From a factory town to a live storefront: the 0-to-1 checklist
You have the stock and the product photos, just never built a storefront. Six stages compressed into a checklist you can tick off, each with a completion standard and a link to the deep-dive article.
This is a checklist, not an article
The previous eleven articles each covered one thing; this one threads them together: prepare, build, take payments, launch, get indexed, operate. Each stage gives you items to tick off and one line on what “done” means.
Do not try to do it all at once — work through the stages in order and finish one before starting the next. That is far faster than running six things in parallel.
Stage 1 · Prepare: products and assets
This stage costs no technical money but decides how smoothly everything after it goes.
- Pick 3 to 5 hero SKUs — do not open with hundreds; an unclear hero makes the page impossible to design
- Prepare product photos (a white-background main image plus lifestyle shots) and write the specs as a list
- Work out the landed price: cost + shipping + payment fees + your margin
- Decide who you are selling to and where — this drives language, currency and logistics
Stage 2 · Build: skeleton first, beauty later (prompts 1 and 2)
People with stock in hand get stuck on design first. The first version only has to be readable, clickable and able to take an order — everything else comes from iteration.
Build me a storefront selling [product category] to [customer type] in [target market], clean and airy style with product photos in the foreground. Start with five pages: home, product list, product detail, about and contact.
Fill in three more pages: returns policy (conditions and window), shipping and delivery coverage (including expected timing), and about (operating entity and contact details). Link all three from the footer.
Stage 3 · Payments: your accounts, your keys (prompt 3)
The Stripe or PayPal accounts are yours to open — we do not open them or collect on your behalf. Your job is to configure the keys into the site so buyers pay into your own account.
Wire payments into the site: overseas buyers pay with Stripe and PayPal in USD, with keys read from server-side environment variables; on success, clear the cart, generate an order number and write it to the database; on cancellation, keep the cart.
Stage 4 · Launch: domain, mobile, real payment (prompt 4)
Launch is not a button; it is these three checks passing.
- Domain attached and HTTPS working
- Click every page on a phone — most of your buyers are on one
- Run one real minimum-amount payment on your live account, refund included
Pre-launch check: does every page hold up on a phone; do the title and description state what the shop sells; do product images load smoothly; does the full order flow work (accept it with a real minimum-amount payment)?
Stage 5 · Indexing: let Baidu find it (prompt 5)
A finished storefront nobody can find may as well not exist. Get the three on-site pieces ready (robots, sitemap, titles) and then submit in the console.
Add robots.txt and sitemap.xml: allow public pages and point at the sitemap, block admin and API paths; list the home page, section pages, each article and the policy pages, excluding anything that requires sign-in.
Stage 6 · Operate: three numbers a week
Two extremes follow launch: ignoring it completely, or fiddling with it daily. The reasonable middle is half an hour a week, three numbers, one change.
- Traffic: is anyone arriving (if not, fix indexing and distribution first)
- Add-to-cart rate: do visitors put things in the cart (if not, fix the detail page and price)
- Conversion rate: do they pay (if not, check shipping, payment methods, trust pages)
- Each week, note the questions customers ask most and fix the page that should answer them — the cheapest source of improvements there is
The one-page checklist
The six stages compressed into a list to tick off:
- 3 to 5 hero SKUs chosen, photos and specs ready
- Landed price worked out: cost + shipping + fees + margin
- Target market decided (language, currency, logistics)
- Five pages generated and reviewed: home / list / detail / about / contact
- Returns, shipping and coverage written up and linked in the footer
- Payment accounts opened, keys on the server only
- One real minimum-amount payment run on the live account, refund included
- Domain attached, HTTPS working, every page clicked on a phone
- robots.txt and sitemap.xml reachable, site verified and sitemap submitted
- Analytics installed so you know weekly traffic / add-to-cart / conversion
Further reading: pick the one that matches where you are stuck
If you are not sure where to start, use this to find the matching article:
- Still choosing tooling: how to choose an AI website builder
- Pet supplies: the storefront in six prompts, step by step
- Cosmetics: page structure and required modules
- Electronics: structuring an electronics storefront
- Stuck on payments: wiring Stripe and PayPal
- Stuck on indexing: getting indexed by Baidu
- Running ads: a landing page that converts
- Running a campaign: pages in hours
- Watching the numbers: dashboards without code
- Costing it out: what a website actually costs
- Just starting: what a one-sentence website can do
FAQ
The three questions we hear most from factory-town sellers:
- Can I do this without export experience? — Yes, but accept that you learn as you go: get one category live and taking payments before expanding. A rough first version is normal.
- Should I start domestic or overseas? — Whichever your customers are. Domestic means filing and Alipay or WeChat Pay; overseas means Stripe or PayPal in USD. The structures and compliance differ, so pick one lane first.
- How do I handle logistics? — Use a freight forwarder or your platform's cross-border service; confirm rates and coverage with whichever you choose. The shipping and coverage shown on your pages must match reality.
Next step
If you want to run through this checklist, start from any of the links below — use the free tier to get a first version live, then decide whether to continue.