How to open
an online store

The short answer

The project first,
then the website

Opening an online store means putting four things together, a product with a margin that can absorb shipping and fees, a website that sells, the tax and legal requirements and a way to bring in visitors. The website is the most visible part, but it is not where to start. With us building an e-commerce website starts at €1,950, and the rest of the guide explains what to decide first, what you need to be compliant and where people most often go wrong. If you want to go straight to the figures, start from the costs by tier.

Opening an online store is worth it when the margin can absorb the costs of distance selling and there is a plan to bring in visitors in the first months. If one of the two is missing, it is better to wait or to start from a marketplace.

The guide applies both to those who want to open an e-commerce business from scratch and to those who already have a physical store or a company and want to sell products online alongside the channels they already have. The timeline and budget change, not the order of the decisions. It is written by someone who has worked on the web since 1999 and builds and looks after online stores, starting from the questions people really ask us before they begin.

The steps

The practical steps to open
an e-commerce business

What to sell and to whom. First of all, run the numbers on a real product. Selling price minus product cost, shipping, payment fee, packaging and share of advertising for each order. If the margin disappears, no website will make it come back. Also decide whether you sell to consumers, to businesses or to both, because prices, payments and terms change.

Name, domain and trademark. Choose a name that can be registered as a domain, check that it is not already someone else's trademark and register domain and accounts in your name or your company's, not in the name of whoever builds your website. These are details that seem like formalities until you need to change provider.

The platform. We work with WooCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop and Magento. The choice depends on the catalog, the integrations with the management system, the markets and how much control you want over the website and the data. The framework for choosing is in the guide to e-commerce platforms, and if you are torn between the two most widespread ones you'll find the comparison in WooCommerce vs Shopify.

Payments. Card and PayPal are the basics. Bank transfer, cash on delivery and installment payments are added depending on your audience. Each method has its own fees, which belong in the margin calculation.

Shipping. Choose one or more couriers, rates by zone and weight, the threshold for included shipping and any in-store pickup. Shipping costs shown late are one of the reasons carts get abandoned.

Catalog and photos. Product pages with copy written by you, real photos and well-organized variations. Descriptions copied from the supplier are the same as on a hundred other websites and Google has no reason to prefer yours. If you want to open an online clothing store the catalog matters even more, with sizes, colors and a clear size guide, because that is what reduces returns.

Customer service and returns. Decide beforehand who answers emails and phone calls, how quickly orders ship and how returns and exchanges are handled. A customer who gets clear answers buys again and leaves reviews, and reviews sell more than any banner.

Promotion. A newly opened store has no visitors. You need campaigns on Google and social media, SEO work on categories and product pages and a list of customers to write to. For campaigns we recommend starting from an advertising budget of €500 per month, paid directly to the platform, with conversion tracking set up properly from day one.

Compliance

Tax and legal aspects
of selling online in Italy

This is a map of what you need if you are opening a store in Italy, not professional advice. Business structure, tax regime and paperwork should be decided with your accountant (commercialista) before you sell your first product.

Can you open an online store without a VAT number? If the store is meant to sell on an ongoing basis, no. The Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian tax authority, states that anyone who starts a commercial activity in Italy must register for VAT, and an e-commerce site opened to sell every day is one. The declaration of start of activity has to be filed within 30 days of starting. For a sole proprietorship (ditta individuale) that has to register with the Business Register, it goes through the Chamber of Commerce's Comunicazione Unica, a single filing that also takes care of Inps and Inail, the Italian social security and workplace insurance institutes. Opening an e-commerce business without a VAT number (partita IVA) to sell on a regular basis is not a viable route, and doubts about borderline cases should be clarified with your accountant before you start.

VAT number for selling online and ATECO code. To sell online on an ongoing basis you need a business with a VAT number. With the ATECO 2025 classification, the Italian classification of economic activities adopted from April 1, 2025, there is no longer a code dedicated to internet retail. The code is chosen based on the products you sell, as for a physical store.

Notifying the municipality. Online retail is a special form of sale under article 18 of Legislative Decree 114 of 1998. It is started with a certified notice of start of activity (SCIA) filed with the municipality's one-stop shop for productive activities (SUAP). According to the Ministry, with several websites a single notice listing all of them is enough, and a website added later has to be notified.

Sales to other EU countries. If you sell to consumers in other EU countries, above €10,000 per year in distance sales the VAT is that of the country where the goods arrive. The OSS (One Stop Shop) scheme lets you declare and pay it from a single country, without registering in each one.

Sales on marketplaces. Under the European DAC7 directive, marketplaces report to the tax authorities the details of those who sell through them. The only sellers excluded are those who in the year made fewer than 30 sales of goods for no more than €2,000 in total. Anyone selling on marketplaces on an ongoing basis therefore has to be compliant just like those selling from their own website.

Privacy and cookies. You need a privacy notice on the processing of customer data. As for cookies, technical cookies don't require consent but must be listed in the notice, while profiling and advertising cookies require prior consent. The banner must have a control to close it without accepting, as prominent as the other buttons, and scrolling the page does not count as consent.

Terms of sale and right of withdrawal. The terms have to explain prices, charges, delivery, warranty and withdrawal. The Italian Consumer Code (Codice del consumo) gives consumers 14 days to withdraw, which for goods start from the day they receive them. If you don't inform them of this right, the period is extended by 12 months. The refund, including delivery costs, must be made within 14 days of the notice of withdrawal, and the direct cost of the return stays with the customer only if you told them beforehand.

Common mistakes

The most common mistakes
when opening an online store

• Setting prices without having calculated shipping, fees and advertising per order.
• Opening with a huge catalog and empty product pages, instead of starting with fewer products done well.
• Using the supplier's photos and descriptions, the same as everyone else's.
• Forcing customers to register before paying, or showing them shipping costs only at the last step.
• Launching campaigns without conversion tracking, so you don't know which ad sells.
• Thinking that the store, once online, will find customers on its own.
• Leaving domain and accounts registered to whoever built the website instead of to you.
• Not updating platform and plugins after launch, until a payment method stops working.

These are the same problems we see when people call us to fix a store that is already open. To see how we work, look at our work on VenditaVernici.it, BBQParadise and Pet Food Web.