European E-commerce Part 1: Tech Stack

I am taking a break from building my small food e-commerce shop to come back to (my roots) writing.

I’ve been working on this project (the ecom shop) since February 2024 and it’s almost ready to launch.

Of course, the fun part of a project isn’t as much doing it as it is writing about it.

So here is my first article on this new series where I am exploring the world of online sales.

NB: I am focusing on European e-commerce for real goods (in contrast to digital goods), which is fairly different from US e-commerce. The European market isn’t as developed, there’s more complexity due to cross-border selling and VAT, and businesses can get significant leverage with translation, which US shops don’t need to worry about.

1. Choosing a Tech Stack

Your tech stack contains every software you’ll need to run your business.

The first (and most important) decision to make is which platform you’ll use to build your website.

There are a lot of options out there, with and without code.

Because I don’t code, we’ll focus on the ones where you don’t need to code.

Just to name a few:

• Shopify
• Bigcommerce
• Volusion
• Woocommerce
• Ecwid
• Wix
• Squarespace
• Sellfy
• Big Cartel
• Sell4Shop
• Salesforce e-commerce
• Etc

There are only three contenders you should consider from this list.

• Shopify (the obvious choice)
• Woocommerce (the underrated choice)
• BigCommerce (the enterprise solution).

Why these three?

Consider the following screenshot from Omnisend, a marketing software for e-commerce.

Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce. A lot of e-commerce-related services only serve those three because they happen to be the most popular ones.

Why?

Let’s just say that Squarespace and Wix are not serious options.

Sellfy is for digital products, Volusion is hard to use, Ecwid is as expensive as Shopify but it’s unfinished, Big Cartel is mainly for artists, and Sell4Shop was created for Americans.

Find below a brief presentation and a pro’s and con’s for all three.

A. Shopify

Pro’s	Con’s
Reliable	Low SEO functions
Checkout options (one-click shop pay)	Can quickly get expensive
Design	Credit cards fee
Apps ecosystem	If they ban you, you lose everything
Free templates	Closed environment (no open-source)
Scalable	No multi-storefront, no multi-shops plans.
5.2 million online stores

Shopify is the obvious choice when building your online shop.

In fact, it powers 10% of the total US e-commerce.

The only major drawback is the basic price (32€/month) added to the price of apps you will need (shopping, marketing, SEO, drag-and-drop, maybe a theme….).

This can catapult your monthly cost to 150€/month, or 1800€/year.

This isn’t much money for Americans but it very much is for the average European.

Who is Shopify good for?

• You are afraid of WordPress.
• You already have a product that sells well in real life and you want to quickly scale up.
• You want to create your shop as fast as possible.
• Branding is really important to you.

Then Shopify is the way to go.

B. WordPress/WooCommerce

Pro’s	Con’s
Technically, free	Many third-party integrations that can sometimes go wrong
You control everything, no one can pull the plug	You have to take care of hosting and security
Customizable ad infinitum	The learning curve to learn WordPress is a bit steeper than Shopify but it shouldn’t take more than a week to feel at home
The cheapest way to sell online (or is it?)
Scalable
The thousands of (free) plugins
5 million online stores

WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) in the world, powering 40% of the entire Internet.

What does that mean?

WordPress is a free platform that enables you to build a website without having to code.

The basic platform was built with blogging in mind so its SEO capabilities are great.

Since it’s open source, you have hundreds of thousands of (mostly free) plugins you can use to turn your WordPress website into anything.

Auresnotes.com uses WordPress, Neil Patel uses WordPress, and the NYT also uses WordPress.

It’s free, lightweight, and easy to learn. But above all, it’s yours. No one can pull the plug on your WordPress website (except for your hosting company).

Now, you can’t sell anything on a basic WordPress site.

You need a plugin for that, and it’s called WooCoomerce. WooCommerce gives you the ability to add products, a shopping cart, a checkout page, and payment methods to your website so you can sell stuff.

It also connects with every software imaginable because it’s one of the most used e-commerce software on the Internet.

Finally, because it’s a WordPress plugin, you can customize it with code as much as you want. It’s easy to do with ChatGPT.

Are there any plugins other than WooCommerce?

Yes. The first option is Ecwid, but it’s expensive, slow, you cannot translate anything, the third-party app market sucks, you have almost no control over your content, and the design is awful.

The other one is called SureCart.

It’s a promising plugin with a small yet dynamic community, but the translation possibilities are non-existent and it has no third-party app marketplace, which means you cannot integrate it with shipping or marketing software.

So you’re left with only one choice: WooCommerce.

UPDATE: October 2024: Surecart now integrates with translation plugins and Sendcloud. I am kinda annoyed that I didn’t figure it out earlier as it would have made my life much easier. If you already have a WordPress blog or don’t want to use Shopify, you should give Surecart a go.

NB: BigCommerce also has a WordPress plugin but you’re much better off using the whole BigCommerce platform instead.

Who is WordPress with WooCommerce (or Surecart) for?

• You already know how WordPress and hosting work.
• You already have a WordPress website.
• You want to keep it cheap.
• You want total control over everything.
• You want to rely on SEO primarily

If you recognize yourself in one of these, then WooCommerce is the way to go.

Additionally, once you can build a WooCommerce store, you can build anything with WordPress.

What Are Other WordPress Solutions?

Shopify Buy Button

For 5€/month, you can display products on your website with custom codes and benefit from Shopify checkout. Shopify pretends that its checkout is the best, but that’s also what everybody else pretends, so, who knows if it’s true?

I do admit that Shopify checkout looks really good.

The only issue is that:

• You can’t translate the checkout.
• The checkout happens on Shopify, which means your customers must leave your website to check out which is not great in terms of shopping experience and SEO.

That being said, if you have a blog with traffic and seek to sell in only one language easily and cheaply, the Shopify Buy Button is probably your best and easiest option.

ShopWP

ShopWP is a WordPress plugin that improves the integration between your WordPress site and Shopify.

I have never tried it but it looks expensive for what it is.

Given that Elementor for WooCommerce only costs 90€/year and gives you almost unlimited design possibilities, ShopWP doesn’t seem worth it.

Shoprocket

I found Shoprocket during one of my random Internet wanderings. It works like the Shopify Buy Button in that all you need to do is display a code snippet and – magic – your products and a cart load onto your page.

The checkout experience is fairly easy as people checkout within the cart widget.

Not going to lie, it sounds promising.

I would have probably gone for that option instead of using WooCommerce had it had the features I was looking for, such as:

• Integration with SendCloud (Europe’s only shipping software) and everything else.
• Translation possibilities.

Do not use Ecwid

After looking for a solution other than WooCommerce for three months, Ecwid seemed promising.

Their WordPress plugin enabled me to add products, a cart, and a checkout page on my WordPress blog, all managed from Ecwid’s platform.

But as highlighted above, there is no customization of anything (from the text on the login page to the forms and colors of the products).

Also, Ecwid didn’t include translation in their basic 25€ plan, so you had to take the €50/month plan which is 100% not worth it when Shopify basics costs 32€/month and WooCommerce is free!

I left Ecwid annoyed because they didn’t want to refund my 30€ and the platform sucked.

I even had to create a GPT tasked to adapt my HTML to a specific HTML style because Ecwid didn’t understand parent elements!

After a week of sweat, I gave up and downloaded WooCommerce.

Should You Build Your Shop on WordPress and WooCommerce?

It depends.

After seven months of working with WooCommerce, I gave up due to too many technical issues.

First, I have had problems with my translation plugin WPML which crashed the website repeatedly (it didn’t work well with Redis (cache)) and failed to translate a bunch of stuff.

Second, my foreign language order did not pass through to Sendcloud.

Third, the numerous plugins that I used made the website insanely slow despite using the fastest WordPress hosting company on the Internet.

Fourth, the custom fields I had to create in WooCommerce did not link with Google’s Merchant Center API.

Fifth, the whole thing ended up being expensive.

• €360 for hosting
• €90 for Elementor
• €100 for WPML
• €59 for WPRocket
• Total: €609 per year, or €50/month.

And that’s because I customized a lot of stuff with code (custom fields, shipping rules, etc) as if I hadn’t, it would have been even pricier.

Wait, I thought WooCommerce was free?

It is. But WooCommerce itself won’t get you far. Unless you sell some really basic products, you’ll need to add plugins to WooCommerce.

Should you go with WooCommerce?

You can still go with WooCommerce, but don’t make the mistakes that I did.

1. Get a commerce theme: get a theme built to respond with WooCommerce and WPML if you want to translate your website.
2. Get a solid hosting company: Hostinger is not cut out for anything that goes beyond a simple blog. Use Cloudways or Rocket.net.
3. Avoid having too many plugins: complexity scales exponentially. Avoid too many plugins.

Or try Surecart, but make sure it integrates with everything you need beforehand.

Conclusion

Unless SureCart or Shoprocket magically integrate with SendCloud and let you translate everything in an SEO-friendly way, WooCommerce is your only solution for WordPress.

The worst part is that, like most things made by WordPress, WooCommerce still sucks as soon as you’re selling something a tad complicated (clothes with different colors and size).

C. BigCommerce

Pro’s	Con’s
Cheaper than Shopify when you scale	The starting cost is pricy
SEO capabilities	The design offered is not as good as Shopify’s
Lots of free themes	Limited number of free themes
Big third-party app marketplace	Most brands BigCommerce displays on its homepage have since switched to Shopify.
No payment fees	High payment fees
Multi-storefront
Easy to implement multi-currency selling

The perfect use-case for BigCommerce is you already have an IRL shop that sells at least 100 different products and you want to start selling online.

The platform calls itself enterprise e-commerce and this is exactly what it is.

BigCommerce is for companies who want to “sell stuff online“, not build a brand (that’s what Shopify is for).

For example, if I were to start a makeup or a coffee brand, I would use Shopify.

But if I were to sell second-hand bikes or gardening tools, I would use BigCommerce.

Here’s one example and a second example of BigCommerce shops.

Who is BigCommerce for?

• You already are a big company
• You have a lot of products to sell
• Your products are more a matter of rational decision-making to be bought than they are a matter of branding and marketing.
• You operate in different international markets.
• You want a multi-storefront option

2. What to Look For in an E-commerce Platform?

At this moment, no e-commerce platforms offer great SEO capabilities, full translation, and integration with European shipping software for an affordable price, except the combination WordPress – Woocommerce – Rank Math – Elementor – SendCloud. The closest version of this is Shopify with drag-and-drop and SEO plugins, but you’ll be limited to three markets on a basic plan and adding one more market will cost you 450€/month. Otherwise, the BigCommerce enterprise plan can offer it all to you, but who knows how much it costs.

The perfect e-commerce platform is the one you design yourself, which is what many companies have eventually done.

I like to take Swappie as an example. Their e-commerce platform is flawless. But then, it’s also entirely coded.

Simply put, there’s no perfect e-commerce CMS.

I have chosen WooCommerce because:

• I wanted to grow with SEO
• I didn’t want to pay Shopify €32/month when I already have a hosting plan for auresnotes.com and all of my other websites.
• I wanted to scale to several European markets
• I wanted to translate my content into 10+ languages.

Simply put, nobody on the market offers this solution today for cheap, except for WordPress with WooCommerce.

What to Look for in an E-commerce Platform?

• Speed: customers quit websites that are slow to load.
• Security
• An extensive third-party app marketplace
• Translation and localization
• Gateway to your desired marketing channels (SEO, social media ads, etc)
• Integration with other marketplaces (Amazon, Bol, eBay, etc)
• Integration with as many marketing, customer support, and inventory tools (social proofs, reviews, abandoned cart, CRM, email designer, notifications, tracking…)
• Structured data: Your platform should be able to communicate to Google, Instagram, TikTok etc through the use of structured data so you can start selling on those platforms by seamlessly integrating to them.

This is a lot to take care of for one company which is why all of the serious players (Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce) have third-party app marketplaces.

I wish there was an easier way to build an SEO-ready multilingual European e-commerce website, but right now, there isn’t.

If you have €5 million to invest and you want to build the European Shopify, hit me up and we can become billionaires!

3. Third-Party Apps and Other Services

Since none of the platforms have all the desired features natively, you’ll have to install a range of third-party apps.

I have made a non-exhaustive list here.

Now, I don’t know everything about Shopify and BigCommerce, symbolized by my question marks in the following table.

As you grow, you’ll need and want more tools (the following list is mainly for WordPress but most of these also integrate with Shopify and BG).

• Email and SMS marketing: Ominsend, Klaviyo, Brevo, etc.
• Social marketing: FOMO, Ortto, Nudgify, etc.
• Reviews: Google reviews, YotPo, reviews.io, etc.
• Heatmap & Session Recording Tools: Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, etc.
• Product recommendation: Quizell, Convertflow, etc.
• Checkout: Bolt, Shopify Checkout, Checkoutwc, etc.
• Payment providers: Stripe, checkout.com, Rapyd, Noda, etc.
• CRM: Your CRM should be the same platform you use to send marketing emails, which is why it’s important to choose marketing software that encompasses as many marketing channels as possible (emails, social media, SMS, live chat, forms, dynamic coupons, etc) so you don’t spread. Choose one made for e-commerce. Omnisend, Klaviyo, Brevo, Drip, ActiveCampaign are good ones.
• Website speed and caching tool: WP rocket
• Analytics: Google Search Console, Independent Analytics, Koko Analytics
• Inventory management
• Social media management: I think Canva is probably the cheapest option today.
• Customer support platform: Most of the time, Gmail is enough. If you want a live chat on the website, you can always use Crisp, Gist, or WhatsApp for business (ideally, such functionality should be powered by your CRM/marketing platform…).
• Loyalty & Rewards Program Software: this should also be taken care of by your marketing software.
• Affiliate Marketing Platform: The purpose is to get bloggers to link your product. AM is not what it was in 2010 though since bloggers sell their own products most of the time.
• Marketplace Integration Tool: this software enables you to sell on marketplaces from the same dashboard.
• Product feed tool: A product feed tool aggregates all of your products information into a format (XML, for example) that can be distributed to Google and social media platforms so you can seamlessly sell there.
• A/B Testing Tool: the purpose is to test how you present things (emails, products, landing pages) and see which design/copy works the best.
• Retargeting/Remarketing Tool: people don’t buy right away after seeing your website. Sometimes, it takes them three months before they make a decision. Retargeting helps you choose who came to visit your website and is likely to buy if you encourage them a little.
• Subscription Billing Software: these enable you to sell your product as a subscription.
• Influencer Marketing and UGC Platform: Heepsey helps you find and reach out to influencers so they talk about your product. There are many others.
• Workflow Automation Tool: sometimes, it’s just about connecting events with Zapier.
• Pricing Optimization Tool
• Mobile App Builder
• Design software: Affinity, Adobe, Canva, Paint.NET, Gimp, Inkscape
• Photo editing: Photoroom (app), Adobe, Affinity
• Note-taking: Notion, Obsydian, Onenote, Evernote, Ticktick
• Compliance & Tax Management Software

Hardware

• Label printer and labels (use a thermal printer, not an ink one.)
• Packaging (you’ll need boxes, bubble wrap, and tape, and then some nicely designed packages if you sell hair products or jewelry, for example).
• Scale and measuring tape to decrease transportation costs as much as possible.
• Normal printer if you want to print the invoice and send it in the package (I recommend you send it automatically by email).
• Camera to take pictures of your items
• Mini photo studio

4. Cost

This is where you need to be strategic.

A lot of solutions will be cheap in the beginning and increasingly expensive as you scale.

Let’s take an example with these product recommendation quiz services.

Zoom on those pics and compare the prices.

The first picture (Revenue Hunt) is the best option for anyone starting as you get 100 free answers to your quiz per month.

The second pic (Quizell) only gives you 10 free answers and the third pic (Convertflow) does not have a free plan.

But what happens if you grow beyond 100 quizzes per month?

Revenuehunt will charge you 39$ while Quizell will only charge you 13$. Convertflow will charge you 22$.

Beyond 500 engagements per month, you will want to use Convertflow which calculates plans based on views. You will only pay 22$/month instead of 99$ or 43$.

All of this to say that price is dynamic and depends on what you want.

You can get a WooCommerce store for free but it will be ugly.

It will work, but it will be ugly.

Here are different stacks you can choose with different pricing.

The Cheapest E-Commerce Plan

The cheapest plan only uses free tools. The only expense you’ll have will be your domain name and hosting.

In this case:

• Domain name: 20€/year
• Hosting: UPDATE: I originally wrote that you could go with Hostinger, Siteground, or WP Engine. It wasn’t accurate. My website kept crashing on Hostinger whenever I wanted to work on it, WP Engine was banned by WordPress, and Siteground doesn’t seem to be that good. After reading some stuff online and checking which hosting companies other WooCommerce websites used, Rocket.net and Cloudways came on top.
• Theme: Get a free theme with an enormous community so you can ensure that the theme will be continuously updated. I use OceanWP for auresnotes.com and Astra for my shop. I prefer OceanWP.
• CMS: WordPress (free)
• E-commerce plugin: WooCommerce (free)
• SEO plugin: RankMath (free)
• Drag-and-drop: Elementor free and Header and Footer for Elementor (free)
• Heatmap: Clarity (free)
• Caching and speed plugin: Lightspeed (free)
• Form and marketing plugins: Forminator and Hustle (free)
• Analytics plugin: Independent Analytics (free)
• Backup: Updraft Plus (free)
• Chatbot: Crisp (free)
• Image compressor: Converter for Media (free)
• Payment provider: PaymentPlugins and Stripe (free) or Paypal (free)
• Mailing software: MailerLite (free)
• Shipping software: Sendcloud (free)

Total: 68€/year.

You can also buy an already-designed theme on Themeforest (kalles, for example) so you get a nicely-designed website ready to use and can skip on the designing and subsequent design tools.

The Best ROI E-commerce plan

This plan gives you maximum performance and flexibility while being the cheapest.

• Domain name: 20€/year
• Hosting: Hostinger: cheapest plan for WooCommerce stats at 4€/month for four years then 15€/month. However, you will quickly need to upgrade to the next one which you can get for 8€/month then 20€/month. Other good companies include Siteground and WPEngine.
• CMS: WordPress (free)
• E-commerce plugin: WooCommerce (free)
• SEO plugin: RankMath (free)
• Drag-and-drop: Elementor pro for WooCommerce (80€/year)
• Heatmap: Clarity (free)
• Caching and speed plugin: WPRocket (60€/year)
• Form and marketing plugins: Omnisend (180€/year), Brevo (84€/year).
• Analytics plugin: Independent Analytics (free)
• Translation plugin: WPML (90€/year)
• Backup: Updraft Plus (free)
• Chatbot: Crisp (free)
• Image compressor: Converter for Media (free)
• Payment provider: PaymentPlugins and Stripe (free) or Paypal (free)
• Shipping software: Sendcloud (free)

Conclusion

The platform you choose ultimately depends on what you need and what you sell.

• For SEO-based businesses, choose WooCommerce. WordPress’ SEO capabilities are unmatched (and free).
• For branding and social media-based businesses, choose Shopify. It’s the vibes, man. Customers feel when they’ve landed on Shopify and that makes them feel good.
• For enterprise e-commerce, choose BigCommerce.

I’ll update this article as I learn more about the topic.

For more articles, head to auresnotes.com.