The 4-task Setup Checklistgets your tenant live. This pre-launch checklist is the bigger thing: it’s the “am I actually ready to switch on ads and accept the first real customer?” gate. Don’t skip it — half-baked launches refund more, get more chargebacks, and lose money on the first week of ad spend.

End-to-end purchase test

• Buy a £1 ticket on your own site using a real card (not a test card). Refund yourself afterwards.
• Confirm the order email lands. Confirm the receipt looks right. Confirm the ticket appears in My Account → Tickets.
• Test on iOS Safari with Apple Pay and on Android Chrome with Google Pay. Both should work without a card-detail prompt.
• Test the free entry route — submit a postal entry yourself and confirm it appears in Admin → Entries → Free Entries.

Email deliverability

• Send a test marketing email to your own inbox and to a Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook test address.
• Open each and check it lands in Inbox, not Promotions / Spam. If it’s in Promotions, your domain warm-up is too aggressive — send 50–100 emails over the next week before doing a 5,000-recipient blast.
• Confirm the from-name and reply-to address feel like your brand, not noreply@.

SMS deliverability

• Send a test SMS to your own phone. Confirm the sender ID is set to your brand short-code or alphanumeric (not a long number) for UK recipients.
• Confirm the unsubscribe link works and the from-link points to your domain, not the Twilio default.

Test competition cleanup

• Delete or end-date every test competition. They’ll embarrass you in screenshots otherwise.
• Delete test customers (search by your own email + variants). Their orders skew your early reports.
• Reset any test instant-win payouts so the public ticker doesn’t show fake wins.

Brand & copy review

• Re-read your About, Terms, Privacy, and Free Entry Route pages. Replace any template wording (“Lorem ipsum”, “Your company here”, etc.).
• Test every link in the footer. Broken legal links are a customer-trust killer and an ASA/Ofcom flag waiting to happen.
• Check your hero image and competition images render correctly on mobile, desktop, and slow 3G. (We auto-optimise but extreme file sizes can still drag your speed score.)

Compliance & legal

• Cookie consent banner — confirm it appears on first visit; confirm GA4 + Meta Pixel only fire after consent.
• Age gate / 18+ confirmation — visible in your terms; on the free entry form; mentioned in your footer.
• Free entry route— postal address listed, T&Cs published, audit trail working.
• GamCare / responsible-play footer— required if you call it gambling; recommended even if you don’t.
• Trustpilot / review platform listing— claim your domain even before you have reviews so competitors can’t impersonate it.

Operations & on-call

• Add at least one alternate admin user. Don’t be a single point of failure on a launch night.
• Save the Cashflows merchant portal login somewhere your co-admin can access if you’re unreachable.
• Subscribe at least two people to checkout-failure Slack alerts (or set up email forwarding).

Switch the payment from test to live

• Cashflows — toggle from sandbox/test to live in your raffle admin Integrations → Cashflows. Re-test a £1 purchase after the switch.
• Confirm your bank account on Cashflows’ merchant portal so settlement reaches you, not a holding account.

Marketing soft-launch

• Don’t spend your full ad budget on day 1. Run £20-£50/day for a week to surface bugs before scaling.
• Watch your Sales report + GA4 realtime during the first 24 hours of ads. Pause if anything looks broken.
• Have a launch-day SMS to your existing customer list (if you have one). The cheapest, highest-ROI marketing send you’ll ever do.

Related: 4-Task Setup Checklist · PCI Compliance · Terms & Privacy.