A florist launched her shop on a Thursday, announced it on Friday, and took her first order on Saturday morning. The order confirmation went to her, the customer got nothing, and the delivery date in the order was a day she did not deliver. None of that would have shown on a checklist. All of it would have shown on one real order.
The launch checklist covers what to read and click. This is the other half: the things you can only find by buying from yourself.
1. Place a real order with your own card
Not a test mode, not a free item. Pick the cheapest real product, go through checkout on your phone as a customer, and pay with your own card. You are checking six things at once:
- the price, shipping and tax that appear at checkout are the ones you meant;
- the payment goes through and lands in your own payment account;
- the stock count drops by one;
- the confirmation email reaches the customer's address (use one you do not run the shop from);
- the notification reaches you;
- the order appears in your orders list with the right status.
Then refund it. On a card order the refund goes back through the payment provider, and the order should move to refunded with the stock returned. If any of those six is wrong, you have found it for the price of a coffee.
2. Book an appointment, then cancel it
If the site takes bookings, book one as a customer for a day next week. Check that the slot was real (your hours, your buffer between appointments), that the confirmation arrived, that the booking is on your calendar, and that cancelling it releases the slot. If you take a deposit at booking, pay it and watch it arrive. Deposits that cut no-shows only work if the deposit actually gets taken.
3. Submit every form from a phone
Contact, quote request, newsletter signup. Fill each one in on a phone, badly: a typo in the email address, a missing field, a very long message. The errors you get are the errors your customers get. Then confirm the submission reached your inbox and did not land in spam.
4. Check the emails will keep arriving
A confirmation that reached your inbox today can still fail for a customer on a different provider next week. If your site sends email from your own domain, Google's sender guidelines ask for SPF or DKIM on the domain and a spam rate under 0.3%; a site builder that sends on your behalf has usually done this, and one you host yourself usually has not. Send a confirmation to a Gmail address and an Outlook address and look at where each landed.
5. Apply a discount code and a gift card
If you have either, use one on the test order. Check the floor, the ceiling and the expiry you set in discount codes that do not lose money, and that a gift card leaves its remaining balance on the card rather than vanishing.
6. Read the page as a search engine does
Open Google Search Console and inspect the homepage with the URL Inspection tool. It tells you whether Google can fetch the page and whether anything is blocking it. Then submit the sitemap in the Sitemaps report; Google calls it a hint rather than a guarantee, but it is the hint that gets a new site crawled. The website checker reads any page for the SEO, accessibility and page-weight problems a human misses.
7. Try the legal pages and the policy links
Click the privacy policy, the terms, the returns policy and the cancellation policy from the checkout and booking pages, where they are actually read. A policy link that 404s at the moment of payment is the one a chargeback dispute will quote. The legal pages your website needs lists them.
8. Do it again after the first change
Every change to prices, shipping, tax or hours is a reason to run the order again. It takes four minutes, and it is the only test that checks the whole chain from the button to your bank.
Then announce it
A site that has passed one real order and one real booking is ready to be told about. How to announce a new website is the next step, and your website's first 30 days is what to watch afterwards.
Questions
Is it a problem that my test order shows in my sales?
Refund it and it shows as refunded, which is accurate. Do not delete it; orders are your record, and the refund needs the order to exist.
Can I test without paying?
You can test the forms and the pages without paying. You cannot test the payment, the stock, the confirmation chain or the refund without a real payment, and those are the parts that fail in public.
How often should I repeat the test?
After any change to prices, shipping, tax, hours or the payment account, and once a quarter regardless. Website maintenance for people who do not want to maintain a website puts it in the quarterly hour.
What if the confirmation email went to spam?
Check the domain's SPF and DKIM records first, then the sending address: a site sending "from" a Gmail address through another server will often be filtered. Send from your own domain, authenticated.