Home & Garden Ecommerce Site Design
Tracey Wallace
Home and garden often sees the most difficulty in selling online where it concerns shipping and shipping costs.
Many items are fragile
Many items are large (and require freight)
Many items need to be bundled (both large and small)
It’s a testament to details to get this information correct –– and show it to customers when they need to see and know it.
After all, surprise someone with massive shipping costs at checkout and you run the risk of losing them. Forget to include the pieces to put a piece of furniture together and you’ll likely be getting a bad review. Have an item break on the way to a home and, well, you can just forget about customer lifetime value at that point.
But as physical retail declines in the home and garden space, there is more and more opportunity for online brands to capture market share.
Here is how 21 online brands in the home and garden space designed to educate at every step along the path to conversion –– and then some.
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1. Swoon Living
As told to BigCommerce by Patrick Fitzpatrick, Swoon.
My website www.swoonliving.com showcases why BigCommerce is such a success.
As a small business owner with limited web design knowledge, I was able to create a professionally polished ecommerce site that fulfills all of my needs.
After launching, I was able to quickly edit and smooth out any difficulties my customers encountered. This lead to mapping out all of the custom options I offer in a clean and orderly layout.
It has always been difficult to map out my custom options on various platforms, but with BigCommerce I’ve finally found a way that works.
Product photography for glassware is always tricky, but I’ve been able to capture the beauty of our glass and wood products.
The Swoon Decanters showcase what I’ve learned in product photography, as well as my skills as a glass designer. The Black Walnut Foot Decanter is the pinnacle of my current design practice and I think it is shown off quite well on the site.
2. Incy Interiors
As told to BigCommerce by Verity Muscat, Director at Pixel Eight Creative.
We moved Incy over to BigCommerce and transformed the website from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan. The move resulted in 500% increase in sales within months. Because of the success, Incy was able to open a U.S. BigCommerce store as well.
3. Revive
As told to BigCommerce by Blake Luetjen, Revive.Â
I have analyzed our basic user interactions and focused on hot spots on the site for the last 6 months.
Small changes were made once a month to monitor the website loading times of the customers, which has lead to an increased CTR. When customers have called to ask questions about the products we sell, I ask them for a real opinion.
The strong personal communications has led me to figure out exactly what the users do not like. This has been my first design experience on BigCommerce and has absolutely been a flawless, positive experience as a designer, developer, and owner.
Within the first 2 days of relaunching our site, the positive feedback from our customers has felt amazing. Providing a high-quality product means nothing, if your design and layout lack the same quality.
4. Tatine Candles
As told to BigCommerce by Margo Breznik, Tatine Candles.
We wanted our store to be a more evocative experience with gorgeous product photography to draw in the customer.
A non-traditional black background was more on-brand for us than trendy white. As opposed to a blank white background product shot, we made the singular product photographs have elements of texture and color to provide a sense of the home space where our products would be living.
5. Print Decor
6. Prune Danish
7. Grill Grate
As told to BigCommerce by Brad Barrett, Grill Grate.
We know our product is not easy to ‘figure out.’ Customers used to come with intent to buy but were confused (often). Our effort to streamline the decision tree coupled with our teams really listening to our customers helped us make it much easier to buy.
Conversions are up 20% and we get constant compliments on the site, unsolicited.
8. Luumo Design
Out of the Box Themes Made for Home & Garden
No development. Customize everything with a click of a button. Get your theme here.
As told to BigCommerce by Maria Dumoulin, Marketing Associate at Kenneth Lynch and Sons.
We are a 3rd generation corporation selling a wide range of outdoor elements to a varied market group.
The flexibility of the design platform allowed us to highlight each one of the brands that we created within our company so that we can eventually directly target these various groups.
We went from a static 20 page website to a true ecommerce site! The metrics are not even comparable. We now see a lot of return customers coming back to gather information for their projects.
The look and feel of our site is elegant and clean, which really highlights the beauty of our high end products. Our web designer helped us select the BigCommerce platform based on the flexibility that it had to offer. We are really thrilled with the results!
 10. Real Sliding Hardware
As told to BigCommerce by Caleb Wilson, Real Sliding Hardware.
Despite the high volume, we’ve been able to focus our efforts on creating an aesthetically pleasing storefront. We take pride in the quality of our products and feel that we’ve built a website that reflects that same quality.
11. Bright Agrotech
As told to BigCommerce by Chris Michael, Co-Owner and Director of Growth & Community at Bright Agrotech.
We’re a vertical farming startup on the high plains of Laramie, WY that empowers local farmers to grow better food with techniques that make sense for our resource-constrained world.
Our ecommerce store only makes up about 8-10% of our total company’s annual revenue, but it’s instrumental for us to attract new customers and help get them started in the vertical farming space.
We’re a farmer-focused company with a strong emphasis on education, so we wanted our ecommerce store to represent those same values. We worked to do just that with simple layouts, media-rich product descriptions, helpful digital resources available for purchase, an easy one-step checkout, and finally customer-focused receipt emails to round out the user experience.
Last year we had over 100,000 visitors come to our store with an average conversion rate of 1.86% and we’re already on track to beat these numbers (40% of the way there as of March 31).
 13. Verve
As told to BigCommerce by Jeff Starr, Developer at Pixel Grapes.Â
The Verve store features some design specific features such as an off-canvas cart & a fullscreen overlay menu. It shows how simple clean design and custom elements can be utilized to develop a stand out store.
14. Renin
As told to BigCommerce by Michal Zawada, Ecommerce Manager at Renin.Â
We considered a few things when redesigning, including:
Picking the right content management system
Focused on website design and user experience practices
SEO Practices
Best practices to comply with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation
Website Speed and Website Security
15. Sod Depot
As told to BigCommerce by Luis Silva, Sod Depot.
We really found BigCommerce worth the investment. No one in our industry looks into things like this to really enhance their internet presence. Finding a partner like BigCommerce that can help achieve that is priceless and we feel like we are the leading company in our industry thanks to their help.
 16. iCustom Rug
As told to BigCommerce by Sarah Kristic, iCustom Rug.
We believe our store is the perfect design for selling products with options, and with the easy way of choosing and customizing your area rug from our website.
 17. Metro Screenworks
18. Cudesso
As told to BigCommerce by Lisa Stoch, Cudesso.
Cudesso is a new ecommerce store with more than 3,000 products and essentially 3 sites that sit on one seamless site.
With 3 distinct divisions, and thousands of products it is quite a complicated site which needed to feel easy to the consumer.
We feel it’s aesthetically pleasing, user friendly, educational and utilizes all aspects of the BigCommerce platform to create a great user experience and an awesome ecommerce site.
Color coding is consistent through each division and carried through to the most minute detail. We have pulled in social feeds in a unique way to help showcase our beautiful home projects. We feel we have the right combination of dynamic and static aspects to the site.
BigCommerce has given us the tools on the back end to be able to deliver a beautifully designed and functional web site!
19. Greenbee Landscape
As told to BigCommerce by Shawn Holstein, Greenbee Landscape.Â
Greenbee Landscape was developed because a large percentage of consumers want to have the option to do some or all of the landscape work themselves (DIY), but don’t have either access to the same plant and building materials that traditional landscape companies have, or don’t have the design and/or knowledge base to make their vision come to life.
One of our clients favorite attractions is our pre-designed plant packages that provides them with a complete design, all the plants they need and step by step instructions for installation and care of the plants.
Greenbee gives consumers the options they want in a user friendly and simple online format that they can research and place their order from the comfort of their home. The overall website design does an outstanding job of bringing colors, shapes, effects, nature and creativity to life.
The Greenbee website has elevated the standard in the landscaping industry and the feedback we have gotten from our clients and others that have viewed the website has been outstanding since we officially launched it a couple of weeks ago. We’re looking forward to many more years of success partnered with BigCommerce.
20. Deck Expressions
21.Core Glow
As told to BigCommerce by Paige Whitehead, Core Glow.Â
We offer a fresh design for medium- to high-tech glow stones. By combining a clean theme, professional photography, and intuitive site construction, our web sales have increased by ~200% in the first quarter compared to our outdated WordPress site.
We are new to the scene and bring a fresh and professional face to all things glow.
Leading Home & Garden Stores Choose BigCommerce
Get more design inspiration here.
Tracey is the Director of Marketing at MarketerHire, the marketplace for fast-growth B2B and DTC brands looking for high-quality, pre-vetted freelance marketing talent. She is also the founder of Doris Sleep and was previously the Head of Marketing at Eterneva, both fast-growth DTC brands marketplaces like MarketerHire aim to help. Before that, she was the Global Editor-in-Chief at BigCommerce, where she launched the company’s first online conference (pre-pandemic, nonetheless!), wrote books on How to Sell on Amazon, and worked closely with both ecommerce entrepreneurs and executives at Fortune 1,000 companies to help them scale strategically and profitably. She is a fifth generation Texan, the granddaughter of a depression-era baby turned WWII fighter jet pilot turned self-made millionaire, and wifed up to the truest of heroes, a pediatric trauma nurse, who keeps any of Tracey’s own complaints about business, marketing, or just a seemingly lousy day in perspective.