Your first 30 days after launching a store

The first month after launch is when most stores are decided, and most of them get spent badly. People either freeze and change nothing, or change everything at once and learn nothing from either.

A month is enough time to answer two or three real questions if you choose them in advance. It isn't enough to build a business, and expecting that is how people quit in week five.

Week one: check that everything works

Before spending anything on traffic, buy from your own store. All the way through, on a phone, paying with a real card.

You're checking that the order arrives in your dashboard, the confirmation email sends, the tracking event fires in your analytics, and the supplier receives what they should. Then refund yourself and check that path works too, because the first time you handle a refund shouldn't be with an angry customer waiting.

Broken tracking is the most expensive thing on this list, and it's invisible. Stores routinely run ads for weeks against events that were never recording, then conclude the product doesn't sell.

Also this week: write the answers to the five questions customers will ask most. Delivery time, returns, sizing or compatibility, payment methods, how to contact you. Put them where people will see them rather than in a policy page.

Week two: get the first traffic and watch behaviour

Send a small amount of traffic, from ads or from wherever your audience already is, and resist judging sales. You're watching behaviour.

Look at where people stop. Do they reach product pages? Do they add to cart? Do they start checkout? The shape of that drop-off tells you more in week two than revenue does, because the sample is too small for revenue to mean anything.

Keep the spend low. The goal is information, and you don't need many visitors to see an obvious drop-off.

Week three: fix the biggest leak, then test one thing

By now the drop-off will point at something. Fix that first, whether it's a product page that doesn't answer the obvious objection, a shipping cost appearing too late, or a checkout asking for too much.

Then pick one thing to test. One. A different main image, a different headline, a different opening offer. Running three tests at once on low traffic gives you three results you can't attribute.

Give it long enough to gather enough orders to mean something. On small numbers, patience is the only substitute for volume.

Week four: decide what you learned

At the end of the month you should be able to answer three questions.

Do people want this? Measured by whether strangers who don't know you added things to a cart, not by whether friends said it looked good.

Where do they leave? Measured by the drop-off, and whether your fix in week three moved it.

What does it cost to get one customer? Total spend divided by orders. Rough on small numbers, but you need the rough figure to know whether the maths can ever work.

If the answers are encouraging, do another month with slightly more spend and one more test. If they're not, change one large thing rather than many small ones. Usually the product or the audience, since those are upstream of everything else.

What not to do this month

Don't scale spend because of one good day. Small numbers swing wildly. Three orders on a Tuesday isn't a trend.

Don't redesign the store. It's rarely the design, and a redesign resets whatever you'd started to learn.

Don't add five apps. Each one changes the store and none of them will be individually measurable afterwards.

Don't quit in week two. Two weeks of low traffic tells you almost nothing. Most stores look identical at that point whether they're going to work or not.

What a good month looks like

Not necessarily profit. A good first month produces clear answers, a store that works end to end, one leak found and fixed, and a rough idea of what a customer costs.

That's a foundation for month two. Revenue in the first thirty days is pleasant when it happens and a poor guide either way, because the numbers are too small to trust and the store is still changing underneath them.