Opening an E-shop in Greece in 2026: Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom

For most small businesses opening an e-shop in Greece in 2026, the right choice is Shopify if you want to launch in weeks and never think about servers, WooCommerce if you want to own everything and have a developer to keep it updated, and a custom build only if you sell something the off-the-shelf platforms handle badly: configurable products, trade pricing, deep stock or ERP integration, or volumes where percentage fees start to hurt. All three can sell well. The difference is who maintains it, what it costs once fees are counted, and how easily you can leave.

The platform is also the smaller decision. Payments, shipping, receipts that reach AADE, returns and the legal pages take as much work as the shop itself, and they are the same on every platform. This guide covers both, for owners of shops, producers and workshops in Greece who want to sell online properly, from olive oil in Pieria to ceramics in Thessaloniki.

Prices below are taken from the platforms’ own pages as checked in October 2026. Build costs for a typical e-shop are covered in our guide to business website costs in Greece, so we do not repeat them here.

The short answer: which platform for whom

• Choose Shopify if you have up to a few hundred products, want to manage orders yourself from a phone, and prefer a predictable monthly bill to a maintenance contract.
• Choose WooCommerce if you already run WordPress, publish a lot of content, need a plugin that only exists for WordPress, or want your shop on hosting you control.
• Choose custom if your pricing or product logic does not fit a standard product page, you sell mainly to other businesses, the shop must stay in sync with an ERP or warehouse system, or your turnover is high enough that platform fees are a real line in the accounts.
• Choose none of them yet if you have ten products and no idea whether people will buy online. A product page with a contact form, or a listing on a marketplace, is a cheaper way to find out.

What every e-shop in Greece needs, whatever it runs on

Before comparing platforms, list what the shop must do. These items are needed on Shopify, WooCommerce and custom alike, and they decide most of the work:

• Payments Greeks actually use: debit and credit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, IRIS, and often cash on delivery.
• Shipping: rates and labels for at least one courier, and a pickup-locker option.
• Legal documents for every sale: a retail receipt or invoice issued through software that transmits it to AADE’s myDATA.
• Legal pages: terms of sale, delivery and returns, privacy policy, cookie policy and your business details.
• Consumer-rights features: clear pre-contract information, an order button that says the customer will pay, and an online withdrawal function.
• Greek and English: at least for product pages and checkout if you sell to tourists or abroad.
• Good product data: real photos, dimensions, weights, ingredients or materials, stock levels and prices including VAT.
• Accessibility: a checkout that works with a keyboard and a screen reader. For many e-shops this is now a legal requirement, covered below.

Shopify: fast to launch, fees to watch

Shopify is a hosted platform: you pay a monthly subscription and Shopify runs the servers, security, checkout and updates. Its Greek pricing page lists these plans in euros:

The important detail for Greek merchants: Greece is on Shopify’s list of countries where Shopify Payments is available, subject to business type and verification. With Shopify Payments, you pay the card rate above and no extra Shopify transaction fee. If you prefer a Greek gateway, such as a bank gateway or Viva.com, which offers a Shopify checkout, you pay that provider’s fees plus Shopify’s transaction fee from the last column. On the Basic plan that is 2% of every order, which is easy to overlook. Shopify says it does not charge that fee on manual payment methods such as cash on delivery.

Where Shopify works well

• Live in days or weeks, with hosting, security updates and backups handled for you.
• A good mobile admin for managing orders from the shop floor.
• A large app store, including apps for Greek invoicing, Skroutz feeds and couriers.
• Checkout performance and reliability that a small business would struggle to match alone.

Where it pinches

• Apps add up. A myDATA connector, reviews, a Skroutz feed and a courier app can each carry a monthly fee.
• You rent the platform. You can export products and orders, but the theme and apps do not move with you.
• Unusual logic, such as pricing by weight cut to order, B2B price lists or bundles built from stock, often needs paid apps or a higher plan.
• Prices change at Shopify’s discretion, and some features are reserved for higher plans.

WooCommerce: free software, real running costs

WooCommerce is an open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a shop. The software is free, and your shop lives on hosting you choose, so you own the code, the data and the server account. “Free” refers to the licence, not to the shop. WooCommerce’s own pricing page lists the costs that remain: hosting of “$25 – $350/month for most stores”, paid extensions at “$29 – $299/year per extension”, and payment processing fees. A small Greek shop can run on cheaper hosting than that, but not on the cheapest shared plan once traffic and plugins grow.

The cost people forget is maintenance. WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and every plugin need regular updates, and an update can break checkout on a Friday evening in August. Someone has to test updates, keep backups and watch security. That is a monthly cost, either your time or a care plan. Our article on the real cost of a “free” website covers the same trap for simpler sites.

Where WooCommerce works well

• No platform transaction fee; you pay only your gateway.
• WooCommerce plugins exist for Greek gateways and services, for example Viva.com Smart Checkout and a Skroutz Marketplace and XML extension from the third-party developer WPSlash.
• Content and shop on one site, which suits producers who publish recipes, guides or news.
• You can move host or developer without rebuilding the shop.

Where it pinches

• Speed depends on hosting and build quality; plugin-heavy shops are often slow on phones.
• Security and updates are your responsibility.
• Plugins from different authors do not always work together, and some are abandoned.
• Total cost is less predictable than a single subscription.

Custom: when building your own makes sense

A custom e-shop is written for your business, usually as a fast web front end connected to a payment provider, an invoicing provider and your stock system. It costs more up front and is rarely the right first step. It earns its keep in a few situations:

• Unusual pricing or configurators: furniture built to dimensions, printed goods, gift boxes assembled from stock, fish sold by weight with cleaning options.
• B2B portals: customer-specific price lists, credit terms, repeat orders and invoices rather than receipts.
• Deep ERP or stock integration: one stock figure across the shop, the counter and wholesale, with orders flowing straight into your accounting software.
• High volume: when a platform fee of even 1–2% on top of card fees is several thousand euros a year.

For reference, our website Signature tier, which covers bespoke builds including an e-shop, starts from €2,500. Where the shop is really an ordering system or a B2B portal, it is priced as custom software: Essential from €1,000, Growth from €3,000 and Signature from €10,000, depending on scope. All are fixed written quotes, and once the project is paid in full, the code belongs to the client. Before choosing this route, read our comparison of custom software and off-the-shelf SaaS; the same logic applies to shops.

Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom at a glance

Three-year cost: an illustrative example

Monthly prices mislead, because payment fees usually outweigh the platform bill. Here is a worked example for a hypothetical shop. It is illustrative only: the build and maintenance figures are our assumptions, not quotes, and your numbers will differ.

• Online sales of €96,000 a year (€8,000 a month), average order €50, so 1,920 orders a year.
• All orders paid by card. To compare like with like, we apply Shopify’s Basic online rate of 1.9% + €0.25 to every option as a stand-in for card processing; Greek gateway rates vary and are often negotiable.
• Shopify Basic billed annually (€19 a month) plus €40 a month of apps; €1,500 one-off set-up.
• WooCommerce with €30 a month managed hosting, four paid extensions at about €100 a year each, €60 a month maintenance and a €2,500 set-up.
• Custom build at €8,000, with €50 a month hosting and care plus €1,000 a year of changes.
• All figures exclude VAT, courier costs, marketing, photography and marketplace fees, which are similar whichever platform you choose.

Three lessons come out of it. First, at this size card fees are the biggest single cost on every option, so negotiate them. Second, Shopify’s extra fee for third-party gateways can turn the cheapest option into one of the dearest, so decide your gateway before your plan. Third, custom only pays when it does something the others cannot, such as saving staff hours on stock and invoicing, or when volume is high enough that fees outweigh the build.

Greek integrations: payments, couriers, myDATA and Skroutz

Payments

Cards dominate. In the 2026 GR.EC.A and ELTRUN e-commerce survey, as reported by CNN Greece, 67.3% of consumers said they usually pay online by debit card and 34.4% used Apple Pay or Google Pay, while cash on delivery and PayPal were described as stable or gradually declining. Offer cards and wallets through a gateway (Shopify Payments, a bank gateway, Viva.com, Everypay or similar), and consider IRIS: according to a December 2025 report, IRIS Commerce has been available at every e-shop in Greece since 1 December 2025. Ask your gateway how it supports IRIS. Cash on delivery still matters to some customers; if you offer it, check your courier’s fee and how unpaid returns are handled.

Couriers and lockers

The same survey found pickup lockers had become the most popular delivery method, used by 73.1% of respondents, ahead of home delivery at 52.5%. Offer at least one courier, such as ACS, Geniki Taxydromiki, ELTA or Speedex, plus a locker option such as Box Now or a courier’s own lockers. What matters most is that the integration prints labels and sends tracking numbers automatically; copying addresses by hand stops working at about twenty orders a day.

myDATA, receipts and e-invoicing

Every sale needs a legal document whose data reaches AADE’s myDATA platform, either a retail receipt for consumers or an invoice for businesses. Decision A.1170/2023 also introduced an obligation to transmit e-shop order slips to myDATA, with its scope and start date left to a later decision, as summarised by EY; ask your accountant whether it applies to you yet. For B2B sales, electronic invoicing is mandatory in two phases: according to AADE it applied to larger businesses from 2 March 2026, and for businesses with turnover up to €1 million it starts on 2 November 2026, with a transition until 31 January 2027. From 1 February 2027, domestic B2B invoices can be issued only through an authorised e-invoicing provider or AADE’s free timologio and myDATAapp apps, AADE says. In practice, connect the shop to an invoicing provider that integrates with your platform; several, such as Wrapp, list Shopify, WooCommerce and Skroutz connectors. Agree the exact setup with your accountant before launch.

Skroutz and marketplaces

Skroutz is where many Greek shoppers compare prices. Listing usually means providing an XML product feed, and both platforms have tools for it, such as the Skroutz Connect app for Shopify, made by the third-party developer Pandectes, and the WooCommerce extension above. Skroutz fees depend on how you sell there and on the product category; check the current terms in the Skroutz merchant portal and include them in your margin calculation. Keep stock and prices synced, because overselling on a marketplace damages your rating quickly.

ERP and accounting

If you also sell from a counter or wholesale, decide which system holds the true stock figure. For a small shop, the e-shop can be the master. Once you have a commercial ERP, stock and prices should flow from it to the shop, and orders back. This is the integration that most often justifies a custom build.

Legal must-haves for selling online in Greece

• Pre-contract information and the 14-day withdrawal right. Under the Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU, transposed in Greece through consumer protection Law 2251/1994 as amended, consumers can withdraw from most online purchases within 14 days of delivery without giving a reason. The EU’s Your Europe guidance for sellers adds that if you do not give the required information, the customer has one additional year to withdraw, and that you must refund within 14 days of being notified. Exceptions include goods made to order and perishables.
• An order button that says it. The final button must make clear the customer is committing to pay, for example “Order & Pay”, and you must confirm the order on a durable medium such as email.
• The online withdrawal button. Directive (EU) 2023/2673 added a withdrawal function for contracts concluded online, applying from 19 June 2026 according to a Hogan Lovells briefing. Greece transposed it with Law 5317/2026, which adds Article 3ζα to Law 2251/1994, as summarised on Lawspot: a clearly labelled, always available withdrawal function, a confirmation step and an acknowledgement on a durable medium.
• Terms, returns and business details. Publish terms of sale, delivery times and costs, the returns process and your business identity, address, email and phone.
• Privacy and cookies. Process customer data under the GDPR, and ask consent before non-essential cookies. The Hellenic Data Protection Authority’s guidance on cookies and trackers recommends that rejecting takes the same number of actions as accepting, and warns against cookie walls.
• VAT on sales to other EU countries. An EU-wide €10,000 threshold applies to cross-border distance sales to consumers. Below it you can generally charge Greek VAT; above it you charge the customer’s country’s rate, and you can declare it through the One Stop Shop instead of registering in each country. Ask your accountant to watch the threshold.
• Accessibility. Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act applies to e-commerce services for consumers. Microenterprises providing services, with fewer than 10 staff and no more than €2 million turnover or balance sheet, are exempt. Our guide to the European Accessibility Act for Greek websites explains who is covered and how to fix a checkout.

E-shop launch checklist

1. Platform chosen on three-year total cost, including gateway and app fees, not the monthly price.
2. Domain, platform and hosting accounts registered in the business’s name.
3. Card, wallet and IRIS payments tested with real small orders, including a refund.
4. Courier and locker options live, with automatic labels and tracking emails.
5. Every order produces a receipt or invoice that reaches myDATA, checked with your accountant.
6. Terms of sale, returns, privacy and cookie pages published; cookie banner lets visitors reject as easily as accept.
7. Final button says the customer will pay; order confirmation email sent; withdrawal function works end to end.
8. Product pages show prices including VAT, delivery costs, stock and real photos, in Greek and English if you sell to visitors.
9. Checkout tested on a mid-range phone over 4G, with a keyboard and with a screen reader.
10. Skroutz or other feeds validated, and stock syncing tested before the first promotion.
11. Analytics count orders, revenue and abandoned checkouts, and one named person owns updates and backups.

How Orya One can help

Orya One is a software house in Paralia Katerinis, founded in 2026 by data scientist Dimitris Kampouridis. You work directly with the people building your shop, every quote is fixed and in writing, we design for GDPR from the start, and once the project is paid in full, the code we write is yours. Our website tiers start from €400 for a simple site and from €2,500 for bespoke builds such as an e-shop, and a care plan for hosting, updates, backups and small edits starts from €25 a month.

We will also tell you when a custom build is not worth it. If Shopify or WooCommerce fits your shop better, we will say so and explain why. If you already sell online, ask for a free website check: a written report on speed, phones, Google and accessibility. If you are starting from scratch, send us a short note with what you sell, how many products and how you take orders today, and we will help you pick the platform that costs least over three years.