How Can an Unresponsive Design Hurt Your Customer’s Online Shopping Journey?

Have you ever visited a website on your phone, only to find the text too small, the buttons hard to press, or the pages taking forever to load? Frustrating, right? Now imagine one of your customers having that same experience on your online store.

These days, people shop on all kinds of devices—mobiles, tablets, and laptops. If your website doesn’t work well on all of them, you could be losing customers before they even get started – all because of a poor online shopping journey.

In this blog, we’ll explain what an unresponsive design is, how it affects your customer’s journey, and what you can do to fix it.

What’s an Unresponsive Design?

A website with responsive design automatically adjusts to different screen sizes. So whether someone visits your site from a desktop computer or a smartphone, it still looks good and works properly.

An unresponsive design, on the other hand, doesn’t do that. It might look fine on a computer, but completely fall apart on a phone—images get cut off, buttons are too tiny, and text is hard to read. This kind of experience can quickly drive people away.

Understanding the Online Shopping Journey

To understand how design affects your customers, it helps to know the basic steps of an online shopping journey:

1. Landing on your website (through search or ads)
2. Browsing through your products
3. Choosing a product to learn more
4. Adding to cart and checking out
5. Following up (like tracking orders or coming back to shop again)

Each of these steps is a key part of your customer’s decision-making process. If even one stage feels clunky or confusing—especially on mobile—it can break their flow and stop them from completing a purchase. 

That’s why good web design should work to support the entire journey and ensure customers can move to the next without friction. 

Now let’s look at how poor design can hurt each of these steps.

How Unresponsive Design Makes Things Hard for Your Customers

1) Bad First Impressions

If someone opens your website on their phone and it looks messy or broken, chances are they’ll leave straight away. People judge a website in just a few seconds. If it doesn’t look trustworthy or easy to use, they won’t stick around.

2) Hard to Browse

Menus that don’t work properly, text that doesn’t fit on the screen, and links that are hard to tap—these are all signs of an unresponsive site. When browsing feels like a chore, people give up and move on.

3) Frustrating Product Pages

Customers want to see product photos, read clear descriptions, and maybe even compare a few options. If your product pages don’t display well on mobile, they might miss important info—or worse, not trust what they see.

4) Checkout Nightmares

Even if someone makes it to the checkout, a difficult payment process can ruin the sale. Tiny text fields, confusing buttons, or slow loading pages cause people to abandon their carts.

5) No Return Visits

A bad experience means they probably won’t come back. And they might tell others to avoid your store too. Repeat customers are key to growing your business, and design plays a big role in keeping them happy.

The Cost of Poor Online Shopping Experience to Your Business

It’s easy to think of unresponsive design as just a “tech issue” or something you’ll fix later—but the truth is, it has real consequences for your bottom line. Every time a customer gets frustrated and leaves your site, that’s potential revenue walking out the digital door.

And in a competitive online space, they’ve got plenty of other places to go. Here are the potential results of not addressing and improving customer experience:

• Lower conversion rates (fewer people buying)
• Poor Google rankings (because Google now uses mobile-first indexing)
• Bad reviews
• High bounce rates (people leaving your site quickly)

How Can You Fix an Unresponsive Website?

If you’ve realised your website isn’t giving customers the smooth, mobile-friendly experience they expect—don’t stress. The good news is, there are clear steps you can take to turn things around. Whether it’s a few simple fixes or a complete overhaul, improving your site’s responsiveness can have a big impact on customer satisfaction and sales.

At Chromatix, we’ve helped many businesses across Australia create responsive, user-friendly websites that are built to convert leads into paying customers. Here’s how hiring our web design agency in Melbourne can get you back on track:

1. Site audit – We assess your current website across all devices
2. Mobile-first design – Built specifically for mobile usability from the start
3. Clean, custom UX/UI – Designed for smooth user journeys and easy navigation
4. Fast load times – Optimised performance on all devices
5. Fully responsive builds – Flexible layouts that adapt to any screen size
6. Conversion-driven approach – Every element designed to increase sales
7. Ongoing support – We keep your site responsive and up to date

Wrap Up

Your website is often the first experience people have with your brand. If it doesn’t work well on mobile, they may never come back. 

Don’t settle on a responsive design that just looks nice. It should build trust, make shopping easy, and increase sales.

If your online store isn’t getting the results you want—or if you’re just not sure where to start—we’d love to help. Get in touch for a free consultation on how we can build you a website that work beautifully on every device.