A store that launches with a beautiful homepage and a broken checkout is worse than one that launches a week later. The mistakes that cost real money on a new ecommerce site are rarely visual — they are a shipping rule that charges nothing, a tax setting nobody checked, a confirmation email that never sends, or a returns page that does not exist until the first return.
This is the list we work through before a store goes live. It takes a day. It is worth a day.
Products: the details that generate support emails
- Every product has a real description, not the manufacturer's paragraph copied across forty listings. Duplicated supplier copy is also a search problem, because nothing distinguishes your page from everyone else selling the same item.
- Prices are right, including sale prices, and nothing is still sitting at the placeholder figure you used while building.
- Stock counts are accurate and the store knows what to do when something runs out mid-checkout.
- Variants work. Click through every size and colour combination on at least a few products and confirm the price, image and stock all change correctly.
- Weights and dimensions are filled in if shipping is calculated from them. A missing weight is how a store ends up shipping free by accident.
- Images are consistent — same background, same framing, same proportions — and sized for the web rather than straight off the camera.
Checkout: test it like a customer, not like the owner
Place real orders before you open. Not a test-mode click — a genuine, small purchase with a real card, and then refund it. Then do the same from a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi.
- Does the payment actually arrive in the right account?
- Does the order appear in your admin with the right items, address and total?
- Does the customer receive a confirmation email, and does it land in the inbox rather than spam?
- Do you receive a notification of the new order?
- Does a declined card show a helpful message rather than a blank page?
- Can someone check out as a guest, without creating an account?
- Does a discount code apply correctly, and stop applying when it should?
Test the refund path too. The first time you issue a refund should not be the first time you find out how.
Shipping and tax: the two settings that quietly lose money
These are the most common expensive errors on a new store, because both look fine until an order arrives from somewhere you did not plan for.
- Define every zone you will actually ship to, and switch off the rest. A store that accepts an international order it cannot fulfil has to refund it and apologise.
- Check the rate for a heavy item and a light item, and for a basket with several things in it. Flat-rate shipping on a heavy product is how margin disappears.
- Decide what free shipping costs you before you offer it, and set the threshold above your average order value rather than below it.
- Confirm tax is calculated and displayed the way your customers expect — included in the price or added at checkout — and that it is correct for each place you sell to. Tax rules differ by jurisdiction and by product type, and this is worth asking an accountant about once rather than guessing every year.
The policy pages customers look for
Shoppers who have not bought from you before go looking for these, and a store without them feels risky. Payment providers also expect them.
- Shipping policy — where you ship, what it costs, how long it takes, what happens to a delayed parcel.
- Returns and refunds — the window, the condition required, who pays return postage, how long a refund takes, and what is excluded.
- Privacy policy — what you collect and why.
- Terms of sale.
- Contact — a real address and a way to reach a person. This page does more for conversion than most store owners believe.
Write them in plain language. A returns policy nobody can understand is the same as no returns policy when the argument starts.
Email: the messages that do the work after the sale
Most stores launch with the default transactional emails and never look at them. Open each one and read it as a customer would:
- Order confirmation — items, total, address, and what happens next.
- Shipping confirmation with a tracking link.
- Refund confirmation.
- Password reset, which must actually arrive.
- Check they come from your own domain rather than a generic address, and that the sending domain is authenticated so they are not filtered as spam.
If you plan to market by email, set that up properly from the start rather than retrofitting it later — our guide to email marketing for small business covers permission, what to send and the rules that apply.
Technical items that are hard to fix later
- The staging block is removed. A store that launches still telling search engines not to index it can sit invisible for weeks before anyone notices. This is the single most common launch mistake in the industry.
- HTTPS works everywhere, with no mixed-content warnings on product or checkout pages.
- One version of the site is canonical — with or without www, with the other redirecting.
- If you are replacing an old store, every old URL redirects to its new equivalent. Skipping this is how a rebuild loses years of rankings in a weekend; the mechanics are in redesigning without losing SEO.
- Analytics and Search Console are installed under your own accounts, with ecommerce tracking switched on so you can see revenue rather than only visits. See setting up Google Analytics 4 and Search Console.
- Product pages load quickly on a phone. Oversized product images are the usual culprit — see checking and improving website speed.
Access and ownership
Before launch, confirm the accounts are in your name: the domain, the hosting, the store platform, the payment processor, analytics. This is far easier to settle now than during a disagreement later, and we have written about how it goes wrong in who owns your website after launch.
The week after launch
- Watch for failed payments and abandoned checkouts — both point at a problem you can still fix cheaply.
- Read every support email as feedback on the site, not just as a question to answer. Three people asking the same thing is a missing paragraph on a product page.
- Place one more test order yourself after a week, because something always changes.
- Check Search Console for crawl errors.
If you would rather have someone go through all of this with you, it is part of how we build an ecommerce website. To talk it through, contact us.
