Buying a Shopify store: what to check first

Shopify makes it easy to spin up a store, which also makes it easy to dress one up for sale. A clean theme and a tidy product page tell you nothing about whether the thing makes money, or whether it'll keep making money once the current owner walks away. Before you get anywhere near a price, there are a few things to actually look at.

1. The live analytics, not the screenshots

Ask to see the Shopify admin live, with you watching. The dashboard shows sessions, conversion rate, returning-customer rate and sales over time, and it's much harder to fake in a screen-share than in a cropped image. Watch the conversion rate and the repeat purchases closely. A store that converts well and brings people back is worth far more than one with big traffic and a checkout nobody completes.

2. Where the traffic comes from

Two stores can post the same revenue and be worth wildly different money depending on how they get their customers. Open the traffic sources. If it's all paid, from a single ad account, you're buying a dependency: the day that account has a bad week, so do you. Search, direct, email and a spread across channels are what you want to see, because they keep working after the sale.

3. The apps and what they cost

Shopify stores lean on apps, and apps come with monthly bills and sometimes lock-in. Get the full list: what each one does, what it costs, and whether the store falls apart without it. A subscription app or a reviews app holding all the social proof can be perfectly fine, but you need to know it's there before it turns up on your card or breaks during transfer.

4. The supplier and the real margin

Find out who actually fulfils the orders, on what terms, and whether those terms follow the store to a new owner. A great-looking store with a supplier who ghosts you or hikes prices the moment you take over is not a great store. Work out the margin after product, shipping and fees, not the flattering number on the sales page.

5. How ownership actually moves

Shopify ownership transfers by moving the store owner account to you, usually by changing the account owner in the store's settings once the deal is done. That happens after the money is secure, never before. Along with the store you want the domain, the ad accounts, the email list and the supplier contacts, moved across one at a time and confirmed, not handed over as a pile of logins on trust.

Run those five checks and you'll know whether you're buying a business or someone's headache. When you do move on it, keep the payment in escrow until every one of those things has changed hands. On EcomFlips that's built in: you pay into Escrow.com, transfer through a checklist both sides confirm, and the money releases only once it's actually done.