Launching a store is an operations project wearing a design costume.
Shopify led ecommerce capability in our tests; general builders can work for small catalogs. Compare on the main ranking.
Run a genuine transaction on the card types your customers use, in your currency, then refund it. Check what the statement descriptor says, whether the receipt arrives, and how a failed payment is presented. A hosted checkout — the kind Shopify and Stripe provide — also narrows your payment-card compliance obligations substantially, because card details are captured on the provider's systems rather than yours. That is a real reason to prefer hosted checkout over a self-managed form.
Selling into the United States, most states set an economic nexus threshold around $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions per year, with several large states — California, Texas and New York among them — using $500,000 instead. Cross the threshold and you must register and collect in that state.
Selling across the EU, the old per-country distance-selling thresholds are gone. A single EU-wide threshold of €10,000 in annual cross-border consumer sales now applies: below it you charge your own country's VAT, above it you charge the customer's country's rate and file through the One-Stop-Shop, which is one registration and one quarterly return instead of many. Confirm your own registration duties with an accountant before launch — the platform will not do it for you.
Time yourself buying one simple item on a phone as a new customer. Anything over about a minute is losing sales, and the usual culprits are a forced account, an address form fighting autofill, and shipping cost appearing only at the final step. Show total cost as early as you can.
Order confirmations and shipping notices are the emails customers actually want, and they fail silently. Authenticate the sending domain properly — the major providers now require it of bulk senders and treat unauthenticated mail harshly — and send yourself a real order to confirm the receipt arrives in an inbox rather than a spam folder.
Refund, shipping, privacy and contact pages published; a return actually processed end to end; the support address monitored by a person. Advertising into a store that cannot process a refund converts a marketing cost into a chargeback.
Shopify led commerce capability in our testing; general builders remain workable for small catalogues. The full comparison sits on the main ranking.
Not usually before the first sale, but you need to know your thresholds. In the US that is commonly $100,000 or 200 transactions per state, with $500,000 in several large states; in the EU it is a single €10,000 cross-border threshold. Confirm with an accountant.
For almost every small merchant, yes. Card details are handled on the provider's systems, which reduces your compliance burden substantially compared with capturing them yourself.
For a small catalogue, comfortably. Dedicated commerce platforms pull ahead on inventory, multi-channel selling, shipping rules and checkout optimisation as the catalogue and order volume grow.