Your e-shop: the guide

The platform: a decision that looks bigger than it is

The first question is almost always the same: WooCommerce, Shopify or something built from scratch? And almost always, only the monthly subscription gets compared. The real cost lies elsewhere: in hosting, in plugins paid for every year, in fees, and in the person who will maintain the shop.

There is also a trap that costs money. Shopify charges an extra fee when you do not use its own payment system, up to 2% of sales. Many Greek articles present it as unavoidable, saying that system is not available in Greece. It is.

The prices from the official pages, and when each one makes sense, are in WooCommerce, Shopify or custom in 2026. And the uncomfortable conclusion: the platform is not the decision that will make or break your shop. Choose the one you can maintain.

Filters that create thousands of pages

Colour, size, price, brand. Filters help customers find what they want, but every combination of them also creates a new address. A shop with three hundred products can end up with ten thousand pages, and Google spends its time on those instead of the pages you care about.

It is not your mistake; it is the platform's default. How to spot it in Search Console, and why duplicate content is not penalised the way people say, I explain in your shop's filters are generating infinite pages.

Abandoned carts

Seven in ten people who put something in the cart leave without buying. That is the average of fifty studies, and much of it cannot be fixed: many were just looking. Much of the rest, though, can be fixed, usually without a new platform.

Among those who really meant to buy, the top reason they left is extra costs such as shipping, and they hurt most when they appear late. Next come slow delivery, lack of trust, being forced to create an account, a checkout that asks for too many fields, and errors on the site. The six fixes, in the order they pay off, are in cart abandonment: why 70% leave.

Payments: what you pay, and to whom

The question "which payment gateway should I use" is slightly the wrong question. The right one is "what do I pay, to whom, and how do I see it itemised". The fee on every card payment is not one amount. It is three, and the European regulation gives you the right to see them separately.

If you sell small amounts, there is also a Greek law that caps the charges on transactions up to 20 euros with consumer cards, in specific retail categories and for three years. On a ten-euro order, though, what usually hurts is the fixed charge per transaction, not the percentage. The prices the providers publish themselves, and the banks that do not publish them, are in payment gateways in Greece: what you actually pay.

Stock: when the same item is sold twice

If you also have a physical shop, you know the scenario. The last item is sold at the shop till, the e-shop never finds out, and in the evening an order arrives for something that is not there. When people update stock by hand in two places, this is not an accident. It is a matter of time.

"Connecting to the stock system" helps, but only if an agreement comes first: which system holds the truth about stock, and what happens with an unpaid order, a cancellation and a return. The three questions to ask before you commission it are in the last one was sold in the shop, the e-shop is still selling it.

The same order, written down again and again

In many shops the order arrives in the e-shop, is retyped into the business software for the invoice, and again into the courier's system for the shipping label. The cost never arrives as a charge, but you can work it out in five minutes: time per retype, times the number of retypes, times your orders per day. Then add the mistakes.

Where to start, and when the keyboard is cheaper than a connection, with an example from a delivery business that collects payment at the door, is in are you typing the same order into three programs?

The product page: what the photo doesn't show

A buyer in an e-shop cannot hold the product. They want to know whether it fits, whether it works with what they already have, what they will find in the box, and how the variants differ. When the page doesn't say, they leave, they phone, or they buy the wrong thing and send it back.

Why it pays to say when a product isn't right for someone, what the law already asks for, and why the information should be text rather than part of an image, is in the photo doesn't tell them if it fits.

Returns: the part nobody designs

A consumer has fourteen calendar days to withdraw, without giving a reason. For goods, the days count from delivery, not from the order. And if you have not informed them of that right, fourteen days become a year and fourteen days.

Who pays for shipping, what is excluded, why withdrawal is not the same as a warranty, and when, for services and digital content, you need a separate tick box rather than a paragraph in the terms, all based on the law itself, are in returns: the part nobody designs until it happens to them. For your own case, ask a lawyer.

And the part this page does not cover

An e-shop is first of all a website: it has to be fast, work properly on mobile, and be genuinely yours. That has its own page, the guide to your website.

Cookies, the privacy policy and accessibility apply to every shop and are in the guide to security and legal matters.