What paperwork and integrations you need to legally open an online store in Moldova

Many entrepreneurs start backwards: they build the site, add the products, and only then ask what paperwork they need. You can do it that way, but you risk finding out — right when you try to connect a payment processor — that you're missing something essential, and by then you lose weeks, not hours.

Here's exactly what needs to be sorted out, in the order it matters.

1. Legal structure and company documents

You can't legally sell online as an individual without entrepreneur status, beyond a few exceptional cases of occasional sales. In practice, you need one of two options:

• SRL (LLC) — the most common choice if you want to grow, hire people, or work with partners.
• Individual Enterprise (ÎI) — faster to set up, suited for a small store, with lower administrative costs, but with unlimited liability against your personal assets.

Regardless of the structure, you need: a registration certificate from the Public Services Agency, a tax code (IDNO), a business bank account (not your personal one), and, if you sell VAT-taxable products, registration as a VAT payer once you cross the legal revenue threshold.

Without a business bank account, no serious payment processor will sign with you — so this is step one, not an administrative detail to "deal with later."

2. Electronic fiscal cash register and fiscal integration

This is where most people go wrong. An online store that collects payments — whether by card or cash on delivery — has to issue a fiscal receipt, just like a physical store. You need a registered fiscal cash register and control device (CMC) with the State Fiscal Service, connected to your platform so that every completed order automatically generates a fiscal receipt, not manually, at the end of the day.

That means your e-commerce platform needs to have (or allow integration with) an API to the electronic cash register solution you choose. If the platform doesn't support this from the start, you end up issuing receipts manually — which doesn't scale past your first 20-30 orders a day.

3. What needs to be on the site, not just behind it

Legally, an online store has to clearly display:

• Company details — name, IDNO, registered address, contact information.
• Terms and conditions — including the return policy (14 days for most products, per consumer protection legislation).
• Privacy policy — because any site that collects order data (name, phone, address) falls under Law 133/2011 on the protection of personal data.
• Prices displayed clearly in Moldovan lei, with VAT included if you're a VAT payer.

These pages aren't a formality to fill in with a generic template — an inspection or a customer complaint can quickly expose a return policy copied from another site, with terms that don't match what you actually sell.

4. The technical integrations you actually need

Beyond the strictly legal side, a functional online store needs a few integrations without which it simply can't operate:

• Payment processor — an agreement with a bank or a processor (e.g. maib, Victoriabank, Paynet) for card payments, plus a cash-on-delivery option if you offer that too.
• Courier — integration with a courier company (Nova Poshta Moldova, other local couriers) for automatically generating waybills, not filling them in manually order by order.
• Automatic notifications — order confirmation, delivery status, via email or WhatsApp/Telegram, so you don't get customers calling to ask "where's my package."
• Electronic fiscal cash register, as mentioned above — non-negotiable.

Every missing integration means recurring manual work for you or your team. A store with 50 orders a day without basic automations loses hours every day on things a system could do in seconds.

How much it costs to set everything up

At Synq, an online store is usually built on the STANDARD (699 EUR) or PRO (1,499 EUR) package, depending on how many integrations you need — online payments, courier, electronic cash register, automatic notifications. The STARTER (299 EUR) package is only enough if you're selling a small catalog, without needing complex integrations from month one.

Beyond the build itself, most stores also need CRM automation to manage orders and, at some point, monthly maintenance to stay up to date with fiscal requirements — cash register and reporting legislation keeps changing, and a site that's "built and forgotten" risks falling out of compliance without you knowing.

If you already have your company registered and you're just stuck on the technical part — how to connect the cash register, courier, and payments into a single flow that doesn't eat up your day — the realistic next step is to have a concrete conversation about which platform and integrations fit you, not to search for yet another general tutorial.