Conversion-Led UX & Wireframes
Wireframes for home, collection, product, cart and checkout drawn from your own session recordings, site-search logs and support tickets. Not a template library.
Amsterdam
Shopify Store Design & Development in Amsterdam
Custom Shopify storefronts for Amsterdam brands that need to read as Dutch at home and as a credible European seller three borders away.
Delivered remotely for brands across Amsterdam and Netherlands.
Build · Amsterdam
Why Amsterdam brands come to us for this
- Dutch and English run as real Shopify Markets locales, so filters, cart and transactional email translate with the product copy
- iDEAL positioned first at checkout and tested against the rest of the payment set, not buried under card fields
- Garment measurement and fit blocks built into apparel and denim templates, because the withdrawal right makes returns a margin line
- Freight-rated shipping, lead times and configurable variants handled for furniture, lighting and interiors catalogues
- Delivery day, evening slot and pickup-point expectations surfaced on the product page, not buried in a shipping policy
The working language of an Amsterdam ecommerce team is English. The buying language of a Dutch consumer is not, and the gap between those two facts is where a lot of domestic revenue quietly goes. A Dutch shopper will read your English product page, understand every word of it, and still hesitate at a checkout that asks for a card number before it offers iDEAL. That hesitation does not show up as a bounce. It shows up as an add-to-cart that never became an order, which is why so many founders here believe their store is fine.
So we build the language layer into the theme rather than on top of it. Navigation, facet labels, size and fit copy, shipping and returns pages, cart, and the transactional emails all move together as one locale, driven through Shopify Markets with separate URLs and hreflang that a crawler can actually distinguish. The English storefront still exists, because for a brand selling into Germany, France or the Nordics as a foreign name, English is often the sensible default. What we will not ship is a Dutch product title sitting above an English delivery promise.
Then the catalogue decides the templates. The categories this city actually produces each break a stock theme in their own way. Denim needs garment measurements, fabric weight and stretch behaviour on the page, because the fourteen-day withdrawal right means a bad fit is a refund you have already paid to ship twice. Furniture and lighting need freight-rated shipping, lead-time fields and configurable options built out of real variants and metafields. Bike parts need fitment and compatibility filtering that answers the only question the buyer arrived with. Plants and bulbs need dispatch windows and country rules expressed in the shipping logic. We design the page types around what you sell rather than making your catalogue apologise for a theme.
Local context
The Dutch calendar and the Dutch delivery promise are build inputs
Two things about this market change the shape of a build. The first is that the Dutch gifting peak lands on Sinterklaas, 5 December, which means order cutoffs, gift messaging and stock warnings need to be live in mid-November and wound down before most of Europe has started. A launch plan borrowed from a US brand arrives roughly three weeks late here, so we scope cutover well clear of it and put the cutoff banner and delivery-estimate logic in the theme editor where your own team can move a date without a developer. King's Day in late April is a smaller but real retail moment for anyone with a seasonal or apparel line. The second is the delivery promise itself. Dutch buyers expect a named day, an evening option, and a pickup point they can choose at checkout, and that expectation is set on the product page long before the shipping step. We wire carrier cutoffs and delivery estimates into the PDP rather than leaving them to a policy page nobody opens.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Amsterdam brand’s realities.
Full service detailCustom Online Store 2.0 Theme
A bespoke theme in clean, commented Liquid with modular sections your team can rearrange themselves. Zero dependency on page-builder apps.
Merchandising & Navigation System
Collection architecture, filtering, badging and cross-sell rules mapped to how your catalogue actually sells. Bestsellers surface; dead stock stops eating grid space.
Speed Budget & Core Web Vitals
Image pipeline, third-party script audit and app cleanup enforced against a hard budget: LCP under 2.5s on 4G mobile, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200ms.
Catalogue & Content Load
Products, variants, metafields, collection copy and redirects loaded and QA'd in a dev store before cutover. You review a real store, not a Figma file.
Launch, Handover & Documentation
Loom walkthroughs, a written theme guide and 30 days of post-launch fixes included. Your team owns the store from day one.
Scoped and quoted for your Amsterdam store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Amsterdam engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Discovery & Data Pull
Two weeks inside your analytics, heatmaps, site search and support inbox. We leave with a ranked list of what is currently costing you revenue.
Architecture & Wireframes
Sitemap, template inventory and grey-box wireframes for every page type. Signed off before a single pixel gets designed.
Design System
Figma component library, type scale and every awkward state: empty cart, sold out, pre-order, bundle, back-in-stock, subscription upsell.
Build & QA
Liquid development in a dev store, tested on real devices and against your live app stack. Accessibility checked to WCAG 2.1 AA.
Launch & Measure
Redirect map, tracking validation, DNS cutover on a low-traffic window. Then 30 days of monitoring against the pre-launch baseline.
Proof
Design & Build results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Performance Apparel (DTC)
~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus
Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.
+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
Home Goods & Furniture
~$11M/yr, 2,300 SKUs, configurable upholstery, US · Shopify Plus + Hydrogen storefront (Oxygen)
Fabric, leg and size options turned 2,300 SKUs into more than 40,000 variant permutations, and the Liquid theme rendered a configurable PDP in 6.9 seconds on mobile. Collection filtering ran client-side, so 40% of shoppers left before the first product painted. The named constraint: the ERP stayed. It was the single source of truth for stock and lead times and was not up for replacement.
6.9s → 1.4smobile LCP75th-percentile field data on configurable PDPs
+64%CVR on configurable products0.44% to 0.72%. Sitewide conversion rate rose 23%
+52%organic sessionsserver-rendered facets made 1,900 filter combinations indexable for the first time
+$2.4Mincremental annualized revenuemonth-8 run rate vs. the pre-build baseline
In their words
Clients on this work
AOV $58 → $79
“Full rebuild in 11 weeks, launched two days before Black Friday, which was an aggressive ask and probably a stupid one on my part. They pushed back hard on three homepage ideas I was attached to and were right about all three. AOV went from $58 to $79, mostly off the bundle builder they put on the product page.”
CEOHome fragrance brand, ~$6M/yr · Phoenix, AZ
Verified via Shopify Partner referralFAQ
Design & Build in Amsterdam — your questions
One store with Markets, in almost every case at your size. Separate stores mean duplicated catalogues, duplicated themes and two sets of app subscriptions, and the inventory drifts within a month. Markets gives you country-specific domains or subfolders, per-market pricing and correct hreflang from a single admin. The exception is a genuinely different assortment or legal entity per country, which is rare below the scale where you would be having that conversation with a tax adviser first.
It affects how we build every store, and it has a specific edge in the EU because ecommerce services are in scope with a carve-out for the smallest businesses. Practically it means keyboard-operable navigation and cart, visible focus states, proper form labels and error messaging, sufficient contrast, and accessible names on every icon-only control. We build to WCAG 2.1 AA as standard and document what was tested, so if a question ever comes, you have an answer rather than a scramble.
Measurements in centimetres, weights in grams or kilograms, and any size chart expressed in EU sizing with the conversion shown rather than assumed. On-image text is the trap: baked-in English copy on a hero or a size graphic cannot be localised, so we move that text into the theme as real strings and keep the imagery clean. It is a small discipline that saves the entire Dutch storefront from looking half-translated.
By treating it as a conversion and margin problem rather than a legal page. The statutory right is not negotiable, so the work is in reducing the reasons people use it: garment measurements on the product, model height and size worn, fabric behaviour, real fit feedback from previous buyers, and honest imagery of colour under normal light. On the returns side we build the flow so a customer registers the return in a portal instead of emailing support, which gives you a reason code you can actually act on.
Eight to twelve weeks for most brands, from kickoff to live. A single-catalogue store with clean product data lands closer to eight. Add subscriptions, B2B, or a multi-market rollout and you are looking at fourteen to eighteen. We give you a dated Gantt in week one and update it weekly.
We build on Shopify's Dawn reference theme and replace the sections we need. That gives you Shopify's own performance and accessibility baseline plus a codebase that survives platform updates. Premium themes carry code you will never use and cannot safely delete.
That is the point. Every content block is a native theme section with a schema your merchandiser can configure in the theme editor. You get a written guide and recorded walkthroughs. If you still need us for a homepage change, we built it wrong.
Next step
Design & Build for your Amsterdam brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.