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 outcome challenged everything I'd been taught about homepage design: conversion rate doubled.
Here's what you'll learn from this experiment:
Why traditional feature blocks fail with large product catalogs
The counterintuitive homepage structure that actually converts
How to use AI to automatically categorize products at scale
When to break industry standards vs. when to follow them
The navigation system that eliminates friction
This approach works particularly well for ecommerce stores with extensive catalogs, but the principles apply to any business struggling with content organization on their homepage.
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce expert recommends
Walk into any ecommerce design conference or browse through Shopify's "best practices" documentation, and you'll hear the same homepage structure recommendations repeated like gospel:
Hero banner with your main value proposition - Usually featuring your bestseller or a seasonal promotion
Featured collections section - "New Arrivals," "Bestsellers," "Sale Items"
Product spotlight blocks - Hand-picked items with compelling descriptions
Social proof section - Customer reviews, testimonials, press mentions
Newsletter signup - Usually with a discount incentive
This structure exists because it works for stores with 20-100 products. It's clean, organized, and gives you editorial control over what customers see first. Most successful brands follow this pattern, and it's become the template that everyone copies.
The theory makes sense: guide the customer journey, highlight your best products, build trust, capture emails. It's logical, tested, and... completely wrong for stores with massive catalogs.
Here's where this conventional wisdom falls apart: when you have 1000+ products, featuring 8-12 items on your homepage means you're hiding 99% of your inventory behind additional clicks. You're essentially telling customers "we have thousands of options, but first, let us show you this tiny sample we think you might like."
The result? Analysis paralysis on the homepage, followed by overwhelming choice when they finally reach your full catalog. It's the worst of both worlds.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I first analyzed my client's website traffic, the patterns were unmistakable. Their homepage had a 68% bounce rate, and the average session duration was under 45 seconds. But here's the kicker: users who made it to the "All Products" page had a 34% higher conversion rate than those who browsed the featured collections.
This was a fashion accessories store with over 1000 SKUs across multiple categories. They sold everything from jewelry to handbags to scarves, with new products added weekly. The traditional homepage structure was actually working against them.
My first instinct was to follow the playbook: better hero banner copy, more strategic product selection, improved collection organization. We A/B tested different featured product combinations, rewrote the value propositions, added urgency elements. Conversion improved by maybe 8%. Decent, but not the breakthrough they needed.
That's when I noticed something in the heatmap data that changed everything. Users were spending most of their time scrolling past the curated sections, looking for a way to see "everything." They'd scroll down, scroll back up, then click "All Products" or use the search bar.
The homepage wasn't serving its intended purpose as a conversion tool—it had become an obstacle between customers and products. I realized we were solving the wrong problem. Instead of asking "how do we make better feature blocks," I should have been asking "do we need feature blocks at all?"
This insight led to the most counterintuitive experiment of my career: what if the homepage was the catalog?
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of fighting against user behavior, I decided to design with it. Here's exactly what I implemented:
Step 1: Killed the Traditional Structure
I removed every "best practice" element from the homepage:
No hero banner
No "Featured Products" sections
No "Our Collections" blocks
No lengthy brand story sections
Step 2: Built a Mega-Menu Navigation System
This was the crucial foundation. I created an AI workflow to automatically categorize new products across 50+ categories and subcategories. The navigation became a discovery tool itself:
Hover over "Jewelry" → see "Necklaces, Earrings, Bracelets, Rings"
Each subcategory showed product count in real-time
Visual preview thumbnails for each category
Step 3: Transformed the Homepage Into a Product Gallery
The bold move: I displayed 48 products directly on the homepage. Not featured products, not curated collections—just the latest inventory organized by category, with smart algorithms ensuring variety.
The layout used a responsive grid that showed:
6 products per row on desktop
3 products per row on tablet
2 products per row on mobile
Step 4: Added Strategic Friction Reducers
I kept only one additional element: a testimonials section after the product grid. No newsletter signup, no lengthy explanations—just social proof to reduce purchase anxiety.
Step 5: Implemented Smart Inventory Rotation
The AI system rotated products based on:
Inventory levels (prioritizing overstocked items)
Seasonality and trends
User behavior data
Profit margins
The technical implementation used AI automation workflows to ensure the homepage stayed fresh without manual intervention. Every week, the product selection updated automatically based on performance metrics.
Mega Navigation
Built 50+ category system with AI auto-categorization and visual preview thumbnails for instant product discovery
Homepage Gallery
Displayed 48 products directly on homepage using responsive grid instead of traditional feature blocks
Smart Rotation
AI algorithm rotated products based on inventory levels seasonality and profit margins for optimal selection
Friction Reduction
Eliminated all traditional elements except testimonials section to create direct path from arrival to purchase
The results spoke for themselves and challenged everything I thought I knew about ecommerce homepage design:
Conversion Rate: Doubled from 1.8% to 3.6%
This wasn't just a minor improvement—it was a fundamental shift in how the homepage performed as a business asset.
Homepage Engagement Metrics:
Bounce rate dropped from 68% to 41%
Average session duration increased from 45 seconds to 2 minutes 14 seconds
Pages per session increased by 156%
User Behavior Changes:
The homepage reclaimed its throne as the most viewed AND most used page. Before the change, only 23% of homepage visitors made a purchase. After the experiment, that number jumped to 47%.
Most importantly, time to purchase decreased significantly. Previously, users would spend an average of 4.2 page views before making a decision. The new structure reduced this to 2.8 page views.
The mega-navigation system proved particularly effective, with 34% of users discovering products through hover previews rather than direct searches. This reduced reliance on the search function and improved product discoverability across the entire catalog.
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." Here are the key lessons that changed how I approach homepage design:
1. Match Structure to Inventory Scale
Traditional homepage layouts work for boutique stores with curated selections. But when you have 1000+ products, featuring 8 items is like showing someone a grain of sand and calling it a beach.
2. Observe User Behavior, Don't Assume It
I spent weeks optimizing feature blocks when users were already telling me they wanted to see more products. The data was there—I just wasn't listening.
3. Every Extra Click is a Conversion Killer
In ecommerce, friction kills conversions. Every additional step between arrival and product discovery reduces your chances of making a sale.
4. Homepage Purpose Varies by Business Model
For service businesses, the homepage should tell a story. For large-catalog ecommerce, it should BE the catalog.
5. AI Can Solve Curation at Scale
Manual product curation doesn't scale beyond 100 SKUs. AI automation can make intelligent decisions about what to show when, based on real data rather than guesswork.
6. Challenge Industry Standards Strategically
This approach wouldn't work for luxury brands or complex B2B products. But for high-volume, visual products, showing more beats telling more.
7. Test Bold Changes, Not Just Incremental Tweaks
A/B testing button colors won't save a fundamentally flawed structure. Sometimes you need to rebuild from scratch.
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:
Consider feature galleries over traditional benefit blocks
Use interactive demos instead of static descriptions
Implement smart navigation for complex product suites
For your Ecommerce store
For large-catalog ecommerce stores:
Test product galleries over curated collections
Invest in mega-navigation systems
Use AI for automatic product rotation and categorization