A step-by-step guide to starting an online store: choosing what to sell and a platform, adding products, designing the storefront (including changing your theme by describing it to Cartly Command), payments, shipping, taxes, launch and your first customers, with realistic costs.
Starting an online store takes three things: something people want to buy, a website that takes their money, and a way to get the order to them. The rest, from the logo to the email list, can wait until the first orders come in. This guide walks through each step in the order that saves the most time, with rough costs, and shows where Cartly fits if you build on it.
Pick a product you can describe in one sentence to a specific person: “linen shirts for people who work outdoors in hot climates” beats “clothing”. A narrow audience is easier to reach, easier to write for, and easier to say no to when you are tempted to add everything.
Before you spend money, check that people already look for it. Search for the product the way a customer would and look at who sells it, at what price, and what their reviews complain about. Those complaints are your opening. If nobody sells it at all, ask why before you assume you found a gap.
There are four common models, and you can mix them later:
Whichever you choose, order a sample yourself. You cannot write an honest product description, or answer a customer’s question about fit, for something you have never held.
Choose a name that is short, easy to spell after hearing it once, and available as a domain. A .com is still the safest choice for an international store; a country domain such as .de or .co.uk can build trust if you sell in one country. Expect to pay about $10 to $20 a year for the domain.
You do not need the domain on day one. Every Cartly store gets a free address on your-store.mycartly.pro with HTTPS, so you can build and test first. When you are ready, connecting your own domain works on every plan, and once your DNS points at your store and you click Verify Connection, Cartly issues the SSL certificate automatically (see Connecting a custom domain).
The platform runs your catalog, cart, checkout and orders. Switching later is possible but painful, so compare a few on what will matter in a year, not just on the first week:
For a deeper comparison of platform types, read What Is an Ecommerce Platform; if you are weighing Cartly against the best-known option, see our Shopify alternative comparison.
On Cartly, plans start at $19 a month and Cartly takes 0% transaction fees on every plan; your payment provider’s own fees still apply. The 7-day trial runs on the Starter plan and needs no card. A new store opens with the Clarity theme, ten sample products, collections, a blog, About, Contact and FAQ pages, menus, and template legal pages (privacy, terms, refunds), so you can see how everything fits together and then replace the samples with your own (Your new store’s sample content). Prices for all plans are on the pricing page.
Product pages do the selling, so give each one what a shopper would ask a salesperson:
Moving an existing catalog? Cartly imports products from CSV and Excel (.xlsx) files with a column-mapping step (CSV import), and the Shopify import app brings over your products with their variants, prices and stock from a Shopify store.
Start from a theme rather than a blank page. Cartly’s own themes are all free; switch between them, then adjust colours, fonts, sections and texts in the visual editor, where you see each change on your real products. If you or a developer want full control, the code editor and GitHub sync give access to every template file.
Keep the first version simple: a home page that says what you sell and for whom, a menu with your main collections, readable product pages, and a footer with contact details and your policies. Consistent photos, fonts and spacing from page to page do more for a professional look than extra features.
Some changes are not a setting: a darker header, rounder buttons, a “Only 3 left” message under the price, a FAQ section on the home page. Until recently each of those meant learning the theme’s template language or waiting for a developer. With Cartly Command in the theme editor, you describe the change in plain words, in any language, and it makes it for you:
Requests that work well are specific: “Make the header sticky when scrolling, on desktop and mobile”, or “On product cards, show the discount percentage instead of the word Sale”. AI credits are included in every plan: 200 a month on Starter, 500 on Growth, 2,000 on Pro and 7,000 on Enterprise, also during the trial. Command is not available for a theme connected to GitHub; edit that one in GitHub. The step-by-step guide is Editing your theme with Cartly Command.
Offer the methods your customers expect. Cards, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay, cover most shoppers; PayPal adds trust for first-time buyers; buy-now-pay-later can lift the average order for pricier products.
On Cartly you connect your own accounts with Stripe (cards, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay when you enable them in Stripe), PayPal, Adyen, Mollie, Klarna, Razorpay, Mercado Pago or Authorize.Net, in the countries and currencies each one supports. You can also switch on cash on delivery, or bank transfer with your own payment instructions (Taking payments with your own Stripe account, Cash on delivery and bank transfer). Payments land in your own provider account, and Cartly adds no transaction fee on top.
Decide where you ship and what it costs before your first order. A simple start:
Cartly’s shipping zones take countries, a flat rate, a free-shipping threshold and a delivery window (Shipping zones). When you outgrow flat rates, the ShipEngine app adds live carrier rates and label printing, and the AfterShip and 17TRACK apps keep order tracking up to date (Live shipping rates and labels).
Tax rules depend on where you are registered and where your customers are, so ask an accountant which taxes you must charge before you launch. Then enter those rates for each country or state; Cartly applies the rates you set, including on shipping if you choose (Taxes).
You also need a privacy policy, terms of service, and a refund and returns policy that you actually follow. A new Cartly store starts with template versions of these pages, already published and linked from the footer; read them and adapt them to your business and local law before you launch.
Before you tell anyone about the store, go through it as a customer would:
A new store gets no traffic by itself. Start with the channels that cost time rather than money, then spend where you see results:
A lean start, not counting stock, looks like this:
Your biggest cost is usually the first batch of stock or samples, which is why dropshipping and print on demand are popular for testing an idea.
A focused weekend is enough to have a working store with a theme, ten products, payments and shipping. Sourcing products, taking photos and writing descriptions usually take longer than the store itself.
Not to launch. Themes and the visual editor cover most design changes, and Cartly Command handles the rest from a plain-language request. A developer becomes useful for custom features or a fully custom front end; Cartly’s code editor, GitHub sync and APIs are there when you get to that point.
Yes, as long as you ship there and your payment provider supports it. Prices in local currencies and translated storefronts, through Cartly Markets, are part of the Growth plan and above; see Create your first market.
Launch with the basics done well and let the first orders show you what to improve. On Cartly, most design changes need no developer, and the platform takes no cut of your sales. You can start a Cartly store on the 7-day trial, no card needed.