Ads bring strangers to your store, and every gap in the store costs you part of what you paid to bring them. Fixing the gaps costs time and nothing else, and none of them needs a developer. Go through this list before you set a budget.
Every gap in your store costs part of what you paid to bring visitors there.
1. Buy something yourself
Place a real order on your phone, or a test order if your payment provider has a test mode. Try each payment method you offer. Check that the confirmation email arrives and that the order appears where you expect it. Stores often fail at the last step, and a failure there wastes every click you paid for.
2. Say how long delivery takes, on the product page
Buyers who cannot find a delivery time either leave or write to you and then leave. Put a range of days for each country you sell to on the product page, not only on a separate shipping page. If you use a supplier or print partner, take the range from their own figures and add a few days of margin.
3. Publish the policy pages
You need a privacy policy, a refund policy, a shipping policy and terms of service. Payment providers and ad platforms often look at these pages when they review an account, and buyers read them before they hand over a card number. Link them in the footer so they appear on every page.
4. Show who you are
Add a business name, an email address that works, and an address or at least a country. A store with no way to reach anyone looks risky. Answer messages quickly, because a reply within a day removes many doubts on its own.
5. Check the tracking before you rely on it
Install the ad platform’s tag or pixel and make sure it records a purchase. Place a test order and confirm the purchase event shows up once, not twice and not zero. Meta’s Pixel Helper and Google’s Tag Assistant are free browser tools that show whether a tag fired on the page. Without a working tag, the ad platform cannot learn which clicks bring buyers, and you cannot tell which ads work.
6. Open the store on a phone with mobile data
Many ad clicks come from phones. Open your store on your own phone without Wi-Fi and time how long the first product page takes to load. Large uncompressed photos are the usual cause of a slow page, and resizing them fixes most of it.
7. Write your own product descriptions
Copying the supplier’s text gives shoppers and search engines a page they have seen elsewhere. Write a short description in your own words: what it is, the size or material, who it suits and what is included. Use photos that show the product from more than one angle.
8. Make the page match the ad
Send each ad to the page for the product in the ad, not to the home page. If the ad shows a blue jacket or mentions free shipping over $50, the visitor should see that jacket and that offer straight away.
If you only have an hour
Do the test order first, then the tracking check, then the policy pages. A store that cannot take payment, cannot report a sale or cannot show basic policies causes the largest losses. Delivery times, descriptions and page speed can follow over the next few days while a small test budget runs.
After the checks, start small
Set a small daily budget and watch where visitors stop. If many view a product but few add it to the cart, the product page needs work. If many add to cart but few pay, look at shipping costs and the checkout. The step where people leave tells you what to fix next, before you raise the budget.
The choice between ad platforms comes next, and our comparison of Meta and Google ads for a new store covers it. We also build and fix stores through our web design service and run campaigns through paid ads.