Ecommerce UX Best Practices in 2024: Design your way to the customer’s heart (and wallet)

In ecommerce, where revenues shoot through the roof every year, it’s surprising how often user experience (UX) takes a backseat. Maze-like navigation, off-target layouts, and hour-long checkout processes shoo customers away, causing millions of ecommerce businesses to lose millions in revenue.

To increase your store’s revenue, without driving traffic, you have to prioritize exceptional user experiences built on the back of ecommerce UX best practices. But contrary to popular opinion, conversion-worthy ecommerce UX goes beyond visual frills. 

40+ ecommerce projects later, *instinctools’ team has curated an extensive knowledge base of ecommerce UX dos and don’ts — and we’re laying it all out in this no-fluff guide. 

The value of smooth user experience and the price tag of poor UX in ecommerce

Even non-experts can sense when a user experience feels off — and so can your customers. That’s why the laws of visual attractiveness apply to ecommerce more than to any other industry. And this isn’t just our assumption: over 85% of shoppers are less likely to return to a site after one sour experience. But it gets worse — 70% of customers abandon purchases because of bad user experience (you do the math).

Conversely, even a tiny investment of 1$ in a great ecommerce user experience can drive $100 of impact on the bottom line. A well-designed user interface can increase your conversion rates by up to 200%, while an improvement in UX design can add a 400% boost to conversions.

Successful ecommerce sites know firsthand the power of user-friendly storefronts. Jeff Bezos invested 100X more into customer experience than ads during the early days of Amazon. Today, this ecommerce giant is known for exemplary conversion rates of around 10%. 

UX best practices for ecommerce: dos and don’ts across the website customer journey

It’s no longer about buying a product, ecommerce shoppers are after the end-to-end experience of being a customer — from the initial interaction with a brand to the purchasing process and beyond. For an ecommerce business, it means an enjoyable shopping experience through and through, at every touch point of your customers’ journey.

In 2024, it’s no secret that ecommerce interaction with your customer begins long before they land on your website. First impressions happen through Google Product feeds, Bing Shopping, social media, and even your email newsletters. So, if you care about capturing attention, you’ve got to start off-site, not on your homepage. 

While we’ll dive into off-site UX tips soon, today’s focus is all about crafting an exceptional on-site user experience.   

1. First interaction with your website

They say that the UX of the homepage of an online store is critical for your business. But what about a shopping card? Or a product page? In reality, users can land anywhere on your site, that’s why prioritizing the UX of every page is crucial to sweep both first-time and regular users off their feet.

1.1 Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices 

By 2025, mobile commerce is slated to surpass 44% of retail ecommerce sales in the US. Responsive, mobile friendly websites are no longer an option — unless you want to see your customers spending their dollars elsewhere. 

When it comes to mobile sites, mobile ecommerce UX best practices include:

• Adapting your website to different screen sizes and orientations
• Optimizing touch targets by adding finger-friendly, tappable elements 
• Testing your website on real mobile devices to validate its responsiveness
• Prioritizing quick loading by optimizing image sizes and leveraging browser caching
• Focusing on content that is easily digestible on mobile devices

Here are the UX elements that can hurt mobile optimization:

• Horizontal scrolling — some elements might be pushed out of the viewport.
• Cluttered layouts — these can be hard to navigate on mobile devices.
• Complex visual elements and heavy files — they can overload older and less powerful models. 
• Formidable forms — typing is more challenging and error-prone on mobile.

INSTINCTOOLS’ CASE IN POINT:  When modernizing an ecommerce solution for one of our long-term clients — a contact lens seller — our UI/UX team spotted an unusual trend: on some product cards, customers were buying lenses only for one eye. Turned out, only the right tab was visible on mobile, which hindered navigation for mobile users and hurt sales. Once we fixed this issue, our client saw an upward trend in sales.

To make sure your website looks flawless on mobile, you can test it with Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test. If there are any mobile UX flubs cropping up on smartphones, Google’s tool will show you what they are.

1.2 Get your navigation right

As many as 76% of ecommerce websites have mediocre-to-poor performance when it comes to category and homepage navigation. To buck this trend, your website should offer customary, simple, and intuitive navigation that taps into familiar patterns and cues.

User-friendly navigation heuristics include:

• Adopting clear, concise, and consistent labeling across all pages
• Dividing categories and subcategories into manageable chunks
• Making sure that categories are distinct and non-redundant to prevent confusion
• Creating meaningful parent categories that accurately represent their subcategories
• Implementing tiered navigation to improve findability for users and reduce the cognitive load  
• Adding breadcrumbs to help users quickly understand where they have landed
• Making sure your website has an intuitive search functionality (auto-suggestions, voice search)

Conversely, overly complex navigation with hidden elements or inconsistent labeling can end the user journey without starting it.

1.3 Make your ecommerce site accessible to all users

According to the EU Accessibility Act (EAA), any ecommerce business (except for those with fewer than 10 employees and revenue below €2 million) with E.U. customers must ensure a fully inclusive experience starting with June 28, 2025. While compliance requirements vary by region, an ecommerce website must at minimum implement Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA to break down digital barriers.

According to our experience, most ecommerce websites have one or a few of the following accessibility issues:

• Incompatibility with assistive technologies
• Low-contrast text or poor color contrast
• Difficult/poor keyword navigation (navigation is possible only with a mouse)
• Lack of link styling (links blend into the surrounding text or the background)
• Lack of visual or auditory signals (headings, labels, captions, and more)
• Small touch targets

Along with eliminating the issues we mentioned above, you should also adopt the following ecommerce UX design best practices to promote a better, more accessible experience for your consumers:

• Allow users to resize any text up to 200% without assistive technology
• Use simple, consistent terminology throughout the entire customer journey (your UX writer should collaborate with a UX designer to create consistent messaging)
• Voice-enable your interface to provide alternative input and search options
• Keep the number of choices on each page to a minimum
• Add extensive product information and make it available to AT users
• Eliminate redundant hyperlinks and add descriptive link text 

1.4 Keep your ecommerce website lightning-fast

No matter how rad your design is, if your website takes forever to load, your customers will leave faster than a cheetah can sprint. In fact, websites that take over 2 seconds (!!) to load cost retailers $2.6 billion in lost sales each year. 

Keep in mind that a UX designer alone cannot ensure fast loading. However, they can at least prioritize quick loading times and ease of navigation over flashy elements like video backgrounds or interactive elements, which can hinder your website performance.

2. Product search

When an online shopper gets down to the brass tacks, a well-designed product search function will help them find the necessary items in a few clicks. There’s a lot that goes into designing an intuitive and efficient product search journey, that’s why we’ll keep it to the essentials.

2.1 Stick to easy search functionality

There are two types of customers that can pay a visit to your ecommerce store. The first cohort is in the market for something specific, while the other group includes those that came to browse without any direction. Make sure your ecommerce UX covers both groups of customers, helping them make buying choices through straightforward, on-the-nose search features.

Here’s what elements your customers can benefit from on the quest for the perfect product:

• Including a pop-up search screen to support one-screen search (one screen = one action)
• Enabling search by image, barcode, and voice
• Supporting searches that include one or more product attributes
• Enabling abbreviation, symbol, and slang searches
• Ensuring synonym and typo tolerance
• Supporting problem-oriented keyword search
• Placing trending queries, bestsellers, and promotions in a search bar 

You can also add an AI product finder that understands natural language queries to take the hassle out of the product search and make it easier for customers to stumble upon an ideal product.

Beyond the search bar, other product search best practices include:

• Prioritizing exact matches at the top of search results
• Displaying the total number of items in the product list
• Replacing endless scrolling and pagination with “Load More” links
• Including user rating averages and the number of ratings
• Adding well-designed, visually appealing, and informative product cards that have just the right amount of information to nudge users to click on them

2.2 Ensure logical product categorization 

When it comes to product categories, you have to keep the right balance between overcategorization and the lack of granularity. To serve a top-notch ecommerce user experience, ecommerce sites should enable users to easily drill down on the products, without going to great lengths.

Here’s what product categorization best practices you can implement to support a hassle-free online shopping experience:

• Implementing faceted search to organize large inventories
• Adding visual cues (icons, images, or color-coding) to make filters and facets more intuitive for customers
• Adopting a consistent visual hierarchy structure with clear levels, including categories, subcategories, and attributes
• Providing “Sales” and “Deals” filters
• Including user rating averages and the number of ratings
• Providing checkboxes for filter options

The most common usability issues we spot on our clients’ ecommerce websites include:

• Implementing “Sales” as a category instead of making it a filter (the category silos items, making it impossible to view the broader list of non-sale products).
• Creating separate categories for product types with shared attributes.
• Overusing nested categories with many levels.

At American Eagle, “Denim Dresses” are placed in a subcategory of “Dresses” — making it impossible for a user to see a combined list of both “Denim Dresses” and “Mini Dresses”

3. Home page and product page

As we said, a customer’s journey can commence anyplace. Whether it’s a homepage that will serve as the first point of contact or a product page — each of them should never fail to reel in a buyer.

Homepage

Besides being pretty, your online storefront should make for a convenient, easily scannable catalog of products, pages, and collections to increase buying momentum right out of the gate. To achieve that effect, you should adhere to the following UX ecommerce best practices:

• Making the search field obvious on the homepage
• Featuring a broad range of product types on the homepage
• Avoid auto-rotating carousels on mobile homepages (you can go for a hybrid approach and combine an active slider with static tile images of select categories and products like Amazon or iHerb does) 
• Implementing country and language selection thoughtfully (prominent placement, default settings, local shipping and return options, and multilingual customer support)
• Consolidating key information on the homepage such as delivery options, return policy, and other information
• Including a link to the FAQs in your footer

Product page

As your buyers cannot physically try out products, you need to do your best to make your products come alive via high quality images and graphics. Your ecommerce UX should also equip customers with all the necessary information about the product, thus improving customer satisfaction post-purchase as well.

Here are some good ecommerce UX practices that we’ve helped brands implement to improve product pages and boost conversions:

• Displaying social proof and user generated content such as reviews, ratings, and customer photos to promote informed buying decisions
• Suggesting related products to enhance cart value
• Using vertically collapsed sections instead of horizontal tabs on product pages to improve discoverability
• Featuring at least 3 to 5 images to showcase each product
• Using a video or 360-degree photo slider to demonstrate products from every angle
• Highlighting the primary “Add to Cart” with a prominent and unique design
• Making return policies and delivery options explicit
• Adding product comparisons with highlighted differences

Incomplete or boring product information, bland specs with a “wall of text” appearance, or ambiguous info about product delivery or return policy can hurt online sales, averting potential customers. The same goes for hidden tabs and call-to-action buttons.

4. Cart

According to research, the average cart abandonment rate is as high as 70% — and the majority of these lost customers can be attributed to subpar user experience. Almost the final stretch of any customer journey, your cart page design should become a bridge between customers and your business – with products put in the right place, with graphics of the right size, and with the right information.

Based on the hundreds of tests we’ve done for our ecommerce clients, here are the 

non-negotiable building blocks your cart needs to convert ready-to-buy customers: 

• Cart modification options that allow users to adjust quantities or remove items from the cart
• Visible cart summary that displays the number of products after moving them to the cart (both on desktop and mobile)
• Clear feedback when a buyer adds new items to the cart
• A consolidated, pared-down, itemized list of products (product names, product images, the quantity of the product, product’s price, estimated delivery dates, subtotal with taxes)
• Security seals and reassuring elements, such as trust badges, accepted payment options, money-back guarantee to show the legitimacy of your website
• Motivators to buy in the empty cart
• Prominent “Checkout” or “Proceed to Checkout” button

If your customers add a bunch of items to their cart, but then mysteriously evaporate, make sure your cart page is free from noisy popups and special offers. Incomplete information about shipping and delivery terms, lack of customer support options, and unclear thumbnail images might also drive away your customers.

INSTINCTOOLS’ CASE IN POINT: One of our clients, a premium jewelry seller from Switzerland, noticed their cart abandonment rates increasing. Our UX team analyzed the website’s flow and attributed this trend to an inconvenient checkout process (the website didn’t allow users to add multiple items to the cart). By redesigning the checkout flow and analyzing the metrics post-launch, we saw the company’s conversions increasing by 50% (including both mobile devices and website traffic), validating our hypothesis.

5. Checkout

When your customer is a few clicks away from placing the order, your checkout page should aim to reduce the number of hoops to jump through. Otherwise, you risk losing up to 22% of online shoppers to an overly complicated checkout process.  

Here’s what a rudimentary checkout experience should look like: 

• Guest checkout — your customers should be able to shop and purchase without account creation
• Progress indicators — the checkout process should consist of clearly demarcated steps (up to 4 steps)
• Multiple payment options — offer flexible payment options, including buy now, pay later payment methods
• Clear order summary — provide detailed summaries, including taxes and shipping

We often see ecommerce brands inserting unexpected fees during the checkout process, providing ambiguous shipping information, or asking customers to sign up before placing an order. All these, including excessive checkout flows, can take a toll on your conversion rates and sales.

6. Confirmation

The customer journey does not end with the checkout, but a lot of companies seem to forget about this fact. After finalizing the order, your customers should clearly understand the next steps and how to handle issues post-purchase.

Here’s how you can produce a lasting positive effect on your customer after the purchase (and make the most out of it):

• Provide a clear (and preferably personalized) confirmation/thank-you message or indicator post-purchase
• Add cross-sell deals to the confirmation page and make sure your customers can snatch them without having to resubmit any payment data
• Include informational resources related to the ordered products or services (timeline, courier contact method, order number, etc.)
• Add customer support options

However, avoid cluttering your confirmation page with details. Instead, include comprehensive information in an order confirmation email. 

How to develop UX for your ecommerce website? Care for happy customers, and the money will follow

Even though we’ve exposed you to the UX best practices in ecommerce, you cannot blindly copy and paste those tips. Each ecommerce website is different and so is your user behavior.

Analyze your unique needs and requirements

At *instinctools, we always start with thorough business analysis where we work hand-in-hand with our ecommerce clients to identify their needs, pain points, and product vision. We also run stakeholder interviews to gather valuable business insights and understand technical constraints that can impact design decisions. 

By conducting the initial dive-in, you’ll lay a solid foundation for the UX design project, making sure the final interfaces align with your business objectives.

Performing in-depth research and target audience analysis

To draw up a blueprint for further development, our product design team also consolidates market and competitors’ data to identify areas for improvement and determine competitive design features. By combining this data with thorough target audience analysis (and customer feedback, if possible), we can create a holistic, tailored UX strategy that meets your customer expectations. 

For existing ecommerce websites, our team peers into the relevant metrics, including your conversion rates, task completion rates, task success rates, user error rates, and user retention rates. This allows us to analyze the as-is state of the current user experience and put forward a hypothesis for informed design decisions. 

At this stage, our UX design team also performs content inventory to visualize the information structure of your website and/or application. Whatever products you’re selling, you need to streamline the flow as much as possible to keep your selling platform user-friendly and conversion-worthy.

User flow mapping is another essential technique in website UX/UI development that allows designers to visualize the steps a user takes from initial awareness to post-purchase. By having the flow laid out, the UX/UI team can empathize with the user, spot gaps and pain points in the current design, and deliver a more efficient purchasing journey. 

Developing wireframes

Wireframing significantly reduces design revisions, enabling to create a user-friendly and efficient system on the first try.

There are two types of wireframes your UX design team can implement. Low-fidelity wireframes serve as skeletons for your future design, demonstrating the high-level logic of interfaces at the early design stages and explaining design concepts to stakeholders. High-fidelity prototypes, on the other hand, are more detailed, replicating the look and feel of the final solution down to subtle elements such as buttons, menus, and links. 

If you have an established design system or an existing website, you can start with high-fidelity wireframes. 

Transforming your wireframes into final designs

Once prototypes are validated, UX designers get down to creating the final screens of your ecommerce solution. Beyond the end points of a user journey, designers also craft screens for intermediate states, such as loading screens, error messages, and confirmation prompts. The final layouts are then handed over to the development team. 

Tip: We always insist on prioritizing user expectations instead of making bold redesign decisions. A sudden, drastic redesign can alienate existing customers, hindering user experience and impacting your sales. That’s why you have to optimize new designs iteratively, helping users absorb change.

User-testing and validating new designs

The only way you can find out whether your new design has hit the mark is by analyzing user behavior and other key metrics post-launch. Our team uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative validation methods that allow us to size up the impact of new interfaces and see which design aspects work.

UX can take a good product and multiply its value

Your ecommerce website is the only salesperson that promotes your brand 24/7. Exceptional UX makes sure it does it effectively, no matter how far along your customers are in their shopping journey. A well-designed, selling website puts customers first, showcasing your brand while allowing for a seamless, enjoyable shopping experience.

The job of a perfect design is never done. To make sure your user experience stays aligned with your customers’ needs, you should continuously experiment, analyze results, and refine your store’s features according to customer feedback.