What to Have Ready Before You Open

Buy from yourself first

Before opening, place a real order on the live store with a real card, then refund it. That single test exercises the checkout, the payment gateway, the delivery rates, the confirmation emails and the refund flow.

It is the most useful hour you will spend before launch, and a surprising number of stores open without doing it.

Emails are the usual failure

• Order confirmation, from your own domain rather than a default
• Dispatch and delivery notifications
• Refund confirmation
• Abandoned cart, if configured
• Account and password reset

Check each one arrives, is not in spam, reads correctly and carries your branding. Default templates with placeholder text are a common and unnecessary embarrassment.

Delivery rates for every zone

Test a delivery address in every zone you have configured, including the awkward ones — offshore addresses, remote postcodes, and any country you have enabled.

Quoting a rate you cannot honour and cancelling the order afterwards is worse than not offering that destination at all.

The pages people actually look for

1. Delivery information, complete and specific
2. Returns policy, plainly written
3. Contact details including a real address
4. Terms and privacy notice
5. About, with actual people

Those five are what a cautious first-time buyer checks before entering card details.

Read it on a phone

Most of your visitors will be on a phone. Browse a collection, open a product, add to cart and check out, on mobile data rather than office wifi.

Problems that are invisible on a large screen — a filter that will not close, a button below the fold, a form that zooms — become obvious immediately.

Frequently asked questions