Vetrelle: Why a Web Agency Built Its Own Store Platform

In Colombia, 84.1% of online stores use WhatsApp to sell, according to the NubeCommerce report covered by Portafolio (in Spanish). For a shop that sells on Instagram or TikTok, that means a familiar loop: a buyer asks the price by DM, then whether size M is left, then whether it ships to their neighborhood.

The catalog lives in a PDF made in Canva that goes stale with every sold-out item, and orders scatter across chats. We built Vetrelle, W2B's product for retailers, for that business. Here is what it does, why a web agency built it, and, just as plainly, who should not use it.

What is Vetrelle?

Vetrelle is a Colombian platform for creating an online store and running it from a phone, built for businesses that sell through Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp. Each store has a catalog with categories, sizes, colors and real stock, plus a cart where the buyer builds an order without asking anything by DM. At checkout, the order leaves as one WhatsApp message with size, color, quantities, total and address. That order is saved in a dashboard where the seller updates its status, and stock drops when the seller closes it. Vetrelle is not a payment gateway: it never touches the money between seller and buyer, and it takes no commission on sales. Sellers collect the way their customers already pay, through Nequi, Bre-B, bank transfer or cash on delivery. It is billed monthly in Colombian pesos and runs in Spanish. It is a W2B product, built by the same team behind our custom web development.

Why a web agency built a store platform

W2B builds websites, search visibility on Google and AI assistants, and workflow automation. When a business that sells on social asks us for an online store, the honest answer is uncomfortable. A custom store means design, development, a payment gateway and maintenance, and for a shop that closes every sale on WhatsApp that is usually more than the business needs.

Public data from Colombia points the same way. A NIQ study published by Portafolio in July 2026 (in Spanish) found that 65% of Colombian consumers have bought directly through social media, with WhatsApp leading at 47%. Buyers complain so often about accounts that hide prices that the habit has a name, «precio al DM» (price by DM), which El Estímulo (in Spanish) analyzed across Instagram brands.

Money already moves without cards. In the DANE EMICRON 2024 micro-business survey, Colombia's national statistics office found that 97.5% of micro-businesses take cash, 38.9% accept transfers or online payments, and only 1.6% accept debit cards. For that business, a payment gateway is a per-sale cost that misses the real problem: getting the order complete and not losing it in the chat. That is why we built Vetrelle, and the Vetrelle page on W2B lists every feature it has today, with the presentation video.

How an order moves through Vetrelle

The full path has six steps, and none of them needs a payment gateway or a computer.

1. The seller adds each product once from a phone, with photo, price, sizes, colors and stock.
2. The seller shares the store link in the bio, in stories or in a chat. On the entry plan the store lives on its own Vetrelle address (yourstore.vetrelle.com), with the store's name, logo and color; higher plans can connect a custom domain.
3. The buyer sees prices and available sizes without asking. A sold-out size shows as sold out and cannot be ordered.
4. The buyer fills the cart and sends the order through WhatsApp: size, color, quantities, total and address in one message.
5. The order lands in the seller's dashboard with a status. When the seller closes it, stock drops automatically.
6. The seller collects the usual way: Nequi, Bre-B, bank transfer or cash on delivery.

The fastest way to understand it is to open the Vetrelle demo store (in Spanish) and place a test order. To see first what the seller receives, here is the exact WhatsApp order format (in Spanish).

Vetrelle compared with other ways to sell on social

There are four common ways to sell on social in Colombia. This table compares what the buyer sees, what happens to the order, and how the seller gets paid.

For a shop moving off a PDF, Vetrelle explains the step from a PDF catalog to a digital catalog with stock and cart (in Spanish). For a shop already comparing gateway platforms, the Tiendanube vs Vetrelle comparison (in Spanish) uses dated official figures and says when Tiendanube is the better choice.

Who Vetrelle is for, and who it is not for

Vetrelle fits when all three of these are true:

• The shop sells on Instagram, TikTok or WhatsApp and closes the sale in a chat.
• It handles variants: clothing, shoes, accessories or beauty, with sizes and colors. Vetrelle has a guide for that case, an online clothing store with sizes, colors and stock per variant (in Spanish).
• Customers pay through Nequi, Bre-B, bank transfer or cash on delivery.

It is not the right tool, at least today, if any of these applies:

• Customers need to pay by card or PSE inside the store.
• A large catalog has to sync with inventory, invoicing or a marketplace.
• The shop sells outside Colombia or in a language other than Spanish.

In those cases Shopify or Tiendanube may fit better. If the operation needs something of its own, that is what we build in custom web development and online stores. We say it even though Vetrelle is ours, because recommending the wrong tool costs us more than one sale.

Common mistakes when moving sales out of the DMs

Moving from messages to a store fixes nothing if the chat habits move with it. These are the four to avoid.

1. Publishing the store without prices. If buyers still have to write to learn the price, the store only added a step.
2. Keeping stock in your head. A size that shows as available and does not exist produces the worst message of all: the apology after the buyer already decided.
3. Paying for a gateway your customers will not use. If almost everyone pays by transfer or cash on delivery, the gateway is a per-sale cost that buys nothing.
4. Building a custom store before knowing what sells. A custom project makes sense once the products, the volumes and what the operation needs to connect are known.

Applied to ourselves: how vetrelle.com is built

The Vetrelle site follows the same rules we apply to client sites. It is built in Astro, and we explain when to build with Astro instead of WordPress in another post. The home loaded 54 KB of compressed JavaScript in the September 29, 2026 measurement, and no video downloads before the page finishes loading.

No price is typed by hand on any vetrelle.com page: prices are read from the product every time a page is generated. A plan table never goes stale, and an AI assistant never quotes a price that already changed. The site also publishes an llms.txt, the file that summarizes a site for AI assistants, with what Vetrelle does and does not do.

It is the same search visibility work on Google and AI assistants we do for clients, applied to our own product. The difference is that here we see the result directly, because we are also the client.

How to try Vetrelle

Vetrelle solves one concrete problem: the order that today gets assembled message by message arrives complete in WhatsApp and stays on record. The Vetrelle plans, monthly in Colombian pesos, and the free trial with no card are on vetrelle.com, the online store for selling on Instagram and WhatsApp, in Spanish. If what you need is a custom store or a site that brings customers from Google, start a project with us.