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.
Portland, OR
Shopify Store Design & Development in Portland, OR
Shopify storefronts for Portland brands whose customers read the spec sheet before they read the marketing.
Delivered remotely for brands across Portland and Oregon.
Build · Portland
Why Portland brands come to us for this
- Width, volume and last data held in structured metafields so filters, comparison tables and fit guidance never disagree
- Refurbished and trade-in templates with condition grading built in, on the same domain as the main catalogue
- Warranty registration and repair booking treated as storefront features rather than support-inbox overflow
- Admin and bulk-edit workflows designed for a small-run drop cadence, not a one-time catalogue load
- Build calendar planned around a Pacific Northwest autumn season, so cutover never lands in your outerwear peak
Portland sells to a buyer who wants the numbers. Last shape, volume, upper material, stack height, drop, denier, fill weight, whether the sole can be resoled and by whom. A theme that treats all of that as a paragraph of body copy under the add-to-cart is throwing away the only thing that separates a considered purchase from a coin flip. We build the product page around structured fields — metafields per attribute, not prose — so the same data drives the filter, the comparison table, the size guidance and the schema without anyone retyping it.
That structure is also the cheapest return-rate work available. Most footwear and technical apparel returns in this metro trace back to a page that could not answer a width or layering question, and the fix is not a returns app bolted on afterwards. It is width and volume stated as their own values rather than buried in a size chart image, a comparison to the well-known models a Portland customer probably already owns, and aggregated fit feedback shown where the size selector is, not three scrolls down in reviews.
The third thing a Portland build has to carry is the second life of the product. Warranty registration, repair booking, parts ordering, trade-in intake and a condition-graded refurbished line are reasons people buy here, not after-sales admin. We design those as storefront templates from the start — a refurbished collection with real grading standards, a warranty flow that captures the serial at registration — because retrofitting them into a theme built for a single linear purchase is always the more expensive job.
Local context
The supply chain is local, so the content bottleneck is too
Portland is the one metro in North America where a small brand can reach pattern makers, developers, materials people and sample rooms inside an afternoon's drive, and that changes how a build has to be sequenced. Catalogues here move in small runs with genuine spec changes between them, so the store cannot depend on a one-off content load done by an agency and never touched again. We build the admin side for the person in the Central Eastside workshop who knows what changed: metafield definitions with sensible names, a documented per-attribute template, bulk editor views set up for a size-and-width matrix, and a drop workflow that does not require a developer. We also plan the build around the wet half of the year, because a technical outerwear brand does its photography and merchandising for autumn in July and does not want DNS moving in October.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Portland 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 Portland store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Portland 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 Portland — your questions
Shopify's variant ceiling forces a decision, and the wrong one is a separate product per width that splits your reviews and rankings. We usually model size and width as two option dimensions on one product and push everything else — last, volume, resole eligibility, materials — into metafields, so the variant matrix stays small enough to manage. Where a full US size-and-width grid genuinely will not fit, we split by width with canonical and internal-linking rules that keep one page authoritative.
Yes, and it should. A separate second-life domain starts from zero authority and splits your traffic, whereas a graded refurbished collection on the main store inherits it. The build needs condition grading as a real product attribute, separate inventory locations, and honest photography of the actual unit rather than the studio shot of the new one. The operational side — grading, cleaning, shooting — is the part that decides your launch date, so we scope it before committing to one.
It should be built so a drop is a content task rather than a development task. That means a launch template your team can duplicate, scheduled publishing, a back-in-stock and notify flow already wired, and a queue or password window if the drop justifies one. We also make sure last season's drop page does not become a dead 404 — it either redirects to the successor product or stays as an archive page with the specs intact, because those pages accumulate links.
No. ConversionEX is a single-office company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Portland clients work with us remotely — we are an hour ahead, so your morning is our late morning and nothing sits overnight. We fly out at the start of a build and roughly twice a year after. We would rather say that than pretend to a Central Eastside address on a contact page.
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 Portland 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.