Open an online store, start selling

Who this checklist is for

You want to sell physical products online, your own store, not a marketplace stall, and get to real, repeatable sales. This checklist is for first-timers who have a product idea but have never dealt with suppliers, storefront platforms, or conversion.

What it takes

Typical startup cost is $1,000 to $10,000 depending on inventory depth; the storefront itself is cheap ($30 to $100/month), inventory is what costs money. Idea to first sale usually takes 1 to 3 months. The hardest part is not building the store, it is picking products people actually want and getting the first strangers to trust a brand-new site with their card.

How the checklist flows

Product decisions come first: "Choose your first products" (start with 3 to 10 SKUs, not 50) and "Order samples from suppliers", never sell what you have not held in your hands. Then the legal-and-money layer: register the business and open a business bank account. The build phase follows: "Set up your online storefront", card payments, and "Set up shipping and returns" with honest rates and a returns policy you can afford. What sells the product is the content phase, "Shoot your product photos" in good light on a plain background, photos move conversion more than any app, then write your product pages around outcomes and objections, and connect analytics so launch week produces numbers, not guesses. Finally, launch loud: run your launch promotion, get bookkeeping running, and chase early reviews.

Mistakes that sink first-timers

• Sinking the whole budget into inventory before a single sale validates demand
• Launching with supplier stock photos, customers can smell a store that never touched its own product
• Ignoring shipping math; underpriced shipping quietly eats the entire margin

Real-world examples

• Gymshark, Ben Francis started at 19, screen-printing gym apparel in his parents' garage and selling through a Shopify store; the brand grew into one valued at over £1 billion, all originating from a bootstrapped online storefront.
• A widely-documented pattern: most first-time online stores launch on a hosted platform (Shopify and similar) with a narrow product line, leaning on strong product photography and clear product pages rather than building custom e-commerce infrastructure.
• Momentum comes from getting the basics tight, choose your first products and set up your online storefront before worrying about scale.

From a founder's point of view

An online store is deceptively easy to open and deceptively hard to get sales into, the storefront is a solved problem, but traffic and trust are not. Founders often perfect the site for weeks when the real levers are a product people actually want, photos that make it look worth buying, and a way to reach the first hundred buyers. Start narrow, let a hosted platform handle the plumbing, and put your energy into the handful of pages and channels that actually convert.

Your first milestone

Ten orders from strangers, not friends or family, at full price. That is proof of demand you can scale ad spend against.