If you want to register a business for your online shop, you need the necessary know-how. However, you can learn this quickly.
Registering a business with an online shop: How to do it smoothly
To register a business in the e-commerce sector, you first decide on a legal form and then register your business with the trade office.
- Decide on legal form: If you run your online shop alone, choose a sole proprietorship as your legal form. If you set up the business jointly with another person, a partnership under civil law is the best legal form. To exclude personal liability, you can also start as a corporation.
- Full-time or part-time employment: If you are a full-time online retailer, investing more than 15 hours of work per week and earning your entire living from it, it is a main business. If you are employed full-time or would like to test out how well your online shop works, it is a secondary business and you may be able to make use of the small business regulation.
- Contact the trade office: Contact the relevant trade office to register your business. Depending on the trade office, you can expect costs of between 15 and 80 euros. In addition to the application for business registration, the trade office may also request a police clearance certificate.
- Fill out additional forms: When registering a business, the trade office informs various authorities and institutions – usually the tax office, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the trade supervisory authority and the Federal Statistical Office. This means that you will be given further forms that you must fill out and send back to the relevant authorities.
- Fill out the tax registration questionnaire: The most important thing here is the tax registration questionnaire for the tax office, which you can fill out online in the Elster portal, for example. You will receive a tax number and can indicate here whether you would like to make use of the small business regulation.