Published on 6 minutes
With a webshop the attention usually goes to the looks and the technology. In practice the trouble sits elsewhere: in shipping, returns, stock and the administration underneath. Those are the things that catch up with you in month two if you have not thought them through.
Start at your product page, not your homepage
Most visitors arrive from Google or social media straight onto a product page. That page therefore has to tell the whole story on its own: what it is, what it costs, when it arrives, and why buying it from you is a good idea.
- Several photos, including one that shows the scale.
- Stock and delivery time visible on the page itself.
- Shipping costs before someone reaches the checkout.
- Sizes, materials and specifications without hunting for them.
- Your return terms in plain language.
Payment methods: iDEAL is not optional
In the Netherlands the vast majority of webshop payments run through iDEAL. That is the first one you switch on. Card, PayPal and pay-later are common alongside it, depending on your audience and your margin.
Account for the transaction cost per method. Pay-later lifts conversion, but costs you more per order and brings extra administration.
Shipping is a decision, not a detail
Free shipping above a threshold raises average order value, but only if that threshold matches your margin. Do the maths before switching it on. Decide these upfront in any case:
- Which carrier you use and your cut-off for same-day dispatch.
- What shipping to Belgium costs, if you deliver there.
- Whether people can collect, and how that works.
- Who pays for returns.
- How long someone has to return, with the statutory fourteen days as the minimum.
Stock and bookkeeping
While you have ten products, tracking stock by hand is fine. At a hundred products across several sales channels it becomes a source of errors, and nothing is worse than selling something you no longer have.
A link between your webshop and your bookkeeping also saves time structurally: orders become invoices without anyone retyping. That is exactly the kind of automation that pays for itself within a few months.
What it costs
A webshop is more work than a website, because more hangs off it: product pages, payments, shipping and the administration behind it. With us a webshop starts at 199 euro per month with no setup fee, or 3,500 euro one-off.
Start smaller than you think
The most common mistake is starting too big: three hundred products, five categories, a blog and customer accounts, all before the first order lands. Start with the products you know sell, watch what people do, and build from there. A webshop that grows with your range is cheaper than one you have to rebuild after six months.