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.
San Francisco, CA
Shopify Store Design & Development in San Francisco, CA
Shopify storefronts built for the two businesses this city actually produces: the subscription brand and the hardware company with a ship date that keeps moving.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Francisco and California.
Build · San Francisco
Why San Francisco brands come to us for this
- Subscription decision designed into the product page, not bolted on after add-to-cart
- Pre-order, reservation and deposit templates for Dogpatch and SoMa hardware launches
- Prop 65, ingredient and sourcing disclosure structured as metafields, not footer text
- POS and online inventory as one system for a single Valencia Street or Hayes Valley flagship
- Clean, commented Liquid handed to a technical founder who will read it — and be able to extend it
Most storefront briefs we get from this city arrive with an architecture attached. The founder is technical, has read the Storefront API docs over a weekend, and has a strong view about whether the product page should be a React island. That is a better starting point than no view at all, but it tends to produce a build where the interesting engineering happens in places that do not sell anything, while the variant model, the subscription selector and the shipping estimate — the parts a customer actually touches — get whatever attention is left. We start from the opposite end.
The second thing that shapes a build here is that the first order usually is not the point. A coffee, supplement or refill brand in this market is buying a customer, not a transaction, which means the subscribe decision has to be made on the product page rather than rescued in a post-purchase upsell. That changes the template: cadence chosen before add-to-cart, the price difference stated in dollars rather than a percentage badge, pause and skip visible as a promise up front, and a bundle path for the customer who wants three things on one delivery schedule.
Then there is California in the details. Prop 65 warnings on supplements, skincare and anything with a cord need a home on the page and in the metafields rather than a line buried in the footer. Ingredient and sourcing disclosure is expected by this buyer, not optional. And if you run one shop on Valencia Street, Hayes Valley or Chestnut, the site and the shop floor share inventory or they do not — a POS integration that is nearly right creates oversells on a Saturday, which is the day it costs the most.
Local context
Build for the flagship-plus-national shape, and for a ship date that moves
Two San Francisco patterns break generic themes in specific ways. The first is one physical store plus a national online business: rent in this city means you get one location, so the website is not a satellite of the shop, it is the larger business, and inventory, gift cards, appointment booking and customer records have to run as one system rather than two that reconcile nightly. The second is the connected-device launch, where the storefront exists for months before the product does. That build needs reservations and deposits, a ship-date field that can be updated honestly and communicated to every reservation holder at once, serial capture at fulfilment, warranty registration and a route back in for RMAs. We build those as content-editable structures your team can move without a developer, because the date will move and it will move on a Friday.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Francisco 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 San Francisco store
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Francisco 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 San Francisco — your questions
It usually works better. We write Liquid that reads like something a developer would maintain — commented sections, no mystery snippets, a documented metafield schema, and a repo you keep. Where it goes wrong is when technical ownership turns into rebuilding parts of Shopify that already work, so we are direct about which custom code will earn its maintenance cost and which will become a liability the first time Shopify ships a platform update.
Show both, default deliberately, and state the difference in money rather than in a badge. We build the selector so cadence is chosen before add-to-cart, the saving appears as a dollar amount per delivery, and pause, skip and cancel are described in plain language on the page rather than discovered in the account area. Hiding the cancel path raises first-order conversion and raises chargebacks and complaints with it, which is a bad trade in California specifically.
As structured product data with a defined display rule. The warning lives in a metafield on the products it applies to, renders in a consistent place near the ingredient and compliance content, and flows through to any channel that needs it. That is cleaner than a global footer disclaimer, and it means adding a new SKU that needs a warning is a catalogue task rather than a theme edit.
We have not found that it changes the outcome, and we should say plainly that there is exactly one ConversionEX office and it is in Albuquerque, New Mexico — no San Francisco address, no local staff. Mountain Time starts an hour before yours, which in practice means answers waiting when you open. You have more agency options in this city than anywhere else in the country, so the reason to pick us has to be the work rather than the postcode.
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 San Francisco 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.