E-commerce agency Switzerland.

An e-commerce agency takes on four blocks of work: choosing the system, building the shop, setting up the commercial logic behind it, and the ongoing work on visibility and conversion after launch. The last block is the largest — and the one most quotes treat most thinly.

• System choice and concept: range structure, categories, variants, filters, search logic. How does someone find a product whose name they do not know? That question decides more about revenue than any design choice.
• The build: design of home, category, product and checkout pages, setting up the system, importing product data, mobile rendering, load time.
• Commercial setup: payment methods and their contracts, shipping zones and rates, VAT rates per product group, stock levels, order and dispatch confirmations, the returns process, connections to accounting or inventory management.
• After launch: preparing product pages for search, setting up measurement properly, analysing abandoned baskets, maintaining the range, running campaigns. A shop is not a project with an end date. It is an operation.

The difference from a pure web design agency sits in block three. A handsome product page is demanding craft but comparatively low risk. A wrongly set shipping rule, a tax rate on the wrong product, or a payment provider that does not fit your basket cost real money from the first order onwards. How we build websites in general is described under web design, and the price bands sit there too.

The system question is not settled by feature lists but by a single quantity: how far your processes deviate from the standard. The closer you are to the normal case — product into basket, pay, ship — the more clearly a rented system wins. The more special-case logic is involved, the more a custom build pays off.

• Rented systems (Shopify and comparable providers): you rent software, hosting, security and payment processing. The shop stands up quickly, the checkout has been tested across millions of shops, and extensions come from an app directory. The price is recurring fees, limits on customising the checkout, and a degree of dependence on the provider. The detail sits on our page Shopify agency Switzerland.
• WooCommerce: a shop layer for WordPress. Sensible when a well-maintained WordPress site already exists and the shop is part of it. You keep full control over data and extensions — and carry responsibility for updates, security and load time yourself. How quickly a stack of twenty plugins becomes a maintenance case is regularly underestimated.
• A custom build, including as a headless architecture: the selling logic is built rather than configured. Right for configurators, customer-specific price lists, complex availability logic or tight coupling to an existing production process. Wrong when the actual reason is "we want something of our own". The comparison of the system worlds is worked through in our article on headless CMS and WordPress.

A pragmatic test from practice: write down the ten processes your shop has to handle. If eight of them are built into a rented system and two are covered by apps, take the rented system. If four of them need special solutions, the rented system becomes a permanent building site — and the custom build is the cheaper option over five years. We run the same arithmetic for software generally, set out under CRM: buy or build.

The build falls into our website range of CHF 3,000 to 25,000, and a shop generally sits in the upper part of it. The reason is not the design effort. It is the number of rules that have to be configured and tested before the first real order passes through cleanly.

Five factors drive the price: the number of products and above all variants, each additional language, the connection to an existing inventory, point-of-sale or accounting system, bespoke logic in the buying process, and the volume of product-data work. That last point is almost always underestimated: 400 products with maintained copy, photos, dimensions and tax rates are a project of their own alongside the shop build. Doing that work internally saves real money. Leaving it tacitly to the agency means finding it again in the final invoice.

More important than the one-off figure are the running costs, because they routinely go missing from quotes. They include the platform or hosting fee, the payment provider fees on every transaction, any app subscriptions, maintenance and security updates, and the cost of visibility. Budget a three-figure franc amount per month for operations before a single hour of your own time for range and orders is counted. A first order of magnitude for your undertaking comes from our project calculator.

Failed shops almost never fail on the technology. They fail at five points that look too small in the project plan. We name them before the contract starts, because every single one can tip a project over.

• Range maintenance. Who adds new products, who updates prices, who takes sold-out items off the site? Without a named person and a fixed routine, a shop goes stale within months. That is the most common reason a technically flawless shop reaches nobody after a year.
• Shipping logic. Zones, weight and size classes, bulky goods, collection in person, free shipping above a threshold, delivery into the EU including customs and import tax. These rules have to be decided commercially before anybody implements them. Improvised during the build, they produce exactly the cases where shipping costs more than the margin allows.
• Payment methods. Without TWINT or purchase on invoice, a measurable share of orders breaks off at the last step. But every additional method costs a fee and upkeep — the selection belongs to basket size and audience, not to a completeness checklist.
• VAT. Standard rate 8.1 per cent, reduced rate 2.6 per cent for certain goods. With a mixed range the rate belongs on the individual product. Notice it first in the accounts and you are correcting retrospectively.
• Returns. Surveys of online retail report return rates in the mid double-digit percentages for fashion and considerably lower across all categories; the processing cost per return in Switzerland is put at around CHF 20. Leave that out of your contribution margin and in some categories you are selling at a loss without noticing.

The countermeasure is unspectacular: these five points get decided in writing before the build rather than discussed during it. How the effects are then measured is described on our page about conversion tracking.

A shop copied from a German template is misconfigured in Switzerland on at least four counts. The list below is not legal advice — it shows what has to be settled before launch.

• Price display. Consumers must see the price actually payable in francs, inclusive of VAT and every non-optional surcharge. A net price display is not an option in a consumer shop.
• VAT and cross-border trade. 8.1 and 2.6 per cent domestically. Anyone delivering from abroad falls under the mail-order rule above CHF 100,000 in annual turnover from small consignments and has to register in Switzerland. Since 1 January 2025 platform taxation applies as well: electronic platforms are themselves treated as the seller for the sales handled through them.
• Returns. Swiss law knows no general right of withdrawal in distance selling. Whatever you grant voluntarily has to be in your terms. If you target EU customers deliberately, EU law applies there — including the electronic withdrawal button required from 19 June 2026.
• Data protection. The revised Swiss Data Protection Act requires an accurate privacy notice, a record of processing activities, and clarity about which services in the shop send data to which country. Analytics and advertising tools in the checkout are the most delicate part of that.

For shops that want to be found in the Swiss market, a fifth layer is added: product pages are search pages. They carry the terms people actually search for, and they need structured data so that price and availability can appear in the results. What that means in detail sits in the glossary entry on schema markup; the ongoing work on it runs as an SEO engagement, with full-service SEO from CHF 800 a month.

Below roughly 30 orders a month, an own shop is on cost grounds almost always the worse answer than a marketplace or a simple order page. The arithmetic behind that is simple enough to check yourself.

An own shop creates fixed costs whether or not anyone orders: platform, payment provider, maintenance, hosting. Put CHF 300 a month against that. A marketplace creates no fixed costs but a sales commission — Galaxus states 7 to 18 per cent depending on category for its German marketplace, and in Switzerland the fee is likewise agreed per category. At 12 per cent commission and an CHF 80 basket, every marketplace order costs CHF 9.60. Break-even therefore sits at CHF 300 divided by CHF 9.60, around 31 orders a month.

That calculation deliberately leaves out the build. Add it — CHF 12,000 spread over three years is about CHF 333 a month — and the threshold rises to roughly 66 orders. So anyone expecting five or ten orders a month is mostly buying fixed costs and maintenance effort with an own shop. For that case three routes are better: selling through an established marketplace, a single well-made order or pre-order page with a payment connection, or a deliberately small test of the kind described on our page about prototype validation.

There are good reasons to choose your own shop anyway: you own the customer data, you set the price, you build a brand instead of a listing, and with repeat-purchase products the arithmetic turns from the second purchase onwards. Those should be the reasons, though — not the assumption that an own shop is the cheaper option. Which channel suits which range is what we work through in e-commerce consulting, before anything is built.

We are a small digital agency with our own development team in Zollikon near Zurich, and we build shops ourselves rather than passing concepts on. In e-commerce that is the decisive point, because the critical parts — payment integration, shipping rules, tax rates, interfaces — are development work and not a presentation slide.

Two projects evidence it. For JUCAN Tailored Suits we delivered the website, the branding and a Shopify store in the same look and feel, together with the search work. For Don Leone Delivery we developed a bespoke delivery system with zone-based delivery logic and built the online shop around it — a case where the zone rules were the actual product. Both are documented with their starting point and their outcome under our work.

The process is the same in every project: a short preliminary review covering range, audience and the channel question; then the system decision with written reasoning; then the build, the configuration of the commercial rules, and a test run with real orders before the shop goes public. After launch we either carry on working on visibility and conversion, or you take over yourself with access to every system. Either way the shop and its data belong to you.