When I was hired by a Canadian outdoor retailer, the good news was that customers already liked them.
The company had an established store and brand, a ton of excellent reviews and knowledgeable staff who knew how to sell. I wasn’t starting from scratch, and I don’t want to take credit for demand that already existed.
The problem was that their Shopify store didn’t reflect the quality of the physical business. Product listings were incomplete, important categories were buried, images weren't optimized for mobile traffic and the homepage directed visitors toward company news instead of products.
My job was essentially to stop the website from getting in the way.
Here’s what I changed.
1. I stopped the bleeding
Sales staff had been updating Shopify for years without much training or any consistent process. They knew the products, but they weren’t web specialists. Listings had missing information, duplicate headings and photos without alt text. Some images had been uploaded directly from photographers and were more than 15 MB, making pages painfully slow to load.
I ran a site audit using SE Ranking and found more than 3,500 errors and warnings.
From there, I trained the team on better content practices and began working through the backlog. The number steadily came down, and new problems stopped appearing at the same rate.
There wasn’t much point improving the store if we kept making it worse behind ourselves.
2. I turned the homepage back into a storefront
Once the cleanup was underway, I turned my attention to the homepage.
The hero was being used as a latest-news section. When I arrived, it promoted the opening of a dock. The announcement had no photos and led nowhere useful.
I checked the analytics, identified the site’s most visited product category and replaced the dock announcement with a link to it instead.
People were coming to the website to shop. The first thing they saw should probably help them do that.
3. I followed the sales data into the navigation
The same logic applied to the site's navigation.
I looked at which category pages were attracting traffic and generating sales, then made those the primary nav links. I also featured those categories more prominently throughout the homepage so customers could reach them without hunting through menus.
At the same time, I moved categories receiving little or no attention out of the most valuable positions.
Customers were already telling us what interested them. The website simply needed to listen.
4. I made free shipping hard to miss
Making the right products easier to find was one problem. Removing a major purchase objection was another.
The company offered free shipping on orders over $250, but the website barely mentioned it.
I added the offer to the announcement bar and homepage hero, linked directly to the shipping details and reinforced it in newsletters. In key locations, I emphasized the words free shipping rather than hiding them inside a longer sentence.
If you have a good offer, whispering about it seems counterproductive.
5. I put the right people on camera
The retailer had another underused advantage: knowledgeable people who were comfortable talking about the products on camera.
I began producing straightforward videos featuring the owner and members of the sales team. They weren’t elaborate productions, but they didn’t need to be. The people featured were credible, engaging and knew what they were talking about.
The videos expanded the company’s presence on YouTube and gave us useful content for the online store.
Sometimes useful beats polished.
6. I focused on the products already driving the business
Trying to overhaul every listing would have taken forever, so I identified the store’s 20 best-performing products and started there. I added relevant product videos, cleaned up the landing page formatting and made sure the copy helped customers understand what they were buying.
This kept the clean-up project manageable and concentrated the effort close to existing revenue.
Every product page needed to meet a basic standard, but not every page deserved the same investment. The analytics showed me where the additional effort was most likely to matter.
7. I swept the digital floor
Finally, I cleaned up the store visually.
The site used an older Shopify theme, and years of inconsistent updates had left it looking cluttered. I replaced low-quality logo files with cleaner assets, introduced a more legible typeface, added whitespace and gave the product photography more room. I also made sure the products shown most prominently had strong, properly optimized images.
None of this was a dramatic redesign. It was the digital equivalent of sweeping the store.
Customers may not consciously notice when the floor is clean, but they definitely notice when it isn’t.
The Result
Within six months, the store’s Shopify conversion rate increased by approximately 60% relative to its starting point.
Unlike the controlled A/B test I ran for the Victoria Royals, I fixed several obvious problems at once, so I can’t isolate the impact of any single change. That was deliberate: the business needed its store fixed, not preserved for the sake of a cleaner experiment.
There wasn’t one magical conversion trick. I mostly made the store easier to navigate, easier to trust and better at showing customers things they already wanted.
Apparently, that matters. Quite a lot.
