How to Build an E-Commerce Site? A Beginner's Guide from Zero to First Sale

In short: Setting up an e-commerce site in Turkey comes down to four jobs: registering your business as a taxpayer, registering the site with ETBİS before you start trading, preparing contracts and a returns process that comply with the Distance Contracts Regulation, and then building the right platform together with its payment and shipping integrations. The legal steps take a few days; the decision that takes the longest, and is the most expensive to fix later, is the choice of infrastructure.

You have a great product and you want to sell it online. It sounds simple, but the first decisions you make when starting out in e-commerce will either let you grow your business with ease months later or trip you up at every step. In this guide we walk through, in order, the steps to take, the legal obligations to meet and the mistakes we see most often when getting an e-commerce site ready for sale from scratch.

1. The business comes first: sole proprietorship or limited company?

Selling online on a regular basis is a commercial activity. To issue invoices, sign contracts with payment providers and register with ETBİS, you need a tax registration. There are two common ways to start:

• Sole proprietorship (şahıs şirketi): faster and cheaper to set up, and often chosen for testing at a small scale. Profits are taxed as the owner's personal income.
• Limited or joint-stock company: more setup and accounting overhead, but it separates liability and looks more established; a better footing if you plan to raise investment or work with large suppliers.

Which one is more advantageous for you depends on your turnover, ownership structure and tax situation. Make this decision with a certified accountant (mali müşavir), and use the same meeting to clarify your e-invoice and e-archive status (see below).

2. ETBİS registration: before the site opens

The Ministry of Trade's Electronic Commerce Information System (ETBİS) is the register of service providers engaged in e-commerce. According to the Ministry's ETBİS page, anyone engaged in e-commerce or intermediary activity must register with ETBİS through the e-Devlet (e-Government) portal before starting operations. Companies register with their MERSİS (central trade registry) number and tax ID, and tradespeople with their national ID number and tax ID; you also declare the domain names and mobile apps you use.

In practice this means: once you have your domain, complete the registration before opening the site for sales. Remember to update it whenever you add a new domain or mobile app.

3. Invoicing: e-archive and e-invoice

Online sales are invoiced like any other sale. Moving to the e-Invoice (e-Fatura) and e-Archive Invoice (e-Arşiv Fatura) systems described on the Revenue Administration's e-Document portal becomes mandatory based on turnover and sector thresholds; taxpayers within the e-Archive system issue their internet sales as e-Archive invoices and state on the invoice that the sale was made online. Because the thresholds change from period to period, we don't quote an exact figure here; check your current status with your accountant.

On the technical side, what matters is that the invoice is issued automatically with the order, not by hand. Make sure from the start that your chosen platform can talk to an e-invoice/e-archive integrator; issuing invoices manually works at a few orders a day, not at a hundred.

4. Legal pages and the sales contract

Selling to consumers at a distance falls under the Distance Contracts Regulation (Mesafeli Sözleşmeler Yönetmeliği). When you design your site, these provisions show up directly on your screens:

• Pre-contract information form (Article 5): before confirming the order, the consumer must see the seller's identity and contact details, the main characteristics of the product, the total price including taxes, delivery and payment information, and the conditions of the right of withdrawal. This form is shown in the checkout step, before the confirmation checkbox.
• 14-day right of withdrawal (Article 9): the consumer may withdraw from the contract within 14 days without giving a reason and without paying a penalty. For goods, the period starts on the day the product is received.
• Refund within 14 days (Article 12): once the withdrawal notice reaches you, you must refund all payments, including any delivery costs, within 14 days, in a manner suited to the payment method the consumer used and in a single payment. If you did not name a carrier for returns in the pre-contract information, you cannot charge the consumer for return shipping.
• Exceptions (Article 15): the right of withdrawal does not apply to cases such as goods made to the consumer's specifications, perishable goods, or goods whose packaging has been opened and which cannot be returned for health and hygiene reasons. If your product falls into one of these groups, state it clearly in the pre-contract information.
• 30-day delivery limit (Article 16): for goods, delivery may in no case take longer than 30 days.

In addition, Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce requires your identifying information (trade name, address, contact details) to be easily accessible to buyers before a contract is made, and requires prior consent for commercial email and SMS. Because you process personal data at checkout and sign-up, your KVKK (Turkey's data protection law) privacy notice and cookie management should be ready from day one; see our data protection checklist for this. The regulation has been amended over time, so we recommend having your contract texts reviewed by a lawyer.

5. The infrastructure decision: which platform?

The most decisive choice in e-commerce is made right at the beginning. The right choice depends on the size of your catalog, your integration needs and your team's technical capacity:

In e-commerce, the real cost isn't building the site; it's being forced to abandon the wrong infrastructure a year later.

When deciding, ask yourself: "What will I need most a year from now?" If you have 30 products today, a ready-made platform is usually the right start. If needs such as dealer pricing, complex stock or production integration are already clear, the framework in our article off-the-shelf or custom software? will settle the decision.

6. Payment infrastructure

There are two common ways to accept card payments in Turkey:

• Payment institutions (e.g. iyzico, PayTR): applications and integration are usually quick, and installment payments with many banks' cards are offered through a single integration. Compare commission and payout (settlement) terms at the proposal stage.
• Your bank's virtual POS: may allow you to negotiate commission at high volume, but each bank requires a separate application and integration.

Whichever you choose, make sure 3D Secure is enabled, that card details are not stored on your server, and that refunds can be made from the admin panel. To meet the 14-day refund period for withdrawals, you should be able to refund with one click in the panel, not by writing to the bank.

7. Shipping and operations

Once you have an agreement with a carrier, the integration needs to do three things automatically: create the shipment record and label from the order, send the tracking number to the customer, and write the delivery status back to the order. Put the carrier and return code you agreed for returns in the pre-contract information form; this reassures the customer and, under the regulation, makes clear who bears the return cost.

8. Pre-launch checklist

1. Tax registration done, e-invoice/e-archive integrator connected.
2. ETBİS registration done; the domain is correct in the record.
3. Pre-contract information form, distance sales contract, returns and withdrawal terms, KVKK privacy notice and cookie policy are published.
4. Trade name, address, phone and email are reachable from every page.
5. A test order was placed with a real card, refunded, and the invoice was issued correctly.
6. A shipment was created and the tracking number reached the customer.
7. The site was tested end to end on a phone: search, product, cart, checkout.
8. Product pages have unique titles and descriptions; the sitemap was submitted to Search Console.
9. Analytics and conversion tracking are set up and work together with KVKK consent.

9. Getting seen and converting

The work isn't done once the site is live; the real challenge is finding visitors and turning them into buyers. A solid technical SEO foundation, product descriptions you write yourself and fast-loading pages should all be considered from day one so your product pages appear in search engines. Measure which devices your visitors use with your own analytics and test the design on those devices. We covered how speed affects sales in our Core Web Vitals article, and how to turn visitors into buyers in our conversion rate guide.

Common mistakes

• Leaving the legal steps for last: ETBİS registration and contract texts are prepared before sales start, not after.
• Copying contracts from another site: another business's return terms, carrier and exceptions won't fit your product.
• Planning to issue invoices by hand: this is the first process to break as orders grow.
• Using manufacturer descriptions as they are: when hundreds of sites use the same text, your product page gives search results no reason to rank it.
• Choosing a platform on the initial price alone: look at the one-year total of subscription, commission, plugin and development costs.

For more, see our article on 8 common mistakes when launching an e-commerce site.

E-commerce isn't a shop window, it's an end-to-end sales machine. At Kodakod, we build your e-commerce infrastructure on WordPress, Shopify, Ticimax, İkas or custom software to match the scale of your business; from payment, shipping, invoicing and stock integrations to SEO and conversion optimization, we set up every link in the chain that leads to a sale, all in one place. For details, visit our e-commerce solutions page.