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. The result? We doubled the conversion rate by turning conventional wisdom on its head.
Here's what you'll learn from this experiment:
Why traditional hero banners kill conversions for large catalogs
The homepage structure that actually drives sales
How to turn your homepage into your highest-performing page
When to break industry standards (and when to follow them)
The AI workflow that saved us months of manual categorization
This isn't another theoretical framework—it's exactly what I implemented on a real store with real revenue on the line. Let's dive into how I approached this challenge.
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce ""expert"" will tell you
Walk into any ecommerce conference or scroll through any design blog, and you'll hear the same gospel repeated endlessly: your homepage needs a compelling hero banner. The formula is practically carved in stone.
Here's what the industry typically recommends:
Hero section with value proposition - A large banner showcasing your main benefit
Featured product collections - Curated selections to guide browsing
Social proof placement - Testimonials and trust badges prominently displayed
Clear navigation hierarchy - Organized categories and subcategories
Compelling call-to-action buttons - "Shop Now" or "Discover Collection" placement
This conventional wisdom exists because it works—for stores with focused product lines. When you're selling 10-50 carefully curated items, a hero banner highlighting your bestseller makes perfect sense. You can control the narrative and guide customers exactly where you want them to go.
But here's where this advice falls apart: when you have hundreds or thousands of products, the traditional homepage becomes a bottleneck. Visitors spend precious seconds scanning your featured collections, trying to figure out if what they need is buried in "Summer Essentials" or "Staff Picks." Meanwhile, your actual inventory sits invisible behind category pages.
The problem isn't that the advice is wrong—it's that it treats all ecommerce stores the same. A boutique jewelry shop and a comprehensive home goods retailer need completely different approaches. But the industry keeps pushing the same one-size-fits-all solution, and store owners keep wondering why their conversion rates plateau despite having "perfect" homepages.
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 ecommerce owners would consider a dream problem: too much success. Their Shopify store housed over 1000 products across dozens of categories, and their catalog was growing weekly. But their conversion rate was stuck at 0.8%—painful for any business, especially one with such extensive inventory.
The situation was clear from the analytics. I spent hours diving through their user behavior data and discovered something that would reshape how I think about ecommerce homepages forever: visitors treated the homepage like a lobby, not a destination.
Here's what was actually happening:
Users landed on the homepage
Spent 3-5 seconds scanning the hero banner and featured collections
Clicked "All Products" or used the search bar
Got overwhelmed by endless product grids
Left without purchasing
The beautiful hero banner showcasing "Trending Now" was essentially decoration. The carefully curated "Staff Picks" section? Ignored. The testimonials positioned prominently below the fold? Never seen.
My first instinct was to follow the playbook—optimize the hero banner, improve the featured collections, test different value propositions. We spent two weeks A/B testing headlines, trying different product arrangements, and tweaking the call-to-action buttons. The results were marginal at best—maybe a 0.1% improvement in conversion rate.
That's when I realized we were solving the wrong problem. We weren't dealing with a messaging issue or a design problem. We were dealing with an architecture problem. The traditional homepage structure was fundamentally incompatible with a large, diverse product catalog.
The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking like a designer and started thinking like a customer with a specific need, browsing a store with 1000+ options.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of continuing to optimize within the traditional framework, I proposed something that made my client uncomfortable: what if we treated the homepage like the product catalog itself?
Here's exactly what I implemented:
Step 1: Eliminated Traditional Homepage Elements
I removed everything that stood between visitors and products:
Hero banner - completely gone
"Featured Products" sections - deleted
"Our Collections" blocks - removed
Brand story content - moved to a separate About page
Step 2: Built a Mega-Menu Navigation System
The key insight was that with 1000+ products, navigation becomes everything. I created an AI workflow to automatically categorize products across 50+ categories. This wasn't just tagging—it was intelligent sorting that could place products in multiple relevant categories simultaneously.
The mega-menu allowed visitors to explore without ever leaving the homepage. Hover over "Kitchen" and see subcategories for "Appliances," "Cookware," "Storage," and more. Each category showed product counts, so visitors knew exactly what inventory depth we had.
Step 3: Homepage as Product Gallery
This was the radical part: I displayed 48 products directly on the homepage. Not featured products or hand-picked selections—the actual catalog, intelligently rotated based on popularity, seasonality, and stock levels.
The layout was simple:
Clean grid showing product images, names, and prices
Quick-view functionality on hover
Smart filtering options at the top
Infinite scroll for deeper browsing
Step 4: Strategic Social Proof Placement
I didn't eliminate social proof—I repositioned it. After the product grid, I added a testimonials section that visitors would see after they'd already engaged with products. This timing was crucial: people only care about reviews after they're interested in buying.
Step 5: AI-Powered Categorization System
Managing 50+ categories manually would be impossible. I built an AI workflow that automatically sorted new products as they were added to the store. The system analyzed product descriptions, images, and attributes to place items in appropriate categories, ensuring the mega-menu stayed organized without manual maintenance.
The entire implementation took three weeks. The most time-consuming part wasn't the design—it was setting up the AI categorization system to handle the ongoing product flow.
Smart Navigation
AI workflow automatically sorted 1000+ products into 50+ categories for easy browsing
Product Focus
Displayed 48 products directly on homepage instead of hiding inventory behind category pages
Social Proof
Moved testimonials below product grid - visitors see reviews after they're already interested
Data-Driven
Homepage became both catalog and conversion tool - no separate product listing pages needed
The outcome challenged everything I'd been taught about homepage design: conversion rate doubled from 0.8% to 1.6% within 30 days.
But the numbers told an even more interesting story:
Homepage engagement increased 340% - visitors actually stayed and browsed
Time to purchase decreased 45% - fewer clicks between landing and buying
Cart abandonment dropped 28% - clearer product discovery reduced hesitation
Mobile conversion improved 89% - simplified navigation worked better on small screens
The homepage reclaimed its position as the most-viewed AND most-used page on the site. Before the change, 78% of homepage visitors immediately clicked to category pages. After the implementation, 52% of visitors made their first product selection directly from the homepage.
Perhaps most importantly, customer feedback shifted dramatically. Instead of complaints about "hard to find products," we started receiving compliments about "easy browsing" and "great selection visibility." The store finally felt like what it was—a comprehensive retailer, not a boutique trying to act bigger than it was.
The AI categorization system proved its value immediately. When the client added 47 new products the following month, every item was automatically sorted and appeared in appropriate mega-menu categories within hours, not days.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experiment taught me that industry standards are starting points, not finish lines. When you have a unique challenge—like a massive product catalog—you need a unique solution.
Here are the key lessons that now guide my approach to ecommerce homepage design:
Function over convention - The best homepage is the one that serves your specific inventory and customer needs
Friction kills conversions - Every extra click between landing and purchasing costs you customers
Navigation is product discovery - For large catalogs, how people browse matters more than what they see first
Timing matters for social proof - Show testimonials when people are ready to buy, not when they're still exploring
Automation enables personalization - AI categorization allowed us to maintain organization at scale
Mobile changes everything - Simplified navigation becomes even more critical on small screens
Test your assumptions - What works for 50 products might fail catastrophically with 1000+
The biggest mistake I see ecommerce stores make is treating their homepage like everyone else's homepage. Your inventory size, customer behavior, and business model should determine your approach, not what worked for a completely different type of store.
If I were implementing this again, I'd spend more time on the initial AI training. The categorization system worked well, but it took several iterations to handle edge cases and ambiguous products correctly.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies with extensive feature sets or multiple product lines:
Consider feature-focused homepages over generic value propositions
Use mega-menus to showcase platform depth
Display use cases directly rather than hiding them in subpages
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores with large catalogs (500+ products):
Test homepage-as-catalog approach with your best-selling items
Implement intelligent categorization for better navigation
Move social proof below product discovery sections
Prioritize mobile navigation simplicity