We've tried to bring all these steps and actions points together into one big (huge) launch checklist that you can use whether you're launching a totally new business, a new brand or even just a new site for an existing business. Of course, depending on which of these apply to you, you may already have a lot of this in place - in which case just tick it off an move on.

This list is always going to be incomplete, so if there's something glaringly missing please let us know and we'll add it. It's a living document, so we'll leave a note here of when it was last updated.

This list is not specific to Pakk, so can be used as a reference for launching on any platform. However, it's worth noting two things:

1. This list is somewhat opinionated (a bit like Pakk). We have our approach to e-commerce and a lot of that is codified in this list. Feel free to ignore any of it if you feel it's wrong.

2. Pakk specific implementation details appear in italics after each point.

Suggestion: Print this list off and tick off the tasks once they're complete

• Have you negotiated shipping rates with couriers? Do you know how the Post Office charges for your types of products? Could you achieve better rates by using a courier "aggregation" service.

• Have you considered / talked to your courier about less common services like international shipping, remote areas shipping, express services, insured services, collections, pay-on-delivery etc. Don't get surprised when couriers charge you over the odds for such services because you forgot to negotiate specific rates.

• Set up the shipping methods you want to offer on your e-commerce system so that they reflect the charging structure (unless you want to explicitly make a loss or profit on shipping). Pakk - set up your shipping methods and apply to your site.

• Could you offer free shipping? It's highly enticing for customers. Perhaps you could offer free shipping for orders over a particular value.

• Have you set up your physical order processing workflow for maximal efficiency? This is a bit beyond the scope of this article, but think through: picking list generation and printing, picking in the warehouse, packing, shipping labels, daily courier collection or deliver in to courier's depot, post dispatch tracking etc. Pakk - you might want to set up customer Order 'stages' and define a starting stage to reflect your internal workflows.

• Are your company details (legal name, address, VAT and company number) clearly displayed on the site and on your policy documents Pakk sites - Pakk takes care of it for you.

• Privacy policy: Is it GDPR compliant? Does it have a statement to that effect? Does it specify what data is collected and why? Does it specify with whom data is shared? Does it specify how long data will be kept? Does it explain and link the Cookie Policy? Pakk sites - Pakk takes care of it for you.

• Wherever information is collected from customers (e.g. registration forms), are you positively asking for their agreement to the privacy policy? Pakk sites - Pakk takes care of it for you.

• Terms and conditions: Are they linked to prominently around the site? Pakk sites - Pakk takes care of it for you.

• Before purchase: Are you positively requesting agreement to both terms and conditions and privacy policy? Pakk sites - Pakk takes care of it for you.

• Cookie warning. Make sure it respects the 'Cookie Law' in the way it functions. Pay attention to 'essential' versus 'non-essential' cookies. Pakk sites - Pakk takes care of it for you.

• Cancellation form: Do you have a simple form that customers can use to request cancellation of their order? Is it linked from the Terms and Conditions? Pakk sites - Pakk takes care of it for you.

• Have you negotiated rates with your chosen credit card provider (if you have existing volume)? Have these been applied to your account?

• Have you integrated at least one credit/debit card processor, PayPal, then any industry specific payment processors you need. Pakk sites - Stripe, PayPal, Paytriot and Viva Wallet are built in and mostly only require you to enter your account ID and enable. You might also need to set up webhook notifications.

• Have you tested your integration well? Have you tried both payment success and failure scenarios to see how your system handles them? Does the information flow through to your customer service team. Pakk sites - for our built-in payment processors we record detailed transaction meta-data which can be inspected in the admin panel.

• Have you considered fraud? What tools do your payment processors provide for detecting fraud? Are you using them? What are you going to do internally to minimise fraud? Pakk sites - use colour codes or 'stages' to mark orders that need to be reviewed.

• Do you understand the post-payment flow? How often is money paid to you? To which account? How is it batched up? How can you reconcile it?

• Do you also want to offer 'offline' payment methods such as 'bank transfer'? If you set them up, make sure you provide the information the customer needs to make the payment. Pakk sites - create and customise as many manual payment methods as you need.

• Homepage: we recommend a single, highly visual, full-width hero image showcasing your most important product/feature/category with a link to it. No carousel, videos, animations etc. Pakk sites - homepage layout enforces a hero image. Configure in site layout setup.

• Homepage: pick out 5-6 features, products, categories, blog sections etc that you'd like to showcase and set up simple blocks of content that briefly summarise them, provide eye candy and a link. Pakk sites - use homepage blocks to create your homepage layout.

• Homepage: display your USP points somewhere prominent. Pakk sites - USP bar is displayed towards the top of the homepage.

• Systematise repeated content blocks. Most sites will have little bits of content that are repeated in different 'slots' around the site (on product pages, category pages etc). Use your platforms 'widgets' or 'snippets' type functionality to create these blocks in one place and use them to call out important sections, products, offers throughout the site. Pakk sites - use 'Feature Blocks' to create content blocks and place them around the site.

• Create 'related item' recommendations on each product page. If you can customise the text that goes before these recommendations, avoid the usual "Customers also bought" and try something more eye-catching like "Customers who bought black trousers also bought these black leather belts". Pakk sites - use 'related' type categories to group together related items.

• Group together products that are essentially different versions of the same thing as 'variants' - e.g. sizes, colours, quantities. Pakk sites - use 'variant' type categories.

• Provide a 'New Products' category so repeat customers can identify new products. Pakk sites - the 'new' category is autogenerated and a link placed in the main product navigation menu. Set up the 'days new' parameter to control what appears on that page.

• Provide an 'On Sale' category so customers looking for bargains quickly know where to go. Keep it up to date. Pakk sites - the 'sale' category is autogenerated and a link placed in the main product navigation menu if you have any products with discounts applied.

• Delivery page: Does it list all shipping methods? Does it answer common questions about delivery that customers might have? Does it explain how delivery costs are calculated? Is it up-to-date? Pakk sites - delivery page is autogenerated from shipping methods available on the site. You can add a custom 'explanatory' text to the top and/or link an FAQ page to be embedded at the bottom.

• Contact page: Does it make it clear what the preferred way to contact you is? Does it encourage customers to use that method? Does it provide alternative methods? Does it give your opening hours? If you have a physical presence, does it give the location/opening hours? Does it provide an embedded contact form that feeds into your help desk? Pakk sites - contact page is autogenerated. Set up opening hours, custom text and embedded contact form in site setup.

More information on how Pakk helps with SEO

Guide to Google Services for E-Commerce Businesses

• Look up best practices for meta data and create good, concise and human readable: URLs, meta title and meta description. Pakk sites - set all these SEO fields under the 'Web' tab for publishable entities like products, pages, posts etc

• Make sure your pages are generating Twitter Card, Open Graph (Facebook) and Structured Data (Google) and embedding it correctly in the <head> of your site. Pakk sites - this is taken care of for you, just get the SEO fields filled out correctly.

• Favicons and site manifests for all different browsers and devices. Pakk sites - just set your 'favicon' logo in site setup, everything else is done for you.

• Submit your site to Google Webmaster console and keep an eye out for errors, crawl problems and notifications. Try to use the "domain" verification method if possible for ease of maintenance.

• In the Webmaster Console, set up and submit your site's sitemap. If you platform allows for autogeneration, set up an upload schedule for the sitemap. Pakk sites - you can always get the sitemap at /sitemap.xml. Set up a schedule for the sitemap to be downloaded daily.

• Set up Google analytics and integrate the JS snippet into your site. Pakk sites - just enter your Google analytics ID in site setup.

• Use the Google 'Rich Snippets' testing tool to preview how Google sees your site and how it might generate snippets. Try to ensure that they are as rich as possible for all page types (product/post/page etc.). *Pakk sites - you don't need to do this - we do it for you.

• Are you on Google business? Make sure you have claimed your business and keep the details up to date.

• Sign up for and active Google Merchant Center. Set up all your business details and if you are intended to run multiple sites/stores from the same account, ask for your account to be upgrade to a "Multi Brand" account.

• Get your product feed into Google Merchant Center. There are a variety of options for doing this, ranging from manual entry to CSV import to API integrations. *Pakk customers - just choose the "Web Crawl" option and Google will automatically build a feed from the rich metadata we embed on each product page.

• Put the feed in Google Merchant Center to work by activating free listings and potentially linking with your adWords account and activating paid listings.

• Can people find your brand presence on social media? Include links to your profiles wherever possible. Pakk sites - just set up your profiles in site setup and links will be shown throughout the site automatically.

• Are you creating engaging and informative content on a regular basis? Is it easily discoverable within the site? Are posts cross-linked to product where relevant? Pakk sites - use the 'Posts' and/or 'Feed' functionality to create content on a regular basis, link to the 'content homepage' from the main site homepage. Cross link products and posts with 'content tags'.

Guide to Creating Visual Style and Branding in Pakk

• White background. Minimal coloured text. No more than 3 fonts. No more than 3 brand colours. Legible body text. Pakk won't let you do anything else.

• Clear footer with: secondary menu for important site areas, logo, company address, legal and contact details, copyright message. Pakk sites - create footer menu in site setup. Company details are displayed automatically - make sure they are correct in your account setup

• Some sort of top menu in the header with links to prominent pages/sections around the site (e.g delivery page, contact page, content homepage). Pakk sites - configure the aux bar menu in site setup.

• Your brand primary colours sprinkled subtly throughout the site (buttons, links, etc) but not overkill. Pakk sites - just set the brand colours in the site setup, Pakk does the rest.

• Your logo should be displayed prominently but subtly around the site (e.g. header and footer). Make sure the resolution is good and it scales well across devices - a sharp logo is really important. Pakk sites - just set the logo in the site setup, Pakk does the rest.

• Choose fonts that represent your brand but are easy to read. Use no more than 3 fonts (headers, accents and body text), but preferably 2. Make sure they are used in a consistent way in terms of sizing, font weight, style etc throughout the site. Pakk sites - just set your brand fonts in the site setup, Pakk does the rest.

• Decide on a few (2-5) "unique selling propositions" and display them prominently in banners/blocks/widgets around the site. Keep it short and to the point. Pakk sites - fill your USP points in site setup, Pakk does the rest.

• Make sure your site functions and displays well across smartphones, tablets, multiple desktop browsers and alternative devices like TVs. Pakk sites - this is taken care of for you.

• Have you set up a reviews system so customers can leave merchant and product reviews? Pakk - reviews functionality is built in. Switch on review collection and customise review collection text, email wording and other options.

• Are you displaying reviews prominently on your site? Pakk - a reviews page is autogenerated and linked from the footer. Product pages display relevant reviews.

• Are you featuring your aggregated reviews score (e.g. 4.7/5) on your homepage? Pakk - create a Feature Block with an image of your review aggregation score and feature on homepage.

• Quick global search should allow finding product by keyword from anywhere in site. Pakk sites have global search by default.

• Main product navigation menu should have 5-7 links, corresponding to the main sections or departments on your site. Pakk sites autogenerate the main menu - make sure you have 5-7 parent categories.

• Don't have an infinitely nested category hierarchy if you can avoid it - 2 to 3 nested levels at most. Pakk product navigation menu goes shows only 3 levels deep.

• Product category views (lists of products) should offer useful sorting and filtering (on pertinent product attributes). Pakk sites implement functional filter bars on category views.

• Do you allow customer to mark products as favourite or create a Wishlist? Pakk sites allow this by default