Answers
What is a due diligence checklist for buying an ecommerce store?
Short answer: Check 24 months of platform sales against payment-provider payouts and bank deposits, refunds and chargebacks, supplier invoices, ad spend viewed in the ad accounts, product and traffic concentration, supplier terms, inventory on the closing date, owner hours and which accounts actually transfer. Then close through escrow with a written handover period.
What should you check before you contact the seller?
- Run the listing through the free red-flag checker for payback, the asking multiple and flags.
- Check the store's age, product range and reviews from the outside.
- Work out the price you would pay on verified profit, not the asking price: true payback calculator.
Which financial records should you check first?
- 24 months of sales from the store platform, by month.
- Payouts from Shopify Payments, Stripe or PayPal, matched to bank deposits.
- Refunds and chargebacks by month.
- Supplier invoices backing cost of goods.
- Ad accounts (Meta, Google, TikTok) for spend and return, viewed live.
- App, theme, shipping and fulfilment costs that sit outside the P&L.
What should you check about customers and traffic?
- Share of revenue by product: one product above half of sales is concentration.
- Returning-customer rate and email list size, engagement and consent.
- Traffic by channel in Analytics: one channel above 60% is a flag.
What should you check about operations and the transfer?
- Supplier terms: will the supplier sell to you at the same price, and is there an agreement?
- Inventory count and valuation on the closing date, paid separately from the multiple.
- Owner hours per week, by task, and who does customer service.
- Which accounts transfer (store, domain, email list, social accounts, ad accounts) and which you must open yourself.
- Trademarks, product images and content: who owns them.
- Escrow and a handover period written into the agreement.
Which red flags should you expect?
On ecommerce listings our checker most often raises one traffic channel over 60%, a margin that looks too high, under 12 months of history and no connected data source. The ecommerce seller question checklist turns this list into questions you can send as-is.
Sources
- Escrow.com, Fee calculator, US dollar transactions, read 7 October 2026
- Stripe Docs, User roles, read 7 October 2026
- FirstPass Memo, seller question bank, October 2026 (general checklist), our own questions
- FirstPass Memo, red-flag checker rules, our own rules, published as /rules.json
Related
- How to verify Shopify revenue
- Is buying a Shopify store worth it?
- True payback calculator
- How escrow works
- Glossary of listing terms
- More questions buyers ask
Get the ecommerce (not Amazon) seller checklist
Enter your email and the next page gives you the ecommerce (not Amazon) seller question checklist (web page and PDF) straight away, no waiting, along with the other free files: seller question checklists for eleven business types, the 72-hour vetting plan and a deal-tracker spreadsheet. Nothing is emailed; you download them on the page.
No newsletter: we send at most one email, when paid memos open. Reply "stop" to hello@firstpassmemo.com to be removed. Looking at a live listing priced $10k–150k? Apply for a free beta memo instead; its confirmation page has the same downloads.
Composite examples are invented and labelled. Figures from other sites are quoted with a link and the date we read them; FirstPass figures are asking prices and seller-stated profit, not sale prices. Informational screening only, not investment, legal or tax advice.