An online store is more than a storefront design; product, payment, shipping, returns and customer contact form one chain, and the weakest link decides your sales. Making these seven decisions before you build reduces costly fixes later.
1. Marketplace, your own site, or both?
Marketplaces bring ready traffic, but the customer is not yours, price competition is fierce and commission eats your margin. Your own site means building traffic yourself, but the customer list, the brand and the margin stay with you. For most businesses the answer is both: the marketplace as a sales channel, your own site as the brand and repeat-customer channel.
2. Ready-made platform or custom build?
For a standard catalogue, cart and checkout, a ready-made platform is often enough. Custom pricing, a dealer or wholesale flow, a product configurator or special integration with a stock system call for custom development. We weighed the same question in general in ready-made theme or custom design. Decide for the needs two years from now, not today’s.
3. Payment method and provider
Card payments need a payment institution or a virtual POS agreement. Compare the 3D Secure flow, instalment options, whether refunds and cancellations can be handled from a panel, the fee structure and how long money takes to reach your account. Also count the extra work of bank transfer and cash on delivery.
4. Shipping and order flow
Which carrier will you use, are labels printed by hand or automatically, how does the customer get the tracking number? A flow that works by hand at low volume becomes a bottleneck as orders grow. Whether shipping is included in the price or shown separately also directly affects conversion.
5. Legal requirements
Distance selling has legal texts: pre-contract information, the distance sales agreement, withdrawal and return terms, a data protection notice and a privacy policy. Scope varies with the product and how you sell; have a lawyer check these and keep them easy to find on the site.
6. Build product pages for search
Most organic traffic in e-commerce arrives at category and product pages. So:
- Give every product and category its own address, unique title and description; do not copy the supplier’s text.
- Add meaningful alt text to product photos.
- Mark up price, stock and reviews with structured data (schema.org
Product). - Do not leave retired products with empty pages; redirect to the category or a similar product.
- Do not let filter combinations generate endless addresses.
For general technical prep, see five things slowing your website down; in e-commerce a slow page means an abandoned cart.
7. After the sale: support and contact
If customers cannot easily find order status, return requests and invoices, they write or call. Collecting WhatsApp, email and phone requests in one place shortens response times; our WhatsApp sales CRM setup guide can help.
Short list before you start
- Which channels will we sell on, and what is our own-site goal?
- Does a ready-made platform fit our products and flow?
- Are the payment provider, instalments and returns process clear?
- Is shipping and order flow manual or automatic?
- Are the legal texts ready and checked?
- Who prepares content and photos for product pages?
You can find the scope of our online store projects on our e-commerce service page and the industry’s general needs on the e-commerce industry page. Earlier work is on the references page.
Tell us what you want to sell and your goal; we will say plainly whether a ready-made platform or a custom solution suits you.
