Rebuilding a slow Shopify-style storefront into a 1.2s conversion machine

The challenge

The store took over 6 seconds to become interactive on 4G. Product discovery required three taps, and the cart abandoned silently when payment retries failed. Paid traffic was growing, but revenue per visitor was flat.

Research

• Session recordings on 1,400 mobile visits to locate drop-off points.
• Core Web Vitals audit across the 20 highest-traffic URLs.
• Interviews with 8 repeat customers about how they choose a product.
• Competitor teardown of 5 Indian D2C skincare storefronts.

Strategy

• Move product discovery above the fold with concern-based filters, not category trees.
• Ship a lean front end and defer every non-critical script.
• Make payment failure a recoverable state instead of a dead end.
• Instrument every funnel step before changing anything else.

Design decisions

• Concern-first navigation (acne, pigmentation, ageing) replacing SKU categories.
• Sticky add-to-cart with live price and offer state on mobile.
• Ingredient and result blocks designed for scanning, not reading.

Development

• Image pipeline with responsive AVIF/WebP and lazy loading below the fold.
• Route-level code splitting; third-party scripts loaded after interaction.
• Retry-safe payment handler with recovery email on failed transactions.

How we worked

1. 1
   Audit

   Performance, analytics, and funnel baseline captured in week 1.
2. 2
   Prototype

   Clickable mobile flow tested with 6 users.
3. 3
   Build

   Incremental rollout behind a traffic split.
4. 4
   Optimise

   Four weeks of post-launch iteration on real data.