A store designed around the moment someone decides.

Nine to twelve weeks is typical for a store of moderate size: two weeks of evidence gathering, two on structure, four or five on design and build, then launch preparation. Deep catalogs, custom integrations or a platform migration add time, and we will say which of those apply before quoting. Where the site is fundamentally sound we often recommend a targeted rebuild of the deciding screens instead, which takes a few weeks and usually returns more than a full redesign would.

A fixed project fee quoted after a scoping conversation, with the assumptions written down so the number does not move for reasons you did not choose. Cost tracks catalog complexity, how many templates are needed, integrations with your warehouse or ERP, and whether content and photography are in scope. We will tell you plainly when a redesign is not the best use of the budget — several stores that asked for one left with a improvement plan and kept their site.

Shopify suits most stores, and we say so rather than pretending every project deserves something exotic: the hosting, checkout and app ecosystem solve problems you would otherwise pay to rebuild. Webflow makes sense when content and campaign pages lead and the catalog is small. BigCommerce or a headless build earn their complexity with very large catalogs, unusual pricing logic or multi-region operations. The right question is what your operation needs to do daily, not which platform is fashionable.

It can, and the protection is unglamorous: a redirect map written before launch covering every old URL, page titles and structured data carried over, internal links rebuilt, and rankings watched daily for a fortnight afterwards. We involve the ecommerce SEO team during design rather than after, because most ranking damage is decided when someone quietly deletes a category page. Expect a small dip in the first weeks; expect it to recover, and expect us to say so if it does not.

Mobile, without much debate. Mobile is about 70% of ecommerce sessions and converts at 2% against 3.4% on desktop, so the phone is both the majority of your traffic and the weakest part of the funnel. Designing there first forces the hard choices — what the first screen must say, how many fields the checkout really needs — and the desktop version benefits from them. We review on real handsets on real connections, because a browser preview flatters everything.

Often the better investment, and we scope it as its own engagement. We read the behaviour data, rank the leak points, and rebuild the collection, product, cart and checkout screens in place rather than replacing the store. With cart abandonment averaging 70.22% across 50 studies, the checkout alone usually holds more upside than a new visual identity. If the platform genuinely cannot support what the evidence asks for, we will say that too.

Mostly by removing things. Image weight, third-party scripts and app embeds cause the majority of the damage, and each app added over the years was worth it to somebody, so we measure the cost of each in real load time before proposing a cut. Then it is the usual craft: modern image formats, lazy loading, minimal blocking scripts, a theme that is not fighting itself. It matters more than a lab score suggests — slow loads disrupted 11.6% of retail sessions and JavaScript errors 17.8%.

It answers the questions that stop a purchase, in the order a shopper asks them. Imagery that shows scale, texture and the thing in use; the variant choice made obvious; delivery cost and date stated on the page rather than discovered in the cart; sizing, materials and compatibility where the doubt is; returns explained in a sentence; reviews that mention the specifics. Most underperforming product pages are not ugly, they are silent — and the missing sentence is usually one your support inbox has already written.

We can, and we will tell you when your existing library is good enough. Where imagery is the bottleneck — inconsistent backgrounds, no detail shots, nothing showing scale — our creative studio shoots product and lifestyle sets designed to work on both the store and in ads, which avoids paying twice. Category and product copy can be written with the SEO plan so the pages are built once. If you have a strong in-house creative capability, we art-direct and stay out of the way.

As a data project with a design attached, in that order. Products, variants, customers, orders and reviews are mapped and test-migrated to a staging store first, so surprises happen where they are cheap. URLs get a redirect map, integrations are rebuilt and tested against real orders, and we agree a rollback plan and a quiet launch window with your operations side. Launch day should be boring; every dramatic migration we have inherited skipped the staging step.

That is a requirement, not a bonus. Templates are built so merchandising changes, campaign pages, new collections and seasonal banners can be made by your team without a developer, and the design system is handed over in your design tool with components documented. We run a training session, record it, and leave a short written guide for the things people forget. If you need us afterwards it should be for new capability, not to change a headline.

Against the numbers agreed before it was built: add-to-cart rate, checkout completion, revenue per session and sales split by device, compared year over year rather than against the launch week. We verify tracking against real orders after launch, because a redesign that appears to have halved conversion has usually just broken a tag. Where a change did not work we say so and revert it; the monthly improvement cycle exists precisely because no first version is right everywhere.

It is designed in rather than audited at the end. Contrast, focus states, tap target sizes, keyboard navigation, form labels and alt text are part of the component work, and we test with a screen reader on the deciding screens before launch. Beyond being right, it is commercially sensible: the same choices that help a screen reader also help someone shopping one-handed on a bright street. Where full compliance requires changes to third-party apps we will document exactly what remains and why.

As a shared vocabulary, never as a template. Early on we look at stores you admire and, more usefully, stores in adjacent categories that solve a structural problem like yours — a deep catalog, a configurable product, a subscription. We pull out the specific mechanic worth borrowing rather than the look, because copying the visual identity of a brand with different customers is how stores end up feeling generic. The reference list goes into the brief with a note on what each example is for.