To improve your ecommerce conversion rate, find where shoppers drop out and remove the reason. In most online shops that means four places: product pages that don’t answer the buyer’s questions, a checkout that asks for too much, pages that load slowly on a phone, and too few signs that the shop can be trusted. Fix those, in that order of evidence, and you’ll usually sell more from the traffic you already have, before spending another pound on ads.
The rest of this guide shows how to find the leaks in your own shop and what good looks like at each stage.
How can UX design increase ecommerce sales?
Good UX increases sales by making each step from landing to payment quicker and less uncertain. Every time a shopper has to hunt for the delivery cost, zoom into a blurry photo or retype their address, some of them leave.
Take a hypothetical example we’ll follow through this post. Say you run an independent homeware shop in East London, selling ceramics and linen online. Traffic is healthy, mostly from Instagram and Google Shopping, but sales are flat. A quick look at the data shows three things: most visits are on phones, a lot of people add to basket, and a large share of them never finish checking out.
That pattern is common, and it tells you where to look: at what happens after someone has decided they like something.
Why do shoppers abandon their basket?
Shoppers abandon baskets mainly because of surprises and effort late in the process. Baymard Institute, which has studied checkout usability for years, puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at around 70%. Some of that is people browsing with no intention of buying yet. A lot of it is fixable.
The reasons that come up again and again in Baymard’s surveys:
- Extra costs appearing late: delivery, fees or tax that weren’t shown on the product page.
- Being forced to create an account before paying.
- A long or confusing checkout, with more form fields than the order needs.
- Not trusting the site with card details.
- Delivery that’s too slow, or a returns policy that’s hard to find.
For the homeware shop, the first fix is obvious once you look: delivery costs appeared only at the final step. Showing “Free UK delivery over £60, otherwise £4.95” on every product page and in the basket removes the surprise.
Fixing the product page
The product page does the job a shop assistant would do in person. It has to answer every question a buyer would ask before they’ll pay.
A checklist for each product page:
- Photos that show scale and detail: a mug in someone’s hand, linen close up, the item in a real room. Let people zoom on mobile.
- The facts up front: dimensions, materials, care instructions and whether it’s dishwasher safe, near the price.
- Price, delivery cost and delivery time together, above the add-to-basket button.
- Stock and variant clarity: if the grey is sold out, say so before someone selects it.
- Reviews close to the button, including the critical ones. A product with only five-star reviews looks less believable.
- One clear add-to-basket button in your accent colour, big enough to tap easily. Our guide to tap targets covers the sizes.
Most ecommerce sites don’t need a redesign to sell more. They need to stop making buyers work for information they’d get instantly in a shop.
Simplifying the checkout
A good checkout asks only for what’s needed to deliver the order and take payment, and offers the fastest ways to do both.
- Offer guest checkout. Invite people to create an account after they’ve paid, when you already have most of their details.
- Add express payment. Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal let returning shoppers skip most of the form on a phone.
- Use postcode address lookup, so a UK address takes two taps instead of six fields.
- Show progress and keep the basket summary visible, so people can see what they’re paying for at each step.
- Keep error messages specific. “Please enter a valid UK postcode” is better than “Error in form”.
Shopify and WooCommerce both support guest checkout and express payment options, so for many shops these are settings and small template changes rather than a rebuild.
Speed and mobile
If most of your shoppers are on phones, the mobile experience is your shop. Test it on an actual mid-range phone on 4G. The office Wi-Fi flatters everything.
Common culprits are oversized product images, too many apps or plugins loading scripts on every page, and carousels that load ten large images when people see one. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will show you which pages are slow and why; our guide to why websites are slow covers the usual fixes.
Visual design and trust
Visual design affects sales because it shapes whether a shop looks credible and whether people can find what matters. A calm layout with a clear hierarchy makes it obvious where the price, the options and the button are. Too many banners, badges and pop-ups compete for attention and push the product down the screen.
Trust signals help most when they’re specific: a real returns policy in plain English, a UK contact address and phone number, recognisable payment logos, and reviews from a named independent platform.
What is a good ecommerce conversion rate in the UK?
There isn’t one figure that applies to every shop. Most published benchmarks put typical ecommerce conversion rates in the low single figures, but they vary a great deal by sector, price point, device and traffic source. A shop selling £15 gifts will convert very differently from one selling £1,500 sofas.
Your own trend is the more useful measure. Track conversion rate by device and traffic source in GA4, change one thing at a time, and compare the weeks before and after.
What should a London ecommerce redesign fix first?
Fix what your data shows is losing the most sales, which is rarely what a redesign brief starts with. Before changing anything, look at:
- The funnel in GA4: product view, add to basket, begin checkout, purchase. The biggest drop between two steps is your first priority.
- Session recordings and heatmaps from a tool such as Microsoft Clarity (free), to watch where real shoppers hesitate.
- Customer service emails: the questions people ask before buying belong on the product page.
For our homeware shop, that order of work would be: delivery costs shown early, guest checkout and express payment, then faster product images on mobile. Only after those would a visual refresh be worth its cost.
How we approach ecommerce design
We design and build online shops for growing businesses, and we start with the data: where shoppers drop out, and why. From there our in-house team fixes the product pages, checkout and performance issues first, then refines the design. If your shop gets traffic but not the sales it should, you can see how we approach ecommerce website design in London.
FAQs
How can I increase my ecommerce conversion rate quickly?
Start with the checkout and product pages. Show delivery costs on product pages, offer guest checkout and express payment such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and make sure every product page answers the obvious questions about size, materials and delivery time. These changes often need settings and small design changes rather than a rebuild.
What is ecommerce UX?
Ecommerce UX is the design of the whole shopping experience: how people find products, judge them, add them to a basket and pay. It covers navigation, search, product pages, checkout, speed and mobile usability. Good ecommerce UX makes buying feel quick and certain, which reduces abandoned baskets.
Does website speed affect ecommerce sales?
Yes. Slow pages, especially on phones, lead more people to leave before they’ve seen a product or finished checking out. Speed also feeds into Google’s Core Web Vitals, which form part of how Google assesses page experience. Oversized images and too many third-party scripts are the most common causes in online shops.
Should I redesign my ecommerce site or improve the one I have?
If the platform is sound and the problems are specific, such as a long checkout or thin product pages, improving the existing site is faster and cheaper. A redesign makes sense when the platform can’t support what you need, the site is slow at its core, or the brand has moved on. Either way, base the decision on your funnel data.
