Shopify or a custom website?

The short version: if selling products online is the core of your business, use Shopify. If your website's job is to make people contact you, build custom. Almost everything else is detail — but the detail is where the money is, so here it is.

The three questions

1. Do you take payments on the site? If yes, Shopify starts ahead. Payments, tax, fraud, refunds and compliance are enormous problems that are already solved there.
2. How often does your content change? Daily stock changes want a shop platform. A services site that changes twice a year does not.
3. Is your site a shop or a pitch? A shop needs catalogue infrastructure. A pitch needs speed, structure and persuasion — and carrying a platform you do not use is pure overhead.

What Shopify genuinely does better

• Payments and tax. iDEAL, cards, Klarna, PayPal, EU VAT per country. Rebuilding this is months of work and a liability you do not want.
• Catalogue management. Variants, inventory, collections, bulk edits. Unremarkable until you have 300 SKUs, then indispensable.
• The ecosystem. Reviews, subscriptions, shipping, email flows — a few clicks each.
• Not being your problem. Security, uptime and PCI compliance are handled. That is worth real money.

What a custom site does better

• Speed. A hand-coded page ships a fraction of the code. On mobile connections the difference is visible, and page experience feeds into ranking.
• Structure. You can shape URLs and pages around search intent instead of around a theme's assumptions. For a services business this is the whole game.
• No rent. No monthly platform fee, no transaction cut, no app subscriptions that accumulate quietly.
• Design freedom. Nothing is “not possible in this theme”.
• Ownership. The files are yours and they keep working regardless of anyone's business decisions.

Three-year cost, honestly

People compare build prices and ignore what happens next. Rough but realistic figures for a small business:

The hybrid nobody mentions

You do not have to choose one for everything. A common and sensible setup is a fast custom site for everything that has to rank and persuade — home, services, about, content — with a Shopify storefront on a subdomain or a subfolder for the part that takes payments.

You get search performance where it matters and payment infrastructure where you need it. It is slightly more work to set up and it is frequently the right answer for a brand that sells a small range alongside a service business.

The mistakes we see most

• Shopify for a services business because someone said it was “easier”. You pay monthly for a shopping cart you never use.
• Custom-building a shop to save €40 a month, then discovering that VAT, refunds and abandoned carts are not weekend projects.
• Choosing by theme. The theme is the cheapest, most replaceable part of the decision.
• Ignoring category pages. On Shopify, collection pages are where organic traffic lands, and most stores leave them on defaults.

If you are still unsure, the fastest way through is to describe what you sell and to whom. We will tell you which one we would build and why — including when the answer is the cheaper one. Ask us, or look at what a three-language Shopify build looked like in practice.