A Published Audit

Forty-three findings on one storefront.

This is a real store audit, redacted and published in full. The business is not named. Nothing in the findings has been softened. If you are considering paying us to audit your store, you should be able to read one first.

The Store

A direct-to-consumer fashion label, three years trading.

On Shopify. Selling mainly into India, at an average order value of around ₹6,000. Founded and run from outside that market. The storefront layer had not been materially changed in fifteen months.

The audit was run across twelve categories and produced forty-three findings. Six of them are set out below in full, including one that we deliberately did not publish as a finding. The rest were graded medium and low and are the ordinary housekeeping any three-year-old store accumulates.

43findings
12categories rated
15months since the storefront layer last materially changed

Six Of The Forty-Three

Every finding names a location, an observation, and a fix.

“Your images are too large” is not a finding. Which images, on which page, at what size, and what it costs. That is a finding. The same discipline applies to the legal and configuration items below.

Critical

The market configuration nobody had checked

Three regional storefronts were configured. The founders’ own market was not one of them, so every visitor from their home country fell through to the default: rupee pricing, and a banner promising free delivery across India, while the published shipping policy specifically committed to delivering to that country in 9 to 11 business days.

Their own countrymen were being shown a storefront built for somewhere else, on a site that had promised in writing to ship to them.

Open item, not a finding

A currency stack that looked fine and might not have been

A third-party app converted displayed prices to each visitor’s local currency in the browser. Underneath, the store’s configured market currency was unchanged. So a visitor saw pounds while the configuration said rupees.

Whether the checkout then charged in pounds, or reverted to rupees with a foreign exchange fee attached is the difference between a clean sale and a chargeback. We could not establish that without placing a test order, so we did not claim it.

It went into the report as an open item, with the two-minute test the owner could run themselves: add to cart from the market in question, go through to the payment step, and read the currency. Every report we write carries a section like this.

Critical

A star rating going to Google that no customer had given

The review app was carrying seed data, and an aggregate rating derived from it was syndicating into Google Shopping.

Since April 2025, UK rules on how businesses handle reviews have had a regulator behind them that no longer needs a court to act. This is not a cosmetic finding, and it is the kind of thing that is genuinely easy to miss. Seed data is a default in more than one popular review app, not a decision anyone made.

High

Contract documents pointing at a dead domain

The terms customers were agreeing to at checkout linked out to a domain that no longer resolved. The agreement was live; part of what it referred to was not.

High

Terms and refunds contradicting each other

The terms nominated a governing law under which the store’s own published refund policy did not work. Two documents, both live, each describing a different deal.

Medium

A paid app that could not do its job

A merchandising engine was installed, subscribed and running against product data that did not contain the fields it needed to function. A monthly bill for a capability that was structurally unable to operate.

The Twelve

What was rated.

Each category is scored, with the method stated so the numbers can be checked. The report closes on a ranked priority list: what to fix first, judged on impact against effort. That is the section clients actually use.

  • Market and currency configuration
  • Product and collection pages
  • Cart and checkout
  • Product data and structured markup
  • Performance and Core Web Vitals
  • Findability and indexation
  • Accessibility
  • Security and headers
  • Legal documents and disclosures
  • Consumer law and distance selling
  • Reviews and trust signals
  • Apps, integrations and cost

On Method

The audit was wrong twice before it was right.

That report went through three versions before it was fit to send. The second corrected four findings from the first, including one recommendation that would have pushed a wrong measurement into production if anyone had acted on it. The third corrected the framing again once the trading timeline was properly established.

We would rather tell you that than not. An audit nobody has reviewed against itself is an opinion with a scorecard attached. Ours are reviewed before they reach you, and when a finding does not survive that review it comes out and the correction is recorded.

Finding 02 above is the same discipline in public. We could see the configuration. We could not prove what the checkout actually charged. So it went in as an open question with the test attached, not as a conclusion. Every report we write has a section listing what we could not verify and why.

Why the business is not named

Audit clients are anonymised by default. We publish findings, not names. Nobody wants their defects public, and discretion is part of what you are paying for. If a client would rather be named, that is their decision to make and not ours.

Our website builds are named, because a finished site is something a client is pleased with. An audit is the opposite kind of document. The two are treated differently on purpose, and you can see both on this site: the named build work is here.

Free

Mini audit

Your homepage and one page. Five scores and five findings, each one checkable by you in ten minutes on your own site. Two business days, no call, no obligation.

Request a free mini audit →

£899, total payable

E-commerce Store Audit

Twelve sections, up to eight pages plus a complete checkout run-through on a real device, a written report and a 45-minute debrief. Five working days.

See what it covers →

Want to know what is on your own store?

Start with the free mini audit. Five findings, two business days, and you can verify every one of them yourself.

Request