Online store design: the purchase path first

No size chart, no delivery date, no shipping cost. The customer goes back to search for the information they couldn't find with you, even though your company has known that answer for years.

Twenty attributes in one list and none of them answer the question the customer walked into the category with. They'll pick the competitor who gets them to the product in two clicks.

On a phone, the order button hides under the browser bar, and the discount code field eats half the screen. The purchase path ends with hunting for a button.

Online store design is work on the purchase path: making the way from arrival to order short and clear. It's the store's UX, not a graphic layer tacked on at the end. It starts with catalogue architecture and the questions a customer arrives with, and ends with the states nobody likes designing: out of stock, a payment error, an empty basket.

Sources: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment · Nielsen Norman Group, e-commerce UX

Online store design: from catalogue architecture to wireframes

• ✓ Workshop: who buys, what they look for before buying, and what sets you apart from competitors
• ✓ Catalogue architecture: categories, filters and naming that get a customer to the product
• ✓ Wireframes of the key views: home page, category, product page, basket and checkout
• ✓ Mobile first: phones bring most of a store's traffic, so we design the key views on a narrow screen first
• ✓ States most briefs skip: out of stock, payment error, empty basket, no search results
• ✓ Handover to development: grid, typography, components and a description of what happens after a click

A store design can be ordered without a build: the wireframes, graphic design and clickable prototype are handed over to any contractor you like. If we build it too, the design is folded into the overall quote.

• The purchase path has steps no theme accounts for.
• The brand sells on looks, and a theme flattens it to the same level as competitors.
• The catalogue is large and needs its own filters, not a category list.

• The process is typical and the budget should go into stock and campaigns: a build on a theme.
• You have a store and want to know where it loses customers: start with a store UX audit.
• You're designing a company site with no basket: that's website and store design.

We don't start with the home page. We design the views closest to the purchase decision first: the product page, category, basket and checkout. In most stores we run, that's where traffic from search and campaigns lands, while the home page tends to get discussed the longest despite deciding a purchase less often. It comes last, once we already know what it needs to lead to.

A second rule governs the order within a view. We design online stores starting from the states that break sales, not the ones that look good in a wireframe: an unavailable product, one unit left in stock, a variant with no photo, a basket with a single item, a validation error on a form. A store spends more time in these states than anyone assumes while designing it.

The workshop's output isn't a visual to sign off, but a full set of wireframes laid out in purchase-path order, each with a description of what should happen after a click. The same file describes both the design and the build, so there's no stage of translating graphics into code.

Store UX beyond the brief: filters, search, empty states

A brief usually talks about how the home page and product page should look. These are four things we design regardless of the brief, because without them a store performs worse than it looks.

Reviews from outside the portfolio, including the less comfortable ones

A portfolio only ever shows what went well, because that's what a portfolio is for. The three profiles show everything anyone chose to write, including the times we weren't the right fit.

What we hear when quoting a store design

We answer the same way here as on a call, even when the answer means a smaller job for us.

“We have a theme, just change the colours”

That's often enough, and we'll say so. We suggest a custom design when your range needs a different product page than a theme allows for: a configurator, a size table, dependent variants. A colour change doesn't solve that.

“A graphic designer will do it faster and cheaper”

They will, if they're given the catalogue architecture and a list of states to design. Without that you get three nice-looking screens and a question at every new view after. At JustIdea, most of the work happens before the first wireframe.

“We'll decide on the look after the build”

That's the most expensive order possible. Changing a layout after coding costs many times more than the same change in a wireframe, and the development team sits waiting in the meantime. That's why we sign off the design before the first line of code.

Price, timeline and ownership of the design: questions before you decide

Price, purchase path and platform for a store design