Rebuilding an online store around how people actually shop on a phone

The store worked. Orders went through, stock stayed in sync, payments cleared. What it did not do was persuade.

Most of the traffic arrived on a phone, and the phone experience was the weakest part of the site. Category pages collapsed into a long column of images with no way to narrow them down, so finding the right product took as many taps as giving up did. Product pages pushed price and delivery below three screens of marketing copy. Checkout asked for an account before it asked for an address.

The brief we were handed was "make it look better". The brief we agreed on was narrower and easier to measure: make products findable on a small screen, and stop losing people between the basket and the payment step.

We started with the catalogue rather than the homepage. Products were regrouped around the way customers describe what they want instead of the way the back office files it, and every listing page got filters that survive a tap on the back button.

Product pages were rebuilt so that price, availability and the delivery estimate sit above the fold on a 375-pixel screen, with the imagery below them rather than in front of them. Checkout went from a multi-step account flow to a short guest-first form with address autocomplete and the payment methods the store's own data showed people reaching for first.

The interface work ran alongside a performance pass, because a responsive layout that arrives late is not responsive. Images moved to modern formats and correctly sized variants, render-blocking third-party scripts were cut back, and the desktop-only components stopped being shipped to phones at all.

Compared like for like against the same period a year earlier:

• conversion rate up 150%
• sessions up 200%
• revenue up 300%

Revenue moved further than either input on its own because the two compound: more of the people arriving found something, and more of the people who found something finished. The mobile checkout change accounted for the largest single share of the conversion lift.