Unlocking Growth Through Behavioural Science: How We Transformed a Footwear Brand’s E-commerce Experience

Online footwear retail is a highly competitive market today. It has become necessary for every brand to understand customers’ challenges in finding the right product and the reasons behind cart abandonment or hesitation at checkout. Addressing these issues involves more than just fixing bugs; it requires insight into human behaviour. So, when we partnered with a footwear brand, our focus extended beyond a website redesign; we reimagined the entire customer journey through the lens of behavioural science to create tangible business outcomes.

This is the story of how we identified, diagnosed, and solved friction points across every customer touchpoint, generating measurable improvements to both user experience and business outcomes.


Setting the Foundation: What’s Inside the Footwear Buying Mindset

Our secondary research unveiled critical consumer behaviour insights. Unlike other products, footwear requires a unique evaluation process. Customers worry about fit, comfort, and performance, concerns that are difficult to address in a digital environment. Footwear buyers do not make impulse purchases; they weigh alternatives, scan user ratings and reviews, and dwell on sizing guides before committing. As a result, it is a research-heavy journey driven by what we call the confidence gap.

Online footwear shopping carries inherent risk, and without trying products on, customers need alternative signals of trust and reassurance.

These insights laid our foundation, not just for optimising a website, but for building digital bridges across psychological barriers that keep customers from confidently clicking “buy.”


Our Approach: Journey Mapping Meets Behavioural Diagnosis

We began by mapping the complete ecosystem of customer interactions across a footwear ecommerce website. This included the happy path from discovery to ordering, the browsing journey, account creation and management, the complete ordering process, and all post-purchase journeys including cancellations, exchanges, returns, and refunds. Each journey represented a distinct mental model and set of user goals.

This is where most companies stop, but we were just getting started. For each journey, we broke down every single micro-step. We didn't just look at "add to cart" as a single action. Instead, we examined the moment of seeing the button, understanding available sizes, checking delivery timeframes, weighing the decision, clicking the button, and receiving confirmation. This granular view revealed friction points invisible at the macro level.

For each micro-step, we conducted a comprehensive behavioral diagnosis. We asked ourselves and based on secondary research what mental obstacles prevented progress, identifying issues like decision paralysis from too many options, loss aversion and the fear of making the wrong choice, uncertainty about product quality or fit, lack of social proof or trust signals, and cognitive overload from complex information. We also examined the practical obstacles such as unclear delivery timelines, complicated return policies, missing size information, unclear product specifications, and confusing navigation paths.

But here's where we applied a nuanced understanding that would shape our entire approach: friction isn't always the enemy.


The Good Friction Paradox

One of our most important insights was recognizing that not all friction should be eliminated. Strategic friction can actually improve outcomes. Consider account creation during checkout. While conventional wisdom suggests removing every obstacle, a brief pause that explains the benefits of creating an account increases completion by creating a sense of commitment and reducing drop-offs on return visits.

Similarly, during returns, we introduced an intentional “Are you sure?” moment for footwear-specific issues. For example, when users selected a size or fit-related reason, we surfaced guidance like whether the shoe typically loosens after a few wears or highlighted availability of the same shoe in a different size. This short interruption reduced hasty returns without preventing users from completing the return when needed.

On the other hand, we identified where friction genuinely hurts. Excessive form fields increase abandonment exponentially with every unnecessary field. Slow load times have no upside whatsoever. Complex navigation drives users away when they can't find what they need.

Our goal wasn't to create a frictionless experience - it was to create an appropriately-frictionless experience, with intentional friction placed strategically to improve both user and business outcomes.


Solutions Through Behavioural Science

For each diagnosed barrier, we developed targeted interventions rooted in behavioral science principles. Let me walk you through some specific examples that illustrate how this approach works in practice.

The product pages themselves needed rethinking. Customers often have objections and questions, but they have to hunt for answers. By moving delivery and return information above the fold, adding clear "Free returns within 30 days" messaging, and including user-generated content showing products in use, we anticipated and answered objections before they became reasons to abandon.

We also translated product features into customer-relevant meaning rather than leaving them as technical claims. Key features were presented visually, not just named. For example, instead of simply stating “memory foam,” we explained what this meant in practice, such as improved pressure distribution and all-day comfort. By converting features into tangible benefits, we reduced interpretation effort and helped customers better judge comfort and suitability without physical trial.

The ordering journey presented its own behavioral challenges. We know there’s significant cart abandonment at the account creation step. Customers ready to buy suddenly face a decision about whether to create an account, which feels like a separate commitment layered on top of their purchase decision. We introduced guest checkout, offered social login to minimize friction, and adopted progressive profiling where we collected data over time rather than all at once.

Checkout anxiety manifests in subtle ways. Customers hesitate, or abandon entirely just before completing their purchase due to trust deficit. We addressed this by adding trust signals such as security badges and payment icons to reinforce safety at the moment of payment. We kept the order summary visible throughout checkout so customers always knew what they were committing to, and made the cost breakdown fully transparent with no surprise shipping charges. Each intervention was designed to remove a specific psychological trigger for last-minute abandonment.

What We Learned

First, granularity matters. High-level journey maps can miss the micro-moments where real decisions take place and where behavioural interventions have the greatest impact.

Second, psychology often outweighs technical optimisation. A fast page fails if choice overwhelms users; great design falls flat if it doesn’t build trust. Technical improvements only work when paired with an understanding of human fears, biases, and mental models.
Third, friction isn’t the enemy; it is, in fact, a tool. The goal isn’t zero friction, but intentional friction. When placed strategically, it can prompt consideration or build commitment. What matters is knowing when friction helps and when it hurts.

Additionally, context changes everything. What’s a barrier in one journey can be a benefit in another. First-time visitors, returning users, discovery, checkout, and returns each demand different interventions.
Finally, we proved that behavioural science is measurable. When you understand why people behave as they do, you can design interventions that deliver quantifiable results.


Conclusion

The future is here. It is no longer about optimising e-commerce platforms with faster load times and prettier designs; it requires a deep understanding of human behaviour and designing experiences that work with human psychology. For our work with the footwear brand, this meant transforming every journey from a series of obstacles into a guided path that acknowledged customer concerns, reduced uncertainty, and strategically deployed friction only where it served both user and business goals.

The result was clear: an e-commerce experience that doesn’t just sell shoes, but builds confidence, trust, and lasting customer relationships. By grounding every decision in behavioural science, we created a website that understands not just what customers do, but why they do it, and designs for both.