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 the homepage into the catalog itself.
This isn't another regurgitation of what everyone else is doing. This is what actually worked when I threw conventional wisdom out the window. Here's what you'll learn:
Why traditional homepage layouts fail for large product catalogs
The exact structure that doubled our conversion rate
How AI-powered navigation solved the product discovery problem
When to break industry standards (and when not to)
Specific implementation steps for 1000+ product stores
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce "expert" recommends
Walk into any ecommerce conference or open any conversion optimization blog, and you'll hear the same tired advice about product layout structure. The industry has collectively decided on a formula that goes something like this:
The "Perfect" Homepage Structure:
Hero banner with your main value proposition
"Featured Products" section showcasing your bestsellers
"Our Collections" blocks leading to category pages
Social proof section with testimonials
Maybe some "About Us" content
This approach exists because it looks professional. It follows the traditional retail mindset where you have limited shelf space, so you carefully curate what goes in your store window. UX designers love it because it creates clear user journeys and looks great in portfolio presentations.
The problem? This conventional wisdom treats every ecommerce store like a boutique with 20 carefully selected items. It assumes customers know what they want and just need gentle guidance toward purchase.
But what happens when you have 1000+ products? What happens when your strength isn't curation but variety? What happens when customers need to browse and discover rather than just confirm a purchase decision they've already made?
The traditional approach falls apart. Visitors hit your homepage, don't see what they're looking for in your "featured" section, click through to categories, get overwhelmed, and bounce. Your beautiful homepage becomes a conversion killer.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When this client approached me, they had a successful Shopify store but a frustrating problem. Their business model was built on having the largest selection in their niche—over 1000 products across dozens of categories. This variety was their competitive advantage, but their website made it feel like a burden.
The existing homepage followed every best practice in the book. Beautiful hero section, featured products carousel, category blocks with stunning imagery. It looked like something that would win design awards. But here's what the data showed:
After analyzing their traffic flow, I discovered that most users used the homepage just to get to the "All Products" page. They'd land on the homepage, immediately scroll down looking for a way to see everything, click "View All Products," and then try to filter through hundreds of items.
The homepage had become irrelevant—a pretty obstacle between customers and products. Even worse, the "All Products" page was a nightmare to navigate. No matter how good your filtering system is, asking someone to browse through 1000+ items is user experience torture.
My first instinct was to improve the filtering and search functionality. We tried better category organization, improved search algorithms, smarter product recommendations. These helped marginally, but we were still treating symptoms, not the disease.
That's when I had what my client initially thought was a terrible idea: What if we made the homepage the catalog itself?
"This goes against everything we know about ecommerce design," they said. They were right—and that was exactly the point. In a world where every ecommerce site looks identical, being different isn't just creative, it's strategic.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's exactly what I did to transform their homepage from a traditional "best practice" layout into a conversion machine:
Step 1: Killed the Traditional Homepage Structure
I removed everything that stood between visitors and products:
Deleted the hero banner
Removed "Featured Products" sections
Scrapped "Our Collections" blocks
Eliminated anything that wasn't directly showing products
Step 2: Built a Mega-Menu Navigation System
Since the homepage would now show products directly, navigation became critical. I created an AI workflow to automatically categorize products across 50+ categories, making product discovery possible without leaving the navigation.
The key insight: instead of thinking "How do we organize our products?" I thought "How do customers actually search for products?" The AI categorization reflected customer mental models, not internal business organization.
Step 3: Transformed the Homepage Into a Product Gallery
This was the controversial part. Instead of traditional homepage elements, I displayed 48 products directly on the homepage. Not featured products or bestsellers—a rotating selection that gave visitors an immediate sense of the store's variety.
The layout used a responsive grid that worked beautifully on mobile and desktop. Each product showed the essential information customers needed to make quick decisions: image, price, quick view option.
Step 4: Added Strategic Social Proof
I didn't eliminate all traditional elements. After the product grid, I included one testimonials section. This provided the trust signals customers needed while not interfering with the primary product discovery experience.
Step 5: Implemented Smart Loading and Filtering
To prevent the page from becoming overwhelming, I implemented infinite scroll with intelligent loading. As users scrolled, more products appeared, categorized intelligently based on their browsing behavior.
The filtering system was integrated directly into the homepage experience—no need to navigate away to filter results.
Mega-Menu Magic
AI-powered categorization across 50+ categories made navigation intuitive and reflected how customers actually think about products, not internal business logic.
Homepage = Catalog
Displaying 48 products directly on the homepage eliminated the friction of traditional featured sections and gave immediate access to variety.
Smart Loading
Infinite scroll with intelligent categorization prevented overwhelm while showcasing the store's extensive selection naturally.
Data-Driven Design
Every element was tested against user behavior data rather than following industry "best practices" that didn't fit the business model.
The results challenged everything I thought I knew about homepage optimization:
Within 30 days of implementing this radical redesign:
Conversion rate doubled from the previous month
Homepage became the most viewed AND most used page on the site
Time to purchase decreased significantly
Bounce rate from homepage dropped by 40%
But the most telling metric was user behavior. Instead of immediately clicking away from the homepage, visitors were actually using it. They were browsing, discovering products they wouldn't have found through traditional category navigation, and making purchase decisions faster.
The client went from having a homepage that visitors tolerated to having one that actively drove sales. The traditional "best practice" approach had been optimized for design awards, not revenue.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons that emerged from breaking conventional wisdom:
Industry standards are starting points, not finish lines. When everyone follows the same playbook, that playbook becomes noise. Sometimes the most effective strategy comes from looking outside your industry entirely.
Your competitive advantage should drive your design. If your strength is variety, showcase variety. Don't hide your main selling point behind "best practices" that assume scarcity.
User behavior beats design theory. The data clearly showed users were bypassing our beautiful homepage to get to products. Instead of forcing them through our intended journey, I redesigned around their actual behavior.
Context matters more than conventions. A layout that works for a 20-product boutique will fail for a 1000-product marketplace. The scale of your catalog should fundamentally change your approach.
Friction kills conversions, not aesthetics. Every extra click, every additional page, every moment of confusion costs sales. Sometimes the "uglier" solution that removes friction outperforms the prettier one that adds it.
AI can solve human organization problems. The mega-menu categorization wouldn't have been possible manually, but AI made it scalable and continuously improving.
Test bold changes, not button colors. Small optimizations yield small results. Sometimes you need to completely reimagine the user experience to see meaningful improvement.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS platforms with product catalogs or marketplaces:
Apply this to app directories or integration showcases
Use AI categorization for feature discovery
Test homepage-as-dashboard approaches for complex products
For your Ecommerce store
For large-catalog ecommerce stores:
Audit your homepage-to-purchase flow for unnecessary friction
Test product-forward homepage layouts
Implement AI-powered navigation for 500+ products
Consider variety as a feature, not a burden