E-Commerce Launch Checklist: 20 Things You Need Before Going Live

Launching an e-commerce store is one of the most exciting things a business can do — and one of the easiest to get wrong by going live before you're ready. The cost of a premature launch isn't just lost sales on day one. It's the trust you lose from customers who encounter a broken checkout, a missing policy page, or a slow-loading product gallery. First impressions in e-commerce are difficult to recover from.

This checklist covers the 20 things we run through with every e-commerce client before flipping the switch to live. Work through each section systematically and you'll launch with confidence.

Design and User Experience

1. Complete a full mobile audit on a real device

Over 70% of e-commerce traffic comes from mobile, and the majority of abandoned carts happen on mobile too. Don't test on a browser's device emulator — use a real iPhone and a real Android device. Tap every button, scroll every page, and complete a test purchase end-to-end on mobile. Look for overlapping text, unclickable buttons, and form fields that require awkward zooming. These issues are invisible on desktop and catastrophic for mobile conversion.

2. Test page load speed with real tools

Run your homepage, your category pages, and your most important product pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Aim for an LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) under 2.5 seconds. If you're over 4 seconds on mobile, you will lose a significant portion of visitors before they see your products. Compress images, implement lazy loading, and minimise third-party scripts before launch — not after.

3. Verify your site hierarchy and navigation make sense to a stranger

Ask someone who has never seen your store to find a specific product using only the navigation. If they struggle, your category structure needs work. Your main navigation should reflect how customers think about your products, not how you organise your warehouse. A confusing navigation is one of the top reasons users leave without purchasing.

4. Confirm your search functionality works properly

If your store has more than 30 products, site search is essential. Test it with exact product names, partial names, and misspellings. If someone searches for "blue sneakers" and gets no results because your products are tagged "navy trainers," you have a taxonomy problem. Ensure search returns relevant results and handles zero-result states with useful suggestions rather than a dead end.

5. Review all images for quality and consistency

Product images are the closest thing online shoppers have to touching the product. Every product should have at least 3 images: a clean white-background hero shot, a lifestyle context shot, and a detail shot. Ensure consistent image dimensions across your catalogue so product grids don't have mismatched aspect ratios. Avoid compressed, blurry, or watermarked images — they signal low credibility before a customer reads a single word of your copy.

Product Setup and Catalogue

6. Write unique, substantive product descriptions for every product

Manufacturer descriptions are duplicate content — Google will not rank you for them, and they rarely address the questions that actually drive purchase decisions. For each product, answer: What does it do? Who is it for? What are the dimensions, materials, and compatibility details? What makes it different from alternatives? Even 150–200 words of original, specific copy per product is significantly better than copying the manufacturer spec sheet.

7. Set up inventory tracking and stock alerts

Nothing damages trust like a customer completing a purchase and receiving an "unfortunately this item is out of stock" email 24 hours later. Configure inventory levels, enable out-of-stock warnings on product pages, and set low-stock email alerts for yourself. If you can't track inventory accurately at launch, consider hiding certain products until your fulfilment process is more robust.

8. Configure all product variants correctly

If you sell products in multiple sizes, colours, or configurations, test every variant combination in your catalogue. Check that the right SKU, price, and stock level are associated with each variant. Add a size guide or variant selection guide where needed. Missing or broken variants are a top reason for cart abandonment in apparel and accessories categories.

9. Verify all pricing, including taxes and currency

Confirm your prices are displaying correctly, taxes are calculating properly for your jurisdiction (HST/GST/PST as applicable in Canada), and your currency is set correctly. If you're selling internationally, confirm which currencies you're accepting and that exchange rate calculations are configured. Tax miscalculation is both a customer trust issue and a legal compliance issue.

Payments, Shipping, and Checkout

10. Complete a test transaction using every payment method you offer

Use your payment gateway's test mode to complete a full transaction — adding to cart, applying a discount code, proceeding to checkout, entering payment details, and receiving a confirmation email — for every payment method you plan to accept (credit card, PayPal, Affirm, Apple Pay, Google Pay). Then switch to live mode and do it again with a real $1 transaction before launch. Broken checkout flows are the number one reason for lost revenue on launch day.

11. Configure shipping rates accurately

Unexpected shipping costs are the top reason for cart abandonment, cited by over 48% of shoppers in checkout research. Your shipping rates need to be accurate, transparent, and visible before the final checkout step. If you offer free shipping above a threshold, make that visible on every product page and in the cart. If you use calculated rates from Canada Post or a courier API, test orders to multiple Canadian postal codes to verify the rates are calculating correctly.

12. Set up abandoned cart recovery

On average, 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. A well-configured abandoned cart email sequence — sent at 1 hour, 24 hours, and 72 hours after abandonment — can recover 5–15% of those carts. Set this up before launch, not after. Include the cart contents, a compelling subject line, and a direct link back to the cart. A 10% recovery rate on a store doing $20,000/month in abandoned cart value is $2,000 in otherwise-lost revenue.

13. Test your order confirmation and shipping notification emails

Transactional emails are often the most read emails your brand sends. Your order confirmation should include: order number, itemised list of products, shipping address, estimated delivery date, and customer service contact information. It should look professional — with your logo, brand colours, and consistent formatting — not like a default platform-generated template. Test these on both desktop and mobile email clients.

SEO Foundations

14. Write unique title tags and meta descriptions for all key pages

Every product page, category page, and static page needs a unique title tag (under 60 characters) and meta description (under 155 characters). These are what show up in Google search results — they're your unpaid ad copy. Generic titles like "Product — Store Name" tell Google nothing and earn poor click-through rates. Specific titles like "Men's Merino Wool Crew Neck Sweater — Free Shipping | Brand Name" perform dramatically better in both rankings and clicks.

15. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console

Create an XML sitemap that includes all your indexable product and category pages, submit it to Google Search Console, and verify your domain. This tells Google your site exists and which pages to crawl first. Without this, new e-commerce stores can take weeks longer to appear in search results. Also check that your robots.txt file isn't accidentally blocking Google from crawling your product or category pages — a common configuration mistake in platform setups.

16. Implement structured data for products

Product schema markup (JSON-LD) tells Google specific details about your products — price, availability, reviews, and ratings — enabling rich snippets in search results. Rich snippets (the star ratings and price displays you see in Google results) consistently earn higher click-through rates than standard results. Most e-commerce platforms have apps or built-in support for this, but test your implementation using Google's Rich Results Test before launch to confirm it's valid.

Legal and Compliance

17. Publish all required legal pages

You need, at minimum, the following pages before going live:

• Privacy Policy: Required under PIPEDA in Canada and GDPR if you have any European customers. Explains what data you collect and how you use it.
• Terms and Conditions: Governs the relationship between your store and your customers. Includes purchase terms, dispute resolution, and limitations of liability.
• Return and Refund Policy: Legally required to be accessible before purchase in many Canadian provinces. Must clearly state your return window, conditions, and process.
• Shipping Policy: Processing times, carrier options, and delivery timelines. Reduces support tickets dramatically by setting clear expectations.

These pages also reduce chargebacks, build customer confidence, and are required by most payment processors as a condition of your merchant account.

18. Verify your cookie consent setup

If you use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or any third-party tracking, you need a cookie consent mechanism — particularly for Canadian customers under applicable privacy legislation and for any EU/UK visitors under GDPR. Ensure your consent banner actually controls whether tracking scripts fire, not just whether the banner shows. A consent banner that doesn't actually disable tracking provides no legal protection and is increasingly scrutinised by regulators.

Marketing and Launch Readiness

19. Connect all marketing pixels and verify they're firing correctly

Before you spend a single dollar on ads, verify your tracking is working. Use Meta's Pixel Helper Chrome extension to confirm your Facebook/Instagram Pixel is firing on page views and purchase events. Use Google Tag Assistant to confirm your Google Ads conversion tags are firing correctly on the order confirmation page. Launching ad campaigns without verified conversion tracking means you're flying blind — unable to see which ads drove revenue, unable to optimise toward what works.

20. Prepare your launch marketing plan

A new e-commerce store with no traffic is a store that makes no sales, regardless of how good it looks. Before you go live, define your Day 1 traffic strategy:

• Will you run Google Shopping ads from day one?
• Do you have an email list from a pre-launch campaign to notify?
• Are you announcing on social media with a specific offer or promotion?
• Do you have influencer partnerships or PR placements planned?
• Is there a launch discount code you're promoting, and does it work correctly?

Traffic does not appear automatically after launch. If you've built the store but have no plan to bring customers to it, delay launch until you do.

Before You Launch

Working through this checklist takes time — typically 1–2 weeks of focused effort before a launch date. That's time well spent. The e-commerce stores that launch with all 20 items confirmed earn customer trust from transaction one, avoid the demoralising experience of fixing critical issues under live traffic, and position themselves to grow rather than firefight.

If you're in the process of building your store and want a second set of eyes before launch, or if you're considering building an e-commerce store from scratch with these foundations baked in from the start, the team at ZB Media Group has done this before and can make sure nothing slips through.