Why an Indian shop should own its online store

A shop already has a name, a counter, and a way people pay. The online store should sit in the same place: on a domain you chose, in a database you can open, on hosting you can leave. Marimart is that store. It is the script. The catalog, checkout, and invoices run on your server. One licence is one store on one domain.

Owning the store is a practical choice, not a slogan. The customer list, the stock count, and the GST invoice are the records of the business. They should not live only inside an account you rent month to month. When the shop moves host, changes a developer, or simply wants a copy, those records should come with you.

What “on your server” means

You buy ordinary hosting. A shared panel such as hPanel is enough. The host needs PHP 8.1 or newer, with intl, mbstring, curl, json, pdo_mysql, and sodium, plus MySQL or MariaDB and SSL on the domain. The host requirements are the same list the installer checks.

The install is three steps, also written on the getting started section of this site and in the install guide. Unpack the zip into public_html. Put mariviq.key and mariviq-backup.pub in the private folder. Those two files are emailed for that store only. They are not inside the zip. Open /install, enter the database and the first admin, and sign in at /admin.

After that, the shop is a normal website on your domain. Customers see your pages. Orders land in your database. Staff pack and ship from the admin you signed in to. Mariviq does not host the store, and does not hold the customer list.

The catalog is the part people browse: categories, variants, search, filters, reviews, and a wishlist. Products can arrive from CSV or Excel. Prices show with Indian grouping, so a larger number reads the way a shop already writes it. Guest checkout is the default. An account is optional. Coupons, shipping rules, and a pincode check sit on the same order.

What stays when you leave a rented shopfront

A rented shopfront is convenient on the first afternoon. The monthly fee covers the servers, and the templates are already there. The trade is the record. The product list, the orders, and the people who bought are rows in someone else’s database. Exporting them later is a project. Closing the account is a deadline. A change in that company’s pricing or rules is your change too, because the shop cannot run without them.

A script you install works the other way around. Hosting is a bill you already understand: disk, a database, and a domain. The store is files in a folder. If you change hosts, you move the files and the database. If you change who helps you, they work on the same install. The licence is for one store on one domain. A second shop, for you or for a client, is a second purchase, with its own database, domain, and keys. That split is deliberate. Customer accounts are not shared across stores.

Updates are the other half of ownership. For two years from the day the store is approved, the admin can take the next release from System. The store enrolls itself. Mariviq approves it when the code matches. Download checks the package, and the keys and client files stay where they are. You are not waiting on a platform release train you cannot see, and you are not blocked from the version you are allowed to take.

What you still pay for

Owning the script does not remove the other bills. You still pay the host. You still pay for the domain. You still pay the payment gateway its fee when a customer pays by card or by a hosted checkout. Cash on delivery, UPI, and bank transfer have their own rules, covered in how India pays on this checkout. A GST invoice is a print from the order, not a filing. The return still goes to the GST portal. What the store prints, and when it prints a tax invoice instead of a bill of supply, is in GST invoices on a store you host.

The licence price is on request. Write with your name, phone, and the domain if you have one. What arrives after payment is the install zip, the two key files, and the steps to put them on the server. Hosting is not included. Updates after the two years are not included.

Who it fits

It fits a shop that already has photographs, a sense of its own colours, and someone who can log in to hosting. Clothing, home, food, jewellery, books, and beauty are the same storefront. The brand kit sets colours, fonts, radius, and buttons. Six themes read those variables, so a new palette is not a new theme. The page builder lays out the home page from blocks. The storefront stays readable with JavaScript off, which is also what a crawler needs.

It is a poor fit if you want Mariviq to keep the server, answer customer chats, or file the GST return. The product is the shop software. The business around it stays yours: the host login, the gateway account, the GSTIN, and the person who packs the parcel.

A useful first week

Spend the first day on the install and a handful of real products, with alt text on the photographs. Spend the next on payments and a test order, including the invoice. Then write the policies in the page builder: shipping, returns, and the address of the business. The knowledge base follows the admin from catalog through setup, and it stays on the version of the guide that matches the store.

The point of the week is a store you can explain. You can say where the files are, who holds the database password, which gateway receives the card, and which page prints the invoice. That is the whole argument for hosting it yourself.