Template platforms hand you a theme and then bill you for every feature you add to it. A custom build costs a fortune, and then costs again to stay alive. Portican is the third option: a storefront designed around your brand, every capability included in the price, and the whole thing kept running by us.
Your store goes live within two weeks of us receiving your catalogue.
A florist delivers within the hour, on the day someone promised their mother. A bakery can only sell what it baked this morning. A wine merchant must not sell to a minor. Mainstream platforms either do not know these rules exist, or sell them back to you as a monthly app.
Delivery day and time slot, order cutoff, days you do not ship. Customers only ever see dates you can actually meet, instead of the ones you have to phone them about later.
A separate recipient address, the occasion, a message on the card, a line on the ribbon. We can reach the recipient on the morning of delivery so they are home, and not a day earlier, so it stays a surprise.
Invoices that carry every detail the law in that market asks for, numbering with no gaps, credit notes tied to the original, and an export in the shape your accounting software expects.
Everything below is built, running and included. Nothing here is an add-on with its own monthly fee, and nothing here is something you have to configure yourself unless you want to.
Built in Next.js for your brand. Not a template you keep bending in an editor until it gives.
Filter by occasion, recipient, price and availability. Filter URLs stay readable and indexable.
No detour steps. Shipping options and their price appear as soon as the address does, not at the very end.
The things a physical shop keeps by the register, offered against what is already in the basket. Never the same product twice.
Seasonal landing pages, guides and articles that bring people in from search, edited without a deployment.
From your current store or an XML feed, with images, variants and category placement. Not a bare list of names and prices.
Stripe or GoPay, on your own merchant account and your own keys. The money goes to you, we never sit in the middle of it.
By country and by postcode. Your own van locally, a carrier for the rest, each with its own delivery promise.
Three levels of promise: exact day and time, exact day, or approximate. You pick the one you can keep.
Order before 11:30 and it goes tomorrow, later and it goes the day after. Configurable, and counted in the store’s own time zone.
Carrier labels and pickup points straight from the admin, on your own carrier contract, with tracking mailed to the customer.
Each shop with its own address, opening hours and preparation time. Cash on delivery is hidden on gift orders, because the recipient does not know about the order.
One admin, one stock pool, one queue of orders behind all of them.
A starting point for a new market, not an autopilot. You then set the prices that market will actually bear.
Products, variants, categories and filters. Not half a store with a foreign menu and a foreign basket.
You connect it yourself in the admin. The store sorts out its own certificate without you.
The rate follows the country goods are delivered to, not the language of the store. A configuration that would tax incorrectly is refused.
Every detail the market’s own law requires, including net unit price and a recap per tax rate. Checked against documents from real accounting software.
A merchant outside VAT issues an accounting document rather than a tax invoice with a zero rate. It is one setting.
A separate series per market and per document type. Tested against gaps, duplicates and simultaneous orders.
Their own series, tied back to the original document.
Company and VAT identifiers on the document, validated in the format that market uses. A Czech VAT number is not a Slovak one and the form knows it.
Every document for a period in one command, PDFs included.
Order states included. Not a half translation where every second button stayed in English.
Only what has to be done today. No abandoned baskets cluttering a list nobody can act on.
What is being made today and for when. Built for the morning in the workshop, not for an analyst.
Product copy, price lists and catalogue chores drafted in the admin. Always for approval, never straight into the store.
Folders, search, bulk move, upload. Not one flat list of four hundred files.
Which emails go out, what their subject says and how the first line reads. Per market.
On a product, a category, a first order or a whole basket, with their own validity.
Earned on a purchase, spent on the next one. For shops people come back to.
What sells, what sits, and over which period. Your own reporting periods, not only calendar months.
A separate feed per market, with Google categories and without the items Google would reject. Price, availability and breadcrumbs in the results.
A map of old URLs to new ones, address by address, including the categories and products that got renamed on the way.
The nightly dump is restored into an empty database and the rows are counted. A copy lives off the server, not next to it.
Most platforms let you switch a country on the moment their interface is available in its language. Language is the smallest part of it. The merchant still has to issue a document that survives an audit there, charge the right rates, and meet the duties that country places on a seller. We treat that as our problem, not yours.
Storefront and admin language. The language documents and emails go out in. Tax rates in the table. Currency and price conversion. What that country requires on an invoice. Rates confirmed by an accountant who works there. Fiscal receipt rules. Consumer information and the right to withdraw. The list of legal documents a store must publish. How long documents have to be kept.
The list lives in the repository, not behind a checkbox in an admin screen. A checkbox can be ticked thirty seconds before a campaign goes out. A line in the repository goes through review and leaves a record of who added it and when.
You will not find out from a customer or an inspector that the invoices your store has been sending for six months are not valid there.
Whether you crossed a distance-selling threshold or joined a special scheme is between you and your accountant. Our duty is that the platform lets you comply when you decide to.
Where a country needs something we do not have, the country stays shut and we say so. Fiscal cash registers are on that list today.
Shopify, WooCommerce and PrestaShop are good platforms and for a great many merchants they are the right answer. This table is deliberately narrow: it covers the places where their shape works against a shop like yours, and it says plainly where they match us or beat us.
Swipe the table sideways.
| Portican | Shopify | WooCommerce | PrestaShop | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The storefront | Custom built for your brand, included | A theme; going headless means your own developers | A theme plus plugins, assembled by you | A theme plus modules, assembled by you |
| Adding a capability | Already in the plan | A paid app, monthly, per app | A paid extension, usually yearly | A paid module, then paid again to keep it current |
| Delivery date, time slot and cutoff | Built in, with blackout days | Paid app | Paid plugin | Paid module |
| Gift orders to a third party | Built in, with a note on the delivery day | Paid app | Paid plugin | Rarely covered |
| Invoices that satisfy local law | Built in per market, with credit notes and gapless numbering | Native VAT invoices, with gaps around B2B checkout, third-party channels and some countries | Paid plugin | Built in, quality varies by country |
| Opening a new country | Ten requirements verified before the country opens at all | You configure tax and documents yourself | You configure everything yourself | You configure everything yourself |
| Who keeps it running | We do, in the price | Shopify hosts; your apps and configuration stay yours to fix | You, or an agency by the hour | You, or an agency by the hour |
| What it costs to begin | Nothing, for your first fifty orders | A trial with a clock on it, then a plan | Free software, paid hosting and extensions | Free software, paid hosting and modules |
| Access to your own data | Full GraphQL, no call limits | Rate limited API | Full access | Full access |
| If you leave | Full export and an open-source core any developer can pick up | Your data exports; the platform does not | It was always yours | It was always yours |
The subscription is a store that works. These are the jobs you either do yourself or hand to us. They are charged once, always at a price agreed before we start.
Not a recoloured template. We design the store around your brand, including typography, photography and the small details that decide whether it feels expensive. You get it as your own storefront, not as a theme that can be clicked into ruin.
Products, categories, images, customers and order history. Plus a redirect map so the ranking you spent years building survives the move. We go through it address by address, not just the home page and the main categories.
Shooting, cropping, a consistent background and the copy to go with it. The most common reason a store looks cheap is not the platform. It is photographs taken on a phone on the kitchen counter.
An audit of what you rank for today, the redirect map, structured data and the shopping feed. We watch the first weeks after launch so that any drop is caught while it is still small.
We walk through a document with the person who does your books, then set the numbering and the export format to match what their system expects. An hour now beats a pile of rejected documents in six months.
Two hours with the people who will actually process orders. Not a presentation for the owner, but real work on real orders on the day you go live.
Start at nothing and pay when the store starts selling. No fee per feature, no share of your revenue.
The whole platform, until the store finds its feet.
for your first 50 orders
For a store that sells every day.
excl. VAT
When the store needs something that does not exist anywhere yet.
priced to the work
A site that is live, on our address.
on a portican.com address
The same site, under your own name.
excl. VAT
Designed for your brand rather than assembled from blocks.
excl. VAT
You get your catalogue, customers and orders in a readable export, plus the database as a whole. The store is built on Vendure, which is open source, so any developer can take it over. We do not keep you by keeping your data.
A store with a catalogue you hand us as a feed or a spreadsheet goes live within two weeks. With design work and a full history migration, plan for four to six weeks. The date you get is a commitment, not an estimate.
There is no catch and no clock. Free has every feature, runs on your own domain and never expires; it simply stops taking new orders at the fiftieth one. Nobody asks you for a card to start, and if the store never reaches fifty orders you never pay us anything.
Yes, and most of it is built for exactly that: products, prices, copy, emails, shipping and domains are all set in the admin. What cannot be set there we do, and for ordinary changes that is not billed.
Tell us. If it makes sense for more than one store, we build it and every customer gets it without paying more. If it only applies to you, we quote it as development. Either way we tell you up front which of the two it is.
Any country we have finished the readiness work for, and we will tell you exactly which those are before you sign. Selling from one market into another is a different question and depends on thresholds and schemes that belong to you and your accountant. Our job is that the platform lets you do it properly.
On a server in the European Union, with backups in European storage at Cloudflare. The only thing that leaves is what you personally send to the assistant in the admin. Without it, nothing goes out.
Because we are young and we would rather not sell on borrowed numbers. Instead of a reference, we will build a demo of your store and walk you through it: everything on this page is in it and working. Early customers get terms that will not be available later.
Send us a link to your current site, or just a few product photos. We will build a demo of your store from it and go through it with you. No commitment and nothing to sign.