E-commerce design judged on revenue per visitor, not aesthetics.
Most online stores lose the majority of buyers at three specific points: the product page, the cart, and the first checkout step. We find which one is costing you most, then design the fix and measure it.
Where online retail actually loses money
The product page doesn't answer the objection
Shoppers leave a PDP because a specific question went unanswered — sizing, materials, delivery timing, returns. The page presents what the business wants to say rather than what the buyer needs resolved before committing.
Checkout asks too much, too early
Account creation before guest checkout, address before shipping cost, surprise fees at the final step. Each is a defensible internal decision and each measurably costs orders — abandonment concentrates on exactly these moments.
Mobile is the majority and the afterthought
Most sessions are mobile; most stores are designed and reviewed on a desktop. Thumb reach, form input, image zoom and payment-sheet integration are where mobile conversion is won or quietly lost.
Acquisition is subsidising a leaky funnel
Paid spend rises to compensate for a conversion rate nobody has interrogated. Fixing the funnel is almost always cheaper per incremental order than buying more traffic to pour into it.
What you actually get
Funnel diagnostic
Analytics and session review to locate exactly which step loses the most revenue, so design effort is spent where the money actually is rather than where the page looks worst.
Product detail page design
PDPs structured around the objections that stop purchase — imagery, specification, sizing, delivery, returns and social proof, sequenced by what buyers ask rather than by what is easy to populate.
Cart and checkout redesign
Guest checkout, transparent costs shown early, minimal field counts, address autocomplete and native payment-sheet integration. The highest-leverage surface in most stores.
Discovery and navigation
Category structure, filtering and search designed so shoppers reach a relevant product quickly — the step before the funnel that determines how much enters it.
Post-purchase and retention
Order tracking, returns and re-order experiences. Retention design is consistently underinvested relative to acquisition, despite a far better return per hour of work.
Accessible, mobile-first design
WCAG 2.1 AA as standard and mobile as the primary design target rather than a responsive afterthought — both of which correlate directly with conversion on real device mixes.
How the engagement runs
Diagnose
Weeks 1–2. Funnel analysis and heuristic review to identify and size the biggest leaks. Delivered as a ranked list before any redesign is proposed.
Prioritise
Week 2. Issues scored on revenue impact against build effort, so the work sequences by return rather than by enthusiasm.
Design
Weeks 3–7. Redesign of the highest-impact surfaces, mobile-first, with every state specified including out-of-stock, partial availability and payment failure.
Measure
Post-launch. Against the conversion metric agreed at the start. Retail is one of the few categories where design impact is unambiguously measurable, so we commit to it.
Proof
Conversion work across sectors
Our e-commerce practice draws on conversion work across our client base rather than a single flagship retail launch — the funnel diagnostics that reduced Adda247's support tickets 60% and lifted onboarding completion 45% use the same method applied to a purchase journey. Read the full case study →
Related work
Start with a fixed-scope UX audit — for retail it is almost always the right first engagement because the return is measurable within weeks. Related reading: why e-commerce bounce rates run high.
What it costs
How retail engagements usually run
Most start with a two-week fixed-scope conversion audit, because in e-commerce the return on a diagnostic is measurable quickly and it tells us whether a redesign is even warranted. Design work follows on the surfaces the audit identifies. See the pricing page.
Typical timeline
Audit is two weeks. A checkout or PDP redesign typically runs 3–5 weeks. Full-store work is 8–10.
Common questions
In most stores we look at, checkout and the product detail page dominate, and checkout usually wins. Forced account creation, shipping costs revealed late, and excessive form fields are the three most common and most fixable causes of abandonment. Before assuming, though, run the diagnostic — the biggest leak differs by store, and redesigning the wrong surface is expensive and demoralising.
We will not quote you a number before looking, and be sceptical of anyone who does. Improvement depends entirely on where you start — a store with forced account creation and hidden shipping has far more headroom than one already following current practice. What we commit to is agreeing the metric upfront and measuring honestly against it, including when the result is smaller than hoped.
Yes. We design against your platform's actual constraints rather than producing an idealised design that requires replatforming to build. If a recommendation genuinely does need a platform capability you do not have, we say so explicitly and separate it from the changes achievable within your current setup.
Usually targeted fixes, and that is what the audit is for. Full redesigns carry real risk — you change everything simultaneously, so when conversion moves nobody knows which change caused it, and if it drops you cannot isolate the cause. Sequenced, measurable changes to the highest-impact surfaces are lower risk and usually deliver most of the value.
We design the variants and interpret the results; we do not run the testing infrastructure. Worth noting that most stores below a certain traffic volume cannot reach statistical significance on small changes in reasonable time — in that situation, applying well-established practice is a better use of effort than under-powered testing.
It is the primary case, not a variant. The majority of sessions are mobile in most catalogues we see, yet most stores are designed and signed off on desktop. Thumb reach, input friction, image zoom and native payment-sheet integration are where mobile conversion is decided, and none of them are visible in a desktop review.
Where is your funnel leaking?
Send us your store. Thirty minutes and we'll tell you which of the three usual drop-off points is costing you most — and what we'd change first.