Launch Checklist: 12 Things to Check Before Your Online Store Goes Live

Most launch-day problems aren’t design problems — they’re small, checkable things that got missed because nobody ran through them in order. This is the list we go through before any store goes live.

Before launch

1. Place a real test order, start to finish — not just to the payment screen. Confirm the order actually arrives in your system and you get notified.
2. Test every payment method you’re offering, not just the one you use personally. A gateway that works with one card type isn’t guaranteed to work with all of them.
3. Check stock and inventory logic — does the site correctly stop selling something once it’s out of stock, or can it be over-sold?
4. Confirm order confirmation emails/messages actually send, and check what they look like from the customer’s side, not just that a log shows “sent.”
5. Test checkout on an actual phone, on mobile data — not just resized in a desktop browser. Most of your traffic will be exactly this.
6. Verify shipping costs calculate correctly for every region you deliver to, including the edge cases (remote areas, free-shipping thresholds).
7. Read every policy page as if you were a first-time customer — shipping, returns, privacy. Missing or vague policy pages are one of the fastest ways to lose a hesitant buyer’s trust.

Also worth checking

8. Product images load correctly and are actually compressed — this is one of the most common causes of a slow storefront.
9. Search actually returns relevant results for the product names and terms customers are likely to use, not just exact matches.
10. Analytics and tracking are firing before launch, not added after — you want day-one data, not day-thirty data.
11. 404 and error pages don’t dead-end the visitor — give them a way back to the store, not just an error message.
12. Someone other than the person who built it tests the whole flow. Whoever built the site already knows how it’s supposed to work, which makes them the worst person to catch what an actual customer would trip on.

None of these individually take long to check. Skipped together, they’re most of what actually goes wrong in the first week after a store launches.

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If you’re planning an e-commerce launch and want a team that handles the build, the integrations, and the ongoing maintenance, see our custom web development service — or send us a brief and we’ll tell you what your specific store needs before any proposal is written.