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.
Baltimore, MD
Shopify Store Design & Development in Baltimore, MD
Custom Shopify storefronts for Baltimore businesses whose hardest design problem is a delivery date, a case pack or a part number.
Delivered remotely for brands across Baltimore and Maryland.
Build · Baltimore
Why Baltimore brands come to us for this
- Ship-day, cutoff and blackout logic built into the theme so the store stops selling deliveries your packhouse cannot make
- Dual-path templates: retail pricing and gifting on one route, case packs and account pricing on the other, one catalogue
- Part, model and serial-range data structured so port-area trade buyers can find a fitting without calling your counter
- Season-open and season-closed collection states your team switches without a developer, from crab season into oyster months
- A pre-built disruption notice component — channel closures, heat embargoes and nor'easters are planning inputs here, not surprises
Most Baltimore stores that come to us describe a design problem and have an operations problem wearing a design costume. A Fells Point seafood shipper wants a nicer homepage; what is actually costing them is a checkout that will happily sell a Thursday order for Saturday delivery when nothing leaves the packhouse on Friday. A supplier out toward the port wants a cleaner catalogue; what they need is enough structured product data that a buyer can find a fitting by model instead of calling. We build the rules first and the pixels second, because the reverse order is how a store gets redesigned twice.
The second thing that shapes a Baltimore build is that most of these businesses serve two customers at once. The same catalogue sells a single tin of seasoning to a household in Canton and eight cases to a caterer, or one gasket to a homeowner and a pallet of them to a rigging contractor. A generic theme picks one of those buyers and quietly annoys the other. We design template logic that recognises which one is looking — retail pricing and gift messaging on one path, account pricing, case quantities and reorder history on the other — off one product record and one inventory pool.
And then there is the aesthetic question, which in this city is not decorative. Hampden's Avenue, Station North and Fells Point produce brands with genuine visual identity and very small teams, and those teams need to run a seasonal storefront themselves. So every section we build is a native Online Store 2.0 block with a schema a two-person business can operate: swap the hero for the holiday lights window, switch on a heat-embargo notice, retire a collection when the season closes. If changing the homepage in December requires emailing us, we built the wrong thing.
Local context
A Baltimore storefront has to know the calendar and the weather
Maryland blue crab runs from roughly April into December and oysters carry the cold months, which means a food brand here has two different stores across one year and a hard handover between them. Retail follows a different rhythm again: Artscape and the summer festival run, the Fells Point fall crowd, the Hampden holiday-lights window in December, then a dead January. On top of that sits weather — a July heat wave and a February nor'easter both break overnight perishable delivery, and the Key Bridge closure in 2024 taught every business in this region that a disruption can arrive with no notice at all. So we build the seasonal switches into the theme rather than into a developer's inbox: season-open and season-closed collection states, a cutoff and blackout calendar the owner edits, and a sitewide notice component that is written, styled and tested months before anyone needs it. We also scope launches to land outside your peak and cut over DNS on a low-traffic Tuesday, never into a season you spent all year stocking for.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Baltimore 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 Baltimore store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Baltimore 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 Baltimore — your questions
That is usually the single highest-value piece of the build. Delivery-date selection tied to your packing days, carrier cutoffs enforced by the clock rather than by hope, and blackout dates for holidays and heat events all live in the storefront and shipping configuration. Once they are set, the order that used to generate a phone call never gets placed. We treat every manual correction your team currently performs as a rule specification.
Design matters differently. Nobody buys a hydraulic fitting because the photography is moody, but they abandon when they cannot confirm it fits their machine. So the design work goes into compatibility surfacing, scale references in imagery, honest lead times on anything moving by freight, and filters built from real attributes rather than a marketing taxonomy. A good industrial storefront looks plain and answers questions fast.
Yes, if it is built for that. Every content block is a native theme section with a plain-language schema, and we hand over recorded walkthroughs plus a written guide rather than a codebase and good luck. The test we hold ourselves to is whether your owner can build a new seasonal landing page on a Sunday night without opening a support ticket.
No. ConversionEX has one office and it is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We serve Baltimore and the DC corridor remotely on Eastern hours, and we travel out to start a project and when something genuinely needs a room. Renting a Harbor East mailing address would be simple and would tell you nothing true about who is building your store.
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 Baltimore 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.