Almost every ecommerce redesign budget is spent in inverse proportion to where the money is made. The home page gets the attention, the debate and the revisions. The pages that decide revenue are the category listings, the on-site search, the product page and the checkout, and the last of those is where a measurable proportion of customers leave every single day. A design company worth hiring will say so before you ask.
The checkout is where the largest gains are
Every additional field, every forced account creation, every unexpected cost appearing at the last step and every payment method you do not offer removes a proportion of buyers who had already decided. A guest option, address autocomplete, the payment methods your customers actually use, and total cost visible early are unglamorous and usually the highest-return changes in any ecommerce project.
On-site search is used by your most valuable visitors
People who search on a shop are much closer to buying than people browsing, and most shops have never looked at what those people type or what comes back. Reading the site's own search log is the cheapest research available: it tells you what you are missing, what you have and cannot be found, and which words your customers use for products you have named differently.
Product pages carry the work and the markup
Real photographs from several angles, honest dimensions and materials, the questions customers keep asking answered on the page, stock status, delivery cost and returns terms stated plainly, and correct structured data so the listing shows price and availability in search results. This is the page where design, content and technical work all pay at once, and it is usually templated and forgotten.
Ask what happens to your addresses in a replatform
Changing platform changes product and category addresses, and an ecommerce site can have tens of thousands. Every one needs mapping to its replacement, the discontinued ones need deliberate decisions, and it needs checking after launch. This is where redesigns lose their traffic, and the mapping is cheap while the recovery is not.
Speed on a phone is a revenue number
Most shops now take most of their traffic on phones and a slow product page loses buyers before they see the price. Image weight is nearly always the cause, followed by third-party scripts that somebody added for a trial and nobody removed. Ask the design company to be accountable for page weight in the specification rather than treating it as a technical detail afterwards.
Questions people ask about ecommerce design companies
Where should an ecommerce design budget go?
Checkout, product pages, category listings and on-site search, roughly in that order. The home page gets the attention and the debate, and it is rarely where the revenue difference is made.
What is the single most common checkout mistake?
Forced account creation, closely followed by delivery costs appearing at the last step. Both remove buyers who had already decided, which is the most expensive kind of loss there is.
What should we check after a replatform?
That every old product and category address redirects to its replacement, and that the ones you retired were retired deliberately. This is where ecommerce redesigns lose their traffic, and it is cheap to do and expensive to fix later.
How important is speed?
It is a revenue number, not a technical one, because most shops now take most traffic on phones. Image weight and forgotten third-party scripts are nearly always the cause.