A friend messaged me last week: “I want to start an online store, which platform should I use?” My first question back was what he’s selling and to whom. He paused for a good few seconds. That’s a pretty common moment — most people picture the website first and the business around it second. The website is actually the easy part; you can have one built or set up in a week or two. Everything else takes longer and matters more.
Registration: sole proprietor status, group, and activity code
For online retail in Ukraine, most people register as a sole proprietor (ФОП) under the second or third simplified tax group. Group two is cheaper — a flat monthly tax, currently around a thousand hryvnias plus social contributions — but it caps your annual income and mostly limits you to selling to individuals, not companies. Group three is more flexible: 5% of income (or 3% plus VAT if you work with VAT-registered clients), no restriction on who you sell to, and a higher income cap.
The activity code for an online shop is 47.91 — retail sale via mail order or the internet. If you also make the product yourself, say you sew clothing and sell it, add a separate manufacturing code too; tax authorities look at that code specifically, not just the trading one.
Registration itself takes about fifteen minutes through the Diia app, no trip to the tax office required. Before you do it, though, it’s worth an hour with an accountant or reading a few Telegram channels for sole proprietors — the limits and rates get updated fairly often, and it’s easy to miss a change if you’re relying on memory.
Picking a niche you can actually fulfill
The common mistake is choosing a niche because it’s trending on TikTok rather than because you have real access to the product and the margin can survive advertising costs. Consumer electronics look tempting until you run the numbers and realize there are dozens of large players buying at prices you’ll never match. A narrow niche tends to work better early on — not “clothing” but, say, “maternity wear in plus sizes.” Fewer competitors, a clearer audience, and ad copy gets easier to write when you know exactly who you’re talking to.
A simple test: would you buy this item online yourself, sight unseen? If not, think about what offsets that hesitation for other buyers — reviews, video, a clear return policy.
Suppliers: your own stock, dropshipping, or China
There are really three routes. First, holding your own stock: you buy a batch upfront, store it at home or in a small unit, and ship it yourself. Best margin, but your money sits tied up in inventory and there’s a real risk of ending up with stock nobody wants.
Second, dropshipping through a Ukrainian supplier — they hold the stock, you take the order and pass it along. No frozen cash, but thinner margins and you’re at the mercy of someone else’s shipping timelines. Third, importing from China through 1688 or Alibaba, often also run as dropshipping via a middleman. Cheaper upfront, slower delivery — two to four weeks — and you should budget for some percentage of items arriving damaged or not quite matching the photos.
Early on, mixing approaches makes sense: keep a small stock of your best sellers at home for fast shipping, and source the rest of the catalog to order.
Payments: taking money legally
A sole proprietor sets up card processing through a bank or payment service. LiqPay (run by PrivatBank) and Monobank Acquiring are the two most common choices for a small store — both can be set up online within a couple of days, with fees typically around 2.5-3% per transaction. Both plug into pretty much any platform — WooCommerce, Prom, Shopify, a custom build — usually through a ready-made plugin or module.
Cash on delivery through Nova Poshta is still popular too, especially for new stores without a track record yet — customers pay on pickup, which builds trust faster than prepayment alone. The downside is that a share of parcels come back unopened, and you’re covering shipping both ways on those. Early on it’s worth offering both options and watching your refusal rate over the first month.
Delivery: Nova Poshta and beyond
Nova Poshta is the de facto standard for Ukrainian e-commerce — branches in nearly every town, parcel lockers, courier delivery. Ukrposhta is cheaper but slower and less convenient for the buyer; it works better as a backup option for customers in smaller towns without a Nova Poshta branch nearby. Integration with Nova Poshta ships with pretty much every off-the-shelf platform and CMS — the API is open, and even a custom build can hook into it without much extra work.
The platform: a decision, not a project
This is where the website question actually belongs, and the right answer depends on budget and ambition. For your first sales, a marketplace like Prom.ua or Rozetka is often enough — they already bring traffic, so you can test a niche without building a separate site at all. Once a product starts selling, moving to your own store makes sense: an off-the-shelf CMS like WooCommerce or OpenCart to launch, custom development later once traffic or specific processes outgrow a template. We covered the technical side of that launch in more detail in a separate article, “How to Build an Online Store from Scratch.”
First sales without a marketing agency budget
Instagram and TikTok are the cheapest channel to start with, especially for products that photograph or film well. You don’t need a professional shoot right away — a phone and decent daylight are enough for your first posts.
Google Ads and Meta ads are worth turning on once early sales have already confirmed people want the product — otherwise you risk burning a budget advertising something the market doesn’t actually want. Price comparison sites like Hotline or the Prom.ua marketplace bring in traffic almost as soon as you list a product, and that channel gets overlooked by a lot of first-time sellers.
What first-timers usually underestimate
- Time spent processing orders and answering customer questions — it’s not ten minutes a day, especially early on when every question is a new one.
- Returns and exchanges — worth mapping out before your first sale, not after your first complaint.
- Tax bookkeeping — even under the simplified system you need to keep an income ledger and file on time.
A store launched in two weeks usually outlasts one that spent six months getting “perfect” before opening. First batch of stock, sole proprietor registration, first Instagram post — a month later you’ll already know whether the niche works. The rest gets figured out along the way.
