You didn't just rent a shop. You built one.

Whoever has the property insured usually pays to repair it first. For your fit-out and stock, that is your own policy. Your insurer can then try to recover the money from the other party. It can only do that if two things are true: they were responsible for it under the lease, and they were liable at law, for example through negligence.

That recovery is the slow part. A liability claim can take a year or two to settle, so you never want to rely on one to get your shop open again. Insure what is yours, get it fixed and keep trading, and let your insurer try to recover the money behind the scenes.

What we check: your lease, so we know which parts of the shop are yours to insure before anything goes wrong. The full picture of who insures what in a leased building is in who pays for building insurance on a commercial property.

Contents and Stock. On the business packs we place, everything you own inside the shop is insured as one section, with one sum insured. That figure has to be the full replacement cost of everything on site: fit-out, contents, electronic equipment, furniture, plant, stock and any customer goods you are holding. It is exactly the wrong section to go small on.

The fit-out is everything built into the space: shopfitting, joinery, counters and till points, flooring, lighting, signage, and plumbing or electrical work done for your shop. If it would need a tradesperson to remove it, it is fit-out, insured at what it would cost to rebuild today. Most wordings pay stock differently, usually at market value, so we check how yours settles before we set the sum insured.

Glass. Shopfront windows, doors and internal glass, plus the signage often fixed to it. A single large shopfront panel can run into thousands of dollars to replace, and it's usually a cheap add-on most shops never think about until it's smashed.

Business interruption. Your fixed costs, rent, wages and lost profit while you cannot trade, and while you win your customers back afterwards. See Business Interruption Insurance.

Public liability. Your legal liability if a customer, delivery driver or passer-by is injured in your store, most commonly a slip or a fall. Most public liability policies also include product liability for what you sell. See Public Liability Insurance.

Theft and money. Stock and till contents against theft (insurers usually want evidence of forced entry when the shop was unoccupied), and cash in the till and on the way to the bank. What business insurance theft cover actually pays for sets out the triggers.

The fit-out gap. Your lease almost certainly makes you responsible for insuring your own fit-out, but leases rarely spell that out in words a shop owner would notice. So the assumption drifts: "the building's insured, that probably covers what's inside it." It doesn't. If a fire or a burst pipe wrecks your shopfitting, the landlord's insurer pays to fix the landlord's walls and floor slab, and your joinery, till points, signage and flooring are yours. The gap bites again at lease-end, when a make-good clause requires you to remove fit-out you never valued.

The stock-seasonality trap. On the business packs we place, your stock sum insured lifts automatically once your trading runs well above your own yearly average, with no need to tell the insurer in advance. The catch is the cap: the lift has a ceiling and only runs for part of the year, so a peak that is higher or longer leaves you short in the weeks there is most stock to lose. The Seasonal Stock Clause sets out the trigger, the ceiling and the day cap.

Your stock figure is also tested against its true value at the start of your policy period. If it falls short, a partial loss can be scaled down in proportion, and a total loss pays only up to the sum insured. The Co-Insurance Clause shows the maths.

Your lease gets read. Down to the clause that says what you must insure and what you must remove at the end of the term. That clause is where the fit-out gap gets closed or missed.

Glass, breakdown and theft get decided, not assumed. A shopfront window is cheap to insure and expensive to replace. We'd rather have that conversation now than after it's broken.

Anyone running a shop, boutique, specialty store or showroom from leased space. Most of the retail shops we insure sell food, homewares or clothing, but the same fit-out, stock and income questions apply to any storefront business.

If you own the building your shop trades from as well, you also have a building to insure. Start at our page for business owners who occupy their own premises. If you lease, our page for business tenants covers what a lease usually asks you to hold.

If you own the shop building and lease it to a retailer, the covers you need are the building, the rent and your own liability rather than the fit-out and stock on this page, so start at commercial property insurance.

1. Insuring Contents and Stock for less than the full replacement cost of everything on site. In our experience, the single most common retail mistake.
2. Waiting on the landlord's side to pay. Your own cover gets you trading; the recovery can follow.