If you make something and sell it — pottery, prints, honey, candles, a few dozen orders a month at a market stall — the online-shop question usually stalls in the same place: the platforms that look easy are expensive, and the ones that are cheap look like a weekend of setup you do not have. This guide walks through opening a real online shop for €2 a month, what that price honestly buys you, and what it deliberately leaves out so it can stay that cheap.
What “a real shop” actually needs
Strip away the marketing and an online shop is a short list of parts:
- A public storefront — a web address a customer can open, browse and trust.
- A product catalogue — your items, with photos, prices and descriptions.
- A checkout — a cart and a way to take card payments.
- An orders view — somewhere every sale lands so you can pack and post it.
- The emails — a confirmation to your customer and a heads-up to you.
That is the whole job. Everything beyond it — abandoned-cart funnels, upsell engines, multi-currency tax automation — is a feature someone is charging you for, not something a small shop needs on day one. The reason most shops overpay is that they buy the big bundle to get the short list.
Where the €2 comes from
The honest answer to “how is it only €2 a month” is that Agora does the short list and stops. It runs your shop; it does not stand between you and your customer’s money. Your checkout runs on your own Stripe account, so payments land directly with you and Agora never holds your revenue or takes a cut of a sale. There is no percentage, no per-order cent, no revenue share hidden in the terms — just a flat €2 a month for the software, and Stripe’s own standard processing fee on each payment, charged directly to you.
That single design choice is what keeps the price flat whether you take one order or a thousand. A platform that skims a percentage of every sale has to charge you more as you grow; one that only ever charges for the software does not.
Step by step, in an afternoon
Here is the actual path from nothing to selling.
1. Sign up and name your shop
Start the 30-day free trial — no card up front. Pick your shop’s name and it becomes your address, in the shape yourshop.agora.dloizides.com. That storefront is real and shareable from the moment you publish; you can put the link in your bio, on your market sign, or in a message to a customer who asked “do you ship?“
2. Connect your Stripe account
Link your own Stripe account — a few minutes if you already have one, a short sign-up with Stripe if you do not. This is the step that means the money is yours: from your very first order, card payments settle into your Stripe balance and Stripe pays you out on its normal schedule, with nothing waiting on Agora. If you want the detail on why this matters, see connect your own Stripe.
3. Add your products
Upload your items — photos, names, prices, descriptions — and group them into categories if you have a few types of thing. There is no cap on products, images or categories, so list ten things or ten thousand; the price does not move. Set a stock count on anything limited so you sell out cleanly instead of overselling.
4. Set up the selling basics
Add a coupon code if you want to run a launch discount. Set one flat shipping fee. Choose your colours, type and logo so the shop looks like you and not like the software it was built on. None of this is an upgrade — it is all in the one plan.
5. Publish and share
Publish, and the storefront goes live. From here, a customer browses, adds to cart and checks out by card; the money lands in your Stripe, the order lands in your dashboard, and the confirmation and notification emails are sent for you. Your job is to pack it and post it.
What it does not do — on purpose
Being straight about the gaps is part of choosing well. Agora does not calculate, collect or file your taxes or VAT — you are the merchant of record, and the tax obligations of your sales are yours (a general primer: do I need to charge VAT?). It does not convert currencies — you sell in the single currency your Stripe account settles in. And it does not act as the seller of your goods — it is shop software; you are the shop. Each of those omissions is deliberate, and each one is a reason the bill is two euros rather than twenty.
Is €2 too cheap to trust?
It is a fair question. The thing that makes it sustainable is that Agora is deliberately small and does not touch your money — so it has no expensive payment infrastructure to fund and no incentive to lock you in. There is no contract and no notice period; you can cancel from your dashboard and export your products and orders on the way out. The trial is a genuine 30 days with no card, so the cheapest way to judge it is to open a shop and see.
Open one this afternoon
You can go from nothing to a live storefront in the time it takes to photograph your products and write their prices. Start your free trial → — 30 days free, no card, then €2 a month.