The 20 things to check on a neglected store.

Start here. Every item below is either losing you an order today or charging you for nothing.

• Every price on the site matches what you actually charge10 minHow: Pick your ten best-selling products and compare the site price to your current price list. Check sale prices that were meant to be temporary.Why it matters: Stale prices are the most common problem in a neglected store, and the two failure modes are both bad: you either lose margin honouring an old price or lose the sale to a surprise at checkout.
• You still use every app you are paying for10 minHow: Shopify admin → Settings → Apps and sales channels. Then Settings → Billing to see what each one actually charges.Why it matters: Apps accumulate and almost never get removed. Most neglected stores are paying for at least one thing nobody has opened in a year, and some are paying for two apps doing the same job.
• You have completed a real order on your own phone10 minHow: Buy something from your own store on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi. Use a real card and refund yourself afterwards.Why it matters: Nothing else finds what this finds. Owners test on a desktop, and the mobile checkout is where the money actually is and where broken things hide.
• Nothing is listed that you cannot actually supply30 minHow: Filter products by inventory, then check for items you have discontinued but never unpublished.Why it matters: Selling something you cannot ship costs you the order, the refund admin and the customer. It is worse than being visibly out of stock.
• What you charge for shipping still covers what it costs you30 minHow: Settings → Shipping and delivery. Compare your rates, and any free-shipping threshold, against what you actually paid on your last twenty orders. Separate the local ones from the remote ones.Why it matters: Rates get set once and then carriers raise prices. A free-shipping threshold that made sense two years ago can mean a handful of remote deliveries quietly absorb the margin from a month of local orders, and nothing about it looks like an error.

A store nobody can find has a traffic problem, not a conversion problem. These are the mechanical causes.

• You have Google Search Console connected and have looked at it this month30 minHow: search.google.com/search-console. Add your domain, verify it, then open the Pages report and read the reasons pages are not indexed.Why it matters: This is the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site. Running a store without it is guessing, and it is free.
• Every product has its own title and meta descriptionan hour+How: Search your own site on Google with site:yourshop.com and look for repeated or missing titles.Why it matters: Duplicate or missing titles are the most common reason product pages do not rank. It is unglamorous, mechanical, and fixable in an afternoon.
• Your products are in Google Merchant Center and actually approvedan hour+How: Connect Merchant Center, then read the Diagnostics tab. Look for disapprovals, which are usually missing GTIN, brand or product category.Why it matters: Free Google Shopping listings are available to nearly every store and are gated behind boring data rather than competition. For most small stores this is the single largest untapped source of buyers.
• Product descriptions are yours, not your supplier'san hour+How: Copy a sentence from one of your descriptions and search it in quotes on Google. If forty other sites come back, it is not your copy.Why it matters: Identical manufacturer text gives a search engine no reason to prefer your page over any other reseller's. It is not a penalty, just a reason to rank something else.
• Collection pages have actual words on them30 minHow: Open your main collection pages. If there is a heading and a grid of products and nothing else, that is the problem.Why it matters: Collection pages are usually a store's best chance at category-level search terms, and an empty one tells a search engine nothing about what it is for.
• Nothing links to a page that no longer exists30 minHow: Search Console → Pages, and look for 404s. Also check your main navigation and footer by hand.Why it matters: Broken links waste crawl budget and lose customers mid-journey, and they accumulate silently every time a product is deleted.

For a store with existing traffic this is usually the cheapest revenue available, because the alternative is silence.

• An abandoned cart gets a reminder10 minHow: Add something to your cart, enter your email, then leave. See whether anything arrives within a day.Why it matters: Someone who reached your cart is the warmest traffic you will ever have. A store that says nothing to them is treating a nearly-completed sale exactly like a bounce.
• A new subscriber hears from you more than once10 minHow: Sign up to your own newsletter with a fresh address and see what happens over the following week.Why it matters: Most stores collect email addresses and then never use them until a sale, by which point the subscriber has forgotten who you are.
• Your emails actually arrive10 minHow: Send yourself a campaign at a Gmail address and a Microsoft one. Check the spam folder, not just the inbox.Why it matters: Deliverability fails silently. Nothing errors, the messages simply stop being seen, and stores routinely discover it months later.
• The automations you built years ago are still sending10 minHow: Open your email tool and check the send volume per flow over the last thirty days. Look for a flow at zero.Why it matters: A renamed product or a changed template can leave a flow technically active and sending nothing. Zero sends is the tell.

Slower to fix, and worth doing once the items above are done.

• The store loads acceptably on a mid-range phone30 minHow: pagespeed.web.dev, mobile tab. Ignore the score and read which resources are actually slow.Why it matters: Speed on a mid-range Android on mobile data is what most of your customers experience. Your own new iPhone on office wifi tells you nothing.
• No product image is larger than it needs to be30 minHow: Right-click and check the file size of your hero and main product images. Anything over about 300KB is a candidate.Why it matters: Oversized images are the most common cause of a slow store and the easiest to fix without touching code.
• Shipping cost and delivery time are visible before checkout10 minHow: Walk through your own store as a customer and note the first point where shipping cost appears.Why it matters: Unexpected shipping cost at the final step is one of the most reliable reasons a cart is abandoned. Saying it earlier costs nothing.
• Your returns policy is findable and written in plain language10 minHow: Try to find it in three clicks from a product page.Why it matters: A hidden or legalistic returns policy makes a first-time buyer hesitate, and the hesitation is invisible to you because they simply leave.
• A customer can tell you are a real business10 minHow: Check that a contact method, a business name and an about page exist and are current.Why it matters: For an unknown small store, visible proof of being real does more for conversion than most design changes.