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, plus a couple of details, stock and payments, that break in the first month if nobody has thought them through.

Which platform: a store that's actually yours

The first decision is which platform, and it pays to be practical. We build stores to measure for one concrete reason: the store is yours and it fits your business, not the other way round. 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.

Owning the store also has a flip side worth knowing from the start: someone has to look after it. Updates, backups, security and speed don't happen by themselves, and a neglected store tends to show it right in the busy season, when the most orders are coming in. So when you choose a platform, ask two more questions: who's going to maintain it, and who's going to add new products. On our online stores page we explain how we set things up so it doesn't depend on someone remembering.

Shipping from an island: do the maths before setting prices

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.

A simple way to do the maths is to test with four or five real products from your catalogue: weigh them, measure them packed and ask your carrier for a price to each destination you care about. Separate what stays on the island, where your own delivery is sometimes worthwhile, from what has to cross to the mainland or go abroad. Bulky or fragile products change the numbers completely: a ceramics or furniture store can't use the same shipping table as a jeweller. And don't rule out in-store collection: it saves local customers the delivery charge and brings people through your door.

Photos and copy: online, the photo is the product

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.

What does that mean in practice? A consistent background across the whole catalogue, several photos per product — the whole item, the detail and in use, so the size is clear — and a product page that answers what customers would ask you at the counter: dimensions, material, how to care for it, how long it takes to arrive. A useful exercise is to write down the three questions customers ask most in your shop and check that the page answers them without anyone having to email you. And remember that copy counts for Google too: the supplier's description is repeated on dozens of sites, which makes it very hard for your page to be the one that shows up.

Three languages properly written, not machine-translated

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.

You don't need to translate the whole catalogue on day one. Start with what drives the store: your best-selling products, the basket, the checkout, the confirmation emails and the shipping and returns terms, which is where an odd sentence makes someone abandon the purchase. And bear in mind that each language has to rank on its own, with its own addresses and its own copy, as we explain in our post on multilingual websites.

Stock and payments: what breaks in the first month

If you also have a physical shop, stock is the most common source of headaches: someone buys online the last unit that another customer has just taken from the counter, and you have to write and cancel an order that was already paid. Decide from the outset where the inventory lives — in your till system, in the online store or in a spreadsheet someone updates every day — and who is responsible for keeping it accurate. If you can't sync it, at least leave a safety margin on low-stock products.

Payments work the same way: a customer who reaches the end of checkout and can't find their usual payment method leaves, and that's the sale that hurts most because it was already made. Offer cards as a minimum plus the methods your customers already use, and before going live make real test purchases, start to finish, on a phone and in every language: you'll spot errors that never show up on the office computer.

The money: check first whether Kit Digital applies

On money: before asking anyone for a quote, check whether you qualify for a grant. Kit Digital covers up to €2,000 under the e-commerce solution, which goes a long way on a simple store. It includes setting up the catalogue, configured payment gateways and shipping, a responsive, self-manageable store, level AA accessibility and basic SEO for your products. We're an accredited Digitalisation Agent and we process the grant ourselves; before counting on it, check where the calls currently stand.

Timing: if you want to sell at Christmas, start in September

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.

A sensible split would be: in September, decide the catalogue you'll open with, take the photos and settle the shipping table; in October, build the store, load the product pages and run the test purchases; and in November, have the store live and taking its first orders, so you can catch problems calmly before the December peak. If you run a shop on the island and want to see how we approach these projects, online stores for shops has the details.