E-commerce Platform Update Checklist

Duplicate the live Shopify theme (Online Store → Themes → Actions → Duplicate) and export a CSV of products, customers, and orders. For headless or custom builds, snapshot the database and tag the current Git commit. Attach the duplicated theme name and snapshot location so rollback is one click, not a scavenger hunt.

Post the deploy window in #ops Slack and email CX, paid media, and email/SMS leads. Marketing should pause Klaviyo flows and Meta/Google ads if checkout will be affected — a sale during a broken checkout window costs more than a delayed deploy.

Read the changelog end-to-end. Flag deprecated Liquid filters, checkout extensibility migrations (the Checkout.liquid sunset is the canonical example), API version bumps, and any app-side schema changes. Don't assume a minor version bump is non-breaking — Shopify and most apps have shipped silent metafield-namespace changes mid-cycle.

Confirm the version targets of every connected app — email/SMS (Klaviyo, Postscript), subscriptions (Recharge, Smartrr), reviews (Yotpo, Okendo), helpdesk (Gorgias), tax (Avalara, TaxJar), and any review-pixel or attribution scripts (Triple Whale, Northbeam). Marketplace connectors (Sellbrite, Linnworks) and 3PL integrations are the most common silent breakers.

Open support tickets with each flagged vendor and capture their compatibility timeline. If the vendor can't ship a fix in your window, decide whether to delay the update, swap apps, or run a temporary workaround. Document the decision so the deploy lead is not making it at 2am during the window.

Write down the exact rollback steps: which theme to republish, which app versions to revert, who has the credentials, and what the customer-comm message is if checkout breaks. A rollback that takes 10 minutes to plan during the incident is the difference between a 15-minute outage and a 2-hour one.

Push the update to an unpublished preview theme or a separate staging store. Confirm the preview URL is gated (preview link only, no public Google indexing) — staging environments scraped by bots are a common source of duplicate-content SEO penalties and customer-data leaks.

Run the test suite plus a manual checkout end-to-end with a real card on a test order — guest checkout, logged-in checkout, Shop Pay, Apple Pay, gift card, and discount code. PDPs: variant switching, inventory display, add-to-cart, upsell widget. Mobile and desktop both. Most checkout regressions only show on mobile Safari.

Open DevTools and walk the homepage, collection, PDP, cart, and account pages. Watch for 404s on assets, Liquid render errors in the response body, broken metafield references, and any third-party script (reviews, attribution, chat) failing CSP. Capture screenshots of any blocker before flipping the answer.

Patch in the staging theme, re-run the smoke tests, and re-audit. Do not promote to production with known checkout, PDP, or payment regressions — even a 1% conversion-rate drop on a typical DTC traffic day costs more than the deploy delay.

Publish during your store's lowest-traffic window (typically 2–6am local time for US DTC; check GA4 hourly traffic). Never deploy in November/December for Q4-heavy brands without a written exception from leadership. Watch live order volume in Shopify and abandoned-cart rate in Klaviyo for the first 30 minutes.

Republish the duplicated theme from the backup step, revert any app version bumps, and post the customer-comm message in the maintenance banner. Open an incident channel and capture timeline, root cause, and customer impact (orders lost, sessions affected) for the post-mortem.

Place a real test order on production from mobile Safari, mobile Chrome, and desktop. Verify the order lands in Shopify, the confirmation email fires from Klaviyo, the subscription is created in Recharge if applicable, and the order syncs to the 3PL or ShipStation queue.

Run the same paths customers run: variant selector on a multi-option PDP, search with a typo (test predictive search), customer login + order history, and gift-card balance lookup. These are the flows that quietly break and don't surface in error logs.

Pull Shopify's app/theme error logs, GA4 event errors, and PageSpeed Insights for LCP, INP, and CLS on the homepage and a top PDP. A theme update that adds 400ms of LCP on mobile is a silent conversion-rate killer that won't show up in any error report.

Pull 20–50 customers from your Klaviyo VIP or top-quintile-LTV segment and email them a feedback link. VIPs catch issues a casual visitor would silently bounce on, and they're more forgiving when something is rough. Offer a small store-credit incentive — disclose it per FTC endorsement guides if they're posting publicly.

Tag any post-deploy tickets in Gorgias with a release-specific tag and run a Klaviyo or Typeform survey to the beta panel. Watch for any spike in checkout-error or subscription-management tickets — those are the highest-revenue-impact regressions.

Triage the reported issues by revenue impact: anything blocking checkout or affecting subscription billing is P0; cosmetic and edge-case issues are P2. Push P0 fixes through the same staging-then-production path you used for the original deploy — don't hot-patch production directly.

Compare the 7-day post-deploy conversion rate, AOV, and add-to-cart rate against the trailing 14-day baseline, segmented by device. Account for traffic-source mix shifts (paid vs. organic) so you don't blame the deploy for a paid-media pause. A conversion-rate drop greater than 5% is investigation-worthy.

Document the new theme version, app versions, any custom Liquid sections added, and the rollback path. Future-you debugging at 11pm on Black Friday will thank present-you for this.

Walk Gorgias agents through the new flows live — what changed in checkout, in self-service returns (Loop, AfterShip), and in subscription management (Recharge customer portal). Update Gorgias macros for any flow that changed wording or required fields.

Identify the three to five most likely post-deploy ticket types — "my saved card disappeared", "my subscription portal looks different", "discount code stopped working" — and pre-write the macros. Pre-canned answers reduce AHT by 30–50% during the post-deploy ticket bump.