Start Strong in 2025: Your Ecommerce Foundation Checklist for Growth

We’re kicking off the new year with a fresh approach to help you learn more from us—and about how we can help your business grow.

By putting ourselves in your shoes as an ecommerce business, we’re delivering the insights and tools we believe will make the biggest impact on your success throughout the year. We’re starting strong in Q1 with a focus on “Enhancing Your Ecommerce Foundation”— helping you build a streamlined, integrated, and scalable foundation that drives sustainable growth.

For January, it’s all about laying the groundwork for success by auditing and optimizing key foundational elements like your platform, payment systems, and tax compliance. We’ve broken this process into 5 key categories, presented as a checklist you can work through this month to set your business up for a successful year ahead.

The categories are:

1. Platform Setup
2. Payments/Checkout
3. Tax compliance
4. Security and Data privacy
5. Hosting and Infrastructure

No need to stress—we’re here to break down each category and highlight exactly what you need to focus on. Ready to dive in? 3, 2, 1... Let’s go!

1. Optimizing your ecommerce platform Setup

• Check on the scalability, reliability, and alignment of your current platform to your growth goals. Ensuring the performance is meeting the standard you are wanting to achieve.
  • Leveraging platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Shopware to empower your business for success today and sustained growth in the future.
• Review your integrations and features of your website, ensuring that integrations such as ERP, CRM, and inventory work smoothly and are functioning correctly with your backend systems. Additionally, updating or installing any new features that are necessary to support or meet your business needs.
• Ensure your website is set up for mobile optimization. Do a full review of what your site looks like on mobile, to ensure that you are presenting a seamless user experience across all devices.

2. Implement and optimize payment and checkout systems/processes

• Audit the configuration of all payment gateways to ensure they are set up properly and functioning securely. Then evaluate the efficiency and performance of the tools you have in place to identify if there is an area for improvement. Lastly, test your payment methods, ensuring there continues to be a secure and smooth customer experience.
• Optimize and simplify by streamlining your checkout flow to reduce any abandoned cart, prioritizing removing any unnecessary steps, enabling guest checkout, ultimately having that frictionless checkout. Then you can fine tune any subscription models you have in place. Ensuring that user friendly integration and clear terms for your recurring customers.
  • Indochino was able to find ways to streamline their payment solutions using Klarna and Stripe to create a frictionless customer experience.
• Expand payment options for your customers. If you don't already have diverse payment options in place, now is the time to start thinking about adding them. Examples could include, subscriptions, installment plans and buy now/pay later solutions to ensure you attract and retain more customers
  • By expanding their payment solutions using Klarna, Juiced Bikes now offers flexible payment options like buy now, pay later that has ultimately improved conversions.
  • By implementing Ba/ance, Home Roots was able to focus on financing options that support customer retention. They increase their retention by integrating financial options into their payment methods.
• Integrate and analyze data by making sure that you are integrating your payment data. Syncing the data with reporting tools to help gain insights into your customers behavior to drive better decision making.
  • Alma was able to implement Stripe and relies on them to help with handling global ecommerce needs. Specifically global payment capabilities to handle rapid growth.

Irish Titan utilizes many partners within in this space, others that you can lean into or reach out to us on more information on are PayPal, Square and Bold.

3. Tax Compliance and Reporting

• Check tax rates ensuring accuracy and alignment for all sales regions, utilizing tools for automation and calculations
  • Diamondback Branding and PXG Parsons both utilize Avalara to help not only streamline and automate tax calculations for compliance but handle the complex tax setups that come into play when you are selling across multiple regions.
  • Annmarie Skin Care utilizes and implements Zamp to help their growing business streamline their tax compliance process which allows Annmarie Skin Care to just focus on growth while Zamp handles the complexities of accurate and automated tax calculations.
• Review reports by auditing your last years tax reports to confirm compliance and find/fix any inconsistencies that need to be addressed
• Update your tax settings for new markets if you are planning to expand to other regions or countries, adjusting the tax setting to comply with those local tax laws.
  • Hay Chix utilizes Zamp to help simplify their tax management. As their business expanded into new markets, Zamp supported them in ensuring their tax setup is meeting the standard of each of the regions.

4. Website Security and Data privacy

• Verify that you have data backups in place to ensure that your critical data is being saved and can be restored if something goes wrong.
  • Jeffree Star and Lord and Taylor highlighted the need of implementing Rewind to have robust data backups and protection in place for the ability to recover from any major disruptions and mitigate the risk of critical data loss.
• Conduct security and compliance audits to identify vulnerabilities and apply necessary patches and upgrades to secure your site. Making sure that your payments and systems meet SSL and PCI/DSS compliance. Overall, assessing and updating your security measures to align with all compliance standards.
  • Gosselin Photo & Video and Rainbow Shops integrated Signifyd for chargeback prevention but ultimately to enhance any fraud protection to ensure their transactions are secure to help aid in building customer trust.
• Verify data privacy compliance to ensure GDPR and CCPA compliance for data collection, storage and usage. Being clear and transparent in your privacy policy to reflect the latest regulatory requirements.

Strengthen your data handling by encrypting communications, security store sensitive information and make sure that you are periodically reviewing your data protection strategy.

5. Hosting and Infrastructure

• Assess your hosting provider ensuring that your current hosting solution is capable of handling your site traffic and optimized for fast load times and minimal downtime.
  • Cambridge Audio utilizes Platform.Sh to not only ensure they have a reliable and scalable ecommerce setup but uses Platform.Sh to have the reassurance that they have a hosting solution in place that is able to handle peak traffic periods without downtime.
• Monitor your site uptime by setting up proper monitoring and proactive response to any server issues.
• Lastly, test for any scalability issues, ensuring that all of your infrastructure can scale appropriately, especially for those peak shopping periods.

There are other partners within the hosting space that we at Irish Titan lean on as well including Pantheon and Webscale!

Wrapping It Up – Let’s Set the Foundation for a Bold Year Ahead

As we kick off Q1, remember this: success in ecommerce doesn’t happen by accident—it’s built on a strong, intentional foundation. By auditing and optimizing your platform, payments, tax compliance, security, and infrastructure, you’re laying the groundwork for growth that’s sustainable, scalable, and strategic.

We know this process can feel overwhelming, but don’t sweat it—we’ve got your back. From fine-tuning checkout systems to ensuring compliance and boosting site performance, this January is all about doing the groundwork so you can spend the rest of the year focused on driving revenue and creating memorable customer experiences.

So let’s roll up our sleeves, check the boxes, and get your ecommerce house in order. After all, at Irish Titan, we’re not just about checking boxes—we’re about checking the right ones to help you grow smarter and bolder.