Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Last year, I took on a Shopify website revamp for a client 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 rogue. Here's what I actually did:
Killed the traditional homepage structure and turned it into the catalog itself
Built an AI-powered mega-menu to handle 50+ categories automatically
Displayed 48 products directly on what used to be the homepage
Removed every friction point between visitors and products
Applied lessons from 20,000+ pages I'd optimized using AI across 8 languages
The outcome challenged everything I'd been taught about homepage design. In this playbook, I'll walk you through the exact process that doubled conversion rates and made the homepage the most viewed AND most used page again. You'll also discover why ecommerce optimization sometimes means breaking the rules entirely.
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce ""expert"" recommends
Walk into any ecommerce optimization discussion, and you'll hear the same gospel repeated like a mantra. The conventional wisdom around catalog page optimization follows a predictable pattern that sounds logical but often fails in practice.
The Standard Playbook Everyone Follows:
Hero Banner Strategy - Create compelling above-the-fold visuals that showcase your brand story and primary value proposition
Featured Collections - Curate specific product groupings to guide customer discovery and highlight seasonal offerings
Separate Category Navigation - Build detailed mega-menus and dedicated category pages to organize your extensive product catalog
Homepage as Hub - Design the homepage as a marketing vehicle that funnels users toward specific product pages
Progressive Disclosure - Reveal products gradually through multiple clicks to avoid overwhelming visitors
This approach exists because it works brilliantly for smaller catalogs and brand-focused retailers. When you have 20-50 products, curation makes sense. When your story matters more than your selection, hero banners convert. The problem? This framework completely breaks down when you're dealing with massive catalogs where discovery, not persuasion, becomes the primary challenge.
Most "best practices" are really just "common practices" disguised as wisdom. They assume all ecommerce sites face the same challenges, but a 1000+ product catalog operates in a completely different reality than a boutique store. The conventional approach treats symptoms—poor navigation, high bounce rates—without addressing the root cause: too much friction between intent and discovery.
After seeing this pattern fail repeatedly across large catalog clients, I realized we needed to stop treating massive product selections like small curated boutiques. Sometimes the best feature page structure is the one that removes features entirely.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The project landed on my desk with a clear problem: a Shopify e-commerce site with a massive inventory challenge. My client had built an impressive catalog of over 1000 products, but their conversion rate was terrible despite decent traffic numbers.
When I started analyzing their user behavior data, the problem became crystal clear. The homepage wasn't functioning as intended. Instead of being a destination, it had become nothing more than a glorified loading screen. Users would land on the carefully crafted homepage, completely ignore the hero banner and featured collections, then immediately navigate to the "All Products" page.
Here's what the user journey actually looked like: Homepage → Click "All Products" → Endless scroll → Confusion → Exit. The beautiful homepage was creating a unnecessary step in the customer journey, and that friction was killing conversions.
The client had followed every ecommerce best practice to the letter. Their homepage featured stunning product photography, compelling copy about their brand story, seasonal collections, customer testimonials, and a sophisticated navigation structure. On paper, it should have worked. In reality, it was optimized for a completely different type of business.
This wasn't my first encounter with large catalog challenges. I'd previously worked on AI-powered content generation for a site with 3000+ products across 8 languages, generating over 20,000 SEO-optimized pages. That experience taught me that massive catalogs need fundamentally different approaches than boutique stores.
The traditional ecommerce playbook assumes customers know what they want and just need to be convinced to buy it. But with 1000+ products, most customers don't know what they want—they need to discover it. The homepage was acting as a barrier to discovery rather than facilitating it.
After watching the same pattern repeat across multiple large catalog projects, I knew we needed to throw out the conventional wisdom entirely. The solution wasn't going to come from optimizing the existing structure—it required completely reimagining what a catalog homepage could be.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of following the traditional ecommerce playbook, I decided to treat the homepage like what it actually needed to be: the product catalog itself. This wasn't a minor optimization—it was a complete structural overhaul that challenged every assumption about homepage design.
Step 1: The Great Homepage Purge
I started by removing everything that stood between visitors and products. Out went the hero banner that nobody was engaging with. Gone were the "Featured Products" sections that were essentially random selections. I deleted the "Our Collections" blocks that were creating decision paralysis. Every traditional homepage element got the axe.
The goal was simple: eliminate every click between landing and browsing. If users were immediately clicking to "All Products" anyway, why make them click?
Step 2: Building the Mega-Menu Navigation System
With over 1000 products, navigation became critical. I built an AI workflow to automatically categorize new products across 50+ categories. This wasn't just about organization—it was about making product discovery possible without leaving the navigation itself.
The system analyzed product attributes, descriptions, and metadata to assign items to multiple relevant categories automatically. When new products were added, the AI ensured they appeared in all appropriate sections without manual intervention.
Step 3: The 48-Product Homepage Gallery
Here's where I went completely against conventional wisdom. Instead of teasing products or featuring collections, I displayed 48 actual products directly on the homepage. The homepage became the catalog.
I chose 48 because it created a visually satisfying grid that loaded quickly while showcasing enough variety to represent the full catalog breadth. Each product showed with essential information: image, title, price, and quick-add functionality.
Step 4: Strategic Content Minimization
The only non-product element I kept was a testimonials section, positioned after the product grid. Everything else was stripped away. No brand story, no mission statement, no elaborate value propositions—just products and social proof.
This decision came from understanding that in large catalogs, trust signals matter more than brand messaging. Customers needed to know others had successfully found and purchased products, not hear about company values.
Step 5: Mobile-First Implementation
Given that most traffic was mobile, I optimized the product grid for thumb navigation. Products were sized for easy tapping, with clear spacing and intuitive scroll patterns. The mega-menu collapsed cleanly on mobile while maintaining full functionality.
I also implemented lazy loading for the product images to maintain fast page speeds despite the increased visual content. Performance was crucial—a slow-loading catalog page would defeat the entire purpose.
This approach represented a fundamental shift from "homepage as marketing vehicle" to "homepage as functional tool." Instead of trying to convince people to browse, I made browsing immediate and effortless.
Navigation Revolution
Built 50+ category AI system for instant product discovery
Homepage Transformation
Turned traditional homepage into functional 48-product catalog
Friction Elimination
Removed every click between landing and browsing products
Performance Optimization
Maintained fast loading with mobile-first product grid design
The results spoke louder than any ecommerce best practice guide ever could. Within the first month of implementing the catalog-first homepage design, we saw dramatic improvements across every meaningful metric.
Conversion Rate Performance: The most significant change was a complete doubling of the conversion rate. Users who previously bounced after seeing the traditional homepage were now engaging with products immediately. The elimination of friction between landing and browsing translated directly into more purchases.
User Engagement Metrics: The homepage reclaimed its position as both the most viewed AND most used page on the site. Previously, it had been merely a gateway that users rushed through. Now it became a destination where actual shopping happened.
Page Navigation Patterns: Time to purchase decreased significantly because users no longer needed to navigate through multiple pages to find interesting products. The homepage became a functional shopping environment rather than a marketing brochure.
Mobile Performance: Mobile users, who represented the majority of traffic, showed particularly strong improvements. The thumb-friendly product grid and streamlined navigation made mobile shopping significantly more pleasant and efficient.
Most importantly, this wasn't a temporary boost from novelty. The performance improvements sustained over time because we'd solved a fundamental user experience problem rather than just optimizing around the edges. When you align your design with actual user behavior instead of theoretical best practices, the results compound.
The success validated a key principle I've applied across multiple large catalog projects: in ecommerce, friction kills conversions. Every extra click, every additional page, every moment of confusion costs you customers. Sometimes the best optimization strategy is aggressive simplification.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This project fundamentally changed how I approach large catalog optimization. The biggest lesson? User behavior beats best practices every time. No amount of beautiful design can overcome structural friction in the customer journey.
Key Insights That Changed My Approach:
Function Over Form - In large catalogs, utility matters more than aesthetics. A functional catalog beats a beautiful brochure.
Data-Driven Design Decisions - Watching actual user behavior revealed that our assumptions about homepage purpose were completely wrong.
Scale Changes Everything - Strategies that work for 50 products fail catastrophically at 1000+ products. Different problems require different solutions.
Friction Auditing - Every click between intent and action needs justification. If users are skipping steps, those steps are probably unnecessary.
Mobile-First Reality - With most traffic on mobile, navigation patterns that work on desktop often create mobile friction disasters.
AI-Powered Organization - Manual categorization becomes impossible at scale. Automated systems aren't just helpful—they're essential.
Performance As Feature - Fast loading isn't a nice-to-have in large catalogs—it's a core functionality requirement that affects every interaction.
If I were to implement this again, I'd start with the friction audit first. Map the actual user journey, not the intended one. Identify every point where users abandon the intended path, then ask why those friction points exist.
The approach works best for large catalogs where discovery is the primary challenge. It's less suitable for brand-focused retailers, luxury goods, or products requiring extensive education before purchase. Know your users' primary intent, then optimize for that instead of fighting against it.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS Product Catalogs:
Replace feature pages with integration galleries showing actual use cases
Display pricing transparently alongside each feature set
Use category-based navigation for different user types or company sizes
For your Ecommerce store
For Ecommerce Stores:
Audit user paths from analytics to identify friction points in product discovery
Implement AI-powered categorization for catalogs over 500 products
Test homepage product display quantity based on your mobile traffic patterns
Prioritize page speed over visual complexity in large catalog implementations