Digital acceleration enhances process efficiency, reduces time and resource wastage, and boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty. Mobile shopping apps, as a critical medium of digital acceleration, serve as knowledge repositories, collecting extensive consumer data to improve user experiences. Despite several heuristic evaluations on mobile apps, more heuristics must be tailored for mobile shopping apps. The existing study applied general mobile application heuristics without tailored guidelines for integrating new and traditional heuristics into checklists, and they did not specifically focus on mobile shopping apps. This study aims to develop a heuristic evaluation checklist for operability measures to identify operability issues in mobile shopping applications. This study addresses this gap through a three-phase approach. Phase 1 involved a comprehensive literature review to identify usability issues and suitable evaluation methods for mobile shopping apps. Phase 2 focused on heuristic identification, categorising heuristics into categories and subcategories, and providing development guidelines. Phase 3 developed and verified a heuristic evaluation checklist, extending Nielsen’s heuristics to fit mobile shopping apps. The checklist was refined to include two heuristics, four sub-heuristics, and 14 evaluation questions based on relevance and frequency in the literature. Twelve experts verified the checklist, including usability experts, software/mobile app developers, and mobile shopping app designers. This study presents a validated heuristic evaluation checklist for identifying operability issues in mobile shopping applications, ensuring its applicability and effectiveness in improving user experiences. For future work, additional validation should be made by comparing the proposed heuristic evaluation checklist with other heuristic checklists.