%201.png){kind=icon}
.webp)
%201.png)
A consumer brand's website has a job that other websites do not: it has to agree with the shelf.
The pack a shopper picks up in a store and the image they see in a grid on their phone are the same recognition test, run twice. If the site was designed by people who never saw the packaging, the brand fails that test without anyone noticing, because each piece looks fine on its own.
Here is what we see go wrong most often in CPG, in the order it costs the most.
1. The site and the packaging are designed by different people, months apart
This is the expensive one, and it is almost always a sequencing accident rather than a decision. Packaging gets done first, because it has a manufacturing deadline. The website comes later, often with a different studio, working from a logo file and a colour code.
What gets lost is everything that is not in the logo file: how the product photographs, what the pack looks like at thumbnail size, which detail a shopper actually uses to recognise it on a crowded shelf.
With MUZE we designed the packaging and the store as one system, on the premise that the product had to work as a thumbnail before it worked on a shelf. That constraint changes real decisions — how much text survives on the front, how the colour blocks read at 200 pixels, whether the flavour is legible before the brand name.
The test is cheap: shrink your product photo to the size of a phone grid tile. If you cannot tell your flavours apart at that size, neither can a shopper, and no amount of site design fixes it.
2. The homepage does not explain the price
Most CPG brands we meet are priced above the category average and have a reason. The site rarely contains the reason.
It contains adjectives — artisanal, small-batch, crafted — which every competitor also uses, and which a shopper has learned to discount. What it does not contain is the specific, checkable thing: where the ingredient comes from, how long the process takes, what you refuse to do that the cheap option does.
Dixie Grace sells premium boiled peanuts from a homepage that looked amateur relative to the product. That gap is not a branding problem in the abstract. It is a shopper deciding, in about four seconds, whether the price is a mistake or a signal.
3. The catalogue is organised the way the company thinks
Internally, a brand organises products by line, by launch date, by manufacturing run. Shoppers do not think in any of those.
They arrive with an occasion, a dietary constraint or a gift in mind. A catalogue that mirrors the org chart forces them to translate, and a meaningful share of them do not bother.
With Marie Birdie, golf apparel for women and girls, the catalogue had to be organised around how golfers actually shop rather than how the inventory was structured. Same products, different doors into them.
The diagnostic: write down the three reasons someone buys from you. Then look at your navigation. If those three reasons are not the top-level categories, your menu is a filing system, not a sales tool.
4. The checkout breaks where nobody looks
Design attention concentrates on the homepage and the product page. The money is lost after both.
Franco's Pasta came to us with a site that did not adapt to phones and a checkout that broke. We rebuilt it on Shopify. That is not a glamorous piece of work and it was the single highest-value thing in the project, because the sale that dies in the checkout is the most expensive one to lose: it was already decided.
Test it yourself, on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi, and complete an actual purchase. Most founders have never done this on their own store.
5. Nobody can say which campaign produced the sale
A CPG brand usually sells through several doors at once — its own store, Amazon, retail, sometimes a farmers market — and the reporting from each one lives somewhere different.
The result is that the channel with the clearest dashboard gets credit, and the budget follows the dashboard rather than the revenue. If you cannot say which campaign, search or email produced a given order, every spending decision after that is a guess.
We wrote about how to diagnose that in can you name where your last five customers came from. It applies to a snack brand exactly as it applies to a contractor.
What good CPG website design actually decides
Four things, in this order:
- Recognition. The pack and the screen have to pass the same test, at thumbnail size, before anything else matters.
- Justification. The specific, checkable reason for the price, above the fold, in language a competitor could not copy.
- Navigation by occasion. Doors built around why people buy, not around how you manufacture.
- A checkout tested on a real phone, on real mobile data, by someone who has not seen it before.
Everything else — animation, scroll effects, an editorial section — is worth doing only after those four are true.
Where to start
Run the thumbnail test and the checkout test this week. They take twenty minutes together and they will tell you whether your problem is design, merchandising or plumbing. Those are three different projects and they are usually bought as one, which is why so many CPG rebuilds change the look and not the numbers.
We design packaging, brand and store as one system for consumer brands. See how we work with CPG brands, or look at MUZE and Dixie Grace.
Ask it on a call. A Growth Audit also shows which pages already bring in customers and what to fix first.
.png)
.png)
Keep reading
Not sure where your site is losing customers?
A Growth Audit tells you which pages already work, which ones leak, and what to fix first. Before you commit to a redesign.
Stop letting technical debt limit your revenue. Get a 30-minute strategic diagnostic of your digital infrastructure. No fluff, just strategy.