Opening a Shopify store takes an afternoon: you sign up, choose a theme and upload three products. Getting that store to sell is another story. Almost everything that decides whether it works is settled before you create your Shopify store: what you sell, how much it costs you each month, how you organize the catalog and who is going to run it once it’s live. These are the seven things worth having clear before you start, with the most repeated mistake in each one. Prices and tax rules are the ones for Spain, as an example.
Quick summary
| Key | What you decide | The usual mistake |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What you sell and to whom | Catalog, margin and customer | Opening the store “to see if it sells” |
| 2. Real monthly cost | Plan, apps, fees and when it pays off | Looking only at the plan price |
| 3. Catalog structure | Collections, variants and product page fields | Designing before organizing |
| 4. The theme | A theme designed for your product | Choosing it by the demo photos |
| 5. Payments, shipping and taxes | Gateway, shipping rates, VAT and legal texts | Discovering European VAT with the first sale to France |
| 6. Mobile and speed | Photos, apps and page weight | Testing the store only on a computer |
| 7. The day after | Who manages it and how | Depending on someone to change a price |
1. What do you sell and to whom, before choosing a platform?
The platform is the last thing to be decided, even if it’s the first thing people search for on Google. Before that come three questions: what you’re going to sell (how many products, with which variants, whether there are digital products), at what margin, and who is going to buy it from you.
A five-product store with customers who already know you is nothing like a five-hundred-item catalog that has to find new people. The first needs little more than a good product page and a good checkout; the second, filters, search and a thought-out structure. Write it down on one page. If it doesn’t fit, the store won’t solve it either.
2. How much does a Shopify store really cost per month?
The plan price is the easy part. In Spain, the Basic plan costs €24 a month if you pay the year upfront and about €36 if you pay month by month; the next one, Grow, ranges between €79 and €105. But the real bill has more lines:
- The plan. Basic is enough for most stores starting out.
- The fee per sale. With Shopify Payments you pay a percentage plus a fixed amount for each card order, and the percentage goes down on higher plans. If you prefer another gateway, Shopify adds its own surcharge: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced.
- The apps. Reviews, shipping, invoices, subscriptions. Many are free to start with; others charge every month and pile up without you noticing.
- The domain. About €10–20 a year.
- The theme. Free or paid, with a one-time payment.
Add it all up before thinking about the design. That figure is what your store has to pay every month, whether it sells or not.
When does going online pay off?
The math is simple: your fixed monthly costs divided by what you clear on each order. The result is the number of orders you need just to not lose money.
An example with round numbers, so the math is visible (yours will be different):
- Fixed costs: €36 plan + €30 apps + €2 domain = €68 a month.
- Margin per order: you sell at €40, the product costs you €18, the shipping you absorb is €5 and the payment fee is around €1.50. You’re left with about €15.50.
- Orders to cover costs: 68 ÷ 15.50 ≈ 5 orders a month.
If you’ve also invested in setting up the store, spread it over time: €2,970 over two years is about €124 a month, and the figure rises to about 13 orders a month. Up to there, the store pays for itself. Beyond that, it starts to earn.
It pays off when there’s enough margin per order, a product people buy again or recommend, and some way of bringing in visits: customers you already have, social media, a newsletter, a physical shop. It doesn’t pay off, yet, if you sell four products, have nobody to show them to or the margin comes to two euros. In that case it’s better to start by selling through social media, on a marketplace or to order, and open the store when that math works out.
3. How do you organize the catalog before designing?
The design can be changed in an afternoon. The catalog structure can’t. Before uploading products, decide:
- Collections: how the customer is going to search: by type, by use, by brand or by season. In Shopify a collection is just a group of products: you can have as many as you need, but each one has to have a reason.
- Variants: size, color, format. Shopify supports up to three options per product, so if your product needs more, it has to be thought through before importing.
- Product page fields: the data the customer really looks up, such as material, measurements, origin or ingredients. In Shopify they’re stored as metafields, so they can be filtered and always shown in the same place instead of being buried in the description.
If your products have something or someone behind them — an author, a winery, an artist, an ingredient — it’s worth giving it a page of its own with all its products underneath. That’s exactly what our themes Parker and Parker Open do.
4. Which Shopify theme should you choose?
The most common mistake is choosing the theme by the demo photos. The demo is set up with studio photos and four perfect products; your store isn’t. Look at other things:
- That it’s designed for a catalog like yours: few products with a lot of story, or many with filters.
- That the product page has room for the data your customer needs.
- That it works well on mobile without tricks.
- That it can be changed from the Shopify editor, without touching code for every little thing.
- That it has updates and someone behind it.
Shopify’s free themes are a solid base to start with, and the paid ones in the Theme Store are paid for once and usually bring more sections. There are also themes designed for a specific type of product: Parker, our theme for bookshops and publishers, and Parker Open, for stores whose products have an origin to tell, such as music, art, courses, collectibles, food, fashion or health. Both are free if you install them yourself.
5. What needs sorting out in payments, shipping and taxes?
It’s the least glamorous part and the one that causes the most scares.
- Payments. Shopify Payments is Shopify’s own gateway and avoids the external-gateway surcharge. If you prefer another, you can use it, but add that surcharge to every sale.
- Shipping. Define the rates before launching: flat rate, free above a certain amount, by weight or by zone. And count the packaging, which also costs money.
- VAT. In Spain the standard rate is 21%, with reduced rates for some products. If you sell to consumers in other EU countries, as long as those sales don’t exceed €10,000 a year you apply Spanish VAT; above that, you apply the VAT of each destination country, and you can declare it all together through the One-Stop Shop (OSS) at Spain’s tax agency.
- Legal texts. Legal notice, privacy, terms of sale and returns. In the EU the customer has 14 days to withdraw from an online purchase. Shopify provides templates, but they have to be adapted to your business.
6. Why do mobile and speed matter?
Google indexes the mobile version of websites: what it sees on mobile is what counts for appearing in its results. And it measures the experience with three indicators, the Core Web Vitals: that the main content loads in under 2.5 seconds (LCP), that the page responds to a tap in under 200 milliseconds (INP) and that nothing jumps around while loading (CLS below 0.1).
In Shopify, what weighs most is usually what you add yourself:
- The photos. Shopify serves them resized, but it’s best to upload them already cropped and at a reasonable size.
- The apps. Some load their code on every page, even if you only use them on one.
- The decorations. Sliders, videos on the home page and chained pop-ups.
Test the store on your phone, on mobile data and not on the office wifi. If it drives you mad, it’ll do the same to the customer.
7. Who is going to run the store the day after?
A store isn’t finished the day it’s published: that’s where it starts. Someone has to upload products, change prices, answer orders, prepare campaigns and check that everything works. Before launching, decide who is going to do it and make sure they know how to do it without asking for help with every change.
Shopify has a clear advantage here: hosting, security and updates are on them, so technical maintenance is much lower than in a WooCommerce store. We explain it with numbers in how much work each type of website asks of you per month. And for the day-to-day, AI already helps with quite a few tasks: you’ll find it in managing your Shopify store with AI.
How we do it at Mister Mikel
We build Shopify stores from start to finish: catalog, design, payments, shipping and training so you can run it yourself. A complete store starts at €2,970 + VAT. If your product fits one of our themes — Parker for books, Parker Open for products with an origin — you can install it yourself for free, or ask us to install it and adapt it to your catalog, with a separate quote well below a complete store. It’s all at Shopify online stores.
Frequently asked questions
Opening it, not much: the Basic plan costs between €24 and €36 a month in Spain, depending on whether you pay yearly or month by month, plus the domain and the apps you need. What changes the figure is the setup: doing it yourself, installing a theme and adapting it, or commissioning the complete store, which at Mister Mikel starts at €2,970 + VAT.
No. Products, prices, orders, discounts and most design changes are done from the admin and the theme editor. Code only comes up when you want something the theme doesn’t include.
Shopify, if you want a store you can run without a technician: hosting, security and updates are included. WooCommerce gives more freedom, but demands more maintenance. We compare them in depth in Shopify or WooCommerce for a publisher.
Yes. Products, customers and orders can be migrated from WooCommerce, PrestaShop and other platforms, and it’s worth redirecting the old URLs so you don’t lose your search rankings.
It depends mostly on the catalog. A simple store, with the catalog prepared, can be ready in a few weeks. What takes the most time isn’t the design, but getting the photos, the texts and the product data ready.
Keep reading
- Shopify or WooCommerce for a publisher
- Website maintenance: how much work each type of site asks of you per month
- Managing your Shopify store with AI
- Shopify online stores
- Parker Open, the Shopify theme for products with an origin
Sources
- Shopify, plans and pricing (Spain)
- Finom, “Precios de Shopify en 2026” (April 2026), prices in euros for Spain (in Spanish)
- Agencia Tributaria (Spain’s tax agency), sales to consumers in other EU member states (in Spanish)
- Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights (14-day right of withdrawal)
- Google, web.dev: Web Vitals
- Google Search Central: mobile-first indexing
