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.
Istanbul
Shopify Store Design & Development in Istanbul
Shopify storefronts for Istanbul manufacturers whose buyer is in Denver or Dusseldorf and has never heard of the workshop the product came out of.
Delivered remotely for brands across Istanbul and Türkiye.
Build · Istanbul
Why Istanbul brands come to us for this
- English written as English, not translated from Turkish product sheets that read as machine output within two sentences
- Dual inch and centimetre measurements taken off the sample, so a US buyer can check against a garment she already owns
- Metafield-driven spec for textiles: GSM, weave, cotton origin, care and shrinkage, filterable rather than buried in copy
- Shopify Markets set up for USD, EUR and GBP with clean retail price points per market, not live conversion decimals
- Workshop and production photography from Merter, Zeytinburnu or Ikitelli built into the template as trust evidence
The hardest part of a storefront built in Istanbul is not the design. It is that the person you are asking for a card number has no reference point for you. She cannot drive past the building, she does not recognise the district, and she has no idea whether a parcel from Turkiye takes four days or four weeks. Every template decision on the site is really an answer to one of those doubts, and a store that treats them as an afterthought converts at a fraction of what the product deserves.
So we build the evidence into the page rather than into an About section nobody opens. Garment and product measurements in inches and centimetres, taken from the actual sample rather than converted off a Turkish size label. Towel weight in GSM, cotton origin, weave, and wash behaviour held in metafields so they filter and compare instead of sitting in a paragraph. Production photography from the floor in Merter or Zeytinburnu, because a shot of a cutting table does more for a first-time buyer than another lifestyle frame. A delivery date, not a shipping-time range.
The commercial layer runs underneath all of it. Shopify Markets configured for USD, EUR and GBP with prices that read as retail prices in each one rather than a live currency conversion ending in odd decimals, duty and import tax settled at checkout so no courier knocks asking for money, and a returns route the buyer can see before she commits. Those are theme and configuration decisions made at build time. Retrofitting them into a live store six months later is the expensive version of the same job.
Local context
A factory advantage that only survives if the storefront carries it
Istanbul brands almost always have the better product and almost never have the better page. The city sits on a manufacturing base most DTC labels rent from at arm's length, with Bursa textiles, Denizli towels and bedlinen and Gaziantep rugs within a few hours, and Istanbul Airport putting an express parcel on a US or European doorstep inside a working week. That is a genuine argument against a competitor drop-shipping from a container. It just never reaches the customer, because the storefront was built from a Turkish-market theme, the copy was machine-translated, the size chart is in EU numbers only and the shipping page says nothing about who pays duty. We build the store the other way round, starting from what an American or German buyer needs to see before she believes a company she has never heard of, and working back to the catalogue. The result is usually a smaller site with far more said on each page.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Istanbul 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 Istanbul store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Istanbul 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 Istanbul — your questions
It depends on whether the Turkish side of the business needs a storefront at all, and often it does not, because domestic demand already runs through Trendyol and Hepsiburada. If you do want both, we build them as separate Shopify Markets with their own catalogues and pricing rather than one site with a language toggle, because the Turkish buyer and the export buyer want different payment options, different delivery promises and often different products. Mixing them produces a site that serves neither well.
It works when the manufacturing itself becomes the story rather than something you apologise for. Factory-direct only converts if the page proves the factory: production photography, materials specified properly, minimums explained, and a reason the price is what it is. What does not work is a wholesale catalogue uploaded as a retail store, with 900 SKUs, style codes as product titles and no editorial. Cutting to a merchandisable range is usually the first real decision.
By publishing garment measurements as the primary information and treating the size label as secondary. A US buyer does not trust a conversion table, and she is right not to, because Turkish manufacturing size runs vary by category and by factory. We put chest, waist, length and sleeve in inches and centimetres on every variant, add model height and size worn, and structure it as metafields so it renders consistently across the catalogue instead of as a PDF chart somebody has to open.
Deliberately, and in writing. The team is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so our morning is your late afternoon, roughly 16:00 to 19:00 Istanbul time. Calls are scheduled inside that window on purpose and everything else moves as written handovers you read at the start of your day, with a staging link and a specific list of decisions waiting for you. Builds do not stall on the time difference. They stall when nobody wrote down what they needed.
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 Istanbul 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.