If You Skip These Before Launching, You'll Regret It Live

Create a test coupon for 100% off, go through your checkout as a customer, complete the purchase, and follow the entire post-purchase journey. Don't just assume it works because you built it. Actually walk through it.

Most creators test individual pieces — the sales page, the checkout, the course content — but never the full sequence in one sitting. Gaps only become visible when you experience it as a stranger would.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: You'll discover on launch day that your checkout redirects to the wrong product, or that the email triggered on purchase is missing the course link, or that the course itself isn't actually attached to the offer. These are all common. They're also invisible until someone pays real money and hits them.

Kajabi's own documentation walks you through how to create a test purchase — including using test mode for payment processing.

After someone pays, where do they land? If the answer is "my homepage" or "a blank page," you've already lost them. The post-purchase moment is the highest trust moment in your entire customer relationship. A student who just paid is excited, attentive, and ready to be told what to do next. A Thank You page that says nothing wastes that entirely.

Your Thank You page should confirm the purchase, tell them exactly what to do next, link directly to the course dashboard, and set a clear expectation for what the experience ahead looks like.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: Confusion triggers doubt. Doubt triggers refund requests — not because the course is bad, but because the student feels abandoned before they've even started. According to Baymard Institute's cart abandonment research, the moments immediately after payment are critical for retention. A dead Thank You page is the single fastest way to erode the confidence your sales page just built.

If you're dripping content — releasing lessons over days or weeks rather than all at once — you need to verify the schedule behaves the way you think it does. Log in as a test student. Check what's locked, what's unlocked, and what the unlock dates actually are.

Kajabi's drip settings can be counterintuitive. Content can drip based on enrollment date, a fixed calendar date, or days after a specific action. If you've touched these settings multiple times during build, there's a real chance something got misconfigured.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: Students either get everything on day one (defeating the purpose of your curriculum structure) or they're locked out of content they expected immediately and flood your inbox. Both create support headaches. Kajabi's drip content guide outlines every trigger option — worth re-reading even if you've used it before.

Privacy Policy and Terms of Service aren't optional — they're legally required in most jurisdictions if you're collecting payment information or email addresses. They need to be linked in your site footer and accessible from your checkout page before someone pays.

Most creators create these pages once and forget them. The issue is that during redesigns, template switches, or product migrations, footer links often break or disappear entirely without anyone noticing.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: Beyond legal exposure under GDPR and CCPA, missing legal pages erode trust with buyers who look for them before purchasing — particularly in professional and B2B audiences. If a potential student can't find your Privacy Policy before entering their card details, many will simply leave.

Your refund policy needs to be findable before someone pays, not buried in a confirmation email they receive afterward. This is both a legal requirement under FTC guidelines and a buyer confidence signal.

If someone has to hunt for your refund policy, they'll assume the worst. A clear, easy-to-find refund policy actually increases conversions — it removes friction at the exact moment of hesitation.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: Chargebacks. A buyer who can't find a refund policy — or who feels misled about it — will go to their bank instead of coming to you. Chargebacks are significantly more damaging than refunds: they carry fees, hurt your payment processor standing, and can eventually cause Stripe or PayPal to restrict your account.

The welcome email is the most-opened email you will ever send to a student. Open rates for post-purchase transactional emails consistently sit above 60–70%, compared to 20–25% for standard marketing emails. This is not the place for a one-liner.

Your welcome email should tell students exactly how to access the course, what to do first, what to expect in week one, and how to get help if they need it. Treat it like an onboarding call condensed into 200 words.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: Students sit on an empty "You're in!" email with no clear next step and move on to something else. The initial momentum — the peak moment of motivation right after purchase — evaporates. Completion rates suffer. Engagement drops. Refund requests increase. A weak welcome email is one of the most invisible but damaging things in a course launch.

Before you publish any coupon — in an email, on social, on a webinar — go to your actual checkout and use it yourself. Check the discount applied, the expiry date, the number of uses remaining, and whether it applies to the right product.

Coupon errors are among the most embarrassing and trust-destroying launch failures. A code that doesn't work after you've publicly promised it makes you look unprepared at exactly the moment you need your audience to trust you enough to buy.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: An expired code. A code that gives 100% off instead of the intended discount (a common testing error that never got corrected). A code tied to the wrong product. Any of these create a flood of confused emails during your launch window — the worst possible time to be troubleshooting instead of selling.

More than 60% of internet traffic now comes from mobile devices. A significant portion of your students will watch your course videos on their phone, on a commute, in a coffee shop — not on a desktop with a fast connection.

Turn off your WiFi. Open your phone. Try to watch a lesson. Does it load? Does it buffer? Does the player work in Safari on iOS?

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: Students who can't watch your videos on mobile will either give up silently or email you frustrated. Neither is acceptable when Kajabi's video hosting is built to handle this — meaning the issue is almost always a file size or encoding problem on your end that's easy to fix before launch and nearly impossible to fix gracefully during one.

In Kajabi, every member of your site has a role — and those roles carry very different permission levels. It is possible to accidentally grant a paying student admin access to your entire site. It is equally possible to accidentally restrict them from content they paid for.

Check your offer settings, your product permissions, and the access level assigned to any test accounts you created during the build process. Then check them again after any settings change.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: A student with accidental admin access can see — and in some cases edit — your backend, pricing, other students' data, or unpublished products. A student with too-restricted access simply can't use what they paid for and will report it as broken. Both require immediate damage control. Kajabi's guide to account user roles is worth reviewing in full before every launch.

Kajabi has an uptime record that's generally excellent — but generally isn't the same as always. Their status page has recorded incidents ranging from slow load times to full outages, and Murphy's Law has a way of timing these events with launches.

What will you do if your checkout page won't load at 10am on your launch day? Do you have a direct PayPal link as backup? A way to take manual payments and enroll students? A message ready to send your list explaining the delay?

This isn't pessimism — it's professionalism. Creators who have a backup plan handle outages without losing sales or credibility. Creators who don't, panic publicly and lose both.

⚠ What goes wrong if skipped: A platform issue beyond your control becomes a crisis that looks like your failure. Your launch momentum — which is time-sensitive by nature — stalls. Students who were ready to buy navigate away and don't come back. Having even a simple contingency (a direct payment link, a delay email draft, a 2-hour pause announcement) is the difference between a speed bump and a disaster.