How to create an online store for your business (that actually sells): steps, platform and costs

“I want to create an online store” is something we hear almost every week, and there are usually two situations behind it: a brick-and-mortar business that wants to sell online, or a company that already sells and wants to stop taking orders over WhatsApp and email. In both cases, the right question isn't “which platform should I use?” but “what kind of store do I need so that selling online doesn't cost me more than it brings in?”

This guide sums up what we've learned as a WooCommerce agency and PrestaShop agency, building and migrating stores for SMEs, wholesalers and brands. It follows a simple order: what to decide, what to build and what it costs.

Step 1: decide before you build

Four questions that shape everything else:

• Who do you sell to? Consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B). A B2B store needs customer-specific price lists, ordering by SKU, credit terms and, from 2027, compliance with Spain's mandatory e-invoicing. A B2C store needs conversion, easy payments and clear shipping.
• How many products do you have, and how often do they change? 40 stable products are not the same as 30,000 with prices and stock that change every day. The latter needs ERP integration from day one.
• Where does the truth about your stock and prices live today? If it's in an ERP (Dolibarr, Odoo, Sage…), the store has to read from it. If it's in Excel, now is the time to fix that.
• Who will handle the orders? How fast, from where and with what tools? A store nobody runs is just a pretty website.

Step 2: choose the platform (WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shopify)

For a company in Spain, we almost always recommend one of the first two:

If you want the details, we have a full comparison: WooCommerce vs PrestaShop vs Shopify. The short version: if your business runs on content and brand, go with WooCommerce; if it runs on catalog and B2B, PrestaShop; if you want to test the waters without investing and can live with the commissions, Shopify.

Step 3: what every store needs to sell

A well-built catalog

Your own photos, descriptions that answer customers' questions, well-structured variants (size, color, format) and categories designed around how people search, not around how you organize your warehouse.

Payments

Cards through your bank (Redsys, the Spanish card payment gateway) or a gateway such as Stripe, Bizum (a must-have in Spain) and PayPal. For B2B, bank transfer and deferred payment with a credit limit per customer. We cover this in payment gateways for ecommerce.

Shipping

Rates by weight or order value, free shipping above a threshold, in-store pickup, and a carrier integration that generates labels and tracking without anyone typing addresses.

Legal

A legal notice, privacy and cookie policies, terms of sale that include the right of withdrawal, and a checkout process that complies with consumer law. It isn't optional, and it isn't just a matter of copying text from another website.

SEO built into the design

Clean URLs, categories with text, product pages with structured data, fast load times and an architecture Google understands. A store's SEO is decided at the design stage, not afterwards. All the more so if you're going to migrate from another platform.

Analytics

GA4 with enhanced ecommerce tracking and, if you plan to invest in ads, the Meta pixel and Google Ads conversions set up properly from day one.

Step 4: connect the store to your ERP (where time is won or lost)

This is what separates a store that creates work from one that saves it. If every web order has to be copied into your invoicing software, every price change has to be made twice and the store's stock never matches the warehouse, your store is costing you hours every day.

The solution is an integration between your store and your ERP: products, prices and stock flow from the ERP to the store, while orders and customers flow from the store into the ERP, where they're picked, invoiced and booked. We explain it step by step in how to integrate your ERP with WooCommerce or PrestaShop. A real example: a spare parts wholesaler with 30,000 SKUs now has up-to-date stock and prices online and at the counter, with no overselling.

What it costs to create an online store

It's the other big question, and it deserves an honest answer: it depends on the scope, but it can be narrowed down. We're talking about professional stores built by a team that issues proper invoices, not weekend templates:

• Simple store (small catalog, payments, shipping, legal pages and basic SEO): the budget depends on the setup and content required.
• Store with a custom design: the catalog, product configurators, blog and SEO work all need to be scoped.
• Store integrated with your ERP: the budget depends on B2B workflows, customer-specific pricing, warehouses and marketplace connections.

On top of that come the recurring costs: hosting, domain, SSL certificate, payment gateway (a fee per transaction), maintenance and updates. With WooCommerce or PrestaShop you pay the platform no license fee and no commission on each sale, which is what weighs most in the end once the store is selling.

The most expensive mistake isn't overpaying for your store: it's paying for a store that doesn't connect to anything and having to rebuild it the following year.

Common mistakes when creating an online store

• Choosing the platform based on the first-year price rather than on what it will cost once you're selling.
• Uploading the catalog by hand “for now” and ending up maintaining it by hand forever.
• Launching without Bizum, without free shipping above a set amount and without a clear returns policy.
• Leaving SEO for later and discovering that the category structure can't be changed without losing rankings.
• Not measuring: not knowing where your sales come from or what each one costs.

Shall we build your store?

At Interconecta we design and develop online stores with WooCommerce and PrestaShop, integrate them with your ERP and connect them to payment gateways, carriers and marketplaces. If you're thinking about creating an online store for your business, or rebuilding the one you have, tell us what you sell and how you work: we'll tell you which platform fits, which integrations you need and what it would cost, with a fixed-price proposal and no obligation.