Why Choosing an Agency That Specialises in eCommerce Website Design is Important

Building an eCommerce site yourself using Shopify or Squarespace templates is relatively easy, but creating an eCommerce website that’s scalable, strategic, secure, and better at driving sales revenue is not. That’s why choosing an agency with a team of eCommerce web experts to build you a customised website yields the best outcome.

Let’s look at what eCommerce website design is and why working with experts is important.

What is customised eCommerce website design?

The purpose of eCommerce site design is to create a user-friendly shopping experience where customers buy products or services online. Customers can access your store to buy their favourite products from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

Why is web design for eCommerce important?

This year, 23 million Australians – or 85% of the population – are projected to buy consumer goods online. With a user base that big, there’s a lot of competition. Poor customer experiences can cause massive revenue hits. Every button placement, checkout flow, and product page layout in eCommerce website design directly affects whether someone buys or bolts. And customers make those decisions within seconds.

Why is working with an eCommerce website design agency important?

Subscription-based content management systems like WordPress.com and Shopify offer limited customisation and flexibility. Your ability to personalise the shopping experience for your users and adapt the site as your business grows is handicapped.

eCommerce templates are built to serve a common denominator of businesses, users, and products. This means you lose the benefit that customisation offers to your customers. One study estimates that 59% of online shoppers believe they find more interesting products when online retail stores are personalised to them.

Choosing to work with a professional agency will ensure your online store is customised to your business, your customers, and your products. The website will be scalable, strategic, secure, and will drive revenue.

Scalability

Scalability lets your website grow as your business does. Web designers and developers build a flexible, modular system that can handle 100 customers or 100,000 customers at once without slowing or crashing.

Building in scalability from the start means your website won’t need to be rebuilt in a year or two. That future-proofing results in fewer surprises down the road.

Grappling with the restraints of pre-built templates can be frustrating, as Futuretheory’s marketing coordinator Juliette recalls from past experiences as an in-house marketer:

I think that quick and easy website builders are fine for most businesses until you actually start to grow.

The more physical locations and products we had, the more integrations we needed. I found myself butting up against the limits of a cookie-cutter website builder like Wix. Supporting online and in-store orders, with custom rules, was not possible.

We ended up only using Wix to host and manage our general website and then linking to an external site for our online store, run by a specialised SaaS provider (Bopple). That meant dealing with two support teams (almost constantly, might I add) and paying two subscription fees. Not to mention, that’s an SEO nightmare!

I’d tell any eCommerce business now to just start with a custom site. You could pay subscription fees for years and still face the cost of a rebuild when you need to grow.

Beyond the initial design and web development, eCommerce websites have ongoing needs, so establishing a continuing relationship with an experienced agency that can support you as you grow is a wise investment.

After launching a new site, an experienced agency can provide website support for plugin updates, performance monitoring, and the occasional fix when something breaks. An agency relationship gives you access to that support when you need it, rather than scrambling to work it out on your own. If you’re weighing the pros and cons of agency cost against a DIY build from templates, score scalability and ongoing support as decisive pros.

Strategy

A customised eCommerce solution is strategic. In a crowded field of online retail stores, you won’t look or feel like anyone else.

When working with a professional agency, strategy informs every website design decision, from choosing a unique look for your brand, building pages for SEO, to designing your own business workflows and personalised customer journey.

Building Brand Identity

Pre-built templates have to work for the widest possible audience. They may limit layout options, animations, transitions, or the look of buttons and search bars.

A custom eCommerce site builds your brand identity by using your logo, design elements, graphic assets, colour scheme, and more. You can also align the look and feel of your eCommerce site with your social media channels and ads so your customers recognise your business when they see it, no matter where they are online.

Planning for SEO

Pre-built templates may be very limited in how headers are used on the website or whether you can change how URLs appear. In contrast, a custom eCommerce website is designed to give you the ability to create URLs for every product and category from popular keywords, optimising search engine rankings. The higher your ranking in search engine results, the more users will find your online store organically, building your online presence.

Designing for Business Workflows

Pre-built templates depend on built-in tools or third-party apps to automate workflows. These work fine for common workflows in a standard retail model. An example is sending the customer an email when an order is placed. For anything out of the ordinary, you’ll need another app. And those apps may not talk to each other.

If you have a workflow that uses more complex logic, then a custom website is the way to go. For example, orders could be routed to different manufacturers based on the customer’s GPS location to save on shipping. Developers can also ‘bridge’ your online retail store to the rest of your business. Examples are integrating the online retail store with your physical warehouse or specific accounting system.

Mapping the User’s Journey

Custom eCommerce websites are designed for your particular customer’s journey and their unique needs. First, your customers have to find you, so let’s look at the all-important landing page.

The Landing Page

First impressions matter. And you don’t have much time: the average user takes less than 0.5 seconds to decide whether to stay or go.

The landing page is your storefront. Your aim is to draw the user in with the look and feel of your site. High-quality photos and images attract users and confirm the quality of the website. A hero image – an eye-catching picture of high quality – can set the mood for your online business instantly and build brand identity.

Once users are drawn in, easy-to-follow navigation keeps them there. Making the user experience (UX) seamless is the top priority for the design project. Experienced eCommerce website designers will use header navigation, including a search function, and clear call-to-action buttons to guide users quickly and easily to find what they want and make a purchase. The footer can be used for links or information that’s important to the user’s journey – like social media links or shipping and return policies – but not crucial for the header navigation.

Choosing to work with a professional eCommerce agency also means you can ensure that your new eCommerce platform is fully accessible. This protects you from alienating your customer base, improves SEO, and even protects you from lawsuits.

Organisation and Product Pages

Imagine how a customer moves through a physical store. Products are grouped logically so that customers can easily find them.

Pre-built templates often group products into hierarchical collections or categories, like Apparel>Women>Dresses. Tags are then added for basic characteristics like colour, price, or size.

In a custom website, you can control how your products are organised, displayed, and managed. Rather than forcing your products to fit into certain categories, you can build fields for any category you want and filter for all the attributes that apply. A professional agency can advise on how to streamline those filters to make the customer’s journey as quick as possible. Futuretheory’s managing director Germaine notes, ‘We want to limit choice so the user isn’t inundated. The filter terms we choose have to move the user forward to what’s important.’

Product pages help customers decide whether to buy the product. In templates, there’s usually a pre-determined layout for products. If you want to add features like ‘Frequently Bought Together’ or ‘Size Guides,’ that generally requires separate apps.

A custom eCommerce website can tell stories about your products that appeal to your particular customer in whatever layout works for that product. High-resolution images should allow the customer to examine the product from different angles or rotate the product in 3D. Users should be able to zoom in for more detail so they have a good sense of what they’re buying. Video demonstrations are helpful as well to show how to use the product. Product recommendations and reviews also make the buying decision easier.

An agency experienced in eCommerce will devise a digital marketing strategy for your product descriptions. The tone and voice will match your brand, and the copy will be optimised with keywords to improve search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to your site.

Checkout

Checkout is where you either make the sale or end up with an abandoned cart. The statistics are staggering:

• 18% of customers will abandon the cart if checkout is too complicated.
• 19% will bolt if they have to create an account rather than using a guest checkout option.
• 10% will dump the cart if they want more payment methods.

An improvement in checkout design can increase the conversion rate by 35.26%.

While Shopify’s One-Page checkout has become the standard and has an edge over traditional multi-step checkouts, a custom website still handles non-standard sales better. For example, a business may need custom tax calculations for several different countries. Custom websites can also handle pre- and post-purchase upselling for approved customers.

Customer support also differs between pre-built templates and custom websites. With pre-built templates, plug-ins offer a third-party layer for customer support. Because the support is offered by a third party, the chat box or customer interface may look different from the rest of the website. These plug-ins can handle recent orders and basic information.

With custom websites, the support is built in, using the same design language. Support can be integrated directly into the user interface, so that a help prompt appears if the customer is struggling with a particular task. Custom builds can also let a human or AI support agent see what the user sees on the screen to guide them through a process.

In a custom website, information is presented clearly to your particular customer and personalised to them. They can locate what they want quickly, and a custom website makes their lives easier by offering more sign-in and guest options, discounts and rewards, and support. The result is a lower bounce rate and more conversions.

Now let’s talk more about checkout in terms of security.

Security

If a customer doesn’t trust your eCommerce site with credit card information, it doesn’t matter how good it looks or how great the navigation is. A study found that 19% of online shoppers abandon a cart if they don’t trust the site.

Pre-built templates on eCommerce platforms provide all the data security and release regular patches. They are PCI DSS Level 1 Certified, which means that the actual credit card numbers are replaced with tokens. If the platform is hacked, the cyber criminals get worthless tokens rather than actual credit card numbers. The downside is that because the security is centralised, cyber criminals who find one weakness are able to attack thousands of stores at once. Another downside is that if you need to add third-party apps for customised solutions, cyber criminals can exploit them to get into the customer database.

With custom-built websites, your business is responsible for the security, but you’re a smaller target since you aren’t part of a big platform. You also have total control over how security is implemented. Web designers and developers build many security measures into custom websites.

SSL makes sure that every page, including checkout, uses HTTPS, a secure, encrypted channel. A padlock icon lets customers know their data cannot be intercepted by cyber criminals.

Custom websites integrate with PCI-compliant payment gateways like PayPal, replacing actual credit card numbers with tokens, as already described. Other tactics include writing code that walls off sensitive data or sanitises data entered in fields so cyber criminals cannot insert malicious code to reveal private information.

Having an ongoing relationship with a professional agency is important. They can either handle ongoing security maintenance or advise your team.

It’s crucial to get security right. IBM reports that the global average cost of a data breach in 2025 was 4.4 million USD. The consequences for failing to protect customer data include lost business, labour involved in detection and escalation, legal fees and regulatory fines, credit monitoring services for affected customers, and notification costs to inform customers and regulators. A data breach also erodes trust in your brand. Customers who are affected will share their experience with others and are unlikely to buy from you again. Google will flag your site as insecure, killing your organic traffic.

Better revenue driver

Loading speed and mobile responsiveness of your website are key drivers of revenue. The best eCommerce websites are built for speed. How fast your landing page loads will affect how quickly potential customers see your website. Speed drastically affects conversions. A delay of 1 second translates into a 7% reduction in conversions. A 2-second delay brings conversions down by 11%. And for mobile phone users, if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, 53% abandon the website.

And speed is where the pre-built templates let you down. Their code tends to be bloated and clunky because the template has to work for every business. All those extra attributes and filters that you don’t use slow down the loading speed. So do all the extra plug-ins you add to make the site work.

Custom websites don’t have all that extra code, so they load much faster. In addition, designers and developers optimise images for smaller file sizes, and the site will load images only as the user scrolls down to them, saving load time. Every unnecessary character in the code is stripped, and heavy scripts go to the bottom to optimise speed.

What about responsiveness? Web designers experienced in eCommerce will make sure your website looks great on every device your customers use, but mobile devices are particularly important. eCommerce on mobile phones this year is projected to be worth 3186 billion USD and to account for 62% of all eCommerce sales.

Responsiveness in pre-built templates may mean the site is just shrunken down to a phone screen rather than optimised to that device. The result can be slow loading or instability with the menus. Google looks for this and ranks the website accordingly.

Custom builds avoid these issues by using a mobile-first design. Be sure to go with a professional agency that prioritises a responsive design for your online store.

Ready to take your eCommerce platform to the next level?

A professional agency can build a custom eCommerce website for you that’s scalable, strategic, secure, and better drives revenue.

We’d love to hear more about your vision for your online retail store. Get in touch with us so we can organise a meeting.