An e-commerce conversion checklist you can work through today

If your store gets traffic but not enough orders, the cause is rarely the design. It is a short list of unanswered questions and unnecessary steps sitting between the product photo and the confirmation page. This checklist walks through the places those problems hide, roughly in the order they cost you money, and most of it is work you can ship the same day.

Start with the product page

The product page is where the decision happens. Everything before it is traffic and everything after it is administration. Open your three best sellers on a phone, in a private window, and read them the way a stranger would. The page should answer, without a search or a scroll hunt, what the item is, what it costs in the buyer's currency, whether the size or variant they want is in stock, when it will arrive, and what happens if it is wrong.

• One primary action. Add to cart should be the loudest control on the page. Wishlist, compare, share and financing widgets are secondary and should look it.
• Variant selection that fails loudly. If a colour or size is out of stock, say so on the swatch, and offer a back-in-stock notification rather than a dead end.
• Delivery expectation, not delivery jargon. "Arrives by Thursday if you order today" beats "Standard: 3 to 5 business days" for most buyers.
• Specifications a person can act on. Dimensions, materials, fit notes, compatibility, care instructions, warranty. Vague copy creates support tickets and returns.
• Reviews near the decision. A rating summary at the top with a jump link to the full reviews, and photographs from buyers where you have them.
• A sticky add-to-cart on long pages, so the buyer never has to scroll back up to act on a decision they already made.

Write the page for someone who has never heard of you. If a question comes up more than twice a month in support, it belongs on the page, not in an FAQ three clicks away.

Imagery that answers questions

Product photography is not decoration; it is evidence. The buyer cannot hold the item, so the images have to do the holding. A workable set for most catalogues is a clean shot on a plain background, the product in use or in a room, a scale reference next to something familiar, a detail shot of the material or finish, and one image that shows what is in the box.

Then make those images cheap to load. Serve modern formats such as AVIF or WebP with a fallback, size them properly for each breakpoint rather than shipping one huge file to every device, load the first image eagerly and lazy-load the rest, and set width and height attributes so the browser reserves the space and the page does not jump while it renders. Layout shift on a product page is a conversion problem as much as a performance one, because the button moves as the thumb comes down.

Give every image real alternative text describing the product, not "IMG_4821". Alternative text is a baseline WCAG requirement, it helps buyers using screen readers, and it gives search and AI assistants something accurate to work with when they summarise your catalogue.

Shipping, duties and returns: before the cart, every time

Unexpected cost is one of the most common reasons a full cart never becomes an order, and it is almost always self-inflicted. Put the shipping rule where the buyer meets the product: a plain sentence under the price, a threshold if you have one, and a link to the detail for people who want it.

A shipping charge the buyer sees for the first time on the payment step is not a pricing problem. It is a trust problem, and it follows them to the next store.

If you sell across the border between Canada and the United States, or anywhere else with duties, be explicit about who pays them and whether the total shown at checkout is landed cost or not. Buyers who get a courier invoice after delivery do not come back. Returns deserve the same treatment: the window, who pays return postage, the condition required, and how long a refund takes, written in normal language on the product page and linked from the cart. A generous policy stated vaguely converts worse than a modest policy stated clearly.

Cart, checkout and the mobile reality

Checkout is where you subtract rather than add. Run this sequence in order, and time the first step so you have a number to compare against after the rest of the work.

1. Buy something on your own site on a mid-range phone, on mobile data, with a card you actually use. Note every moment you hesitate.
2. Turn on guest checkout. Offer account creation on the confirmation page, after the money has changed hands, where it is a convenience rather than a toll.
3. Delete every field you cannot defend to a colleague. Company name, second address line, title and birthday are usually unnecessary, and phone is only worth keeping as an optional field for courier delivery notices.
4. Add address autocomplete and postal code lookup, then set correct input types and autocomplete attributes so browsers and password managers can fill the form.
5. Show the order summary, including tax and shipping, on every step, and make the cart editable without leaving checkout.
6. Put a visible progress indicator on multi-step flows, and never clear a filled form on a validation error. Validate inline, in plain language, next to the field.
7. Move discount code entry out of the way of the buyer who has no code, and remove any promotion that sends people off to hunt for one.

Mobile has its own failure modes. Tap targets need real spacing, the numeric keypad should appear for card and postal fields, sticky headers and chat widgets must not cover the pay button, and any drawer or accordion has to scroll properly when its contents grow. Test with one hand while walking. That is how your buyers actually shop, and it is how most of these faults reveal themselves.

Payments, trust and security cues

Payment choice is a conversion lever, not a finance detail. Offer the wallets your buyers already have, because a wallet button skips the whole address and card form. Add the local methods that matter to your market, keep card payments working cleanly through 3-D Secure so authentication challenges do not silently fail, and if you offer instalments, show that on the product page rather than revealing it at the end.

Trust cues should be verifiable, not decorative. A padlock graphic proves nothing. What reassures a cautious buyer is a real business address and phone number, a named returns policy with a real window, the payment marks for the methods you genuinely accept, order confirmation timing stated up front, and a privacy statement that says what you do with an email address. On the technical side: HTTPS everywhere with no mixed content, a tight content security policy, no third-party script on the checkout page that does not have a good reason to be there, and card details handled by your payment provider's hosted fields so they never touch your servers. Security and speed reinforce each other here, because every extra tag on checkout is both a risk and a delay.

After the sale: email and measurement

Post-purchase email is the cheapest revenue in the business and the most neglected. At a minimum, send an order confirmation immediately, a shipping notice with a working tracking link, a delivery follow-up that asks whether everything arrived correctly, a review request timed to when the buyer has actually used the product, and a replenishment or complementary-product note if your catalogue supports it. Abandoned cart and browse abandonment sequences belong here too, written like a helpful reminder rather than a chase. Authenticate your sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC so these messages land in the inbox, and keep the transactional stream separate from marketing so a promotional unsubscribe never kills a shipping notice.

Measurement is what turns this checklist into a program. Instrument each stage separately, watch it for a full business cycle, and change one thing at a time.

Log return reasons as a fixed list of coded options rather than free text. Returns are the highest-quality feedback you will ever get on your product pages, and the pattern usually points straight at a photograph or a specification you left out. If you want help designing the tracking plan and the test queue, that is the work described on our analytics and CRO page, and the lifecycle side sits on email and lifecycle.

How OlDevs helps

OlDevs is a full-stack technology studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, building software and running growth programs since 2014. On e-commerce work, we usually start with a walkthrough of your real funnel on a real phone, fix the product page and checkout faults that need no debate, then set up measurement so the next round of changes is decided by evidence rather than opinion. The engineering and the marketing sit with one accountable team, which matters here because most conversion problems are half front-end and half campaign.

You get a working demo every week, code and designs built to WCAG 2.2 AA, and full ownership of everything we produce: code, designs, accounts and IP are yours. We reply to every enquiry within one business day. Clients outside Vancouver work with us remotely, on video calls in their own time zone, with on-site visits when the work calls for it. See how we build on web development, or request a quote and tell us where your funnel is leaking.