What I check before taking over a store
A short, unglamorous list. Most of it takes twenty minutes and tells you more about whether a store is in trouble than any analytics dashboard will.
When a founder asks us to take over their operations, I go through the same list first. It takes about twenty minutes and it tells me more than a month of analytics would.
The inbox, not the dashboard
First thing I ask for is read access to support. Not the numbers, the actual messages. Twenty tickets tell you what the store is really like: what breaks, what customers misunderstand, whether the product page is lying about sizing, whether anyone has replied in four days.
Analytics tell you what happened. The inbox tells you why.
Whether the size guide matches the product
This one is boring and it is responsible for a startling share of returns. If the measurements on the page do not match the garment, you are paying return shipping for a copywriting error. On denim especially, most of the "fit not as expected" claims trace back to a page that never listed measurements in the first place.
How many products are quietly unavailable
Not out of stock, which is visible. Unavailable: a variant nobody can fulfil, a supplier who stopped answering, a bundle that references a discontinued item. These sit there taking ad spend and generating cancelled orders.
Who has access to what
Almost every store I have taken over had at least one of: a former freelancer with active admin, an app installed two years ago that nobody remembers approving, or the founder's personal account as the only owner with no recovery set up.
The last one is the dangerous one. If you are the sole owner of your Shopify account and something happens to your email, your business is a support ticket.
What the last thirty orders looked like
Not the total. The individual orders. Where they came from, what they contained, how long fulfilment took, whether anything was refunded. Thirty orders read one by one will show you your actual business in a way a revenue chart never does.
Why I do this before quoting
Because the honest quote depends on it. A store with clean listings and a tidy inbox is a different amount of work from one with three years of accumulated mess, and quoting the same for both means either overcharging the first or resenting the second.
It also occasionally means telling someone they do not need us yet. That happens more than you would expect, and it is a much better conversation than the one six months into work that was never the right fit.