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.
Toronto, ON
Shopify Store Design & Development in Toronto, ON
Custom Shopify storefronts for GTA brands who are quietly running a Canadian store and an American one out of the same theme.
Delivered remotely for brands across Toronto and Canada.
Build · Toronto
Why Toronto brands come to us for this
- CAD and USD built as two priced markets with their own rounding, shipping rates and thresholds — not an FX widget
- French storefront wired at theme level so filters, cart, delivery estimates and transactional email all follow the switch
- Outerwear and boots merchandising: temperature ratings, layering logic, and a store finished in August for an October season
- Yorkville-grade jewellery templates: made-to-order lead times, engraving variants and gifting cutoffs that hold
- Shipping profiles with a courier fallback alongside Canada Post, so a postal disruption is a setting, not a scramble
The first architectural decision on a Toronto build is not what the homepage looks like. It is whether the store is one market or two. Most GTA brands take a larger share of revenue from the United States than from Canada, which means the theme has to render a CAD price to a shopper in North York and a USD price to a shopper in Ohio, with separate rounding, separate shipping rates and separate free-shipping thresholds, without a floating converter widget making the numbers look improvised.
The second decision is language. Selling into Quebec means a real French storefront, and Shopify's translation layer only covers what the theme exposes to it. Every hard-coded string a previous developer dropped into a section file — filter labels, size guidance, delivery estimates, the empty-cart message — stays in English forever unless the build accounts for it. We structure templates so the language switch carries navigation, facets, metafields, cart and transactional email together, because a half-translated store fails Quebec buyers and reads as careless to the ones it does reach.
Then the catalogue. The categories the GTA actually produces each break a stock theme in their own way. Cold-weather technical outerwear needs a temperature-rating and layering story, not a size chart. Jewellery out of Yorkville needs made-to-order lead times and engraving variants that survive a gifting deadline. A second-generation importer in Scarborough going direct needs a storefront and a wholesale price list off one inventory record. We design the templates around what you sell rather than asking your catalogue to compress into six generic sections.
Local context
A GTA build is scoped against a season that ends in December
Toronto retail years are lopsided in a way that dictates the build calendar. Outerwear, boots and anything cold-weather does the bulk of its year between late October and Boxing Day, so the storefront has to be finished, load-tested and merchandised in August — a build that lands in November has already missed the thing it was built for. Everything else keys off Black Friday through the Boxing Day week, which in Canada is a genuine second peak rather than a US afterthought. On top of that, parcel delivery in this country has been interrupted often enough that we treat carrier fallback as a build requirement: every shipping profile gets at least one courier rate alongside Canada Post, and the delivery-estimate block on the product page reflects the carrier that is actually moving the order. We scope kickoff so DNS cutover lands in your shoulder season, and we do not touch it after the first week of November.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Toronto 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 Toronto store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Toronto 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 Toronto — your questions
The same store, yes; the same prices, almost never. We build the US as its own market with a USD price list you set deliberately rather than a live conversion of your CAD price, which is how brands end up with $47.83 on a product page. Shipping rates, free-shipping thresholds and delivery estimates get set per market too. One theme, one admin, two commercially distinct storefronts.
At build time it is modest — mostly discipline about never hard-coding a string, plus the translation and review itself. Retrofitting it onto a live theme is where it gets expensive, because someone has to audit every section file a previous freelancer touched. If Quebec is anywhere in your plan for the next two years, do it now rather than in year three.
February to April, to be live and stable by August. Your revenue window is roughly ten weeks long and you cannot test a new storefront inside it. Starting in July means launching into your season with untested checkout, unproven size guidance and no baseline to compare against, which is the one scenario where a redesign can genuinely cost you a year.
No, and we would rather say so than rent a Bay Street mailbox. ConversionEX is based in Albuquerque and works with GTA brands remotely. Toronto is two hours ahead of us, so your whole working day overlaps ours and calls happen whenever you want them. We come up for kickoff and for the workshops where being in the room genuinely changes the output.
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 Toronto 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.