Every ecommerce conference, every industry blog, every consultant has a list of best practices. Add trust badges. Use urgency messaging. Simplify checkout. Show social proof.
These aren’t bad ideas. Many of them work—in certain contexts. But treating them as universal truths causes real problems.
The Context Problem
A best practice is a solution that worked for someone else, in their specific situation, with their specific customers, at a specific point in time.
Trust badges work when customers don’t yet trust you. They can look desperate when you’re an established brand.
Urgency messaging works for impulse purchases. It can feel manipulative for considered decisions.
Social proof works when prospects identify with the people shown. It backfires when they don’t.
How Best Practices Spread
Here’s how it usually happens: A company runs a test. Something wins. They share the result. It becomes a case study. The case study becomes a best practice. The best practice becomes industry gospel.
But what gets lost is everything that made it work. The specific audience. The market conditions. The existing design. The competitive landscape. The price point. The product category.
By the time it reaches you as “best practice,” all that context has evaporated. You’re left with a tactic, stripped of the strategy that gave it meaning.
The Copying Trap
When you implement best practices without understanding why they work, you’re copying tactics instead of understanding principles.
This creates sites that look like every other site. The same layouts. The same trust badges. The same urgency banners. A sea of sameness that makes differentiation nearly impossible.
More importantly, it means you’re optimizing for generic customers instead of your specific customers. You’re solving problems that may not be your problems.
Principles Over Practices
Instead of asking “what are the best practices?”, ask “what principles explain why those practices sometimes work?”
Trust badges work because credibility matters. But there are many ways to build credibility—and the best approach depends on what your customers specifically need to believe.
Urgency works because motivation fades over time. But there are ways to maintain motivation that don’t rely on countdown timers and limited-stock warnings.
Social proof works because people look to others when uncertain. But the form it should take depends on who your customers trust and relate to.
Starting From Your Reality
The best approach starts with your specific situation:
Who are your customers? What do they believe? What makes them hesitant? What would build their confidence?
Then look at your current experience. Where does it fall short of meeting those needs? What would genuinely help?
The solution might look like a best practice. Or it might look completely different. The point is that it’s grounded in your reality, not someone else’s case study.
When Best Practices Are Useful
Best practices aren’t useless. They’re a starting point for thinking, not an endpoint for implementation.
If you’re new to ecommerce, they provide a baseline. If you’re optimizing, they suggest hypotheses to test. If you’re stuck, they offer direction.
But they should always be filtered through the question: does this actually apply to my situation, my customers, my goals? If you can’t articulate why a best practice would help your specific case, don’t implement it just because everyone else does.