E-commerce UX audit: where your orders get lost

The customer only finds out the price and shipping time in the cart, after adding the product. Some go back to search to compare with someone who showed that up front, and don't come back. Moving that information higher costs nothing but a decision.

A mandatory account, a phone number, a company name for a private purchase, a notes field before choosing delivery. Every extra field loses some people, and this is the exact moment where people who had already decided to buy give up.

Filters taken from the platform's default settings, not from how buyers actually choose in your industry. The customer scrolls through hundreds of items they can't narrow down by the parameter that matters most to them, and leaves without ordering.

An e-commerce UX audit is a review of the whole buying journey looking at where and why buyers drop out of it, based on your own data, not on someone else's aesthetic taste. It rests on three sources, none of which is enough on its own.

What does a buying-journey audit cover?

• ✓ Category listing: filters, sorting, price and availability, and the call to action that should lead to a purchase, not to another page
• ✓ Product page: order of information, variant choice, images, and delivery cost and timing visible before add-to-cart
• ✓ Cart: what happens with a single item, with an out-of-stock product, and with a discount code that doesn't work
• ✓ Checkout: number of fields, when the account gets created, delivery and payment choice, and how form errors are handled
• ✓ Path to the product: navigation, homepage and internal search, meaning three clicks to a category and results for a typo, a common name and a catalogue number
• ✓ Mobile as the primary version, not a variant, together with accessibility for screen reader users
• ✓ Post-purchase views: confirmation, parcel tracking, returns. The screens that decide whether the customer comes back

The audit ends with a document and an hour-long call, not a new store design. If a decision to redesign follows the audit, that's separate work with its own quote, and the list of fixes becomes its brief instead of disappearing into a drawer.

• Traffic is growing, but the number of orders isn't.
• Cart abandonment is above seventy percent.
• Mobile converts at half the rate of desktop.

• There's barely any traffic: start with store SEO or campaigns instead.
• The store takes several seconds to load a page: start with speed optimisation.
• You're after a new look: that's store design, and the audit becomes its brief.

Online stores: what clients say

Three things we hear before a UX audit

Each one is reasonable, and each has an answer you can check before signing anything.

„The store looks good, we had a design done”

A UX audit doesn't judge how a store looks, and that's the most common misunderstanding about this service. We check whether you can buy without stopping to think, which is a question about the order of information, the number of fields and how edge cases are handled. A good-looking store can have a broken journey, and the other way round.

„We already know the problem is in the cart”

Even better, that shortens the work. The audit then answers not WHERE, but WHY and WHAT TO CHANGE, and that second question is usually where DIY attempts trip up. Tell us that at the brief and we'll go deeper into the cart and checkout instead of spreading attention across the whole journey.

„We want a new store design straight away”

Then the audit becomes the first stage of the project, not a separate cost, and we say so plainly. Redesigning without knowing where customers currently drop off carries the same mistakes into a nicer-looking layout. When we run the implementation, the audit counts towards the project quote.

Store UX audit: questions before you decide

E-commerce UX audit: what else is worth knowing