Web Design Mistakes To Avoid: Ecommerce Design Pitfalls

In ecommerce, a well-designed website draws customers in and guides them toward a purchase. The inverse is also often true, according to Sara Mote and Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge, cofounders of Mote Agency, who offer website and brand design and building services. In their experience, the biggest web design mistakes actively impact business growth.

Take the way pop-ups have been designed to accommodate the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires businesses to obtain consent before deploying non-essential cookies. Rembrant says the execution of this design requirement only seems to frustrate users, adding that the pop-up banners have caused an economic cost of billions, perhaps trillions of dollars, according to a Shopify study.

Intrusive pop-ups are a classic example of how website design mistakes can significantly affect user experience—and your bottom line. Keep reading for common mistakes paired with expert advice to help you avoid them.

4 web design mistakes to avoid

1. Prioritizing aesthetics over practicality
2. Not considering where users come from
3. Overcomplicating your UX design
4. Telling an inconsistent story

Here are some common web design mistakes that Sara and Rembrant say hurt your site’s usability and search visibility.

1. Prioritizing aesthetics over practicality

Aesthetics are important, but if your visually appealing website doesn’t guide users through the purchase process easily, you’re missing out on potential conversions. A Baymard Institute study found that 18% of online shoppers will abandon their carts when faced with a difficult checkout process. On the other hand, Shopify data shows that checkouts increase when a product details page offers a direct path to checkout.

Beauty brand Fluff founder Erika Geraerts says that when she conceptualized her first site design as an art piece, most users found it to be a maze of confusing menus. Switching to a simpler Shopify template removed the friction without sacrificing aesthetic appeal, she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.

Sara describes how web designers can split the difference: “The balance is about maintaining something that feels very unique for a brand, while still asking, How can we keep a really clean user experience?”

“The thing about friction is that, individually, each instance can feel minor, but you’re not designing for one moment or one action, you’re designing for a sequence of decisions,” she says. “Even if each individual instance feels quite minor, by the time you’re getting to checkout, you’ve lost someone emotionally.” 

A simple design with plenty of white space and a consistent brand color palette will serve you better than a site packed with videos and graphics that take forever to load.

2. Not considering where users come from

Sara says that how a visitor arrives on your site impacts their experience with your product. 

“Strategically, when we’re working on a design, we’re always considering what the linear narrative is,” she says. “We’re pacing information that’s being consumed by the user and trying to account for all of the various places from which they could have landed on the site. Perhaps it’s a press article where they have a lot of context around the brand. Perhaps it’s just a naked link from friends dropping them in a chat like, ‘Check this out.’ We want to consider what that narrative is and how we can add to it.”

High-converting landing pages also have a clear value proposition and call to action (CTA). Sara gives the example of pairing a product image and description with a CTA that directly relates to what you’re priming the consumer for, like “Learn more” or “Add to bag.” The Mote team uses tools like HotJar to identify where user engagement is highest, and they consider what questions users might have when encountering these areas to build thoughtful CTAs.

“Having a linear narrative is a solution for a lack of clear direction,” Sara says. “It’s critical that you ensure that at each part of the site, the information and the call to action are aligned. If someone is seeing content, the call to action needs to be based on what they’re seeing.”

3. Overcomplicating your UX design

The team behind sustainable toothbrush brand Suri resisted pressure to make their site overly complex and bespoke, instead choosing a practical Shopify theme. Rather than worrying about offering novel features, cofounder Gyve Safavi says they foregrounded user experience. 

“We spent a lot of time focusing on simple functionality,” he says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “Shopify makes it very easy to do that. Sometimes, the simplicity of the core function a site needs to deliver makes it easy for the user to get through. And that’s what I think is enabled by Shopify.”

Sara advises keeping simplicity in mind as you test out new UX design trends and features, like AI-powered user experiences. “There are always new ideas and features and trends that are being put in place and tested, and I think there’s room to do that when it’s done well, but also very selectively,” she says. “It’s important to ensure it’s not just about adding more and more and more to a site. If you want to try out something more experimental, pare down other elements to create room for it. But there’s still this opportunity to have a bit of a playground and test out and iterate and see what someone may connect with.”

Rembrant adds, “Anything that you do on a website that increases complexity basically introduces a new area where you can lose trust if you get it wrong.”

4. Telling an inconsistent story

Another common design mistake: a lack of coherence across your website (on desktop and mobile devices) and other digital channels. According to Rembrant, consistent design has a cumulative effect. “Design creates trust and creates profit,” he says. “This means that design needs to have clarity, consistency, and coherence. Clarity is on the component level. Consistency is for the whole page. And coherence is in between the pages, but also between your social channels.”

This approach unifies how you present your brand online. “We used to only focus on the design and development of the website, which is what’s traditionally called ecommerce,” Rembrant says. “But we have, in the past few years, transitioned to what’s more broadly called digital commerce, which means we design Google Ads, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and email for all the clients we work with. The reason that this matters is cross-channel harmonization. Emotionally, what that really comes down to is consistency.”

There are benefits to prioritizing consistency. “If you tell a story that starts on Instagram and then people see the continuation of that on TikTok and then later on YouTube, and then they visit your website and the story continues there, all the way down to the point of the purchase—you provide harmonious, consistent, and coherent experience that has an enormous impact on all of your key metrics, from [return on as spend] ROAS, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value,” Rembrant says.