Building customer trust in early stage ecommerce
Exploring how trust, clarity and customer experience influence purchasing behaviour within an early stage ecommerce brand.
Overiview
Dear Izzie is a small independent girlswear label I started during a career transition period. Beyond running day-to-day operations, the experience gave me hands-on exposure to how customers behave, hesitate and make purchasing decisions within an ecommerce environment.
As the brand was still in its early stages with limited social proof and traffic, one of the biggest challenges was designing an experience that balanced editorial branding with conversion clarity and customer trust.
My Role
Owner
Shopify management
Product page optimisation
Content planning
Customer journey thinking
Campaign analysis
Ecommerce operations
Customer communication
The Challenge
Several recurring friction points became apparent through customer interactions and observing user behaviour across the ecommerce journey.
These included:
uncertainty around sizing and fit
low purchase confidence due to limited reviews and social proof
balancing visual storytelling with product clarity
low-intent traffic from paid campaigns
helping customers compare and understand products more easily
The challenge was not only designing an aesthetically cohesive experience, but also reducing hesitation and improving clarity throughout the customer journey.
Key Observations
Trust heavily influenced purchase behaviour
Customers often looked for reassurance around sizing, fabric comfort and product quality before making purchase decisions. In the absence of strong social proof, clarity and transparency became especially important.
Branding and conversion needed to coexist
While maintaining a consistent visual identity was important, overly editorial presentation sometimes reduced product clarity and increased hesitation.
Different traffic sources resulted in different behaviours
Observing campaign performance highlighted differences between high-intent and low-intent traffic behaviour, particularly across placements and customer entry points.
Design Iterations
Several changes were explored across the ecommerce experience to reduce friction and improve customer understanding.
Improving product clarity
Refined product descriptions and product page structure to better communicate fit, fabric, comfort and product functionality.
Strengthening trust signals
Explored ways to surface reassurance through sizing guidance, product information and customer support touchpoints.
Simplifying product discovery
Tested different approaches to merchandising, collection organisation and cross-product pairing to help customers navigate the catalog more easily.
Reflection
Running Dear Izzie gave me a different perspective on customer experience beyond traditional enterprise UX projects.
It strengthened my understanding of:
customer hesitation and decision-making
trust-building in low-social-proof environments
balancing branding with usability and clarity
ecommerce behaviour and conversion friction
designing within operational and business constraints