How to Build a E-commerce Store as a Solo Developer

What You're Building

An e-commerce store is an online storefront where you sell physical or digital products directly to customers. This could be anything from custom t-shirts to digital templates to handmade jewelry. The beauty of building your own store instead of using Etsy or Amazon is that you own the customer relationship and keep way more of the revenue.

I helped a friend set up an e-commerce store for her candle business in 2024. She'd been selling on Etsy and losing about 15% to fees. Moving to her own store cut that to under 3% (just Stripe fees). That math alone makes it worth the effort.

Difficulty & Timeline

Recommended Tech Stack

For a solo developer, you don't want to build a payment system from scratch. That's insane. Use Shopify's Storefront API with a custom Next.js frontend, or go full headless with Medusa.js if you want total control. For simpler stores, even a static site with Stripe Checkout works surprisingly well.

Here's my honest recommendation for most people. If you're selling fewer than 50 products, use Next.js with Stripe. If you need inventory management, shipping calculations, and a full product catalog, use Medusa.js or Saleor as your backend. Skip WooCommerce unless you already know WordPress well.

Step-by-Step Plan

Phase 1: Foundation (Week 1-2)

Pick your approach based on what you're selling. Digital products? Next.js plus Stripe Checkout is all you need. Physical products with variants, shipping, and inventory? Set up Medusa.js.

Start with your product catalog. Get your data model right first. Products, variants (size, color), pricing, images. I've seen too many solo developers jump straight into the fancy UI and then realize their data structure can't handle basic things like "this shirt comes in 3 sizes and 4 colors." Model your data before you touch CSS.

Set up Stripe early. Create your account, add your products, and get a basic checkout flow working. You should be able to buy something from your store by the end of week one, even if the site looks terrible.

Phase 2: Core Features (Week 2-3)

Build the product listing page, individual product pages, and a cart. The cart is where most solo developers waste time. Here's a shortcut that I wish someone had told me earlier. Use Stripe Checkout Sessions instead of building a custom cart. You pass an array of line items, Stripe handles the checkout page, and you get a webhook when payment succeeds. No cart state management, no checkout form validation, no PCI compliance headaches.

If you absolutely need a custom cart experience, use Zustand for state management. It's simpler than Redux and handles cart persistence out of the box with a localStorage middleware.

Add product images using Cloudflare R2 or even just Vercel Blob storage. Don't overthink image hosting early on.

Phase 3: Polish & Launch (Week 3-4)

Add order confirmation emails (Resend or SendGrid), a basic order tracking page, and your shipping configuration. Set up your domain and deploy.

For physical products, integrate a shipping calculator. EasyPost has a decent free tier and handles USPS, UPS, and FedEx rates. For digital products, set up automatic delivery via email after purchase.

Write product descriptions that actually sell. This is where most developer-built stores fail. The tech is fine, but the copy reads like a database dump. Spend real time on this.

Monetization Strategy

You're selling products, so the monetization is built in. But think about expanding revenue per customer. Offer bundles at a slight discount. Add a subscription option for consumable products (coffee, supplements, supplies). Sell digital add-ons alongside physical products.

One thing I've noticed works incredibly well for solo e-commerce stores is email marketing. Capture emails with a 10% discount popup, then send a simple weekly email with new products or restocks. Mailchimp's free tier handles this until you hit 500 subscribers. After that, switch to something like Buttondown or Loops.

Your margins matter more than your revenue. A store doing $5k/month with 60% margins is better than a store doing $15k/month with 10% margins. Focus on products where you control the pricing and the supply chain.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Building a custom payment system. Just use Stripe. I cannot stress this enough. Every hour you spend on payment processing is an hour you're not spending on your actual product. Stripe Checkout handles taxes, multiple currencies, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 3D Secure. You literally cannot build something better as a solo developer.

Ignoring mobile. Over 60% of e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices. If your store doesn't work on a phone, you're losing more than half your potential customers. Test on a real phone, not just Chrome DevTools.

Adding too many products at launch. Start with 5-10 products. Seriously. A store with 10 great products converts better than a store with 200 mediocre ones. You can always add more later.

Skipping analytics. Install Plausible or Umami from day one. You need to know which products people look at, where they drop off, and which traffic sources actually convert. Flying blind with an e-commerce store is a recipe for wasting ad money later.

Is This Worth Building?

Yes, if you have something to sell. The mistake most developers make is building the store before having a product. Don't do that. Find the product first, validate demand (even if it's just asking people on Reddit or Twitter), and then build the store.

The technical part of e-commerce is mostly solved. The hard part is finding products people want and getting traffic. If you already have an audience, a following, or a niche you understand well, building your own store is almost always better than selling on a marketplace. The margins are better, you own the customer data, and you can build exactly the experience you want.

If you don't have a product yet but want to practice, build a store for someone else. Charge them for it. You'll learn the tech, make some money, and have a portfolio piece. That's how I got started, and it was way more motivating than building a store for imaginary products.