Test Shopify store before launch

Shopify keeps the admin, where you edit products, apart from the storefront that buyers load. You check the store while logged in, so the admin shows you what you set up, not what a buyer gets. A product that is not on the Online Store channel, or a country missing from your shipping rates, can look fine in your admin. A buyer then lands on a missing product page, or reaches a shipping step with no option at all. Your admin shows no error for either, because from where you sit nothing is broken.

• Open the store address in a private window while logged out, not in the tab where you edit products.
• If a password page is on, enter the password as a visitor would, and confirm it opens the store.
• Open each product you sell and check it is available on the Online Store channel.
• Pick each option, such as size or color, and confirm the add-to-cart button responds to the choice.
• At checkout, type an address in a country you sell to and confirm a shipping option appears.

Test one buyer from the first screen to the payment step. The buyer lands on a product page, checks the price and looks for the option they want. They pick it, press add to cart, and the cart shows what they chose. Checkout comes next, and it asks for an address before it shows a shipping choice. A test of only the home page and the first product you built misses every screen after that. Each screen can fail on its own, and a buyer who hits the failure leaves without writing to you.

Your admin and the storefront are two different views, even in the same browser. The theme you chose can also lay out a product page differently on a phone than on a laptop. An option menu that opens fine on a laptop can sit behind a menu button on a phone that a visitor may never tap. Test both widths in a logged-out window. Mimiq visitors use laptop and phone browsers, so one run can show a phone visitor who could not reach the add button, with a screenshot of that step.

Shipping is the other half of the blind spot. You set rates for the countries you thought of, and a buyer from a country you did not list reaches the shipping step with nothing to choose. That step looks broken, but the store is doing what it was set up to do. Only an address from that country shows the gap, which is why a test needs one.

A checkout test goes up to the payment step and stops there, because visitors cannot pay with a real card. Test the payment itself in your payment provider's test mode, using its published test card numbers, and check that the order appears in your admin. An app that adds a step at checkout, such as a review widget or a loyalty box, belongs in the test too, because a buyer meets it before they pay.

A store keeps changing after launch. A theme update, a new app at checkout, a shipping rate change or a product moved off the online channel can each break the path a buyer takes. Run the same logged-out visitors again after each change, before the next campaign sends traffic, and compare the step where they stopped with the last run.