You are choosing who will build your online store or move it to a new platform, and the contractor sends a portfolio and screenshots of the admin panel. A screenshot shows the admin on its best day. It does not show how the admin behaves when a manager changes prices on about ten products at once, or when the owner looks for an order from three months ago. You can check this before you pay: ask for a view-only demo login and go through it yourself.
Why a portfolio and screenshots are not enough
A portfolio shows the storefront: what the buyer sees. You will live in the admin, every day. It decides whether a manager can change a price alone or has to wait for a developer, whether the owner finds the right order in a minute, and whether anyone can see who deleted a product yesterday. None of this is visible in a screenshot, and on an empty test store with three products everything feels fast.
What to ask for
A login to the admin of a working project, not a demo sandbox. The login must be view-only: nothing can be changed from it. If you are offered a walkthrough on a call instead, that is also an option, but it is better to click through the admin yourself: during a walkthrough it is easy to steer around whatever looks worse.
What to check in fifteen minutes
Products
Open the list and look for bulk operations: select several products and change the price, availability, or section in one action. If there are none, every such change becomes a separate piece of work.
Sections and menus
Can new sections and menu items be created from the admin, or only in code? It is a small thing, and it is exactly what people end up waiting for a developer to do.
Page address
What happens to the old link if you change a product's address: is a redirect set automatically, or do you have to remember it? Old links live in search results, in newsletters, and in other people's articles.
Orders
Open an order card. How many statuses does it have, can you create your own, and what depends on a status: stock, payment, emails to the buyer? If the status a manager moves and the status that money and stock depend on are separate, the risk of errors in your accounting is lower.
Action log and permissions
- is there a log of who changed what, and when;
- does it record denied access attempts, and not only successful actions;
- can a staff member be limited to certain sections, so that the accountant does not see everything and a manager does not see other people's totals.
What a demo login must hide, and what it can show
A live store means buyers' personal data: names, emails, phone numbers, addresses. If a contractor gives you a login where all of it is open, be wary: that may be how they treat your customers' data too. A good demo login hides the name, email, phone, address, and order totals, and does not open buyers' conversations with consultants at all: the personal data sits inside the sentences themselves, so there are no fields to mask.
The catalog with prices should stay visible: prices are public on the storefront anyway, and without them you cannot show how a price change works. Review texts can stay too: they are published on the product page, while the author's name and email are hidden.
Separately, check that nothing can be changed from this login. A view-only login that accidentally lets someone edit prices is dangerous for the store itself.
What no admin will have, and how to talk about it
However convenient an admin is, it cannot do everything. A new block on the storefront, your own section in the panel, an exchange with your accounting system: these are done through development. The answer "we can do everything" does not say where the boundary lies. A reasonable answer sounds like this: what changes often is moved into the panel, and what changes once is done by the contractor. Ask where that line is and ask to see it on screen: which fields, statuses, emails, and roles the owner changes alone, and what is built to order.
How this looks on our side
Our demo login opens the admin of the IWANT store: a working store with a catalog of 3,786 products and an order history from 2016 to 2026, which we moved from a hosted platform to our own engine. If you want the read-only login and the list of what is hidden, ask us. The catalog in this admin is ours; in its place will be yours.
When this check is not needed
If the store is small, changes rarely, and you do not plan to work in it yourself, screenshots and a conversation with the contractor's previous client are enough. Checking the admin matters for those who will open it every day, or who expect their staff to do so without a programmer.
