Starting and Building an E-shop: How to Create an Online Store

Building an e-shop takes 8 basic steps: market research and suppliers, registering the business with the tax office, buying a domain name, choosing hosting/server, building the online store itself (WooCommerce, Shopify or a custom solution), connecting to banks and PayPal, partnering with a courier company and, finally, promotion through Google Ads, Meta Ads and SEO.

At WebMate we have built and promoted more than 200 e-shops since 2014, including brands such as mformama.gr, kavoukistools.gr and neostroma.gr. In this guide we share what we have learned in practice.

The cost of building an e-shop in Greece ranges from around €1,000 for a simple WooCommerce solution to €15,000+ for custom development, while the average build time is 4–12 weeks. The complete guide below goes through each stage of the build step by step, so you can get your online store off to the right start, whether you build it yourself or with a partner.

A study by Adobe found that the pandemic acted as a catalyst for e-commerce, speeding up its growth by 4 to 6 years. That is an impressive leap, especially when you consider how fast technology already moves every year.

Of course, the e-shops that appeared in that rush were rarely well built or planned. Most were created out of a need to go live quickly and sell straight away. E-shops costing 1,000 and 2,500 euros went up without any plan whatsoever.

Unfortunately, this situation exploited the (literal and metaphorical) desperation of business owners who watched their income fall dramatically, or even disappear altogether.

Nobody needs an online store like that, built without a plan, because it will probably close just as quickly, as so often happens these days. First, let’s watch a video about a successful online store.

3 Hard Truths About Opening an E-shop in Greece

1. €800 e-shops are a trap — far from a “solution”
   When someone quotes you €800 for an e-shop, be aware:
   • They won’t do a competitor analysis
   • They won’t look at the conversion rate
   • They won’t offer a custom design
   • They won’t be available for support
   The result? Usually losses after the first 6 months.
2. No e-shop sells on its own
   You need: advertising (Google Ads, Meta), SEO, email marketing and a person behind the brand. If you don’t have a budget for these → don’t start.
3. The build is 20% — Maintenance is 80%
   Your e-shop will need ongoing changes, additions and conversion optimisation. Choose a provider who will stay with you for the long term — no hit-and-run.

Which platform should you build your e-shop on?

The platform you choose for your e-shop determines your store’s cost, flexibility and SEO. Below is a comparison of the 4 most popular options:

WebMate recommendation: For the Greek market, WooCommerce remains the best value for money for 9 out of 10 clients, thanks to full support for Greek banks and couriers and its SEO flexibility.

Below we look at what you need to be prepared and to start your own e-shop with a plan and a strategy.

If you want to create an e-shop without a physical shop, read our article.

Getting started with your e-shop

If your business is already registered with the tax office, ask your accountant about the additional activity code(s) (KAD, the Greek business activity classification) that need to be opened, or about adding online sales to your existing activity.

You don’t need a physical shop to decide to get into e-commerce. Plenty of people today have created online stores with no previous retail experience and without a physical shop.

Growing an e-shop never stops; it has to be continuous!

If you haven’t yet set up a business of any form (sole trader, limited partnership (EE), general partnership (OE), etc.), you need to do the following.

• Register with the tax office, in person or online
• Get a cash register or fiscal device for printing receipts
• Find an accountant to keep your books

Apart from these, you need premises to serve as your registered office. The good thing about online stores (e-shops) is that you don’t need a shop on the high street, just premises from which you dispatch products through a courier company. The rent should be as low as possible, and today it is fairly low for premises outside commercial areas. Alternatively, you can even set aside a space in your home, but it must have its own entrance, e.g. the pilotis (the open ground-floor area common in Greek buildings), a ground-floor storeroom or the roof terrace.

If you have any form of company, it is wise to talk to a lawyer so that you have proper articles of association setting out everything needed for the relationship between the partners.

Pay close attention to the law, because fines rain down!

Online stores and tax

In your e-shop, the final price must include VAT.

So your e-shop must be able to:

• validate the VAT number (AFM, the Greek tax ID) when an invoice is issued,
• show the product’s value separately,
• show the tax,
• show the total amount the consumer has to pay.

Many e-commerce stores accept payments in only one currency. To give your customers a more flexible and smoother shopping experience, you can let them choose the currency they prefer.

There are two ways to set this up:

1. Register the currencies you want with your bank:

• Contact your bank and tell them which currencies you want to accept.
• The bank will update your account, and your customers will be able to choose the payment currency at checkout.

2. Show prices in other currencies:

• Keep up to date with current exchange rates.
• Show your product prices in several currencies alongside your base currency.
• Customers will see the price in their chosen currency, but payment will be made in the base currency.

Further options:

• You can update exchange rates manually or integrate your bank’s API so they update automatically.
• You can offer a currency switcher at various points in your e-shop.

Benefits:

• Attracting customers from different countries.
• A better user experience.
• More sales.
• An e-shop with an international outlook.

After registering the business

Find your domain name

First of all, you need to decide what your e-shop will be called. A good domain name for your online store should have the following characteristics:

1. it shouldn’t be too long, i.e. no more than 10–12 characters
2. it should sound good, so it’s easy to pronounce
3. it should feel familiar, so it sticks in people’s memory
4. it should reflect you (your line of business)
5. ideally, it should contain a keyword you will target later

Choose hosting/a server

The server for your online store is extremely important and plays a big part in whether your e-shop succeeds. If your server is slow, no customer will complete their purchase, and most won’t stay in your shop for long, because the delay will wear them out. Think of a slow server as a shop with a very long queue both to get in and to pay. At WebMate we provide affordable hosting with very high speeds.

Find who will build your online store

Building your website is no simple matter. How your e-shop looks, how it is structured and how fast it is are all key to the success of your new business. How do you choose who will build your website, and what should you ask for?Apart from what we mention in the previous article, you should look closely at their previous work and whether it was successful. The price each professional quotes is subjective. The 2,000 euros one person asks for may be little compared with what they will deliver, while the 400 euros someone else asks for may be a lot, because the result won’t make you any profit.

Frequently asked questions

Organising things in parallel

Good organisation means you have found your suppliers and reached an agreement with them. Several of our clients have a company vehicle that goes round every day collecting the ordered items from suppliers, and over time they build up stock of fast-moving items so they can serve customers faster.

The items that are hard to sell online are those where the consumer needs to use their senses: nobody will buy a cologne online unless they already know its scent. With products like these, however, we can use images and copywriting to create that sensation ourselves and let the customer almost smell the fragrance.

Over time, the added value comes from reliability, good customer service, flexible handling of returns, communication and, importantly, secure transactions and personal data. When many of our clients started their e-shop, all their orders were cash on delivery. Gradually their regular customers started paying by credit card, and in the end they dropped cash on delivery altogether. For this to happen, of course, you need to build a strong brand that customers want to buy from and whose products they need.

Banks, PayPal & your e-shop

Most banks today offer merchant accounts, where at checkout the consumer goes to the bank’s site to complete the transaction. This saves us from buying extra products to secure it. You can open a merchant account too. It does come at a cost, as the bank charges a commission on transactions, so it pays to research which bank to work with. Besides banks, there are payment providers such as Viva, Everypay and Stripe, and since 1 December 2025 every e-shop in Greece must also accept IRIS payments. PayPal charges more (3.4% + €0.35 for most sales within Greece), so weigh it up carefully before adding it.

As for cash on delivery and shipping, which are an extra cost, I’ll explain how they are charged so you can see they aren’t prohibitive. Some sellers, of course, try to make a profit on these too, and end up uncompetitive.

Courier companies give e-shops special contract rates that depend on shipping volume, weight and destination, and they usually charge separately for cash on delivery. Get quotes from two or three companies and negotiate for a better rate. You can easily offset this cost with an offer that you don’t pass on to the product price, giving free shipping instead.

Another method that’s popular these days is Klarna, which gives the consumer a buy now, pay later option.

E-shop advertising and SEO

When it comes to the online store (online shop), e-shop advertising and search engine optimisationpackages start according to your products and the number of listings you will run at the beginning. After that, you take over updating it or, if you can’t, we handle it for you.

Advertising can be done in any possible way, but whatever you choose, it needs to be strong enough at the start to perform. Advertising can take many forms, such as Google ads, or search engine optimisation. Of course, Facebook advertising is also very important, as is advertising on other social media, e.g. TikTok Shop for Greek e-shops.

A blog for organic promotion

The most important thing for search engine promotion is for your e-shop to have a blog, and for that blog to be active. We covered the reasons why a website should have a blogin another article, along with why you should have a company Facebook page. Using the blog and the Facebook page together brings dream results: customers and, of course, sales through your e-shop.

Warnings against online stores come either from competitors or are aimed at people who are fraudsters by nature and would behave the same way whether in the digital or the physical world. So there is no point in scaring people about danger and fraud, since these have existed for far longer in the physical world.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is perhaps the best and cheapest way to promote your e-shop and to make sure your existing customers don’t forget you and buy again and again. What sets good email marketing campaigns apart is what they say: they give the reader value instead of desperately trying to sell products. Read in this article what you should avoid in your business’s digital marketing in general.

Connecting your e-shop to Skroutz & BestPrice

In retail with well-known products, the best way to get immediate sales and visits to your store is to connect your e-shop to a platform such as bestprice and skroutz (Greece’s two main price-comparison sites). On its own, of course, this won’t bring complete success, but with remarketing social media ads and Google Ads advertising it can deliver the best possible results!

What you need to do, of course, is talk to the people who built your website so they can set up the integration. The integration isn’t always free, and how easy or hard it is depends on how your online store was built.

At WebMate we build websites and online stores on WordPress, and as well as installing the ready-made plugins available for connecting your store to Skroutz and BestPrice, we also build custom integrations to suit each client’s needs.

A real case study from one of our clients

Client (clothing e-shop, Northern Greece) — ROI example:

Before (e-shop built for €1,500 by a cheap provider):

• Conversion Rate: 0.4%
• Monthly traffic: 5,000 visits
• Orders/month: 20
• Average profit per order: €35
• Revenue: €700/month = €8,400/year
• Advertising budget: €800/month
• Net result: -€1,200/year (loss)

After (rebuilt by WebMate for €4,500):

• Conversion Rate: 2.8% (7x improvement)
• Same traffic, same budget
• Orders/month: 140
• Revenue: €4,900/month = €58,800/year
• Net result: €49,200/year

The extra initial investment of €3,000 paid back 16x in 12 months.

My e-shop is built. What now?

Building the e-shop is probably the easiest part, since the hardest thing is bringing people to your online store and getting it to sell. We have written an article on what to do after you create your online store to help you!

In short, after creating your e-shop , you need to work on promoting your e-shop – website promotion , social media advertising, Google Ads advertising, remarketing and, more generally, attracting potential customers to your e-shop. If your e-shop is properly built and meets your customers’ needs, you are very likely to succeed with your online store.

Advertising an e-shop is a very important process these days and, done properly, will make a success of your online store. Closely tied to advertising is social media management for your business, which as well as bringing sales also strengthens your overall brand.

Data analysis

After creating your e-shop, you should keep a constant eye on the data from google analytics or any other platform such as hotjar so you can keep improving in line with your customers’ requirements and needs.

I’ve also created a free Google Analytics 4 mini course for you, so you can even do the data analysis yourself.

At WebMate we take on website development and e-shop creation , and we have offices near Katerini, Kavala, Drama and Xanthi to create your own website.

Data analysis in e-shops with the help of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can improve business efficiency by automating processes and optimising inventory management. AI algorithms can predict demand for specific products, helping owners keep ideal stock levels and cut storage costs. AI can also make customer service more efficient through chatbots, which can answer frequently asked questions and provide help in real time, freeing up resources for more complex tasks.

Artificial intelligence in online stores

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful ally for online store owners, offering innovative solutions that transform the customer experience and improve business efficiency. Today AI is part of the day-to-day running of many e-shops, from product recommendations and chatbots to product descriptions and ads, and what it can do grows every year.

One of the most important areas where AI can add value is the personalised customer experience. Through data analysis and machine learning, AI can predict customers’ preferences and needs, offering personalised product recommendations and tailored shopping experiences. This translates into greater customer satisfaction and, ultimately, higher sales. AI can also help identify market trends and preferences, allowing store owners to adjust their strategies accordingly.

In addition, AI can improve business efficiency by automating processes and optimising inventory management. AI algorithms can predict demand for specific products, helping owners keep ideal stock levels and cut storage costs. AI can also make customer service more efficient through chatbots, which can answer frequently asked questions and provide help in real time, freeing up resources for more complex tasks.

In short, artificial intelligence gives online stores the ability to improve the customer experience, increase sales, optimise internal processes and gain a deeper understanding of their market. Building AI into their strategy is now both desirable and essential for success in today’s digital world.

Videos about e-shops and how to grow them

E-shop examples built by WebMate

More articles on e-shop development

Want to see how to increase sales in your e-shop, with figures and priorities?

Want to see how to increase sales in your e-shop, with figures and priorities?

Want to see how to increase sales in your e-shop, with figures?