When it comes to starting your new ecommerce business, there are many things that you need to consider. For many entrepreneurs, it can be a frustrating time with many moving pieces. After all, you want to make sure that you are doing everything you can to ensure a smooth and successful launch. An ecommerce launch checklist is essential to organize tasks and prevent common oversights during the launch of an ecommerce website. If everything goes smoothly, you’ll be left with satisfied customers – but that’s not always easy to achieve.
If you have your ducks in a row before you begin, you can ensure that you won’t be scrambling to do what needs to be done at the last minute. That’s where this ecommerce checklist comes in.
Before You Start
These high-level things must be addressed to ensure a smooth and successful website launch. It is crucial to consider pre-launch factors, including your audience, unique value proposition (UVP), set business goals, branding, choosing an ecommerce platform, on-page, technical SEO, and design consistency to optimize content for SEO and ensure usability and accessibility across platforms.
Define your target audience
Defining your target audience is crucial in creating a successful ecommerce website. Your target audience is the people most likely to be interested in your products or services. Consider demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points to define your audience.
Demographics include age, gender, income level, education level, and occupation. Interests encompass hobbies, passions, and lifestyle choices. Behaviors involve purchasing habits, browsing habits, and engagement with your brand. Pain points are the challenges, needs, and desires that your products or services can address.
Understanding your audience will help you create content, products, and marketing strategies that resonate with them. It will also help you optimize your ecommerce website for search engines, as you can use keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for.
For example, if you’re selling outdoor gear, your audience might be people who enjoy hiking, camping, and outdoor activities. To optimize your website for search engines, you can use keywords like “hiking gear,” “camping equipment,” and “outdoor apparel.”
Develop a unique value proposition (UVP)
A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a statement that explains how your ecommerce website is different from others in the market. It’s a promise you make to your customers about the value they’ll receive from shopping with you.
Your UVP should be clear, concise, and compelling. It should explain what sets your website apart, your benefits, and why customers should choose you over your competitors.
For example, if you’re selling eco-friendly products, your UVP might be “Shop with us for sustainable products that are good for you and the planet.” This UVP explains your unique value proposition and sets you apart from other ecommerce websites that may not prioritize sustainability.
Set business goals and objectives
Setting business goals and objectives is essential for creating a successful ecommerce website. Your goals and objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Examples of business goals and objectives for an ecommerce website might include:
- Increase sales by 20% within the next six months
- Improve customer satisfaction ratings by 15% within the next 3 months
- Increase website traffic by 50% within the next year
- Reduce cart abandonment rates by 10% within the next quarter
Having clear business goals and objectives will help you create a roadmap for your ecommerce website and make informed decisions about marketing, product development, and customer service.
Have a custom domain
If you are still operating your business on something like “bobs-superstore.myshopify.com” to “www.bobs-superstore.com,” you need to change that before you launch. Use one of the many domain registration services available to you to set up a custom branded domain. You can usually get this for a relatively low yearly fee, and that’s a small price to pay to ensure that you are presenting your business professionally.
Getting started on the right platform
These high-level things must be addressed to ensure a smooth and successful website launch. Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your business, you want to make sure you have a firm handle on your competitive market. Remember, you are not just launching a website – you are launching an online business. Planning and execution are crucial for ecommerce success, ensuring a smooth customer experience and effective inventory management.
Before you start to build your ecommerce site, you’ll also want to think about your ecommerce platform. For the most part, you can’t go wrong with BigCommerce, Shopify, or WooCommerce.
However, there are some nuances between them. If you go with a POD or dropship site and do not use sales funnels, Shopify and Bigcommerce are the right solutions, as they have more integrations and plugins.
If you use sales funnels, like ClickFunnels, landing pages, sales pages, or 1-click upsells, Shopify or WooCommerce are a better fit.
If you want to grow your site with SEO and content marketing, BigCommerce and Woocommerce are slightly better than Shopify.
- Review Competitor’s Website Design, Content & Offers
- Develop Your Core Branding & Logo
- Plan/Draft Your Key Messages / Sales Content
- Research Keywords & Content Ideas to Reach Your Target Audience
- Obtain Product Samples and Finalize Logistics Plan
- Obtain High-Quality Product and Lifestyle Images
- Choose and Set Up Ecommerce Platform
- Secure A Custom Domain
- Install Essential Apps
- Set Up Email Forwarding
Set up email forwarding
If your ecommerce business is set up through Shopify, you can create an email with your domain handle so that your customers can contact you. This email can be forwarded to your personal address. However, email hosting is separate from your ecommerce platform, so you’ll need to use a service like Google Apps for Business to reply to your customers using that branded email. This allows you to maintain professional communication and continuity throughout the customer’s journey.
Have an email helpdesk
Use an email helpdesk to manage and organize your support emails. You should set up an email like “support@yourbusinessdomain.com” and forward that to your helpdesk email.
Have sales channels activated
Many ecommerce businesses use social media channels and blogs to sell their products. If you plan on doing this, you must ensure the proper sales channels are activated. There are Pinterest Buyable Pins, Facebook Shop tabs, Instagram Shoppable Posts, Twitter Buy Buttons, and the Buy Button for your WordPress blog – you should review these and understand the ones you need to maximize your success.
Customize Theme Design
When a prospective customer visits your online store, you want to make sure that you are leaving your mark. Your site’s overall design should be attention-grabbing and effectively highlight your products.
Keep consistent branding and colors
Having consistent branding on your website helps to maintain continuity for the customer. To maintain the consistency of your site design, ensure you look through every page of the site—be on the lookout for fonts, colors, and other primary style elements. You want them all to match and create a consistent feel across the website.
Have clear calls to action on the site
Your ecommerce site is a tool for you to sell your products, so you need to make sure that your customers know how and where to make a purchase. The button colors on your site should be visible, and make sure you are using clear action phrases on the page – phrases like “Buy Now” and “Shop Here” are good places to start.
Have high-quality images
People can touch, feel, and see products in person when they shop in person. When people shop online at an ecommerce store, they cannot do that. So, the images on the page need to be high quality and visually appealing.
High-quality images can help to increase conversions, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance your brand’s reputation. Make sure that the images show your products from various angles and include close-up images of product details. When selecting images for your ecommerce website, consider factors such as:
- Resolution and clarity
- Color and contrast
- Composition and layout
- Authenticity and relevance
You can use high-quality images to showcase your products, demonstrate their features and benefits, and create a lifestyle or atmosphere that resonates with your target audience.
For example, if you’re selling fashion products, you might use high-quality images of models wearing your clothing or accessories. If you’re selling home decor products, you might use high-quality images of beautifully decorated rooms or spaces.
By following these tips and best practices, you can create a successful ecommerce website that attracts and retains customers, drives sales and revenue, and builds a strong brand reputation.
Have an easily accessible cart and checkout pages
You don’t want customers to leave because they can’t figure out how to buy one of your products! Your site design should include an easy-to-see cart icon. A good place for this is in the top right corner of your menu. This way, a customer can check out from any page of your ecommerce site.
Make it attention-grabbing
Make sure you can grab your customers’ attention. When people shop on the internet, they don’t want to spend too much time hunting for what they want. Your homepage should feature images of your core products and have text that can easily draw a user’s attention. You want your site to make a great first impression.
Save theme presets and test menus
If your store’s theme allows for it, for example, with Shopify, you can save themes for testing or publish them later. This way, you can quickly and easily switch between your theme options to alter the appearance of your store when you need it. You should have these set up and saved to use later with relatively little hassle.
Your ecommerce site’s menus should be easy for your customers to use. By creating clear and accessible menus, customers can have a seamless experience navigating your store. Before launching, test the menus out by having friends or family members try to search for products on your site. If they can’t easily find what they’re looking for, your potential customers will likely have trouble, too. You should adjust your menus accordingly.
Theme design considerations
The most popular ecommerce platforms come with a fully customizable ecommerce theme. Customizing your website design is easy if you know what you’re doing. When launching your online store, for example, on Shopify, it comes with a default theme that’s already loaded. It is called the “Debut” theme so that you can get started immediately with minimal customization.
Most ecommerce platforms have standard themes that you can pick from to fit your business needs. You may also visit their theme store or a third-party marketplace if you want to purchase a premium theme or can’t find a standard theme. If you’re looking for a more personalized ecommerce theme unique to your brand, you should hire a designer or developer who can help.
Choosing a premium theme that you can customize is a more cost-effective way, saving hours of the time it would take to design it and reducing total website costs. However, customizing a theme comes with a range of difficulties. You can customize yourself, but most require an ecommerce designer or developer. You’ll need to be careful and do your due diligence before diving into the source code. One small mistake can cause your theme to break.
If you dive in and do it yourself, you’ll need to consider a unique look and feel for the home page, including the header and footer design and each page template when customizing your ecommerce website.
- Home Page
- Header Design
- Footer Design
- Product Page Template
- Category Page Template
- Static Page Template
- Blog Post Template
- Optimize and Upload Images
- Save Theme Presets
- Customize the Cart and Checkout Page
Optimize User Experience
Each page on your ecommerce site serves a purpose for the user. Ensure each one does what it’s supposed to do to ensure an optimal customer experience.
Optimize the images
You need to make sure that the images on the homepage work properly. Also, be aware of how quickly your site loads—users tend to leave sites that load too slowly, and one primary reason this happens is poorly optimized images.
Remove password protection
Don’t forget to remove password protection so your customers can access your website. You need to remove password protection before you make your ecommerce store live for the public. You’ll do this when you’re ready for the world to see your store – so this should be one of the last things you do.
The About Us page
For several reasons, your site should include an About Us page. First and foremost, visitors to your page can learn more about you and your business – and understand why your store may be the solution to their needs. And secondly, the About Us page is generally one of the most highly visited pages on any website. This is where you can engage with your customers truly humanly – let them know who you are.
The Contact Us page
Obviously, you want to ensure that your customers can contact you whenever they need to. Depending on your business needs, you can offer email, phone, AI contact center, or live chat support options. You don’t need to have all three, but you should have at least one, and make sure it’s clear and easily accessible for your customers.
We have already discussed setting up an email with your business domain. You can install a live chat support widget in your store using a program. You can also explore options like OpenPhone, which allows you to create a business phone number that you can operate from your personal device.
The FAQ page
Everyone has questions, and this is where they get answered. You may be new, so you don’t know if you have any “frequently” asked questions yet, but you can anticipate things that your customers may need to know. Customers will generally check a FAQ page before they contact you, so having some helpful information here can make the entire process easier for everyone.
The Shipping, Returns, & Refund Policy page
Customers want to know what to expect before they make a purchase, and this is where you lay out all of that information. Include information about your shipping process, refund policy, and return policy. Also, include a time frame for customers to return items. Customers may shop elsewhere if you don’t have this information readily available.
The Terms & Conditions page
Many countries legally require a Terms & Conditions page on ecommerce websites. This is a legal document to inform customers of your business practices, and it can help protect your store in the event of some legal action.
The Privacy Policy page
Another legal consideration required in many countries is the Privacy Policy page. For instance, if you are going to advertise on Facebook Ads, you must have a Privacy Policy page on your website. It may be a good idea to consult with legal counsel to create an adequate privacy policy for your business.
Make sure your site is cohesive
All the pages of your ecommerce website need to work together to attract users and move them down your sales funnel. Your content has to showcase your brand, build customer trust, and sell your products. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial in driving traffic to your site.
Make sure all of your pages have original content written for users and optimized for search engines. Double-check that all your pages have optimized SEO titles and descriptions. Make sure all your images have alt tags, and add schema and product metadata as needed.
After loading all your content, set up your header and footer navigation and ensure you have clear links to terms and customer support information. If your site is especially large, information architecture will need special attention. Category pages are crucial for enhancing navigation and SEO, helping customers find products efficiently, and managing pagination and canonical URLs to combat duplicate content issues.
- Home & About Page
- Category and Product Pages
- Blog Posts
- Contact Us Page
- FAQ Page
- Shipping, Returns, & Refund Policy Pages
- Terms & Conditions Page
- Privacy Policy Page
- Finalize Header and Footer Navigation
- Remove “Powered By” Branding From Your Ecommerce Platform
Payments, Checkout, & Shipping Logistics
You must ensure your products and systems are organized properly on your ecommerce site.
Track inventory numbers correctly
Keeping track of inventory can be a bit of a headache, but it’s absolutely necessary. You don’t want a product to keep selling long after you’ve sold out of it – that leads to unhappy customers and a lot of extra work for you. Ensure that you have accurate inventory cutoffs for your products. Ensure you’ve correctly entered the inventory integers so you don’t have to encounter this issue. And, for good measure, double-check.
Check tax rates and currency
When you create a Shopify store, the default tax rates are based on the area from which you are selling. Take the time to ensure they are correct and charge your customers the correct taxes. It’s good to consult a tax professional to ensure everything is up to par.
Most Shopify themes support currency customization. If you plan on selling outside your country, make sure that your theme is compatible – this will allow customers to view your ecommerce store in their currency. This is an easy accommodation that helps prevent customers from abandoning their shopping carts because they don’t understand the prices.
Check your product weights
Double-check the weight of your products and ensure they are accurately inputted so that you don’t run into any issues or mistakes determining shipping costs. This is especially true if you’re using real-time carrier-calculated shipping. This will ensure a smoother launch of your ecommerce store and help avoid cart abandonments due to overpriced shipping rates.
Integrate payment gateways
Ensure your customers can purchase from your store using their preferred payment method. Consider different payment gateways, such as Shopify Payments, PayPal, Stripe, or something similar.
Set up payment authorization & capture
Generally, you can capture a customer’s payment in one of two ways – either automatically or manually. A customer’s credit card will be authorized and charged automatically if you choose the automatic option. The manual option means the card is not charged until you accept the payment. Which one you choose depends upon the way your business operates. So consider this option carefully.
Customize the Cart page
Your cart page should provide all the information you need about the customer without anything extra. You can include various options to improve your customers’ experience. Please take the time to consider this before you launch.
Be mindful that an overly complex checkout process may be overwhelming for customers. Please keep it simple and limit the form fields your customers must fill out during checkout. If you require a lot of information, it’s a good idea to separate the form into several pages so customers don’t have to do it all in one big step.
Set Up Your Email Automation
When setting up email automation, it’s essential to cover key touchpoints: Welcome emails greet new subscribers and set the tone for your brand relationship. Lead magnet emails deliver valuable content to entice potential customers. Win-back emails aim to re-engage inactive subscribers with irresistible offers. New customer emails express gratitude and reinforce their purchase decision, while repeat customer emails reward loyalty and encourage further purchases. These automated sequences ensure you’re nurturing customer relationships effectively.
Enable abandoned cart emails
Abandoned carts are a reality for ecommerce businesses, but you can email these customers to try to bring them back. You can manually or automatically send abandoned cart emails to customers who have left your store before purchasing the items in their carts. Providing incentives in these emails is a good idea – like a discount code or a percentage of their outstanding order. Ensure this feature is prepared and enabled before launching your ecommerce store.
Collect customer emails at checkout
Email is one of the most personalized ways to connect with your customer base. You can maintain contact with your customer base by collecting their emails at checkout. You can have an email opt-in option somewhere on your homepage – this can also be a pop-up triggered by visitors scrolling through the site. It would be best to allow visitors to opt-in to your email newsletter at checkout. This will help you to grow your email marketing list.
Add a shipping origin address
The shipping origin address is used to calculate the cost of shipping. Ensure this is correct so you are charging your customers the proper amount. Pay special attention to this if you ship your products from a location different from your store’s main office so that your customers get the correct shipping amount quoted every time.
Customize order fulfillment settings
Your store’s fulfillment settings will differ depending on how you produce your products. You may make, manufacture, wholesale, or drop ship your products. You can set your fulfillment to occur manually or automatically. Ensure you have chosen this and have systems before your store launches.
Activate any third-party fulfillment services
Integrate the service properly with your store before launching. Third-party fulfillment services like shipping or warehouse picking, packing, and shipping must be considered. Doing this will help ensure a smooth customer experience from the beginning.
Shipping labels & packaging
If you ship your products, ensure you have all the necessary materials before launching. Once the orders start coming in, know how to ship and package your products effectively and efficiently. This means having packing envelopes, boxes, tissue paper, packing peanuts, bubble wrap, tape, scissors, label-making supplies, receipt paper, and any other possible supplies on hand.
They will handle this portion if you use a fulfillment center or dropshipper.
Organize your order notifications
If a team is working with you, it’s extremely important to be organized. You should know who will receive order notifications and who will manage the process. Get this organized before you launch to avoid any potential hiccups moving forward. It’s a good idea to do a few dry runs so that you know your system works properly.
Payment logistics checklist
Before you launch your online store, make sure you have all of the logistics in place to accept payment and process orders effectively.
- SSL certificate
- Set Up Inventory Tracking
- Check Tax Rates & Currency
- Double Check Product Shipping Weight
- Integrate Payment Gateways
- Set Up Payment Authorization & Capture
- Enable abandoned cart emails
- Integrate email marketing automation software
- Collect Customer Emails at Checkout
- Add a shipping origin address
- Activate any third-party fulfillment services
- Shipping labels & packaging
- Organize your order notifications
- Conduct test purchases
- Test forms and email automation
- Ensure security measures for ecommerce sites, such as SSL certificates and verification systems, to protect customer payment information.
Spelling and grammar
As you complete your ecommerce website, double and triple-check the copy on each page. The last thing you want is an unsightly and unnecessary spelling or grammar error to bring things down. Online tools like Grammarly can help catch some of the bigger mistakes, and a second set of eyes on every piece of copy can help to ensure that you aren’t missing any crucial errors that can present your business in a less-than-professional light.
Post-Launch Marketing / Setup
Post-launch marketing is crucial for driving your ecommerce store’s success. Start by analyzing customer feedback to refine your strategy. Engage with your audience through targeted social media campaigns, email newsletters, PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising, and SEO optimization. You have to track performance metrics to adjust tactics. Consistency and adaptability are key to maintaining momentum and growing your brand.
Marketing your ecommerce Site
When you have an online store, you need to make sure people can find it. That’s where effective online marketing comes into play. There are things you can do both on-page and off-page to help give your store the visibility it needs.
Leverage social media
It would help if you were consistent when marketing your online store with social media. That means posting regularly when your customers are looking – so know your audience. You can consider many social media platforms, but you should focus on your potential buyers’ social channels. If your customers are primarily on Instagram, spending your marketing energy and money on Facebook doesn’t make much sense. Please pay attention to your customer base and understand where they spend their time online.
Use PPC advertising
Pay-per-click advertising lets you get right in front of your customers when they search for your products. By bidding on keywords related to your products, you can create ads that appear in the search engine results. This can be a great way to help you generate traffic to your online store – especially just after you launch. It can take some time to get a foothold in the SERPs with SEO, but PPC can help you gain visibility immediately.
Implement an SEO strategy
When you have an online store, it’s important to have a solid SEO strategy in place. After all, you’re competing with some major marketplaces online, like Amazon. You need to optimize your online store in order to receive more visits, and you do that by incorporating SEO keywords into your product listing titles, descriptions, website copy, tags, and so on. By including frequently-searched terms and phrases into your site, you can drive traffic and boost sales.
Use email promotions
Email marketing is a simple way to target buyers with promotions tailored to their unique needs. When customers are interested in how your product can benefit them, they are more likely to engage with discounts and offers. For instance, store visitors who viewed products but didn’t make a purchase might benefit from an email discount tailored specifically to first-time buyers.
Email marketing is also a good way to stay in touch with your current customer base.
Create a blog
A great way to implement those frequently-searched keyword phrases into your site is with a blog. Promoting your business through blogging can help your online store in various ways. It not only sets your business up as a thought leader in your industry, but it can also help your site regarding SEO. Additionally, you can promote your business’s blog via social media for additional exposure.
If you don’t know what to write about, take some time to think about the types of questions that your customers frequently ask. How do they engage with your product daily? How can they integrate your products into their lives?
With these different marketing channels in place, you can stay top-of-mind with your customers.
Optimize the meta titles and descriptions
Ensure your meta titles and meta descriptions are updated with the correct information for SEO purposes. You want your potential customers to be able to see you when they conduct a Google search. These meta fields are important in ensuring you put the right information out there. They should be short and sweet – stick to the 160 character limit for descriptions. The meta title should include your store’s name so that search engines and customers can easily identify it.
Image alt tags and product meta info
If there’s ever an error with the images loading on your site, customers will see the image alt tag information. Additionally, alt tags are important for users who may be using an accessibility software that describes images on a page to them. They also show search engines what the picture is – so they should be optimized with keywords for SEO purposes.
The product meta information acts similarly to image alt tags. This information is an important part of your SEO strategy. It should be clean and clear for your potential customers. Each product page should be optimized with keywords so your products appear in search engine results.
Set yourself up for success
If you plan to use ads to drive traffic right when you launch, make sure your customer support game is up to snuff. People expect fast, friendly support 24/7. You might not pull that off when you launch, but that should be your benchmark.
When you get into ecommerce, you want to know what’s working and not. This is especially true of an ecommerce store. Fortunately, there are many ways to track the success of your store. If you’re using Shopify, it provides a dashboard for analytics and reports. You can also integrate the Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics to track this information in one place, so be sure to install them in your ecommerce store before you launch.
- Set up social profiles as sales channels
- Set up email helpdesk / live chat
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Pixel
- Remove Password Protection
- Submit Product Feed To Google
- Double Check Spelling and Grammar
- Delete Sample/Test Pages
- Set Up Facebook Ads
- Conduct Influencer Outreach
- Launch Content Marketing Campaigns
Build and Grow Your Ecommerce Website
This is a general checklist that should apply to most ecommerce store launches. Depending on your store’s unique needs, you may not need all these steps. But it’s always a good idea to have a checklist to launch your ecommerce store confidently.
If this seems like many things to consider, don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. We are here to help you every step of the way. Contact us today to build and grow your ecommerce website.
