🧩 Essential Prerequisites Before Starting an Ecommerce Project

Before you even begin maintenance—or even launch day—there are some critical steps every Indian ecommerce business must prepare. These steps dramatically reduce delays, prevent payment integration issues, and streamline your logistics from day one.

🧾Business Documentation & Compliance Setup

Many new ecommerce store owners overlook basic documentation, causing delays during payment gateway approval and GST invoicing. Ensure you have:

  • Active GST number (mandatory for most products)
  • PAN card & business registration certificate
  • Bank account in the business name
  • UDYAM registration (optional but helpful for MSMEs)

🚚Logistics & Shipping Partner Accounts

Before launch, create accounts with at least one major logistics partner. Popular choices include Delhivery, Bluedart, Shiprocket, Ekart, and XpressBees. This ensures seamless integration into your ecommerce website, especially if built with ecommerce website development in India services.

💳Payment Gateway Readiness

Every store needs an active payment gateway account. Before launch, ensure you have applied for or completed verification for:

  • Razorpay / Stripe / PayU account
  • UPI AutoPay setup
  • International payment enablement (optional)

📦Inventory & SKU System Setup

If your product catalog lacks standardized inventory or SKU codes, your operations will become chaotic. Set unified SKU formats before launch.

🎯Marketing & Tracking Tools Prepared

Most owners forget this and end up with missing analytics data. Prepare:

  • Google Analytics (GA4)
  • Google Search Console
  • Meta Pixel
  • WhatsApp Business & broadcast template approvals

🗂️Backup Strategy & Hosting Disaster Recovery Plan

Before launch, you must define how frequently you will back up your store (daily/weekly). A disaster recovery plan prevents total data loss.

The Mandatory Security and Technical Checklist

In today's world, digital payments are growing rapidly, and the first step is to keep customer data safe and protected. To keep data safe, your first line of defense is the maintenance of your website, which can help prevent threats and downtime.

Software Updates & Patching

If you are using Shopify, WooCommerce, or any custom-built ecommerce website platform. It is important to keep updated on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis and continuously monitor server logs for suspicious activity. Malware easily attacks outdated platforms.

Daily Backups and Uptime Monitoring

You must ensure that your website is backed up regularly. The backup should consist of your database and system files. Whenever your website crashes or you experience server failure or a security breach, a backed-up system will minimize your costly downtime. Every second your store is down means that you are losing business to your competitors.

Mobile-First Performance Optimization

India is a growing market in the digital era, with 800 million internet users nationwide. The majority of users are shopping via mobile phone. To grab this opportunity, your website should be very fast on slow Internet connections and offer a seamless user experience.

Page Speed, Caching, and CDN

A slow website kills the interest of your website users. They will be forced to use your competitor’s website. Therefore, all high-resolution images were compressed to the next-generation image format (WebP or AVIF format). Minify your css and javascript files, use browser caching, aimed for a load time below 2–3 seconds.

Simplify Mobile Navigation

Mobile-friendly websites are preferred by search engines, and users find them easy to navigate. This results in an order from users and ranking boosting in the search engine. Ensure that your website menu is clear and concise, with a visible search bar.

Continuous Content Refresh and SEO

Search engines reward higher rankings with active and fresh content. Maintenance is an ongoing process that keeps your website live and visible to users and search engines.

Local SEO and Google My Business

If your business has a local presence in any city in India, local SEO is crucial. By keeping your Google local businesses updated, you can localize client leads or inquiries.

Implement and Audit Schema Markup

One of the critical parts of SEO is Schema Markup, also known as structured data. This helps search engines better understand your content. For e-commerce websites, ensure that you have a valid product schema, review schema, and FAQ schema. To check your product page schema visit Schema markup tool by Google.

Monitor Analytics for Conversion Funnel Drops

You should also integrate Google Analytics with your website to analyze the steps leading to your checkout page.

The Checkout and Trust Factors

The checkout page is where sales are made. Maintaining the product, checkout, and payment pages makes user purchases faster and more reliable.

Payment Gateway Testing and UPI Integration

Always run a test transaction once a month to ensure that all your payment gateways are working the way you want. Ensure that credit cards, UPI, Mobile wallets, and debit cards are integrated properly and functioning flawlessly.

Managing and Displaying Social Proof

Always ask customers for their reviews. This helps build store credibility. Show reviews on each product page and all reviews on the homepage or front page. This will help customers buy your product with trust and reliability.

Strategic Marketing & Customer Retention

A successful ecommerce business relies on repeat purchases. Maintenance extends beyond the technical to include the platforms where your customers engage.

Optimize for Social Commerce & WhatsApp

Indian e-commerce is heavily influenced by social platforms. Ensure deep integration with WhatsApp Business for customer support, order updates, and personalized offers. Use Instagram and Facebook Shop integrations to create a seamless shopping experience directly from social media feeds.

Email Marketing and Loyalty Automation

Set up automated email flows for abandoned carts, welcome sequences for new subscribers, and personalized re-engagement campaigns for inactive users. Maintaining this automation ensures customers are brought back to your site without constant manual effort.

Financial and Legal Compliance

The regulatory environment in India evolves quickly. Staying compliant with financial and consumer laws protects your business from penalties and ensures ethical operations.

GST and Tax Configuration Updates

Ensure your e-commerce platform's tax calculations (specifically GST) are always up to date and correctly applied based on product category and shipping location. Tax discrepancies can lead to major compliance issues and customer complaints.

Consumer Protection and Returns Policies

Regularly review and update your Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, and Returns/Refund Policy to align with the latest Consumer Protection Act rules. Clear, accessible policies build immense trust and mitigate legal risks in the eyes of the consumer.

Advanced Core Web Vitals (CWV) & Technical SEO

Google uses Core Web Vitals (CWV) as a direct ranking signal. Moving from "adequate" to "excellent" on these metrics requires specialized maintenance focused on user experience signals.

Optimizing for CLS and Interactivity (INP)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the measure of visual stability. The key maintenance task is to always reserve space for dynamic content. This means explicitly defining the `width` and `height` attributes for *all* images and video embeds. For banner ads or dynamic elements, pre-allocate space using CSS to prevent content from jumping down as these elements load.

Interactivity to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness to user input. Combat poor INP by auditing third-party scripts (especially trackers and marketing tags). Defer or asynchronously load non-critical JavaScript. Use browser tools to identify and break up long-running JavaScript tasks that block the main thread and delay user interaction.

Mastering Logistics and Returns (Reverse Logistics)

Operational efficiency is a non-technical form of maintenance that drastically affects customer satisfaction, which in turn fuels positive social proof and SEO.

Seamless Reverse Logistics for Trust

In India, a simple, hassle-free returns process (reverse logistics) is a massive differentiator. Maintenance involves integrating your store with a reliable third-party logistics (3PL) provider that specializes in returns and COD collection across diverse pin codes. Test the returns portal monthly to ensure customers can initiate a pickup with minimal clicks.

Pin Code Serviceability Audit

Regularly audit your serviceability matrix. Due to rapid infrastructure changes, your 3PL partner's coverage changes. Upload your latest pin code list to your platform and ensure the serviceability checker is accurate. Showing a customer an available pin code only to deny service at checkout is a critical trust failure that must be avoided.