UX checklist for an online store

Always ask someone else - preferably someone who is not familiar with your store. This is a fundamental limitation of testing your own product: you know every path by heart, so you unknowingly bypass navigation problems that are blocking for a new user. 3-5 people from your target audience are enough, each with a separate task ("buy a blue sweater in size M and see when it arrives"). Watch without prompting - where they stop says more than any questionnaire.

Three data sources give the answer in order of increasing accuracy. GA4 with e-commerce funnel shows where users leave the purchase path - if 60% drop off between "shopping cart" and "delivery details," the problem is at that stage. Session recordings (Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity - Clarity is free) show specific behavior: where they click, where they stop, where they scroll back. User testing gives the most accurate answer, but takes time. For most stores, the funnel alone in GA4 plus a few dozen session recordings are enough to pinpoint the 3-4 biggest problems.

It depends on where you are losing customers - and this is a question for your data, not for general benchmarks. If users add products to the cart but don't complete the purchase - the problem is in the checkout. If they are referring from product pages without adding to cart - the problem is in the product card or category navigation. As a general rule of thumb: optimizing the checkout gives you a faster and more measurable return, because you are acting on users who have already made a purchase decision - any barrier at this stage is a lost sale that was already "ready."