Website or webshop?

A webshop is not a website with a cart on it. It is a small warehouse, a bookkeeping department and a customer service desk, all of which need tending. People discover that difference only once the shop is live.

What a webshop costs you after launch

• Products need maintaining. Images, descriptions, prices, variants, stock counts. Fifty products is an afternoon a month. Five hundred is a job.
• Orders need handling. Packed, shipped, tracked. Someone does it, every single day an order arrives.
• Returns. Danish consumers have a 14-day right of withdrawal. That is not an option, it is the law, and it has to be handled every time.
• Customers write. "Where is my parcel?" arrives several times a week as soon as things pick up.

None of it is hard. It is just always there, and it does not go away because you are busy with something else.

When an ordinary website is right

If you sell few things at high prices — or sell a service rather than a product — a webshop is often the wrong tool.

A buyer about to spend DKK 40,000 wants to talk to you. He does not want to add to cart. A page that explains what you do, shows you have done it before, and makes it easy to write to you sells better than a cart ever will.

And you can take payment without a shop: send an invoice with a payment link. The customer pays by card or MobilePay, you book it, and you have skipped an entire system.

When a webshop is right

• You have many products, and people already know what they want
• The amounts are small enough that nobody wants to call first
• You sell the same thing again and again — that can be automated
• You want to be able to sell while you sleep

If three of the four are true, build the shop. If only one is, wait.

The middle path people miss

Start with a proper website and put a few products up for sale — your best five. Then you find out whether people actually buy from you online, without having built a warehouse first.

If it works, we expand. If it does not, you have saved DKK 20,000 and a lot of evenings.

In short

Do not ask "what should I have built". Ask "what do I want to spend an hour a day on six months from now". The answer to the second gives you the answer to the first.