Every ecommerce launch has the same anatomy: a homepage that sets expectations, product pages that do the selling, and a checkout that either closes the sale or loses it. Most of the conversion loss happens quietly, in the last mile — a confusing shipping cost, a checkout that resets when a coupon fails, a trust signal that's missing at exactly the moment someone is deciding whether to hand over their card details.
This is the checklist we run before any storefront we build goes live. It's organised by the three places we see the most leakage.
Product pages
- Above-the-fold price, availability, and primary CTA visible without scrolling on mobile.
- At least one lifestyle or in-context image, not just studio shots on white.
- Shipping cost and estimated delivery window stated on the product page, not discovered at checkout.
- Size/variant selection that visibly updates price and stock before add-to-cart.
- Reviews visible near the fold, with a real count — not buried below a wall of specs.
- Clear return policy link, ideally with the return window stated in plain numbers.
- Cross-sell or bundle suggestions that load fast and don't push the buy box off-screen.
Cart and checkout
- Guest checkout available — account creation is optional, offered after purchase, not before.
- Progress indicator so the buyer knows how many steps remain.
- Coupon field that doesn't break the form or clear entered data on an invalid code.
- All costs — shipping, tax, fees — shown before the final payment step, never revealed for the first time on the last screen.
- Autofill-friendly form fields with correct input types (numeric keypad for card numbers, etc.) on mobile.
- Multiple payment methods, including at least one express option (wallet-based checkout).
- Inline validation errors, not a full-page reload that clears the form.
- Order summary persists and is editable from the payment step without losing progress.
Trust and post-purchase
- Security badges or payment provider logos near the payment fields, not just in the footer.
- A real support channel — email or chat — linked from the checkout, not hidden three clicks deep.
- Order confirmation page and email that both fire reliably and include a tracking path.
- Abandoned cart recovery configured and tested with a real card, not just assumed to work.
- Analytics events verified end-to-end — add-to-cart, checkout start, and purchase all firing exactly once, not zero or twice.
We build this checklist directly into every ecommerce website we ship — catalog, checkout, and fulfilment treated as one system, not three vendors.
View our ecommerce work →The pattern behind the list
Almost every item above traces back to one principle: remove uncertainty at the exact moment someone is about to commit. Buyers don't abandon carts because they changed their mind about the product — they abandon because a cost appeared they didn't expect, a form broke, or nothing on the page reassured them that this was a safe place to enter payment details.
None of these fixes are expensive to build. They're expensive to discover after launch, once the traffic — and the ad spend behind it — is already flowing through a leaky funnel.