How to Start an Online Store in India: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2026

A situation I see every few weeks: a woman in Kharghar has been selling handmade sarees through Instagram posts and WhatsApp messages for two years. Orders come in as DMs, payment comes by UPI screenshot, and she tracks everything in a notebook. Sales are steady, the notebook is overflowing, and a cousin has told her she needs “a proper website”. She wants to know where to start.

Her customers are already online. TRAI’s latest quarterly report counts 1,114.17 million internet subscriptions in India at the end of June 2026, and 1,066.43 million of those are wireless. The useful question is what order to do things in so that the store makes money once it exists. This guide is the order I give clients, with the published fees and rules that apply at each step.

1. Prove demand and work out your margin per order

The cheapest store to fix is the one you have not built yet. Before spending on a website, sell your intended range for a few weeks through the channels you already have: WhatsApp, Instagram, a stall, friends of friends. You are testing two things. Will strangers (not just people who know you) pay your price? And how much is left after every cost of getting the product to them?

Owners usually know their product cost and selling price. They tend to underestimate the costs in between. The table below lists the costs that sit on every online order. Where a fee is published, I give it; the rest you need to fill in with your own quotes.

Sources: Razorpay pricing and Shopify India pricing, checked 30 October 2026. Rows without a published rate are for you to fill in.

A quick illustration using only the published fees: on a ₹1,000 order paid through Razorpay on Shopify Basic, the gateway takes ₹23.60 (2% plus GST on the fee) and Shopify takes ₹20. That is ₹43.60, or 4.4% of the order, before you have paid a courier. If your product margin is 20%, almost a quarter of it is gone to payments and platform alone.

2. Put the business basics in place

Payment gateways, couriers and marketplaces will all ask for documents before they work with you. Sorting these early avoids a store that is ready to launch but cannot take money. At a minimum you need a business bank account in the name you will trade under, and a decision on GST.

GST: take advice, do not guess

Whether you must register for GST depends on what you sell, your turnover, whether you ship to customers in other states, and whether you sell through marketplaces. The rules for online sellers have changed more than once and are still being discussed by the GST Council, and the advice I see online is often out of date or contradictory. I am not a tax adviser, and I would rather you hear it from one. Ask a chartered accountant this specific question: “If I sell these products from my own website to customers across India, and possibly on Amazon or Flipkart, do I need to register?” Get the answer in writing.

The consumer rules your store must follow

The Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 apply to online sellers, including businesses that sell their own stock from their own website. Law firm Trilegal’s analysis of the rules summarises the main duties. Here are the ones that affect how your store is built.

Source: Trilegal, analysis of the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, August 2020. A law-firm summary, not legal advice; have a lawyer review your policies.

Customer data is the other area to plan for. The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules were notified on 14 November 2025 and phase in over 12 to 18 months, according to PTI’s report. An online store collects names, phone numbers and addresses on every order, so collect only what you need and write a privacy policy that matches what you actually do.

3. Choose where to sell: your own store, a marketplace, or both

You have three realistic routes. A hosted platform such as Shopify, where you pay a monthly fee and the platform runs the technology. WooCommerce, free software on WordPress that you or a developer host and maintain. Or a marketplace such as Amazon or Flipkart, where the traffic already exists but the customer belongs to the marketplace and you pay its commission and fees.

Sources: Shopify India pricing and WooCommerce pricing, checked 30 October 2026. WooCommerce’s hosting estimate is a global USD figure. Marketplace fees change often; check each seller portal.

One India-specific detail changes the Shopify maths. Shopify’s own supported countries list does not include India for Shopify Payments, and says merchants in unlisted countries must use a third-party provider. That is why the per-sale fee in the table applies to almost every Indian Shopify store taking online payments.

My opinion: for a first store with a modest catalogue and no developer on hand, Shopify is the lower-risk start because nobody has to patch servers. WooCommerce makes more sense when you already run WordPress, want content and products in one place, or expect high sales where the per-sale fee would sting. Marketplaces are a good way to test demand, and many of my clients sell on both, using their own store to build repeat customers.

See also: for a detailed comparison with worked fee examples, read Shopify vs WooCommerce for Indian businesses, and for the full budget, what an e-commerce website costs in India.

4. Set up payments, including UPI and cash on delivery

Indian shoppers expect UPI, cards, netbanking and wallets, and in many categories cash on delivery. A gateway such as Razorpay covers the online methods. According to Razorpay’s pricing page, its standard plan charges a 2% platform fee per successful domestic transaction, up to 3% on international cards, with no setup or annual fee, and 18% GST on its fee rather than on the order value. Money settles to your bank on a T+1 cycle by default.

Two details catch new sellers. First, UPI is free of MDR under RBI policy, but Razorpay states that its 2% still applies as a platform fee, so UPI orders are not free to you on the standard plan. Second, Razorpay’s Shopify integration guide says your website should be reviewed by Razorpay before you integrate, and only the Razorpay account owner can connect the store. Build that review time into your launch plan; your policy pages and business details need to be live for it.

Cash on delivery

Shopify treats COD as a manual payment method and states that you are not charged third-party transaction fees for manual payments. That makes COD cheaper in platform fees, but it carries its own costs: the courier’s COD charge, cash remittance delays, and orders refused at the door, which you pay to ship both ways. Many sellers set a COD limit, a small COD fee, or confirm COD orders by WhatsApp before dispatch.

5. Decide shipping and returns before you design anything

Delivery promises and return terms decide whether people buy. Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research, which averages 50 studies, puts the documented average abandonment rate at 70.22%. Its survey of US online shoppers lists the reasons below. This is US data, so treat it as direction for Indian shoppers rather than a forecast.

Source: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics, page updated September 2025. US shopper survey; average rate from 50 studies. Not India-specific.

Look at how many of those are decisions you make before a single page is designed: extra costs, delivery speed, returns policy, showing the total early, payment methods. A beautiful store with a ₹99 shipping charge revealed at the last step will lose sales to a plain store that says “Free delivery above ₹999” on every product page.

For shipping, compare at least two couriers or aggregators on rates by weight and zone, pincode coverage, COD remittance time and how they handle returns. For returns, write a policy you can afford and keep it simple enough to fit in two sentences on the product page.

6. Build the store for phones and slow connections

With 1,066.43 million of India’s internet subscriptions on wireless connections (TRAI, June 2026), design and test on a mid-range phone first. Speed has a measurable cost: a Google-commissioned study by 55 and Deloitte, Milliseconds Make Millions, found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load time was associated with an 8.4% increase in conversion rates on retail sites. That study covered 37 European and US brand sites in 2019, so it is not Indian data, but the direction is consistent with what I see.

Google’s Core Web Vitals give you clear targets: the main content should load within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap in under 200 milliseconds, and the layout should not jump around (a CLS score under 0.1). Ask whoever builds your store to hit these on the home, category and product pages.

What makes a product page sell

• Clear photos on a plain background, plus at least one showing the product in use or at real size.
• An honest description that answers the questions you get on WhatsApp: size, material, care, what is in the box.
• Price, delivery time and return terms visible without scrolling far.
• Guest checkout. Forcing an account costs sales (18% in Baymard’s survey above).
• Real reviews once you have them, and your phone or WhatsApp number for questions.

Product content is usually the slowest part of any launch. I have seen stores ready in two weeks wait two months for photos. Start shooting and writing while the store is being set up.

7. Keep ownership of your store, domain and accounts

This sounds like admin, but it is the step I most often see go wrong. Register the domain, the Shopify account or hosting account, the payment gateway and the Google accounts in your business’s name, with you as the owner. Developers should get their own access, never your password.

Shopify makes this straightforward with collaborator accounts: you give a Shopify Partner a request code, approve their request from your admin, and their access does not count towards your staff limit. On WooCommerce, the same principle applies to your hosting account and WordPress admin: you own it, and the developer gets a separate login you can remove.

8. Get your first customers

Launch day traffic usually comes from people who already know you. That is fine for the first orders, but a store needs a steady way to reach strangers. Start with one or two channels and do them properly.

• Your existing customers. Message your WhatsApp and Instagram buyers with the store link and a reason to try it. Our WhatsApp marketing guide covers how to do this without being blocked.
• Google free listings. Through Merchant Center, Google’s free listings can show your products at no cost across Search, the Shopping tab, Images, Lens, Maps and YouTube. Google says showing is not guaranteed, and it depends on the product data you provide.
• Search. Product and category pages written around what buyers search for, with e-commerce SEO basics such as titles, structured data and a sitemap. See what SEO is and how it works for the fundamentals.
• Ads, when your margin allows. Google Shopping and search ads bring buyers quickly but cost money per click; read how to advertise on Google before you spend.
• Email. Capture emails at checkout (with consent) and send a short note after delivery and before festivals. See email marketing for small businesses.
• Local pickup or delivery. If you sell locally, a complete Google Business Profile helps nearby buyers find you.

Where this advice breaks down

• Fees and rules change. Every Shopify, WooCommerce and Razorpay figure here was checked on 30 October 2026. GST rules for online sellers in particular are under active discussion, so recheck with your CA.
• Much of the conversion data is not Indian. The Baymard and Deloitte figures come from US and European shoppers. Indian buyers rely more on COD and UPI, and their reasons for abandoning may rank differently.
• Some businesses should not build a store yet. If you sell a small range to repeat customers, a WhatsApp catalogue with UPI payment may serve you well until order volume makes the notebook unmanageable.
• Marketplace-first can be right. In categories where buyers start their search on Amazon or Flipkart, your own store may play a supporting role for repeat customers rather than being the main channel.
• Legal summaries are not legal advice. The consumer-rules table is based on a law-firm summary from 2020. Have a lawyer check your policies for your category.

Launch checklist

The saree seller in Kharghar did not need a complicated website. She needed her margins checked, her policies written, a simple store her customers could pay on, and a plan to reach people beyond her WhatsApp list. Get those in order and the notebook can finally retire.