How to make an online shop in Bulgaria: step by step
From picking a platform to the first order - catalogue, couriers, payment and launch, with no code and no agency.
Step 1: choose how you will build the shop
You have three routes: pay an agency for a custom site, assemble a shop yourself in a website builder, or start with a ready-made platform. The agency is expensive and takes months; the builder is cheap, but then you chase plugins for couriers, payment and invoices on your own. A ready platform comes with all of that built in, so you focus on the products, not the plumbing.
The real difference is not the price of the launch, it is who maintains the shop afterwards. With a custom site and with a builder you stay responsible for updates, for keeping the plugins compatible with each other, and for someone picking up the phone when checkout stops on a Friday evening. With a ready platform that is part of the subscription.
Check how you pay, too. Some platforms take a percentage of every sale, which you do not feel in the first month and feel a great deal in the twelfth. The full bill for all three routes, with real numbers, is in the separate cost guide.
Step 2: domain and hosting
Your shop lives on your own domain - for example yourbrand.bg. With a ready platform the hosting and the domain are included in the monthly price, and the SSL certificate and backups take care of themselves. If you already own a domain you point it at the shop; if not, you register a new one and connect it from the settings.
.bg or .com depends on where you sell. For a shop serving Bulgarian customers, .bg says immediately where you are and what language will greet them. If you have orders from abroad in mind, .com does not box you in. Both work equally well technically - the choice is a marketing one, not a technical one.
Connecting it is a single setting at your domain registrar and usually shows up within a few hours. The certificate is issued automatically, so the address starts on https without you doing anything. If you currently have an old site on the same domain, you leave it running until the shop is ready and switch over when you decide to.
Step 3: add the products
You add products with photos, price, stock and variants - sizes, colours and custom fields. You arrange them into categories, and if you are migrating from another platform you upload the whole catalogue at once with a CSV or Excel import. Every product gets its own page, optimised for search engines, so customers find you in Google too.
You need a variant when the same item sells in several versions and each has its own stock - a t-shirt in four sizes, a mug in two colours. If you sell something singular, do not overcomplicate it: one product, one price, one stock count. Variants can always be added later without touching the photos you have already uploaded.
Photographs do more work than the description. The same background, the same light and the same framing across the whole catalogue make a shop look ordered even with twenty products. Do not wait for the full range - the catalogue can be extended at any time, and a shop with twenty well-shot products sells better than one with a hundred rushed ones.
Step 4: set up delivery and payment
This is where a ready platform saves the most work. Econt, Speedy, Sameday, BOX NOW and Pigeon Express are built in - the customer picks an office, an address or a locker straight at checkout, and the waybill is generated on its own. Cash on delivery is the norm in Bulgaria and is included, with the amounts reconciled against the orders automatically. For card payments you switch on Stripe or Borica, and bank transfer is there from the start.
Delivery to an office and to a locker costs less than delivery to an address, which is why they lead at most Bulgarian shops. You do not have to choose on the customer's behalf: you switch on the couriers that suit you and let all three collection methods appear at checkout. The price comes live from the courier, or from your own rate table if you prefer fixed prices by region.
Decide who pays for delivery, too. The customer can pay it, it can be free over a certain amount, or you can absorb it entirely. A free-shipping threshold is the simplest way to lift the average order, as long as it is calculated so it does not eat the margin. The payment method also has a tax consequence - with cash on delivery the obligations differ from courier to courier, and that is explained separately in the fiscal-device guide.
Step 5: the legal pages a shop has to carry
An online shop in Bulgaria owes its customers a few public documents: a privacy policy, supplier information and terms of service. Those three pages are generated automatically from your shop's own details and are ready before you launch. You can edit any of them, and if you change your mind you can restore the generated version.
Edited text stays yours - we never rewrite it. So when we update one of the templates you get an email saying your version may now be missing a correction we have since made - a new sub-processor, a change in payment methods, a new returns clause. Whether to take it is your call.
Alongside them come the cookie banner a customer sees on their first visit, and the two customer-service pages - "Delivery and payment" and "Returns and exchanges" - which you fill in with your own terms. The fiscal device is a separate question: whether you need one depends on the payment method and the courier, and it has a guide of its own, because the answer is not the same for every shop.
Step 6: launch the shop and market it
Before you go live you try the whole flow in test mode - order, waybill, email - with no real shipments and no real money. After launch you reach customers through the built-in Meta Pixel and Conversions API for Facebook and Instagram ads, a catalogue feed and campaign reports. Transactional emails for orders and the newsletter go out from your own domain, and abandoned-cart recovery brings back the customers who did not finish an order.
Test mode is literally your shop, except payments go through a test card and the courier request never reaches a real courier. Walk through it as a customer: place an order, pick an office, pay, read the email the customer receives, and check the waybill in the admin. Whatever you do not like there gets fixed before a real customer ever sees it.
After launch the orders land in the admin and move through clear statuses, and the waybill is issued with one click. The first days are for watching: where customers stop at checkout, which products get looked at and not bought, which delivery method they choose. Those answers are worth more than most of the advertising you could run in the same week.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a developer to make an online shop?
No. With a ready platform you add the products and switch on a courier and payment from a clear admin in Bulgarian, without a line of code. You only need a developer if you want a fully custom site.
How long does it take to launch an online shop?
With a ready platform - days. The foundation is ready from the start; your time goes into adding products and photos. A custom site from an agency usually takes months.
Which couriers does the shop support?
Econt, Speedy, Sameday, BOX NOW and Pigeon Express are built in - with cash on delivery, automatic waybills and a choice of office, address or locker at checkout.
How much does it cost to make an online shop in Bulgaria?
With a ready platform you pay a fixed monthly price from €19, with hosting and domain included and no commission on sales. The full bill, with agency and DIY for comparison, is in the cost guide.
Can I accept cash on delivery?
Yes. Cash on delivery is built in for every courier, and the amounts are reconciled against the orders automatically. You can add card payments via Stripe or Borica too if you like.
Do I need a fiscal device for an online shop?
It depends on the payment method and the courier, so the answer is not the same for every shop. With cash on delivery through a courier licensed for postal money transfers, that receipt stands in for the fiscal one; with other methods the obligation stays yours. The detail, with the legal grounds, is in the separate fiscal-device guide.
Can I move my shop over from another platform?
Yes. The whole catalogue uploads at once from CSV or Excel, photographs included. The old product addresses redirect to the new ones, so your positions in Google and the links already pointing at you are not lost in the move.
Which pages am I obliged to have in the shop?
A privacy policy, supplier information and terms of service. All three are generated automatically from your shop's details and you can edit them. Alongside them come the cookie banner and the "Delivery and payment" and "Returns and exchanges" pages, which you fill in with your own terms.
Make your online shop today
Catalogue, couriers, payment and hosting - ready in minutes, with no commission on sales.
Start your siteRead next
