Free Store Review - Learn How To Review Your Online Store Like A Pro
Free Store Review - Learn How To Review Your Online Store Like A Pro

Your online store is finally ready and your fingers are itching to launch your first Facebook ads… But before you do that, you have to be sure your store is optimized and in perfect condition so you can convert your visitors to actual paying customers.

In most cases, users just post their store link on some big dropshipping groups and hope for some honest feedback about their stores. This method is good but you really depend on the kindness of other people and their knowledge. I have seen enough store review posts on Facebook where the so called “pro tips” were not helpful at all…

So to help you with your store review, I decided this week’s article will be about how you can check your online store without any help from others. We’ll go through the most important parts of your store to make sure it’s ready to get traffic and hopefully sales.

Important Note: Ecomhunt users can always ask Jack Kaching, our online consultant, to review their store. Jack has reviewed thousands of online stores and after his review, you can be sure your store is ready to start getting sales!

 

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1. Payment Gateways

The first thing I check on EVERY online store I build are the payment gateways – It doesn’t matter how many stores I built in the past, I never launch ads before I manually purchase an item from my new store.

Shopify allows you to test your checkout through their Bogus Gateway which is there make sure your taxes, shipping, and other settings work correctly. In most cases, I run a Free Shipping online store so no taxes or shipping rates exist so I don’t use their Bogus Gateway. Instead, I simply purchase a product from my store as if I am a real customer.

If I accept PayPal, I use my second PayPal account to purchase from myself to make sure everything works and the payment goes through. If it’s Stripe, I purchase a product from my store from a different credit card I own to see if everything works correctly.

Sometimes the issue can be within your payment provider so by checking it this way, I make sure everything works so my store is ready to receive traffic. If you don’t have another credit card or PayPal account, then just ask friends or family to make a purchase from your store.

I also setup the payment to be captured manually and not automatically:

This gives me more control over the money that goes into my PayPal or Stripe account so I don’t have to pay fees if I need to cancel an order.

 

2. Checkout Page

Now that our payment gateways work, we have to make sure our checkout page looks good, optimized, and that it calculates everything correctly. So first of all, I start by adding trust badges to my checkout page and make sure the footer has my store policy links in it.

You can see the trust badges on the photo above – Instead of displaying a simple logo, I edit it on Photoshop and add trust badges on the right side. For the policy links, I create them on Shopify by using their policy generator and it is automatically displayed in the footer.

It’s important to have trust badges and policy links on your checkout and not just a blank checkout page with a single logo. A 5-minute work to add these to your checkout page and you will see how it increases your conversion rate!

Now that we have our trust badges and policy links, it’s time to check if our shipping rates and taxes work too. If you’re running a Free Shipping store, there’s really nothing to check here. But if your store has shipping rates and taxes, you have to make sure they’re calculated correctly.

If you miss a shipping zone or forget to setup a shipping rate for a certain product price/weight, your customers won’t be able to checkout. We’re spending money to bring traffic to our store so it would be a shame if they can’t buy because of some technical issue…

 

3. Checkout Settings

Next is a quick review of our checkout settings to make sure we don’t confuse and “force” any extra steps on our customers. So first of all, accounts should be disabled and I think this is the default options on the checkout settings. There’s no need for any accounts on my dropshipping store…

Next is to choose how our customers can checkout either by using only email or phone number. I always choose only email because I don’t want to deal with any SMS messages and phone support… So email is of course the only option I choose.

These are my options in the form options and order processing:

Most important part for me here is to make sure the phone number is optional and not required. Some people don’t like giving away their phone numbers so if this field is required, there’s a chance they will not buy from my store.

In the order processing, I make sure the shipping address is the billing address by default. This is the case with most customers so this options saves them a lot of time instead of typing the same address twice.

And of course, I make sure address auto-completion is on for my customers to checkout faster ๐Ÿ™‚

For the email marketing option at checkout, I always preselect the sign-up option:

Make sure to check the rules of your country and the rules of the countries you sell in before preselecting this option.

 

4. Product Page

Now it’s the product page’s turn to be reviewed so we don’t miss a thing that can hurt our conversions.

The first thing any product page must have are again the trust badges:

Customers need to see all the time that your store is secured and trusted. It takes 5 minutes of work tops to display trust badges on your product page so your customers feel safe and to increase your overall conversion rate.

Next on the things your product page must have are the Shipping times and the Guarantees:

Customers go through your product page to learn more about the product and to also see how much time it will take it to arrive. Some dropshippers think that displaying shipping times will hurt the conversion rate but trust me that this isn’t the case.

If the product you’re selling is good and people love it, they will buy it no matter how much time it will take to arrive. Be frank with your customers and tell them it can take 2 to 4 weeks for the item to arrive and it should be alright. If they email you asking where is their order, answer quickly and explain that there’s a slight delay.

Guarantees are also important to give a piece of mind to your customers about the product – It’s basically there to tell them we’re so sure you will love our product that we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee + a full refund if you’re not happy.

Next are the MUST HAVE product reviews:

Reviews are super important to have on your product page because a big percentage of your customers will check them before placing an order. Statistics show that the average consumer reads about 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business. This one fact is enough to show you the importance of having reviews on your store.

It’s also really easy to import reviews to your store. You have plenty of review apps like Loox or Ali Reviews to automatically import reviews from a chosen source to your store.

IMPORTANT: Don’t forget any detail about your product! If your product works with batteries, you have to let your customers know what kind of batteries they need and if it’s included in the order. If your product has a plug, you have to offer multiple plug styles if you sell worldwide.

You will lose sales if you fail to mention an important detail about the product you sell. You shouldn’t play a “guess the missing product detail” game with your customers ๐Ÿ˜‰

 

5. Shopify Apps

Your Shopify store needs to have certain apps installed before you can run any traffic. Review apps, cart recovery apps, email marketing apps, etc, are here to make sure you make as much sales as possible.

It does cost money to have these installed but you will make much less if you don’t use any apps. Emojix is a gamification exit popup quiz to catch your customers attention before they leave your store and to offer them a discount so they complete their purchase. Unlimited Bundles & Discounts lets you build quick bundles to increase your AOV(Average Order Value).

Sticky Cart app is there to always display your Add to Cart button so the customers can easily click on it when they finished reading the product description. Some of the apps are free and some are not, but every app has its purpose. These apps pay for themselves by making you more sales!

 

To Sum It Up:

It may look much and to some of you it may also look a bit complicated, but now you can finally review your own store and launch your ads knowing there’s nothing to stop your customers from buying.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

Good Luck ๐Ÿ™‚

 

Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

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7 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks for the great tips! I actually had a problem once with my PayPal setup and I found out about only after spending $100 on ads without any sales… as soon as I fixed it and checked everything was working I started getting sales the same day!

    • In some countries, paypal isn’t available and this is something I cannot change. Try opening a business account somewhere in a country PayPal accepts or just accept only credit card on your store. That’s ok too and I don’t see a problem with that.

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