Building a sales site from scratch

What do you actually need before starting?

Far less than people think. A sales site, when it's born, is a page describing one thing to sell, a button that takes the money, and an address you can send to people. Everything that gets added — the second category, the blog, the newsletter, the loyalty scheme — comes after proof that someone buys.

The real starting question isn't technical, it's commercial: what exactly do you sell, to whom, at what price. While those three answers are fuzzy, no tool will replace them. A perfect site in front of an imprecise offer sells nothing.

The classic trap is starting with the domain name and the logo. They're the only two things you can do without having decided what you sell — which is exactly why people take refuge there.

• An offer: an object, a service, a course, a file. One is enough to start.
• A price decided in advance, not a range.
• Two or three decent photos of what you sell.
• A way to be paid, meaning a payment account in your name.
• An address to share. It doesn't have to be a domain you bought.

Which prerequisites aren't real ones?

The first is administrative. In Switzerland, a sole proprietorship only has to register with the commercial register from CHF 100,000 of annual turnover; below that, registration is optional. What does get declared from day one is self-employed status with the AHV/AVS compensation fund. If you sell alongside a job, or from another country, your situation may differ: your compensation fund and your cantonal tax administration are the authority, not a guide.

The second is technical. You don't need to code, buy a domain name or choose a host in order to sell. A platform supplies the address, the pages and the payment; a domain in your name gets attached later, once the shop is running, without the original address ceasing to work.

The third is a perfect catalogue. Publishing thirty items at once delays going live by weeks and teaches you nothing. A single offer online teaches you in three days what thirty in draft never will.

• A company: not required to start in Switzerland below the register threshold — check your situation with your AHV/AVS fund.
• A purchased domain: useful later, useless for the first sale.
• Knowing how to code: no, provided you go through a platform rather than a bespoke site.
• A full catalogue: one offer is enough to start and to learn.
• A professional logo: redoable any time, and it sells nobody anything at the start.

Bespoke site, platform or marketplace?

Three families of tools exist, and they don't answer the same question. The bespoke site lets you do everything and asks everything of you: skill, budget, maintenance. The platform gives you a shop of your own, with your address and your customer relationship, for a subscription or a commission. The marketplace lends you its audience but keeps the customer: on Etsy or Amazon, the buyer is their buyer first.

For someone starting from scratch, the trade-off is between two risks: never going live (bespoke site) and never owning your audience (marketplace). The platform is the usual compromise, precisely because it leaves the customer relationship on the right side.

Nothing forces a permanent choice. Plenty of makers sell on a marketplace for volume and keep their own shop for repeat customers, new releases and decent margins.

How do you actually take the money?

Selling online assumes a payment provider: it takes the customer's card, checks the transaction and pays you out. On Mopsee that role belongs to Stripe, and the shop simply refuses to create a payment while your account isn't verified.

That verification isn't a platform formality: it's imposed on every merchant, everywhere, and covers your identity and bank details. It's the one wait in the process that depends neither on you nor on the tool you pick. Have an ID document and your IBAN ready, and start the process the day you create the shop, not the night before your launch.

Which payment methods your customer is offered — cards, wallets, local methods — depends on what your payment account enables. The currency is your shop's: in Switzerland, the franc by default.

How do you get first customers with no budget?

First customers almost never come from a Google search: at the start your shop has no history, and search engines take weeks to take it seriously. They come from people who already know you, or from the place where your work is visible.

The most common mistake is announcing the shop once and then waiting. Going live isn't an event, it's a starting point: show the making, the behind-the-scenes, one product at a time, and put the link back every time. The link has to be shareable anywhere, which means a short address of your own.

Search visibility, meanwhile, builds in the background. It starts producing visits when the pages have existed long enough to be indexed and the product pages are precise enough to answer a question. It's a deferred return, not a launch channel.

• Tell the people who already said "let me know when you sell", one by one.
• Put the shop link in the bio of every network you post on.
• Publish the process, not just the finished piece: that's what gets shared.
• Answer every question in public — the answer serves the next person.
• Don't run ads until the page converts the visitors you bring by hand.