The 10 mistakes we keep seeing in Cypriot e-shops

When we look at a Cypriot e-shop, we rarely find anything dramatic. We find the same ten things in different combinations: settings nobody revisited after launch, and copy that went in “for now” and stayed.

This list doesn’t come from generic guides. It comes from the checks in the audit tool we use, from 100 chatbot conversations in our own shop, antoniadis.com.cy, and from what we fixed there. We don’t name any other shop. Every mistake ends with how to fix it: in an hour or in a week.

The short answer

• The most expensive mistake isn’t technical. In our own shop’s chat, 19% of conversations asked about location, opening hours or contact details and 10% about shipping, while all of it was written on pages of the site.
• Supplier copy, pasted as is, is duplicate and often wrong. In our own catalogue we found a melting point of 240 °C where the correct figure is 227 °C.
• Half of them take an hour to fix, with no developer. The other half take a week.
• If a firewall or JavaScript hides the page, AI tools won’t recommend you, however good the copy.
• An audit catches eight of the ten. The first two show up mainly in what your customers ask.

#	Mistake	Fix	Where it shows
1	Shipping, hours, location buried	One hour	Chat, phone calls, email
2	Returns policy hidden or missing	One hour	Chat, phone calls
3	Supplier copy pasted as is	One week	Audit
4	Products with no description	One week	Audit
5	Titles and meta left to the platform	One hour	Audit
6	Half-done second language	One week	Audit
7	Duplicate or conflicting structured data	One week	Audit
8	Firewall or robots.txt blocks AI tools	One hour	Audit
9	Content that needs JavaScript	One week	Audit
10	Heavy photos with no alt text	One hour	Audit

What customers look for and can’t find

1. Shipping, opening hours, location: written down, but buried

No crawler finds this one. Your customers do. In 100 chatbot conversations on antoniadis.com.cy, from 23 August to 19 September 2026, 19% asked about location, opening hours, contact details or pickup, and 10% about shipping. The data is aggregated and anonymised. And the site has all of this, on pages of its own.

This isn’t an opinion, it’s a measurement. When a customer opens a chat to ask something that’s already written down, the information is buried. The most common case: the shipping cost appears for the first time at checkout.

How to fix it in an hour: one line next to every product price with the shipping cost and the free-shipping threshold. Opening hours, address and phone number in the footer of every page, not only on “Contact”. And look at what customers asked on the phone this week: it’s either missing from the site or in the wrong place.

2. A returns policy hidden in the terms and conditions

It often exists only as a paragraph inside long terms and conditions, or not at all. Customers look for it before buying from a shop they don’t know. There’s a practical reason too: according to the EU’s Your Europe portal, consumers buying at a distance have 14 days to withdraw without giving a reason. And if they weren’t told beforehand that they pay the return shipping, the seller pays it. What you don’t write down, you can’t rely on.

Google also accepts the returns policy in a shop’s structured data and can show it next to the price. Our own shop didn’t have it there either when we checked in September.

How to fix it in an hour: a separate “Returns” page, linked from the footer and the product page. Four things: how many days, who pays for the return, how it’s sent back, how the money is refunded. Have your lawyer look at the final text, because we don’t give legal advice. The markup for the policy is ready to copy in our guide to structured data.

The copy on your product pages

3. Supplier copy, pasted as is

Every shop that buys from the same supplier has the same text, so Google has no reason to prefer yours. And it’s often wrong. When we rewrote the catalogue of antoniadis.com.cy, checking against the manufacturer turned up a solder alloy with a 240 °C melting point on the supplier’s sheet, where the correct figure is 227 °C. It also found a set advertised with 30 figurines that contained 22.

The audit searches, in quotes, for a phrase from the middle of each description: if other domains come back, the text isn’t yours. The figure is an estimate from a sample, and the report says so.

How to fix it in a week: not the whole catalogue. Rewrite by hand the 20–50 products that bring in the revenue, with specifications from the manufacturer’s page. The rest of the catalogue follows category by category. In our own shop, the categories we rewrote grew 39% in organic clicks. The ones we left untouched, over the same period, stayed at −1%.

4. Products with no description, or a single sentence

Supplier copy is at least copy. Worse is the product with a title, a photo, a price and nothing else. Google has nothing to rank, AI tools have nothing to quote, and the customer asking “will it fit mine?” gets no answer. In our chat, 20% of conversations were questions about specifications, compatibility or equivalents. That’s exactly what the description should say.

The audit measures descriptions under 150 words across 24 products drawn from the whole catalogue and gives a range, roughly ±17 points. A bare percentage from a sample that small promises a precision it doesn’t have.

How to fix it in a week: a template with two sentences on what it is, five specifications, where it’s used and three common questions. Fill it in first for the products with the most traffic, which Search Console shows you. For products people search by part number, write the manufacturer’s code and its variants into the text: in our chat, many people typed nothing but the part number.

5. Titles and meta descriptions left to the platform

Most platforms use the product name as the page title. For the meta description they use either nothing or the first lines of the description. Yet the title is what a customer reads on Google before deciding whether to click. On the pages we rewrote on antoniadis.com.cy that kept the same URL, CTR rose 60%, from 4.72% to 7.55%. Same position in the results, more clicks.

How to fix it in an hour: one rule in the template: product name, key attribute, brand, and the shop’s name at the end, under 70 characters. Then hand-write meta descriptions for the 20 pages with the most impressions in Search Console. The rest can wait.

6. The second language is half done

In Cyprus nearly every e-shop has, or needs, English. Three things we see often: an English menu over Greek descriptions, English pages from machine translation, and two languages without hreflang, so Google doesn’t know they’re the same page. In our own shop’s chat, 32% of conversations were in English and 18% came from outside Cyprus. That’s one shop and one month, but it shows who a single-language site is missing.

How to fix it in a week: don’t translate the whole catalogue. Translate properly the pages that sell, the categories, shipping and returns, with a glossary so every term is written the same way everywhere. And make sure every page points to its counterpart in the other language with hreflang.

What the machines read

7. Structured data that’s duplicated, incomplete or contradictory

It’s rarely missing altogether: PrestaShop, WooCommerce and Shopify already output some kind of Product. The mistake is elsewhere. Two Products on one page because an SEO module added a second. An empty description field. “In stock” in the markup and “Sold out” on the button. On antoniadis.com.cy we found a breadcrumb declared twice and an empty description, and we walk through both in our guide to structured data.

A mismatch in availability usually starts outside the markup: the site’s stock isn’t updated from the warehouse or the supplier, and that’s solved with automation, not with schema.

How to fix it in a week: check three pages in the Rich Results Test: a product on sale, one that’s sold out and one with variants. Count how many Products you see. The fix goes in the theme template, in a child theme so it survives updates. If stock sync is the cause, you need a custom integration with your warehouse system.

8. A firewall or robots.txt that shuts out AI tools

A “block bots” switch on the CDN, a security plugin, a robots.txt rule someone added once. Along with the unwanted bots, they shut out the crawlers of ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. The shop doesn’t notice, because for people everything works. Our tool has run into a shop whose firewall answered every request without a browser with a 403. Not a single product could be read. And what AI tools can’t read, they don’t recommend when someone asks where to buy.

How to fix it in an hour: open your robots.txt and search for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot and Google-Extended. Then open the bot settings of your CDN or firewall. Decide deliberately whom you let in. Our guide to AI crawlers has ready-made snippets for e-shops.

9. Content that only appears with JavaScript

Some themes and modules load the description, the specifications or the reviews with JavaScript after the page opens. Visitors see no difference. AI crawlers, however, don’t run JavaScript: in a measurement by Vercel in December 2024, none of the major ones did. Whatever loads only through a script doesn’t exist for them.

The audit downloads the page twice, once as plain HTML and once through a browser, and compares them. If the description exists only in the second, it shows up in the report.

How to fix it in a week: turn off JavaScript in your browser and open a product page. Whatever is missing needs to come from the server. Usually a module or a theme tab is to blame, and the fix is in the template, not the content.

10. Heavy photos with no alt text

The photo goes up straight from the phone or the supplier’s site, several MB each, with no alt text. The page is slow, especially on mobile, and the image tells nothing to Google or to a screen reader.

How to fix it in an hour: turn on compression and WebP, in the platform’s settings if it supports them or with a module. Then write alt text for the photos of your 20 best-selling products: one phrase on what the photo shows, not a list of keywords. You can measure speed for free with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Where to start

The five one-hour fixes fit into an afternoon and need nobody else: do them first. For the rest, start from what your customers say. Ask whoever answers the phone which three questions they heard most this month, or open your chat logs.

If you want to know which of the ten apply to your shop, the free mini-audit checks five product pages, AI crawler access and one benchmark question in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and arrives as a one-page email. The full audit, at €390 excluding VAT, adds structured data, a comparison with three competitors and an action sheet with cost estimates. Or tell us what’s on your mind, and we’ll tell you where we’d start.