Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
When I took on a Shopify website revamp for a client drowning in their own success, I discovered something every "best practices" guide gets wrong about ecommerce homepages.
Here's the brutal reality: while every agency was preaching about hero banners and carefully curated product sections, my client's 1000+ product catalog was bleeding conversions. Visitors would land on the homepage, immediately click to "All Products," then get lost in an endless scroll. The homepage had become completely irrelevant.
The data was screaming at us - but no one was listening. Every visitor was using the homepage as nothing more than a doorway. Yet every ecommerce "expert" kept insisting on the same tired formula.
So I did something that made my client uncomfortable: I turned their homepage into their catalog.
Here's what you'll learn from my experiment that challenged everything:
Why traditional homepage structure fails for large catalogs
How I identified the real user behavior patterns
The 48-product homepage strategy that doubled conversions
When to break industry standards vs when to follow them
How to measure homepage effectiveness beyond vanity metrics
This isn't another "best practices" rehash. This is what happens when you test industry orthodoxy against real user behavior - and discover that sometimes the best homepage feature is removing features entirely.
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce expert recommends
Walk into any ecommerce agency today and they'll pitch you the same homepage formula. It's become so standardized that most platforms offer it as a template:
Hero banner with promotional messaging - Usually featuring your bestseller or current sale
Featured products section - Hand-picked items to showcase your range
Collections grid - Visual category navigation to guide browsing
Social proof section - Customer testimonials and review highlights
About/brand story - Building trust and connection
This approach exists because it works... for certain types of stores. If you're selling 10-50 carefully curated products, this structure makes perfect sense. You can spotlight your bestsellers, tell your brand story, and guide customers through a manageable selection.
The problem? Most successful ecommerce stores eventually outgrow this model. Once you hit hundreds or thousands of products, the traditional homepage becomes a bottleneck. Customers know what they want - they want to browse and discover. But the "best practice" homepage forces them through unnecessary steps.
Here's where conventional wisdom breaks down: it assumes all visitors need education and guidance. In reality, many visitors to established stores want to get straight to browsing. They're not looking for your brand story - they're looking for products that solve their immediate need.
Yet agencies keep pushing the same formula because it's what they know, what clients expect, and what looks "professional" in case studies. The result? Beautiful homepages that nobody actually uses the way they're intended.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The client came to me with a classic problem disguised as a success story. Their Shopify store was thriving - over 1000 products, steady traffic, growing revenue. But their conversion rate was stuck, and they couldn't figure out why.
I started where I always do: diving into the analytics. What I found was fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. The homepage was getting plenty of traffic, but the user flow told a different story entirely.
Here's what the data revealed: visitors were treating the homepage like a transit station, not a destination. They'd land, spend maybe 10 seconds scanning, then immediately click through to the "All Products" page. From there, they'd either find what they wanted quickly or bounce after getting overwhelmed by the endless scroll.
The traditional homepage structure was creating friction, not reducing it. The hero banner was ignored. The featured products section got some attention, but visitors who clicked through often bounced because they wanted to see more options. The collections grid was being bypassed entirely in favor of the search bar or "View All" links.
I realized we were solving the wrong problem. Instead of trying to make the homepage more persuasive, we needed to make it more functional. Instead of forcing visitors through our carefully designed funnel, we needed to give them what they actually wanted: immediate access to browsing the full catalog.
This was especially true for their audience - people looking for specific types of products who wanted to compare options, not be sold to. They knew the store carried what they needed; they just wanted to find it efficiently.
The conventional wisdom said this was backwards. "You can't just dump products on people," every ecommerce guide warned. "You need to guide them, educate them, build trust first."
But the data disagreed. Our best-converting visitors were the ones who could quickly access the product catalog and find what they needed without jumping through hoops.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Against every piece of conventional advice, I proposed something radical: turn the homepage into the catalog itself. Instead of teasing products and forcing clicks, display them directly where visitors expected to find them.
Here's exactly what we implemented:
The New Structure:
Immediate product grid - 48 products displayed directly on the homepage
Intelligent categorization - Products auto-sorted across 50+ categories using AI
Mega-menu navigation - Comprehensive category access without leaving the page
Minimal additional content - Just a testimonials section below the products
The technical implementation was crucial. We couldn't just dump 48 random products and hope for the best. Instead, we built an AI workflow that automatically categorized new products and rotated the homepage display to show the most relevant items based on seasonality, inventory levels, and browsing patterns.
The Mega-Menu Strategy:
The navigation became the real hero. Instead of forcing visitors to guess which category might contain what they wanted, we created a comprehensive mega-menu that revealed the full catalog structure. Visitors could preview categories without leaving the homepage, then dive deeper when they found something interesting.
Why 48 Products Specifically:
This wasn't arbitrary. Through testing, we found that 48 products hit the sweet spot - enough variety to satisfy browsers without creating decision paralysis. It filled the viewport on most desktop screens and created a satisfying scroll experience on mobile.
The key insight was treating the homepage like a department store floor plan rather than a magazine spread. Visitors could see immediately that this was a serious catalog with serious variety, then use the navigation to focus on their specific interests.
We also implemented smart filtering that worked seamlessly with the homepage display. Someone looking for a specific type of product could filter the 48 items shown, or use the mega-menu to access the full category pages.
Homepage Metrics
Track scroll depth, product clicks, and time-to-purchase rather than traditional bounce rate
AI Categorization
Automated product sorting reduced manual curation work by 80% while improving relevance
Mega-Menu Design
Comprehensive navigation preview reduced unnecessary page loads and improved user satisfaction
Testimonial Placement
Single social proof section below products provided trust without disrupting browsing flow
The results challenged everything I thought I knew about ecommerce homepage design. Within two weeks of launching the new structure, we saw immediate improvements across every metric that mattered.
The numbers spoke for themselves:
Conversion rate doubled from the previous month. More importantly, the homepage reclaimed its position as the most-used page on the site, not just the most-viewed. Time-to-purchase decreased significantly because visitors could start their product discovery journey immediately instead of navigating through multiple pages.
But the most surprising result was the improvement in customer satisfaction. Support tickets related to "can't find products" dropped dramatically. The mega-menu structure made the entire catalog feel more organized and accessible.
Visitor Behavior Transformation:
The analytics revealed a complete shift in how people used the site. Instead of bouncing from the homepage to search or category pages, visitors were actually engaging with the homepage content. Product clicks from the homepage increased, and those clicks converted at higher rates because people were finding relevant items immediately.
The testimonials section, positioned below the products, started getting more engagement too. People would browse the products, then scroll down to read reviews, creating a natural trust-building flow that felt organic rather than forced.
Perhaps most telling: when we A/B tested the old homepage structure against the new one months later, the traditional approach performed so poorly that we ended the test early. Once visitors experienced the direct-access model, they didn't want to go back to the gatekeeper approach.
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 often just industry habits. Here's what I learned that applies beyond this specific case:
User behavior trumps design theory - What people actually do matters more than what design guides say they should do
Friction isn't always obvious - Sometimes the most "helpful" features create the most friction
Scale changes everything - Solutions that work for small catalogs often break at larger scales
Context matters more than convention - The right homepage depends entirely on your audience and catalog size
Testing beats guessing - Even "obvious" improvements need validation against real user behavior
The biggest lesson: don't optimize for what you think looks professional - optimize for what actually works. This homepage "looked wrong" to every ecommerce expert who saw it, but it worked better than anything conventional.
I also learned that sometimes the best way to improve a feature is to eliminate it entirely. Every section we removed made the page more effective, not less. The hero banner, featured collections, brand story sections - they were all just obstacles between visitors and products.
When this approach works best: Large catalogs (500+ products), returning customers, product-focused rather than brand-focused shopping behavior. When it doesn't: New brands needing education, luxury/lifestyle brands where story matters, small curated collections.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies, this translates to feature-first product pages rather than marketing-heavy landing pages for established products.
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores with large catalogs, prioritize browsing over branding on your homepage to reduce friction and increase conversions.