30 days to a store
that's ready to sell.

Every other job on this list gets judged by numbers. If a purchase is counted twice, or not at all, you'll make week two and three decisions on bad data, and Google's and Meta's automated bidding will learn from the same bad data. So the first week isn't exciting. It's plumbing.

Merchant Center sits in week one for a different reason: it takes time. Google says Shopping ads reviews can take three to five working days, and some other features take a few weeks. Start it on day one and it's ready by the time your Shopping campaign is in week three.

Reviews come last in the month because they need delivered orders to ask about. If your store already has a steady flow of orders, move week four's review tasks forward. The order matters more than the dates.

Six tasks a week, most of them an hour or less. Tick them off as you go: the list remembers where you got to on this device.

Place a real order on your own store and follow it through. In GA4, the purchase should appear once, with your order number as the transaction ID. Google Analytics removes duplicate purchase events that share a transaction ID, but only on web data, and it warns that reusing one ID for different orders can make you undercount.

Then check Meta. If you send purchases from both the pixel and the Conversions API, Meta only counts them once when the event ID and event name match, and the second arrives within 48 hours. For Google Ads, set up the purchase conversion with the real order value and turn on enhanced conversions, which send hashed first-party data, scrambled with SHA256 so Google can match more sales to ads.

In Merchant Center, verify and claim your store website first: it ties the domain to your account. Then add shipping. In Australia, shipping costs are required for Shopping ads and free listings, so a missing rate stops products showing at all. Add your return policy, including the return window and any restocking fee, which Google may show on ads and listings. Then submit the feed.

Pick ten products: the ones that make the most profit, not the most revenue. A best seller with a thin margin is a poor place to send more traffic. Work only on those ten this week, in the feed and on the page.

On each page, the total price, the delivery date and a one-line returns summary sit next to the button. Prices include GST: the ACCC says the total price must be shown as a single figure. Check any 'was' price is one you actually charged. The advertising rules page has the detail on sale claims.

Write your own description, add your own photos, and turn any size chart or spec table that's an image into text. Then check the page's product markup. Google's merchant listing structured data carries price, stock, shipping and returns into search results, and it should match the feed exactly. The SEO page covers product pages in depth, and the AI shopping page covers what AI tools read.

Buy from yourself again, this time on a phone, on mobile data, as a guest. In Baymard's research on US shoppers, 18% of those who abandoned a cart said the site wanted them to create an account, and 9% said there weren't enough ways to pay. If your checkout forces an account, fix that first.

Take any card surcharge out of the checkout. The Reserve Bank decided that surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa debit and credit cards ends on 1 October 2026, so a leftover surcharge line is now a problem, not a pricing choice. The card fee comes out of your margin, which is one more reason to know your margin before the ads start.

Then work out break-even ROAS: 1 divided by your margin after product cost. The e-commerce hub has a calculator that includes shipping and returns. Launch one Shopping campaign with each product in only one campaign, and set the budget from your sales goal. The Google Ads page has a check for Performance Max or Standard Shopping, and the budget page works the budget backwards from the orders you want.

An email list is the cheapest way to get a second order, but only if people agreed to it. The ACMA calls express consent best practice, and says it is up to you to prove a person consented: keep a record of who, when and how. Unsubscribe requests must be honoured within 5 working days. Sign up to your own list, then unsubscribe, and see what happens.

Reviews next. Ask every customer a few days after delivery, using the same message every time. The ACCC's guidance on how businesses can and can't use online reviews rules out hiding or editing the bad ones, so check your review app's display settings too.

Once you pass 50 product reviews, apply for Google's Product Ratings. Star ratings on Shopping ads need at least 50 reviews across all your products, and Google says reviews usually go live two to four weeks after approval. On free listings, ratings can appear whether or not you're in the program.

Open GA4's purchase journey and see which step loses the most people. The sales page has a calculator that turns that into dollars. Then compare the sales Google and Meta claim with the orders your store actually took. If the platforms claim more than you sold, something is double-counted, or they're taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway.

A month of Shopping data is a first read. Leave the campaign alone long enough to learn, change one thing at a time, and write down what you changed and when.