Guide
Buying a Shopify store: what to check before you pay
What to check before buying a Shopify store, starting with the public site and then the store’s own records. Figures are from our scan of 200 Flippa listings, 80 of them ecommerce stores.
Is buying a Shopify store worth it?
It depends on whether the revenue continues after the sale, and that is checkable. Read the order history for the trend, refunds, discount use and repeat buyers, confirm the domain and supplier accounts transfer, and check the site for security problems. Price the ones that fail into the offer.
Each of those has a section below, and the full checklist covers any website.
What does the order history tell you?
Whether the store is growing, and what its revenue costs. Compare the last three months with the three before. Then measure refunds as a share of revenue, the share of list value given away in discounts, and how many customers bought twice. Each is read from Shopify’s own records with read-only access.
The F(x) checks that read the orders:
- Whether store revenue is growing or shrinking
- How much of the revenue comes back as refunds
- How much of the revenue needs a discount
- Whether the same customers buy twice
F(x) asks Shopify for read_orders, read_all_orders and read_customers, and for nothing that can change the store.
How secure are ecommerce stores listed for sale?
Our study scanned 80 ecommerce stores among 200 Flippa listings. They averaged 2.7 findings each. Across the whole sample, 113 sites were not served over HTTPS and 10 set a session cookie that any script on the page could read. Both can be found from the address alone, before contacting the seller.
Scan the store’s address to run the public checks, free. The sample is the newest and cheapest listings on Flippa, and the study states what the figures do not cover.
What else has to transfer when you buy a Shopify store?
Everything the store relies on that sits outside it: the domain if it was registered elsewhere, the email, supplier and app accounts, and any ad accounts. List each one with the seller, check the domain’s registrar and expiry in the public record, and agree in writing which accounts move to you and when.
The free domain checkshows a domain’s registrar, expiry date, DNS, hosting and email providers.
Run the URL scan
Paste the address of the listing. 21 checks run from it, free, with no account.