E-commerce best practices: the six principles behind online stores that sell

In e-commerce, a best practice is something independent research has seen work again and again across many stores. Usability studies such as Baymard Institute's test real shoppers on hundreds of sites, so their findings describe how people buy online in general rather than what worked once for one brand.

That rules out tricks. Fake countdowns, invented discounts and hidden fees can lift a number for a week, but they are not best practice, and several of them breach EU consumer law. Everything below is about removing the doubts and the friction that stop willing shoppers from buying.

Shoppers arrive from search engines, ads, social media and AI assistants, and most land on a product or category page rather than the home page. Each of those pages has to work as a front door. It should say clearly what the product is, show the price and lead naturally to related products.

Inside the store, site search should handle typos, synonyms and product attributes such as colour or size, and it should never return an empty page. Category pages need filters that match how customers choose. Outside the store, Product structured data with price, availability, shipping and returns makes the same facts readable for Google and for answer engines.

The biggest reason a willing shopper does not buy is that they cannot tell whether the product is right for them. In Nielsen Norman Group's e-commerce studies, 20% of failed purchases came from incomplete or unclear product information. Baymard found that 42% of users try to judge a product's size from its images.

So the product page carries the sale. It needs a full set of images including one that shows scale, a description that says who the product is for, specifications in the same order as similar products, and video where movement or fit is the selling point. Our guides to product pages, product photography, product video and product descriptions go through each part.

A shopper who found you through an ad five minutes ago has to judge from the page alone whether you are real and fair. Reviews matter most. Spiegel Research Center found that a product with five reviews had a 270% higher purchase likelihood than one with none. Company details, visible return terms and payment methods the shopper already uses come next.

Since December 2024, the EU's General Product Safety Regulation also requires online listings to show who the manufacturer is, how to contact them and any safety warnings. That is a legal duty, and it is also exactly the kind of information that makes a store look trustworthy.

Baymard's average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%. Among shoppers who left for a reason other than browsing, 40% named extra costs, 18% a forced account and 17% a long or complicated checkout. Show delivery costs before the cart, offer guest checkout, ask only for the fields you need and offer the payment methods your market uses.

Delivery is part of the purchase too. A clear delivery date answers the question "will it arrive in time?" better than a range of business days. Our cart abandonment guide covers twelve specific fixes.

Returning customers cost nothing to acquire again, so the experience after the order matters as much as the one before it. Keep delivery promises, send useful order updates, make returns easy and make reordering a single click for products people buy again.

Returns are also feedback. The NRF and Happy Returns estimate that 19.3% of online sales were returned in 2025. Reasons such as "smaller than expected" or "colour different from the photos" point straight at the product page, and fixing them prevents the next return.

The principles above tell you what good looks like. Measuring tells you where your store falls short. Track how many shoppers move from product view to cart, from cart to checkout and from checkout to order, split by device and channel. Then work on the step that loses the most people. Our conversion rate optimization guide describes the process.

The six principles hold everywhere, but the question that decides the purchase does not. Start with the question for your category, because answering it is usually worth more than any general improvement. Each industry has its own guide, linked below.