E-Commerce Platform Redesign: 40% Conversion Increase
A complete frontend redesign and performance overhaul that increased conversion rates by 40% and reduced page load times by 65% for a mid-market European fashion brand.
Key Results
The Challenge
Our client, a growing European fashion brand with €15M in annual online revenue, was losing customers to slow page loads and a clunky mobile experience. Their existing platform, built on a legacy monolithic CMS, had:
- 5.2 second average page load time on mobile
- 1.8% conversion rate (industry average is 2.5–3%)
- 68% mobile traffic but only 30% of revenue came from mobile
- No image optimization — product images were 2–5MB each
They needed a modern frontend without migrating their entire backend. The solution: a headless commerce architecture.
Our Approach
Phase 1: Audit & UX Research (Weeks 1–3)
Before writing any code, we conducted a thorough analysis:
- Performance audit — Lighthouse scores, Core Web Vitals, real user monitoring data
- Heatmap analysis — Where users were clicking, scrolling, and dropping off
- Competitor benchmarking — Analyzed the top 10 fashion e-commerce sites for UX patterns
- User interviews — 15 interviews with actual customers about their shopping experience
Key findings:
- 42% of users abandoned on the product listing page due to slow image loading
- The checkout flow had 6 steps — industry best practice is 3 or fewer
- Size selection was confusing, leading to high return rates
Phase 2: Design & Prototyping (Weeks 3–5)
Our UI/UX designer created a completely new design system:
- Mobile-first approach — designed for mobile screens, then adapted up
- Streamlined checkout reduced from 6 steps to a single-page flow
- New size guide with visual fit recommendations
- Quick-view modals for product browsing without page navigation
Phase 3: Development (Weeks 5–14)
We built a headless commerce frontend using Next.js + Shopify Storefront API:
- Server-side rendering for product pages (SEO + performance)
- Static generation for category pages (instant loads)
- Image optimization pipeline with Cloudinary — automatic WebP, responsive sizing, lazy loading
- Algolia search — instant search with typo tolerance and faceted filtering
- Optimistic UI — cart updates feel instant, no waiting for API responses
Phase 4: Testing & Launch (Weeks 14–16)
- A/B testing the new design against the old site (80/20 traffic split)
- Results were so positive that we moved to 100% after just 5 days
- Monitoring and performance tuning in the first week post-launch
The Results
After 3 months of operation with the new platform:
- Conversion rate: 1.8% → 2.5% (40% increase)
- Page load time: 5.2s → 1.8s (65% faster)
- Mobile revenue share: 30% → 46.5% (55% increase)
- Bounce rate: 58% → 39% (33% reduction)
- Average session duration: +45%
Key Takeaways
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Performance is a feature. Every second of page load time costs real revenue. The image optimization alone accounted for 40% of the performance improvement.
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Headless doesn't mean reckless. By keeping Shopify as the backend, we avoided the risk and cost of a full platform migration while gaining full frontend control.
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Mobile-first isn't optional. With 68% of traffic on mobile, designing for desktop first and "making it responsive" would have been backwards. Mobile-first design led to a simpler, faster experience on all devices.
Technology Stack
“The numbers speak for themselves. Our mobile conversion rate doubled within the first month after relaunch. The Soatech team understood e-commerce UX at a level we didn't expect from a development agency.”