes the least glamorous but most important block: legal pages, a cookie banner with clean consent logic, GDPR-compliant tracking, test orders with real payment providers in live mode. I recommend checking Core Web Vitals in this phase too, because a fast shop measurably sells better than a slow one. If you also need a landing page for campaigns, that can be planned separately, see landing pages.

Costs: what a shop realistically costs

The price range for an online shop is wide, because "online shop" can mean anything from 30 products to a B2B portal. Rough benchmarks help with budget planning.

A simple shop on Shopify or WooCommerce with a standard theme, clean configuration, and legal coverage runs between 4,000 and 7,000 euros. A custom-designed shop with its own design, multiple payment providers, more complex shipping logic, and basic integrations runs 8,000 to 15,000 euros. Once inventory management, ERP connections, B2B features, or multilingual variants are added, 15,000 to 25,000 euros is realistic, with no fixed ceiling.

On top come ongoing costs: hosting for WooCommerce from about 20 euros a month, Shopify from 36 euros a month on the basic plan, transaction fees, and possibly a maintenance contract between 80 and 300 euros a month. Planning these numbers in from the start avoids nasty surprises in year two. For a broader overview of total costs, see get a website built: costs.

Working together: why a freelancer is often the more pragmatic choice

For most small and mid-sized shops, an agency is overkill. A freelancer brings less overhead, shorter decision paths, and a direct line to the person actually building it.

I work as a solo freelancer, which means you talk to the person doing the design, writing the code, and setting up the payment providers. No project manager translating between you and the team. That saves time and misunderstandings. On bigger projects I work with proven partners, but responsibility stays in one place.

If you want to know what that kind of collaboration looks like in practice, see hire a freelance web designer. For regional projects around Fürth and Nuremberg, there are dedicated pages, for example freelance web developer in central Franconia. The best starting point is always a short conversation to check whether the project fits what I do well. Let's talk.