eCommerce Web Design Services
Category, product, cart, checkout. Traffic is expensive and most of it leaves at one of those four screens. eCommerce design is the work of finding out which one, and fixing the reason.
Where the money leaks
Most store redesigns treat these as one visual problem and give them one visual answer. They aren't. Each screen has a different question to answer and a different reason people leave.
Screen 01
Job: narrow it down
Screen 02
Job: answer the doubt
Screen 03
Job: don't lose them here
Screen 04
Job: get out of the way
How store design actually works
This is the real difference between designing a store and designing a website. Almost every page is generated from a template, so the design work is building a system that holds up across your entire catalogue, including the awkward products.
Template 01
Has to work for your best photographed hero product and for the one with a single supplier image and a two line description. Designed against the worst case, not the showcase.
Template 02
Needs to hold nine products and nine hundred without either feeling broken. Filtering, pagination, and empty states all get designed rather than inherited from the theme.
Template 03
Size, colour, bundle, subscription. The messiest part of most stores, and the place where a theme's default behaviour quietly costs orders every day.
Template 04
Out of stock, no search results, failed payment, empty cart. Each one is a moment where a customer decides whether to try again or leave, and each one usually looks like an error page.
Designing against your real catalogue rather than a curated selection is the whole point. A template that only looks good with perfect photography is a template that will look wrong on most of your store.
Mobile
Which changes the design brief entirely. Desktop first stores get shrunk down until they technically fit, and then everyone wonders why mobile converts worse.
Platform
Migrating a store is a serious project and it's rarely the answer to a design problem. If you're already selling on something that works, we design within it.
Sits on WordPress, so design freedom is high and you keep full control of the site and its data.
Worth knowing
Performance depends heavily on how it's built and how many plugins accumulate, so restraint matters more here than elsewhere.
Hosted, stable, and quick to launch on. Checkout is largely fixed, which removes both a risk and an option.
Worth knowing
Design effort concentrates on category, product, and cart, since checkout customisation is limited by the platform itself.
Larger or custom platforms are workable, and the design principles don't change even when the implementation does.
Worth knowing
We'll be straight with you about whether the build side is something we should take on or whether you need a specialist.
If your store also isn't getting found, that's a separate problem with a separate cause, and design won't solve it. It's covered on eCommerce SEO. Build work beyond design sits with web development.
Worth saying
Some conversion problems have nothing to do with how the store looks, and a redesign aimed at them is money spent in the wrong place.
If people abandon when they see the shipping total, no layout change fixes that. The honest answer is a commercial one, and we'd rather say so than redesign the cart.
A product template can only present what it's given. If the images are weak, that's usually the highest return thing to spend on, ahead of design.
If very few people are arriving at all, improving the conversion rate on that traffic changes very little. Getting traffic comes first.
Common questions
No, and often you shouldn't. If the drop is concentrated on one screen, redesigning that template is faster, cheaper, and easier to measure than rebuilding everything.
Full redesigns make sense when the store has outgrown its structure or the platform is genuinely fighting you. Otherwise, targeted work usually wins.
From your own analytics, if it's set up to record the steps of the purchase journey. We look at where people stop rather than guessing from the design.
If that tracking isn't in place, getting it working is the first thing to do. Redesigning without it means nobody can tell afterwards whether it helped.
It can, and stores are more exposed than most sites because of the sheer number of URLs. Category and product URLs get preserved where possible and redirected properly where they can't be.
If your store gets meaningful organic traffic, that constraint gets built into the plan from the start rather than handled after launch. More on that under eCommerce SEO.
Usually yes, and it's frequently the sensible option. A well built theme with the templates redesigned around your actual products gets most of the benefit for a fraction of the work.
Where that breaks down is when the theme's structure is the problem, at which point patching it costs more than replacing it. We'll tell you which situation you're in.
No. It matters enormously for a store, and it's a specialism worth hiring properly for rather than getting as an add on from a design agency.
What we will do is tell you what the template needs: which angles, what aspect ratio, and which shots are doing the persuading.
You do, completely. The platform account, the domain, the customer data, and the store itself stay in your name throughout.
We work as a user on your accounts and that access can be removed at any point without anything breaking.
Same design system, different problem. If you're not selling online, the other two are more likely what you need. Pricing sits on the main web design page.
Other web design services
Thirty minutes on your store, your numbers, and whether the fix is a redesign or something cheaper.
Or email hello@culmen.digital