Client handover template for Ecommerce

The client handover with the items a store cannot afford to lose: the catalogue feed and whatever generates it, the product data mapping, creative source files rather than exports, the promotion calendar, and the rules still running against all of them.

Everything else is the general handover, unchanged. One row per item, named exactly, verified from the receiving side, with ownership distinguished from access.

Use it whenever a store changes agency, brings advertising in-house, or loses the person who set the account up. In this category the configuration outside the ad account is larger than the account itself, and it is the part that is routinely forgotten.

Start it weeks ahead, because feed integrations and platform verifications both have queues.

In most categories the ad account is the bulk of what changes hands. In a store it is a minority of it.

Behind the account sit the feed and whatever generates it, a mapping from the store's own product fields to the advertising platform's, a set of custom labels whose meanings live in somebody's head, rules that act on the catalogue, and a library of creative in a dozen formats derived from source files nobody has asked for.

That is the part that gets forgotten, because none of it appears on an invoice and none of it is visible in the account. A handover that lists campaigns and access rights and stops there will leave a successor with a working account that quietly stops being correct within a fortnight.

The feed is the first row for one reason: everything else degrades gracefully and the feed does not.

A feed that stops updating leaves shopping campaigns running on yesterday's prices and availability. There is no error. Campaigns keep spending, ads keep serving, and products that are out of stock or repriced keep being advertised. The symptom looks like a performance problem, and it will be treated as one for weeks.

So the row names the integration, where it runs, what schedule it refreshes on, who can change it, and whether ownership moved. Verify it from the receiving side by watching a refresh succeed after the transfer, not by looking at a settings screen.

Behind the feed is a mapping, and it is the single most reconstructable-in-theory and painful-in-practice item in this list.

Which store field becomes the product title. How variants are grouped. What each custom label actually means — usually margin bands, seasons or stock positions, named by somebody who has left. Which products are deliberately excluded and why. What rules rewrite the data on the way through.

Write it down as a document and attach it to the row. A successor who has to infer the meaning of a custom label from its behaviour will get it wrong, and they will get it wrong in a way that shows up as a budget decision.

Creative in a store is reused constantly: recut for a new ratio, re-edited for a new offer, restaged for a new season.

A handover that delivers finished assets delivers things that cannot be changed. The successor's only option for a new format is to recreate or reshoot, which is the most avoidable cost in the whole transition.

So the row names the source files, where they live, and who can reach them. Where the files sit with a supplier — a photographer, an editor — that is a relationship row as well, with the supplier named and the arrangement recorded.

Automated rules in a trading account are usually numerous, often old, and frequently built around the previous season's assumptions.

List every one: what it does, what it acts on, what bounds it has, and who built it. Then decide, explicitly, whether each transfers or stops. A rule left running after a handover is authority nobody holds, acting on an account nobody is watching, and the first time it does something surprising will be during a peak.

The same applies to scheduled reports, which will otherwise keep arriving in the inboxes of people who have left.

A store's next quarter is usually partly decided before the handover happens.

Hand over the calendar as a document: which promotions are planned, what offers have been agreed, what creative has been commissioned, what has been booked with suppliers or platforms. Include anything with a cancellation cost.

A successor who does not know a sale opens in three weeks will plan a quarter that collides with it, and the collision is discovered in the week when nothing can be changed.

The last category is the one that makes the account's decisions legible.

Which segments have which margins, and where those figures came from. What stock cover was assumed when the current weights were set. What the targets were based on. None of that lives in an ad account, and without it the successor cannot tell a deliberate decision from an accident.

A short document, attached to a row, is enough. It is the difference between inheriting an account and inheriting an account you can defend.

A quiet category that breaks quietly: the verifications and configurations tied to the store's domain rather than to an account.

Domain verification, the tracking that fires on the site, the conversion definitions, the catalogue connection, any app installed on the store platform for advertising purposes. These are usually set up once, by whoever built the integration, and they are invisible afterwards because they simply work.

They break when an account is closed or an app's authorisation lapses, which is precisely what happens during a handover. List each one, name who holds it, and confirm from the receiving side that it still reports correctly a week after the transfer rather than on the day.

Seven checks. Items are listed by category and named with identifiers. The feed, its generator and its schedule are handed over, and a refresh has been watched to succeed from the receiving side. The product data mapping is written down, including what every custom label means. Creative source files, not only exports, have moved, with supplier relationships named. Every automated rule and scheduled report has been listed and either transferred or stopped. The promotion calendar and every commitment are recorded. And the margin and stock assumptions behind the current targets are written down.