How to Start an Online Store in India: A Practical Step-by-Step Checklist

Selling online in India has never been easier to start. UPI has made paying online normal for almost everyone, courier aggregators reach most pin codes, and a store can be live in weeks rather than months.

But “easy to start” isn’t the same as “easy to succeed”. Many new stores launch, get a handful of orders from friends and then go quiet. Usually it’s not because the products are wrong, but because something in the basics — trust, delivery, payments or marketing — wasn’t thought through.

This checklist walks through the decisions in the order you’ll face them. It isn’t legal or tax advice; for registrations and tax, speak to your CA. But it will help you ask the right questions.

Step 1: Marketplace, your own store, or both?

Your first decision is where to sell. The options aren’t exclusive, and many brands use both.

A common approach is to use marketplaces for discovery and volume, while building your own store for repeat customers, better margins and a brand people remember. If you already have an audience on Instagram or WhatsApp, your own store often makes sense from day one.

Step 2: Registrations and paperwork

Before you take payments, sort out the basics with your CA:

• Business structure. Sole proprietorship, partnership, LLP or private limited. This affects tax, liability and what payment gateways ask for.
• GST registration. Selling goods online generally brings GST questions earlier than in a physical shop, especially through marketplaces. Your CA can tell you what applies to your products and turnover.
• Current account. Payment gateways settle money into a bank account, usually in the business’s name.
• Product-specific licences. Food products need FSSAI registration; cosmetics, supplements and some other categories have their own rules.

Payment gateways will ask for documents during onboarding — typically PAN, bank details, business proof and your website with policy pages in place. Having these ready avoids delays.

Step 3: Choose your store platform

For most small and mid-sized Indian brands, the choice comes down to three routes:

• Hosted platforms such as Shopify. Quick to set up, hosting and security handled for you, monthly subscription plus app costs. Good if you want to launch fast and don’t need unusual features.
• WooCommerce on WordPress. Flexible, no platform subscription, huge choice of extensions, and you own everything. It needs good hosting and regular maintenance.
• A custom-built store. Makes sense when you have unusual requirements — complex pricing, B2B ordering, deep integration with your inventory system — and enough volume to justify the cost.

Whichever you choose, make sure the domain is registered in your name and that you can export your products, customers and orders if you ever move.

Step 4: Payments

Indian customers expect UPI, cards, net banking and wallets. A payment gateway such as Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree handles all of these through one integration. Compare their transaction fees, settlement times and how they handle refunds.

Cash on delivery

COD still matters, especially for first-time customers and in smaller towns. It also brings higher return-to-origin rates, where the customer refuses the parcel and you pay shipping both ways. Common ways to manage this:

• Offer COD but encourage prepaid with a small discount or free shipping.
• Confirm COD orders by phone or WhatsApp before dispatch.
• Limit COD above a certain order value or for pin codes with high return rates.

Step 5: Shipping and delivery

Unless you’re delivering locally yourself, a shipping aggregator such as Shiprocket, Delhivery or similar lets you compare courier rates, print labels and track orders from one dashboard. Things to decide early:

• Packaging. Weigh and measure each product packed. Courier charges are based on the greater of actual and volumetric weight, so oversized boxes cost more.
• Shipping charges. Free shipping above a threshold is easy to understand. Build the cost into your pricing where you can.
• Delivery promise. Be realistic. “Delivered in 4–7 working days” that you meet beats “2-day delivery” that you miss.
• Serviceable pin codes. Let customers check delivery availability on the product page before ordering.

Step 6: Policies and trust signals

Indian e-commerce rules expect online sellers to display clear information about who they are and how returns, refunds and complaints are handled. Payment gateways also check for these pages. At minimum, publish:

• A return, refund and cancellation policy written in plain language
• Shipping policy with timelines and charges
• Privacy policy explaining what customer data you collect and why
• Terms of service
• Contact details: business name, address, phone and email, plus a named contact for complaints

Beyond the legal pages, trust comes from details: real product photos from several angles, size charts, honest descriptions, visible reviews and a WhatsApp number that someone actually answers.

Step 7: Product pages that sell

On a store, the product page does the job a salesperson does in a shop. Each one should answer what a customer would ask in person:

• Photos on a clean background, plus photos in use, showing scale and detail. Phone photos in good daylight are fine if they’re sharp and consistent.
• A description that explains material, size, care, what’s in the box and who it’s for — written by you, not copied from the manufacturer.
• Price, delivery estimate and return policy visible without scrolling far.
• Reviews as soon as you have them. Ask early customers for a review and a photo.

Mistakes new stores make

Most of these are easy to avoid once you know to look for them:

• Launching with too many products. Fifty well-photographed products with proper descriptions sell better than five hundred thin listings. Start with your best sellers and add more as you learn what customers want.
• Ignoring the mobile checkout. Go through the full purchase on a phone, paying with UPI, before launch. Count the taps. Remove any field you don’t truly need.
• Forcing account creation. Let people check out as guests. You can offer an account after the order is placed.
• Hiding shipping costs until the last step. Surprise charges at checkout are one of the main reasons carts are abandoned. Show them early.
• No plan for customer questions. Decide who answers WhatsApp messages and emails, and how quickly. A question left unanswered for a day is usually a lost sale.

Step 8: Getting your first orders

A new store gets almost no visitors on its own. Plan how you’ll bring in your first customers before launch:

1. Your existing network. WhatsApp contacts, Instagram followers, past customers from your shop or market stall.
2. Instagram and Facebook. Product reels and posts, with the store link in your profile. Small paid campaigns to lookalike audiences once you have some sales data.
3. Google Shopping and Search ads. These reach people actively searching for products like yours. Start small and track every sale.
4. SEO. Category pages and helpful guides that rank over time. This is slow to start but becomes your cheapest source of customers.

Measure cost per order from each channel, not just clicks or likes. Our guide on conversion tracking explains how.

If you’re planning a store and want a second opinion on platform, payments or launch plan, talk to us. We build WooCommerce and custom stores, and we’ll tell you honestly if a hosted platform would suit you better.