Design An eCommerce Website: Key Highlights
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Research-led positioning: Market trends, competitor analysis and buyer personas shape an eCommerce experience that aligns with real user expectations.
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Features built for scalability: Payment options, store capabilities and technical planning determine how well your site supports future traffic and product growth.
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Performance as a sales factor: Fast load times, optimized media and mobile responsiveness directly impact conversion rates and user retention.
For your website visitors, an engaging site can mean the difference between a swift exit and a lasting impression.
When it comes to eCommerce, even the best of products can be overshadowed by a poorly designed website. User experience is the key to ensuring your visitors not only stay but also engage and purchase.
By 2028, the U.S. eCommerce market share is projected to reach 20% of the worldwide total, so the way your site is designed will play a direct role in how much you sell, how often customers return and how your brand is perceived.
Below, we’ll share how to design an eCommerce website in six steps, plus cover best practices for engagement and share our favorite examples for inspiration.
How To Design An eCommerce Website
With 63% of global consumers saying they’ve bought products straight from a brand’s site, the way your eCommerce experience is planned has a measurable impact on conversions and repeat purchases.
The structure of your pages, the flow between them and the cues that guide visitors all shape how easily customers move from browsing to buying.
Step 1. Define Your Objectives & Set Goals
The first step is to set clear, quantifiable goals for your eCommerce website.
With industry revenue in the US projected to reach $1.83 trillion by 2029, the standards for digital growth are rising quickly, and your targets should reflect where you expect your brand to compete in that environment.
Your goals could include key performance indicators (KPIs) for sales, traffic, conversion and even brand visibility.
For example:
- Sales targets: Monthly, quarterly, or yearly sales or revenue objectives. These can serve as stepping stones to long-term goals. For example, if you aim to increase yearly sales by 20%, break it down to 5% quarterly growth to make it more manageable and measurable.
- Traffic goals: Target numbers for monthly website visitors or specific campaign-driven traffic. For example, you might be experiencing organic website growth due to SEO and your next goal could be that you want to increase your website traffic by 15% over the next quarter.
- Conversion rates: This is typically the number of desired actions (e.g., purchases) divided by the total number of visitors. For eCommerce brands, 2-3% is considered a good conversion rate.
Step 2. Perform Market Research & Analysis
Part of the design process is to understand the market conditions, along with your competitors and target audience.
With 92% of consumers in the U.S. shopping online, understanding how people buy and how competitors position themselves can become a direct advantage in a crowded space.
Understanding market conditions by gathering data on:
- Economic trends that influence spending patterns
- Technological advancements shaping how consumers browse and purchase
- Industry-specific developments that affect product demand
- Regulatory changes that impact how you operate
- Consumer behavior that signals how preferences are changing
Next, performing a competitive analysis means you need to research the big names in your niche or sector. During your analysis, look at:
- Website structure and ease of browsing
- Product range and how items are presented
- Pricing strategy and promotional patterns
- Customer reviews and feedback
- Marketing and branding initiatives
- Customer service quality and responsiveness
Tools like Ahrefs can help you benchmark competitor websites to understand their strengths and gaps.
Finally, to get to know your audience, research your target market and create detailed buyer personas (like the one of Mike below).
This involves understanding their demographics, interests, pain points and online shopping behaviors.
Step 3. Define Your Technical & Functional Requirements
Every eCommerce website has its technical and functional requirements, which are the features and functionalities the site needs to achieve its objectives.
These requirements shape how smoothly customers move through your store and how well your site supports growth over time.
You should define the following aspects to maximize lead generation and engagement:
- Types of payment: Since 35% of global shoppers abandon their carts when their preferred payment method isn’t available, second only to slow delivery, this is one of the most impactful areas to get right. Identify the gateways your audience trusts and make sure your checkout flow reflects those preferences to reduce friction and prevent avoidable drop-offs.
- eCommerce store features: Features for your e-store might include a wish list, product comparison, multi-language support and more, based on your audience’s needs and expectations.
- Scalability considerations: Plan for growth in product volume, traffic and potential market expansion. If global reach is part of your roadmap, building in multi-language or multi-currency capabilities early helps your site expand without disruption.
Apple demonstrates this approach well by highlighting carrier deals and trade-in values at the top of the page, giving shoppers immediate visibility into cost-saving opportunities before they explore the product itself.
On the right side, the monthly payment plans and purchase prices are displayed clearly, making it easy to compare costs before choosing a model.
As customers scroll, the product features are presented with minimalist visuals and concise descriptions that help them evaluate each version quickly.
Step 4. Choose An eCommerce Platform
The next step is to choose a platform for your website, whether Magento, Shopify or WooCommerce, for example.
Shopify currently leads the eCommerce platform market share in the US with 28%, which reflects how many brands rely on it for stability, integrations and ease of use.
Choose a platform that’s user-friendly, integrates seamlessly with other tools you want to use, and scales with your business growth.
Consider platforms with strong community support for smoother troubleshooting and enhancements.
Let’s break down each platform in terms of features, customization options and user experience:
Shopify
- Design: Shopify offers a range of responsive themes that cater to various industries and aesthetics. Their drag-and-drop interface allows even novices to customize their website’s look without deep technical knowledge. The platform’s design is geared towards a smooth eCommerce experience, ensuring all essential elements are at the forefront.
- Functionality: With its integrated payment system, Shopify simplifies the transaction process. Plus, its app store contains thousands of plugins to enhance and customize the user experience.
- User experience: Shopify sites are known for their streamlined user journeys, fast load times and intuitive interfaces. This makes it an excellent choice if you’re prioritizing user-centric design.
WordPress (WooCommerce)
- Design: WordPress, with its WooCommerce plugin, provides a flexible environment for website design. The vast array of themes available allows for extensive customization. Since WordPress began as a blogging platform, it offers advantages in content integration and SEO.
- Functionality: WooCommerce transforms a WordPress site into a full-fledged eCommerce store. Its extensive plugin ecosystem means businesses can add nearly any functionality they envision.
- User experience: Given its open-source nature, WooCommerce sites can be tailored for specific user journeys. However, achieving the perfect user experience may require more hands-on design and development work compared to more out-of-the-box solutions like Shopify.
Magento
- Design: Magento is a powerhouse for custom eCommerce development solutions. It can handle multiple stores, languages, and even currencies, making it ideal for larger enterprises or international stores.
- Functionality: Being open-source, Magento offers a vast landscape of extensions and customization possibilities. Its built-in features cater to larger businesses with a broad product range and diverse user base.
- User experience: Magento’s complexity can deliver incredibly tailored user experiences, but it often requires a more substantial development investment. The end result, when executed well, can be a highly optimized and user-friendly interface.
Step 5. Plan The UX & UI
With 59% of users saying they prefer spending time on websites they view as visually appealing and well-designed, the experience you create can influence how engaged visitors are from the moment they arrive.
When both UX and UI work in sync, visitors understand your store quickly and spend more time evaluating the products that fit their needs.
To map the user journey (UX):
- Begin with a flowchart or wireframe to visualize the user’s path, from landing on the site to final checkout.
- Prioritize clear navigation, as each category or product should be easily accessible.
- Streamline the checkout process, eliminating unnecessary steps or redundancies.
- Monitor site performance to ensure speedy load times. Delays can deter potential customers.
- Utilize tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg, as their heatmaps and session recordings can offer valuable insights into areas where users linger, click, or drop off, helping you refine their journey.
To design the visual touchpoints (UI):
- Choose a color scheme that resonates with your brand and appeals to your target audience.
- Settle on typography that is both aesthetic and readable. It’s not just about style, as it’s also about delivering information clearly.
- Design buttons, icons, and other interactive elements to be both visually pleasing and intuitive.
- Maintain a consistent layout. Whether a user is on a product page or reading a blog post, they should feel they’re in the same ecosystem.
Flow is a good reference point among eCommerce website design examples because the site introduces the product with large, detailed imagery and simple messaging that immediately tells visitors what they’re looking at.
The navigation is simple enough that visitors can move from the hero section into the shop with little effort.
Across the site, the visuals follow the same tone and style, giving customers a clear sense of continuity as they explore.
Step 6. Allocate A Budget & Resources
Your budget will depend on the size of your eCommerce business, along with the needs and requirements for your e-store.
To allocate a proper budget, consider the following aspects:
- Development costs: Based on the platform and customizations needed, development can range from relatively affordable to quite expensive.
- Design costs: While using a template can be cost-effective and quick, opting for custom UI/UX design offers numerous benefits, including a site specifically designed for your target audience and better metrics.
- Maintenance and upgrades: Consider costs for regular updates, backups, and security checks to keep your site secure and bug-free.
Best Practices To Follow When Designing An eCommerce Website
An optimized, user-friendly site is a strong starting point for attracting visitors, but turning those visitors into long-term customers involves a combination of great products, excellent customer service, and consistent engagement.
Best practices to follow when designing an e-store include:
1. Create A Descriptive Product Catalogue
The product catalogue is essentially the digital equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store’s physical shelves.
It’s where potential customers “walk” through, examining what you have to offer, making decisions and eventually, selecting what to buy.
To create a descriptive catalogue, follow these steps:
- Plan your product categories: This not only aids in navigation but also helps search engines understand and index your products better. Using breadcrumb navigation can also help visitors understand their navigation path.
- Use high-quality images: Ensure that all product images are of high resolution and standardized in terms of size and presentation.
- Write consistent product descriptions: Maintain a consistent format for product descriptions, highlighting the most important features. This helps visitors quickly scan information and compare different products.
- Enable dynamic filters: Allow visitors to refine their search based on various criteria such as size, color, brand, price range, and more. This can be especially beneficial for stores with a wide range of products.
Dropps is one of the eCommerce website design examples that makes its product catalog easy to understand at a glance.
Each item includes a rating, scent options, a short description and the price, giving shoppers enough information to compare products without extra steps.
The consistent layout across the catalog helps visitors identify differences quickly and the bright visuals make each detergent type easy to recognize.
2. Ensure A Seamless Checkout Process
With the U.S. shopping cart abandonment rate projected to reach 83% in 2025, the checkout experience needs to be as smooth as possible or you risk losing customers at the moment of conversion.
No matter how captivating your products are or how impeccable the user experience is, if customers encounter hiccups at the last step, it can negate all prior positive interactions and lead to cart abandonment.
To ensure a seamless checkout process:
- Use fewer steps: Minimize the number of steps to complete a purchase and aim for a single-page checkout if possible.
- Display transparent costs: Clearly display additional costs like taxes, shipping fees, or handling charges.
- Simplify guest checkout: Always offer the option for visitors to check out without creating an account.
- Add secure elements: Design elements like SSL certificates, secure payment gateways and visible trust badges play a crucial role in making visitors feel safe enough to make a purchase.
Partake Foods is one of the eCommerce website design examples that demonstrates how a seamless checkout can keep customers moving forward.
he product page places purchase options front and center, allowing shoppers to buy through Amazon, Instacart or find a nearby retailer with a single click.
Key details like ingredients, nutrition facts and certifications appear right beside the purchase buttons, giving visitors everything they need to decide and complete the transaction in one place.
3. Prioritize SEO & Voice Search
Search engines are often the first point of contact between a shopper and a brand, which makes SEO and voice search important components of how customers discover products.
With 51% of people who use voice search for shopping relying on it to research products, your site should be structured to answer the kinds of questions customers ask out loud as well as the terms they type.
To optimize your site for search engines:
- Research relevant keywords: Use tools like SEMrush or Seranking to identify the phrases customers type and the questions they ask verbally.
- Implement SEO best practices: Use clear headers, descriptive title tags and straightforward meta descriptions so search engines can understand your pages and match them to both typed and spoken queries.
- Implement technical SEO: Make sure URLs are descriptive and reflect the hierarchy of your website. For example: website.com/category/sub-category/product-name. Use a logical site structure that has a clear hierarchy of main categories, sub-categories or individual product pages and regularly check for broken links or pages.
- Optimize images: Make sure your images are optimized by compressing their file size, using keywords to name them properly and adding alt attributes.
4. Improve Cross-Device Performance & Speed
With an average webpage loading its main content in 1.3 seconds and 70% of consumers saying page speed influences their purchasing decisions, even small delays can affect whether visitors continue through the buying journey.
At the same time, over 61.5% of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices, which makes it important for your site to perform consistently across screens, networks and device types.
To improve performance and support a smooth experience everywhere, use these strategies:
- Minimize scripts & plugins: Only use essential plugins and scripts to prevent bloat and slow load times.
- Use CDNs: Content Delivery Networks like Cloudflare distribute assets across multiple servers, helping pages load faster regardless of where the visitor is located.
- Reduce image sizes: Compress images before uploading them using tools like TinyPNG or Compressor.io. Ensure they’re appropriately sized; don’t upload a large image and then scale it down with HTML.
- Optimize videos: Host videos through platforms like Vimeo or YouTube instead of storing them directly on your server to avoid unnecessary load.
- Remove outdated media and content: Regularly clean up your media library, removing unused or outdated images, videos and other media.
Digital Silk’s eCommerce Website Design Examples
As a full-service eCommerce web design agency, Digital Silk works with businesses across industries and backgrounds to create engaging, user-centric and conversion-focused websites.
Some of our more recent projects include:
1. ZipTie
Digital Silk redesigned ZipTie’s eCommerce experience on Shopify Plus with a performance-first approach that addressed major gaps in navigation, product discovery and mobile usability.
The new design introduced a clearer homepage hierarchy, streamlined collection pages with intuitive filtering and standardized product grids that surfaced 20+ stock-keeping units (SKUs) above the fold.
Product detail pages were rebuilt for faster decision-making with improved metadata, quantity selectors and express checkout elements tailored to B2B buyers.
Within 30 days, the redesigned experience drove a 353% lift in conversion rate, a 50% drop in cart abandonment and a 611% surge in mobile engagement.
2. Absolute Dogs
Absolute Dogs needed an eCommerce experience that clearly communicated its courses and memberships so customers could quickly understand what each option offered.
Digital Silk replaced the outdated WordPress setup with a Shopify build that organizes programs by purpose, highlights key benefits and removes the confusion that previously slowed conversions.
The new structure supports a smoother path from exploration to checkout, with clearer messaging, purposeful calls to action and a layout that helps visitors compare options with less effort.
Within the first month, the updated experience drove a 77.88% increase in add-to-cart actions and a 35.63% rise in completed purchases.
3. Buddha Brands
Our collaboration with Buddha Brands was focused on creating an engaging website that showcases their products in a fun and refreshing way.
While creating the website, Digital Silk crafted a narrative around products that enriches the shopping experience.
Instead of mere transactions, our team created visually appealing elements so customers can engage in the brand’s vision and values and build deeper connections.
4. G Pen
G Pen is an industry-leading online vaporizer store that wanted a website design that informs new customers about its range of products and provides a seamless journey to checkout.
Our web design team and digital strategists refined G Pen’s website funnel, ensuring a smooth transition from product discovery to purchase to enhance UX, drive conversions and reduce cart abandonments.
We achieved this by adding a highly visual mega menu navigation and including the product descriptions of bestsellers on the e-store’s homepage.
Common eCommerce Website Design Mistakes
Following best practices is important, but it’s also helpful to know about the most common mistakes to watch out for and avoid.
The most common frequent eCommerce website design errors that can hinder user experience include:
Mistake 1. Poor Navigation
When a site presents overcrowded menus or a confusing user journey, visitors can easily become overwhelmed, leading to a decline in user engagement and potentially lost sales.
Products need to be logically and coherently categorized to ensure a seamless browsing experience.
Mistake 2. A Complicated Checkout Process
A complicated checkout process is a major roadblock for potential buyers. In fact, 17% of shoppers are deterred by a complicated checkout.
When faced with numerous steps, extensive forms or unexpected costs, many opt to abandon their cart.
Mistake 3. Unclear CTAs
Calls to action (CTAs) serve as guiding beacons for your visitors, pointing them towards the desired action, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or reading more about a product.
Despite the crucial role of clear and compelling CTAs in guiding visitors’ next steps and boosting conversion rates, unclear messaging can often leave users uncertain about the next step, which reduces the chance of potential conversions.
Mistake 4. Excessive Design Elements
While it’s tempting to incorporate various design elements to make a site stand out, going overboard can do more harm than good.
Excessive design elements can clutter the site, making it difficult for visitors to focus on the primary content.
Overloaded graphics can also slow down the website, further degrading the user experience and harming SEO efforts.
Mistake 5. Insufficient Product Information
For online shoppers, detailed product information is key. Without the physicality of a traditional store, visitors rely on comprehensive descriptions, high-quality images and user reviews to inform their purchasing decisions.
Insufficient product information can leave potential shoppers hesitant to purchase, leading to decreased trust and potentially driving them to competitor sites for a more informed shopping experience.
Build A Custom eCommerce Website With Digital Silk
Every part of an effective eCommerce experience, from the goals you set to the way customers explore and purchase, shapes how your brand performs online.
When these elements are built with intent and supported by thoughtful design, you create a store that feels intuitive, trustworthy and ready to scale.
At Digital Silk, we design custom eCommerce websites that align with your business objectives and the expectations of modern shoppers.
Our work includes user journey planning, data-driven design, performance improvements, digital strategy and conversion-focused builds across leading platforms.
As a professional eCommerce website design agency, our services include:
Contact us, call us at (800) 206-9413 or fill out the Request a Quote form below to book your free consultation with one of our experts and discuss your project.
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