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.
Pittsburgh, PA
Shopify Store Design & Development in Pittsburgh, PA
Shopify storefronts built for Pittsburgh catalogues, where the buyer arrives with a part number and a drawing rather than a mood board.
Delivered remotely for brands across Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania.
Build · Pittsburgh
Why Pittsburgh brands come to us for this
- Metafield-driven product templates so alloy, tolerance, finish and compatibility are filterable data, not paragraphs
- Drawing, spec sheet and CAD file handling built into the PDP instead of buried on a downloads page
- Case-pack and single-unit variants on one product for Strip District wholesale and retail selling side by side
- Season-shaped launch windows: shoulder months for merchandise brands, shutdown weeks for manufacturers
- Native Online Store 2.0 sections a one-person marketing team can rearrange without a developer
A Pittsburgh product page usually has to do a job most storefront templates never anticipated: prove that a part is the right part. The visitor is a maintenance planner at a plant along the Mon, a purchasing clerk at a hospital in Oakland, or an engineer at a robotics firm who has a competitor's SKU in one tab and yours in another. A lifestyle carousel does nothing for that person. What closes them is a spec table, a compatibility list, a drawing they can download and a stock figure they believe.
The other half of the city's storefront work is almost the inverse. Butler Street makers, Strip District importers and the fan merchandise trade sell on appetite, and they need speed, strong grid merchandising and a bundle path that survives a December rush. We build both, and the mistake we spend most time undoing is a brand that bought a theme designed for one and is trying to run the other through it. A twelve thousand line catalogue put into a template built for forty candles will never behave.
Editability matters more here than in bigger metros because the marketing team is often one person plus the owner. Every section we ship is a native Online Store 2.0 block with a schema, so a seasonal banner, a snow-day shipping notice or a new landing page for a trade show does not require an outside developer and a two-week queue. The store gets handed over with a written theme guide and recorded walkthroughs, and the codebase belongs to you the day it launches.
Local context
Two Pittsburgh catalogues, two very different builds
Scoping in this city starts with a question that sounds obvious and rarely gets asked: is this a specification catalogue or a desire catalogue? An industrial supplier in Robinson or Sharpsburg needs metafield-driven templates, filterable attributes, downloadable drawings, quantity-break display and a logged-in price view — the design work is information design. A Lawrenceville apparel label or a Strip District food importer needs photography-led templates, case-pack and single-unit variants on the same product, and a gifting path that holds up in the last week of November. We also plan the calendar around Pittsburgh's real shape: a fan merchandise brand cannot launch a new theme in October, a wholesale food business cannot cut over in December, and several manufacturers here still take a summer plant shutdown week that is the quietest, safest launch window they have all year. Being on Mountain Time helps rather than hinders on launch day, because our afternoon is your evening, which is when a DNS cutover should be happening anyway.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Pittsburgh 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 Pittsburgh store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Pittsburgh 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 Pittsburgh — your questions
For a technical catalogue, yes, and often it is the correct look. Consistent white-background imagery makes a spec catalogue scannable and keeps a twelve thousand SKU grid coherent. What we usually add is a small number of context and scale shots for the top revenue families, plus dimensional diagrams, because those are what stop a buyer emailing to ask how big the thing actually is.
As structured metafields with file references, not as links pasted into the description. That way the same document can be surfaced on a collection page, in search results and in a comparison table, and replacing a revision is one upload rather than a hunt through product copy. We also make document titles readable, because a buyer will not click a file named REV_C_final_2.pdf.
Yes, and that is usually the right build. Public list pricing and a normal checkout for the walk-up buyer, account-specific pricing and reorder history behind a login for the plant. One catalogue, one inventory, one admin. The design work is making sure the logged-out experience does not look broken to someone who has no account and never will.
No. The company operates from one address, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Pittsburgh clients are served remotely. We fly out for kickoff and for launch when the project warrants it. In practice the parts that genuinely need to be in a room together are the catalogue workshop and the photography plan, and we schedule those deliberately rather than pretending everything needs to be.
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 Pittsburgh 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.