A good e-commerce site design does more than look polished, it removes every point of friction between someone landing on a product page and actually completing checkout. If you're rethinking your own store's design, here are seven brands doing specific things well, and what's worth borrowing from each.
1. Allbirds
Allbirds built its entire brand identity around simplicity, and that shows directly in the site design: minimal color palette, generous white space, and product photography that does the selling without needing much supporting copy. The navigation is deliberately narrow, a small number of clear categories rather than an overwhelming mega-menu.
Key takeaway: A tightly curated product line doesn't need a complicated site to sell it. Simplicity in navigation and layout can read as confidence, not as a limitation.
2. Gymshark
Gymshark leans hard into lifestyle imagery and community proof, using real customer and athlete content throughout the shopping experience rather than just studio product shots. The site also handles a genuinely large catalog well, filtering and category structure stay fast and intuitive even with a huge number of SKUs.
Key takeaway: If your brand has real community or user-generated content, weaving it directly into product pages (not just a separate gallery) builds trust exactly where the buying decision happens.
3. Glossier
Glossier's site is built almost entirely around clean product photography against a consistent, recognizable visual style, soft, minimal, on-brand in every image. Product pages keep copy short and scannable, leaning on visuals over long descriptions to communicate what a product does.
Key takeaway: Visual consistency across every product image builds brand recognition faster than any amount of written copy. If your product photography varies wildly in style, that's often a bigger conversion drag than people realize.
4. Chubbies
Chubbies uses personality and humor throughout its copy in a way that's genuinely differentiated from most e-commerce sites, product descriptions, error pages, even checkout messaging carry the brand's voice. It's a reminder that brand personality doesn't have to disappear once someone leaves the homepage.
Key takeaway: Consistent brand voice all the way through checkout, not just on the homepage, makes a site feel considered rather than templated.
5. Fenty Beauty
Fenty Beauty's site puts real effort into helping customers choose the right product for their specific needs, shade-matching tools, clear filtering by skin tone and type, and detailed product information that goes well beyond a basic description. For a category where the wrong purchase means a return, that guidance meaningfully reduces friction and cart abandonment.
Key takeaway: If your product has meaningful variation (size, shade, fit), investing in tools that help customers choose correctly the first time pays for itself in fewer returns and more confident purchases.
6. Blume
Blume, a smaller DTC skincare brand, does an especially good job of building trust through transparency, ingredient breakdowns, founder story, and clear educational content woven into the shopping experience rather than buried in a separate blog. For newer or smaller brands without the recognition of a major name, this kind of built-in credibility matters more, not less.
Key takeaway: Smaller or newer brands can offset lower brand recognition by making trust-building information (ingredients, sourcing, founder story) visible right where the buying decision happens, not tucked away on a separate page nobody visits.
7. Warby Parker
Warby Parker pairs a clean, simple layout with a genuinely useful tool: a virtual try-on feature that addresses the single biggest hesitation in buying glasses online, not knowing how they'll actually look. It's a strong example of solving the specific objection standing between a visitor and a purchase, rather than just making the page look nice.
Key takeaway: Identify the single biggest hesitation stopping someone from buying your product online, then build a specific feature that solves exactly that objection, rather than relying on design polish alone.
The pattern across all seven
None of these sites rely purely on aesthetics. Each one solves a specific friction point, choice paralysis, trust, fit, uncertainty, and builds the design around solving it. That's the difference between a site that looks good and one that actually converts.
If you're evaluating whether your own Shopify store is doing the same, that's exactly the kind of audit we run as part of our Shopify work, looking not just at how a store looks, but at what's actually standing between a visitor and a completed purchase.
Want an honest look at where your store is losing potential buyers? Book a free strategy call.
