I spent almost 7 years at Shopify across theme support, theme development, and storefront optimization. My partner Kris was there for nearly 7 years as well, mostly on the UX side — she did heuristic evaluations for Plus merchants toward the end of her time there.
We left and started doing independent storefront audits. The thing that surprised me most wasn't what merchants were getting wrong. It was how consistent the patterns were.
The same friction points show up everywhere, across totally different industries, price points, and store sizes. And almost none of them are things an automated tool would catch.
Here are a few that come up constantly:
Trust signals that aren't where they need to be. Merchants will have a great returns policy or solid shipping info, but it's buried on a policy page nobody visits. That stuff needs to be visible on the product page and near the add-to-cart button — right where the buying decision happens. Baymard Institute has done extensive research on this and the data is pretty clear: if buyers can't find trust-building information near the point of commitment, they hesitate or leave.
Navigation that makes sense to the merchant but not the buyer. Collection names that use internal terminology or brand-specific language instead of words a customer would actually search for. Menu structures that reflect how the business thinks about its products, not how someone shops for them. This is one of those things that's invisible when you're inside the business every day.
Mobile experience treated as an afterthought. This one kills me because the traffic split for most Shopify stores is 70%+ mobile. But I regularly see tap targets that are too small, sticky headers eating up half the viewport, and product image galleries that don't work well with swipe gestures. The store looks fine on the desktop the merchant is working from, but the customer on their phone is having a different experience entirely.
No clear visual hierarchy on product pages. Everything is the same size, the same weight, the same color. Nothing guides the eye. When everything is competing for attention, nothing wins. The buyer has to work to figure out what matters, and most of them won't bother.
These aren't edge cases. These are patterns that repeat across hundreds of stores, and they quietly eat into conversions without the merchant ever realizing it.
The fix usually isn't a redesign. It's small, targeted changes — moving a trust badge, renaming a collection, restructuring a mobile menu. The kind of stuff that takes a developer an afternoon but has a measurable impact on how buyers move through the store.
That's what we do now at Spruce Pixel. Every finding gets prioritized by impact, backed by research from Baymard, NNGroup, or Google, and delivered with annotated screenshots and clear action steps. No calls, no fluff, just a PDF your team can work through.
If any of this sounds familiar, your store probably has a few of these hiding in plain sight too.
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