E-commerce Stores

A registered business entity and a merchant account in the business's name at the payment provider. That is a banking and regulatory process, not a programming one; it can take weeks and it can be refused. The store gets built, tested and fully working without taking a single payment until the account arrives — so the application opens in parallel with development, not after it.

A ready-made platform is enough for most stores selling standard products through a normal checkout, and it is a faster, cheaper start with nothing wrong with it. Development becomes necessary when the selling path itself is non-standard — pricing by weight or size, subscriptions, bookings, or a deep link to an existing stock system the platform does not support.

Shipping and payment. A shipping cost that appears suddenly at the last step, or a payment method your audience doesn't use, drop more carts than the price itself. So shipping is shown early in the path rather than at checkout, and payment methods are chosen by what your audience actually uses.

You do, from the admin panel. The more important question is not how but how often, and who inside the team — a catalogue nobody updates becomes stale prices in front of the customer, which is worse than having no store. If there is no existing system to pull from, the speed of the entry panel becomes a condition rather than a nicety.

Usually not at the start. The website is what gets you found by people who don't know you, through search and advertising; an app serves returning customers. If there is no repeat purchase yet, a store first is the sounder call — the app is a next step built on an audience that exists rather than on hope.