What Everyone Overlooks When Building an E-Commerce Site

What (Almost No One) Thinks About When Designing an E-commerce Site

Did you know that by 2025, over 28 million e-commerce websites will be competing in the online sales market? Can you imagine? 28 million e-commerce sites! If Venezuela were the internet, that would mean each citizen would have their own online shop. And even more strikingly, every single day, 2,162 new e-commerce sites go live (data calculated from 2024 and 2025). That’s more e-commerce sites launched per day than there are births in France (in 2025, there are an average of 1,766 births per day).

Why Does the E-commerce Market Continue to Thrive Against All Odds? The e-commerce market has been steadily growing for years. According to the French government’s digital website, francenum.gouv.fr, this continuous growth is primarily driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many retailers to establish an online presence to survive. Additionally, this growth reflects the evolution of consumer behavior—people are developing a genuine enthusiasm for online shopping.

Creating an online store is like opening a business without time constraints or borders.

Let’s now look at the blind spots or commonly overlooked areas by most entrepreneurs or business owners when creating e-commerce platforms. Let’s shed light on what you absolutely should avoid doing!

1. When User Experience is More Strategic than Aesthetic

A good UX is not just about pretty buttons, a nice design scheme, or polished visuals. That’s right, you can’t hear it enough, a successful UX isn’t always what you see, it’s what you don’t notice. A truly effective UX is when the user forgets about the interface and focuses solely on what they came to do on the site.

Picture this: the user journey is so well-designed that you don’t even realize how fluid your navigation was, every action made perfect sense, and there was zero friction, this is the result you should aim for. Now you know what to say to your team at the next e-commerce development briefing.

Ready to develop your e-commerce site? Discover the right technologies for it in our article: What Types of Software Development Are Used for E-commerce?

2. SEO: The invisible art of selling online

Google says it! SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or organic search ranking, is meant to give search engines a helping hand to better understand and interpret all the content on your e-commerce site. Another key point to remember: SEO should help users both find your site in the (SERPs), that is google’s search results—and entice them to visit your online boutique, meaning whether or not to click on your link.

The real ranking starts after the impression: when the user chooses to click or not.

You have no choice. Even before writing a single line of code, you must define a natural referencing strategy based on three pillars: technical structure – content – trust. You’ll need to work on these three on a daily basis, tirelessly, for as long as your goal is to sell online and remain visible. Yes, SEO is a marathon without a finish line. If you stop or slow down, your competitors will overtake you and your sales will suffer.

3. Mobile First: Stop Saying It, Start Doing It!

Are you an online merchant still hesitant to invest time and money into a mobile version? Let’s look at the numbers: 74% of global e-commerce transactions are made via mobile. In 2020, it was 68% (source: Statista, 2024). Mobile online sales in France have grown by an average of 28.91% since 2014. Another notable fact, reported by Think with Google in 2024: conversion rates on mobile-optimized sites are 1.5 times higher than on desktop.

Still unsure about optimizing your online store for mobile?

4. Activate the Superpower of Structured Data

Ever heard of schema.org in SEO? It’s all about structured data—it’s like magic potion whispering to Google: “Please display my products better in search results.” The result? Prices, reviews, stars, availability… You become more visible and significantly better presented than your competitors. It would be a shame to miss out, wouldn’t it?

Here’s a (secret) list of the most useful tags to implement on your e-commerce site:

• Product: makes your product more visible.
• AggregateRating: adds stars and an average rating, which greatly boosts click-through rates.
• Review: highlights customer reviews.
• ImageObject: specifies product visuals and enriches search results with a magical touch.
  

Setting up these tags isn’t necessarily easy, so we recommend entrusting the task to experts—through IT outsourcing, for instance.

If you want to discover more about e-commerce, discover our article : How to Quickly Develop your E-commerce Website

5. Online, You’re Not Selling a Product—You’re Selling a Feeling of Trust First

Trust is the number one currency in an online store. If you don’t have your users’ trust, your sales will suffer.

Establish a website security plan. It won’t just protect you from hacking—it will also reassure and retain your customers.

If these little secrets have inspired you (and we hope they have), then all that’s left is to wish you the best of luck in building a true commercial machine—one that meets real user expectations and the increasingly demanding standards of search engines.