Shopify Launch Checklist: 20 Steps for a Smooth 2025 Debut

You can’t brute-force a Shopify launch the night before. The merchants who win in 2025 line up operations, compliance, and demand generation weeks in advance. Use this expanded checklist as your working doc, and adapt each step to your catalog size, revenue targets, and in-house resources.

1. Choose an ecommerce platform that matches your channel mix and internal bandwidth—test trials and confirm it can scale with your product velocity.
2. Lock a memorable custom domain (and fallback variations) so every touchpoint reinforces your brand name.
3. Enable reliable hosting with CDN coverage and PCI compliance—Shopify bundles this but still verify uptime commitments.
4. Stand up your back office: banking, bookkeeping, SKU naming, and SOPs for order, refund, and support flows.
5. Secure the licenses, permits, and insurance coverages required for every market you will ship into.
6. Model your funding plan: inventory, packaging, paid media, and buffer capital. Consider Shopify Capital if you need fast access without credit checks.
7. Confirm billing and subscription settings inside your ecommerce admin so nothing lapses mid-launch.
8. Configure tax profiles and shipping rates for each region—including duties and broker fees if you plan to sell cross-border.
9. Document your fulfillment approach—whether in-house, dropship, or 3PL—and capture packaging specs, SLAs, and contingencies.
10. Draft essential pages: homepage, About, Contact, FAQ, shipping & returns, privacy, and terms—stress-test on mobile and ensure the voice is consistent.
11. Audit every piece of content: hero copy, meta titles, CTAs, and product descriptions. Correct grammar, tone drift, and broken links.
12. Refresh your ecommerce SEO plan: target keywords, internal linking, schema markup, and a clean XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.
13. Compress and rename imagery with descriptive, keyword-aware file names and alt text to keep speed high across devices.
14. Rewrite default transactional and marketing email templates—welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back—so they sound like your brand.
15. Run end-to-end checkout tests on desktop and mobile with live payment methods, discount codes, and edge cases like multi-address shipping.
16. Publish contact touchpoints everywhere—footer, Contact page, live chat, and automated reply times—so shoppers can reach you instantly.
17. Activate sales channels where your audience already shops: social commerce (TikTok Shop, Instagram), marketplaces, retail POS, or wholesale portals.
18. Install only the apps you need on day one (reviews, quizzes, size guides, bundling) and document ownership so updates don’t get ignored.
19. Wire up analytics from the start: Shopify dashboards, GA4, pixel tracking, and event naming that matches your reporting cadence.
20. Ship a prelaunch marketing plan—email waitlists, creator seeding, PR outreach, gated early access, and presale offers—to guarantee day-one traffic.

Treat the checklist like a sprint board: assign owners, add due dates, and track QA evidence (screenshots, Looms, testing orders). If a step feels overkill today, document what would trigger it in the future so the team knows when to revisit.

• Offer self-service returns with automated labels to reduce support load.
• Embed post-checkout surveys to spot acquisition channels that don’t show up in last-click data.
• Stand up a launch-day war room—Slack channel or Zoom—with owners for payments, fulfillment, marketing, and support.
• Prep a fallback promotion (gift with purchase, free shipping) in case launch-day traffic underperforms.

Launch day rarely matches the deck. What separates top-performing stores is the ability to respond without scrambling: dashboards already calibrated, FAQs live, and customer support scripts rehearsed. Keep iterating the checklist as you expand into new regions or add complex fulfillment like subscriptions and bundles.