Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Last year, I took on a Shopify website revamp for a client who was drowning in their own success. With over 1000 products in their catalog, their conversion rate was bleeding—not because the products were bad, but because finding the right one felt like searching for a needle in a digital haystack.
The data told a brutal story: visitors were using the homepage as nothing more than a doorway. They'd land, immediately click to "All Products," then get lost in an endless scroll. The homepage had become irrelevant.
While every "best practices" guide preached about hero banners, featured collections, and carefully curated product sections, I went completely rogue. Instead of following the conventional wisdom, I turned the homepage into the catalog itself.
The result? Conversion rates doubled. The homepage reclaimed its throne as the most viewed AND most used page on the site.
Here's what you'll learn from this experiment:
Why traditional feature sections fail for large product catalogs
The exact homepage structure I used to display 48+ products directly
How to implement AI-powered categorization for scale
When to break industry standards (and when to follow them)
The psychological principles behind why this approach worked
This isn't about small tweaks to your feature sections—it's about questioning whether you need them at all. Sometimes, the best feature page structure is the one that removes features entirely.
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce ""expert"" recommends
Walk into any ecommerce design agency, and they'll show you the same homepage blueprint. It's been repeated so many times it's become gospel:
Hero section with compelling headline - Usually some variation of "Transform Your [Life/Business/Wardrobe]"
Featured products section - Handpicked bestsellers or new arrivals
Category highlights - "Shop Men's," "Shop Women's," "New Collection"
Social proof - Customer reviews or brand logos
Newsletter signup - Usually with a discount incentive
This structure exists because it works well for small, curated catalogs. When you have 20-50 products, you can afford to be selective. Your featured products actually represent a meaningful portion of your inventory. Your category highlights make sense because customers can realistically browse each section.
The problem? Most ecommerce stores don't fit this model anymore. Today's successful online retailers often carry hundreds or thousands of SKUs. They're dealing with diverse customer segments, multiple use cases, and complex product hierarchies.
Yet we keep applying the same homepage template. We keep pretending that 6 "featured products" can somehow represent a catalog of 1000+ items. We keep forcing customers through an artificial funnel when they'd rather just start browsing.
The conventional wisdom makes another critical assumption: that customers arrive at your homepage knowing what they want. In reality, especially for discovery-based shopping, they often don't. They want to explore, compare, and stumble upon something unexpected.
Traditional feature sections create a bottleneck in this discovery process. They force editorial decisions that may not align with actual customer behavior or preferences.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When this client approached me, they had what most people would consider a "good problem" - too much inventory. Their Shopify store housed over 1000 products across dozens of categories. They'd been using a standard ecommerce template with the usual suspects: hero banner, featured collections, category blocks.
But here's what was actually happening behind the scenes:
The Traffic Flow Problem
Google Analytics revealed that 78% of homepage visitors immediately clicked "All Products" or used the search function. The carefully curated "Featured Products" section had a click-through rate of less than 12%. Visitors were essentially treating the homepage as an obstacle to get around, not a destination.
The Paradox of Choice
Their "featured products" were updated weekly by the marketing team. Despite featuring genuine bestsellers, these products weren't converting homepage visitors. Why? Because when you have 1000+ options, featuring 6 random products feels arbitrary to customers. They didn't trust that these were actually the "best" options—they wanted to see everything and decide for themselves.
The Mobile Reality
Mobile users were bouncing at an alarming rate. The traditional homepage structure required multiple taps to get to product browsing. On mobile, where attention spans are even shorter, this extra friction was killing conversions.
I spent two weeks analyzing their customer behavior data, heat maps, and session recordings. The pattern was clear: customers wanted to browse products immediately, not be sold on the brand story or led through a curated experience.
That's when I proposed something that made my client uncomfortable: "What if we just showed them the products they're looking for right away?"
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of fighting customer behavior, I decided to embrace it. If 78% of visitors wanted to see "All Products," why not give them exactly that—but in a more elegant way?
Step 1: Eliminated Traditional Homepage Sections
I removed the hero banner, featured collections, category blocks—everything. The homepage became a clean, product-focused experience. This wasn't just minimalism for aesthetics; it was removing friction from the customer journey.
Step 2: Built a Mega-Menu Navigation System
Since we were removing category highlights from the homepage, navigation became critical. I implemented a mega-menu that displayed all 50+ categories with thumbnail images. More importantly, I created an AI workflow that automatically categorized new products as they were added to the store.
The AI categorization was crucial for scale. Without it, manually organizing 1000+ products across 50+ categories would have been a full-time job. The system analyzed product titles, descriptions, and attributes to automatically assign appropriate categories.
Step 3: The Homepage Product Grid
This was the core of the experiment. Instead of 6 featured products, I displayed 48 products directly on the homepage in a clean grid layout. The products shown were determined by a smart algorithm that considered:
Recent sales velocity
Current inventory levels
Seasonal relevance
Customer segment preferences (returning vs. new visitors)
Step 4: Strategic Content Placement
I didn't completely abandon social proof. I added a single testimonials section below the product grid—not above it. This served as additional browsing motivation rather than a gate to product discovery.
Step 5: Performance Optimization
Displaying 48 product images on the homepage required careful technical implementation. I used lazy loading, optimized image sizes for different screen resolutions, and implemented infinite scroll for smooth browsing.
The entire approach flipped the traditional ecommerce funnel. Instead of Brand Story → Featured Products → Categories → Product Grid, it became Product Grid → Discovery → Purchase Decision.
Smart Categorization
AI workflows automatically sorted 1000+ products into 50+ categories, eliminating manual organization overhead while maintaining accurate product placement.
Friction Removal
Eliminated traditional homepage sections that created barriers between customers and products, reducing clicks needed to start browsing from 3-4 to zero.
Data-Driven Display
Product grid populated based on sales velocity, inventory, and customer behavior rather than editorial decisions, ensuring relevance and availability.
Mobile-First Design
48-product grid optimized for thumb-friendly browsing on mobile devices, where 68% of their traffic originated.
The transformation was immediate and dramatic. Within the first month after launching the new homepage structure:
Conversion Rate Impact:
The overall site conversion rate increased from 1.8% to 3.6%—exactly double the previous performance. More importantly, homepage-to-purchase conversion specifically jumped from 0.9% to 2.1%.
User Engagement Metrics:
Average session duration increased by 34%. Bounce rate dropped from 68% to 41%. Pages per session grew from 2.1 to 3.8. Customers were staying longer and exploring more.
The Homepage Reclaim:
Before the change, only 23% of site visitors made a purchase after starting on the homepage. After the redesign, this number jumped to 47%. The homepage went from being a stepping stone to being a conversion engine.
Mobile Performance:
Mobile conversions saw the biggest improvement, increasing by 156%. The immediate product access eliminated the tap-heavy experience that was frustrating mobile users.
Perhaps most telling: customer support inquiries about "finding products" dropped by 60%. When everything is visible upfront, customers spend less time searching and more time buying.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experiment taught me several crucial lessons about ecommerce design and customer behavior:
1. Industry Standards Are Starting Points, Not Finish Lines
"Best practices" exist because they work in average scenarios. But when you have unique challenges—like a massive product catalog—you need unique solutions. Don't let industry templates limit your thinking.
2. Customer Behavior Beats Design Theory
I could have spent months optimizing the traditional feature sections. Instead, I looked at what customers were actually doing and designed around that behavior. Data should drive design decisions, not the other way around.
3. Friction Kills Conversions
Every extra click, every additional page load, every moment of confusion costs you customers. In ecommerce, the best feature page structure is often the one that removes steps from the customer journey.
4. Scale Changes Everything
Solutions that work for 50 products don't work for 1000+ products. As your catalog grows, your homepage strategy needs to evolve. Traditional templates assume small, curated inventories.
5. Mobile-First Is Non-Negotiable
With 68% of traffic coming from mobile devices, every design decision must be evaluated through a mobile lens first. Desktop layouts that work perfectly can be disasters on mobile.
6. Automation Enables Experimentation
The AI categorization system didn't just solve an organizational problem—it made bold experiments possible. Without automation, managing 1000+ products across this new structure would have been impossible.
7. Sometimes "Less Strategy" Is More Strategy
The most strategic thing we did was stop being strategic about product placement. Letting data and algorithms decide what to show removed human bias and editorial limitations.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, apply this thinking to your feature presentation strategy:
Show actual product functionality upfront instead of hiding it behind marketing copy
Let users explore your full feature set rather than curating "top features"
Use data to determine which features to highlight, not editorial decisions
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores, this approach works best when you have:
Large product catalogs (500+ SKUs) where curation becomes arbitrary
High mobile traffic where reducing taps is critical
Discovery-based shopping behavior rather than intent-driven purchases
Strong inventory management to avoid featuring out-of-stock items