How to make your online store better by tomorrow with UX writing

On October 15, 2026, I had twenty minutes on the Mastercard Stage at RESHOPER, the biggest e-commerce conference in Czechia, to show store owners how a few simple changes in their copy can sell more and make shopping easier for people. Because that’s what UX writing is about. This is the talk written up, with numbers and links to sources, and localized for readers outside Czechia. You can flip through the slides here, they work with the arrow keys.

It’s 10:40 pm

First, picture one person. They don’t come to you fresh, in a suit, at a hundred percent. It’s 10:40 pm. They’re tired and annoyed, their kid has a fever and the syrup has run out. They need to order medicine, fast. They open the app and it tells them: “Our pharmacy heroes are taking a breather.”

This happened to me. And I thought: what does that mean? No delivery tonight? Tomorrow either? Should I run to the emergency room? What the hell am I supposed to do? The message was playful, cute. And it didn’t help me one bit.

And this isn’t one tired person shopping with you. This is how a quarter of your customers read.

• One in four adults across OECD countries can only handle short, simple texts. The survey measured people aged 16 to 65, so seniors aren’t even in the number (OECD, Survey of Adult Skills 2023).
• Fifteen to twenty percent of people are neurodivergent. They have ADHD, dyslexia or autism, and their brain works a bit differently (Doyle, British Medical Bulletin 2020). Like mine, because I have ADHD.
• In Czechia, where I’m from, 3% of adults report an ADHD diagnosis (Vňuková et al. 2021).

Anyone still learning the language reads the same way. And at 10:40 pm on a phone, most of us.

So here’s the leitmotif: be kind to people. Especially at 10:40 pm. I believe it comes back to you. In every hack you’ll find something that annoys you when you shop, too. And the great thing about copy is that it’s quick to fix.

The average user is a myth

We like to think the average user comes to us rested, focused and familiar with our store. There’s a name for it: the myth of the average user.

This page was shown to seniors in the first wave of covid vaccination sign-ups in Czechia. Remember how those systems kept crashing?

What do you think seniors did when they saw it? The obvious answer is that they kept refreshing the page. That’s exactly what they didn’t do. They sat and waited, because nobody told them to refresh.

Not everyone understands what you mean, and not everyone fills in the gaps. Don’t make people think, that’s the classic rule.

Part one: copy for every brain

The first four hacks are for every brain. When you help people whose brains work differently, you help everyone.

Hack 1: Write for sixth graders

A lot of store copy looks like this:

In the event that the shipment is not collected within the specified period, it shall be returned to the sender and any re-dispatch is charged in accordance with the current price list.

Nobody talks like this. I learned nothing. Apparently I have to go find some current price list, so I know zilch. Tell me instead how long the parcel waits for me, what happens if I don’t collect it and how much it costs to send it again:

Your parcel waits at the pickup point for 7 days. If you don’t collect it, it comes back to us. We’ll send it again for €3.90.

Write a regular store for the general public at a sixth grade reading level. Not sixth grade slang, but words a twelve-year-old understands. If you run a specialist store for scientists, go up to tenth grade at most. I promise you that a nuclear physicist and a supermarket cashier will both appreciate copy they understand and get through smoothly.

Use verbs, one idea per sentence and fifteen words at most. Start with your copy about shipping, returns and complaints. Then go through your texts and ask: would a sixth grader get it?

And the data: landing pages written at a 5th to 7th grade level convert at 11.1%, copy at a “professional” level at 5.3% (Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report 2024). Unbounce measured it on 41,000 landing pages, and it’s a correlation, not an experiment.

Hack 2: Say it literally

Once you’re in the copy, look for puns, irony and idioms. Some people read them completely literally. The pharmacy heroes, for instance. A person with autism won’t get what you mean. Neither will a tired person at 10:40 pm. W3C has it as a separate pattern in its guidance on cognitive accessibility.

I got this notification from my bank when I was sending a lot of money toward my mortgage:

Woohoo, off it goes! Your money will land in two shakes.

Playful, cute. But I needed to know two things: that the payment went out, and when to start panicking. After:

Payment sent. It usually arrives within an hour.

Or this one: a button that says “Hook it” instead of “Add to cart”. Am I buying fish or playing a game? If you know the UX laws, this is Jakob’s law: users spend most of their time on other sites. We’d love to think they live on ours and know every button by heart. The truth is they spend their time elsewhere. So your store should work, and talk, pretty much like the others. Skip the riddles and cryptic buttons. There are places on a website where the brand can shine. Payment and shipping aren’t among them.

Hack 3: Be specific. One thing has one name

Premium backpack with an innovative design for an active lifestyle. A great companion on every journey.

A great companion on every journey could just as well be a dog. What I want to know is: how many liters does it hold, how much can it carry, how much does it weigh, is it waterproof. Those are the questions in my head, and I just want someone to answer them. When the description doesn’t, I go looking for the specs elsewhere, on the manufacturer’s site or at another retailer. And I may well buy it there, because I find out it’s cheaper. After:

The backpack holds 22 liters and weighs 780 g. It fits a 15.6″ laptop and two days’ worth of stuff.

Thirty-four percent of shoppers leave when product names and descriptions are unclear (Salsify 2026, about 3,000 shoppers). Replace every adjective in a description with a number or a fact.

And the second thing: call the same things by the same name across your whole site. A pickup point can’t be a branch on one page, a collection point on another and a parcel shop in the email. An order can’t be called a purchase somewhere else. Otherwise people wonder whether you mean something different, and that’s cognitive load for nothing.

Hack 4: Write headings as questions

When your copy is long, chop it up. Otherwise you get a wall of text: anything that spills over three lines, and people skip it automatically. Highlighting doesn’t help either. When half of it is bold, nothing stands out.

People don’t read on the web, they scan. Nielsen Norman Group has tracked it with eye tracking since 2006, and its 2020 summary says the same thing: people almost never read word for word. Give them a heading as a question and a short answer under it. Question, answer, question, answer:

Who are they for? Runners who do up to 15 km a week. What’s in the box? The shoes and a spare pair of laces. When will they arrive? Tomorrow, if you order by 4 pm. How do I return them? Within 30 days, free at any pickup point.

AI assistants find their way around copy like that just as easily when they recommend a product.

Part two: shopping without stress

Part two is the purchase itself and the cart. A scary number: customers abandon seven carts out of ten. Baymard averages 50 studies and gets 70.22%. Three hacks to help with that.

Hack 5: An error message says what, why and what next

What bugs me most is filling in forms. That’s where a lot of people drop off, and stores don’t help them much: 94% show only generic error messages (Baymard, Checkout UX 2025). These are real messages I ran into:

Please fill in all fields.

All of them were filled in. I was booking a table at a restaurant, and the 2 in the number of guests was just a placeholder hint, in almost the same color as my answers. I couldn’t finish the booking until I overwrote it with my own 2, which looked exactly the same.

Something is wrong with the email address you entered. Change it.

I only have one. What’s wrong with it? After:

How many of you are coming?

Looks like the @ went missing from your email.

When you know where the error is and what’s wrong, say it right next to the field, and keep the field filled in. A tired person won’t puzzle out where they made a typo. They’ll leave.

Hack 6: A form that forgives

While we’re on forms: you can prevent errors. An error message should be the last resort. It never feels good, even when the mistake is mine. There’s a name for this: forgiving software.

Think of it as a guardrail. Guardrails are there so that someone driving like an idiot doesn’t fly off the road. You can build the same guardrails for a tired person online:

• Take the phone number with or without spaces, with or without the country code. Crunch it on the backend.
• The postcode with or without a space.
• Show password requirements up front, not after submitting.
• Warn me that Caps Lock is on before I type my password.
• When I make a typo in gmail.com, don’t say “invalid email”. Say “Did you mean jane@gmail.com?”

Forgiving software mostly doesn’t let the error happen in the first place.

Hack 7: Say the price, shipping and returns up front

Drip pricing is a dark pattern where costs appear one by one. Extra costs are the most common reason people abandon a cart, 40% of them give it (Baymard, survey of US shoppers, not counting people who were just browsing). I don’t know why companies hide it.

Shipping depends on the selected method, the price will be calculated at checkout. Returns are subject to our returns policy.

This sentence doesn’t tell me what shipping costs, when the parcel arrives or how I return it. Tell me up front:

Shipping €3.90, free over €60. Delivered tomorrow. Return within 30 days, free at any pickup point.

Three sentences on every product page and again next to the Buy button: what shipping costs, when the goods arrive and how to return them. If €8 pop up at the end, I leave anyway, just angrier. And if you offer free shipping above some amount, keep showing in the cart how much is missing. That can mean bigger orders, too.

Part three: credibility

The last part is credibility. How to build it, and not break it, even when AI writes for you. Three places: what AI says on your behalf, how you explain your reviews and which words you choose.

Hack 8: Write a voice guide for AI

Everyone is trying to bring in AI these days. And what it writes is good enough. Good enough is what everyone can do now, that’s the baseline. But 32% of people trust a brand less when they can tell its communication is written by AI. Only 7% trust it more (Klaviyo 2026, 8,000 consumers in 8 countries). So unless you want to sound like everyone else, you have to lay your own tone of voice over it.

How? Write writing guidelines, so AI has something to hold on to. Four things that belong in them:

• A golden bank of copy. Samples you’re proud of. AI learns your voice from them better than from adjectives.
• A component card. What it is, where it’s used, how many characters it has, and a good and a bad example.
• A glossary with bans. AI understands “never error, always couldn’t”. It doesn’t understand “write naturally”.
• Zones instead of tone. The word “friendly” tells AI nothing. The rule “critical zone: no humor, no emoji, no exclamation marks” it can follow. A delight zone like the order confirmation can take more brand than an error message.

If you don’t write it down, AI will improvise. And you don’t want that for your brand. This is the kind of guide I build with brands on my tone of voice projects.

Hack 9: Say how you verify reviews

The second place where credibility grows or falls is reviews. In 2022, consumer authorities across Europe checked 223 major websites and couldn’t confirm that 144 of them did enough to keep reviews genuine. At least 55% potentially broke EU rules (European Commission, January 2022). Since May 28, 2022, EU rules treat it as material information whether and how you check that reviews come from real customers (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive).

And “4.9 out of 5” alone isn’t enough. I want to know if that’s from three reviews or a thousand. Who wrote them, employees or customers. And what you do with the negative ones. After:

4.9 out of 5 from 1,254 reviews. Only customers with an order can write one, and we check it against the order number. We don’t delete negative reviews.

A few sentences, and your credibility shoots up. Label AI-generated review summaries as AI-generated.

Words matter to people

A developer put “Jižák, finally a dream city” on a billboard for a new project in our part of Prague. Jižák is the nickname of our neighborhood, and locals say it with one more letter: Jižňák. Our neighborhood Facebook group erupted: it must have been written by someone from Brno, a newcomer who doesn’t know the place. It ended in a poll: 73% Jižňák, 27% Jižák, 396 votes and dozens of comments. One letter. Such a small thing, right?

The words your customers use are in your reviews, support tickets and comments. Get into the community a little. Don’t tell board gamers that Monopoly is a great strategy game. Don’t call it Frisco when you’re selling to San Francisco.

Hack 10: Write a glossary for your store

One glossary for your team and for AI: your signature words, the shared names for things in your store, and considerate words with their replacements.

Shared names: branch, collection point, parcel shop, all of it is a pickup point. Login, log on, sign in, all of it is sign in.

Words that blame: instead of “You entered the wrong password”, write “That password doesn’t match”. Instead of “You forgot to buy”, write “You can still add”. Instead of “Are you sure you want to leave?”, write “Leave without saving?”.

Labels and comparisons: instead of “Crazy deals”, write “40% off shoes”. Blind users are people who are blind. Blacklisted is blocked, and dummy data is placeholder data.

Words that leave someone out: instead of “Dear moms”, write “Dear parents”. Instead of a “Gender” field, ask “How should we address you?”.

The list keeps growing. With it you’ll be more consistent and kinder, and you’ll help your copywriters and AI write the same way. Google and Microsoft publish their lists, and your own grows out of complaints and support questions. No law regulates word choice, but it affects how much customers trust you.

Two questions for every sentence

Ask of every sentence you write in your store: would a tired customer know what happens next and what to do? And would they know what it costs them in money, time or personal data? If the sentence answers both, leave it alone. If not, start with it on Monday.

Homework for Monday

Pick one hack and try to fix it on Monday. Copy is the fastest thing to fix.

And at 10:40 pm, when you’re wiped out, try buying something in your own store on your phone. You’ll see whether you’re kind to people, or not quite yet. One hack a week, and you’re done by Christmas.

The full slide deck is here. And if you’d like help with the copy in your store, get in touch.