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.
Chicago, IL
Shopify Store Design & Development in Chicago, IL
We build Shopify storefronts for Chicago brands that already have a warehouse, a sales rep and a distributor list — and now need the direct channel to earn its keep.
Delivered remotely for brands across Chicago and Illinois.
Build · Chicago
Why Chicago brands come to us for this
- Catalog taxonomy modelled first for deep Midwest manufacturing SKU counts, then designed around
- MAP-safe pricing display so a direct storefront does not start a distributor conversation
- Freeze-window and cold-pack messaging built into PDPs for Chicago food and beverage brands
- Dimensional and freight shipping logic for housewares, grills and oversized goods
- Launch windows scheduled around McCormick Place and theMART trade calendars, not ours
A lot of Chicago brands come to a storefront project sideways. The company is thirty years old, the revenue comes from grocery, hardware or specialty wholesale, and the website was built once by a cousin's agency to satisfy a retailer who asked for a URL on the packaging. Nobody designed it to sell. It shows.
That starting point changes the build. A Fulton Market snack brand needs freeze-protected shipping windows and multi-pack architecture on the product page. A Merchandise Mart housewares line needs dimensional freight logic and room-based merchandising. A Ravenswood brewery or distiller needs age gating, state shipping rules and a case-quantity cart. None of that is theme decoration. It is structure, and it has to be decided before anyone opens Figma.
We build in clean Online Store 2.0 Liquid, with the sections your merchandiser can actually rearrange, and we build the operational truth into the front end: real stock by location, honest delivery estimates from a Midwest warehouse, and pricing display that will not get you a phone call from your largest account. Then we hand it over documented, because your team is small and nobody in your building wants to file a ticket to change a homepage banner.
Local context
Building for a wholesale-shaped business
The typical Chicago merchant we build for is not a DTC-native brand. They are a manufacturer or distributor with real inventory sitting in Elk Grove Village, Bedford Park or out along I-55, an ERP that has been running since before Shopify existed, and a catalog whose logic was designed for a line sheet rather than a collection page. That means the design work starts with taxonomy — how a 900-SKU housewares or hardware catalog collapses into browsable collections — and with MAP rules, so the direct channel does not undercut the retailer whose reorder pays the mortgage. It also means the calendar bends around trade: the Inspired Home Show and NeoCon at theMART set the spring, the National Restaurant Association Show at McCormick Place sets May, and nobody wants a cutover the week the sales team is on the floor.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Chicago 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 Chicago store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Chicago 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 Chicago — your questions
Yes, if the pricing and assortment rules are designed in from the start. We build MAP-compliant display, channel-specific pricing and a direct assortment that avoids head-to-head SKUs with your largest accounts. Many Chicago manufacturers run direct primarily for new-product testing, hard-to-stock items and first-party customer data rather than to win on price.
It should, and most do not. We build seasonal shipping logic into the product page and cart: cold-pack or freeze-protection surcharges, restricted ship days, and honest messaging when a January order to a northern zone will be held. Surfacing that before checkout costs a few conversions and saves a lot of melted or frozen returns.
Eight to twelve weeks for most catalogs, longer if the data is messy or an ERP is in scope. For Chicago brands with a trade-show rhythm, the practical answer is to start in the quarter before your market season so the store is live and stable while buyers are looking, not being rebuilt while your team is at McCormick Place.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. ConversionEX is based in Albuquerque, and we serve Chicago clients remotely. Mountain time overlaps almost the entire Central business day, and we travel in for kickoffs, warehouse walkthroughs and quarterly planning.
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 Chicago 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.