Planning your shop

Module 1: Before you start · Reading time: 9 minutes

Learning objective: After this lesson you can make a shop plan: what you sell, to whom, to which countries, how customers pay and who does what.

Key concepts: consumer (B2C) and business (B2B), product range, countries, VAT situation, shipping, payment methods, terms and conditions, roles and tasks, test shop

Why a plan first?

Almost every setting in WooCommerce follows from a choice you should have made earlier. Which countries do you choose under "Selling location(s)"? Do you enter prices with or without VAT? Which payment methods do you switch on? If you don't know that in advance, you click through the wizard at random and have to fix it later, sometimes with orders that have already been charged incorrectly.

A shop plan doesn't have to be a business plan. One page is enough. It forces you to make choices, and it's the document you keep coming back to throughout this course. In this lesson we fill in the plan for Theehuis Example, as an example for yours.

What do you sell?

Start with your product range, and be specific: how many products, what kinds, how often does it change?

Theehuis Example sells:

• about 40 types of tea in bags of 100 and 250 grams (one variable product per tea, lesson 3.2);
• 12 teapots (simple products, lesson 3.1);
• a digital recipe book as a PDF (a downloadable, virtual product, lesson 3.3).

Each of these three types has its own consequences. Tea is a food product, teapots are fragile and heavy, and a download has different rules for the right of withdrawal (lessons 3.3 and 5.2). So you can already see that your product range determines your settings for shipping, VAT and terms and conditions. Watch out for rates too: not all products have the same VAT rate. You'll see how to set that up in lesson 4.1.

Who do you sell to: consumers or businesses?

This is the choice with the most consequences. If you sell to consumers (B2C, business to consumer), the consumer protection rules from module 5 apply: information in advance, the 14-day right of withdrawal, the withdrawal button, the order button with an obligation to pay. And consumers must see the total price including VAT (EU: Directive 2011/83/EU; the Netherlands: Article 6:230m of the Dutch Civil Code; see lesson 4.1).

If you sell only to businesses (B2B, business to business), those consumer rules largely don't apply, you may show prices excluding VAT if you say so clearly, and when you deliver to a business in another EU country the VAT can be reverse-charged (lesson 4.1). But then you do have to make sure that really only businesses place orders.

If you do both, set up the shop for consumers and add something for businesses, such as a field for the VAT number. The other way round doesn't work: a B2B shop where consumers also order is then missing all the consumer rules.

Theehuis Example sells mainly to consumers and sometimes to restaurants. So it chooses a consumer shop with prices including VAT.

To which countries?

Two questions that often get mixed up:

1. Who do you sell to, in which country? That determines your language, your terms and conditions and your VAT.
2. Which countries do you ship to? That determines your shipping zones and costs (lesson 4.3).

Selling to consumers in other EU countries has tax consequences. As long as you stay below € 10,000 per calendar year, together with all your other sales to consumers in other EU countries, you usually charge the VAT of your own country, according to the Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Administration). If you go above it, you charge the VAT of the customer's country and you can declare it through the Union scheme (One-Stop Shop, OSS). Lesson 4.2 explains this. For your plan, this is enough: estimate whether you'll reach that threshold.

And think about the rules per country. If you sell to German consumers, you have to deal with German requirements such as the Impressum and the button text "zahlungspflichtig bestellen" (lessons 5.1 and 5.4). Every extra country means extra work. It's better to start small: Theehuis Example sells in the Netherlands and Belgium, and ships to those two countries and Germany.

How do customers pay and how do you ship?

Choose payment methods that suit your customers. Dutch consumers often pay with iDEAL (which is gradually moving over to Wero, lesson 4.4), Belgian consumers with Bancontact, international customers with a credit card or PayPal. Later you'll choose a payment provider that offers the methods you need. More methods don't automatically mean more sales, but they do mean more to test.

For shipping: who sends the parcels (you, a fulfilment partner), with which carrier, what does it cost per country and from what amount is it free? Can customers also collect? Fragile teapots need different packaging and perhaps their own shipping class (lesson 4.3).

Terms, returns and who does what

Write down what your returns policy will be: within the legal rules (lesson 5.2), but also in practical terms. Where do returns arrive, who checks them, who issues the refund? Who drafts the terms and conditions and the privacy statement (lesson 5.5)?

Then the roles and tasks. A shop doesn't run itself. At Theehuis Example:

Put a name next to every task, even if it's the same name each time. And think about cover: what happens if the owner is on holiday for two weeks?

What you don't know yet

A good plan is honest about open questions. Don't know whether you'll go over the € 10,000? Or which VAT rate applies to your products? Or whether you have to follow packaging rules in Germany? Write it down, with the name of who you'll ask: your bookkeeper, your trade association, a lawyer. This course gives explanations, not advice for your situation.

In practice: how it looks in WooCommerce

Later, your plan will translate almost line by line into settings: the store address, Selling location(s) and Shipping location(s) under WooCommerce > Settings > General (lesson 2.3); VAT under Settings > Tax (lesson 4.1); shipping zones under Settings > Shipping (lesson 4.3); payment methods under Settings > Payments (lesson 4.4). Work it out first in a test shop on a subdomain (lesson 2.1), so you can experiment without customers seeing anything.

Summary

• A one-page shop plan prevents settings you'll have to undo later.
• Product range, customers (B2C or B2B) and countries determine almost all other choices.
• If you sell to consumers, the consumer rules apply and you show prices including VAT.
• Every extra country is extra work: VAT (€ 10,000 and OSS), language, rules and shipping.
• Put a name next to every task and write down open questions with who you'll ask.

Quiz

Exercise

Exercise D1.3: Your shop plan on one page. This is a do-it-yourself exercise. Make your own plan and tick off that you've filled in each point: product range; customers (consumers, businesses or both); countries you sell to and countries you ship to; VAT situation (including whether you might reach the € 10,000); payment methods; shipping methods; terms and conditions and returns policy; who does what (orders, customer questions, technical matters, bookkeeping). Write one or two sentences per point. Then answer: which three things don't you know yet, and who will you ask? A good plan makes choices (not "all countries, all payment methods"), states for consumer sales that prices are shown including VAT, and has at least one open question with a name next to it. Keep the plan: you'll use it in the rest of the course.

Further reading

• Distance sales, such as e-commerce, within the EU (Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Administration), in Dutch): https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/belastingdienst/zakelijk/btw/zakendoen_met_het_buitenland/afstandsverkopen-zoals-e-commerce-en-diensten-voor-particulieren-in-andere-eu-landen/afstandsverkopen-zoals-e-commerce-binnen-de-eu/
• Selling to consumers (ACM (Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets), for businesses, in Dutch): https://www.acm.nl/nl/verkoop-aan-consumenten
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