Launch checklist template for Ecommerce

The launch checklist with the rows a store needs before a season or a promotion starts: the catalogue feed, stock cover on every advertised line, the offer live in the same words as the ads, delivery cut-offs recorded, and the return policy the campaign depends on.

Everything else is the general checklist, unchanged. One row per check, with an owner by name, a due date relative to the start, an honest blocking flag, a verification method and evidence kept.

Use it before every promotion and every season, not only before a big launch. In a store the things that break are the ones that change constantly — the feed, the stock, the offer, the page — and a checklist run only for major launches will miss all of them.

Use it again the morning the offer opens, because a promotion has its own launch inside the flight.

A store's launch risk is not in the ad account. It is in the systems that move every day: the catalogue feed, the stock position, the price file, the promotion engine and the page that shows all three.

That is why the checklist here is run more often than a general one. A season, a promotion, a drop, a price change — each of those is a launch, and each of them can break the same five things. A team that only runs the checklist before major campaigns will discover, reliably, that the small ones are where the money goes missing.

The checks below are the ones worth carrying every time. The rows worth adding beyond them are specific to your platform, and they usually get written the morning after something went wrong.

Everything else on a launch list can be fixed while the campaign runs. A sold-out product cannot.

So stock cover is confirmed for every line the campaign advertises, the day before the start, with the number and the date recorded. Where cover is thin, the choices are to lower the weight, to point the campaign at a segment rather than a unit, or to delay. Launching anyway produces spend that buys disappointment, and the disappointment persists: refunds, complaints, and a worse audience for the next campaign.

This row blocks. It is one of the few that genuinely should.

Catalogue feeds do not usually fail completely. They fail partially, on a handful of items, and the campaign runs on whatever is left.

That is why the check is not the feed is healthy but every advertised product opens from the feed with the right price and availability. Feed diagnostics will tell you there are errors; they will not tell you whether the errors are on the twelve products this campaign is about.

Do it as a customer would: open the products, check the price matches, check the image is the one the creative uses, check the variant that appears is the one being advertised. It takes fifteen minutes for a normal set and it catches the specific problem that otherwise runs for a week.

The most common launch-day failure in this category is an offer that is live in the ads and not yet live on the site.

The check is concrete: open the site as a customer, confirm the offer appears, confirm it applies at checkout, and confirm it is described in the same words the ads use. All three parts matter. A promotion that applies but is not visible loses most of its effect; one that is visible but does not apply produces abandoned baskets and support tickets; one described differently on each side makes the campaign look dishonest.

Where the promotion is scheduled to open at a particular hour, this check belongs on the morning of, not the week before.

The cut-off is the last date an order can arrive in time, and it belongs on the checklist as a recorded fact with a date.

Its purpose is downstream. The creative plan needs to know when the message has to change, the flight plan needs the date in its rows, and the support team needs to know what is being promised. A campaign that carries its ordinary delivery promise past the cut-off converts worse for a reason that shows up nowhere in the reporting, and the team spends a week blaming the ads.

Record it once, put it in the plan, and set the creative change against it.

Where the campaign's offer involves returns — free returns, an extended window, a guarantee — the policy has to actually say so before the ads run.

This is a cheap check and a common miss, because the policy page is owned by somebody who was not in the campaign meeting. Open it, read it, and confirm it matches the promise in the creative. Where it does not, the fix is either the page or the creative, and it is far cheaper before the launch than after the first dispute.

The tracking row in a store is not a settings check, it is a transaction.

Complete a real purchase, end to end, with the campaign's own tracking parameters on the link, and confirm it appears in the reporting with the right campaign, the right value and the right currency. Then refund it. Every part of that sentence has been wrong somewhere: values reported in the wrong currency, purchases attributed to the wrong campaign, parameters stripped by a redirect on one of three landing pages.

Fifteen minutes, once, before the money starts.

Seven checks. Every row has an owner by name and a due date relative to the start. Stock cover is confirmed and recorded for every advertised line. Every advertised product opens from the feed with the right price, image and availability. The offer is live on the site, applies at checkout, and is described in the same words as the ads. The delivery cut-off is recorded and reflected in the creative plan. A real purchase has been completed and seen in the reporting. And the blocking rows are few enough that blocking still means something.