
First things first. If you are reading this and at the stage of your life where you are starting (or helping someone start) a new business - Congratulations! I hope it’s a rewarding journey. If you’re here just to learn - Welcome!
If you are setting up an e-commerce business on Shopify in 2024, take a quick look at this last-mile checklist we have for you before you go live. Assuming your site looks great by this stage on the theme that you carefully picked (after a few serious shortlists!), here are a few things that we hope you’ve not missed:
1. Reviewing the customer journey: Place test orders to make sure your overall customer journey is smooth enough. While doing this, test the entire customer journey from landing on a page to adding to cart to checkout to making a payment on the payment gateway. Ideally getting people other than you & your team who’ve already worked on the website to do so really helps! This will enable you to understand any friction areas that users might face while making a purchase, that you may have missed!
2. Categorizing products into collections: I’ve seen a lot of new businesses relying solely on a ‘Shop All’ collections page which is just an overall collection of all the items on the page. Now if you’re launching with just 1 or 2 products, skip to the next point.
But if you have a good number of products - across categories or concerns or for different target audiences, make sure to categorize them into relevant collections. Having good store hygiene with collections pages right from the get-go allows these page links to be seamlessly used for sharing across channels, and saves manual trouble later as collections expand.
For example, consider you are a beauty brand that has launched with 5 products - across skin, hair, and body categories - that have 2 different types of ingredients, then make sure you have collections pages for each of the categories, and maybe even ingredient types.
3. Making navigation easy: Make your collections easy to access by having an easy website navigation system. When it comes to navigation - keep it simple, easy to use, and ordered by priority. The objective is to help customers easily find what they need.

A good example of a multi-category multi-product brand (Wellbeing Nutrition)
A common mistake we see small businesses make is optimizing navigation for desktop sites, and missing how the experience is on mobile. Because mobile sessions contribute to > 80% of most sessions, don’t make this rookie mistake! P.S. Don’t forget the footer! Your privacy policy, T&C documents, and other policies like shipping and returns are vital to the overall website experience.
4. Setting up order update emails: Shopify has a few order update templates like order confirmation & order cancellation already in place. Make sure you customize those to include your brand’s tone of voice, logo, the right email ID, and other details! The tiny things usually make the biggest impact, don’t they?
5. Enabling collection of reviews: Setting up an app to collect and manage reviews should be on your priority list as you go live with your website. An app like Judge.me helps you send email reminders to your customers to collect reviews and displays them on the respective product pages. You can set up email reminders say 15 days after an order has been placed and customize the email templates, content, and reminder rules depending on the pricing plan you choose, but the basic plan is good enough to start with!
Hope this helps! Reach out to us at meet@thebuildinc.com if you need us to audit your website to improve conversions.
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