Planning Your Website
We audited a well established online shop and found ten faults quietly costing it sales, from a broken email link to a sale price higher than the original. Here is each one, and how to check your own shop.
We audited a well established online shop this summer. Good products, real customers, a genuine reputation. The email address in the footer was wired up as a phone link, so clicking it tried to dial a number. The contact form asked customers to pick their country from three options: Austria, Viet Nam and Japan. No United Kingdom, for a shop in Britain.
None of it was dramatic, and that was the problem. Each fault was small enough to sit unnoticed for months while it quietly cost sales or trust. Here are the ten we found, why each one matters, and how to check your own shop in a couple of minutes.
One product showed its current price with a “was” price struck through beside it. The “was” price was lower. A price rise was being displayed as a discount.
That is not a typo to tidy up later. Trading Standards’ guidance for traders on pricing practices is clear that a price comparison has to be genuine. A “was” price you never really charged, let alone one lower than today’s, misleads the customer. We also found products showing a sale price against a regular price of £0.00.
Check yours: filter your products by “on sale” and look at every was and now pair. If you cannot say when you charged the higher price, take it off.
A product built to order carried a low stock warning. It was never sitting in stock. There were never five.
False urgency is taken seriously now. The Competition and Markets Authority has acted against misleading urgency and price claims, and since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has given it direct powers to enforce consumer law, including fines. A stock warning that is not true is exactly the kind of claim it looks at.
Check yours: switch stock counters off on anything made to order, and make sure every “low stock” message reflects real stock.
As well as the email link that tried to make a phone call, the phone link had two numbers crammed into it, so it dialled neither. It had never worked. Every customer who tapped it on a phone hit a dead end.
Check yours: on your own phone, tap every phone number and email address on the site. It takes two minutes, and it is the most valuable two minutes on this list.
The contact form’s country dropdown offered three choices, and the United Kingdom was not one of them. A UK customer could not fill it in truthfully.
Check yours: fill in your own contact and checkout forms as a customer would, from start to finish.
The free delivery bar told customers they had qualified for free delivery while their basket was empty. Elsewhere, the free delivery threshold displayed as £50,000 instead of £500. There was no option to collect, so every customer was pushed into a delivery charge, including the ones who would happily have driven over.
Check yours: add one cheap item to the basket and read every message the shop shows you. Then do it again with enough in the basket to qualify.
The terms and conditions named a company the owner no longer ran. The shipping policy told customers to collect from an address the business did not trade from. One page was still trading under an old name, and the opening hours said “by appointment only” in one place and “9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday” in another, on the same page.
Customers do look these things up. A gap between your website and the public record is exactly what makes a careful buyer close the tab.
Check yours: read your terms, shipping and contact pages against your real company details, address and hours.
Four separate collection pages ran word for word identical copy. A lighting page and a chairs page both described handmade furniture made by the shop’s own carpenters, which neither range was. Another category held 161 products and had no description at all.
Copied text gives Google no reason to show one page over another, and gives a customer no reason to believe any of it. Our guide on how to write website content covers how to give each page something of its own to say.
Check yours: open your main category pages side by side and read the first paragraph of each.
The meta descriptions, the short summaries Google can show under a page in its results, ran up to 446 characters. Google shows roughly the first 150 to 160. Every one was being cut off mid sentence, often before it said anything useful.
Check yours: search Google for your business name and read your own results as a stranger would.
The main heading on the homepage was just the brand name. It told Google, and every first time visitor, nothing about what the shop actually sold.
Check yours: read only the main heading on your homepage. Could someone who has never heard of you say what you sell?
This one mattered most. The shop had happy customers and a good rating on an independent review site, and not a single review, rating or testimonial anywhere on its own website. It was selling expensive products and asking people to take that on trust.
We named it as the single biggest thing holding the shop’s sales back. The reviews already existed. They just were not where buyers were making up their minds.
Check yours: if you have genuine reviews anywhere, show them where customers decide: on product pages and close to the checkout.
Not one of these needed a rebuild. Each could be put right in the existing shop, and most took minutes once someone had actually looked. That is the real lesson. Shops rarely lose sales to one big disaster. They lose them to small faults nobody has checked for months.
You can run the basics yourself with our website audit checklist. If you would rather someone kept an eye on it for you, that is what our website maintenance plan is for. And if a customer tells you their card payment failed, our guide on why card payments fail explains what usually happened.
Start with what loses sales fastest: every phone number and email link, the contact and checkout forms filled in from start to finish, delivery and price messages, and sale prices. Then check your business details against the public record, category pages for copied text, and how your pages appear in Google's results.
A quick check every month and a thorough one twice a year suits most small shops. Check again straight after any change to your theme, apps, prices or delivery settings, because those are the moments when small faults creep in without anyone noticing.
It can be. Trading Standards' pricing guidance says a price comparison must be genuine, and a was price you never really charged misleads customers. If you are unsure about a particular claim, check the official guidance or ask your local Trading Standards service.
Only if they are true. The Competition and Markets Authority acts on misleading urgency claims, and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gave it direct enforcement powers from April 2025. Low stock messages should reflect real stock, and should be switched off on made to order items.
Google shows roughly the first 150 to 160 characters of a page's meta description and cuts off anything longer, often mid sentence. Rewrite each one so the useful part comes first and the whole summary fits, then check how it looks by searching for the page.
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