Setting up the catalogue is the easy part. What decides whether the store sells are the payment methods you accept, how you solve shipping inside the country and who updates the inventory each week. A guide to the decisions that actually matter.
Almost everyone arrives with the same idea of what building an online store means: upload the product photos and set the prices. That is the easy part, and it is roughly 20% of the work. What decides whether the store sells or sits still are three decisions that rarely come up at the start: how you charge, how you deliver, and who keeps the inventory current.
How you are going to charge
This is the first decision and the one that loses the most people along the way if it is resolved badly. In Costa Rica a serious store needs to cover at least two of these three routes:
- Credit and debit cards, through a payment gateway that charges a fee per transaction. It is what someone buying from their phone expects without thinking twice.
- SINPE Móvil, which in this country is as natural as cash. It requires someone to confirm the payment by hand, unless it is integrated with the bank.
- Bank transfer, useful for large amounts and for business clients, who often need the invoice before paying.
Every gateway charges differently, asks for different requirements and settles at a different speed. Before choosing, ask for three numbers in writing: the fee per transaction, the fixed monthly cost if there is one, and how many business days it takes for the money to land in your account. That third number is what strangles new stores and almost nobody asks about it.
How you are going to deliver
Shipping is where most carts get abandoned. If the cost only appears at the end, half the people leave. And logistics here have a quirk that complicates automatic calculation: much of the country does not use exact addresses, but landmarks.
The three strategies that work, in order of simplicity:
- Flat rate by zone: one price for the Central Valley, another for the rest of the country. Simplest to implement and easiest for the customer to understand.
- Free shipping above a threshold. It raises the average ticket and removes friction, as long as the margin can take it.
- Pickup at the store or at a meeting point, which in local businesses resolves a surprising share of orders.
Whichever you pick, show the shipping cost before the customer fills in their details. A store that springs the freight charge at the last step loses the sale and the trust along with it.
Who maintains the inventory
This is the question that separates a store that sells from an abandoned catalogue. If nobody on the team has the weekly time to mark items out of stock, correct prices and add new products, the store will be out of date in three months and customers will buy things you do not have.
Before deciding on a platform, answer who is going to do that and how many hours a week they have. If the answer is nobody, it is better to start with a small, well-maintained catalogue than with two hundred products that age.
Electronic invoicing is not optional
If you sell and collect payment, you have to issue the corresponding electronic receipt. This is not a detail to be sorted out later: it determines whether the site has to connect to your invoicing system or whether someone will issue each invoice by hand when a purchase notification comes in.
With a few orders a week, doing it by hand works. As volume grows it becomes unsustainable and has to be integrated. Talk it through with your accountant before choosing a platform: some technical decisions depend on the system you already use.
Which platform makes sense
For most Costa Rican small businesses, WooCommerce on WordPress is still the balance point: the initial cost is reasonable, local integrations exist and someone on the team can learn the admin panel. Shopify costs more per month but requires no technical maintenance. Custom development is only justified if you sell something that does not fit the product-cart-payment model, such as subscriptions, time-slot bookings or configurators.
Where to start without getting it wrong
Start small and solid. Ten well-photographed products, one payment method that genuinely works, a clear shipping rule and a process tested end to end — buying from yourself, with your own card — is worth more than a huge catalogue with three broken things in it.
If you want us to look at your case before you invest, get in touch: a short call usually makes it clear whether you need a store or whether a catalogue and a good WhatsApp button will do for now.
Want us to review your site or build a new one?
