What Pages Does Every Ecommerce Website Need?
There are three kinds of page a shop needs and they are judged by different standards. Most articles on this subject cover only the first kind, which is why so many shops are built with excellent product pages and nothing that makes a stranger confident enough to use them.
Three Kinds Of Page
A shop needs pages that sell, pages a UK business is required to publish and pages that make a stranger confident enough to buy. Sorting them into those three groups matters more than the list itself, because each group is judged by a different standard.
Pages that sell are judged on whether they work. Somebody has to be able to find a product, understand it and get it into a basket.
Required pages are judged on whether they are correct and complete. Nobody enjoys reading them and that is not what they are for.
Confidence pages are judged on whether they are specific. A vague reassurance removes no objection, so a page in this group either answers a real doubt with real detail or it is decoration.
The reason this sorting matters is that shops routinely apply one standard to all three. A business proud of its product photography will produce a required page by copying somebody else's, then an About page that says nothing while looking well designed. Each group needs a different kind of attention. Knowing which you are writing tells you what would make it good.
The Pages That Sell
Six page types do the actual selling. Every shop has them. They are not equally well built.
Home. A signpost rather than a shop window, covered in how website design affects ecommerce conversion rates.
Category. The workhorse of the whole shop and the subject of the next paragraph.
Subcategory. Where a large catalogue becomes navigable rather than overwhelming. It is also where most shops either stop too early or divide too finely.
Product. Where a decision either happens or does not.
Search results. The page nobody designs. It is treated as a system output rather than as a page, despite being seen by your most decided visitors.
Basket. A staging post where people check what they have chosen and decide whether to continue.
Category pages deserve the emphasis they rarely get. More people search for a type of thing than for a specific item, so category pages receive a larger share of the demand than product pages do. They are also unrewarding to design, since a grid of products looks finished the moment it exists, so they are usually left as exactly that. The gap between what they receive and what they are given is the largest single opportunity on most shops. It is taken apart in how to design ecommerce category pages.
The Pages A UK Shop Needs
Selling to consumers online in the UK carries obligations about what information you make available and how accessible it is. What follows describes what each page exists to do. It does not tell you what to write.
Terms and conditions. The basis on which you sell, covering how an order becomes a contract, what happens if something is out of stock and how disputes are handled.
Privacy. What personal information you collect, why, how long you keep it and who else sees it.
Cookies. What is stored on a visitor's device and what choice they have about it.
Delivery. What you charge, where you send, how long it takes and what happens when something goes astray.
Returns and cancellations. Distinct things. Returns concern faulty or unwanted goods, while cancellation rights for distance selling are a separate matter with their own requirements.
Contact details. Including a genuine geographic address and a way to reach a person, which is both an obligation and the trust signal covered in the conversion pillar.
Two things worth stating plainly. This page is general information rather than legal advice. Anybody setting up or reviewing these pages should take proper advice on the wording for their own business. And do not copy another shop's policies, which is common and unwise. They were written for a different business selling different things under different arrangements. Inheriting them means publishing commitments you have not read.
The Pages That Build Confidence
These exist to remove specific doubts. Naming the doubt each one addresses is what stops them becoming decoration.
About. Removes the doubt that you might not be a real business. Who you are, where you are, how long you have done this and why you sell what you sell. Specific and unpolished beats general and well written.
How it works. Removes uncertainty where the purchase is unusual. Made to order, fitted, subscription, hire, personalised. If a customer cannot picture what happens after paying, they frequently do not pay.
Sizing and specification guides. Removes the largest single objection in clothing, footwear and anything technical. Not a generic chart, since a generic chart tells somebody nothing about whether your items run small.
Frequently asked questions. Removes the doubts your customers actually have rather than the ones you imagine. The source material is your own inbox.
Customer feedback. Removes the doubt that you might be the only person who has ever bought from you. Genuine reviews with detail and variation, plus the rule that goes with them: never mark up a rating that was not given.
The test across this group is whether you can state the objection each page removes. If you cannot, the page exists because the template offered it.
Support Pages
Order tracking, account and order history, a help section and a returns process somebody can start without composing an email. These are usually built last, if at all, because they feel like housekeeping rather than commerce.
The argument for them is financial rather than tidy. Every support page is an enquiry that does not happen.
Consider the arithmetic on the single most common message any shop receives, which is some version of where is my order. Answered on a page it is answered once. Answered by a person it is answered every time somebody asks, each answer costing a few minutes of attention from somebody who was doing something else. Each one arrives with mild annoyance already attached.
The same applies to how do I return this, what is my order number, when will you have it back in stock and can I change my address. Every one of them is either a page or a permanent tax on somebody's day.
Which makes support pages the cheapest customer service a business will ever buy. They are written once, they work at three in the morning, they never get tired of the question and they remove the specific friction that makes a customer decide not to bother next time.
Pages Worth Having For Search
A shop's categories and products cover people who already know roughly what they want. A large amount of demand comes from people who do not. It needs somewhere to land.
Buying guides. How to choose between options within a category, written for somebody who has not yet narrowed anything down.
Comparison pages. One thing against another, where customers are genuinely weighing two approaches rather than two items.
Problem led pages. What to do when something has happened, which is how a great many people arrive at a product without knowing the product exists.
The reason these need their own pages rather than being added to categories is structural. A category page is already doing two jobs at once: helping somebody browse and earning a position for a category term. Adding a long guide to it makes it worse at both, because the products get pushed down and the writing gets truncated to protect them.
So the arrangement that works is separate pages that link into the categories they support, which keeps each page doing one job. Where those pages sit in a shop's structure, plus why that decision is made during the build rather than afterwards, is covered in how web design affects ecommerce SEO.
What To Leave Out
A page is not free. Each one is something to maintain and something that makes a claim about the business, so an empty page is worse than a missing one.
The empty blog. A section containing three posts from four years ago, perhaps a heading promising content that never arrived. It tells a visitor the business started something and stopped, which is precisely the impression a shop asking for card details should avoid.
Team pages nobody reads. Worth having when the people are the product, as in anything advisory or specialist. Rarely worth having for a shop selling objects, where a visitor wants delivery information rather than photographs of a marketing department.
Duplicated policy pages. Templates frequently supply two returns pages or a delivery page and a shipping page. Whichever a customer finds should be complete, since finding the incomplete one is worse than finding neither.
Template leftovers. Portfolio, services and testimonials sections sitting empty because they came with the theme and nobody removed them.
The common thread is inattention. Inattention is the thing a first time visitor is trying to detect. Every abandoned corner of a shop is evidence for the case they are quietly building against you.
Every page earns
its place.
We plan the page set before designing anything, so a shop launches with the categories, support pages and confidence pages it needs rather than with whatever the template supplied. We do not draft your policy wording. We will tell you where you need proper advice.
What a build covers:
Ongoing management afterwards sits inside our fixed monthly fee. Build work is quoted per project.
Twenty guides.
One subject.
This page covers what to build. The rest of the series covers how category and product pages should work, where conversion is lost, what a build costs and why the search ceiling is set during the build.
