Showcase site or online store: what does your business need?

Two tools, two missions

The showcase site has one mission: to be found, and for what is found to make people want to call you. It presents the company, services, achievements, contact details — your night-shift salesperson, the one who answers when a prospect types your name at 11pm.

The online store has a different mission: to collect payment. It displays a catalogue, takes the order, processes payment and organises delivery. It is not “a site with products”: it is a point of sale, with a point of sale's obligations.

The reflex that gets expensive

“Since we are building a site, we might as well sell online” — the reasoning sounds economical, it is often the opposite. A store demands an up-to-date catalogue, reliable stock, a delivery chain that holds, and someone processing orders every day. Without that organisation behind it, the store becomes an expensive showcase: costlier to build, heavier to maintain, and disappointing for the customer who orders into a void.

The reverse exists too: companies selling standard, shippable products, with demand already proven by phone and social networks — losing sales every month because they cannot take payment online. For them, staying with a showcase is the real waste.

Five questions before choosing

Your situation can be read in these answers:

• Is your catalogue stable and describable — references, prices, photos — or is every sale a bespoke quote?
• Is delivery organised: who packs, who ships, at what cost, within what time?
• Do your customers need to pay online, or does an order by phone and WhatsApp close the sale?
• Who will keep stock and prices up to date, every week, without exception?
• Does the expected volume justify the budget gap — or would it fund your visibility better?

What each one costs

Our prices are public, on the pricing grid: a showcase site runs from 9 900 to 34 900 MAD excl. VAT depending on scale; an online store starts at 23 900 MAD excl. VAT — the gap pays for online payment, delivery and stock management.

In both cases, the site's life after launch — hosting, domain name, backups, monitoring — is covered by the Web Presence plan, at 390 MAD excl. VAT per month. A site without that line in the budget is a site you are planning to abandon.

To place these amounts in the market, we published a full analysis of website prices in Morocco.

The progressive path, often the healthiest

Nothing forces you to build everything on day one. The path that rarely fails: a solid showcase that establishes credibility and attracts enquiries, a WhatsApp button that turns a visit into a conversation — then the store the day order volume proves it will pay for itself.

Building in that order costs nothing extra: the store adds onto the showcase without starting over. Building the other way round — a store downgraded into a showcase — wastes the price gap.