Choosing an ecommerce email platform: a deliverability checklist

Automation builders and store integrations are easy to compare because every vendor lists them. The things that decide whether your Black Friday send reaches the inbox are rarely on the comparison page. Ask these five questions before you sign, in this order.

1. How does it authenticate my sending domain?

Every serious platform signs DKIM for your domain once you configure it — the differences are where the setting lives, whether it is optional, and whether the return path is on your domain too.

• Klaviyo: a dedicated sending domain is configured under *Settings → Domains*, which gives you several CNAMEs — DKIM selectors plus a bounce/return-path subdomain. Copy the values from that screen; they are account-specific.
• Mailchimp: the Domains page separates verifying a domain (proves you own the address) from authenticating it (publishes DKIM and SPF). Both are needed; only the second affects DMARC alignment.
• Brevo, ActiveCampaign and similar: a senders-and-domains area with records to publish, and campaign sending increasingly gated on completing it.

What to check in the trial: send yourself a real campaign, open the raw headers, and confirm dkim=pass with your domain and dmarc=pass with header.from= on your domain. A platform that cannot produce an aligned pass is a platform that will have your mail quarantined the day you tighten DMARC.

2. Shared or dedicated sending pool, and can I see which?

Almost every ecommerce platform puts you on a well-maintained shared pool, which is right for most stores. What matters is whether the vendor will tell you how pools are segmented — by plan, by volume, by sending behaviour — and whether a dedicated IP is available later.

A dedicated IP is only worth it with high and consistent daily volume. Seasonal ecommerce sending, with quiet months and enormous peaks, is the worst possible fit: the IP goes cold between campaigns and then sends a spike.

3. Does it report placement, or only opens?

This is the question that separates a dashboard from a measurement. Every platform reports delivery (an acceptance count) and opens. Neither tells you the folder.

Open rates specifically are no longer a reliable signal: Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches images, and image proxies inflate opens in ways that vary by audience. If a platform's deliverability reporting is built on opens, treat the numbers as directional at best. You need per-provider folder placement from seed testing, and clicks and revenue as the outcome measures.

4. What happens on a brand-new sending domain?

If you are launching a store or moving to a new domain, your first campaign goes out from a domain receivers have never seen. Ask:

• Does the platform ramp new domains automatically, and can you see the schedule?
• Can you send to a segment rather than the whole list for the first sends?
• Does it let you keep order confirmations on a different subdomain from promotions while the promotional domain warms?

The sequence that works: authenticate, publish DMARC at p=none with a reporting address, warm the domain, then ramp campaigns starting with your most engaged customers. Your most recent purchasers are the best possible first audience.

5. Does suppression sync with the store?

Ecommerce lists churn through three systems: the store, the ESP and sometimes a loyalty or reviews tool. If a hard bounce in the ESP does not flow back to the store, the next import re-adds it. Check that suppressions are accessible by API in both directions, and that unsubscribes propagate to every tool that can send.

Thresholds to hold yourself to: hard bounces under 2%, complaints under 0.05%, and a Gmail user-reported spam rate under 0.1% against the published 0.3% bulk-sender limit. For 5,000+ messages a day to Gmail you also need a one-click unsubscribe header (RFC 8058) — most platforms add it, but confirm it in a received message rather than assuming.

Keep transactional mail out of it

Order confirmations, shipping updates and password resets should not share a subdomain or a stream with promotions. If the store platform sends them, authenticate that path too — it is a separate sending identity with its own reputation, and it is the mail customers complain loudest about losing.

What not to do

• Do not import a historical customer list and send to all of it on day one. Segment by recency and work backwards.
• Do not re-engage a two-year-dormant segment from the same subdomain as your revenue campaigns.
• Do not use a shared link-shortener domain in campaigns. Brand the click-tracking domain on your own domain.
• Do not judge platforms on a published inbox-rate benchmark; it was measured with their list and their content.
• Do not migrate platforms to escape a deliverability problem. An unauthenticated domain and a tired list behave identically everywhere.

MailPilot does not integrate with ecommerce marketing platforms, and we will not pretend otherwise. It works on the sending domain and mailbox layer underneath: SPF, DKIM and DMARC verification, warm-up over OAuth (Gmail, Outlook) or SMTP and IMAP (SendGrid, Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark, custom SMTP), real per-provider inbox placement through a seed network, and daily per-mailbox reputation tracking.