Online stores

WooCommerce online store development: which engine suits you

WooCommerce: WordPress-based, the most flexible, and it has integrations for most Romanian payment gateways, courier services and invoicing tools. This is the most common choice when the site and the shop live in one place.

OpenCart: a standalone shop system, it handles large catalogues well and has lower resource requirements. A good fit when the shop is the main business rather than an accessory to a website.

Shopify: monthly fee, no maintenance required, and it solves international selling with the least work. In exchange it is less customisable and the fee grows with volume. If you sell abroad and want to launch quickly, this is often the better choice over WordPress.

What needs separate handling on the Romanian market

Payment gateway, courier and invoicing integration is not optional here, and not trivial either: cash on delivery, for instance, is not a built-in feature in many foreign systems, even though a significant share of orders here work that way.

On top of that comes the legal layer: cookie consent, privacy policy, right of withdrawal, terms and conditions. Without these the shop cannot be launched lawfully, and retrofitting them costs more.

A webshop needs ongoing operation

A brochure site can go years without updates. A webshop cannot: it handles payment data, its plugins update constantly, and every outage is directly lost revenue. The most expensive mistake is a blind update: updating a live shop without testing.

That is why with webshops I recommend the monthly care plan as part of running the shop.