E-commerce Store Audit
Your store gets visitors. This tells you which ones you are losing to your own site.
A fixed-price, independent review of everything between a customer arriving and a purchase completing. Twelve sections, a real checkout run on a real phone, and a ranked list of what to fix first.
The Shape Of It
Around 70% of carts are abandoned. Most of that is not your fault. Some of it is.
Cart abandonment across online retail runs at roughly 70%, averaged across fifty studies. The largest single reason people give is that they were only browsing and were never going to buy, 42% of them. No audit fixes that, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
Set that 42% aside and the documented reasons are specific and countable:
- 40%extra costs appearing too lateyour website
- 20%delivery too slowonly partly your website
- 19%not trusting the site with card detailsonly partly your website
- 18%forced account creationyour website
- 17%a checkout that is too longyour website
Three of those five are properties of your website. Two are only partly. How fast you actually deliver is logistics, and whether people trust you with a card is substantially brand and payment provider, though your site can help with both by saying the right things in the right places.
Knowing which of them is yours is the whole job.
Across IRP-hosted UK merchants, which skew towards small and medium retailers, June 2026 ran at a 2.03% conversion rate with an average order value of £127.06, and mobile accounted for 63.5% of sales. At that order value, a handful of recovered checkouts a month is a real number.
Start Here
A free mini audit, in two business days.
We look at your homepage and one product page and send you a two-page report: five scores, five findings, one thing you are doing well, a plain statement of what we did not cover, and one line on the full audit.
Every finding is checkable by you in ten minutes, on your own store. You do not have to trust a word of it.
No call required. No obligation. The report and one short follow-up, then nothing unless you ask, and no mailing list. Your confirmation email gives you the date your report will arrive.
Request a free mini auditThe Audit
Twelve sections. Eight for the website, four for the store.
Everything in the website audit, plus four sections that only apply when money changes hands.
Sections one to eight, the website audit
- Performance
- Findability
- AI and agent readiness
- Accessibility
- Security and resilience
- Conversion and journey
- Compliance and disclosures
- Measurement
Product and collection pages
Product imagery and variant selection, price and delivery clarity before the cart, stock accuracy, description quality against the questions buyers actually ask, review display, filtering and sorting, and on-site search including what happens when it returns nothing. Performance measured on collection and product pages specifically, because those are heavier than your homepage and they are where the money is.
Cart and checkout
We complete a real purchase to the payment step, on a real phone. Step count and form field count against the market averages of 5.1 steps and 11.3 fields. Guest checkout. When the total cost first becomes visible. Payment methods, including the wallets that dominate mobile. Card form quality, autofill, error handling. Cart persistence. And what happens when something goes wrong: out of stock at checkout, an expired session, an invalid code.
Product data and shopping surfaces
Your product structured data against what Google requires for merchant listings, and whether the markup is in the HTML your server returns, which is what Merchant Center needs for automatic item updates, and which headless and app-heavy stores often get wrong while looking correct in a browser. Feed health, image resolution, return and shipping data. And where the published agentic commerce standards are heading, so your product data is ready when they arrive.
Distance selling and consumer law
Whether your pre-contract information, cancellation rights, refund terms and cancellation form meet what the Consumer Contracts Regulations ask for. Whether your total price is shown when the rules say it should be, rather than assembled during checkout. Whether your countdown timers and low-stock messages reflect anything real. Whether your review handling meets the standard now expected of the store, not just of the marketplace. We check your site against what published requirements ask for. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice.
Section twelve is the one we could not find in any comparable audit on the market. The enforcement regime changed in April 2025 and moved to a regulator that no longer needs a court, and almost nobody is checking.
The Deliverable
Twelve sections, ranked, with the checkout walked in full.
- A one-page executive summary in plain language
- A scorecard for all twelve sections, with the method stated
- Every finding located: which page, which element, which measurement
- The checkout, walked and documented step by step, on desktop and on a real mobile device
- A ranked priority list: what to fix first, on impact against effort
- An appendix of raw measurements so your developer can reproduce every number
- A 45-minute call once you have read it
Diagnostic Work
We publish an audit in full.
One of our audits is published in its entirety, anonymised: forty-three findings across twelve rated categories, the evidence behind each one, and one item we entered as an open question because we could not verify it without placing a test order. If you are considering paying us to audit your site, you should be able to read one first.
Audit clients are anonymised by default. We publish findings, not names. Nobody wants their defects public, and discretion is part of what they are paying for. Our build work is named, because a finished site is something a client is pleased with. An audit is the opposite kind of document.
A direct-to-consumer fashion label, three years trading, on a storefront that had not materially changed in fifteen months.
Read the full audit →What An Audit Finds
Six of the forty-three, on that storefront.
Among them: a market configuration that sent the founders’ own countrymen to a storefront built for somewhere else; a currency converter sitting over an unchanged market configuration; a star rating going to Google that no customer had given; contract documents pointing at a dead domain; terms nominating a governing law under which the store’s own refund policy did not work; and a paid app running against product data that did not contain the fields it needed to function.
It also contains a finding we did not publish as a finding, because we could not prove it without placing a test order. That is in there too, with the two-minute test the owner could run themselves.
Read the full auditPrice
£899. Fixed fee, fixed scope.
£899 covers up to eight pages plus a complete checkout run-through, all twelve sections, the written report, and the 45-minute debrief. No per-page pricing, no scope negotiation. Prices shown are the total payable.
Fixed-price e-commerce audits from UK agencies commonly start between £1,500 and £2,400 once VAT is added, and specialist consultancies start higher.
If you decide you would rather we took the store on
Start a Studio Care or Premium Care plan within 30 days of receiving your report and we credit the audit fee in full against your plan. On Essential Care the credit is capped at three months of your plan fee, because Essential does not include the SEO work or the AI-readiness foundation that a good part of your report will point at.
Care plan clients receive an audit as part of their plan regardless.
Do not sell online? The website audit covers sections one to eight at £499.
Why Us, And Our Interest In It
We build stores. That is why the audit is useful, and it is also something you should know.
This is not a new service line assembled from a checklist. The method behind it comes from audits we have already run: full route-set architecture reviews, performance and Core Web Vitals passes, WCAG 2.2 AA reviews with manual keyboard and screen-reader testing, and compliance and claims reviews. Some were paid. Some were done at no charge before this pricing existed. Each one produced a document somebody acted on. We also build and manage online stores, from simple product sales through to full catalogues, which is why this audit knows where stores break. It is the same commercial interest, so the same fences apply to the report.
We do not name them. 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. Our website builds are named, because a finished site is something a client is pleased with; an audit is the opposite kind of document.
We also check our own audits, and we say when they were wrong. The published store audit 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. An audit nobody has reviewed against itself is an opinion with a scorecard attached.
A person runs your audit and a person writes your report. We use the same measurement tools any competent auditor uses. That is not the differentiator, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What you are paying for is the judgement about which of those measurements matters for your business, plus the work no scanner can do at all: keyboard-only navigation, a real phone, a read of your policy pages, and running your checkout to the payment step the way your customer would. No scanner has ever completed a purchase.
Now the part you should know before you read a word of our recommendations.
Pellmark builds and manages websites and online stores and sells monthly care plans. If you start a care plan within 30 days of your report, we credit the audit fee against it. That is a commercial interest, and here is how we fence it:
- The report does not recommend us. It names what is wrong and what to do about it.
- There are no links to our services inside it, and no conclusion that you need a rebuild.
- If you want us to carry out any of the work, you raise it, and it is a separate conversation.
That paragraph appears in every report we send, not only on this page.
We run the same checks on this site that we run on yours. Ask, and we will send you our own results alongside your report.
Before You Book
The practical details, in one place.
A page that audits other people’s pre-contract information had better publish its own.
- Payment
- We invoice you for the full £899 before the audit starts. There is no checkout on this site. You tell us what you want, we send an invoice, and work begins once it is paid. £899 is the total payable and there is nothing to add to it.
- When the five working days start
- The clock starts on the first working day after two things are true: the invoice is paid, and we have your URL and the pages you want covered. If we are waiting on access you have offered but not yet granted, we will say so, and the clock waits with us rather than running down on you.
- Your date, in writing
- Your confirmation email states the working day your report will arrive. If anything changes it, we tell you before the date rather than after it.
- On the checkout run-through
- We take your checkout to the payment step. We do not complete a purchase unless you ask us to, and if a full test order would be useful we agree it with you first and you decide how it is paid for.
- If you cannot give us analytics access
- The audit still runs and the price does not change. The measurement section becomes a shorter section, the report states plainly what could not be verified, and the rest is unaffected. We will tell you up front what you are giving up so you can decide.
- Rescheduling the debrief call
- Move it as often as you need to. No charge, no notice period. If we have to move it, we offer you the next available slot and it will not be more than two working days later.
- Cancelling
- Before we start, you get a full refund. Once the audit is under way we refund the portion we have not worked, judged against the stages of our own process rather than a formula that happens to suit us. If we cannot deliver on time for a reason that is ours, you hear it before the deadline and you choose between a new date and a full refund.
- A completed audit is not refundable on its findings
- If we do the work and your store turns out to be in good shape, that is a legitimate result and you have paid for a documented, evidenced answer. What is refundable is work we did not do, or did not do on time.
- If a finding is wrong
- Tell us and we will check it. If we got it wrong we correct it and reissue the report. We would rather do that than defend it. Reply to the report, or email hello@pellmark.com with “audit” in the subject line, and you will hear back within one working day.
- Complaints
- Same address, and we will respond within one working day. If we cannot resolve it between us we will say so plainly rather than let it run.
The audit services are covered by our terms of use.
The Boundaries
What this audit is not.
Not legal advice.
We check your store against what published UK requirements ask for and show you where it does not match. We are not lawyers.
Not a full accessibility conformance audit.
It is an expert review against WCAG 2.2 AA with manual keyboard and screen-reader checks. If the findings are extensive, we will say so and tell you what a full conformance audit involves.
Not a conversion testing programme.
It is a diagnosis, not an experiment. We identify where the checkout leaks and what the documented causes are. We do not promise a percentage. Anyone quoting you an uplift figure before looking at your store is quoting a study average, not a prediction about your business.
Not a sales pitch.
See section eight. If the audit concludes your store is fundamentally sound, it will say so, and you will have a documented answer instead of a suspicion.
FAQ
Questions people ask before booking.
Any. Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, BigCommerce, Magento or custom. The sections are the same; only the fixes differ.
Read-only access to analytics and Merchant Center where you have them makes the audit substantially better. We can run without it, and the report states what could not be verified.
We run the checkout to the payment step. We do not complete a purchase unless you ask us to, and if a full test order would be useful we agree it with you first.
No. An audit is included in your plan. Ask us and we will schedule it.
No. We check your store against what published UK requirements ask for and show you where it does not match. Acting on it is a conversation for you and your solicitor, and the report is written so you can hand it to one.
Yes. A full redacted store audit is published on this site: 43 findings across 12 rated categories, the evidence, the severity ratings and the priority order. If you are considering spending £899, you should be able to see exactly what arrives.
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. Our website builds are named because a finished site is something a client is pleased with. An audit is the opposite kind of document.
Yes, in writing. Every report has a section listing what we could not verify and why. The published audit contains one: a currency finding we could see in the configuration but could not prove at the checkout without placing an order, so it went in as an open question with the test attached rather than as a conclusion.
Find out which of them is yours.
Start with the free mini audit: five findings on your own store, each one you can check yourself in ten minutes. No call, no obligation.
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