Say you’re searching for the perfect skincare gift set for a friend. You land on a popular brand’s website, but it’s cluttered and chaotic, with endless clicks and popup ads blocking your way. You’re suspicious. Is this really a luxury brand site or am I about to get ripped off?
You open a new tab and continue your search. You land on another site that feels luxurious and high-end. You find what you’re looking for, but the product description is vague, with only one product image. Are the ingredients organic? Do they test on animals? Is the packaging sustainable? Who else has bought it? Did they like it? I need to know everything about this product before I buy it.
In both cases, you have an in-market, ready-to-buy customer who is held back by a poorly designed user experience.
The first site’s cluttered design and poor user experience (UX) erodes customer trust. The second has a clear and directional flow, but the content lacks essential details.
The best ecommerce experiences are all about balance – design, brand authenticity, user psychology, content, functionality, UX flow, incentives, and so much more.
Each decision influences customers’ perception, confidence, and conversion potential. A poor UX will yield poor conversion rates.
And that is why a thoughtful, conversion-focused design strategy is so critical to a brand’s ecommerce success.
Why Ecommerce Website Design Matters for Conversion Rates
Think of ecommerce website design as a trail of breadcrumbs, guiding users to understand your brand, discover products, and ultimately purchase.
The more chaotic, cluttered, or confusing the design, the higher the skepticism, frustration, and distrust – directly driving higher abandonment rates.
On the flipside, the more intuitive the web design, the easier and more enjoyable the browsing and buying experience – directly driving higher conversion rates.
First Impressions are Critical
It takes customers mere seconds to decide whether to stay and explore a site or continue their search elsewhere.
These blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments can engage customers or turn them off. When organic customer acquisition costs range from $64 to acquire an ecommerce customer to as high as $708 for an aviation customer, savvy brands look to retain as many customers as possible. They need to build websites customers love to use, directly influencing revenue and profitability.
Let’s go deeper into ecommerce design best practices in three key areas: universal (across your full website); product detail pages; and checkout cart experiences.
Universal Best Practices for Effective Ecommerce Website Design
Effective web design is helpful, human, and on-brand. The best ecommerce designs remove friction and confusion, add memorable brand moments, and guide customers to take action. In short: strong UX design is design you don’t notice.
To get there, here’s what to focus on…
User-Friendly Navigation
Your website’s navigation is your customers’ compass to achieving their goal quickly. Focus on keeping it streamlined and descriptive to guide customers’ site exploration without overwhelming them. Cater to mobile users by combining a traditional hamburger menu with a secondary, exposed navigation to show off the breadth of your product line.
Recently, we reimagined site navigation for GOBI Cashmere to offer their shoppers plentiful options to discover products across the brand’s vast product line. Shoppers browse by audience category (e.g., women/men/kids), product type (coats, loungewear, sweaters, etc.), collections like gift sets, essentials and more, for a flexible and intuitive shopping experience.
User-Friendly Navigation Best Practices
- Keep headers organized and concise to reduce overwhelm and decision fatigue.
- Use intuitive descriptions to speak your customers’ language in category descriptions as opposed to using SKU numbers or uncommon naming conventions that more or less mean nothing to the user.
- Optimize for mobile to ensure easy clicking (hamburger menu, plus exposed secondary nav).
- Add visuals and iconography to create an impactful, shopping-app-style browsing experience.
- Offer options to cater to different shopping preferences (e.g., by product, by customer).
Mobile First Design
In Q2 2024, smartphones accounted for over three-quarters of retail site visits in the United States and generated roughly two-thirds of online shopping orders.
Ecommerce experiences must be designed, tested, and optimized for mobile first. It’s non-negotiable.
We take a mobile-first approach to every Shopify experience we design. Mobile has huge conversion potential, but it’s also a smaller design space with many user restrictions.
How you tell the brand story as users scroll down is essential, but challenging. You need to balance brand moments and conversion optimization; performance and storytelling.
You’re making decisions about everything from typeface, call-to-action size, information hierarchy – every detail and pixel matters so much more on mobile.
Mobile-First Web Design Best Practices
- Use a hamburger menu paired with exposed navigation to show the breadth of your product line.
- Deliver a clear visual hierarchy to reflect your brand and guide the customer journey. On mobile, where screen width is limited and users must scroll more, it's important to prioritize content. Creating a deliberate and intentional order of sections; alternating between product highlights and brand storytelling .
- Consider clean and uncluttered layouts, with plentiful negative space to reduce confusion and overwhelm.
- All but minimize user frustration with interstitials that don’t block key information and close easily.
- Leverage natural gestures like swiping left and right with carousels to maximize space efficiency and use space more effectively on mobile.
Speed
Customers are impatient. Over 40% of shoppers will abandon a site or page if it takes more than three seconds to fully load. Designing for speed is mission critical to effective, conversion-focused ecommerce experiences.
Design for Speed: Best Practices
- Compresse and cache media (e.g., imagery, animations) to reduce load time.
- Use web hosted fonts and limited typefaces to decrease CSS file size and improve rendering time.
- Host video on third-party sites, like Vimeo or Wistia to decrease load time.
- Lazy load images to prioritize loading imagery above the fold or within your users’ viewport first, instead of loading the full webpage all at once.
- Use limited or minified JavaScript, CSS, background scripts, and third-party plugins to prioritize the most important enhancements, without negatively impacting site speed.
Site speed was a major focus for our work with Peloton, where popular products frequently sold out in minutes. We spent weeks optimizing site performance to build the fastest-loading ecommerce experience on Shopify, delivering speed and efficiency for Peloton customers and conversions and revenue for the brand.
Clear CTAs
Make it easy for customers to convert. Sounds like a no brainer, but brands unintentionally build friction into conversion points all the time.
Clear calls-to-action guide customers through the sales funnel. Aim for a primary CTA per section, to focus users’ attention and avoid overwhelming them. CTAs should be visually prominent, compelling, and clickable from any device – which is your reminder to test, test, test.
Shopify’s sticky “Add to Bag” CTA appears as users scroll on mobile. This feature enables quicker conversions without requiring users to scroll back up. Similarly, Shopify’s Mini Cart taps into customer urgency, accelerating the checkout process and boosting average order value by keeping users on-page.
CTA Design Best Practices
- Develop a prominent CTA placement strategy to grab attention at key decision points in the customer journey.
- Utilize a single, primary CTA approach to reduce overwhelming users with options. If you absolutely need two CTAs, differentiate the two in ways that clearly show a hierarchy. (Think a solid button vs. one that’s just outlined or a button vs. smaller, hyperlinked text.)
- Use high color contrasts to grab attention and improve readability.
- Employ descriptive and action-oriented copy to create urgency and excitement.
A/B Testing and Continuous Optimization
We often say the real design starts when a site launches. This much, in part, due to the fact that we are always testing and interpreting data to make design decisions that can improve the user experience and ultimately scale conversions.
We don’t rely on gut instinct to make important design decisions. We use analytics and A/B testing to measure all aspects of our Shopify web experiences. We use this data to improve conversion performance for our diverse client base.
Data and real-time test results removes guesswork and egos from design strategy. We believe in a culture of testing, continuous optimization, and data-driven decision making to drive ecommerce success and conversion rate performance.
We always start conversations with our clients around goals and KPIs, so we can ladder every design and optimization decision back to those goals. This deliberate approach helps us balance best practices and conversion goals, while staying true to brand integrity and vision.
A/B testing is a methodology of building multiple variations of a webpage, randomly driving traffic to both versions, and using data to quantify the winning variation. From there, we can implement the winning design and apply lessons learned.
We recommend A/B testing in order to learn more about how buyers are interacting with your website and what to optimize or lean into. For example: Page layouts and navigation structure. CTAs placement, color, or copy. Product recommendations and upsell/cross-sells placement. Headline messaging per audience personas. Webform length, copy, and incentives.
Testing Best Practices
- Test one element at a time to clearly isolate the variable impacting performance.
- Give testing time and traffic to reach statistical significance and collect enough meaningful data.
- Define a clear hypothesis and success metrics to create a solid testing plan and criteria to crown a winner.
- Continuously test and optimize everything to learn more about your audience and incrementally improve conversion performance over time.
Best Conversion Practices for Product Listing Pages and Product Detail Pages
Before we dive in to best conversion practices for product listing pages (PLP) and product detail pages (PDPs), some definitions. A PDP is a specific product page that showcases, say, a sweater. A PLP is the listing pages of a brands collections of products (Category: Sweaters).
When customers are checking out your PLP or PDPs, you have a high-intent buyer at your fingertips. The goal then is to guide them over the finish line, removing every bit of friction that could disrupt their buying experience.
Make Product Comparison on PLPs Easy and Intuitive
PLPs let customers compare products within defined categories (e.g., On Sale, Women’s Accessories), showing off the breadth of inventory.
Product cards make up a PLP’s real estate, helping customers browse information about multiple, often related products.
Laid out in a grid format, these product cards might include product images, pricing, the product name, and badges (e.g., On Sale, New, Best Seller, Limited Edition). These are the essential data points designed to motivate customers to add the product to their cart or click to the product detail page to get more information.
Best Practices for Product Listing Page and Product Card Design
- Use high-quality media to help users visualize the product in-use (e.g., multi-hover imagery, lifestyle, contextual, and product photography and video).
- Include prominent Add-to-Cart buttons to capture high-intent moments.
- Use informative badges to show value and quick facts at-a-glance but be cognizant of creating too much visual clutter.
- Offer user-friendly filters to help customers navigate high volumes of SKUs based on the factors they value such as price, color, or size.
For Rothy’s, we balanced creating a hyper-rich shopping experience, with a clean, modern, and on-brand design. Customers could shop how they prefer, with filters for size, color, pattern and availability. Each product card, meanwhile, showed both product and lifestyle images on-hover, pricing, size availability, and more, while quick “add-to-cart” buttons open up Shopify’s mini cart slider for seamless conversions.
Mini carts or instant checkout, move customers directly to the cart to complete their purchase, but most shoppers click through to PDPs for deeper information. Which brings us to…
Designing Immersive, Conversion-Focused Product Detail Pages
PDPs enable customers to dig deeper into a single product, reviewing materials, colors, variants, use cases, warranty or care instructions, shipping details, and other information that factors into the purchasing decisions.
Brand storytelling and trust building are front-and-center on PDPs. Customers can’t touch, try on, or interact with products online, so product detail pages must work harder to amplify perceived brand value and help customers make informed buying decisions.
Incorporating subtle brand moments throughout your ecommerce site (like your commitment to vegan ingredients or sustainable materials) helps build connection with audiences in authentic ways while driving conversions.
High Quality Media Matters
Compelling high-quality media helps customers visualize themselves using the product; fueling emotional connection, excitement, and FOMO.
Quality pays off here – high-quality photos have a 94% higher conversion rate than low-quality images.
As a Shopify agency, we recommend customers showcase multiple types of high-quality media, like images or explainer videos showing product in-use; zoom-in, at-scale, or 360-degrees around; in different colors or materials; or on different body or skin types.
Brands can pull in TikTok or Instagram videos and other user generated content (UGC) to PDPs to help customers see themselves in the product. By leveraging mixed media or UGC images, brands can effectively show how a product looks on different people or environments. This approach removes the need for separate product shoots, offering a versatile and authentic representation of the products.
Product Descriptions Build Trust and Excitement
Product descriptions must be complete, answer common questions, and highlight benefits in simple, customer-friendly language. Short sentences and bullets make descriptions scanable, making it easier for the customer to consume information. Clear pricing, customer reviews, return policy information, and quality/security/industry seals work together to cement trust, put customers at ease, and motivate conversions. Brands can also add Shopify modules to upsell and cross-sell like “Pairs Well With” or “Complete the Look” to increase average order value.
Best Practices to Increase Conversions on PDPs
- Create a rich media experience to help customers visualize products in-use and get excited to buy (high resolution photography and videos).
- Optimize layouts and CTAs to guide customers’ exploration, reduce visual clutter, and drive conversion.
- Provide detailed product information to help customers feel comfortable making a purchase (while reducing returns).
- Bake in customer reviews, user-generated content, and social proof to put customers’ at ease about how products look and act in real-life scenarios.
- Upsell and cross-sell to increase average order value by showing additional, complementary products and making it easy to add-to-cart.
Together, these PLP and PDP best practices motivate customers’ to buy – but you’re not done yet. Get customers over the finish line by optimizing your checkout cart experience.
Elevating the Checkout Experience
Shopify conversion rates outperform the competition by up to 36%.
With Shopify Checkout, brands can enable Shop Pay, add express checkout, enable in-store pickup, display delivery times, offer different shipping methods, enable tips, add discounts and gift cards… the level of customization is nearly endless. And all of this custom design potential is mobile first and fully responsive.
Shopify Checkout Design Best Practices
- Utilize a clean and simple experience to guide customers through each step.
- Leverage visual cues like progress indicators to drive the checkout process.
- Take advantage of itemized and dynamic cart features to provide itemized information about each product (e.g., thumbnail image, product title, price), while giving customers control to dynamically remove or add items in real-time.
- Embed trust signals like security badges or industry seals to boost customer confidence at checkout.
- Present customer service information to make it easy for about-to-be-customers to get support.
Designing for Conversion Gets Much Easier with the Right Partner
Oftentimes, brands don’t have the in-house Shopify design expertise that can scale conversion rates. Partnering with a Shopify agency like Domaine can bring data-driven best practices, invigorating new design approaches and objective strategies that have are proven to result in what everyone in the room wants: conversions and revenue that scales.
Ready to level up your ecommerce experience and your brand at large? Let’s chat.
