Digital Agency for Third Sector
Digital Agency for Third Sector
If your online shop is not performing as well as it should, the reason is rarely obvious from the inside. An ecommerce audit identifies exactly where value is being lost and what to do about it first.
In 2025, almost a third of all UK retail purchases happened online. Online retail is now a significant income stream for many charities and voluntary sector organisations. For charities with shops, merchandise, branded products or mission-related goods, that represents a real opportunity to generate unrestricted income while reaching new audiences and strengthening supporter relationships.
Most charity online shops, though, are not performing anywhere near their potential. The problems are usually a combination of the same things: checkout journeys that lose people at the final step, product pages that do not do the goods justice, mobile experiences that frustrate rather than convert, and back-end systems that do not connect the shop to the rest of the organisation’s data. None of this is unusual. Most of it is fixable once you know what you are actually dealing with.
Where are people dropping off? Which products are getting views but not purchases? Is the checkout journey as short and frictionless as it should be? Are payment options meeting expectations, including digital wallets on mobile? We review the data and the journey with fresh eyes, identifying the specific points where sales are being lost.
A significant proportion of charity shop traffic arrives on mobile devices, and mobile conversion rates are typically lower than desktop. The reasons are almost always the same: images that load slowly, buttons that are too small to tap reliably, checkout flows that require too much typing on a small screen, and layouts that were designed for desktop and then scaled down rather than built mobile-first. We assess the mobile experience specifically, not just the desktop version.
Good product pages do two jobs: they help people decide to buy, and they help search engines understand what the product is. We review your product imagery, descriptions, categorisation and page structure against both standards. For charities, there is often a third job too: connecting the product to the mission, so that buying feels like a meaningful act rather than a transaction. We look at whether that story is being told.
Page load speed, broken links, stock management issues, payment gateway errors and crawlability all affect both conversion and search visibility. We identify any technical problems that are quietly costing sales.
This is where many charity online shops fall short. A customer who buys from your shop is a warm lead for your fundraising, but only if your systems know about them and can act on that knowledge. We assess how your shop data flows, or does not flow, into your CRM, email platform and reporting. Clean, connected data is what turns a customer into a supporter.
Are your products appearing in search results when people look for what you sell? Are your category pages structured to rank? For charity shops selling donated goods, branded merchandise or niche products, organic search can be a meaningful acquisition channel that most organisations underinvest in.
This audit is useful for any charity, CIC or voluntary sector organisation that sells products online, whether through their own website, a dedicated shop platform or a third-party marketplace. It is particularly relevant for organisations in three situations.
Your shop exists but is not growing. You are getting some traffic and some sales, but conversion is low and you are not sure why. The audit will identify the specific friction points and prioritise the fixes.
You are about to invest in your shop. Before rebuilding, migrating platforms or committing to a marketing budget, an audit tells you what the real problems are. It prevents expensive decisions being based on assumptions.
Your shop and your fundraising feel disconnected. Customers are not becoming supporters, your data is messy and your team is spending time on manual processes that should be automated. The audit maps the gaps and recommends how to close them.
A prioritised action list covering conversion improvements, technical fixes, content recommendations and data integration changes, organised by impact and effort. We are clear about what your team can tackle immediately, what requires development support, and what warrants a more fundamental review of platform or approach.
Where the audit suggests a more significant intervention, such as a platform migration, a shop rebuild or an integration project, that sits under our ecommerce services work rather than here.
Request a charity ecommerce audit
Tell us about your shop, what platform it runs on, and what is frustrating you about its performance. We will confirm whether an audit is the right starting point.
→ Get in touch
Looking for ongoing ecommerce support?
An audit is a good starting point, but the work of building and managing a high-performing charity shop is a separate engagement.
→ eCommerce for charities and non-profits