Not for every range of products. Four questions that usually answer it for you.
An online shop gets treated as the obvious next step: you have products, so sell them online as well. In practice the decision is less clear-cut, because a shop brings something a website doesn't — ongoing work.
A website is finished at some point. A shop never is: stock changes, prices change, orders need processing, packing and sending, questions answering, returns handling. That is the real cost, not the setup.
Four questions usually settle it.
Light, durable, robust, not too bulky — that's the friendly end. Heavy, fragile, chilled or fresh makes shipping more expensive than the margin allows, fast.
That doesn't rule a shop out. It means collection may be the better model: choose and pay online, pick up in the shop. It is far simpler to run and often suits a local business better than it first sounds.
Twenty stable products barely need maintaining. Two hundred products with moving prices is a daily job — and that job decides between success and frustration.
The critical question isn't whether you can manage it but where you do it. If maintenance is only possible at the office computer, it happens in the evening or not at all. If it works from a phone while you're standing next to the goods anyway, it happens in passing. That difference decides more shops than the choice of platform does.
There's a large difference between serving your existing customers more conveniently and winning new customers from across the country.
The first is realistic and often quick to reach: regulars order ahead, see what's available, collect. The second means competing with sellers who ship at scale — for that you need a range not available everywhere, or a price you can hold. Both are possible, but it's a different undertaking with a different cost.
The least glamorous and most important question. An order left sitting for three days because the shop was busy costs you the customer and, with bad luck, a review.
Think it through concretely: who sees the order? How does that person know one has arrived? What time of day does packing happen? If there's no answer, the shop isn't ready — regardless of how well it's built.
If you hesitate on two of the four questions, there is a good intermediate step: a page that shows your range with prices and availability without selling. Enquiries and reservations go through a form or the phone.
That delivers a large share of the benefit — people find your products online — without payment handling, shipping costs, cancellation notices and daily order processing. And it is the foundation a real shop can later sit on without the work being done twice.
Then building it is the smaller part. Plan from the start for how product upkeep fits into your working day, not just for how the shop looks.
Tell me in two sentences what you sell and how it works today — I'll tell you which of the three routes suits you.