What an e-commerce UX audit should tell you
A UX audit exists to answer one question: what on this store is costing us conversions, and what do we fix first? Most audits answer it with a long PDF — heuristics scored one by one, screenshots pasted in, recommendations at the end. The team reads it once, and the backlog barely moves.
Tower answers it differently. Agents walk your store as your personas would, and each issue they find arrives as a finding you can act on:
- A screenshot of the page as your store actually served it — captured, never generated.
- An observation, with quotes extracted byte-exact from the page.
- A severity and an estimated conversion impact, so you sort by what costs the most.
- A user story with acceptance criteria, exportable to Linear, ready for the next sprint.
What the audit covers
The audit follows the buying journey, because that is where conversions are lost:
Navigation and wayfinding
Categories unreachable from the home page, misleading breadcrumbs, a back button that loses the shopper's filters, products filed in the wrong category.
Site search
A query that returns nothing while the product exists, results off-topic for the query, a result count that contradicts the list.
Product pages
Missing or broken images, descriptions copied from the supplier, inconsistent specs, no delivery time where the shopper hesitates.
Reassurance and value proposition
Returns, delivery, stock and payment information that exists somewhere on the site, but not where the doubt is born.
Cart and checkout
An account wall with no stated reason, fields that demand effort without explaining it, a surprise waiting at the cart. Agents stop before payment: no real order has ever been placed, and the stop is a hard guard in the code, not a prompt instruction.
Why agents, and not a crawler or a screenshot reviewer
A crawler checks pages one by one; it never experiences a journey. A model reviewing static screenshots deduces friction instead of meeting it. Tower's agents browse: they type queries, open products, compare them, fill a cart. That is how they find a search that misses a product sold two clicks away — something no page-level check will ever flag.
Walking the store and judging it are separate jobs, held by separate agents, and an evaluation judge screens every finding before you see it. You then judge each finding yourself — actionable, false or noise — in one keystroke.
How much one audit covers — measured
Measured by capture-recapture on a real store, one audit finds about 65% of the defects present, and two audits reach about 90%. That is why Tower runs on a schedule, and why findings are deduplicated from one run to the next: a weekly audit surfaces new defects instead of refilling your backlog with duplicates.
In the latest published pilot, the store owner judged 11 findings out of 11 true. A full walk on a real store took 455 seconds and returned 7 findings, each with its capture.
Manual UX audit vs. Tower
| Manual UX audit | Tower | |
|---|---|---|
| Delivered as | A report to read and translate into tickets | Findings that promote into user stories with acceptance criteria |
| Proof | Screenshots chosen by the auditor | A capture and byte-exact quotes for every finding |
| Frequency | Once, then it ages | On a schedule, deduplicated run to run |
| Setup | Kick-off, access, calls | Your store URL and your personas |
| Judgment | One expert's opinion | You judge every finding; your verdicts train the next run |
A good human expert still sees things an agent misses — strategy, brand, the "why" behind a choice. Tower does not replace that conversation; it makes sure the defects are already in the backlog when it happens.
Getting started
Nothing to install: agents read your public pages the way any shopper does — no snippet, no access to your admin. Any storefront on the public web works, whether Shopify, Magento, headless or custom. Give us your store's URL, describe your personas, and request your free first audit. Questions first? The FAQ answers them with the numbers we actually have.