When someone decides to open an online store, the first question is usually "Shoptet or Shopify". It is a question asked six months before it can be answered. A platform is only a container for six decisions you still have to make, and if you make them after choosing, the container will not fit them.
This article will not tell you which platform to take. It will tell you what to answer first, because after those six answers the platform usually picks itself and the conversation with a supplier is done in twenty minutes.
One: a catalogue is counted in items, not in products
It is not about how many kinds of goods you sell. It is about how many separate rows they turn into, because every size, colour and pack has to be created, photographed, priced and tracked in stock by somebody.
Ten T-shirts in four sizes and three colours is not ten items, it is a hundred and twenty. And the difference between a hundred and a hundred thousand is not convenience but cost: on Shoptet the product count is written into the tariff, so your catalogue sets your monthly bill.
Ask about two years ahead, not about today. A catalogue almost always grows, and it grows in a jump when you take on your first supplier with a range of their own.
Two: where your product data comes from decides the rest
This is the question beginners skip most often, and it is the most expensive of the six. Descriptions, photos, attributes and prices have to reach the shop somehow, and the way they get there determines half the work on the project.
There are three situations, and each leads somewhere different:
- You write and photograph everything yourself. The catalogue grows slowly, technology does not decide anything, and your time is the biggest cost.
- You take data from a supplier. An XML or CSV feed arrives and you are dealing with category mapping, currency conversion, margin rules and excluding items.
- The data lives in an ERP or a stock system. Then the shop is not a database but a shop window, and you need a two-way connection.
The second and third situations mean feed automation, not manual upkeep. It is work you do once and then it runs, but you have to know about it when you pick the platform, because not every platform carries it equally cheaply.
Three: stock can only have one owner
Ask yourself: when the last unit sells, who finds out first? The shop, the accounting system, or the assistant in the physical store?
There is no answer "everyone". There is only "one system knows and tells the others", or "we keep it by hand in two places". The second option does not break immediately, which is what makes it dangerous. It drifts apart quietly over a few weeks and you notice it on an order for something you do not have.
Name the owner of stock before you choose a platform. If it is the ERP, you are looking for a platform with a good API and a connection to your particular accounting system. If it is the shop, you are looking for the opposite: a platform you can reliably export from.
Four: invoicing and VAT set rules you cannot design around
Accounting is not a boring appendix to a shop. It is the part where the rules come from the law rather than from your taste, so everything else adapts to it.
Settle three things at the start:
- Who issues the invoice. The shop, the accounting software, or both - with the risk of two different numbering series.
- Whether you are or will be VAT registered. Registration becomes compulsory at a turnover of 2,000,000 CZK per calendar year; above 2,536,500 CZK you become a payer the very next day.
- Whether you also sell to companies. Then you need prices excluding VAT, VAT number validation and often purchase on invoice with payment terms, which is a different cart entirely.
Source: Czech Financial Administration, information on the changes to VAT registration from 1 January 2025, § 6 and § 94 of Act No. 235/2004 Coll., as of 31 August 2026. The registration application is filed within ten working days of exceeding the limit.
Five: a market border is a border no platform crosses for free
The difference between "we sell in Czechia" and "we sell across Europe" is not translated text. It is prices, currencies, shipping, returns and paying VAT in someone else's country.
If you sell goods to end customers in other EU states, you watch one combined threshold of 10,000 EUR per calendar year across all member states together. Below it you pay Czech VAT; above it, tax is due in the customer's country, and to avoid registering in every country separately there is the OSS scheme with a single filing.
What this means for the choice. Multiple languages and currencies are either in the core of the platform, or they get bolted on and break with every change to the URLs. This is not a feature you add later without consequences, which is why it belongs in the decision now.
If you want to work through this knot in detail with tariff prices, there is a separate decision tree by business type for that.
Six: somebody has to run the shop every day after launch
Launch is the shortest part of a shop's life. Then comes a year in which somebody changes prices, adds products, handles complaints, updates the system and deals with the Friday evening when payments stop going through.
Write down by name who that will be. Not a role, a person. If the answer turns out to be you, alongside your main job, that is a valid answer, but it changes the brief: you need a platform you do not have to administer, not a platform that can do everything.
The choice between a hosted platform and your own solution breaks here too. With your own solution nobody but you is responsible for the server, backups, updates and security, and a platform without an administrator does not degrade gradually - it goes down all at once.
Three symptoms that you started with the platform
This is not a hypothesis, it is the most common reason people come to us. Almost every migration we do started with technology being chosen first and only then anyone working out what it had to do.
- Stock is kept by hand in two places and nobody trusts either.
- The wholesale price list goes out by e-mail in Excel, alongside the shop.
- The second language is bolted on so that search engines cannot see it, and it breaks every time anyone touches the addresses.
Each of these three can be fixed, but it is fixed by rebuilding, not by configuring. And a rebuild including a URL map and redirects costs more than building the shop properly the first time.
Six answers on one page, and only then a supplier
Before you call anyone, write six answers on one page. It takes an hour and saves two meetings, because without them every supplier will recommend whatever they happen to be building.
How many items we will have in two years. Where their data will come from. Where stock is counted. Who issues invoices and in what. Which countries we sell to. Who will run the shop day to day.
Once you have that, the question "Shoptet or Shopify" has an answer, and one you can defend with numbers rather than with an impression.
We will go through those six questions with you before building anything
We build shops on Shoptet, Shopify and WooCommerce and just as often move the ones where the platform was chosen first. Write to us and go through the six points with someone who has already seen how each option turns out.
Write to info@lamapixel.com or call +420 775 599 009.
