Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Picture this: You've just launched your online store with a beautiful, modern design following every UX best practice in the book. Clean homepage, featured products section, intuitive navigation. Everything looks perfect. But three months later, your conversion rate is stuck at 0.8% and customers are bouncing faster than a rubber ball.
I've been there. After working with dozens of e-commerce clients, I realized something that changed everything: most UX "best practices" for online shops are actually conversion killers in disguise. The internet is littered with generic advice that sounds good but fails spectacularly in the real world.
Last year, I worked with a Shopify client who had over 1,000 products and was drowning in their own success. Their beautifully designed store was hemorrhaging potential customers. Every UX consultant they'd hired before me had given them the same tired advice: "optimize your hero section," "add more trust badges," "improve your product page layout."
But here's what actually worked: I threw every conventional UX rule out the window and treated their homepage like a direct catalog instead of a marketing brochure. The result? We doubled their conversion rate in 30 days.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why following traditional UX guidelines can actually hurt your online shop
The counter-intuitive homepage strategy that transformed a struggling store
How to identify when conventional wisdom is killing your conversions
A step-by-step framework for optimizing UX based on actual customer behavior
The psychology behind why "more friction" sometimes means more sales
Industry wisdom
What every e-commerce expert preaches
Walk into any UX conference or scroll through any e-commerce blog, and you'll hear the same mantras repeated like gospel. The e-commerce UX industry has created a playbook that sounds logical on paper but often fails in practice.
The Standard E-commerce UX Playbook includes:
Homepage Hero Sections: Large banner with your value proposition, maybe a featured product, and a clear CTA button
Featured Collections: Curated product sections like "Best Sellers" or "New Arrivals" to guide discovery
Minimal Navigation: Keep it simple with just a few main categories to avoid overwhelming users
Product Page Optimization: High-quality images, detailed descriptions, reviews, and prominent add-to-cart buttons
Streamlined Checkout: Reduce form fields, offer guest checkout, minimize steps to purchase
This advice exists because it works for some stores. Specifically, stores with small, curated catalogs where the brand story matters more than product variety. Think fashion brands with 50 items or artisan shops with unique pieces.
The problem? Most successful e-commerce stores don't fit this mold. They have hundreds or thousands of products, customers who know what they want, and shoppers who prefer browsing to being "guided" through a sales funnel.
Yet every UX consultant applies the same formula: make it pretty, make it simple, guide the customer journey. But what happens when your customers don't want to be guided? What happens when "simple" becomes "limiting"?
That's where conventional UX wisdom falls apart, and where my approach began.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When this client first contacted me, they were frustrated beyond belief. Their Shopify store had been "optimized" by three different agencies, each promising better conversions. Each time, they got a more beautiful website and worse results.
The store had everything you'd expect from a "well-designed" e-commerce site: a stunning hero section showcasing their brand story, carefully curated "Featured Products" and "Our Collections" sections, and a clean, minimalist design that won design awards.
But the data told a different story:
Traffic analytics revealed that 73% of visitors went straight from the homepage to the "All Products" page, completely bypassing the carefully crafted featured sections. They'd land on the homepage, scan for maybe 5 seconds, then click "All Products" and start scrolling through an endless catalog.
The homepage had become nothing more than an expensive doorway. Customers were essentially saying: "Skip the sales pitch, show me everything you have."
Even worse, many customers would hit the "All Products" page, scroll for a while, then leave. With over 1,000 products displayed in a basic grid, finding anything specific was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
The client had tried the standard solutions: better product filtering, improved search functionality, more prominent featured sections. Nothing moved the needle. Conversion rates stayed stubbornly low, and customer feedback consistently mentioned that "finding products was frustrating."
That's when I realized we were solving the wrong problem. We weren't dealing with a discovery issue or a trust issue. We were dealing with a fundamental mismatch between what UX experts thought customers wanted and what customers actually wanted.
Instead of trying to guide customers through a predetermined journey, we needed to give them what they were already looking for: immediate access to the full catalog in a way that didn't overwhelm them.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's exactly what I did, step by step, to transform this store from a conversion disaster into a revenue machine:
Step 1: I Killed the Traditional Homepage
Instead of fighting customer behavior, I embraced it. Since 73% of visitors immediately clicked "All Products," I made the homepage become the product catalog.
I removed the hero banner, featured collections, and brand story sections entirely. The homepage now displayed 48 products directly, with only a testimonials section below. No guesswork, no friction - just immediate product access.
Step 2: I Built an AI-Powered Mega Menu
With over 1,000 products, navigation became critical. I implemented a mega-menu system with 50+ categories, powered by an AI workflow that automatically sorted new products into the right categories without manual intervention.
This meant customers could find exactly what they wanted without ever scrolling through hundreds of irrelevant items.
Step 3: I Made Product Discovery Effortless
The key insight was that customers with large catalogs don't want to be "guided" - they want to browse efficiently. I restructured the entire site architecture around this behavior:
Clear category headers visible at all times
Quick-view functionality for faster product evaluation
Related products that actually made sense (not just "customers also bought")
Step 4: I Added Strategic Friction Where It Mattered
Contrary to UX best practices, I actually added friction in one area: the checkout process. I added a shipping cost calculator directly on product pages instead of hiding costs until checkout. I also integrated Klarna's pay-in-3 option prominently.
Paradoxically, giving customers more payment options and transparency about costs before they committed increased conversion rates even among customers who paid in full.
Step 5: I Optimized for Mobile-First Browsing
Since most traffic was mobile, I redesigned the entire experience around thumb-friendly navigation. The mega-menu collapsed intelligently, product grids adapted perfectly to mobile screens, and the search function became more prominent.
The Psychology Behind Why This Worked:
Traditional UX assumes customers need guidance and persuasion. But customers shopping large catalogs often know what general category they want - they just need efficient tools to find it. By removing "helpful" guidance and providing powerful browsing tools instead, we matched their actual shopping behavior.
Catalog-First Design
Turn your homepage into your product catalog rather than a marketing page when you have 100+ products
AI-Powered Navigation
Use automated categorization to handle large inventories without overwhelming customers
Strategic Friction
Add transparency about costs and payment options before checkout to increase trust
Mobile Browsing Priority
Design the entire experience around thumb-friendly mobile browsing patterns
The transformation was immediate and dramatic:
Within 30 days of implementing these changes, conversion rates doubled from 0.8% to 1.6%. But the real surprise was what happened to user behavior patterns.
The homepage went from being a brief stop-over to becoming the most engaged page on the site. Average session duration increased by 45% because customers were actually browsing products instead of hunting for the "real" catalog.
Cart abandonment decreased by 23%, primarily because the shipping calculator eliminated checkout surprises. Customers knew exactly what they'd pay before adding items to their cart.
Most importantly, the "All Products" page visits dropped by 60% - not because traffic decreased, but because customers found what they needed directly from the homepage and category pages.
The client later told me this was the first time in two years that their website felt like it was working with their customers instead of against them. Sales team reported that customer support inquiries about "finding products" virtually disappeared.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me seven critical lessons that apply to any online shop with a substantial product catalog:
Customer behavior beats best practices every time. Instead of forcing users into your ideal journey, design around their natural patterns.
"Less is more" doesn't apply to large catalogs. When you have 500+ products, customers want access to everything, not a curated selection.
Transparency reduces friction more than simplicity. Hiding information (like shipping costs) creates more problems than showing it upfront.
Homepage purpose depends on catalog size. Small catalogs benefit from storytelling homepages; large catalogs benefit from functional homepages.
AI can solve navigation complexity. Automated categorization makes large inventories manageable without human maintenance.
Mobile browsing patterns are different. Desktop UX rules often break on mobile - design mobile-first, always.
Payment flexibility increases conversions. Offering multiple payment options reduces purchase anxiety, even for customers who don't use them.
The biggest lesson? Stop treating every e-commerce store like it's selling 20 curated items. Large catalog stores need fundamentally different UX approaches that prioritize browsing efficiency over brand storytelling.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS products with large feature sets: Make feature discovery your priority. Create searchable feature directories and avoid hiding capabilities behind "getting started" flows when users want to explore everything available.
For your Ecommerce store
For large inventory stores: Implement catalog-first design with AI-powered navigation. Add shipping calculators to product pages and offer multiple payment options prominently. Design for mobile browsing patterns first.