How to set up an online store in India, from nothing to the first order.

Step 1 — Decide what you are, legally (30 minutes)

You do not need a company to sell online in India. Most small stores start as a sole proprietorship — you, trading under a brand name — with a current account or even a savings account, a PAN, and a UPI ID. That is enough to take money and ship parcels.

GST is the question everyone asks. In short: registration is mandatory once your turnover crosses the threshold (₹40 lakh for goods in most states, ₹20 lakh for services and some states), and it is mandatory regardless of turnover if you sell through a marketplace like Amazon or Flipkart. Selling through your own website to customers in your own state stays under the threshold rule; inter-state sales of goods generally require registration. Payment gateways and courier aggregators often ask for a GSTIN but most will onboard a small seller without one. Read do you need GST to sell online in India and confirm with a CA — rules change, and this guide is not tax advice.

• Sole proprietorship: nothing to register beyond a bank account and PAN. Register a Udyam (MSME) number online for free — some banks and gateways like to see it.
• Brand name: check it isn't taken on Instagram and as a domain before you print anything.
• Keep the money separate from day one. A current account in the brand name makes the accounting and the courier COD remittances clean.

Step 2 — Choose where the store lives (1 hour)

You have three honest options: a marketplace (Amazon, Flipkart, Meesho), a DIY builder (Shopify, Dukaan, SitesPlaced, WooCommerce), or an Instagram/WhatsApp-only setup with no store. The trade-offs are simple. Marketplaces bring traffic and take a commission and your customer relationship. Instagram-only costs nothing and scales badly — every order is a DM, a manual UPI screenshot and a manually typed address. A store of your own is the middle: your brand, your customers, your prices, and you have to bring the traffic.

Most sellers who come to us are doing Instagram-only and drowning in DMs. The fix is not a marketplace; it is a store the DMs point to. We compared the two paths properly in WhatsApp vs a website for selling online.

Step 3 — Build the catalogue (an afternoon)

Before touching a builder, get three things into a spreadsheet or your notes: product names, prices (with what you paid, so you know the margin), and photos. Ten good products beat forty rushed ones — a buyer trusts a tidy store with ten items more than a messy one with forty.

• Names: what a buyer would type, not a code. "Mustard cotton kurta set" not "KS-014".
• Photos: one clean product-on-plain-background shot, one in use, one detail. Phone photos are fine; light and background matter more than the camera — see how to take better product photos.
• Variants: sizes and colours as options on one product, not as separate products.
• Descriptions: two short paragraphs — what it is and who it's for, then material/size/care. See how to write product descriptions that sell.
• Pricing: include packaging and the courier's share in the number, then decide whether to show shipping separately. How to price your products covers the maths.

If the products are already on Instagram, a website, a PDF price list or another platform, don't retype them: the SitesPlaced importer reads all of those and builds the catalogue for you.

Step 4 — Payments: UPI, cards and cash on delivery (1 hour)

Indian buyers pay three ways, and a small store should offer all three from day one: UPI/cards online, cash on delivery, and pay on WhatsApp for the buyers who want to talk first. The online part needs a payment gateway on your own account — Razorpay, PhonePe or Cashfree — which takes a day or two to approve and charges roughly 2% per transaction (UPI is often cheaper; check the current rate cards). The gateway settles to your bank account; a good store platform takes nothing on top.

Cash on delivery is where most first orders come from and where most of the pain is (refused parcels, fake orders). Charge a small COD fee, confirm orders above a threshold on WhatsApp before shipping, and read cash on delivery for small online stores before you switch it on.

Which gateway? They are closer than their marketing suggests; the differences are settlement speed, approval friction and how they treat a store on a subdomain. Razorpay vs PhonePe vs Cashfree for a small store goes through it.

Step 5 — Shipping from home (1 hour)

You will not be negotiating with couriers. You will use an aggregator — Shiprocket, Shipmozo or Rehbar Post — that gives you access to Delhivery, Bluedart, Xpressbees, Ecom Express and the rest at pre-negotiated rates, picks up from your door, and hands you a tracking number. Typical cost is ₹40–80 for a 500g parcel within India depending on zone and courier; check the aggregator's rate calculator with your pin code.

• Sign up on the aggregator, add your pickup address, top up the wallet.
• Connect it to your store so an order becomes a shipment with one click and the tracking number flows back to the customer's Track Order page.
• Buy packaging in bulk: poly mailers for soft goods, corrugated boxes for anything that can break, tape, a marker. Weigh a packed parcel — weight bands decide the rate.
• Print the label; the courier picks up the next day.

The full walk-through, including what to do when a parcel comes back, is in how to ship orders from home in India.

Step 6 — Policies and trust (30 minutes)

Buyers look for three pages before paying a stranger: shipping (how long, how much), returns/refunds (what if it's wrong), and contact (a real WhatsApp number). Write them in plain words. A store that says "7-day replacement for damaged or wrong items, no returns on sale items, WhatsApp us at …" beats a legal wall of text. Use the return policy generator to get a first draft, then edit it: return and refund policy for a small store.

Then switch on product reviews so that after your first few deliveries the pages carry proof from real buyers — how to collect product reviews.

Step 7 — Launch (an evening)

Publish. On SitesPlaced the store goes live on a free yourname.sitesplaced.site address the moment it is created; a custom domain (yourbrand.com) is the first thing worth paying for once you have orders, because it is what makes the link in your bio look like a business. Put the link in your Instagram bio, your WhatsApp Business profile and your status. Send it to the twenty people who have asked "how do I order?" in the last month. That is the launch.

Run the launch checklist once before you post the link — it catches the missing policy page, the product with no price and the test order you forgot to place.

The first month

1. Get ten orders from people who already know you. Fulfil them perfectly. Ask each for a review at delivery. How to get your first 10 orders.
2. Watch where orders come from — most will be Instagram and WhatsApp. Put the store link everywhere those conversations start.
3. Fix what buyers ask about twice. Two people asking about fabric means the description needs a line.
4. When orders are steady, add your own domain, drop the platform badge and switch on analytics and ad tracking. On SitesPlaced that is the ₹499/month Ecommerce plan; everything before it is free, and every new account gets those features free for 14 days to try.

What it costs, honestly

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