Guide
How to brief your online store
Whoever builds your store — a platform, a freelancer, an agency — can only work with what you tell them. A good brief is the difference between a store that feels like yours and one that feels like a guess. This is how to write one.
What a store brief actually is
A brief is a transfer. You know your products, your customers, and the feeling the brand should carry — and all of that currently lives in your head. The brief moves it to whoever is doing the building, in a form they can act on.
Most bad stores are not built badly. They are built from bad briefs: "make it clean and premium," with nothing about the products, the customer, or what the brand refuses to be. Every builder then fills the silence with defaults, and defaults look like everyone else's store.
The six parts of a brief that does its job
1. Goals
What is this store for, concretely? "Launch the summer ceramics collection and take pre-orders" beats "sell online." Name the first milestone — a launch, a season, a first hundred orders. Builders make different choices for a pre-order launch than for a permanent catalog.
2. Customer
One or two sentences about who buys, in your own words. Not a demographic panel — the person you picture when you pack an order. "People who buy handmade gifts for weddings" tells a builder more than "females 25–45."
3. Products and catalog
What you sell, how many products, how they group, and the price range. Twelve chopstick sets across three collections behaves differently in a store than 300 SKUs across a dozen categories. Include the products that must be visible first.
4. Brand direction
Tone, mood, colors if you have them, and references. References carry the most information: two or three stores or brands that feel right, with a note on what specifically you like — the typography, the pacing, the restraint. "Similar to Aesop" is a start; "Aesop's calm, but warmer, and with product photography front and center" is a direction.
5. Facts
The things that must never be invented: materials, dimensions, care instructions, ingredients, origin, shipping timelines. A builder can write persuasive copy around facts. It should never have to guess them — and if you are using AI anywhere in the process, this is the fence that keeps it from decorating your product pages with fiction.
6. Constraints
Markets you sell to, currencies, languages, shipping realities (cold chain, fragile goods, pickup points), and anything the store must or must not do. Constraints stated up front cost nothing. Constraints discovered after launch cost a redesign.
A worked example
Goals: Launch a small-batch skincare line; first milestone is selling out the 200-unit first batch.
Customer: Women 30–50 who read ingredient lists and distrust hype.
Catalog: 4 products (cleanser, serum, cream, gift set), $24–$78, gift set featured first.
Direction: Quiet, warm, apothecary-adjacent but modern. References: Aesop's calm, Tatine's typography. No pastels, no stock imagery of women laughing at cream.
Facts: Full INCI lists, batch numbers, 6-month shelf life, made in Poland.
Constraints: Ship EU-only to start; in-post pickup points required; prices in EUR.
That is under 120 words, and it is enough to build a store that does not look like everyone else's.
Three mistakes that ruin good briefs
Mistake one: adjectives without anchors. "Clean, premium, modern" appears in almost every brief. Anchor every adjective to something checkable — a reference, an example, a counter-example ("modern, but not tech-startup modern").
Mistake two: delegating decisions you care about. "Surprise me" produces a store you will renegotiate line by line. If you care about how the product page opens or how the homepage lands, say so.
Mistake three: hiding the awkward parts. Half a catalog without photos, a shipping method that limits countries, a name that is not final. State them. A brief that omits the problems just postpones them to the most expensive possible moment.
Where the brief goes next
With a freelancer or agency, the brief becomes their scope and their quote. With a theme, the brief becomes your shopping criteria — and usually a compromise, because themes are built for everyone before they are configured for you. With a generative platform, the brief becomes the store: it is the primary input, and the output should visibly carry its fingerprints.
Setka works the second way. The brief — goals, customer, catalog, direction, facts, constraints — is what the whole store is generated around, and every element above maps directly to what it asks for. If you want to see what a brief turns into first, the stores section shows real and demonstration examples, and the preparation guide covers everything to sort out before you write yours.