You have the product in mind and one question left: where do you start? Opening an e-commerce has less in common with building a website than with opening a real shop, with a window, a stockroom, a till and a desk for the paperwork. Only the medium changes: the window sits on a domain, the till is a payment system and the desk is the filing that opens the partita IVA. Taken one at a time, none of the four pieces is complicated.
This guide lines them up. How to open an e-commerce from scratch, what to decide first and what comes later, what it costs to start, which obligations apply to anyone selling online in Italy, and where the first customers come from. Opening an online store asks for decisions more than for a large budget.
In short:
- Three choices come before the website: what you sell, who you sell it to and on which business model.
- The technical part is the quickest: domain, platform, product pages, payments and shipping.
- Anyone selling online on a regular basis opens a partita IVA and registers with the Registro delle imprese through the single ComUnica filing.
- A lean start costs a few hundred euro a year. The line that really weighs, later, is marketing.
E-commerce: what do you need to get started?
What you need to open an e-commerce fits on a short list, and almost nothing on it is technical. A product or a service someone is already looking for, a recognisable audience, a business model that holds its margins, a starting budget. Then come the domain, the platform, the payment methods and the logistics. At the bottom of the list sit the tax and legal obligations.
Knowing how to get started with e-commerce is worth more than any graphic theme. Anyone searching for how to open an e-commerce mostly finds lists of platforms, while the entrepreneurs who start well begin from the order of the decisions. An online store built before you have worked out what it sells and to whom stays a shop window with no passers-by, and no platform patches that hole. The three sections below close the preliminary decisions.
Choose what to sell and who to sell it to
Demand comes before the catalogue. Making an e-commerce that sells starts from who has the problem your product solves, and from how often they look for it. A thinly covered niche pays better than a crowded category where price is the only argument left, and that is where the better opportunities open up. There are three routes: physical products, digital products such as courses, templates and licences, or services the customer books online. The choice changes everything that follows, from the stockroom and shipping through to support. One route is enough to start.
Define the business model
Creating an e-commerce that stands up depends on who holds the goods and who ships them. Every model moves the risk to a different point in the chain, and it pays to know where yours ends up.
| Model | How it works | Where the risk sits |
|---|---|---|
| Own stock | You buy the stock, pack and ship it | Capital tied up in unsold goods |
| Dropshipping | The supplier ships straight to the customer | Thin margins and little control over timing |
| Handmade production | You produce to order or in small runs | Capacity is tied to your own hours |
| Digital products | You sell files, courses or access | No logistics, immediate competition |
| Subscriptions | The customer pays on a fixed cycle | Continuous support is needed to keep them |
| Marketplace | You sell inside a third-party platform | Commissions, and customers who stay theirs |
Study the market, the competition and prices
Before you set a price, look at whoever already sells what you want to sell. Ten competitor product pages tell you almost everything: price bracket, tone, guarantees, delivery times and, in the reviews, what customers did not find. The free space shows up in between. Plenty of companies win on the buying experience before they win on price. The price is then built from the bottom, adding up goods, packaging, shipping, payment fees, the share of returns and taxes. What is left is the margin, and it is the number that carries or sinks the advertising. The right of withdrawal belongs in that sum too: online buyers have 14 days to send a product back, and a share of orders does come back.
How to open an online store: the essential steps
So how do you open an e-commerce in practice? Five steps, in the order worth taking them. The first two are decided on paper, the other three happen inside the platform. Starting from scratch usually takes a few weeks rather than months, and the slow part is never the technical one: it is the decisions on catalogue and pricing. Opening an online store from scratch works better when each step is closed before the next one opens, and planning the opening phase is worth as much as the work inside the platform.
The five steps to opening the store
The name comes before the domain, because the domain has to confirm it rather than correct it. Check that the .it is free, that the trade mark is not already registered and that the same handle is available on social media. Opening a website starts here: a domain generally costs between €10 and €20 a year and has to be renewed. Positioning is the sentence you can explain in ten seconds. It says who the store is for, what the brand promises and why buying there beats the first search result.
There are three routes. Subscription platforms such as Shopify take hosting and updates off your hands and are paid monthly. Open source solutions such as WooCommerce or PrestaShop carry lower licence costs but ask for hosting, maintenance and someone to look after them. Marketplaces bring traffic from day one and keep a commission on every sale. Opening an online shop without regretting it: choose on the hours you can give to the technical side, not on the length of the feature list. The same holds for anyone wondering how to create an e-commerce site from a template.
The essential pages are few: home, categories, product pages, basket, checkout and contacts. Alongside them come the information pages, that is terms of sale, privacy notice, cookie information, shipping and returns. A short checkout is worth more than an expensive theme, because every extra field is one more abandoned basket. Walk the whole journey on a phone before you publish. That is where most of the visits arrive from.
A product page does three things: it explains, it reassures and it removes doubts. It needs a title with the real product name, a description written by you, photos on a neutral background from several angles, price, variants, availability and delivery times. Descriptions copied from the supplier end up identical on dozens of sites, and search engines notice. Creating an e-commerce site that ranks goes through this, long before it goes through advertising.
Card, wallet and bank transfer cover almost every case, while cash on delivery only matters in a few categories. Payment fees move between 1% and 3% per transaction plus a fixed part of a few cents, and they belong in the price. Shipping comes down to three decisions: carrier, who pays for delivery and the free-shipping threshold. Put delivery times and the returns procedure in writing. Customers read them before they pay.
Tax and legal aspects of opening an e-commerce in Italy
Opening an e-commerce in Italy means starting a commercial activity, with the same obligations as a shop with a shutter. The sequence is well established and runs almost entirely online: partita IVA, registration with the Registro delle imprese, the INPS position and the filing with the municipality. One change upsets a widespread habit: since 1 April 2025 the ATECO 2025 classification has retired the old single code 47.91.10 for trade over the internet, and the code is chosen on the goods sold. The online channel is no longer a category of its own.
The obligations at a glance:
- Partita IVA and an ATECO code chosen on the goods sold, not on the sales channel.
- Registration with the Registro delle imprese and the INPS traders position, through the single ComUnica filing.
- The SCIA notice to the SUAP office of the municipality, on the terms that municipality sets.
- Legal pages on the site: terms of sale, privacy, cookies, shipping and returns.
- For anyone selling into other EU countries, the €10,000 OSS distance-selling threshold.
Do you need a partita IVA for an e-commerce?
The line runs between occasional selling and regular activity. Someone clearing out a wardrobe on a listings app is carrying out isolated transactions. Someone who instead buys or makes goods to resell them, continuously and with a minimum of organisation, is running a commercial activity, and from there follow the partita IVA, the Registro delle imprese and INPS contributions. For those who meet the requirements the regime forfettario stays available up to €85,000 of revenue, with a 15% substitute tax and a 40% profitability coefficient for retail trade. Where the line falls in a concrete case is settled by an accountant, on the real numbers.
What documents and information does an online store need?
Legal pages are not a formality. They are what a customer opens while deciding whether to trust the shop, and their absence is noticed sooner than a missing discount.
How much does it cost to open an e-commerce?
What an e-commerce costs depends above all on how much of the work you do yourself. The lines are always the same and split into two groups: the ones paid once to start and the ones that come back every month. The first group holds few surprises. The second decides whether the business carries its own weight. The costs of opening an online store read better that way, by cadence rather than as one total.
Above all of them sits a line no quote puts at the top: marketing. A store without visits does not sell, and visits are either bought or built over time with content and search rankings. Budgeting for it from the first month avoids the surprise in the third.
Costs of opening an e-commerce from scratch
The costs of opening an e-commerce read well side by side in two scenarios: a lean start and a more structured store. The orders of magnitude below apply to trade in physical products in Italy.
| Item | Lean start | Structured store |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | €10-20 a year | €10-20 a year |
| Platform and hosting | Entry monthly plan | Higher plan plus apps and theme |
| Design and development | Ready-made theme | Bespoke project |
| Payment fees | 1-3% per transaction | 1-3% per transaction |
| Accountant | From €400 a year on the forfettario | From €1,200 a year |
| INPS traders contributions | 2026 minimum: €4,611.64 a year | 2026 minimum: €4,611.64 a year |
| Chamber of commerce fee | €53 special section | €120 ordinary section |
| Marketing | As much as you decide | The main line of the budget |
Can you create an e-commerce for free?
Creating an e-commerce site for free is possible in the part people see. Several platforms offer free plans or trial periods, and with a ready-made template the shop window stands up in an afternoon. Anyone looking for how to open an online store for free, or how to create an online store for free, therefore gets a true answer but a partial one. The domain is paid for, the payment fees are paid, the carrier is paid, and the goods have to be bought before they are sold. Anyone after a free online shop also meets limits on the number of products, the payment methods or the custom domain. Treat it as a test bench for the idea, not as the final shape of the store.
How to build a successful e-commerce
Launch day is not the finish line, it is the start of the long part. Building a successful e-commerce depends on four things that move together: a product the market wants, a site that does not waste time, a steady flow of visits and a handful of numbers looked at every week. None of the four is settled once and for all: growth comes from repeating the same checks every week. The three sections below cover the quickest levers.
Optimise product pages for SEO
Product pages are the ones that catch the search, so they deserve more care than the home page. Start from the words customers actually use, not from the internal product name. Every page wants its own title, an original description, light images with alternative text and a category that holds it logically. Internal links between categories and products help search engines see what matters most. On the technical side three things are enough: fast pages, readable addresses and no duplicate content between variants of the same item. Anyone who wants to build an e-commerce website that lasts factors these strategies in from day one.
Promote the store and find the first customers
The first customers do not arrive through organic traffic, which matures over months. Getting started in e-commerce with no audience means putting several small channels together. Social media shows the product in use and works well in visual categories. Email stays the channel with the highest return, and those contacts remain yours. Collaborations with creators in the field bring trust as well as visits, marketplaces give volume straight away, paid advertising turns the tap on for as long as you pay. Use it above all to learn which products convert.
Measure sales, conversions and margins
Five numbers are enough to see where the store is jamming.
The margin is calculated after fees, shipping and returns. It is the only number that says whether the store truly earns, and it is worth reading per product before reading it on the total.
E-commerce or marketplace: which one to choose?
Opening your own online store and selling on Amazon or eBay are not two alternatives, they are two channels with different logics. The marketplace already has the customers. In exchange it keeps a commission on every order and puts you on the same page as whoever sells the same item for two euro less.
Your own store asks you to bring the traffic yourself and in exchange leaves you the brand, the customer data, freedom on pricing and a relationship that can outlast a single order. Many start on a marketplace to learn which products move, then shift sales onto their own site step by step. The two sit together well.
Before you hit publish:
- One complete test order from a phone, payment included.
- Terms of sale, privacy, cookies, shipping and returns all online.
- Delivery times and costs visible before the checkout, not inside it.
- The business account kept apart from the personal one, so margins stay readable.
That last point weighs more than it looks. From the first payment in, keeping the store money apart from personal money is what keeps margins, obligations and returns readable. With the Vivid online business account you open dedicated sub-accounts with an Italian IBAN straight from the app, and every movement stays traceable.
The business account for people who sell online
With the Vivid business account the store takings stay separate from personal spending, and the data reaches the accountant already in order.
Frequently asked questions
How much money do you need to start an e-commerce?
What it costs to open an e-commerce depends on the model. A lean start puts together a domain, the entry plan of the platform, a ready-made theme and the first stock, and stays in the order of a few hundred euro. Then the accountant, INPS contributions and the chamber of commerce fee come back every year, while payment fees move between 1% and 3% per order. The line that grows most is marketing.
Which e-commerce businesses are the most profitable?
The best margins sit where production costs are low and perceived value is high. Digital products such as courses, templates and licences carry no logistics. Specialised niches hold higher prices because direct comparison is rarer, and subscriptions turn a single purchase into recurring revenue. The niche and the margin count for more than the sector itself.
What are the disadvantages of e-commerce?
The online channel asks for steady attention on several fronts. Competition is one click away, so traffic has to be won every month; logistics, returns and support absorb time; the platform needs updating. Stock also wants careful handling. These are all predictable aspects, and budgeting for them alongside the costs of opening an e-commerce means starting with realistic numbers.
What is the average income of an e-commerce?
There is no average income that holds for everyone. The result depends on the sector, the margin per product, average order value, the cost of acquiring customers and the share of repeat purchases. Two stores with the same turnover can close the year very differently. The number to follow is the margin after fees, shipping and returns.
Can you open a website without a partita IVA?
Opening a website and selling on a regular basis are two separate things. Publishing a site, a portfolio or a blog does not in itself require a partita IVA. Once selling becomes continuous and organised, it moves into commercial activity, with the partita IVA, registration with the Registro delle imprese and contributions. Placing a specific case is a job for an accountant.
Note: the contents of this blog are for information purposes and do not constitute legal, tax or investment advice. Requirements, thresholds, ATECO codes and obligations are set by law and change over time, and the prices of the platforms and services mentioned are orders of magnitude to be checked with the respective providers. Before starting a business, speak to qualified professionals.
