Setting up an online store means choosing a platform, preparing your product catalogue, connecting payments and delivery, putting distance-selling terms and registrations in place, then going live. The most common mistake is starting with the design; the right order is to settle how orders, payments, shipping and returns will work, and only then build the shop front.
Key takeaways
- Start an online store with the order, payment, delivery and returns flow, not with the design.
- According to Türkiye's Ministry of Trade, the number of businesses selling online reached 634,611 in 2025; competition is crowded and operational mistakes are costly.
- The choice between a hosted platform, open source and bespoke software depends on catalogue size, integration needs and team capacity.
- Distance-selling terms, pre-contract information, the 14-day right of withdrawal, a privacy notice and any required registration should be ready before launch.
- Feeding your own site and marketplaces from one catalogue reduces stock and pricing errors.
Why is setting up an online store still hard?
Buying online is now a habit rather than an exception. In TÜİK's 2026 ICT Usage Survey in Households, 60.0% of people aged 16 to 74 in Türkiye bought or ordered goods or services online. The seller side is just as busy: the Ministry of Trade's E-Commerce in Türkiye Report 2025 shows the number of businesses engaged in e-commerce rising from 600,800 in 2024 to 634,611 in 2025.
In the same report's survey of 781 businesses, 48.8% sell through both their own web shop and marketplaces, while only 11.7% sell solely through their own site. So your own store is rarely a standalone channel; it usually has to run alongside a marketplace. When stock, prices and orders live in two separate places, overselling, cancellations and complaints follow.
That is where the real cost of a launch sits. A good-looking shop front can be ready in days, but manually updated stock, shipping details copied by hand for every order and returns handled over email tend to break during the first busy promotion. To understand why shoppers abandon a basket, see our guide on why website visitors leave without buying.
Which ecommerce platform should you choose?
The platform decision sets the limits for every step that follows. There are three broad options, and none of them is right for every business. We weigh them in more depth in ready-made ecommerce vs custom build.
| Option | Best suited to | Strength | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosted platform (SaaS) | Fast launch, small to mid-sized catalogue, limited tech team | Hosting, security and updates handled by the provider | Module limits, ability to export your data |
| Open-source platform | Businesses with in-house developers wanting flexible plug-ins | Full access to the code | Security patches, server and plug-in upkeep are yours |
| Bespoke software | Dealer pricing, ERP links, unusual business rules | Fits the workflow exactly | Timeline, budget and long-term maintenance |
Before deciding, work out how many main products and variants you will sell, which data must flow both ways with accounting, ERP or marketplaces, and who will keep the site up to date. If you sell wholesale or through dealers, our guide to B2B ecommerce and ERP integration explains why that usually needs a different architecture.
What are the steps to set up an online store?
Following this order keeps the number of things you have to fix after launch to a minimum.
- Write down the business model: which products you will sell, through which channels and with which payment methods, plus your promotion and returns policy, on a single page.
- Secure a domain and business email: order and dispatch notifications should reach customers from your own domain. We explain why in what is business email.
- Choose the platform: use the table above, and insist on data export and role-based permissions.
- Prepare the catalogue: gather SKU, variants, price, stock, descriptions and images in one sheet, and test a bulk upload with a small batch first.
- Connect payment methods: card, bank transfer and, where it suits your market, cash on delivery. Prefer the payment provider's embedded form, so card details never touch your server.
- Set up delivery and returns: decide on weight-based or flat shipping fees, a free-delivery threshold, label printing and where return requests will land. The flow from withdrawal to refund is set out in online store returns process.
- Complete the legal paperwork and registrations: distance-selling contract, pre-contract information, privacy notice, cookie policy and any mandatory registration.
- Get SEO and measurement ready: title and description tags, a sitemap, structured data, a product feed and analytics tags that respect cookie consent. The detail is in our ecommerce SEO guide.
- Place test orders, then go live: run card, transfer, cancellation and return scenarios end to end, and check who on the team can do what.
What legal requirements should be in place?
If you sell to consumers in Türkiye, Consumer Protection Law No. 6502 and the Distance Contracts Regulation apply. Customers must receive pre-contract information and the distance-selling contract, and as a general rule they have a 14-day right of withdrawal; the exceptions listed in the regulation, such as made-to-order goods, must be stated clearly. Consumer rules in the UK and EU also provide a 14-day cancellation period, so check the rules of every market you ship to.
Businesses trading online in Türkiye must register with the Ministry of Trade's ETBİS system. Because you collect customer data, a KVKK privacy notice must be ready before launch; the difference between consent and notice is covered in KVKK explicit consent vs privacy notice. Marketing emails and text messages need the recipient's prior consent. Take legal advice for your specific situation.
Your own site, a marketplace, or both?
A marketplace brings ready-made traffic but also commission, price competition and limited access to customer data. Your own site gives you control over the brand, the customer relationship and margin, but you have to bring the traffic yourself. For most businesses the right answer is both, run from a single catalogue.
That means entering a product once and sending it to the shop front, marketplaces and ad feeds from the same source. We cover category mapping, mandatory attributes and order import in our marketplace integration guide, and how systems talk to each other in API integration explained.
How does SmartSales make this easier?
SmartSales is the ecommerce product in Digital Bridge's Smart360 family. You open your store with a theme built for your sector and edit the shop front by drag and drop without writing code, while orders, payments, shipping, returns and promotions sit in one panel. There are 30 themes across fashion boutiques, food, electronics, cosmetics and furniture, each with a live demo store.
Picture a cosmetics retailer in Adana that has sold on a marketplace for years and now wants its own site. The team picks a theme from the demo stores and uploads a 1,200-product Excel list to SmartSales. Before anything is written, the system shows a dry-run summary: how many products will be added and which rows contain errors. Rows sharing a product code become variants of a single product.
At checkout, card payments (with up to 12 instalments, as the store decides), bank transfer and cash on delivery are switched on. Card details are entered in the payment provider's embedded form, so they never reach the store's server, and an order is confirmed only by the provider's signed server notification.
The distance-selling contract and pre-contract information form are generated in the store's legal name and fixed to the order as they stood at that moment. Customers request a return from their own account within the 14-day withdrawal period after delivery, and the request lands straight in the panel.
With the marketplace integration module, the same catalogue feeds the marketplace; price and stock are sent only when they change, and orders arrive in the panel. SmartSales reports show true profitability by deducting purchase cost, shipping, marketplace commission and payment fees from sales excluding VAT. Team members get ready-made roles such as Owner, Catalogue, Orders/Warehouse and Accounting/Reports, and price and stock changes are written to an append-only audit log.
On the SEO side, the platform rather than the theme produces titles, descriptions, canonical URLs and structured data; the sitemap is generated automatically and a product feed is prepared in Google Merchant Center format. Through the SmartOperator connection, a separate package module, Smart360's AI customer agent SmartOperator can read product and stock data in read-only mode to help visitors find products. For questions that arrive outside office hours, see answering customer questions after hours. Explore the details on the SmartSales product page.
How Digital Bridge can help
With SmartSales, once the quote is approved the store is set up with the theme you chose from the demo stores, and you connect payments and carriers under your own agreements. Where an off-the-shelf store is not enough, for example dealer-specific price lists or two-way data flow with your ERP, we build custom features through our ecommerce and B2B software services. The SmartSales headless API also lets your own front end or app work with the catalogue; our team creates the access token for your store.
For more of our software guides, browse the software development topic page.
Next step
Start by filling in the nine-step list above for your own business: once your product count, sales channels and payment methods are clear, the platform decision becomes much easier. Then browse the demo stores and try the themes on your phone.
SmartSales is sold by quotation; price, chosen theme and set-up are confirmed in the same quote. To buy SmartSales, fill in the SmartSales sales form with your sector, product count and the modules you need. For any questions, get in touch with us.