A store can look finished and still be unable to earn. The theme is chosen, the products are loaded, the logo is in the corner, and yet the first week of traffic produces orders that cannot be attributed, emails that never send and a checkout that fails silently on one payment method nobody tested. The ecommerce checklist below is what we complete before a new account is allowed to spend on acquisition, because fixing these things after launch costs more and is done under pressure.
This is launch readiness, not diagnosis. It assumes a store that has not traded yet, or one that is about to be relaunched on new foundations. Every item has a pass condition you can verify by doing something, not by asking whether it was done. If a line cannot be verified with a test order, a screen recording or a report, it does not belong on this list.
Our ecommerce checklist starts with a real order
The first task on our ecommerce checklist is to buy something. A real order on a live payment method, on a phone, on the connection a normal customer would use. Then a second one with a discount code, a third that gets refunded, and a fourth that fails deliberately with a declined card. Four orders take under an hour and they surface more problems than a week of reviewing settings, because they exercise the paths between systems rather than the systems themselves.
Watch what arrives afterwards. Order confirmation, payment receipt, shipping notification, refund confirmation: check the sender name, the reply address, the rendering on a phone, and whether anything landed in spam. Check that the order appears in the back office with the right totals, that tax is calculated as expected for each region you ship to, and that stock decremented once rather than twice or not at all.
Measurement, set up once and properly
Analytics and ad platform tracking must be in place before the first campaign, not added in week two when someone asks where the sales came from. Retrofitted measurement leaves a hole at exactly the moment the data would have been most useful, and that early period is when you learn which traffic sources are worth keeping. We verify that purchase events fire once, carry the correct value and currency, and reconcile against back office orders for the test purchases we just placed.
The items we confirm before opening the doors:
- Purchase, add to cart and begin checkout events fire once each, with values that match the order record
- Consent banner behaves correctly, and you know what share of traffic will be measurable once it is live
- Currency and tax handling are consistent between the store, analytics and every ad platform
- Server-side or offline conversion import is configured if you take orders by phone, marketplace or invoice
- One named person receives a weekly report and knows which three numbers they are responsible for
Inventory, shipping and the promises on the page
Delivery promises are the most common source of early complaints, because they are usually written by marketing and fulfilled by operations who were not consulted. Every shipping option needs a real cutoff time, a real carrier transit estimate and a rule for what happens on weekends and public holidays. Write those in one place and make the product page, the checkout and the confirmation email read from it, otherwise the three will drift apart within a month.
Stock behaviour deserves an explicit decision rather than a default. What happens when a product sells out mid-checkout, whether backorders are allowed, whether the item disappears from the catalogue or stays visible with a notify-me form. Each of those choices is defensible, but leaving it to the platform default means the answer changes depending on which plugin was installed last, which is how stores end up selling inventory they do not have.
The pages that stop a first-time buyer
Somebody who has never heard of you needs a small set of reassurances before they will enter a card number. A returns policy written in plain language rather than legal boilerplate. A delivery page with actual timeframes and costs. A contact route that is a real channel with a staffed response time. Company details, registration information and a physical address, which matter more in some markets than others but never hurt.
Check the product pages themselves against the questions your category actually generates: sizing, materials, compatibility, what is included in the box. Every question you leave unanswered is a support ticket at best and an abandoned basket more often, and it is far cheaper to answer it once on the page than repeatedly by email.
Speed, indexing and the first crawl
Near the end of the ecommerce checklist, confirm that the site is actually crawlable: no leftover blocking rules from the staging environment, a sitemap that submits cleanly, canonical tags that resolve to the live domain rather than the development one. A store that launches behind a staging block loses weeks of organic visibility and the cause is easy to miss, because everything looks normal to a logged-in visitor.
Then measure loading performance on a mid-range phone rather than on the machine the site was built on. Product images are the usual culprit, and compressing them properly is one of the few changes that improves conversion, ad quality signals and hosting costs at the same time. Once these items are clear, spend can start, and the first week of data will be worth reading.