The five most common
- Delivery cost revealed at checkout — the largest single abandonment cause
- Supplier product images — identical to every competitor
- No reviews, because nobody automated the asking
- Margin never calculated after returns and fees
- Apps accumulated over years, overlapping and unreviewed
The first one costs the most and takes the least work to fix. Showing delivery cost on the product page is a configuration change with an immediate effect.
Five more
- Collection pages with no content, missing category searches entirely
- Thin product pages that do not answer the questions support gets asked
- No proactive dispatch notifications, generating avoidable support contacts
- Slow on mobile, usually from images nobody resized
- No email to past customers, ignoring the cheapest revenue available
What they have in common
None of these is a design problem, and none requires a rebuild. They are all specific, cheap to fix, and consistently left undone because they are unglamorous.
That is also why fixing them produces disproportionate results compared with the more visible work store owners tend to prioritise.
The order to fix them
| Priority | Fix |
|---|---|
| 1 | Delivery cost visible early |
| 2 | Speed on mobile |
| 3 | Product pages that answer the real questions |
| 4 | Automated review collection |
| 5 | Dispatch and delivery notifications |
Those five are usually a fortnight of work in total and they address the majority of the lost revenue in a typical small store.
Then work out the margin
Once the obvious problems are fixed, calculating contribution margin per product is what tells you where to go next — which products to promote, which to reprice and which to stop selling.
Most owners find at least one surprise in that exercise, and it is usually a best seller.