If you're setting up a new store and you're not sure where to start, here's the order we'd do it in. This is the sequence that comes from doing this for ourselves and, through our agency, for a lot of other brands.
Day 1 — Set up the bones, nothing more
Sign up, pick a theme or the blank canvas, and get your domain pointed at Orbit. That's it. Don't try to design the whole site on day one. Resist the urge to pick colours and fonts before you know what the content actually is.
Day 2 — Add your first 5 products properly
Just five. Not your whole catalogue. Five products, with proper photos, proper descriptions, proper prices, proper stock counts, and a variant or two if you have them. This is the template the rest of your catalogue will follow — if the first five are good, the rest come easy. If they're rushed, you'll be re-doing 500 of them later.
Day 3 — Checkout and payments
Connect your payment provider. Place a test order on your own phone, using a real card (you can refund yourself). Check the receipt, the order confirmation email, and the admin view of the order. This is the one workflow you cannot afford to be broken at launch.
Day 4 — Shipping and tax
Decide your shipping zones, rates, and free-shipping threshold (if any). Set your tax settings for the regions you sell to. Both of these are boring to think about and catastrophic to get wrong — a customer being charged the wrong tax at checkout is a lost sale and, sometimes, a legal problem.
Day 5 — The pages nobody reads, until they do
Returns policy. Shipping policy. Terms. Privacy policy. Contact page. These sound like the last thing on your list, but customers check them right before they buy, and payment providers require most of them anyway. Get them done.
Day 6 — Design pass
Now that you know what the site contains, design it. Set your brand colours, upload your logo, write the homepage copy, pick the fonts. This is the fun part — and it's easier when the content is already there than when you're designing around empty placeholder boxes.
Day 7 — Soft launch
Don't announce publicly yet. Send the URL to 5–10 friends, family, or early supporters. Ask them to buy something. Watch what they get stuck on. Fix those things. Then announce.
The bit most people skip is day 7. It's the single most valuable day of the week.