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Shopify

The nine settings people skip on a new Shopify store

The store looks finished, the orders start arriving, and somehow the money does not. Nine of those leaks are settings you can fix in an afternoon.

By Haseeb Awan /September 2026 /6 min read

A Shopify store can look completely finished and still be quietly broken. The theme is installed, the products are up, the logo is in the corner, and the first orders arrive. Two weeks later the order count looks respectable and the bank account does not agree with it.

Almost every time I open one of these stores, the problem is not the design. It is a short list of settings that nobody changed because the store worked without changing them. Shopify was built for card payments in another market, and the defaults reflect that. Here, with cash on delivery and couriers who charge for the privilege of a refused parcel, the defaults are wrong in a way that costs you money on every order rather than all at once.

These are the nine I check first, in the order I check them.

The list

Nine settings, in the order I fix them

01
Shipping zones that match your actual couriers
The default zone covers your whole country at one rate. Your courier does not. Split the zones the way your courier prices them, and put remote areas where the delivery cost is higher on their own rate. Charging a flat rate everywhere means intercity orders are subsidising the ones nearest you, and you will not notice until you look at profit by city.
02
Cash on delivery, with its own fee
Add COD as a payment method and price it. A COD order costs more to serve than a prepaid one: the courier charges a collection fee, the refusal risk is higher, and the money arrives weeks later. Charging a small COD handling fee also gives buyers a reason to prepay, which is the cheapest way to reduce returns you will ever find.
03
Checkout fields, with phone number required
Turn off the fields you will never use and make the phone number mandatory and validated. Every checkout field you leave in is another place someone abandons, and every order that arrives without a working phone number is an order your confirmation team cannot save. Email is optional here. The phone number is the order.
04
An order confirmation step that actually runs
Shopify will happily accept an order and pass it to the courier untouched. Do not let it. Every COD order should be confirmed by WhatsApp or a call before it is dispatched, with a tag on the order so you can see what has been confirmed and what has not. This single step does more for your return rate than any change to your ads.
05
Abandoned checkout recovery, sent where people read
The default abandoned-checkout email is close to useless for a market that does not check email. Route it to WhatsApp instead, keep it to one message, and send it within the hour rather than the next day. One polite message asking whether they want it delivered recovers orders that the email never will.
06
Pixel and Conversions API, verified against a real order
Installing the pixel is not the same as the pixel working. Place a test order yourself and confirm the event arrives with the right value and the right currency. Half the accounts I audit are optimising towards an event that fires twice, fires with no value, or does not fire on the thank-you page at all. Everything the algorithm does after that is guesswork wearing a confident face.
07
Price, delivery time and return policy above the fold
The three questions a Pakistani buyer asks before anything else are what it costs, when it arrives, and what happens if it is wrong. If any of those needs a scroll or a click, you are asking someone to trust you before you have told them anything. Put all three on the product page where the price is.
08
Out-of-stock behaviour set deliberately
Decide whether Shopify hides sold-out variants, shows them greyed out, or keeps selling. All three are defensible; the default is not a decision. Running ads to a product page where the popular size is silently missing is a way to pay full price for traffic that cannot convert.
09
Notifications in the language your buyer reads
The order confirmation and shipping notification templates ship in formal English. Rewrite them as your buyer speaks, include the courier name and the tracking number, and put the phone number to reach you in the same message. A confirmation people can read is a support ticket you never receive.
Order of work

If you only have one afternoon

Do them in the order above, but if something has to be cut, keep four: tracking verified against a real order, the confirmation step, shipping zones, and the phone number field. Those four decide whether your ad data is readable and whether the orders you paid for actually get delivered. The rest improves the store. Those four decide whether the store is measurable at all.

A store with broken tracking and no confirmation call is not a business yet. It is a way of converting ad budget into courier fees.

Before you spend on ads
Test order placed by you, from your phone, on mobile data
Purchase event verified in the pixel with correct value and currency
Shipping zones split by courier pricing, not by wishful thinking
COD priced, with a prepaid discount if you want fewer refusals
Phone number required and validated at checkout
Confirmation flow written down, with someone named to run it
Abandoned checkout message routed to WhatsApp, under an hour
Delivery time and return policy visible without scrolling
Notification templates rewritten in plain language
The follow-on

What to check when orders exist but money does not

If all nine are done and the profit still is not there, the problem has moved from settings to arithmetic. That is a different exercise: price, product cost, courier charge, packing, return rate and ad cost laid out in one place until you can see what a delivered order is really worth.

I wrote that one out in full, in rupees, with a worked example. If your store is set up correctly and still not making money, start there rather than changing the theme again.

An opinion you can disagree with
Most new sellers redesign the store when orders stop converting. In my experience the design is almost never the reason. Delivery expectations, a missing phone number and an untracked purchase event explain far more lost orders than a font choice ever has.

Want your store checked properly?

Store audits cover exactly this, plus the parts that do not fit in an article: theme speed, product page structure and the courier flow. You get a written action list ranked by what will move first.

See store audits Read the handbook
Haseeb Awan, paid advertising trainer and e-commerce operator, Hafizabad
Written by
Haseeb Awan
Media buyer, e-commerce operator, founder of Digital Hafizabad

I run paid campaigns on Meta, TikTok, Google and Snapchat for stores in Pakistan and for clients in the US, UK, Australia and the Gulf, and I have trained over 5,000 students across my programs. The arithmetic in this article is the same sheet I open before quoting any account.

Keep reading
Unit economics Profit margin for a Pakistani store, line by line The arithmetic to run once the store settings are fixed. Free tool COD profit calculator Put your own price, cost, courier and return rate in.