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A store in one weekend
Hosted platforms such as Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce on WordPress are made to be built by their owners: you pick a theme, add products, connect a payment provider and you are online. With photos and texts ready, your weekend looks like this:
| When | What | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Friday evening | Choose a platform, create the account, connect the domain | 2 hours |
| Saturday morning | Choose a theme, add logo and colours | 3 hours |
| Saturday afternoon | The first twenty products with photo, price and text | 4 hours |
| Sunday morning | Payment methods, shipping rates per country, VAT | 3 hours |
| Sunday afternoon | Terms, withdrawal, privacy, cookies, a test order | 3 hours |
What each platform costs per month is in is Shopify free, is Wix free and is WooCommerce free; how the two biggest compare, in Shopify or WooCommerce. For the legal pages: do I need a privacy policy and do I need a cookie banner.
Three things beginners underestimate
Photos. A product people cannot see well does not sell, not even at a low price. A phone, daylight and a plain background go a long way; for mood shots a shoot day pays off, see corporate photoshoot ideas.
Shipping. Work out your rates per country and per weight before you launch. A parcel across a border costs more than one at home, and finding that out after the first orders means losing money on every one.
Trust. A new store without reviews, an address or a company number on the website makes buyers hesitate. Show your details, ask your first customers for an honest review and answer questions fast.
Build it yourself or get help, part by part
A standard store is a weekend project. What sits in front of it or behind it is not.
What building it yourself costs in year one
Building it yourself is not free: you pay in hours. Price them at what that time would earn in your business.
| Item | Year one | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Platform, Shopify Basic billed yearly | 288 euro | 24 euro a month |
| Setup, 15 hours | 750 euro | 50 euro an hour |
| Updates and additions, 2 hours a month | 1,200 euro | 50 euro an hour |
| Together | 2,238 euro | plus fees per payment |
That is a good trade when you want to test a product, or when you enjoy working on the store. It becomes a bad one once your hours earn more in the business than in the store. The same trade-off for a regular site is in build your website yourself or hire, and whether the store pays for itself in is an online store worth it.
The middle road
You do not have to choose between doing everything and doing nothing. Build the store yourself and hand over only the parts you cannot do: a link to your stock system, a checkout that loads faster, or invoices that go out as e-invoices. In Belgium the last one is required between businesses since 1 January 2026, and more EU countries follow; see is Peppol mandatory in Belgium. Selling to EU consumers also means an accessible checkout, unless you are a micro-enterprise with fewer than ten staff and at most 2 million euro in turnover or balance sheet; see the European Accessibility Act website requirements.
Before you pick a platform
Which platform is easiest to start on yourself?
Shopify and Wix take care of hosting, security and updates, which makes starting easy. WooCommerce gives more freedom, but then you maintain WordPress, the theme and the plugins yourself.
Can I move to a custom store later?
Yes. Products, customers and orders come along as an export; design and integrations are rebuilt, with redirects for your old URLs so Google does not lose you.