First day: online store

An online store on the platform is a location's storefront that behaves like a shop rather than a menu: a catalog with variants, faceted filters, a product page, a cart, checkout with coupons and taxes, delivery and payment collection. The "Online store" business type is chosen at sign-up or changed later in the location settings.

What is on from the start: the catalog, "Websites" (the storefront and its design), inventory, couriers, customers, staff, finance, "Commerce", "Shipments" and "Returns". The till for an online store is off by default — if you switch it on, it looks its own way rather than "like a restaurant's"; tables, the kitchen display and "Devices" are off too. The "Shipments" and "Returns" sections exist only for a store and an online store — food venues do not have them at all.

What you need to get started#

An online store needs no hardware on day one — it needs a computer and a catalog.

• Any computer to work in the panel. The storefront lives on the customer's phone; they do not install an app.
• A file with your products — Excel, CSV, a PDF price list, price-list photos or a link to a site that already has your catalog.
• Product photos. If you have none, the card can be completed by AI: a product shot on a white background is generated from the name, and the description and tags come from the ✨ button in the card editor.
• Payment credentials — access to your country's payment provider account if you want to accept online payments on day one. Otherwise start with "pay on collection".
• A printer — only once shipments appear: carrier labels and the handover register print on an ordinary printer. A receipt printer and a fiscal printer are needed if the store also has an offline counter — then see First day: retail store.

The common frame of the first day#

The common steps (sign-up, location, business type, languages, subscription, help) are described in the hub First day: choose your business type. What follows is specific to selling online.

1. Check the location's business type. "Online store" switches the storefront into shop mode: a catalog and product pages like /product/name instead of a conversational menu, and product markup for search engines instead of a restaurant menu.
2. Load the catalog by import (see the checklists below) — there is no need to type cards in by hand.
3. Look at the storefront as a customer. Open it on a phone: categories, photos, prices, filters, search, the product page, the cart. What the customer sees is the source of truth for orders and shipments.
4. Set up "Commerce" (/commerce): shipping methods, tax rules, coupons. An empty tax table is pre-filled from the preset of the location's country — but it only takes effect after you press "Save".
5. Walk the whole customer path yourself — from the product page to payment and the order email. That is the only check that catches a forgotten shipping method or tax.

⚠️ If you chose the light mode at sign-up, some sections are switched off. Exactly which ones is listed on the "Currently off" screen in the app store.

Checklist: a catalog from a file or another store#

The goal of day one is to move your range without typing and without breeding duplicates.

1. Choose the import path. A plain CSV in a Shopify-compatible schema (one row = one variant; the variant id is deterministic, so a repeat upload does not create duplicates, and an unmapped column does not wipe a field); an AI import from Excel, Word, PDF or price-list photos; or a site crawl — "the whole catalog by sitemap" (up to 20,000 items, with an ETA and a "Stop the crawl" button) or a single listing page. There is a toggle for transferring photos.
2. Review the plan before committing. The AI import shows the items with checkboxes: you can edit the name, price and category inline, duplicates against the current catalog and inside the import itself are flagged, and category trees are created from paths like "Clothing > Men > Shirts".
3. Moving from an existing store — the Migrate to us wizard: an InSales or Shopify export, plus a separate "Stock" track (the dictionary and a goods receipt with purchase prices). There are no direct connectors into other admin panels — we work from exports.
4. Variants and characteristics. The "Colour / Size / Material" axes give every combination its own SKU with its own price, barcode and stock; the attributes for faceted filters come from the characteristics dictionary with its AI wizard: Product characteristics.
5. Categories and collections — categories are the structure, collections are storefront groups for marketing.
6. Catalog export into the same CSV — in case you want to keep the price list in an external file.

Devices you need: a computer only. What can honestly wait: characteristics across the whole catalog (start with the one category you will filter by), editorial blocks on the cards, your own domain.

Checklist: online only and dropshipping#

The goal of day one is for an order to be payable and handed over to a carrier.

1. Storefront design — the "Websites" section (/websites): a live visual editor for the design (logo, cover, colours, font), the location's WEB settings, the site's articles and pages.
2. Shipping methods — "Commerce" → "Shipping": pickup, a flat rate, free above a threshold, local delivery by radius from the warehouse, zone-based rates, carrier adapters (their rate is computed by the carrier itself).
3. Carriers and their credentials — the "Carriers" dialog in the shipments queue or in the location's WEB settings: cards for the carriers of the location's country (CDEK, Russian Post, Yandex Delivery, 5Post, ApiShip, Trackings.GE, Exline, Kazpost, Nova Poshta), sender fields, private credentials and a "Test connection" button — the answer is honestly marked as live or as a sandbox.
4. Payment — Payments: hosted payment by a provider for your country (Stripe, PayPal, Square, Airwallex, PayTabs, iyzico, BOG and TBC in Georgia) or payment on collection. ⚠️ Eight of the 76 providers in the registry are live — check that yours is there before you announce the store.
5. Order rules — minimum, step and maximum quantity per item, personalisation fields (engraving, an inscription), a blocklist and a cap on unpaid orders, a "storefront closed" mode with your own text: Online store.
6. Customer notifications — the order email and the tracking email go out automatically; a tracking number can be entered by hand if the delivery does not go through our engine.
7. Stock accounting is optional. Dropshipping does not need it: items without stock accounting are sold without an availability check. If you do need it — Inventory.

Devices you need: a computer; a printer once labels appear. What can honestly wait: the customer account and the wishlist, gift cards, the affiliate programme.

Checklist: selling through feeds and marketplaces#

The goal of day one is to understand what exactly will travel into the ad account — and to keep empty cards out of it.

1. Card completeness comes first. The feed carries the name, description, photo, price, availability, brand, barcode (GTIN) and category. A product without a photo and a price will be rejected by the platform — the completeness indicator in the editor shows what is missing.
2. Connect the feed with a card in the app store. The platform generates a public feed itself and refreshes it whenever a card is edited; you paste the link into the ad account once: Google Merchant Center, Yandex Products, Meta, Criteo, Pinterest, Microsoft, TikTok.
3. Mind the country limits on the cards. The Google card is hidden if no location in the account is on a Google market (the extension is unavailable in Russia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria); the Yandex Products card is shown only to accounts with locations in Russia.
4. Remember that a feed is not a marketplace. There are no orders inside Google, Yandex or Meta: the customer follows the link to your storefront and orders there. So the storefront, payment and delivery must be ready before you launch a feed.
5. SEO and a domain — so that a click from the feed lands on a decent address: Custom domain, SEO and storefront promotion.
6. Marketplaces as an order channel. The app store holds a catalog of the world's product marketplaces — it answers the question "who will accept a seller in my country and under which exchange model". There is currently no live connection that brings a marketplace order into your panel, so plan your sales around your own storefront.

Devices you need: a computer only. What can honestly wait: everything except one feed. Start with the platform where you already buy advertising.

What can wait#

• Your own domain — Custom domain: the storefront works on the brand domain straight away.
• The customer account, the wishlist, "notify me when back in stock" — switch them on later; the value appears with repeat purchases.
• Gift cards and coupons — Commerce: needed for your first sale, not your first order.
• The affiliate programme and referral links — in the same section.
• Popups and abandoned carts — My website. ⚠️ Abandoned-cart nudges and lifecycle campaigns are executed by a cron on the AWS contour only: on cenaly.ru they can be configured but will not fire on schedule.
• RMA returns — Returns and exchanges: not needed on day one, but the setup takes minutes.
• Reviews, reputation and newsletters — once the first orders are fulfilled.

Limitations worth knowing up front#

The online store vertical works, but it has honest loose ends — plan around them.

• There are no stock reservations. Two customers can order the last item at the same time: the server will not let them pay for what is gone (and will show which lines fell short), but it cannot "hold" an item during checkout.
• On cenaly.ru there is effectively no online payment. YooKassa is implemented but not connected; the customer pays on collection or through the acquiring bank's link.
• /returns (RMA) are unavailable on cenaly.ru — the section is hidden and the storefront has no "request a return" button. A till refund and an order cancellation do not depend on it.
• Not every carrier prints labels — only CDEK, Trackings.GE and Exline; for the rest the adapter only quotes a rate and you take the label from the carrier's own account.
• The shipments queue is built from the last 300 rows — when it is truncated, a note is printed under the list.
• Store Studio opens only for locations of the "Retail" type. An online store is designed with the visual editor and the WEB settings in the "Websites" section.
• There is no bulk catalog editor and no product analytics yet — edits go card by card or through a repeat CSV import.

Troubleshooting#

The products loaded but the storefront is empty. Check that storefront publishing is on in the location settings, that the products are published (the Published column in CSV) and that the categories contain products.

The customer cannot place an order. Most likely no shipping method is set, or the "storefront closed" mode is on — both live in "Commerce" and in the storefront settings.

The checkout total does not match the catalog. The line price is computed on the server: if the catalog changed, the customer is returned to the cart with a new total. Check whether the price changed during checkout.

Payment does not start although the item is "in stock". Before payment the server compares the cart against stock and shows which lines fell short. Check the stock levels in Inventory.

The feed is connected but the platform rejects the products. The usual causes are a missing photo, a missing price, a missing GTIN, or a link to an unreachable page. See the requirements section in your feed's own article.

The order went to the carrier but there is no tracking number. Not every adapter can print a label (see the limitations) — enter the tracking number by hand in the "Shipment" block of the order card.

FAQ#

Do I need a separate account if I already have an offline store?#

No. The business type is a property of the location: the offline location can be "Retail" while online sales run from the same or a separate location in the same account.

Can I move a catalog from another website?#

Yes, the AI import can crawl a site by its sitemap or parse a listing page. Only move your own data and your own photos — someone else's catalog and photos must not be copied.

Is a product in five colours five products?#

Whichever suits you. Variants of one product (the "Colour/Size" axes) live in a single card, while separate colour cards are shown on the storefront as swatch circles that swap the photo and the price on click.

Do I have to accept online payments?#

No. "Pay on collection" always works; online payment is connected through your country's provider when you are ready.

Does semantic search work on a small catalog?#

Yes. In a store, semantic search and the AI shopping assistant are on regardless of catalog size.

What happens to orders if the connection drops?#

The storefront and checkout live in the cloud: the customer simply cannot place an order until the connection is back. Only the till works offline — see If the internet goes down.

Related articles#

• First day: choose your business type — the common steps and the other formats
• Online store: storefront and sales — catalog, facets, product page and checkout in full
• Commerce — coupons, shipping, taxes, gift cards, affiliates
• AI catalog import — a price list from Excel, PDF, a photo or a website
• Migrate to us — exports from InSales, Shopify and other systems
• Returns and exchanges (RMA) — the customer's request, the decision, the money
• SEO and storefront promotion · Custom domain
• First day: retail store — if you also have a counter