Starting an e-shop in the Czech Republic: Shoptet vs custom build

If you’re opening an e-shop in the Czech Republic, someone has already told you to “just use Shoptet”. That advice is often right, and for foreign-owned businesses in particular, sometimes expensively wrong. We build custom e-shops, so you know our bias upfront; here is the comparison we’d want to read before choosing.

What Shoptet actually is

Shoptet is the dominant Czech e-commerce platform: a rented (SaaS) system, comparable to Shopify but built for this market. Tens of thousands of Czech e-shops run on it; the company likes to say roughly every third one. You pay monthly, pick a template, and get the local essentials working out of the box: Zásilkovna pickup points, PPL and Czech Post shipping, GoPay and Comgate payment gateways, Heureka product feeds, EET-era invoicing conventions and Czech VAT logic.

That last paragraph is the entire argument for Shoptet, and it’s a strong one. Rebuilding Czech shipping and payment integrations from scratch is real work; on Shoptet it’s a checkbox.

What it costs (and what it costs later)

Shoptet’s headline pricing is honest but incomplete. As of mid-2026 the rental plans run from a few hundred crowns a month at entry level to roughly CZK 3,000/month at the top tier, ex VAT. Always check their current price list, as tiers and limits shift. The plan is rarely your whole bill:

Cost item	Typical range
Monthly plan	CZK 300 – 3,000/month
Paid add-ons (filters, feeds, reviews, ERP sync…)	CZK 200 – 2,000/month
Template purchase or customisation	CZK 5,000 – 40,000 one-off
Setup by a freelancer/agency	CZK 15,000 – 50,000 one-off

The pattern to watch: each individual add-on costs “only” a few hundred crowns, and eighteen months in, shops routinely pay more for add-ons than for the platform itself. Budget for the stack you’ll actually need, not the plan price.

Shoptet in English: the honest part

This is where foreign-owned businesses get surprised. Shoptet is a Czech product for the Czech market, and it shows:

• Admin: an English interface exists, but expect Czech-first everything around it; the ecosystem was not designed for you.
• Documentation and help articles: overwhelmingly Czech.
• Add-on marketplace: descriptions, settings and support for third-party add-ons are mostly Czech only.
• Support: runs in Czech; you’ll manage with translation tools, but debugging a payment gateway through Google Translate is nobody’s idea of a good Tuesday.
• Storefront languages: multilingual selling is possible, but it’s an add-on-and-workaround exercise, not a native strength.

None of this is a criticism. Shoptet never promised to be an international platform. But if nobody on your team reads Czech, the “cheap and easy” option quietly becomes neither. This single factor drives more Shoptet-to-custom migrations among expat founders than any technical limit.

When Shoptet is the right answer

We tell people to use Shoptet, without irony, when most of these are true:

1. You sell standard physical products to Czech customers: no configurators, no unusual B2B pricing, no weird logistics.
2. Someone on the team reads Czech comfortably.
3. You want to launch in weeks on a small budget and validate demand before investing properly.
4. Zásilkovna pickup points and Heureka visibility matter more to you than design or page speed.
5. You’re fine renting: if you stop paying, the shop stops existing, and you accept that.

For a first Czech e-shop testing a market, that trade is usually correct. Validate on rented infrastructure; invest in owned infrastructure once the numbers work.

When a custom build wins

A Shoptet alternative worth paying for has to earn its price. In our experience it does when:

• English (or German) is your working language, for admin, invoices, support and staff. A custom shop works in whatever language you do.
• You sell beyond Czechia. Proper multilingual and multi-currency selling with correct hreflang is native in a custom build; see how we handle technical SEO.
• Your catalogue or pricing is non-standard: made-to-order products, configurators, tiered B2B price lists, rentals, bookings. On a platform you fight the system; custom, the system is shaped around you.
• Speed and SEO are your growth channel. A hand-coded storefront hits genuine 100/100 PageSpeed scores; template shops carrying years of add-on scripts typically do not, and Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor.
• You want to own the asset. Code, data, design: yours. No platform fee that outlives your patience, no feature disappearing behind a higher tier.

Custom builds at our studio start at CZK 60,000 and typically go live in 2–4 weeks. The full breakdown is on our pricing page, and you can see the kind of storefronts we mean in the portfolio.

Total cost over 3 years

Monthly fees look small until you multiply them. Here’s the honest three-year maths for a serious small shop (ex VAT, realistic mid-range assumptions):

	Shoptet route	Custom route
Build / setup	CZK 25,000 – 60,000	CZK 60,000 – 150,000
Platform plan, 36 months	CZK 22,000 – 108,000	CZK 0
Add-ons, 36 months	CZK 10,000 – 70,000	CZK 0 (features are built in)
Hosting, 36 months	included in plan	CZK 5,400 – 18,000
Care plan, 36 months (optional)	n/a	CZK 0 – 90,000
3-year total	CZK 57,000 – 240,000	CZK 65,000 – 260,000

Read that table twice, because the conclusion is unfashionable: over three years the totals largely converge. The real difference isn’t the sum; it’s what you hold at the end of it. On Shoptet, you’ve rented a shop for three years. Custom, you own one: an asset that works in your language, loads instantly, and costs from CZK 150/month in hosting to keep alive even if you pause everything else.

The cheap path is Shoptet in year one. The expensive path is Shoptet for five years followed by the custom build you needed anyway.

Migrating later: possible, not painless

If you start on Shoptet and outgrow it, you’re not trapped, but plan the exit before you need it:

• Products and customers export cleanly to CSV/XML; a migration is a project of days, not months.
• URLs are the dangerous part. Your category and product URLs carry accumulated SEO value; a migration must map every old URL to a 301 redirect, or rankings earned over years evaporate in a week.
• Order history can usually be exported for your records, though rarely imported anywhere else in full detail.
• Own your domain from day one. Register it in your own account, never through an intermediary; the domain is the one asset that must survive any platform decision.

We’ve taken over several Shoptet exits, and the redirect map is always where the value is won or lost. Whatever you migrate to, insist on it in writing.

The two-sentence version

Czech-speaking team, standard products, testing the market: take Shoptet and don’t overthink it. English-first company, multi-market plans, or a product that doesn’t fit a template: build custom once, own it, and skip the migration tax.

Not sure which side of that line you’re on? Describe your shop in two sentences (products, markets, languages) and we’ll tell you honestly which route we’d take, within 24 hours. If the answer is Shoptet, we’ll say so.