The essential features are the ones without which a customer can't find a product, pay for it and receive it – and you can't fulfil the order. The rest help you sell more or save time. You can use the table when writing a brief for your developer or comparing quotes.
| Feature | Why you need it | When |
|---|---|---|
| Categories and filters | So customers can quickly narrow down the choice | essential |
| Search | For people who know the product name or code | essential once you have more than a few dozen products |
| Product variants and stock levels | So you don't sell what isn't in stock | essential |
| Guest checkout | Fewer abandoned baskets | essential |
| Online payments | Immediate payment and automatic order status | essential |
| Parcel lockers and courier | Delivery method and cost visible in the basket | essential |
| Order management and emails | Statuses, notifications for the customer and for you | essential |
| Terms of sale, privacy and cookie policy | Legal requirements and the payment provider's check | essential |
| Discount codes and promotions | For campaigns and newsletters | simple codes at first, more complex rules later |
| Shipping labels in the admin panel | When your daily shipments grow | later |
| Connection to accounting software | When your accountant can no longer keep up with transferring orders | later, or straight away if you have many orders |
| Prices for business customers | For wholesalers and partners | only if you sell to companies |
The Start package for a Saitai.lt WooCommerce store (from €999) includes one payment provider, one courier with parcel lockers, and filters. The Business package (from €1,690) adds a second payment gateway and 2–3 couriers with shipping labels, and the Premium package (from €2,900) adds a connection to accounting software, B2B prices and multiple languages. We describe the steps from idea to launch in our article ‘How to create an online store’.
In a well-organised catalogue, a customer reaches the product they need in two or three clicks: category, a few filters, product list. So before development starts, it's worth agreeing on which properties (attributes) you'll use to describe your products – these are later used to build the filters.
Supplier prices and stock levels can be updated automatically from XML or CSV files – see our page on product import and sync.
A product page should answer the questions a customer would ask a sales assistant in a physical shop: how much it costs, whether it's in stock, when it will arrive and how it differs from a similar product. The fewer unanswered questions, the fewer calls and returns.
A product page also needs Product structured data: price, currency, availability and, if available, the review rating. Based on this, Google can show the price and whether the product is in stock in its search results. How product and category pages are optimised is described on our page on e-commerce SEO.
Checkout must be short: the customer buys without registering, fills in only the essential fields and sees the final total including delivery before paying. Every extra step or unexpected charge at the last stage is a common reason for abandoning the basket.
The admin panel should show a list of orders with their statuses (awaiting payment, paid, shipped, returned), each customer's order history and order export. It's worth rewriting the customer emails in your own words rather than leaving the platform's standard texts.
To start with, one provider is enough – one that shows bank links and card payment in the basket and changes the order status itself once payment is received. In Lithuania, such services are offered by, for example, Paysera and Montonio. Other methods are worth adding depending on who your customers are.
| Payment method | Who it suits | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Bank links | Customers in Lithuania | Whether all the main banks are on the list |
| Payment cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay | Customers browsing on a phone, and customers from abroad | Whether these methods are enabled in your contract with the provider |
| Stripe, PayPal | Selling abroad | Currencies and the refund procedure |
| Bank transfer, pro forma invoice | Companies and large orders | Who marks the payment as received, and how quickly |
| Instalments or leasing | More expensive products | Whether your provider or a leasing company offers this service |
| Cash on delivery | Customers who want to pay when collecting the parcel | Whether your contract with the courier provides for it |
There's also an important feature the customer doesn't see: refunds straight from the order, if the provider's module supports it. Connecting one provider costs from €150, and what this work includes is described on our page on payment gateway integration.
In the basket, the customer must be able to choose a parcel locker or courier and see the delivery cost straight away. In Lithuania, parcel locker and courier services are provided by Omniva, DPD, LP Express, Venipak and other carriers; which ones to offer depends on your contracts with them and the size of your products.
When you're sending dozens of parcels a day, being able to print labels for several orders at once in the admin panel saves time. More on our page on shipping integration.
To start with, discount codes and sale prices with validity dates are usually enough. More complex rules – volume discounts, ‘3 for 2’ offers, separate prices for companies – are needed once you're already applying them when selling through other channels or working with partners.
When announcing a price reduction, you must also state the previous price – the lowest price applied during the 30 days before the reduction. Lithuania has transposed this EU directive requirement into its Civil Code; it doesn't apply to, for example, perishable goods, and where the price is reduced progressively, the previous price is the price before the first reduction. So you don't have to calculate this by hand, the store should keep a price history and show the previous price automatically; in a WooCommerce store, a plugin is used for this.
Not necessarily at the start. While there are only a few orders, your accountant can import them from an export file. A connection to accounting software pays off when your daily orders grow, you also sell elsewhere, and mismatched stock levels turn into products that have been sold but aren't actually in the warehouse.
The integration usually works in two directions: orders, invoices and customers go to the accounting system, and stock levels and prices go to the store. Saitai.lt integrates online stores with the most popular Lithuanian accounting software, e.g. Rivilė, B1.lt, Centas and Finvalda, provided the software has an API or an import option. Integration with accounting software costs from €490 – more on our page on accounting software integration.
Before ordering the integration, agree with your accountant where the master product and stock data will be kept: if the same data is edited in two places, it soon stops matching.
A store without terms of sale, cookie consent or backups isn't finished, however good it looks. Customers don't notice these elements straight away, so their absence usually comes to light when the payment provider checks the store, or when a dispute or a failure occurs.
The content of the legal texts is provided by the owner or their lawyer, while the developer creates the pages, consent fields and banner for them. You'll find a more detailed list of requirements, with sources, in the article on creating an online store mentioned above.
It's worth building later the features whose value you can only assess once you have data from the first few months. That way, the initial budget goes on what you couldn't sell without.
If your sales process is non-standard – rentals, bookings, a product configurator or contract prices for each customer – it's worth considering a custom Laravel online store.
Preparing a brief for your online store? Send us your feature list and an approximate number of products by filling in the enquiry form. We'll reply within 1 working day and tell you which features are essential from the start, which can wait, and how much the store would cost.
Not all of them. WooCommerce itself has a catalogue, product variants, stock levels, a basket, guest checkout, discount codes, shipping zones and reviews. Modules for Lithuanian payment and shipping providers are usually supplied by the providers themselves, while PDF invoices, B2B prices and volume discounts, showing the previous price or advanced search require plugins. We only install the essential ones – the fewer there are, the fewer conflicts during updates.
Yes. We build and test new features on a copy of the store, and only move them to the live store after checking that the basket and payments still work. Small jobs cost €30/hour, larger ones are quoted separately. The only thing worth thinking through in advance is the structure of your product data – attributes, variants and categories – because that's the hardest to change later.
No, and we don't recommend requiring it. Most customers simply want to buy, so an order form with the essential fields is enough, and you can offer to create an account after the order. Registration makes sense when selling to companies, where a logged-in customer sees their own prices and order history and can repeat a previous order.
From €999. That's the price of the Start package for a WooCommerce store, with one payment provider, one courier with parcel lockers and up to 30 products entered. The Business package with two payment gateways, 2–3 couriers and a custom design costs from €1,690, and each additional payment or shipping provider integration costs from €150. Hosting is from €70/year (the first year is included in the Business package). Prices include all taxes – no VAT is added.
Stock should be counted in one system – usually your accounting or POS software – and the online store receives it from there. If the software has an API or an export option, stock levels and prices can be updated automatically on a schedule, and orders from the store then reduce the stock in the same software. We assess how often and in which direction data should be exchanged based on your software.
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