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 completely rogue. Instead of following the rulebook, I turned the homepage into the catalog itself—and doubled the conversion rate.
Here's what you'll learn from this experiment:
Why industry-standard homepage sections often hurt conversions
The exact section ordering strategy that doubled sales
How to implement this approach on your Shopify store
When to break conventional wisdom (and when to follow it)
The AI workflow that made this scalable for 1000+ products
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce expert recommends
Walk into any ecommerce conference or browse any "conversion optimization" blog, and you'll hear the same homepage gospel repeated like a mantra:
The Traditional Shopify Homepage Formula:
Hero banner with your main value proposition
Featured products section (usually bestsellers)
Collections overview with category images
Social proof and testimonials
About us or brand story section
This approach exists for good reasons. It's clean, organized, and follows proven UX principles. Most successful brands use variations of this structure, and conversion rate optimization experts have data supporting each element.
The logic is sound: ease visitors into your brand story, showcase your best products, then guide them toward making a purchase decision. It's designed to build trust, demonstrate value, and create a smooth user journey.
But here's where this conventional wisdom breaks down: it assumes your visitors want to be "guided" through a journey. It assumes they have time to browse categories and discover products. It assumes your homepage is their starting point, not just a waystation.
For stores with massive catalogs—think 500+ products—this traditional approach creates a fundamental mismatch between what users want (quick product discovery) and what they get (a marketing brochure disguised as a homepage).
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with this client, they had built what looked like the perfect ecommerce site. Beautiful hero section, carefully curated "Featured Products," elegant collection galleries. Every best practice box was checked.
The problem? Their conversion rate was stuck at 0.8%—well below industry standards. More concerning was the user behavior data: 73% of homepage visitors immediately clicked "All Products" or used the search bar. The carefully crafted homepage sections were being completely ignored.
This wasn't a small catalog issue. With over 1000 products spanning multiple categories, customers needed to find specific items quickly. They weren't browsing for inspiration—they were hunting for solutions.
My first instinct was to follow standard CRO advice: improve the featured products selection, A/B test different hero messages, optimize the collection grid layout. We spent two weeks refining these elements, testing different product arrangements and promotional messaging.
The results? A marginal improvement to 0.9% conversion. Better, but not breakthrough territory.
That's when I looked at the analytics differently. Instead of trying to make the homepage "stickier," I started questioning whether the homepage needed to exist as a traditional landing experience at all. If 73% of users were bypassing our carefully crafted journey anyway, maybe we were solving the wrong problem.
The insight hit during a competitor analysis session. I was browsing their sites, and I realized something: I was doing exactly what their users did—immediately hunting for specific products, not reading brand stories or browsing featured collections.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of fighting user behavior, I decided to embrace it completely. If users wanted immediate access to products, why not give them exactly that?
The Radical Homepage Restructure:
I eliminated every traditional homepage element except two:
A mega-menu navigation system with AI-powered categorization
48 products displayed directly on the homepage
One testimonials section after the product grid
The AI-Powered Navigation System:
For a 1000+ product catalog, navigation becomes critical. I built an AI workflow that automatically categorized new products across 50+ categories. This wasn't just tag-based sorting—the AI analyzed product descriptions, titles, and attributes to place items in multiple relevant categories when appropriate.
The mega-menu became a powerful discovery tool. Users could find products without ever leaving the navigation, making the homepage itself the browsing experience.
The Homepage-as-Catalog Approach:
Instead of featuring 4-8 "hero" products, I displayed 48 products in a clean grid format. The selection wasn't random—I used data from their top performers across different categories, ensuring variety while maintaining quality.
Each product tile included:
High-quality product image
Product name and price
Quick "Add to Cart" functionality
Average star rating
The Technical Implementation:
I created a custom Shopify section that pulled products dynamically based on performance metrics. The AI workflow analyzed sales data, inventory levels, and seasonal trends to automatically refresh the homepage selection weekly.
The testimonials section remained as the only "traditional" homepage element, positioned after the product grid to provide social proof for users who scrolled past the initial products.
Performance Impact
Conversion rate doubled from 0.8% to 1.6% within three weeks of implementation
User Behavior
Homepage became the most-used page on the site, with 89% of visitors engaging with products directly
Technical Infrastructure
AI workflow automatically maintained optimal product selection across 50+ categories
Business Results
Time to purchase decreased by 40% as customers found products faster than ever before
The results challenged everything I thought I knew about ecommerce homepage optimization:
Conversion Metrics:
Conversion rate: 0.8% → 1.6% (doubled)
Homepage engagement: 27% → 89%
Time to first product click: 18 seconds → 6 seconds
Average session duration: +23%
User Behavior Transformation:
The most dramatic change wasn't just in numbers—it was in user behavior. The homepage transformed from a ignored waystation into the primary shopping interface. Users stopped hunting for the "All Products" link because they no longer needed it.
Mobile performance improved even more dramatically, as users could immediately see and interact with products without scrolling through multiple sections of brand messaging they didn't want.
The AI categorization system meant that even as new products were added, the homepage remained relevant and discoverable. What started as a one-time optimization became a self-maintaining system.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experiment taught me that "best practices" are often just "common practices" that haven't been challenged. The key lessons:
User behavior trumps design theory - If 73% of users bypass your carefully crafted sections, the sections are the problem, not the users
Catalog size determines strategy - What works for 50 products fails at 1000+ products. Scale changes everything
AI can automate optimization - The categorization workflow made this approach scalable and self-maintaining
Sometimes less is more - Removing traditional elements can improve performance more than optimizing them
Test radical changes, not just incremental ones - A/B testing button colors won't fix fundamental UX mismatches
Data should guide design decisions - User analytics revealed the real problem hidden behind conversion metrics
When to break rules - This approach works best for large catalogs with utilitarian products, not luxury or story-driven brands
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies with multiple product features or tool categories:
Display key features directly on homepage instead of hiding them behind "Learn More" buttons
Use mega-navigation to showcase all capabilities immediately
Let users interact with functionality before reading about it
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores with large product catalogs:
Test homepage-as-catalog approach if you have 200+ products
Implement AI-powered product categorization for scalable navigation
Prioritize product discovery over brand storytelling for utility-focused items