Before you open your online store: a pre-launch checklist

Payments, shipping, tax, emails, policies, speed and backups: what to test before your store takes its first real order, and how to test it.

The first real order is the worst time to discover that the confirmation email goes to spam, shipping is free to the whole world by accident, or the checkout breaks on a phone. Yet that is how a lot of stores find out, because launch day arrives and the testing was 'add something to the basket, looks fine'.

This checklist is the test a customer would run without meaning to. Work through it on a staging copy or before you announce the store, and you will launch knowing the whole journey works, not just the home page.

Place real test orders

1. 1Switch your payment provider to test mode and place an order with each payment method you offer, on a desktop and on a phone.
2. 2Place one real order with a real card for a low-priced item, then refund it. Test mode does not catch everything; a real transaction does.
3. 3Try to fail. Use a declined test card, abandon the checkout halfway, enter an address in a country you do not ship to. The store should handle each one clearly.
4. 4Check the order in your admin: correct items, correct totals, correct customer details, correct status.

Check the numbers

• Shipping: test an order to each shipping zone, including a heavy and a light basket. Make sure there is no zone that ships everywhere for free unless you meant it.
• Tax: confirm tax is calculated the way your accountant expects for the places you sell to, and shown the way your customers expect to see it.
• Discounts: test a coupon, an expired coupon and a coupon combined with a sale price.
• Stock: buy the last unit of something and check that it shows as out of stock afterwards.

Make sure your emails arrive

Order confirmations are the emails customers care about most, and the ones most likely to land in spam if the domain is not set up properly. Place a test order to a Gmail address and an Outlook address and check both inboxes, including spam.

• Send from an address at your own domain, not a free mailbox. A business email address tells the customer the message genuinely comes from your shop.
• Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the domain. Our guide to email authentication explains each record.
• Read every automated email: order received, shipped, refunded, password reset. Replace the default wording with your own.

Publish the pages customers look for

Shoppers check these before buying from a store they do not know, and payment providers often expect them too:

• Shipping information: costs, regions and realistic delivery times.
• Returns and refunds: how long, who pays postage, how to start one.
• A privacy policy that reflects what you actually collect. See our note on GDPR and website compliance.
• Contact details that reach a person, and an answer to the questions you already know you will be asked.

Test speed where it matters: the checkout

Most speed tests measure the home page. Measure the product page, the basket and the checkout on a phone, because that is where a slow page costs money. Basket and checkout pages cannot be cached the way product pages can, so they depend on the server itself. That is why our ecommerce hosting is tuned for WooCommerce, with LiteSpeed store caching that speeds up the catalogue while keeping baskets and checkout correct for each shopper.

Set up your safety net

• Daily backups that include the database, because that is where orders live. Restore one to staging before launch to prove it works.
• SSL on every page, not just the checkout. Every Serverlys plan includes a free, auto-renewing certificate.
• Two-factor authentication for every account that can see orders or refund money.
• A plan for launch-day traffic. If you are announcing to a big list, size for the spike. Our guide to how much hosting you need helps.

Then launch, and watch the first week

For the first week, check every order by hand: payment received, email sent, stock updated, shipped on time. Small problems show up in the first ten orders, not the first thousand.

If you have not chosen a platform yet, start with WooCommerce vs Shopify and our online store setup guide. If you already run a store elsewhere, our free store migration moves it to ecommerce hosting for you, so you can run this checklist on the new platform before switching over.