The 6 checks we run when someone asks us to review their store

When someone sends us their store and asks what's wrong with it, we don't start with opinions about fonts. We work through six checks, in a fixed order.

The order is the point. A stranger arriving on your store decides in a few seconds whether they understand it, then whether they trust it, then whether it works on the phone in their hand. Only after that do speed, the product page and checkout get a chance. If the first check fails, the rest barely matter.

Here's the checklist, what each check catches, and how to run it on your own store.

How we run a review

Two rules keep a review useful rather than overwhelming.

• One big fix, two quick wins. A list of 40 problems gets ignored. We pick the one change most likely to move sales, then two things you can fix in an afternoon.
• We look as a stranger. Logged out, on a phone, landing on the homepage and on a product page, the way your customers actually arrive.

Do the same when you run it yourself. Use your phone, open a private browser tab, and pretend you've never heard of your brand.

1. Clarity: can a stranger tell what you sell?

What it catches: headlines that sound nice and say nothing. "Designed for the way you live." "Elevate your everyday." Lovely, and a stranger still doesn't know if you sell candles or sofas.

How to run it: open your homepage on your phone and look for five seconds. Then close it and answer three questions:

1. What does this store sell?
2. Who is it for?
3. Why would I buy it here rather than somewhere else?

Better still, show it to a friend for five seconds and ask them. If they can't answer the first question, your hero section needs rewriting before anything else on this list.

Often the fix is words, not design. Put what you sell in the headline and who it's for in the line under it. Save the brand poetry for the About page.

2. Trust: do you look like a real business?

What it catches: the small signals that make people wonder whether their parcel will ever arrive. Baymard Institute's checkout research found that 19% of US shoppers who abandoned a purchase did so because they didn't trust the site with their card details. Trust is built long before checkout.

How to run it: look for these, as a stranger would:

• Placeholder content. Sample blog posts, "Testimonial 1", an empty About page, a footer link to a page that doesn't exist.
• A way to reach a human. A contact page with an email address, and ideally a business address or at least a country.
• Policies that exist and agree. Shipping and returns pages that are written for your store, not pasted templates, and that match what the product page says.
• Reviews that look real. A handful of specific reviews beats 4.9 stars from 2,000 people with no text.
• Consistent prices and currency. Nothing that changes between the product page, the cart and checkout.

The fix: remove anything unfinished, fill in the pages people check before buying (About, Contact, Shipping, Returns), and make every promise match.

3. Mobile: does it work on a phone?

What it catches: problems you never see because you build your store on a laptop. Most of your visitors are probably on their phone. You can check in the Shopify admin: the Analytics dashboard has a Sessions by device type card.

How to run it: on your phone, go from the homepage to a product to the cart. Watch for:

• A popup that covers the screen and is hard to close
• An Add to cart button you have to scroll to find
• Text you have to zoom to read
• Pages that scroll sideways
• A chat bubble or banner sitting on top of the product or the button

The fix: most of these are settings, not rebuilds. Delay or remove the popup, move the chat bubble, and check the theme's mobile layout for the product page.

4. Speed: does it feel quick on a real phone?

What it catches: slow pages, and especially slow product pages. Common causes are large images, too many apps, or both.

How to run it: Shopify has a web performance report built in. Go to Analytics → Reports and search for "web performance" (Shopify's help page says typing a colon also lists all of them). It uses real visitor data from the last 30 days and shows three measures, with Shopify's thresholds for "good":

• Largest contentful paint (how quickly the main content appears): 2.5 seconds or less
• Interaction to next paint (how quickly the page responds to a tap): 200 milliseconds or less
• Cumulative layout shift (how much the page jumps around while loading): 0.1 or less

Your store needs to be live with real traffic for this to fill in. Then do the human test: load your best-selling product page on mobile data, not Wi-Fi, and see how long it takes before you could tap Add to cart.

The fix: compress and resize hero images, and count your apps. Each one that loads a script on every page adds weight, even if you stopped using it months ago.

5. Product page: does it answer the questions before they're asked?

What it catches: pages that show a product without explaining it. Shoppers can't touch the item, so the page has to answer what they'd normally ask in a shop: what is it, will it fit, when will it arrive, can I send it back?

How to run it: open your best-selling product on your phone and check, without scrolling past the Add to cart button:

• Is it clear what the product is from the title and first line?
• Can you see the price, the options and the button together?
• Is sizing or dimensions information right next to the size selector?
• Can you find shipping time and returns without leaving the page?
• Do the photos show scale, detail and the product in use?

The fix: start with the description's first line and the information next to the button. Both are text changes you can make in an afternoon, so try them before paying for a new gallery or layout.

6. Checkout: does anything stop people paying?

What it catches: surprises at the last step. In the same Baymard research, the most common reason US shoppers gave for abandoning a checkout was extra costs that were too high, such as shipping, tax and fees, at 40%. Delivery that was too slow came next, at 20%.

How to run it: place a real order on your phone, then refund it. Watch for:

• Shipping costs that appear for the first time at checkout. If there's a free shipping threshold, say so in the cart.
• Forced account creation. Check your checkout and customer account settings so nobody has to sign up to buy.
• Missing payment options. If your customers expect a wallet like Apple Pay or Shop Pay, make sure it appears.
• Delivery times that don't match the product page.

Repeat this test after any change to shipping, apps or checkout settings, not just at launch. If people add to cart and then stop, add to cart but no sales walks through where they drop off.

The fix: show costs early, keep checkout guest-friendly, and make every delivery promise say the same thing.

What to do next

Run the six checks in order, on your phone, as a stranger:

1. Clarity. Can someone tell what you sell in five seconds?
2. Trust. Remove placeholder content and make every policy match.
3. Mobile. Buy something on your phone and note everything that gets in the way.
4. Speed. Open the web performance report and test your best product page on mobile data.
5. Product page and checkout. Answer the fit, shipping and returns questions on the page, and show costs before the last step.

Then pick one big fix and two quick wins, and keep the rest of the list for later. If the checks all pass and sales are still low, traffic but no sales covers what to look at next.

If you'd rather have a second pair of eyes, send us your store link and we'll run the checklist and tell you the first thing we'd fix.