From 14,000 pounds to 240,000 pounds in monthly revenue, and most ecommerce owners still get this wrong.
They treat a redesign as an expense. It sits in the budget next to the electricity bill, as a cost to be minimised rather than a decision to be made well.
The Client I Had to Argue With
Two years ago we onboarded a client with a very plain design. Convincing them to invest properly in usability and the customer journey was hard work, and I understand why. Spending money on how a store feels is uncomfortable when you cannot yet see the return.
When we did finally do it, the project grew into a serious one, with a total budget of around 25,000 pounds.
Why It Worked, and It Was Not the Design
Here is the part that made the difference, and it has nothing to do with taste.
The business already had a customer database. It already had people buying from it. That changes the entire calculation, because improving the experience is not a bet on strangers. It is an improvement delivered to people who have already decided you are worth their money.
When you improve the customer experience for an existing base, you are also improving the return on everything else you spend. Your email campaigns land somewhere better. Your paid ads convert into a store that does not fight the visitor. Your organic traffic stops leaking. It is the same argument I have made about how the same traffic can produce far more revenue once conversion is fixed.
The result was roughly a 10x uplift in revenue, with the same audience and the same customer base. Nothing new came in. The store simply stopped losing what was already there.
When I Would Not Recommend It
Is that an inspiring story? Yes. Would I recommend a redesign to every client we onboard? Absolutely not.
If you do not have a stable customer base yet, a redesign is a very expensive way to guess. You have no behaviour to design around and no data to tell you whether you were right. That is when I would tell you to spend a fraction of your budget and keep the rest for what the data tells you, and I have argued at length that a rebuild is the start of the work, not the end of it.
The Test
Do you already have customers? Do you have a stable base of people who buy from you?
If yes, then a redesign is not money leaving the business. It is money spent on the people who are already funding it, and on showing them that you care how they are treated. That is what all of us want as customers, every time we buy anything from anyone.
If no, spend the money on finding out who your customers are first. The design can wait. The learning cannot.