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How to start an online store step by step

Updated: 14 November 2026 · reading time about 9 minutes

Launching an online store takes very little time today: a few clicks on a ready-made platform and the site is live. What takes much longer is everything around it — formalities, terms and conditions, payments, shipping, product photos and descriptions. These decide whether the store starts selling, or spends its first months empty or breaking rules nobody thought about at the start.

Below we describe how to start an online store in Poland in ten steps, in an order that saves rework. The text is written for small and medium-sized companies that want to sell online — both those just starting out and those that already have a physical shop or sell on Allegro and want a channel of their own.

On tax and legal matters this list is a starting point, not advice. Always confirm the details with an accountant or lawyer — the rules change every year.

Step 1. Validate the idea before you open the store

Setting up the store is the cheapest part of the business. Buying stock nobody is looking for costs far more. Before you start comparing platforms, answer a few questions:

• Who buys, and where do they search today? Type your product names into Google and Allegro. See who sells them, at what prices and how they describe them.
• How will you stand out? Price, advice, fast shipping, your own brand, a narrow niche. “Everything cheaper” rarely beats the big players.
• What is left from a single sale? Subtract product cost, VAT, the payment provider's fee, packaging, part of the shipping cost and returns. Only that figure tells you how much you can spend to acquire a customer.

Example: a specialty coffee store has low shipping costs relative to the price and customers who come back every month. A store selling cheap accessories for a dozen zlotys may struggle, because delivery and handling eat most of the margin. Worth knowing before ordering the first batch of stock.

Step 2. Formalities: business, taxes, invoices

Selling online is ordinary trade, so the same rules apply as in a physical shop. The most common paths:

• Sole proprietorship — registration in CEIDG is free and done online. You choose PKD codes and a form of taxation, and from then on you keep accounts.
• Unregistered activity — allowed for small revenues below a statutory limit tied to the minimum wage. Good for testing an idea, but the limit is easy to exceed, and obligations towards consumers (returns, terms, GDPR) are the same.
• A company — when two or more people start the store together or plan a larger scale from the outset.

Settle three things with your accountant right away: whether and when you will be a VAT payer, whether mail-order sales require a cash register in your case, and how you will issue invoices. Since 2026, invoices to businesses are issued through the National e-Invoice System (KSeF), so a store that also sells to business customers should plan for it from the start — manually retyping orders into accounting software stops making sense at a few dozen orders a month.

Step 3. Terms and conditions, privacy policy and consumer rights

This is the item most often done “at the end” and copied from another store. Yet the terms must describe how your store actually works: which payment and delivery methods you offer, how you handle returns and complaints, who the seller is. The minimum to prepare:

• store terms and conditions with seller details, the order process, payments, delivery, complaints and withdrawal from the contract,
• information on the consumer's right to withdraw within 14 days, with a model return form,
• a GDPR-compliant privacy policy — what data you collect, why, and who you share it with (courier, payment provider, accounting, marketing tools),
• a cookie banner that really blocks analytics and advertising scripts until consent is given,
• for promotions — the lowest price from the last 30 days (required by the Omnibus Directive),
• on product pages — manufacturer details and safety information required by the EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR).

Since mid-2025, online stores are also covered by digital accessibility rules. Micro-enterprises providing services are exempt, but if your company is larger, accessibility (contrast, keyboard navigation, image descriptions) has to be considered when choosing a template.

Step 4. Choose an online store platform

Only now, when you know what you sell and to whom, does choosing a store platform make sense. There are three models, and each distributes costs and responsibility differently.

The Polish market has both subscription platforms (e.g. Shoper, IdoSell, Shopify) and open-source systems. When comparing, don't look only at the first month's price — check sales commissions, the cost of add-ons, product limits and whether you can export your data if you ever want to switch. We compared both approaches in detail in online store: subscription or your own, and broke the costs down line by line in how much an online store costs.

Step 5. Domain, name and identity

The domain should be short, easy to spell out over the phone and free of Polish diacritics. Check that the name isn't registered as a trademark at the Polish Patent Office and EUIPO — renaming after a year means losing Google rankings and recognition. Reserve social media profiles and a company mailbox on the store's domain straight away: messages from a branded address land in spam less often and inspire more trust.

Step 6. Payments and delivery

Choose payment and shipping integrations before building the store, because the checkout configuration depends on them. Polish shoppers expect above all:

• Fast online payments — BLIK, instant transfers and cards. Providers such as Przelewy24, PayU, Tpay and Stripe support them. Compare fees, payout times and refund costs.
• Delivery to parcel lockers alongside courier delivery. Without this option, a purchase can stall at the last step.
• A clear delivery price before checkout — “free delivery from X zł” on the product page works better than a surprise at payment.

With a few orders a day you can create labels manually in the carrier's panel. With several dozen, an integration that creates the shipment from the order and sends the customer a tracking number automatically pays off.

Step 7. Products: photos, descriptions, categories

This is the most common reason for delaying the launch. The store is ready, but products have no photos, descriptions are copied from the manufacturer and variants (sizes, colours) are entered as separate products. Before you start, prepare:

• photos on a uniform background, in the same aspect ratio, plus “in use” shots,
• your own descriptions that answer customers' questions: size, material, use, care,
• a category structure that makes sense to the customer, not the warehouse,
• filter attributes (e.g. size, colour, brand) entered consistently across the catalogue.

Manufacturer descriptions appear in hundreds of other stores, so Google has no reason to show yours. AI tools can speed up writing, but the text must be checked — especially dimensions, composition and technical specs.

Step 8. Setting up and configuring the store

Configuring the store itself usually takes a few days: template and colours, home page, menu, VAT rates, payment and delivery methods, customer emails (order confirmation, shipping, returns), information pages and a footer with company details. Plus analytics: Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, connected in line with the cookie banner.

If you also sell on Allegro or run a physical shop, decide where the “master” stock level lives. Selling the same item in two places without stock synchronisation ends in cancelled orders and negative reviews.

Step 9. Testing before launch

Before you announce the opening, place a few real orders — on a phone and a computer, with different payment and delivery methods. Check:

• that emails reach both the customer and you, and don't land in spam,
• that payment updates the order status and refunds work,
• that the invoice or receipt has correct details and VAT rates,
• that the cart shows the full price including delivery, and the order button clearly states that the order involves an obligation to pay,
• that the site loads quickly on a phone — most e-commerce traffic is mobile.

Step 10. Launch and the first customers

A new store has no traffic. Google needs time to index it and trust a new domain, so in the first months customers rarely come on their own. A typical launch plan for a small company:

• Google Search Console — submit the sitemap and request indexing of the key pages.
• A Google Ads campaign on products and phrases with clear purchase intent, with a small test budget and conversion tracking.
• A Google Business Profile, if you have a pickup point or physical shop.
• Existing customers and contacts — newsletter, social media, asking for reviews after the first orders.
• Content — guides answering customers' questions, which bring search traffic over time.

Treat marketing as a separate budget, independent of the cost of building the store. It's better to build a simpler store and have money for the first campaigns than the other way round.

The most common mistakes when starting a store

• Choosing a platform before calculating margin and needs. Later it turns out the wholesaler integration is missing or commissions eat the profit.
• Terms copied from another store. They describe delivery methods you don't offer and return rules you don't apply.
• Launching with an empty catalogue. A few products with good descriptions sell better than hundreds without photos.
• No plan for traffic. A store without a promotion budget usually waits months for its first orders from Google.
• Too many plugins. In open-source systems every add-on is one more thing to update and a potential security hole.

How much time and money you need to start

A store on a ready-made platform, with products and documents prepared, can launch within a few days to a few weeks. A store built from scratch usually takes longer, depending on the number of integrations. In practice, preparing products, photos and formalities takes longest — not the technology.

At Axisway we run both models. An online store on subscription costs from 200 to 600 zł net per month, with no sales commission and no separate setup fee — hosting, updates and integrations are included. A store on unique code with AI is a fixed price of 6,000 zł net, regardless of complexity. If you want to start promotion together with the store, there's the Basic package for 1,000 zł per month, which also covers SEO and setting up advertising channels. All options are described on the online store development page.

Summary: how to start an online store without rework

Order matters: first the idea and margin, then formalities and documents, next the platform, payments and delivery, products, testing — and finally the launch with a plan for the first customers. The store platform is only one of ten steps, even though it usually gets the most attention. If your customers ask a lot of questions before buying, also read how an AI sales assistant in an online store works.