How to Start an Online Store in India: The 2026 Guide

Starting an online store in India has never been easier to begin, or easier to get wrong. You can set up a shop in an afternoon. Getting it to take payments reliably, ship to the right pincodes, issue proper GST invoices and actually sell is where most new stores stall.

This guide covers how to start an online store in India properly, in the order the work really happens: plan the catalogue, build the store, wire up payments and shipping, then train your team and launch. It's based on the stores we build as an e-commerce website development studio in Delhi, including what tends to go wrong in the first month.

Marketplace, your own store, or both?

Before building anything, decide where you're going to sell. Most Indian sellers end up doing both, but it helps to be clear about why.

A pattern that works for many brands: use marketplaces for discovery and volume, and build your own store for repeat customers, bundles and higher-margin products. If you sell something people buy again and again, like food, skincare, pet supplies or stationery, your own store becomes more valuable every month, because each repeat order costs you nothing to acquire.

The four stages of launching a store

1. Catalogue planProducts, variants, photos, prices and categories decided on paper first.
2. Build the storePlatform, design, product pages and a checkout tuned for Indian buyers.
3. Wire the plumbingPayments, shipping rules, GST invoices and order notifications.
4. Train and launchTest orders, staff training, then go live with a small push.

Stage 1: Plan the catalogue

The catalogue decides how the store is built, so it comes first. Before talking to any developer, put together a simple spreadsheet with:

• Every product, with a clear name, price and short description.
• Variants: sizes, colours, weights or pack sizes. A kurta in five sizes and three colours is fifteen variants, each needing its own stock count.
• Categories the way a customer thinks, not the way your warehouse thinks. "Gifts under ₹999" often sells better than "SKU range B".
• Weights and box sizes, because shipping costs depend on them.
• HSN codes and GST rates for each product, which your CA can help with.

Then there are the photos. Product photos do most of the selling in e-commerce. Plan at least three to five per product: a clean front shot, a detail shot, a scale or in-use shot, and the packaging. Consistent lighting and background across the whole catalogue makes a small store look established.

You don't need a huge catalogue to launch. Twenty well-photographed, well-described products sell better than two hundred with one blurry photo each.

Product photos without a big budget

You don't need a studio. A good phone, a window with soft daylight, a plain white or neutral sheet as a backdrop and a cheap tripod will get you most of the way. Shoot every product the same way: same distance, same angle, same background. Then crop to one consistent shape, usually square, so the category pages look tidy. Compress the images before upload. Customers on mobile data won't wait for a 5 MB photo to load, and neither will Google.

For clothing, jewellery and anything where size matters, include one photo that shows scale: worn by a person, held in a hand or placed next to something familiar. A lot of returns happen simply because the product was smaller or larger than the customer imagined.

The business basics to sort out early

Payment gateways check your business before they switch on live payments, and delays here are the most common reason a launch date slips. Have these ready:

• A current account in the business's name, plus PAN and business registration documents.
• GST registration, if it applies to you. Whether you need it depends on your turnover, what you sell, where you sell and whether you sell through marketplaces, and the rules for marketplace sellers are stricter. Speak to a CA before you launch rather than after.
• Policy pages on your website: shipping, returns and refunds, cancellations, privacy, and terms. Gateways usually look for these during activation, and India's e-commerce consumer rules expect sellers to show clear business details, return and refund terms, and a way for customers to raise complaints.
• A real contact address, phone number and email on the site.

None of this is exciting, but a store that can't take payment on launch day is worse than no store.

Stage 2: Build the store

Choosing a platform

For most Indian businesses, the choice comes down to two options.

WooCommerce runs on WordPress on your own hosting. You get full control, lower running costs and no platform fee on each sale, but you (or someone you pay) look after updates, security and speed.

Shopify is a hosted platform with a monthly subscription. There's much less maintenance, but many features come from paid apps that add up, and you're working inside Shopify's rules.

Neither is "better". A small team with no technical help and a simple catalogue is often happier on Shopify. A business that wants custom features, lower long-term costs and full ownership usually does better on WooCommerce. We recommend one after hearing about your catalogue size and your team, not before.

Product pages that sell

A product page has to answer every question a shop assistant would, because there's no shop assistant. That means clear photos, the price including or excluding GST (say which), sizes with a proper size chart, what's in the box, delivery time to the customer's pincode, return terms, and real reviews. Adding an estimated delivery date next to the "Add to cart" button often does more for sales than any design change.

A checkout built for Indian buyers

Most abandoned carts are lost at checkout. The fixes are usually simple:

• Guest checkout. Forcing people to create an account before paying loses sales.
• Fewer fields. Auto-fill city and state from the pincode. Ask only what you need to deliver.
• Show delivery charges early, ideally on the product page. Surprise charges at the last step are a classic reason people leave.
• The payment options people expect: UPI, cards, net banking, wallets and, if you offer it, cash on delivery.
• Mobile first. Most Indian shoppers check out on a phone, so test the full journey on a mid-range Android handset, not just a laptop.

Stage 3: Wire the plumbing

Payments

A payment gateway such as Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or CCAvenue lets you accept UPI, cards, net banking and wallets through one integration. Compare them on transaction fees (these vary by payment method and plan, so check the current pricing pages), how quickly money settles into your account, how easy onboarding is, and how good their support is when a payment fails. Always run real test transactions before launch, including a refund.

Cash on delivery

COD brings in customers who don't trust a new store yet, but it comes with a cost: return-to-origin (RTO) orders, where the customer refuses the parcel and you pay shipping both ways. Many stores manage this with a small COD fee, a WhatsApp confirmation before dispatch, a limit on COD order values, or a partial prepaid option. Watch your RTO rate from the first week.

Shipping

Most small stores use a courier aggregator, which gives you rates from several courier companies in one dashboard, prints labels and tracks shipments. Set up:

• Shipping rules by weight and zone, or a flat rate with a free-shipping threshold.
• Pincode checks, so customers know before ordering whether you deliver to them.
• Volumetric weight. Couriers charge on the bigger of actual weight and box size, so a large light box can cost more than you expect. Choose packaging sizes carefully.

Orders, invoices and notifications

Every order should trigger a GST-compliant invoice, an order confirmation to the customer (email and ideally WhatsApp or SMS), a notification to your team, and a stock update. Set up abandoned cart reminders too. A friendly message a few hours after someone leaves, with a link back to their cart, recovers a share of those sales for almost no effort.

Stage 4: Train and launch

Before going live, place real orders with every payment method, including COD. Cancel one, refund one and ship one to a friend in another city. Check that the invoice, the emails and the tracking all look right.

Then train whoever will run the store day to day: how to add a product, update stock, process an order, handle a return and read the sales report. A store the owner can't manage without calling the developer is a store that goes stale.

Launch quietly first, to existing customers and your own network, before spending on ads. Fix what they find, then open the doors wider.

Getting your first customers

A new store has no traffic on day one. The usual sources, roughly in order of speed:

• Your existing customers and followers. A launch offer on WhatsApp and Instagram costs nothing.
• Paid ads. Google Shopping and Meta ads can bring sales within days, but only if conversion tracking is set up properly first. Small, focused ad campaigns measured in leads and sales tell you quickly which products and audiences are worth scaling.
• Search. Well-written category and product pages start bringing organic traffic over the following months. It's slower, but it keeps working after the ad budget runs out.
• Repeat purchases. Order follow-ups, reorder reminders and loyalty offers to people who have already bought.

Kapoor Organics, one of the stores we built, now handles about 400 orders a week. What their founder values most isn't the design. It's that when she messages at 10pm with a problem, someone actually replies. Plan for support from the start, because stores have problems at inconvenient hours.

Returns, refunds and customer service

New store owners often plan everything except what happens when something goes wrong. It will. A parcel gets delayed, a size doesn't fit, a customer's UPI payment is deducted but the order doesn't show up. How you handle these moments decides whether that customer buys again and what they say about you online.

Decide these before launch and write them into your policy pages:

• Which products can be returned, within how many days, and in what condition.
• Who pays for return shipping, and whether you offer exchange, store credit or a refund.
• How long refunds take to reach the customer, for prepaid and COD orders separately.
• How customers reach you: a WhatsApp number that someone checks, an email address and, ideally, order tracking they can check themselves.

Keep a few ready-made replies for the questions that come up every day: where is my order, how do I return this, my payment failed. Fast, polite answers to boring questions are what most customers remember.

The numbers to watch in your first 90 days

You don't need a complicated dashboard. These five numbers tell you almost everything about a young store:

Check them weekly for the first three months. Each one points to a specific thing to fix, which is far more useful than a general feeling that "sales are slow".

What it costs to start

There are two kinds of cost: building the store once, and running it every month.

Ask for every recurring cost in writing before you commit. A cheap build that needs ₹8,000 a month in apps isn't cheap.

Mistakes that slow new stores down

• Leaving gateway activation to the last week, then missing launch day.
• Uploading products with one photo and a one-line description.
• Hiding shipping charges until the final step.
• Offering COD everywhere with no confirmation, then losing money on returns.
• Installing twenty plugins or apps "just in case", which slows the store and adds monthly costs.
• Spending on ads before checking that the checkout works on a phone.

If you're planning a store and want an honest view on platform, costs and timeline, send us a few lines about your project. We'll reply the same working day with a rough price and what we'd set up first.