Ecommerce  ·  UX & Conversion

10 Ecommerce UX Design Tips to Increase Your Conversion Rate

By Dana Reyes, gotest24  ·  13 min read

Most stores don't have a traffic problem. They have a "70% of people who put something in the cart never buy it" problem. That number isn't a typo — it's the long-running Baymard Institute average across dozens of studies, and it's barely moved in over a decade. The good news is that a lot of that gap is fixable UX, not ad spend. Here are ten changes that actually move the number, roughly in order of how much impact I've seen them have.

The number worth remembering

Baymard's research puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, and estimates that fixing documented checkout usability issues can lift conversion by up to 35% on a typical large ecommerce site. This isn't a guess — it comes from testing real checkouts at companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Wayfair. Nearly all of the fixes below come out of that same body of research.

1. Let people check out as a guest

Forcing account creation before checkout is one of the single biggest, most consistently documented sources of abandonment in Baymard's research — shoppers cite it constantly as a reason for leaving. If you want the account, offer it after the purchase confirms ("Save these details for next time?"), not as a gate before it. You'll get plenty of accounts created this way anyway, without losing the buyers who just didn't want the friction.

2. Show the full cost before the last step

Surprise shipping fees or taxes appearing at the final step are consistently one of the top-cited reasons people abandon carts. It's not really a UX problem in the design sense — it's a trust problem, and it shows up as a UX metric. If a shipping cost depends on location, let people enter a zip code on the cart page and see the real total before they commit to filling out a checkout form.

3. Cut the form down to what you actually need

Baymard's checkout audits found the average site shows around 23 form elements when 12–14 would do — and that most checkouts can cut form fields by 20–60% without losing any information they actually use. Every field is a small tax on someone's patience. Common ones to look at:

• A separate "company name" field almost nobody uses
• Asking for both phone and email when one will do for order updates
• Address line 2 shown by default instead of collapsed behind a link
• Confirm-password fields — a "show password" toggle does the same job with half the typing

4. Design the checkout for a thumb, not a mouse

Mobile traffic makes up most ecommerce sessions now, and mobile abandonment rates run noticeably higher than desktop across the industry — this is almost always a checkout-usability gap, not a "mobile shoppers are less serious" problem. The practical fixes: big enough tap targets that a thumb doesn't miss, the right keyboard type per field (numeric pad for card numbers and zip codes, not the full alphabet keyboard), autofill and address-lookup enabled, and a sticky "buy now" button that doesn't disappear when the page scrolls.

5. Make the search bar actually forgiving

On-site search is one of the highest-intent moments on your entire store — someone typed exactly what they want — and it's also where a lot of stores quietly lose people to a bad "no results found" page. Search needs to tolerate typos, plurals, and partial matches, and it needs to show something (related products, categories) even on a genuine zero-result query. Nothing that returns a blank page for "sneaker" because someone typed "sneakers."

6. Invest in product photos and real answers, not just more copy

Online shopping's biggest disadvantage versus a physical store is that people can't touch the product. Multiple angles, a zoom function that actually works on mobile, and a size/fit guide close the gap somewhat. A specifics-and-measurements approach beats marketing adjectives — "18oz, dishwasher safe, fits a standard cup holder" answers more real purchase-hesitation than "sleek and stylish." If you sell apparel, real customer photos at different body types do more for confidence than another studio shot.

7. Put trust signals where the doubt actually happens

Security badges, return policy, and real reviews matter — but only if they show up at the moment someone's hesitating, not buried on a separate "About Us" page. Put your return policy near the buy button, not just in the footer. Put review counts and ratings on the product card in listings, not just the product page. If you have a clear guarantee, say it plainly near checkout ("Free returns within 30 days") instead of assuming people will go looking for your policy page.

8. Show a progress indicator during checkout

A simple "Step 2 of 3" at the top of a multi-page checkout reduces the feeling of an open-ended process. People tolerate a few steps fine if they can see the end of them; what they abandon is a form that feels like it could ask them anything at any point. This is a small, cheap change that consistently shows up in usability testing as reducing perceived friction even when the actual number of fields hasn't changed.

9. Speed is a UX feature, not an engineering afterthought

A slow product page or checkout doesn't just annoy people — on mobile connections especially, it directly costs conversions, and Google's own Core Web Vitals now factor into both ranking and how ads perform. Uncompressed hero images and a bloated app/plugin stack are the two most common causes on ecommerce sites specifically. Run your key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and fix whatever it flags as "poor" first — that's usually where the actual damage is, not the items marked "needs improvement."

10. Recover the abandonment you can't prevent

Even a well-designed checkout won't get everyone — a lot of "abandonment" is genuinely just browsing, not a lost sale. But for the portion who were close, a straightforward abandoned-cart email sequence (one within a few hours, a second a day or two later, maybe with a small incentive on the last one) recovers a real, measurable slice of otherwise-lost orders. It's one of the highest-ROI things on this whole list because it's fixing people who already showed real intent, not trying to convince someone cold.

Where these numbers come from

Baymard Institute — Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics
Baymard Institute — Checkout Usability Research
Google PageSpeed Insights