E-commerce Website Checklist: What Your Store Needs Before Launch

Many online stores launch with good products and a website that quietly loses sales: slow product pages, a long checkout, no clear shipping information. Before you launch, or before you pay anyone to build your store, run through this checklist.

Product pages that answer the buyer’s questions

Each product page needs clear photos, an honest description, the price, available options such as size or colour, delivery information and a visible add-to-cart button. If a customer has to leave the page to find an answer, many will not come back.

Easy browsing and search

Organize products into clear categories, add filters that match how people shop, and make sure search finds what customers type. A large catalog without good navigation is a store nobody can shop in.

A short, mobile-friendly checkout

A large share of shoppers browse and buy on their phones. Keep checkout to as few steps as possible, let customers check out without creating an account, and test the whole process on a phone before launch.

Payments you can rely on

Connect a trusted payment gateway, offer the payment methods your customers actually use, and run test orders from start to finish, including failed payments and refunds.

Clear shipping, returns and contact information

Shoppers look for delivery times, costs and the returns policy before they buy. Put them where they are easy to find, and show how customers can contact you.

Speed and security

Slow stores lose buyers. Compress product images, avoid heavy scripts, and make sure the whole site runs on HTTPS. Speed also affects how well your pages show up in search.

SEO for product and category pages

Give every product and category page a unique title and description, descriptive image names and clean URLs, and add structured data where possible so search engines understand what you sell.

Tracking and connecting your systems

Install analytics so you can see which pages and campaigns lead to sales, and think about how orders, stock and customers will connect to your other tools such as a CRM or inventory system. If you want help building a store that is ready for all of this, tell us your catalog size and what you need it to connect to, and we will quote it as one fixed price.