Every store starts from the same place: a few dozen products, an idea, and a lot of uncertainty. At this stage, new store navigation doesn’t need to be complex. It needs to be right and enough. The hard part isn’t making the menu look “full” — it’s holding back so you don’t build a navigation system bigger than the store actually needs.
This article is about the first stage: a new store with a small catalog under 50 products. I’ll describe what it looks like, what the navigation really needs, a few recurring mistakes, and a suggested setup to start with.
What this stage looks like
The catalog is small, often just a few product groups. Sometimes the whole store fits inside “all products” without needing categories yet.
Traffic is still low and uneven. Visitors come from a few posts, a few shares, or a circle of friends. A few dozen to a few hundred views a day is normal.
Most important: you’re still experimenting. Trying which items sell, trying prices, trying how to photograph, trying how to greet. Everything is still shifting. A rigid navigation, carefully built from the start, becomes a burden you have to fix every time you change direction.
In other words, this is a time that calls for flexibility more than completeness.
What a new store’s navigation needs
The short answer: simple and clear. Customers need to find their way to buy within a few seconds — they don’t need a beautiful menu diagram.
On desktop, a tidy header with 3-5 items is enough. For example: Products, About, Contact. People usually scan a page left to right, top to bottom, so the most important items should sit on the left and stay visible, not hidden.
You don’t need a mega menu at this stage. A mega menu suits stores with many subcategories that need to spread out at once. When the catalog is still small, a mega menu will look empty and bulky: open it and you see just a line or two floating in a large frame. It makes the store look bigger than it really is, and customers gain nothing from it.
Don’t forget mobile
This is the part most easily neglected, and yet the most important. In ecommerce today, most store visits come from phones — many industry figures put the number around 70-80%. In other words, most of your customers are looking at your store through a small screen held in their hand.
How people hold their phone decides what’s easy to tap. Research by Steven Hoober (published on Smashing Magazine) found that most actions on mobile are done with the thumb, and the easiest area to reach is the lower half of the screen — often called the “thumb zone”. The top corner is the hardest place to reach.
That’s why a navigation bar placed at the bottom of the screen (a Tab Bar) makes sense: it sits right within thumb’s reach. Customers don’t have to stretch up to the top corner to find the menu.
As for the hamburger menu — the three-line icon that hides all navigation behind it — Nielsen Norman Group has verified that it makes items harder to notice and slower to find compared with keeping them visible. For a small store with just a few main items, there’s no reason to hide them away. A basic tab bar that keeps a few important buttons visible serves customers far better.
Two common mistakes
I’ve seen these two mistakes so often that I almost think of them as a rite of passage for beginners.
Mistake one: making the menu complex too soon. Sellers look at large stores, see multi-level menus, and want their own store to look “professional” right away. So they create categories for things they don’t have products for yet, or split a group of six items into four subcategories to make the menu look full.
The result is a customer clicking “Accessories” and finding exactly two items, clicking “New Arrivals” and finding it empty. That experience is much worse than a neat “All Products” category. A small catalog isn’t a weakness to hide — grouping things together actually makes it easier to buy.
Mistake two: worrying only about desktop and forgetting mobile. People usually build the store on a computer, admire it on a big screen, then forget to check it on a phone. The desktop menu looks fine, but on mobile the items bunch up, the buttons crowd together, or the navigation disappears behind a small icon in the corner.
The fix is simple: every time you adjust the menu, open the store on your own phone and try to buy something like a real customer. If your hand has to stretch or you mis-tap a few times, your customers will too — and they’re less patient than you.
A suggested setup with Navi+
Navi+ lets you configure desktop and mobile separately, so you don’t have to force one design onto both. At this stage, I suggest keeping it truly minimal.
On desktop, build a simple header with 3-5 items. Pick exactly the pages customers need: the main product category, the about page, the contact page. Save the mega menu for when the catalog actually grows.
On mobile, use a basic 4-item Tab Bar. A safe layout that shoppers already know:
- Home — back to the homepage
- Shop — into the product list
- Cart — the cart, always within reach
- Account — account or sign in
These four buttons cover almost everything customers need to do. Placing the cart right on the bottom bar also has a practical point: according to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate in ecommerce is around 70%, so anything that helps customers return to the cart and keep going is worth doing. A Cart button that’s always visible and always easy to tap is one small step in that direction.
One more thing worth watching from the start is speed. Google sets the “good” thresholds for Core Web Vitals: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, and CLS under 0.1. The menu is something that loads early and appears on every page, so a heavy menu can drag the whole store down with it. Navi+ is built not to get in the way of these metrics — this is a good habit to keep early, because fixing it later is always harder.
At the new-store stage, a simple menu that customers can use right away always beats a fancy menu you have to keep fixing.
Because Navi+ is drag-and-drop and needs no code, you can build the layout above in a few minutes and adjust it anytime as the catalog grows. The menu also stays in place when you switch themes, so the design experiments of the early stage won’t break the navigation you just built.
Start small. When the store grows, growing the navigation along with it won’t be too late.
This article is part of the larger guide on Navigation through each stage of a store’s growth — from 10 to 10,000 products.