Starting an online store in Mallorca: what nobody tells you before you begin

Opening the store is the easy part. The hard part comes after: shipping from an island, stock that never matches, photography and three languages. Here are the decisions that actually determine whether you sell or just own a pretty catalogue.

Starting an online store is easier today than it has ever been, and that's precisely the problem. Anyone can publish a catalogue in an afternoon, which is why so many stores sell nothing at all: the technical part stopped being the obstacle years ago, but everyone still treats it as if it were. What separates a store that takes money from an abandoned shop window isn't the platform — it's four decisions that almost never get made in time.

The first is which platform, and it pays to be practical. We work with WooCommerce for one concrete reason: the store is yours. Your customer data, your catalogue and the site itself live on your hosting, not on a platform that can raise your fee, change your terms or take a percentage of every sale. At twenty orders a month that difference is small; at two hundred, it's your entire margin.

The second is shipping, and in Mallorca that isn't a logistics detail: it's the factor that decides whether your store makes sense at all. Shipping from the island costs more and takes longer than from the mainland, and if you haven't worked that out before setting prices, every sale quietly eats into your margin. Decide early where you genuinely ship to, what you charge for it, and above what order value it's worth absorbing. It's a boring conversation to have before you sell, not after a first month of strange numbers.

The third is photography and copy, and this is where most stores fall down. In a physical shop the customer touches the product; online, the photo is the product. We've built stores for very different businesses — Petit Market, Bellini Surf Shop, Damara Joyas, Marianssport — and the pattern repeats: the ones that sell are the ones that invested in their own photography and in genuinely describing what they offer. The ones that used the supplier's stock photo are competing against fifty other stores using that exact image.

The fourth is languages. In Mallorca, a store only in Spanish walks away from a huge slice of the market standing right in front of it: residents and visitors who buy in English and German. We don't mean running it through an automatic translation plugin, which shows and costs you trust at exactly the moment of payment, but having the product page and the checkout properly written in each language.

On money: before asking anyone for a quote, check whether you qualify for a grant. Kit Digital covers up to €5,000 under the e-commerce solution, and in many cases that leaves the project all but covered. We're an accredited Digitalisation Agent and we process the grant ourselves.

And a note on timing, which matters more here than it seems: if you want to sell at Christmas, the moment to start is September. Not because of the website — that gets built — but because of everything else: photographing the catalogue, writing the product pages, settling shipping agreements and giving Google a few weeks to index you. Whoever starts in November arrives at the campaign with a freshly opened store and no traffic.