Most store owners find out about problems only when sales drop. Until that moment, they lose money every day - not because they have a bad product, but because they have invisible errors in the purchase path.
A customer enters the store, browses products, adds to cart - and disappears. No explanation. No contact. No order.
An e-commerce store audit is the tool that lets you find exactly those places - before the problem grows into a full-blown sales crisis.
What is an e-commerce store audit and why do it?
An e-commerce store audit is a systematic analysis of all elements that affect whether a customer buys - from the first visit to the site, through browsing products, all the way to completing an order.
It's not about evaluating whether the store looks nice. It's about detecting specific errors that cause customers to leave without buying.
When it's worth doing an audit:
- You have traffic but low conversion
- Customers abandon their cart at the last step
- You're planning an ad campaign and want to make sure the store is ready
- You haven't done an audit in over 6 months
- You just rolled out new features or changed the store's design
What you risk by not auditing:
A store converting at 1% with 10,000 monthly sessions generates 100 orders. A store converting at 2% generates 200. Same traffic, same products, same price. The difference is errors you can't see with the naked eye.
What does an e-commerce audit check? - 5 key areas
1. Homepage and first impression
You have about 3 seconds for a customer to decide whether to stay. The homepage needs to answer one question: am I in the right place?
A typical error that costs sales: A homepage that looks great on desktop, but on mobile the buttons are too small, text gets cut off and a banner covers the navigation. Over 60% of e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices - a mobile error is an error for the majority of your customers.
2. Product page
This is the moment of decision. The customer looks at the product and answers three questions: is this what I'm looking for, can I trust this store, how much will I actually pay including delivery.
A typical error that costs sales: No delivery time or shipping cost information on the product page. The customer finds out about additional costs only in the cart - and abandons the order. Research shows that unexpected shipping costs are the most common reason for cart abandonment.
3. Cart and checkout
Every additional step in the purchase process is another opportunity to quit. Requiring account creation, an overly long form, missing popular payment methods - each of these cuts conversion.
A typical error that costs sales: Mandatory account creation before purchase. Research shows that the option to buy as a guest increases checkout conversion by up to 35%. If your store forces registration - you're losing every third customer who made it to the checkout.
4. Legal requirements - Omnibus, GDPR, terms and conditions
This is the area store owners most often ignore - and rightfully fear. Legal errors aren't just a risk of fines, they directly impact conversion. A customer who doesn't see a clear return policy or doesn't understand how their data is processed - simply doesn't buy.
A typical error that costs sales and risks a fine: Missing the lowest price from the last 30 days on products marked as promotional. The Omnibus Directive has been in force across the EU since 2023 - stores that don't comply risk regulatory scrutiny and financial penalties. Importantly: the same error that creates legal risk is also a UX problem - the customer doesn't know how much they're really saving on the promotion and loses motivation to buy.
5. Mobile and page load speed
Google has been evaluating sites primarily based on the mobile version since 2021. A slow-loading page isn't just lower search rankings - it's customers who don't wait.
A typical error that costs sales: Page loads over 3 seconds on mobile. According to Google, every second of delay beyond 1 second reduces conversion by 7%. A store that loads in 4 seconds instead of 1 can lose up to 20% of potential purchases - before the customer even sees the products.
What this looks like in practice - an audit example
One of the stores we analyzed sold online courses. Traffic was decent - several thousand sessions a month from Facebook ads. Conversion rate: 0.75%.
After the audit we found three main problems:
Problem 1: Checkout required account creation. Customers who didn't want to register - which was most of them - dropped off at the last step. The store was losing orders from customers who had already chosen a product and were ready to pay.
Problem 2: No Omnibus compliance on promotional products. The store regularly ran promotions - but nowhere showed a crossed-out price or the lowest price from the last 30 days. The promotion looked like a regular price. Customers didn't understand how much they were saving. Besides losing the promotional effect - the store was exposed to regulatory risk.
Problem 3: Product images loaded in 6-8 seconds on mobile. Most of the traffic came from Facebook ads - meaning from phones. Customers clicked the ad, waited several seconds for the product image to load, and left. The ads were working. The store wasn't.
Three errors. Each invisible in standard analytics. Together they accounted for the majority of lost sales.
Manual vs automatic audit - what's the difference
There are two ways to conduct an e-commerce store audit.
A manual audit is a specialist or agency that goes through the store by hand, checks elements against their own checklist and writes a report. The advantage is deep analysis and business context. The disadvantage - time (weeks), cost (thousands of dollars or euros) and subjectivity (every consultant checks something different).
An automated audit is a tool that goes through the store algorithmically, checks hundreds of elements against a fixed set of heuristics and generates a report instantly. The advantage is speed, repeatability and price. The disadvantage - it won't replace human judgment in complex cases.
When each makes sense:
An automated audit makes sense as a first step - to quickly see where the biggest problems are and what to fix first. A manual audit makes sense when you want deep analysis of a specific element, such as redesigning the purchase path or rebranding.
Quomerce does what an automated audit should do - goes through the store like a real customer, checks over 150 things that can go wrong, and gives a prioritized list of problems. No weeks of waiting and no agency costs.
Checklist - what you can check yourself in 15 minutes
No tools needed, just a phone and a browser:
- Visit your store from your phone - does it load quickly and look good?
- Find any product on sale - can you see a crossed-out price and the lowest price from the last 30 days?
- Add a product to the cart - how many steps does the entire process take from product to order confirmation?
- Check if you can buy without creating an account - is there a "continue as guest" option?
- Find shipping cost information - is it visible on the product page, or only in the cart?
- Find the returns policy - is it easily accessible and written in plain language?
- Check the checkout form - how many fields do you need to fill in? Are all of them really necessary?
- Check what payment methods you offer - do you have card, PayPal, local fast payment options?
- Go to the homepage and read the first headline - is it immediately clear what you sell and who it's for?
- Check if you have an SSL certificate - is there a padlock in the address bar next to your store's address?
If you're not sure of the answer on any of these points - you already have a signal of where to start.
Want to know exactly what's blocking sales in your store - without manually going through hundreds of elements?