Online stores built for how Costa Rica buys

The three ways to sell online here, honestly compared

Instagram and WhatsApp only

Where nearly everyone starts, and it is the right call at the beginning: it costs nothing and it proves whether the product sells. If you are moving a handful of orders a month and you can keep up with the messages, do not build a store yet. Put the money into photography and ads.

It breaks later, and always the same way. Every sale consumes an entire conversation. Nobody can browse your catalogue at eleven at night. And if the account is suspended — which happens — the business and the customer list disappear together, because that list was never yours.

Shopify, Wix, Tiendanube

Genuinely good products. You open an account today and sell tomorrow without anyone writing code, and for a simple catalogue that is often the correct decision. What the signup page does not tell you:

• You pay monthly, forever, and more when you need a feature from the next plan up. Some also take a percentage of each sale unless you use their own payment processor.
• Costa Rican payments do not fit cleanly. SINPE Móvil and the local gateways arrive as third-party apps that cost extra and occasionally break with an update.
• Every extra capability is another paid app. The real monthly cost of a mature store is almost never the plan — it is the plan plus five add-ons.
• Loading fast is harder, because you do not control what each app injects into the page, and Google uses that to decide who ranks above whom.

A store of your own

You pay once to build it and then only hosting and maintenance. The catalogue, the customers and the order history are yours, the payment gateway is whichever one suits you, and anything your business actually needs — volume pricing, pickup in store, WhatsApp ordering, a link to your inventory or CRM — gets built because you asked for it, not because a platform allows it.

The simple rule: if your operation fits inside what a platform offers, use the platform. When you start paying for apps to bend it, or when the annual subscription starts to resemble the cost of owning the thing, that is when moving pays for itself.

What comes in every store we build

• Catalogue with categories, variants, stock and prices you control yourself.
• Card payments and SINPE Móvil, with the gateway in your own name.
• WhatsApp order button on every product, prefilled with item, quantity and price.
• Shipping by zone, Correos de Costa Rica or your own courier, plus pickup in store.
• An admin panel you can use without calling us to change a price.
• Built to load fast and to be read properly by Google, in both languages if you sell in both.

Selling to buyers abroad as well as here

If part of your market is outside Costa Rica — a brand you brought with you, tours sold to travelers before they land, coffee or crafts shipped north — the store has to hold two realities at once: prices and payment methods that make sense locally, and a checkout a visitor from Denver recognises. That is a decision about structure, taken before anything is built, not a translation added afterwards.

Moving an existing store without losing your rankings

If you already sell somewhere and want out, the migration is the delicate part: products, customers, order history and above all the URLs. Redirects done properly keep whatever position Google already gave you; done carelessly they hand a competitor the traffic you spent two years earning. We do the migration with the redirect map written down before the switch, not after.