Recently a customer was launching their first Shopify store and they were trying to figure out when to launch.
Finally: is just opening with things being "good enough for now" better than having everything set up in an ideal way?
The only reason I'd delay launching would be because you have some media or press event for a specific day.
I'm a fan of launching early and improving.
Google likes that too because it shows natural growth and due to how they work technically (e.g. limited "budget" of page crawls per day).
I'd say you can launch as long as:
- the checkout and payment process is configured
- there is at least one product or page with content in place, and
- you'd made a rough decision on your page urls would look. e.g. product-only urls, collections based on product type
To be honest, you can change your page urls later so C isn't that important. It's just easier to pick a good option first than to redo.
So launch early. Today if you can.
One great optimization is to make sure your product's structured data is setup correctly for Google's Rich Snippets. With those you'll get more traffic and better converting traffic.
You can either audit your store's structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have all the structured data you need.
It's already helping a few thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.
Eric Davis