Before You Redesign Your Store, Decide These Five Things

By Peter Mendez, founder of Crafted.

This article shares Crafted’s approach to planning an ecommerce redesign. Project examples are attributed to Crafted, rather than to Ecommerce Paradise, and individual project results are not a forecast for another store.

Most store redesigns start in the wrong place. Someone opens a theme gallery or a competitor’s site, picks a look, and the project becomes about the homepage. Six months later the store is prettier and converts about the same, because the decisions that actually move revenue were never made. They were inherited from whatever the template assumed.

When we plan an ecommerce build at Crafted, the visual design comes late. First we settle five questions. Each one changes what gets designed and built, and each one is far cheaper to answer on paper than to fix after launch.

1. Decide who you are selling to, one buyer at a time

“Our customers” is not a buyer. A high ticket store usually has three or four distinct people arriving with different questions. The first time buyer comparing you with two other brands. The returning customer who knows exactly what they want and resents every extra click. The gift buyer who knows nothing about the category. Sometimes a trade or wholesale buyer with an account.

For each one, write down three things: what they need to believe before they buy, the words they use for your products, and the single action you want them to take next. This list becomes the brief for every page. When someone asks what goes at the top of the product page or whether the homepage needs a quiz, you check the buyers instead of debating taste.

2. Decide what the product page has to prove

On a high ticket store the product page does the selling. The homepage introduces you; the product page closes. So design it first, and design it around the doubts a buyer has at that price.

A buyer spending real money wants to see the thing properly, understand exactly what they get, hear from people who already bought it, and know what happens if it goes wrong. That means photography and video that answer questions rather than decorate, specifications written for people rather than for a spreadsheet, reviews close to the price, and shipping, returns and warranty stated plainly near the buy button rather than buried in the footer.

In Crafted’s Duracell project, product pages combined photography, video and ratings for more than 130 products with a checkout route that let shoppers choose a retailer. Crafted reports a 35% traffic increase within two months of relaunch, alongside SEO and other marketing work. That is an agency-reported project result, not evidence that a visual redesign alone produced the increase or that another store will achieve the same outcome.

This is the core of good ecommerce website design: every element on the product page earns its place by removing a reason not to buy.

3. Decide how the catalog is organized before you design navigation

Navigation is the visible part of a deeper decision: how your products are structured. Collections, variants, bundles, compatibility, sizes, materials. If that structure is fuzzy, no menu design will save it.

Map the catalog the way your buyers think about it, not the way your warehouse does. Someone shopping for a gift browses by occasion or price; someone replacing a part searches by model number. Most stores need both, and the build has to support filtering and search on the attributes that matter, which means those attributes have to exist as clean data first.

This matters even more when one business runs several brands. For IZOD and its sister brands, Crafted describes a global navigation that let shoppers move between brand experiences, with one ecommerce cart and checkout. That structure depends on deciding how the catalogs and buying journeys relate before drawing the menu.

4. Decide where you are going to sell, and in what languages

Where you sell shapes the platform more than almost anything else. Selling only in the US on one currency is a simple build. Selling across regions, currencies, tax rules and languages is a different project, and retrofitting it later is painful.

If international is on the roadmap, plan for it even if the first release serves one market. In Crafted’s Banana Republic project, the goal was to consolidate the seasonal catalog and ecommerce store in one international hub. The operational question is whether the team can maintain each market’s content and customer promises without creating conflicting versions.

The same question applies to channels. If you also sell through retailers or marketplaces, decide whether the site should send people there, sell directly, or both. Duracell’s choose your seller checkout was a deliberate answer to that question, not an afterthought.

5. Decide what your team will run after launch

A store is never finished. New products, seasonal campaigns, landing pages for ads, promotions, collaborations. Before choosing a platform or a theme, list what your team will need to do every week without calling a developer.

Then build the editing experience around that list. In our builds that usually means a small set of page templates with reusable blocks: a campaign hero, a product spotlight, a comparison table, a review band, a story section. Your team assembles new pages from those blocks, and every page still looks like your brand because the blocks were designed together.

This is also where platform choice gets real. Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce or a headless setup can all be right. The answer comes from the list above, the catalog structure and the markets you sell in, not from what the last agency happened to prefer.

Then design

Once those five decisions are made, the visual design has a job. It has to make the buyer feel the brand is worth the price, make the product page easy to trust, and make the next step obvious on a phone, where most of your traffic arrives.

A store planned this way has a clearer foundation for future conversion work. The look can evolve with the brand, while measurement and customer feedback show where the structure still needs improvement. No planning method removes the need to test the finished experience.

Turn the Five Decisions Into a Working Redesign Brief

A useful brief names the decision, the person responsible for it, the evidence supporting it, and the condition that would make the team reconsider. Keep those four items together. A mood board can describe the desired appearance, but it cannot tell a developer which shipping rule applies to a heavy product or which buyer needs a compatibility filter.

Start with a small selection of representative products. Choose a straightforward item, a product with meaningful variants, something that requires accessories, and an item with unusual shipping or installation requirements. Designing those examples exposes differences that a single polished demonstration product can hide. Use real information instead of placeholder descriptions wherever possible.

For a new store, clarify the business model before the redesign brief grows. Ecommerce Paradise’s guide to high-ticket dropshipping explains the relationship between the retailer, customer and supplier. That relationship affects what the storefront can promise about stock, delivery, installation and support.

Write a short acceptance statement for each important journey. A first-time shopper should be able to identify the right model, understand the total purchase requirements and see the next step without contacting support for basic information. A returning buyer should be able to find an exact replacement quickly. Those statements give the review team something concrete to test.

Avoid turning every stakeholder suggestion into a mandatory feature. Put ideas into a separate list until someone explains the buyer problem they solve. A quiz may help a buyer choose between genuinely different options, while adding an unnecessary step for someone searching a specific model. The brief should distinguish those cases before anyone pays to build both experiences.

Give the team a clear boundary for the first release. Separate essential buying functions from experiments and later improvements. Product information, working checkout and accurate delivery terms belong in the initial scope. A new personalization feature may be useful, but its value does not justify delaying the basic purchase journey without a clear business reason.

Build a Product Information Checklist Before Templates

For each product family, list the facts a shopper must know before ordering. Depending on the category, that could include dimensions, power requirements, capacity, compatible accessories, assembly, delivery access and what the standard package includes. Mark which facts are required across the whole catalog and which apply only to a particular family.

Assign each fact a source and an owner. A specification copied from a discontinued model should not become permanent because it appeared in the old website. A supplier’s answer should identify the actual model or variant. Keep unresolved information visibly pending within the project so it does not quietly become a customer-facing claim during the migration.

The supplier research guide is useful when that information must come from manufacturers or distributors. Before publishing supplier-dependent promises, confirm the exact fulfillment process and who handles problems. Website design cannot compensate for an unanswered operational question.

Product photography needs a similar checklist. Show scale, important connections, included parts and relevant details rather than repeating the same flattering angle. For a product with several finishes, establish which images represent the selected variant. If a photograph includes accessories sold separately, make that distinction clear beside the image or purchase options.

Review product language with the support team. They know which terms customers misunderstand, which accessories get forgotten and which questions arrive immediately after purchase. Convert those repeated questions into useful page content. The goal is to help customers make informed decisions, rather than to place every possible specification in an undifferentiated block of text.

The same review should cover commercial details. Confirm the advertised price, any quote requirement, shipping calculation, installation options and applicable return conditions. Keep those explanations consistent from the product page through the cart and confirmation email. A redesign that makes the page clearer but creates a different promise at checkout still leaves the underlying problem unresolved.

Test Navigation With Real Shopping Tasks

Catalog structure becomes easier to evaluate when someone has a task to complete. Ask a reviewer to find a product for a particular space, locate an accessory for an existing model and compare two plausible alternatives. Watch the route they take before explaining how the navigation is supposed to work. Their hesitation often reveals labels that make sense internally but not to customers.

Keep a record of search terms that the catalog should recognize. Buyers may use a manufacturer’s model number, a common abbreviation or a problem description. Decide how synonyms, discontinued products and unavailable items should behave. A search result with no useful next step can turn a recoverable information gap into an abandoned visit.

Filters should use dependable product attributes. A capacity filter is only helpful when the relevant products actually have capacity values recorded consistently. Avoid adding filters simply because the theme supports them. Start with the differences that materially change a buyer’s decision and verify the results against representative products.

If the store’s range is still unsettled, revisit the high-ticket niche research guide before committing to a complex navigation system. A focused product range can support clearer category labels and more useful buying advice. Expanding categories is easier to plan when the original organizing principle is explicit.

Make the mobile version part of the review from the beginning. Check that category names remain understandable inside a collapsed menu and that filters can be applied and removed without losing the shopper’s place. A desktop screenshot cannot establish whether the same task is practical on a small screen.

Record the result of each task, not just a general impression of the design. Note whether the reviewer found the right product, understood the distinction between alternatives and identified any restriction before reaching checkout. Small observations become actionable when they are tied to an actual shopping objective.

Plan the Migration and the First Month After Launch

A redesign also moves information and changes routines. Inventory the URLs, product records, customer-facing policies, forms and tracking events that matter to the current business. Decide what stays, what changes and what needs a replacement route. Keep a record of approved mappings so the launch is not dependent on one person remembering where everything went.

Give existing high-value pages particular attention. A new visual hierarchy does not require discarding useful descriptions or removing an established buying guide. Review what customers and staff already rely on before changing it. When a URL must change, include redirect checking in the release work rather than treating it as a later cleanup task.

Business identity and policy content need an owner too. The business formation guide provides background for the operational setup behind a store. The redesign team should use the business’s verified details and approved policies, rather than inventing legal language to fill an empty template.

Before launch, run through a test purchase using the payment methods and delivery scenarios actually offered. Check variant selection, address handling, taxes where configured, shipping options, order confirmation and the internal notification received by staff. Use the platform’s appropriate testing process and keep any real transactions clearly distinguished from test orders.

Agree on what will be monitored during the first month. Useful questions include whether shoppers can find products, whether checkout failures have increased and which questions support is receiving. Keep traffic changes separate from conversion changes. An advertising campaign or seasonal demand can change the numbers without proving that a particular design decision helped or hurt.

Finally, train the people who maintain the site. Have them update a product, replace an image, publish a campaign page and correct a shipping note themselves. Document the steps that cause confusion. A handoff is more useful when it demonstrates that the team can operate the store than when it merely delivers a folder of credentials.

Make the Redesign Review About Decisions

The strongest review meeting returns to the five questions: who is buying, what the product must prove, how the catalog works, which markets the business serves and what the team can maintain. Review those answers before debating the color of a button. A clear answer does not guarantee a result, but it gives each design choice a purpose and makes later testing more useful.

For further ecommerce planning resources, visit Ecommerce Paradise. If you need help translating a business plan into specific store priorities, private coaching offers another route to work through those decisions.

Peter Mendez is the founder of Crafted, a brand-led design and development agency that builds websites and platforms for universities, nonprofits and consumer brands.

Set aside time for a second review after staff have used the site with real tasks. A small issue log should name the affected page, the exact steps that produced the problem, the expected result and the person assigned to investigate. Separate broken functionality from preferences and future feature ideas. That keeps urgent customer problems visible without turning every request into a launch emergency. After a fix, repeat the original task and check the related mobile journey. Closing an issue should mean the behavior was checked, rather than simply that someone changed a setting.