Shopfront basics
The floor, not the ceiling: seven things a stranger cannot proceed without, why each is there, and what to publish when your work genuinely varies or your business runs out of your home.
The seven-item floor
Each of these is justified by what a visitor cannot do without it, drawn from the patterns that fail our entry bar rather than from convention.
- A sentence saying what you sell.
- A way to reach a human.
- Some indication of price.
- Whether you are open, or taking work.
- Where you are, or a clear signal that location does not matter.
- Who you are, in whatever detail applies to your situation.
- A date somewhere that shows the site is tended.
The full reasoning, including the three-item version for people who cannot do all seven, is at the minimum viable shopfront.
Deliberately not on the list: a logo, a blog, a social feed, testimonials, a photograph of a team, or a redesign. None of them is what stops a stranger proceeding.
The hard ones
Pricing pages for the terrified
Five options between a full price list and total silence, for work that genuinely varies. Read it.
Contact pages that work
What to include, and the hard rule about home addresses that applies even when your home is the registered address. Read it.
Opening hours are a promise
Wrong hours cost more trust than no hours. How to make a smaller promise you can keep. Read it.
What your site has to say about who you are
Business identity details, why the answer depends on where you are, and where to check. Read it.
What bad actually looks like
Nine shopfront failures worth checking for describes nine illustrative patterns with what each costs and the smallest possible fix — under an hour, no budget, no redesign.
Every pattern is assembled from more than one case and stripped of identifying detail. We do not publish teardowns of named businesses, and we never will.
Choosing where your shopfront lives
Your own site, a stall on a marketplace, or a social profile only. Your own site vs a marketplace stall vs a social profile only compares them across control, discoverability, cost and exit risk — with a table and no winner.
Exit risk is the axis most comparisons skip: what happens to your customers if the platform changes its rules or closes. If you are running two or three in parallel, the maintenance tax is real and worth counting.
On legal requirements
What a business must display on its website varies by legal form, sector and jurisdiction, and is routinely repeated online as though one country's rules applied everywhere. We do not assert what applies to you.
What your site has to say about who you are names primary sources per jurisdiction, states which one each claim comes from, and says plainly where our research stopped. Nothing on this site is legal advice and none of it can be.
The vocabulary
Shopfront, landing page, storefront and listing get used interchangeably and mean four different things to the person trying to buy from you. The difference that matters is control and exit risk — see the glossary and shopfront, landing page, storefront, listing.
Questions about shopfronts
Does meeting the seven-item floor mean you would list me?
No. The floor is about being legible to a stranger; the entry bar is a separate and stricter document. Plenty of sites clear the floor and are still refused, mostly for the categorical exclusions.
Do I have to publish prices?
No, but publishing nothing about price is itself a signal, usually read as 'expensive' or 'they will quote based on me'. The five graded alternatives are in pricing pages for the terrified.
My business runs from my house. What do I put as an address?
Not your home address, and we would not publish it either. Contact pages that work covers the options, and the legal side is deferred to named primary sources rather than guessed at.
Do you recommend a website builder?
No. Every recommendation of that kind dates quickly and would put us in a position where a platform could reasonably offer us money. The floor is deliberately written to be platform-agnostic.
Will you review my site?
No. We publish no assessment of any business, which includes yours. The checklists are written so you can do the diagnosis yourself, which is more useful anyway.
Is a beautiful site enough?
No, and one of the nine failure patterns exists specifically to break that assumption. A site can be well-designed and still fail to say what it sells.
Legal statements in this section are attributed to named primary sources in the ledger with the jurisdiction stated. Nothing here is legal advice.