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.
Detroit, MI
Shopify Store Design & Development in Detroit, MI
Shopify storefronts for Detroit sellers whose customer already knows the part number and only wants to confirm it fits.
Delivered remotely for brands across Detroit and Michigan.
Build · Detroit
Why Detroit brands come to us for this
- Fitment modelled as metaobjects so one year/make/model selector filters the entire catalog, not one collection
- Part-number search that normalises dashes, spaces and leading zeros and resolves competitor and superseded numbers
- One catalog, two price lists — installer and jobber accounts and retail buyers on the same product template
- Templates that carry lead time and real stock for shops that used to quote every line by email
- Build windows scoped around salt season, Autorama and the Woodward Dream Cruise instead of a generic launch date
A Detroit catalog rarely fails on aesthetics. It fails on the moment a buyer types a number with a dash in the wrong place, gets nothing back, and calls your counter instead — or worse, guesses, orders, and sends the part back three weeks later. Design here means making the confirm-it-fits step take one interaction. Everything else on the page is negotiable; that is not.
So the build starts underneath the theme. Vehicle applications, interchange and supersession records live as structured metaobjects tied to products, not as sentences pasted into a description. Once they do, one year/make/model selector can filter the whole store, persist across collections, and still be readable by search, by filters and by your Merchant Center feed later. Search gets tuned to treat an alphanumeric string as a first-class query, normalising dashes, spaces and leading zeros, and to resolve a competitor's number to your equivalent.
The third layer is that almost every shop in this metro sells twice: to installers and jobbers at one price, to the end customer at another. That is two price lists against one catalog and one inventory pool, not two websites. We design the templates so a logged-in trade account sees its own pricing, quantity breaks and reorder list on the same product page a retail buyer lands on from a forum link, and so nobody in your office has to keep two spreadsheets in sync.
Local context
Built for salt season, show season and a Michigan checkout
The Detroit calendar is not flat and a build schedule should respect it. Road salt drives rust repair, undercoating and replacement demand from November through March, and the discretionary half of the market — performance, restoration, wheels, detailing — wakes up in spring and peaks around Autorama at Huntington Place and the Woodward Dream Cruise in August. We scope heavy build work into the quiet stretch after the holidays so the storefront is live and tested before either wave hits, and we will argue you out of a cutover in cruise week. On the configuration side, Michigan applies a single statewide sales rate with no local add-ons, which makes tax setup mercifully simple, but Windsor is fifteen minutes away and a real share of your orders will be Canadian — so duties, CAD display and Ontario HST get decided at build time rather than bolted on after the first angry support email.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Detroit 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 Detroit store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Detroit 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 Detroit — your questions
Usually yes, and that spreadsheet is more valuable than most clients think. The work is normalising make and model spellings, splitting build-month and submodel qualifiers out of free text, and deciding what happens to rows nobody can verify. We import what is clean, flag what is ambiguous for your counter staff to confirm, and never silently publish a fitment we could not source.
The application record carries the qualifier — build date range, submodel, engine, drivetrain — and the selector asks for it only when it matters. A buyer with a vehicle where the answer is unambiguous never sees the extra question; a buyer in the overlap window does, with plain-language guidance on where to find the build date. That single pattern removes a large share of wrong-fit returns.
It usually feeds it. The store becomes what your counter staff send people to instead of a PDF, and it captures the after-hours and out-of-state demand you are currently losing. We also build the admin side so a phone order can be raised as a draft order against the same customer record, which means your repeat-buyer data stays in one place.
No. The whole company sits in one office, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We work with Detroit and metro clients remotely on Eastern time and travel for kickoff or quarterly planning when the engagement warrants it. We would rather say that than rent a mailbox in Corktown and pretend to be local.
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 Detroit 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.