Every business owner who wants to sell online in Greece arrives at the same three options. And almost always asks the wrong question: "which is best?". The right one is "which fits me?".
Shopify: renting a finished shop
Shopify is the easiest to start with. You pay monthly, you never touch hosting, you never touch updates.
Two problems surface later. The first is cost: transaction fees and app subscriptions sit on top of the plan, and for many Greek stores they exceed the base price. The second, and more serious, is that it is not yours. The rules, the prices and the limits change without anyone asking you.
For the Greek market the sore point is localisation: cash on delivery, invoicing, integration with Greek couriers. All of it is possible — through workarounds and extra subscriptions.
WooCommerce: WordPress with a basket
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. If you already run WordPress and sell a handful of products, it is the logical next step.
Its strength is the enormous plugin market. That is also its weakness: every feature you want is one more plugin, from a different author, on its own update cycle. Twenty plugins arrives sooner than you expect, and from then on every update is a risk.
In practice, the WooCommerce stores we see struggling do not run bad software. They have too many moving parts.
OpenCart: built for one job
OpenCart is not a content system that learned to sell. It was born as an online store. It is open source, it runs on ordinary Greek hosting, and — most importantly — it is yours.
In the Greek market it has an advantage that is hard to see from outside: a mature ecosystem for exactly what a Greek e-shop needs. Cash on delivery with a surcharge and a free-over threshold, shipping through ACS and BOX NOW, card payments and IRIS, feeds for Skroutz and BestPrice.
Its cost is that it needs somebody to look after it. It does not update itself.
The Greek reality
What international comparisons forget: in Greece an e-shop is judged on things that barely exist elsewhere.
- Cash on delivery is still a large share of orders, with everything that implies in surcharges and in orders that are never collected.
- Skroutz and BestPrice bring a large part of the traffic. If your feed is wrong, you do not exist.
- Couriers need vouchers issued properly, not addresses copied by hand.
- Invoicing has its own rules, and they change more often than anyone would like.
Which, when
If you want to test an idea quickly and the monthly fee does not bother you, Shopify will not let you down. If you already have WordPress with traffic and you sell a few products, stay on WooCommerce. If e-commerce is your business, and you want control, predictable costs and deep integration with the Greek channels — OpenCart is the firmer ground.
There is no winner. There is a fit. And the worst decision is choosing a platform because it was recommended by somebody who only knows how to build that one.
