Questions
What should I check before launching an online shop?
An online shop needs everything any site needs at launch, plus four things specific to selling: a checkout that works on a phone, product pages whose structured data agrees with what they display, marketing tracking that waits for consent and records purchases, and order emails that authenticate so they reach the inbox. The first three are visible from outside and quick to verify; the last depends on records the shop's domain publishes.
The checkout, on a phone
Most orders are placed on phones, so the checkout form is the most valuable form on the site.
Every field should declare its type and its autocomplete token, so the phone offers the right keyboard and fills addresses and cards in one tap.
The checkout must be served over HTTPS throughout, with no resource or form action over HTTP.
A viewport declaration that disables zoom, or targets too small to tap, turns a purchase into a struggle at the worst moment.
Walk through a real purchase on a real phone before launch, since static checks cannot operate a payment step.
Product data that agrees with the page
Product structured data should state the same price and the same currency the visitor sees; a disagreement misleads buyers and loses the rich result.
Review and rating markup belongs only on products that really display reviews, and with real values.
Breadcrumb markup should describe where the product actually sits in the catalogue.
Product descriptions should be the shop's own; manufacturer copy repeated across many shops is filtered as duplicate content.
Category pages should contain products; empty categories at launch waste crawl budget and disappoint visitors.
Tracking, purchases and consent
Advertising and analytics tags need purchase events to attribute revenue, and a tag being present says nothing about whether those events fire.
Where consent is required, marketing tags must wait for it; a tag firing on page load, before any choice, is a compliance finding from day one.
The same tag loaded twice — directly and through a tag manager — doubles recorded purchases as well as page views.
Verify with a test order that exactly one purchase event reaches each platform.
Order emails that arrive
Order confirmations, shipping notices and password resets are transactional mail, and buyers expect them within seconds.
They must authenticate as the shop's domain: a sender policy listing the shop platform, DKIM signing under the shop's domain, and DMARC.
A shop platform sending with its own domain by default produces mail that does not align, and under an enforcing policy it is filtered.
Place a test order to an address at a large mail provider and read the authentication verdicts in the headers.
Whether each email is sent at all is only observable from inside the shop.
The general launch checks, which still apply
The staging noindex removed, the sitemap published, and the domain resolving on every hostname advertised.
Old URLs redirected if the shop replaces an existing site, especially product URLs with external links.
Security headers, cookie flags and no exposed development files.
Product images sized for the screens they are shown on, since they are most of each page's weight.
What an external check cannot verify
Payment processing, which requires completing a transaction.
Stock, pricing rules, taxes and shipping calculations, which are business logic behind the checkout.
Whether transactional emails are actually triggered for each order event.
Legal pages and terms, which are a legal review rather than a technical one.
So a clean external report is the technical half of a launch, and the test order is the other half.
Frequently asked questions
- Can a scan test my checkout?
- It reads the checkout page's static signals — HTTPS, field types, autocomplete, viewport. It never submits the form or pays; a real test order on a phone is the only end-to-end check.
- Why do my product prices need to match the structured data?
- Because search engines show the declared price and currency. A mismatch misleads buyers and is a reason for the rich result to be dropped.
- Why check email authentication for a shop?
- Order confirmations are mail sent as your domain. Without a sender policy, DKIM under your domain and DMARC, they are the mail most likely to be filtered.
Sources
Related
VeriFixScan crawls a site and applies its checks to every page it reaches, keeping the evidence behind each finding. Scanning one website is free.
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