In September 2026 we launched tmarket.md, an online store for small appliances and cookware in Chișinău: about 850 products in Romanian and Russian, card payment via maib, delivery by the store's own courier in a time slot the customer picks. We wrote the storefront, the admin panel and the API from scratch.
If you are preparing a store, here is where the time went. Not into code.
1. Decide on day one whose merchant account it is
The goods belong to one company and the site is built by another. The bank ties the card-acceptance contract to a single legal entity, and that entity determines the company details in the site footer, the name in the payment-confirmation email and the terms of sale.
Postpone the decision and all of that gets written twice. For us, the question of who signs the maib contract held up three other items on the bank's list until it was answered.
2. The bank's list has seven items, and each is checked on the live site
maib publishes its site requirements, and its risk team checks them on the domain named in the application before it issues production keys:
- HTTPS on the domain in the application. Not on a test domain: the bank opens exactly the address you wrote down.
- Permitted goods. There is a list of categories that cannot be sold online.
- Complete product pages: description, dimensions, images, what is in the box, material, price, options.
- Terms and conditions in seven sections, plus a checkbox the customer must tick before paying.
- A payment-confirmation email with the order number, merchant, amount, currency, date and items.
- Company details: IDNO, legal name, registered address.
- The maib, Visa and Mastercard logos, usually in the footer.
Two traps. The checkbox must be a real checkbox, not a line saying "by continuing you accept the terms". And the server must reject an order without it: a check that exists only in the browser can be bypassed. We covered the technical side of payments separately: card payment via MAIB in your shop.
3. Product pages take the longest
The longest item was the third one. Photos, dimensions and materials are not written by a developer. They come from the supplier, from catalogues, sometimes from measuring by hand.
For 850 products that is weeks of content work. Start it in parallel with development, not after. Complete product pages matter after the bank's review too: without an image in the product markup, Google will not show the listing with price and availability in results.
4. The phone and the 60-year-old customer
tmarket's audience shops mostly from a phone, and a significant share is over 50. That gave us rules we did not debate: large type, the buy button always in view, the cart one tap away, nothing covering the price.
It also shaped delivery: the customer picks the day and the time slot. For someone waiting at home for a courier, that matters more than one more catalogue filter.
5. Indexing comes slowly. Help it along
A new store does not show up in search the next day. Two and a half weeks after launch, Google had indexed a few dozen pages out of almost 1,900 addresses in the sitemap. That is normal for a new domain, but it can be sped up:
- submit the sitemap to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Importing a site from Google into Bing does not bring the sitemap along;
- connect IndexNow: every time a price or photo changes, the store notifies Bing and Yandex itself;
- add a Google Merchant Center feed so products appear in the shopping tab.
Bing matters more than it looks: ChatGPT takes its web results from Bing. How to get into AI answers is covered here: GEO/AEO: getting cited in AI answers.
6. The customer who asks an AI assistant
tmarket has an MCP server: an interface through which an AI assistant can search products, read price and availability and prepare a link to a filled cart. The person pays on the site. It is a small step, but people increasingly ask an assistant "which blender should I buy" instead of searching Google.
What we would do in week one
- Decide who the merchant is and open the maib account.
- Turn the seven requirements into tasks with deadlines.
- Start product photos and specifications in parallel with design.
- Write the terms in the sections the bank asks for, not from a template off another site.
- Plan for Law 195/2024 from the start: what your site needs.
Project details are on the tMarket.md page. If you are preparing a store and want to know how long it will take you, write to us: we name a timeline after we see the catalogue, not before.