How to start an online store for your small business

You already sell. The counter works, the phone rings, and regulars come back. The one place your products are not for sale is the internet.

Owners in that position usually suspect they are leaving money on the table. What stops them is rarely doubt about demand. It is not knowing what starting actually takes, or what it costs.

Both questions have concrete answers now. This post walks through them in order, along with the decisions you need to make before your first order ships.

Why this is worth deciding now

Online buying continues taking a larger share of American retail, and the gap keeps widening. The Census Bureau reports that online sales reached 16.9 percent of all US retail sales in the first quarter of 2026. Online sales also grew 9.8 percent over the prior year, more than twice the 3.9 percent pace of retail overall.

Those buyers are not waiting for you to be ready. When somebody nearby searches for what you sell and your store is not there, the sale goes to a business that is. The money is already being spent every month, just not with you.

What selling online actually involves now

A decade ago, opening an online store meant hiring a developer or assembling an unstable collection of plugins. Today a single platform handles the storefront, the payment processing, and the checkout, which is the sequence of pages where a visitor actually pays. This post assumes Shopify, the platform built around exactly that job. If you want the reasoning behind that choice, the comparison is covered in how to choose an ecommerce platform.

A first store consists of four working parts:

1. Product pages, one for each thing you sell, with photos, a price, and honest answers to buyer questions
2. A checkout that takes cards and shows the full cost before asking for one
3. Fulfillment, meaning how the box gets from you to the buyer, or how they pick it up
4. A reason anyone finds the store at all

The software now covers the first two almost automatically. The remaining two stay yours, and the fourth ultimately decides whether the store justifies its existence. We will get there.

What it costs

Two numbers decide what a store costs to run. The first is what you pay Shopify every month. The second is what comes out of each sale, and Shopify publishes both plainly.

A basic Shopify store costs $29 a month paid yearly, and card processing takes about 2.9 percent plus 30 cents of each online sale.

That second number is the card cut, the slice that goes to payment processing on every online order. Paid month to month instead of yearly, the plan itself is $39. As of this writing, Shopify offers a trial of three days free and then $1 a month for three months, so trying it costs almost nothing.

Two additional cost considerations might matter for an ecommerce business starting off. First, every Shopify plan includes casual in-person selling, so the same system can ring up a farmers market table or a pop-up without additional software.

Second, the subscription is the smallest line in the realistic budget. Product photography, shipping boxes, and the hours you spend writing product pages cost more than the platform does.

Shopify’s card rate is the cost that repeats. On a $20 order it takes 88 cents, leaving you $19.12 before you have paid for the box, the label, and the tape. The $29 is the number people compare between platforms, but this is the one that comes out of every sale you make.

The decisions only you can make

The setup screens are simple. What they cannot do is make the calls that determine whether the store works, because those calls come from knowing your own business. Before you launch, decide these five things:

1. What goes online first. Begin with your 10 or 20 best sellers rather than the entire catalog, because a tight, deliberately organized catalog outperforms three hundred half-described items.
2. Prices that survive the fees. Rebuild each price with the card cut, packaging, and shipping inside it, not bolted on after the first month of thin margins.
3. Shipping and returns, in writing. Decide what you charge, how fast you ship, what you take back, and who pays return postage, before the first buyer asks.
4. Sales tax. Shopify can calculate most common sales tax rates automatically. Its own documentation still recommends confirming the rates with a tax authority or accountant, because filing and paying remain your responsibility.
5. Who keeps inventory honest. When the shelf and the website share stock, someone has to own the count, or the store sells a jar that no longer exists.

None of these five are technical questions. They are business judgment, the same kind you already use on what to stock and what to charge. Neither the platform nor an agency can decide them for you.

Making these calls before launch is also cheaper than making them after. Change a price, a shipping rule, or your catalog structure once customers are already buying, and you are undoing work rather than doing it.

The part that decides whether anyone finds it

Here is the piece the setup tutorials habitually skip. A brand-new store launches with zero visitors, and it competes with every established listing inside that growing online share. Whether anyone finds it rests on work that happens mostly before launch, in how the store itself is built.

Four things carry most of that weight:

• Catalog structure. How products are named, grouped, and described determines what searches you can ever show up for.
• Product pages that answer real questions. Size, materials, lead time, what fits what. The details are covered in product page optimization.
• A checkout that does not leak buyers. Most carts are abandoned, and the fixes live in checkout flow design.
• The search work itself. Google’s free product listings can surface your products across Search, Maps, YouTube, and Gemini at no cost, but eligibility and ranking depend on how your catalog and pages are structured. The same structure decides whether AI assistants, which more shoppers now ask for recommendations, can understand what you sell well enough to suggest it.

This is the half of the job that rewards doing properly. Shopify store builds are part of the web design work we do. The visibility side is its own ongoing discipline, from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization, the work of making a business legible to AI search. A store built with that in mind starts earning from month one instead of waiting to be fixed.

Where to start this week

Open the trial, add three products, and place a test order on your own phone. An afternoon of that teaches you more than a month of reading, and it costs a dollar.

Then split the list. Keep the decisions that are yours, the products, the prices, the policies, and be deliberate about the build and the search work that determine whether the store gets found. If you want the store built to be found from day one, tell us what you sell and we will map out what your first store needs.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to start an online store?

Shopify’s Basic plan is $29 a month paid yearly, or $39 paid monthly, and card processing takes about 2.9 percent plus 30 cents of each online sale. Plan extra for product photos, shipping materials, and the time it takes to write your product pages. Most first stores cost more in time than in money.

Do I need an LLC to start an online store?

No. You can sell online under the business you already run, including a sole proprietorship. Whether an LLC makes sense for liability or tax reasons is a question for your accountant or attorney, not for your website platform.

Can I create an online store for free?

You can test one for close to free. As of this writing, Shopify’s trial runs three days free and then $1 a month for three months. A store that is open for business carries the normal monthly cost, and taking card payments always involves processing fees.

Is starting an online store profitable?

It can be, when prices are set with fees and shipping included and the store actually gets found. Online sales reached 16.9 percent of US retail in early 2026 and are growing faster than retail overall. Profit comes from the same discipline as your in-person business, margins and repeat customers.