Ecommerce Optimisation: Start with the Customer Journey, Not a Redesign
Updated: 53 minutes ago
A store can look polished and still be difficult to use.
The photography might be strong, the branding consistent and the homepage carefully designed. But if customers cannot find the right collection, compare products or understand delivery costs, the experience can still fall short.
My starting point for ecommerce optimisation is the customer journey: what someone needs to do, what information they need and where the website makes that harder than necessary.
Follow a real shopping task
Rather than reviewing a store page by page in isolation, start with a task.
For a clothing store, that might be:
“Find a warm, waterproof coat in my size and check whether it will arrive before the weekend.”
That task crosses several parts of the website: navigation, collections, filters, product information and delivery details. Reviewing the complete route can reveal problems that are less obvious when looking at individual pages.
Baymard Institute’s ecommerce research examines this relationship between homepage design, category navigation and product discovery. Its findings provide useful reference points for identifying common usability problems. Read Baymard’s navigation research
Make navigation understandable
Collection names should help customers predict what they will find.
A brand-led label such as “The Everyday Edit” might work as a campaign, but it may not be a clear replacement for “Jumpers & Knitwear”. Both can have a place, provided customers can still browse by familiar product categories.
For a practical navigation review, I would ask:
Do the main categories reflect what the store sells?
Are important collections easy to reach on mobile?
Do category names overlap or create uncertainty?
Can customers move between related products without starting again?
The aim is not to make every menu shorter. It is to make the choices more useful.
Give product pages a clear job
A product page needs to help someone decide whether an item is right for them.
For a bag, that could mean showing its dimensions, strap length, compartments and material. For skincare, it could mean explaining ingredients, intended use and application instructions without relying on vague promises.
Useful information should be easy to locate. Customers should not have to search through decorative content to find the details that affect their decision.
Images also need to answer questions. A close-up can show texture; a lifestyle photograph can show scale. Several near-identical images may add less value than one image that explains something new.
Check the journey on a phone
A desktop layout does not tell the whole story.
On mobile, check whether menus are understandable, filters are usable, product options are clearly labelled and buttons remain visible without covering important content.
It is also worth testing ordinary inconveniences: a long product title, an unavailable size or a collection with only a few items.
Prioritise changes and measure the result
Not every issue needs the same attention.
I would usually prioritise problems that prevent a task from being completed, followed by missing decision-making information and then presentation refinements.
Record what changed and why. Where reliable measurement is available, review relevant behaviour before and after the change. Avoid treating a small fluctuation in sales as proof that one design decision caused it.
Good ecommerce optimisation is a process of identifying friction, making a focused improvement and checking what happens next.
Explore my ecommerce case studies to see how I approach product discovery, merchandising and customer journeys.
