Open your online store

An online store is four things working together: the pages people browse, the checkout where they pay, the delivery that gets the parcel to them, and the admin where your team runs products, orders and offers. A store that does the first well and the rest badly still loses money.

Most of the work sits behind the pages. Payments have to be confirmed with the gateway before an order counts. Stock has to be reserved so two people can’t buy the last piece. Every order needs a GST invoice, a courier, a label and a tracking link. Returns, refunds and exchanges need rules your team agrees with.

We build the whole chain, from the product page to the parcel at the door, and connect it to the tools you already run, so an order placed at midnight is packed in the morning without anyone retyping it.

Your own store pays off first with customers who already know you. Marketplaces are good at bringing new buyers, but every order pays a commission and the buyer stays theirs. On your own store, a repeat customer costs you nothing to reach again, and you know what they bought, when and why.

The usual first wins are reorders, bundles and launches. A customer whose bottle is running out gets a reminder from you, not from a marketplace. A new range reaches your existing customers on WhatsApp the day it goes live. A bundle that would be lost in a marketplace listing gets its own page.

Most brands keep selling on marketplaces too. The store and the marketplaces share one stock count and one order view, so the marketplaces bring new customers and your store keeps them.

The engine is the first big decision, and the right one depends on how unusual your selling is. Shopify with a ready-made theme is the quickest start, and right for many shops. Its limits show when you want a faster store on mobile data, a design that doesn’t look like a template, or features such as quizzes, subscriptions and custom bundles.

A headless store keeps Shopify, or a similar engine, for products, carts and orders, and puts a custom storefront in front. That is how we built the skincare store in Mumbai: pages generated ahead of time and served from the edge, so they open quickly on mid-range phones.

A fully custom engine suits businesses whose pricing doesn’t fit a cart: prices that follow the day’s gold rate, trade customers with their own price lists and credit limits, or catalogues too large or too complex for an off-the-shelf engine. We recommend one after the first call, with the reasons written down.

The checkout should fit on one screen and offer the methods your customers already use. In India that means UPI, cards, wallets, net banking and cash on delivery, through a gateway such as Razorpay. Abroad it means cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and local methods such as iDEAL in the Netherlands, usually through Stripe.

We show the delivery date before payment, keep the form short and fill in the city and state from the pincode. Card details go straight to the gateway, never through your servers, and an order is marked paid only when the gateway confirms it.

Every order gets a GST invoice with the right rates and HSN codes, or a VAT invoice where you sell abroad. For stores that sell in several countries, prices can be set per currency rather than converted at checkout, so a customer sees a firm price in the currency they know.

Delivery is decided order by order. As a customer types their pincode, the store checks whether you deliver there and by when. When the order is placed, a shipping aggregator or your own couriers take it, with the courier chosen by its record for that pincode.

Cash on delivery is still a large share of orders in India, and it is where profit leaks. Each cash-on-delivery order can be confirmed on WhatsApp before it ships, with the option to pay online in the same chat. Orders that are never confirmed are held. When a courier reports a failed attempt, the buyer gets a message straight away to fix the address or choose a new time, before the parcel turns back.

Returns and exchanges are requested from the order page. A reverse pickup is booked, the item is checked when it arrives, and the refund or replacement follows, with the customer told at each step.

A store has to be found before it can sell. We build pages that load quickly, carry clear titles and descriptions, and include product structured data, so search engines can show price, stock and reviews beside your listing.

Product pages lead with what people search for: the problem the product solves, the material or ingredient, the size and the price. Guides and category pages answer the questions customers type, which brings in visitors who aren’t searching for your brand yet. A product feed keeps Google Merchant Center and shopping ads in step with your catalogue.

If you are moving from an old store, every old address is mapped to its new page before launch, so the rankings you have earned come with you.

We need your catalogue, your rules and a few accounts in your name. The catalogue means products, variants, prices, GST rates and HSN codes, photos and descriptions; a spreadsheet is a fine start, and we help fill the gaps.

The rules are the decisions only you can make: where you deliver, shipping charges, whether you offer cash on delivery, your return and exchange policy, and which offers can combine.

The accounts stay yours: the payment gateway, which runs its own checks on your business before it pays out, the courier or shipping aggregator, the WhatsApp Business account and the domain. We set them up with you, but they belong to your business. You also need someone who owns the store day to day, usually from marketing or operations.

A store should be one part of your business, not an island. Stock can come from your billing or POS software, your warehouse system or your ERP, so what the store shows is what is on the shelf. Orders, invoices and payments can flow to Tally or your accounting software without retyping.

Marketplaces connect through their own APIs, so one stock count serves every channel and every order appears in one view. WhatsApp carries confirmations, delivery updates and reorder reminders, and enquiries can land in your CRM. Where your existing software has no API, we build a small bridge or use scheduled imports.

Before we build, we agree the few numbers that matter for your store. Usually these are how fast pages open on a phone, how many visitors who start checkout finish it, how many cash-on-delivery orders are confirmed and delivered, how many customers buy again, and the margin per order after fees, shipping and returns.

Those numbers go into a dashboard your team can read without an analyst. After launch we look at them with you, find where shoppers drop out, and fix what is costing you orders: a slow page, a confusing size chart, a courier that fails in one region, an offer nobody uses.

A store is never finished. New ranges arrive, sale days come round, gateways and couriers change their APIs, and customers ask for new ways to pay.

We run the store with you. Before each big sale we check the store against the traffic and the offers planned. Every month we ship releases for new ranges, bundles and campaigns, many of which your team then runs on its own. When a channel starts to matter, such as a new marketplace, WhatsApp selling or a second country, we add it to the same stock and order view.