Shopify store design mistakes that cost you sales

These come up in almost every store audit I do. None of them are hard to fix. All of them cost money while they're there.

On the homepage

A hero with no words. A full-bleed photograph and the word "Discover". A visitor who has never heard of you now knows nothing. Say what you sell — homepage structure.

An auto-rotating carousel. People don't wait for slide three, every slide downloads, and the movement pushes the real content down. Pick the best slide and delete the carousel.

Category links below the fold. The most valuable block on the page, placed fourth, under a brand video and an Instagram feed.

Fourteen top-level menu items. Nobody scans fourteen. Group them, or accept that people will use search instead.

On the product page

Inconsistent photography. Different crops, backgrounds and lighting across the catalogue makes a store look assembled rather than curated. This is a process problem, not a design one, and it's the highest-return fix available to most stores.

No scale reference. The single most common cause of returns in furniture, homeware and clothing.

Delivery cost invisible. If someone has to reach checkout to learn what shipping costs, a proportion of them leave instead.

Reviews below three screens of brand copy. People ready to buy want facts and other people's experiences, in that order.

Fake urgency. Countdown timers that reset, "only 3 left" on a product that always has three left. Customers have learned to read these as dishonest, and they're right — see product page anatomy.

On collection pages

No filters on a large catalogue. Past a few hundred products, browsing without filters is not browsing — collection pages and filtering.

Filters that return nothing. An option with zero matches should be hidden or disabled, never clickable.

Alphabetical default sort. The theme's default, serving nobody.

Infinite scroll with no pagination underneath. The footer becomes unreachable and deep products may never be discovered by search engines.

On mobile

Designed on desktop, checked on mobile. The order is backwards, and it shows — mobile design.

Tap targets too small or too close. Especially variant selectors and quantity controls.

Sticky elements eating the screen. A sticky header, a sticky announcement bar, a sticky add-to-cart and a cookie banner leaves about a third of a phone screen for the product.

A popup on arrival. On a small screen, a newsletter modal before anyone has seen anything is an exit trigger.

Everywhere

Five typefaces. Two is usually one too many.

Contrast that fails. Light grey on white looks refined in Figma and is unreadable outdoors on a phone — accessibility.

Focus styles removed. outline: none for aesthetics makes the store unusable by keyboard.

Images without dimensions, so the page jumps while loading.

A heavy design nobody measured. Four typefaces, a full-screen video and eight image-heavy sections is a slow store by construction — the performance checklist.

In the process

Nobody placed a real order. The single most common launch failure, and it's on the launch checklist for exactly that reason.

No empty, error or loading states designed. So the developer invents them and consistency dies.

A design nobody can maintain. Twelve bespoke pages instead of a system of reusable sections. Six months later the merchant is asking for a developer to change a banner.

Most of these are avoided by following a proper design process rather than assembling sections as you go.

How to find yours

Load your own store on your phone, on mobile data, and buy something. Then ask three people who have never seen it to find a specific product and buy it, while you watch and say nothing.

Twenty minutes, no tooling, and it will produce a longer list than any audit.

Nearly every item here was a decision that felt reasonable in isolation. They only become expensive once they're stacked on the same page.