What Is an Ecommerce Website Design Audit and Why Do You Need One?

Various online stores get steady traffic and still don't sell as much as they should. Often the reason is something small that nobody on the team has noticed, such as a filter that resets when a shopper goes back a page. An ecommerce website design audit reviews your store, finds problems, and shows you which ones to fix first. In this post, we explain what the audit covers and how to know if your store needs one.

What Is an Ecommerce Website Design Audit?

An ecommerce website design audit is a systematic analysis of how your webstore appears and operates from your potential customers' viewpoint.

The reviewer starts with the homepage or Google landing page and follows all the way through to the order confirmation page. The reviewer points out any obstacle faced by the customer during the process.

People sometimes call it ecommerce site design audit. The name matters less than what actually gets checked. Most audits also compare the store against basic UX design principles, such as keeping buttons consistent and confirming clearly when something lands in the cart.

What Does the Audit Look At?

Every store is different, but most reviews cover the same core areas:

The US storefront requires that accessibility gets the right amount of consideration, since issues with WCAG compliance may result in an ADA complaint.

Ecommerce usability testing should also consider trust signals. This includes returns policy and customer feedback. First-time customers who cannot find your returns policy page will leave without hesitation.

How Is It Different From an Ecommerce CRO Audit?

People mix these two up all the time, which is understandable. They cover a lot of the same ground, and some agencies sell them as one package.

An ecommerce cro audit is mostly about data. Someone goes through your analytics, compares conversion rates on desktop and mobile, and works out where people are dropping out of the funnel.

A design audit comes at it from the shopper's side. The reviewer uses the store the way a customer would and notes where things get confusing. Data still plays a part, but mainly to check which of those problems hurt sales the most.

You'll want both at some point. After completing the design review and knowing what needs to change, ecommerce conversion optimization helps determine if the changes are implemented successfully. It may take just an A/B test for a single page to check an impact.

One way to do it is to deal with the simple problems and then schedule an ecommerce CRO audit.

Why Do You Need an Ecommerce Website Design Audit?

The shortest way to explain this is that traffic costs. If you use Google Shopping or Meta advertising, you pay for everyone, even those who abandon their cart.

Consider a home goods retailer in Chicago. Its ad budget grows every quarter, yet revenue hardly moves. During the audit, the delivery date isn't shown until shoppers enter their ZIP code at checkout, and many of them drop off at that point. Showing the date on the product page is an easy change, and one that could win back some of those orders.

There are other clues that a review is overdue:

• Your mobile conversion rate is far lower than desktop.
• Lots of people add items to their cart but never get as far as paying.
• Support keeps answering questions the product page should have covered, like sizing or delivery times.
• Redesign and migration is due soon, but there is no consensus about what will be retained. The audit provides everyone with the same basis for discussion.

In most cases, the changes an audit recommends are small. That's good news, because small fixes cost less and go live faster than rebuilding the whole store.

What Changes for B2B Stores?

A b2b ecommerce website audit covers the same basics, plus a few extra checks.

Business customers tend to reorder the same products and might need approval on the quotation before making any payment; the paper highlights such attributes as fast ordering forms, favorites, and personal pricing. It would certainly be nice if a purchasing manager did not have to look up the same 40 SKUs every month.

Login is another common weak spot. Many B2B sites keep prices behind an account, which makes sense, but the sign-up process can be slow and put new buyers off. A thorough b2b ecommerce website audit will test that flow from the first click to the first order.

How Can You Get Started?

You can make a start without hiring anyone. A simple first pass looks like this:

• Pick your five busiest pages, plus the checkout.
• Open them on your phone and pretend you've never seen the store before.
• Write down every spot where you pause, scroll back, or feel unsure. Even small things are worth noting.

If you want to save some time, an automated tool helps. You can run an audit on your store and get a ranked list of issues for any page. That works well as a first-round ecommerce website design audit before you spend money on specialists.

Bigger stores are a different story, especially when problems show up across several pages. That's when an ecommerce site design audit led by experts, with real user testing, tends to pay off. A few months after your fixes go live, it's worth running the same ecommerce ux audit again to see what changed.

Running a regular business site as well? This guide on website UX audits for US businesses covers the same ideas for sites that don't sell online.

Conclusion

If you're spending money to bring people to your store, it usually is. A handful of fixes on your product pages and checkout can be enough to make the audit worthwhile. After that, keep testing through ecommerce conversion optimization so the gains don't fade as the store grows. And if you'd like help looking at your own store, get in touch with the UX Audit Tool team.