Most ecommerce shops look perfectly fine. Clean layout, decent product photos, a basket that works. And yet 98 out of every 100 visitors leave empty-handed. The problem is rarely how the shop looks. It’s what the shop fails to do at each stage of a visit.
Good web design for ecommerce is about removing the reasons people leave. Every page a visitor lands on either builds enough trust to keep them moving or introduces enough friction to push them out. I’ve spent years pulling apart shops on Shopify and Magento (plus a fair amount of WooCommerce) to figure out which design elements make the difference. They follow the path a customer takes through your site, so that’s how I’ve laid them out here.
Get Your Above-the-Fold Content Right
The above-the-fold experience on any page determines whether someone stays or hits the back button. This applies to homepages and category pages just as much as product pages. Visitors are not reading at this point. They’re scanning for confirmation that they’ve landed in the right place.
ASOS handles this well. When you land on their homepage, you see product imagery and category navigation front and centre. There’s no abstract brand film trying to set a mood. Just clothes, clearly categorised, with prices visible. That directness is what ecommerce web design should aim for, because the visitor’s first question is always: does this shop sell what I’m looking for?
Put Trust Signals Where People Actually See Them
The header plays a bigger role in first impressions than most shop owners realise. Delivery promises and payment badges belong here because they’re part of what a visitor sees before scrolling. I shifted one client’s ‘Free UK Delivery Over £50’ banner from the footer into the header bar, and their homepage exit rate dropped by 14% inside a fortnight. That promise was always there. It was just invisible to the people who needed to see it most: those who hadn’t committed to staying yet.
Fix Your Site Search Before Anything Else
Once a visitor decides to stay, the next friction point is discovery. If someone can’t find the product they’re after within a few clicks, the quality of your design is irrelevant. They’ll leave and try a competitor.
For shops with more than a few hundred SKUs, site search is the primary discovery tool. A basic search bar that returns product titles sorted by relevance is not enough. Shopify apps like Klevu provide predictive results with product thumbnails alongside typo correction and synonym matching. That synonym piece matters more than people think. If someone types ‘trainers’ and your search only recognises ‘sneakers’, you’ve lost a sale to your own database. Predictive search has been shown to lift engagement by 20% on ecommerce sites, which makes the investment in a proper search app hard to argue against.
Make Category Filtering Fast and Accurate
For shoppers who browse rather than search, category page filtering needs to be equally sharp. The most common mistake is displaying every possible filter value regardless of current stock. A shopper selects ‘Size 10’ and ‘Blue’, lands on an empty results page, and exits. That is a guaranteed bounce.
Magento shops running Hyvä themes handle this well because Hyvä’s lightweight frontend lets filter counts update in real time, skipping a full page reload. Visual swatches for colour and size rather than text dropdowns also speed up the process, since picking from colours is faster than reading labels.
Quick-add functionality takes filtering a step further by letting shoppers act on what they find immediately. Selecting size and colour directly from a category grid and dropping items into the basket via AJAX removes an entire page load from the purchase path. B2B ecommerce shops benefit most from this because trade buyers placing repeat orders value speed above everything else.
Stop Hiding Your Navigation on Desktop
Navigation menus tie search and filtering together into a single discovery experience. On desktop, hiding your full category menu behind a hamburger icon is a false economy. Desktop visitors expect top-level categories laid out in the header with subcategories visible on hover. Hamburger menus belong on mobile, where screen space is limited. On a 27-inch monitor, they just add an unnecessary click between the visitor and your products.
Use Product Photography That Answers Real Questions
Every other page on your shop exists to get visitors to a product page. This is where the conversion burden sits, and every element either moves someone closer to the basket or gives them a reason to hesitate.
Product photography is the strongest single lever. Most shops still rely on manufacturer-supplied images shot on white backgrounds, which tell the shopper almost nothing about scale or texture. The shops converting above 3% tend to pair studio shots with lifestyle images showing the product in actual use. Detail close-ups that answer tactile questions make an even bigger difference. Shopify’s product media settings allow up to 250 images and videos per product, so using three or four is a waste of that capacity. Proper product imagery has been linked to conversion lifts of up to 40% in Shopify’s own research.
Give Hesitant Shoppers a Reason to Stay
Below the images, the add-to-basket button needs to sit close to the price and above the fold, in a colour that contrasts with the rest of the page. What most shops miss is the secondary action. A wishlist or ‘save for later’ button alongside the buy button gives uncertain visitors an alternative to leaving. They might not purchase today, but saving an item creates a return visit, and return visitors convert at significantly higher rates.
Urgency and scarcity messaging near the buy button can nudge hesitant shoppers further. Stock counters like ‘Only 4 left’ tap into loss aversion. The critical rule is honesty. Faking scarcity destroys trust the moment a savvy shopper spots it, and they do spot it.
Show Reviews Next to the Product, Not Behind a Tab
Reviews belong directly below the product description rather than hidden behind a tab. Shopify apps like Judge.me or Loox pull verified purchase reviews with photos, which carry more weight than text alone. Position your top two or three reviews where they’re visible alongside the product details, not buried at the bottom of the page. A shopper scrolling past the product description should hit social proof before they hit anything else.
Put Shipping and Returns Info on Every Product Page
Shipping information and payment logos also belong on the product page itself, alongside a clear returns policy. Each of these details removes a question from the shopper’s mind. How much is delivery? Can I pay with Klarna? What if it doesn’t fit? Most shops tuck this information away on a standalone delivery page or behind a footer link. By then it’s too late. The goal is to leave nothing unresolved by the time their eyes reach the buy button, because every unanswered question is a reason to close the tab.
Make Your Blog Look Like Your Shop
Most ecommerce blogs are treated as a separate SEO exercise. A batch of keyword-targeted articles gets published, and the blog template often looks nothing like the rest of the shop. That disconnect between content and commerce means a reader who wants to buy has to mentally switch contexts, which is enough friction to kill a purchase.
The fix starts with template consistency. Your blog should share the same header and navigation as your product pages, right down to the footer. Shopify themes like Dawn handle this natively, but WooCommerce shops often need custom template builds because WordPress treats posts and products as entirely separate content types.
Link Blog Content to Products Properly
Internal linking from blog content to products is where ecommerce content marketing earns its return, but the links need to feel natural within context. If you’re writing a gift guide for runners, link to specific products at the point where you discuss each gift idea. Dumping a product grid at the bottom of every post does not count. Contextual links carry more weight with readers and search engines alike.
Shoppable content takes this further. WooCommerce shops can embed product cards directly inside articles using WooCommerce’s product blocks, complete with pricing and add-to-basket buttons. A reader browsing a styling post can add featured items to their basket while still on the page. That continuity between reading and buying is what turns a blog from a cost centre into a revenue channel.
Email capture within posts creates a separate retention path. Content readers who subscribe sit at a different buying stage than existing customers. Segment them separately in your ecommerce CRM software and build nurture sequences that move them from reader to first-time buyer over weeks rather than pushing for an immediate sale.
Strip Your Checkout Down to the Essentials
The checkout page is where most abandoned baskets die. The single biggest design mistake is asking for too much information across too many steps. Every additional form field is a chance for the shopper to reconsider, get distracted, or give up entirely.
Shopify’s one-page checkout, rolled out to all Shopify shops in 2023, collapsed the old three-step process into a single screen. The difference it made for conversion rates was measurable straightaway. If you’re on WooCommerce or Magento, the same principle applies: get the checkout onto one visible page wherever possible. Guest checkout needs to be the default, not a secondary option buried behind a ‘Continue as guest’ link. Forcing registration before purchase is one of the oldest conversion killers in ecommerce, and plenty of shops still do it. A technical SEO audit service that includes checkout funnel analysis can pinpoint exactly where your drop-offs are happening.
Design for Thumbs, Not Just Screens
Mobile performance is the other half of this equation. Responsive design makes layouts adapt to smaller screens, but proper mobile optimisation means rethinking the entire interaction model. Touch targets need to be at least 48 pixels square. Form fields need to trigger the correct keyboard type (numeric for phone numbers, email for email addresses). The full checkout flow needs to be completable with one thumb.
Most shops have already solved the responsive layout piece. The ones pulling ahead are the ones treating mobile as its own design challenge rather than a scaled-down version of desktop. Given that mobile traffic now accounts for over 72% of ecommerce visits whilst mobile conversion rates sit at roughly 1.82%, that gap is almost entirely a design and usability problem rather than a traffic quality problem.
Match Your Payment Options to Your Audience
Payment options sit at the very end of the purchase path, which makes them easy to overlook and expensive to get wrong. For UK ecommerce, card payments through Stripe or a similar processor are the baseline. PayPal still matters because older shoppers default to it. Apple Pay and Google Pay speed up mobile checkout considerably. Then there’s Klarna or ClearPay for the buy-now-pay-later crowd.
The right combination depends on your audience, so test completion rates rather than guessing. A shop selling £15 candles has different payment needs to one selling £1,500 sofas. The sofa shop probably needs BNPL options prominently displayed. The candle shop probably doesn’t.
Pick Your Starting Point
Pick your highest-traffic pages and check them against the principles above. Moving trust signals into the header is a quick win. Adding a wishlist button to product pages takes a bit more doing but pays off fast. Measure each change through Google Analytics 4’s conversion paths report before rolling out site-wide.
Custom ecommerce builds from agencies like We Make Websites or Design Box tend to outperform off-the-shelf themes because they design around how a specific shop’s customers actually behave rather than following whatever layout trend is popular this quarter. If the technical side feels beyond your team, an ecommerce web design and development service can handle the build whilst you concentrate on trading.
Treating web design for ecommerce as a one-off project is a mistake. The shops that consistently outperform their competitors treat their site as a living system that evolves with real user data, not a static build that gets redesigned every two years because the owner got bored of the current look.
