It is the little things that make a shop sell.

It is tempting to think that a website needs a full redesign before it will sell more, yet some of the largest differences I have seen come from small things: a line of text in the wrong place, a button that does not look like a button, a chart that cannot be read on a phone. This is what putting a few of them right did for one online shop in a little under a fortnight.

The shop sells a specialist product that most of its customers have been recommended by a professional, and it already had a good multibuy offer: 15% off when you buy two, and 20% off when you buy four. The trouble was that hardly anyone took up the larger saving, and when I went looking for the reason, it was not one large problem but a great many small ones.

The offer was in the wrong place.

The multibuy offer was on the product page, but it sat beneath the Apple Pay and Google Pay buttons, the part of a product page people tend to scroll straight past. I moved it up beside the quantity box, where people are actually deciding how many to buy, and added a simple choice of one, two or four, with the saving shown on each, so that choosing four is as easy as choosing one.

The basket does the arithmetic for them.

In the basket, the message now tells people exactly how close they are to the next saving, so that someone with two in their basket reads “add just two more and it rises to 20%” rather than having to work it out for themselves. Beside it sits a single button that adds another of the same size and colour, or makes it four, without sending them back to the product page to begin again.

If the basket holds only the main product, it now also suggests the smaller accessory that goes with it, with a photograph and its price. I first added that as a plain line of text, and it disappeared among the other notes in the basket so completely that even I missed it, which is a small lesson in itself.

Things that looked fine on my screen.

Some of what I found showed itself only when I looked at the site the way customers do. The Proceed to checkout button had picked up a style that made it look like a plain link until you hovered over it, and on a phone you cannot hover at all. The drop-down list for choosing a size had lost its arrow, so it looked like a box to type in. The sizing chart, which the owner uses herself when helping customers, was too wide for a phone, so the larger sizes sat off the edge of the screen, where nobody would think to look. And a button for a payment method that had been switched off months earlier was still sitting on every product page.

None of these would ever prompt a customer to pick up the telephone and complain; they would simply buy less, or leave.

Asking people how they found you.

While the work was under way, I added one optional question at the checkout: “How did you hear about us?” Website analytics can tell you that someone arrived from Google, but not that a professional recommended you and they searched for your name afterwards. Of the nine customers who have answered so far, eight were recommended by a professional, which tells the owner far more about where her time and marketing should go than any chart could.

What happened next.

The changes went live over a few days at the end of October, and I have just looked at the eleven days since. The average order from everyday customers has risen from about £76 to £96. Three customers have bought four at once, which had happened only three times in the whole year before that, and not once in the two months before. One of them added the accessory too, the first the shop had sold since the suggestion went in.

Overall, the shop is taking roughly three times as much a week as it did in the two months before, although that includes one large trade order and this is the busier end of the year, so I would not credit all of it to a few small changes. It is too soon for firm conclusions, and I will look again at the end of the month, but the pattern is already clear enough to be worth sharing.

Why the little things matter.

I have been building websites since 2001, more than 1,600 of them, and the lesson that keeps returning is that people do not use websites the way the people who made them do. They are on a phone, they skim, they are often in a hurry, and every small piece of friction is another reason to buy less, or not at all. A redesign alone will not catch these things, because you find them only by watching how real customers use the site, and then going through it, piece by piece, with their eyes rather than your own.

How it works with me.

If you have an online shop and suspect it could be doing more, I am always glad to look at it. You can read more about how I build and look after online shops, or simply write to me.