The Ultimate Shopify Store Launch Checklist

Tools, apps and e-commerce websites

April 1, 2021

The Ultimate Shopify Store Launch Checklist

Planning a Shopify launch for your store can feel quite precarious in the beginning. It’s overwhelming, and it can seem like a neverending list of to-dos. You might want to get started straight away to kick off your sales.

This article will inform you about everything you need to set up to smoothly launch your Shopify store and start ringing in your sales!

To ensure that your Shopify Store launch goes off like smooth sailing, you should use a central checklist to keep track of the essential details that you need to act on before you can launch your store! ShoppingFeeder has got you covered, so don’t worry about the small stuff just yet!

1. Add your chosen sales channels

According to a survey by the Harvard Business Review, around 73% of customers use more than one channel to make a single purchase with a brand and spend more time on average than those who use it.

The benefits of this can be massive – selling your products in as many places as possible can only be a good thing! It also means that you can expect multi-channel buyers to spend more time on your website.

It would help if you were on the lookout for sales channels that can work well for your business and integrate into your Shopify Store.

Some of the most popular options include:

Your sales channel of choice will easily integrate with the rest of your Shopify store, so it will become easy to keep track of orders and track your most popular products and customers across every platform that you use.

Multichannel Google Shopping — Google Shopping Multichannel

2. Set up transactional emails

Transactional emails are emails that you’ll send based on a potential customer’s interaction with your website. These are usually sent during checkout, purchasing or after an order has been placed.

The most common transactional emails are:

Welcome Emails: Sent out in the beginning, when someone first provides you with their contact details. They may have made a purchase, signed up for your newsletter, downloaded a specific resource or subscribed to your blog.
Confirmation/Thank You Emails: These are sent out for order or shipping confirmations. However, these can also be sent once someone changes their password on your website, updates their credit card details, changes a shipping address or upgrades a service.
Reminder or Notification Emails: These are sent for a specific reason, often informing the customer that an action hasn’t yet been taken. The most common email of this kind is a shopping cart abandonment email, encouraging customers to come back and complete their purchase.
Request Emails: You can use these to ask for customer feedback on a product or overall experience or make other requests like “Share this with a friend”. Many surveys also include an incentive, such as discount or competition entry for a desirable prize.

Due to their content, these emails are highly personal, and your customers enjoy receiving them.

This fact means that they have a better chance of being opened, read, and acted upon when compared to a generic email.

Launch your store with Order Confirmation Emails

3. Make an effort to walk through your checkout and payment gateway settings

Before you can try to drive traffic to your store, you’ll want to be ensure that a visitor can successfully make a purchase on your website.

According to research, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is just under 70%. Therefore, it’s a wise idea to remove any friction at checkout.

When you are testing your checkout process, you’ll want to ensure that:

Shipping rates are displayed during checkout.
Discount codes can be applied easily.
Shoppers can edit their carts easily.
Popular payment methods are readily available, such as PayPal, Payfast or whatever else you choose.
Your customers can view their order status easily.
The contact page is highly accessible in case orders need to be amended or cancelled.
Email notifications are sent to confirm a purchase after every purchase.
If applicable, you have language and currency switching. Your shipping policy clearly states who is responsible for duties and taxes if you offer international sales and shipping.

One smart way to test this is to place a test order on your Shopify site with a live payment gateway to ensure everything is working as you intended.

You'll need checkout for a Shopify Launch — Basic Checkout

4. Collect Customer Feedback

Soon enough, you’ll be up and running with your Shopify Launch. You’ll be selling products in no time! But how will you gauge if your customers are happy with your products once they’ve been received?

The answer to this is to ask your customers for their feedback. This feedback will give you a host of valuable information about what is working well and where you have opportunities to improve.

Setting up a simple post-purchase survey after a purchase is a great way to get this done quickly. The Shopify platform has an easy set-up that can automatically style pop-up surveys to fit in with your existing Shopify store design.

You could ask questions like:

How did you hear about us?
How would you describe yourself?
What product do you want to see next?
How would you rate your shopping experience?
What is your preferred method of connecting with/contacting us?
How would you rate the products you received?
What kinds of products would you like to see next?

Gaining regular feedback will help you gain insights into how you can better serve your customers.

5. Optimize the images on your website

Images that are slow to load can hurt your Shopify store’s user experience and search engine performance. Slower load times have been shown to impact conversion rates negatively.

You must optimize all your images for the web to ensure you have fast load times. Shopify can handle the technicalities of keeping your photos fast to load.

Here are extra things you can do to improve your load speed and image optimization:

Use descriptions when naming your images. These can help with the SEO ranking of your Shopify store. Remember to use the keywords that you want to rank for!
Optimize your alt attributes thoughtfully. Alt attributes are mainly used for improved web accessibility and search engine optimization. Again, take this time to be descriptive and find your target keywords.
Reduce your image size. On Shopify, you can keep images at high quality, but they should remain at reasonable pixel size. This can impact the loading speed of your website.
Are you choosing the correct file type? For online images, a good rule is to use JPEG images for photography/product images and PNG images for simpler graphics and icons.
Check your thumbnails. The image quality of your brand logo is crucial. Remember that this is how customers will think of your brand. Thumbnails are seen all over Shopify sites, so make sure they’re clear across many sizes on your online store. These include viewers on mobile devices, too!
Test your chosen images. You’ll need to know what works and what doesn’t – and why this is so. It would help if you ran some A/B image tests to see which kinds of images work best for your customers.

6. Manage your Landing Pages

Landing pages aren’t the same as product pages. A landing page is a destination for shoppers who come to your Shopify store from a specific Facebook ad, email campaign, display ad, or another stream of traffic.

They are made to highlight a particular promotion or product. The main goal for a landing page is to make the sale.

When campaigns include custom landing pages, they usually see an increase in leads. Make sure that you’ve thought your landing pages, though, as you don’t want to be missing out on lost sales.

Need more help? Check out Shopify’s official checklist to find out more essentials for the Shopify Launch.