Introduction
Melbourne’s e-commerce scene is booming, with more businesses than ever taking their products online. However, simply having an online store isn’t enough. Many businesses struggle with poor website performance, high cart abandonment rates, and low conversion rates—leading to lost sales and frustrated customers.
If your e-commerce site isn’t delivering the results you expect, chances are you’re encountering one (or more) of the 8 common pain points that hurt online stores. Issues like slow page speed, a complicated checkout process, or unclear shipping information can make the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.
The good news? These problems are fixable. By identifying and addressing these pain points, you can enhance your website’s usability, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately increase your revenue.
In this guide, we’ll walk through 8 key issues plaguing e-commerce websites in Melbourne, explaining why they matter and providing actionable solutions to help you optimise your online store. Whether you’re a business owner or a marketing manager, this guide will equip you with the knowledge to transform your website into a high-performing sales machine.
Let’s dive in.
Pain Points & Solutions
1. Poor Homepage Design
🚨 The Problem:
Your website is the digital storefront of your business. If customers land on your e-commerce site and find it cluttered, difficult to navigate, or visually outdated, they’ll leave within seconds. A confusing layout creates a frustrating user experience, leading to high bounce rates and lost sales.
Cluttered homepage with too much information and no clear focus.
If the homepage on your e-commerce website is cluttered with too many elements, images, videos, a jungle of colours, irrelivant pop ups, and multiple buttons, your users will be too distracted to make a decision.
If users are unable to decide on “what to do next”, they are more likely to leave your website.
Example of cluttered web design:
As a designer who’s worked on 100’s of e-commerce website designs, clean design truly is better. It allows you to direct the attention of your user to where you want them to go. That could be to click on a button, use a search bar, or simply read text.
Good design, is what seperates top performing e-commerce sites from the rest.
In a recent study completed by EyeQuant, websites with better “visual clarity” scored a lower bounce rate and higher conversion rate.
From over 300 e-commerce sites that were tested, Avis scored best.
The Australian car rental company genereated a whopping (90/100) in Visual Clarity and the lowest bounce rate (21%).
So how did they achieve such great results?
Their design team simply decluttered their homepage, showing only three of the most important elements in the hero section.
Headline – This prompts the user on the action Avis would like them to take “Book Online” along with the added benefit of having the best rates.
The Booking Calculator – This is positioned in the centre of the homepage, which easily shows the fields the user needs to input to generate a results (location, date, time)
Call-To-Action – A large red button positioned directly under the booking calculator
No other elements are competiting for the users attention. Less distraction, means higher visual clarity.
Their design team definetly deserves a pat on the back.
So how do you go about improving your landing page like Avis?
✅ How to Fix It:
Four Steps To Improving The Design Of Your Cluttered E-Commerce Homepage
1. Determine the main call to action you want users to take when hitting your homepage. It could be exploring a range of products, getting a quote, booking a meeting, what ever it is, identify what it is.
2. Use Hotjar to run a heatmap analysis on your homepage. A heatmap will show where the attention of your users is being directed when they hit your homepage in the form of clicks represented by different colours.
3. Analyse to see if the main action you want people to take is being clicked on more than others.
4. Do your best to remove other distractions which are fighting for your users attention. Rerun the test, and continue to improve.
Remember, when optimising your homepage, apply your changes for Mobile and Tablet devices.
2. Poor Website Navigation
🚨 The Problem:
Imagine walking into a store where the aisles are unmarked, products are scattered randomly, and there’s no clear way to find what you need. You’d probably walk right out.
That’s exactly what happens when your website has poor navigation. If users struggle to locate products, browse categories, or find their cart, they’ll leave in frustration—often heading straight to a competitor’s site.
A website’s navigation should act as a silent guide, leading users effortlessly from one section to another. When it’s confusing, cluttered, or inconsistent, it creates friction that results in lost sales, higher bounce rates, and fewer return customers.
Disorganised menus that make it difficult to find product categories.
- No clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons guiding users toward purchases.
- Lack of breadcrumb navigation, making it hard for users to backtrack.
When your website isn’t easy to navigate, potential customers become overwhelmed and leave—often turning to competitors with a more user-friendly shopping experience.
How Fix Poor Website Navigation
Here at MarketingLab we use three hands-on strategies to determine whether your website navigation is working against you.
- Review Visitor Recording Sessions With Hotjar
Hotjar has a great feature called visitor recording sessions. Visitor recordings are a great way to see how visitors are interacting with your menu in real time. Look out for when people get stuck, click through multiple categories, or simply bounce. These are tell tale signs that your menu can be optimised for better navigation. - 2. Reorganise Your Existing Category List Using Ai
E-commerce stores often set their menu categories based on how they’d search for items, and not in the way their market does. With the help of AI, you can easily reconfigure your menu based on the optimal market categorisation. Simply head to Chat GPT, drop your existing category and sub category list, and ask the AI to review the list and offer suggestions on improving menu categorisation based on how users search for products in the industry. Review the list provided, and see where you can make improvements. - Get Ideas From Top Competitors or Large E-commerce Stores
One of the quickest ways to improve site navigation is to spy on comeptitors or leading e-commerce sites like Amazon. Amazon invests a substantial amount of money into web development and marketing, so you can be assured they know a thing or two about menu categorisation. See how they categorise their products and apply their methodology to your e-commerce site.
Pro Tip:
Ensure Key Pages Are Easily Accessible
Your homepage should prominently display essential links, including:
- Home – A welcoming landing page with featured products and promotions.
- Shop – A direct link to your product catalog or key categories.
- Cart – A visible cart icon so users can quickly access their selected items.
- Contact Us – A clear way for customers to get in touch with support.
Placing these links in the header or main navigation ensures they are always accessible.
3. Complicated Checkout Process
🚨 The Problem:
A long, complex, or confusing checkout process is one of the primary reasons for cart abandonment in e-commerce stores. When customers face multiple steps, confusing form fields, or unexpected requirements (like mandatory account creation), they are more likely to abandon their purchase altogether.
Imagine this scenario: You’ve successfully led a customer to add items to their cart, and they’re ready to make a purchase. But when they hit the checkout page, they’re bombarded with a long form, mandatory fields for unnecessary details, and the requirement to create an account before completing the transaction. Frustrating, right? This experience not only increases the chances of abandonment but also damages the overall customer experience, leading to lost sales.
According to Baymard Institute, a staggering 17% of cart abandonments happen due to a complicated or lengthy checkout process. If you’re not optimising this critical step, you’re likely losing a significant number of potential sales.
Here are 5 Ways To Improve The Checkout Process
1. Allow Guest Checkout
Most E-commerce brands require more upfront information about new-customers. Although this data is super valuable for the brand, it comes at a cost. Asking customers to sign up for an account causes 34% of your customers to abandon cart. Allowing for guest checkout is a great way to retain more customers at this pivotal point. After the purchase is complete, you can prompt the guest to sign up for an account, or in the days following send them an email with a sign up link.
2. Use Google Auto- Address
Let’s face it, no one likes filling in forms, especially your customers. You can improve this process by adding Google Auto Address to your checkout experience. By autofilling the address section of a billing or shipping form, you increase the speed of the checkout process by 20%. These precious seconds could be the difference between a customer changing the mind and leaving, or winning the sale.
Google Auto-Address is compatible with most e-commerce platforms. Either search for plugin via the plugin store or directly search for it on Google.
Google Auto-Fill Download Links
-Woocommerce – https://woocommerce.com/products/google-autofill-customer-addresses/
– Shopify – https://www.shopify.com/au/blog/google-autocomplete
3. One Click Checkout
If your website platform allows for one-click checkout, I would most definitely take advantage of it. The “less is more” approach should definitely be applied to improve conversion rates. Fewer steps in the process means less friction and customers only need to implement their information once. Apps such as ‘Shop Pay’ are great for implementing one-click checkout to your e-commerce website.
4. Adding Security Badges
In a time where trust and security are a priority for online shoppers, security badges at checkout should be a non-negotiable for e-commerce sites, yet they’re one of the most overlooked additions. Shopify and other large e-commerce platforms have reported that by having security badges at checkout (SSL Certificates, Payment Badges, Money Back Guarantees) you can expect to see a 17% increase in conversions.
5. Reduce Distraction
This directly relates to our initial point of decluttering your landing page design. Most checkout pages are over-designed, containing unnecessary elements that confuse or distract your potential customer. There is no plugin or software that you can use to do this, you’ll need to use your judgement when removing elements. A good rule of thumb is to put yourself in the mind of your customer, when you hit the checkout look at what’s catching your eye or causing friction at the checkout. Only keep elements that you believe helped in the process of finalising your purchase.
4. Limited Payment Options
🚨 The Problem:
One of the first thing users do when hitting a checkout page is scan for payment options offered at checkout. In fact, approximately 9% of an e-commerce stores cart abandonments occurs due to a lack of preferred payment methods.
Today’s shoppers expect flexibility and convenience when paying online, and if you don’t provide enough options, you risk losing sales, especially if your products are high-ticket items.
We recently helped an adult store improve their conversion rate, simply by adding afterpay at checkout. With average orders being over $300, customers loved the flexibility of being able to split their payments.
Such a simple optimisation, resulted in a 14% decrease in abandoned cart and 4% increase in sales.
You can checkout the case study here – https://marketinglab.com.au/results/conversion-rate-optimisatio/adult-store/
✅ How To Fix Limited Payment Options Checkout
- Offer Multiple Payment Methods
Here are the most preferred payment methods you should offer at checkout. Use a combination of the most popular and those that apply to your product or brand.
- Credit & Debit Cards – Visa, Mastercard, American Express
- Digital Wallets – PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay
- Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) – Afterpay, Klarna, Zip Pay
- Direct Bank Transfers – Ideal for B2B or high-ticket purchases
- QR Code Payments – Growing in popularity for mobile users
By integrating multiple options, you cater to a wider audience and eliminate friction in the checkout process.
- Integrate QR Code Payment Options for Mobile Users
With mobile shopping on the rise, QR code payments are becoming an increasingly popular checkout option. Platforms like WeChat Pay, Alipay, and even some banking apps allow users to scan a code and pay instantly. This eliminates the need for entering card details and provides a seamless, fast transaction experience. - Clearly Display Accepted Payment Methods Early
Don’t hide your accepted payment methods within a dropdown, chances are your customers won’t find them. Displaying payment methods on Product Pages, Shopping Cart Previews, and on Checkout Page, is great for increasing your chances of them being seen by your customer. - Order Your Logos From Most Popular To Least
Ordering your payment options from most popular to least, is a great way to build instant trust with your audience. If data shows that 65% of your customers checkout using apple pay, then list that logo first. It’s a great trick to ensure that the most popular payment method is seen.
5. Unclear Shipping Information
🚨 The Problem:
Customers hate surprises—especially when it comes to shipping costs. If they reach checkout only to discover unexpected fees or unclear delivery timelines, they’re more likely to abandon their cart.
In fact, 48% of shoppers abandon their cart because of high extra costs (shipping, taxes, and fees), according to the Baymard Institute.
Common shipping issues that frustrate customers:
- Hidden shipping fees only revealed at checkout
- No estimated delivery time provided upfront
- Lack of international shipping options
- Confusing return policies
If your e-commerce store doesn’t clearly outline shipping costs and policies, you risk losing sales and damaging customer trust.
Example of a Shipping-Optimised E-commerce Store
A great example is Chefmart, Australia’s online marketplace for commercial kitchen equipment.
Chefmart solves the shipping issue that many e-commerce stores battle with, which is shipping a range of small and extremely large and heavy items.
This store can provide shipping costs for items of all sizes to customers in real-time on their website at both a product page and checkout level.
By making shipping clear, predictable, and visible early in the buying journey, Chefmart reduces cart abandonment and improves the overall shopping experience.
Checkout their shipping integration via the website – https://chefmart.com.au/
✅ How to Fix It:
Four Steps to Improving Shipping Transparency
1️⃣ Display Shipping Costs on Product Pages
- Instead of surprising customers at checkout, show estimated shipping fees next to the product price or in the cart preview.
2️⃣ Offer Free Shipping Thresholds
- Set a minimum order amount (e.g., “Free shipping on orders over $75”) to increase average order value while making shipping costs predictable.
3️⃣ Provide Estimated Delivery Times
- Show estimated delivery dates based on the customer’s location before they reach checkout.
- Example: “Arrives in 2-4 business days” instead of just “Standard Shipping.”
4️⃣ Add a Shipping Calculator to the Cart Page
- Let customers enter their postcode or country to see exact shipping rates before they proceed to checkout.
6. Poor Search Functionality
🚨 The Problem:
If your customers can’t find what they’re looking for, they won’t buy it. It’s that simple.
A weak search function is one of the fastest ways to frustrate potential buyers. If search results are irrelevant, slow, or too limited, users will bounce off your site and head to a competitor.
Common search issues that kill conversions:
- No auto-suggestions – Customers don’t know the exact product name, and your search gives them nothing.
- Zero results for minor typos – A single spelling mistake, and it’s game over.
- Poor filtering options – Users can’t narrow down results by brand, price, or features.
- Slow or clunky search bar – If it lags, people lose patience.
Shoppers expect instant, relevant results. If your search function doesn’t deliver, you’re leaving sales on the table.
A comprehensive search function is extremely important if your site has an extensive range of products.
Once again, Chefmart is a great example to show here because of how powerful their search function is when helping users navigate through 10,000+ products.
Their search provides popular suggestions, the most applicable categories based on the search term, and the most popular products.
Here’s why Chefmart’s search is fantastic.
✅ Offering smart auto-suggestions – As soon as a user types, relevant products appear in a dropdown.
✅ Providing advanced search filters – Customers can refine results by brand, price range, size, and category.
✅ Enabling typo tolerance – Searching for “convection over” instead of “convection oven”? Chefmart still delivers accurate results.
✅ Displaying real-time stock availability – Users see if a product is in stock before clicking through.
By making search fast, accurate, and intuitive, Chefmart keeps customers engaged and ready to buy.
Most Popular Search Function Apps To Equip Your E-commerce Store
1. Searchanise: Our favourite at Marketing Lab is searchanise. This is the app that we equipped Chefmart with. It’s great for both small and large e-commerce stores, and isn’t overly expensive to run. It’s a great investment for your business, especially if you’re looking to improve site navigation without investing in custom development.
It’s compatible with Shopify, Woo-Commerce and CS CART platforms –https://searchanise.io/shpf-app/
2. Algolia
Benefits: Algolia offers a powerful real-time search engine that enhances user engagement by providing instant, relevant search results. Its hosted site search platform ensures a frictionless experience across devices. Algolia is known for its speed and reliability, making it suitable for websites that require high-performance search capabilities.
When to Use: Ideal for businesses seeking a scalable and customisable search solution that can handle large volumes of data and deliver rapid search responses.
Website: https://www.algolia.com
3. Doofinder
Benefits: Doofinder enhances e-commerce sites with rich and engaging shopping solutions that significantly improve product findability. It offers features like advanced filtering, autocomplete suggestions, and personalised search results, which can lead to increased conversion rates.
When to Use: Suitable for online retailers looking to improve their site’s search functionality and provide a more intuitive shopping experience for their customers.
Website: https://www.doofinder.com
4. Luigi’s Box
Benefits: Luigi’s Box provides a comprehensive search and product recommendation platform designed to enhance the user experience on e-commerce websites. It offers features like search analytics, autocomplete, and personalised product recommendations to boost sales and customer satisfaction.
When to Use: Ideal for e-commerce businesses aiming to optimise their search functionality and leverage data-driven insights to improve product discovery and sales.
Website: https://www.luigisbox.com
7. Missing or Weak ‘About Us’ Page
This one goes a bit left of field, but it’s a crucial yet often overlooked element for e-commerce businesses. Unlike service-based businesses that build trust through direct relationships, e-commerce brands rely heavily on their products to speak for themselves. This often leads to a lack of effort in crafting a compelling ‘About Us’ page—if they even have one at all.
A weak or missing ‘About Us’ page can seriously impact customer trust. When visitors land on your site, they want to know who they’re buying from. A faceless business can seem sketchy, making customers hesitate before making a purchase.
We don’t like to name and shame, but one of Australia’s biggest online skincare brands doesn’t even have an ‘About Us’ page… which seriously blows my mind!
And one of Australias fastest growing pet accessory brands, who have the shortest About Us page in history… Cmon Sandra and Carlos, we want to see how it all started.
Why Your ‘About Us’ Page Matters
Here’s a fun fact: The ‘About Us’ page is often the second most-visited page on a website after the homepage. Why? Because customers want reassurance that they’re buying from a legitimate, trustworthy business. If your ‘About Us’ page is vague or nonexistent, you could be losing potential customers before they even reach checkout.
The best-performing ‘About Us’ pages leave no stone unturned. Think of it as a behind-the-scenes page that gives customers a deeper look into your brand.
A great ‘About Us’ page should:
- Showcase your business’s history and mission
- Humanise your brand by introducing the people behind it
- Offer proof of legitimacy, such as credentials and customer testimonials
- Build trust by displaying real photos of your team, warehouse, or workspace
The ‘About Us’ Page Checklist
Not sure if your ‘About Us’ page needs a revamp? Run it through this checklist:
✅ A clear mission statement explaining why your brand exists
✅ A short brand story covering when and why it was launched
✅ Your store’s location and the areas you serve
✅ A mention of your team (even if it’s just you, show your face!)
✅ Business credentials, awards, and any press features
✅ Social proof: Customer reviews, testimonials, or case studies
✅ A founder’s story to add personality and authenticity
If you’re struggling with writing, don’t stress. You can hire a marketing agency or a professional copywriter to craft a compelling page. However, if you’re on a budget or pressed for time, an AI writing assistant like ChatGPT can be a great starting point.
Here’s a Prompt to Generate a Strong ‘About Us’ Page Using AI
ABOUT US PAGE CHATGPT PROMPT:
“You are a professional copywriting assistant. Your goal is to write an engaging, informative, and professional ‘About Us’ page for an e-commerce store. The tone should be short, playful, and trustworthy. The page should include the following sections:
- Mission Statement
- Brand Story (including when it was launched and the problem it solves)
- Team and store location
- Business credentials (awards, certifications, media mentions)
- Customer reviews or testimonials
- Founder’s story
Here are some details to include: [Insert your brand details here]”
By taking the time to create a well-structured, visually appealing, and engaging ‘About Us’ page, you can turn casual visitors into loyal customers. Don’t underestimate the power of storytelling—it’s what makes your brand memorable!
8. Slow Page Speed
A slow-loading website isn’t just frustrating for users—it directly impacts your sales and search rankings. In today’s fast-paced digital world, customers expect websites to load instantly. If they have to wait, they’ll simply leave and find a competitor with a faster site.
🔍 Why It Matters
- Google reports that 53% of mobile users abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- A 1-second delay in page speed can lead to a 7% drop in conversions.
- Slow sites receive lower rankings on Google, reducing organic traffic and visibility.
Run Your Site Through a Speed Test
Before fixing the issue, you need to diagnose it. Here are free tools to analyze your site speed and pinpoint what’s slowing it down:
🔹 GTmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com) – Provides detailed reports on loading times, performance scores, and improvement recommendations.
🔹 Google PageSpeed Insights (https://pagespeed.web.dev) – Offers mobile and desktop speed scores along with optimization suggestions.
Understanding Your Speed Test Results
The challenge for e-commerce business owners isn’t just identifying slow page speeds—it’s knowing how to fix them. Speed test reports can be overwhelming, filled with technical jargon. Here’s how to break it down and create a simple plan for optimisation.
✅ How to Fix It
1️⃣ Optimize Image Sizes
- Large image files are one of the biggest culprits of slow-loading pages.
- Convert images to WebP format, which reduces file size without sacrificing quality.
- Use image compression tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh to shrink images before uploading.
2️⃣ Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- A CDN distributes your website’s content across multiple servers worldwide, ensuring faster load times for users no matter their location.
- Services like Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront help reduce server load and improve speed.
3️⃣ Minimize Unnecessary Scripts & Plugins
- Excessive JavaScript and plugins slow down your site.
- Remove unused plugins, third-party scripts, and bloated tracking codes.
- Use script minimization tools like Autoptimize or WP Rocket (for WordPress users).
4️⃣ Enable Lazy Loading for Images & Videos
- Lazy loading delays the loading of images and videos until they’re needed (i.e., when a user scrolls to them).
- This speeds up initial page load times and improves user experience.
- Most modern e-commerce platforms (like Shopify & WooCommerce) have built-in lazy loading features.
Conclusion: Take the Guesswork Out of E-Commerce Success
Running a successful e-commerce store is more than just having great products—it’s about delivering a seamless, high-converting shopping experience. From missing trust signals to slow page speeds, even small issues can have a big impact on your sales and search rankings. But knowing what to fix is only half the battle—how to fix it is where real growth happens.
That’s where our Website Tear Down comes in.
We’ll analyse your site from top to bottom, uncovering the hidden roadblocks that may be costing you sales. Our in-depth audit includes:
✅ User Experience Review – Identifying friction points that may be frustrating your customers.
✅ Performance & Speed Analysis – Pinpointing slow-loading pages and bottlenecks.
✅ Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Insights – Review product pages, checkout flows, and call-to-actions.
✅ SEO & Technical Health Check – Ensuring your site is structured for search engine success.
After the review, you’ll receive a clear, actionable optimisation plan with steps you can take immediately—whether you choose to implement them yourself, work with us, or hire another agency.
👉 Book your E-Commerce Website Tear Down today and start turning more visitors into customers!
