The Challenge
Premium retail brands in the Netherlands face a specific digital dilemma: their physical stores create an expectation of quality that their online presence often fails to match. This brand, a respected name in homeware and lifestyle goods with three physical locations in the country, had an e-commerce site that was hurting rather than helping their revenue.
The site had been built on a template platform and extended piecemeal over five years. The result was a PageSpeed score of 34 on mobile, a checkout abandonment rate of 76%, an average page load time of 6.8 seconds, and a mobile user experience so fragmented that 68% of mobile visitors were bouncing within 15 seconds. The brand's story, its provenance, craftsmanship, and values, was nowhere to be found in the digital experience.
The brief was to design and build an e-commerce platform that matched the quality of the brand, performed flawlessly on all devices, and created the conditions for customers to discover, trust, and buy, repeatedly.
"A slow website is an apology. Every second of load time is a silent message to your customer that their time does not matter to you."
The Approach
UX Research & Journey Mapping
Session recordings, heatmaps, and customer interviews revealed the specific friction points causing abandonment: slow category pages, confusing navigation, a three-step checkout with unclear progress, and product pages that buried purchase decisions under irrelevant information. A journey map was built for each of four key customer archetypes, first-time buyers, returning customers, gift purchasers, and trade buyers.
Design System & Visual Identity Integration
A complete design system was built to carry the brand's premium identity into every digital touchpoint. Typography, colour, spacing, and component libraries were designed from scratch, ensuring consistency across all 20 pages. The checkout flow was redesigned as a single-page experience with progressive disclosure, reducing cognitive load at the moment of purchase decision.
Performance-First Technical Build
The new platform was built mobile-first with performance as a non-negotiable constraint. Images were converted to WebP with responsive srcsets, JavaScript was deferred and tree-shaken, CSS was inlined for critical above-fold content, and a CDN was implemented for all static assets. The resulting PageSpeed score, 96 on mobile, 99 on desktop, reflected a build philosophy where every kilobyte was justified.
Product Page Conversion Architecture
Each product page was designed around a conversion architecture framework: trust signals above the fold, social proof within scrolling distance, size/variant selection with immediate visual feedback, a persistent add-to-cart element on mobile, and a cross-sell section based on browsing behaviour. Average time-on-product-page increased from 42 seconds to 2 minutes 18 seconds.
SEO & GEO Foundation
The platform was built with search visibility as a core design requirement, not an afterthought. Product schema, BreadcrumbList, Organisation, and LocalBusiness JSON-LD were implemented throughout. URL architecture was redesigned for clarity and crawlability. The result was a 58% increase in organic traffic within 60 days of launch, compounding the conversion improvements.
Results
96
PageSpeed Mobile
+42%
Conversion Rate
-61%
Cart Abandonment
+58%
Organic Traffic
Core Web Vitals, Before vs After (lower is better for LCP/CLS, higher for INP)
Conversion Rate by Device
Monthly Revenue, 6-Month Post-Launch
“Within the first week after launch our online revenue doubled. By month three we were consistently beating our previous best month. Rima understood our brand at a level that made the whole process feel effortless, even when the technical work behind it was anything but.”
Key Deliverables
UX research: session analysis, heatmaps, customer interviews
Full design system with component library
20 pages built: home, category, product, checkout, content
Single-page checkout redesign with progress indicators
PageSpeed 96 mobile, full performance optimisation
Product, BreadcrumbList & LocalBusiness schema
GA4 e-commerce tracking with full funnel visibility
Client CMS training & content management handover
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