Launching your store
Your store is built. Launching is the short handover from building it to bringing people to it, and it is worth ten minutes of your attention.
The ten minute check
Look at your store the way a stranger would.
- Would you recommend it to a friend or family member? If the honest answer is no, find the reason. It is usually the homepage, or a product you would not buy yourself.
- Can a visitor tell what you sell in five seconds? Read your homepage from the top. If the hero and the first paragraph could belong to any store, put your own words in.
- Click three or four product buttons. They should open the right product at the merchant, and the link should carry your affiliate tag. This is where a missing tag shows up.
- Look at it on your phone. Most of your visitors will. Scroll the homepage and one product page.
Then finish your store's Launch Plan. It covers the rest, including getting your store in front of Google, and it will flag anything you have missed.
🔗 Launch Plan feature guide
What happens next
Some members make sales within 48 hours, some within a few days, some after a few weeks. The one thing they have in common is that they stuck at it, followed our recommendations, and never gave up.
Search engines take a little while to find a new store, and that is true of every store ever launched, so it is nothing to read anything into. In the meantime there is plenty you can do that works faster, and the rest of the Playbook is about exactly that.
An hour a week, on the right thing
Your store is live now, and it stays live while you improve it. The improving is the fun part, but keep most of your hour for getting people through the door. Changing your colour scheme for the third time feels productive. Sending your first hundred visitors is.
Pick one traffic source and start this week. Search traffic builds up over time and is worth the most in the long run. Social gets you your first visitors soonest. One done properly beats two done half way.
Start with the Search Traffic category, or with Social and Community if you would rather see visitors sooner.