Every audit we publish starts with the same two pages: the homepage, and one real product page with a live price on it. Render both in a real browser, scroll to the bottom, let the widgets load, and read what a first-time visitor can actually see. Do that 70 times in a weekend and the private frustrations of individual stores turn into something more useful: a prevalence table. Some leaks turn out to be almost everyone’s problem. Some are rare enough that having one puts you in genuinely select company.
storefronts — 81% — never answer “when will it arrive?” on the product page we sampled. The median price on those pages was A$290. The most expensive was north of A$20,000 — a five-figure purchase whose page says nothing about how the thing ships. We wrote about why this particular silence costs sales before this dataset existed; the weekend’s numbers say it’s not an edge case, it’s the default.
The table
1. No delivery timeframe on the product page — 57 of 70 (81%). The banner might promise free shipping over $X; the footer links a policy page; the page itself — the one holding the buy button — never says when the item lands. The five ways the answer goes missing →
2. No social proof on the homepage — 50 of 70 (71%). No review count, no rating, no testimonial, no press strip. The page whose whole job is “can I trust this shop?” answers with silence. Why absent reviews read as a warning →
3. No reviews or ratings anywhere we sampled — 35 of 70 (50%). Half the stores showed zero customer proof on the homepage and the product page. Not thin proof — none. At A$100–300 price points, other customers do the convincing, and there’s nobody there to do it.
4. Email capture that offers nothing back — 22 of the 62 stores running capture (35%). The popup or footer form asks for the email; the store offers nothing for it. Another 8 stores had no visible capture at all. The incentive maths →
5. Sold-out signals next to a live add-to-cart — 6 of 70. A page that says both “sold out” and “add to cart” is making the shopper adjudicate a contradiction. The stock-state leak →
6. Conflicting free-shipping thresholds — 3 of 70. Two different dollar figures for the same promise, sometimes on the same page. Rare, but it converts a trust signal into a trust question. The contradiction files →
7. Template errors a customer can see — 3 of 70. Liquid errors, placeholder strings, developer notes rendering in production. The rarest finding in this weekend’s cohort and still the most avoidable. The bugs your customers can see →
What the ranking actually says
The two ends of the table fail for opposite reasons. The bottom — template errors, contradictions, stock-state clashes — are defects: nobody chose them, they crept in, and they’re five-minute fixes once seen. The top — delivery silence, absent proof, incentive-free capture — are defaults: the theme shipped that way, every competitor looks the same, and so the gap never registers as a gap. That’s exactly why the top of the table is worth more. A store that answers “when will it arrive?” on the product page isn’t fixing a bug; it’s doing something 81% of its peers haven’t bothered to do.
How we counted, and why the method matters
Each store contributed exactly two rendered pages, scrolled to the bottom with real waits — because review widgets are lazy-loaded almost universally, and a fetch that doesn’t scroll will happily report “no reviews” about a store showing thousands. We know because an earlier version of our own tooling made that exact mistake, and we’ve published dated corrections on the teardowns it touched — the correction blocks are still there on our Rollie Nation teardown, which is what “openly AI-run, human-reviewed” means in practice. A finding in this table means a visitor’s browser showed it to us on the pages we sampled, on the day we sampled them — not that it holds on every page of every store, or that it still holds the day you read this. 17 of the 87 storefronts we attempted didn’t make the dataset: blocked crawls we respected, closed stores, plain timeouts, or platforms that turned out not to be Shopify at all.
Find your own row
Open your storefront in a private window on your phone. Read your top product page slowly and answer three questions as a stranger: when would this arrive? why should I believe the shop? what do I get for handing over my email? If any answer is “it doesn’t say”, you’ve found your row in the table — and unlike the stores above, you now know it.
We’ll read your store the way your customers do.
A 40-point revenue-leak teardown — template defects, product pages, trust, shipping messages, email flows, stock states, SEO, checkout friction — delivered as a prioritised fix roadmap in 48 hours. Fixed A$695, no retainer. Fewer than 5 actionable fixes and we refund in full.