Rebuilding Three Ecommerce Sites on Shopify Plus

— Conversion Up 25%

Overview

FI'm the sole UX designer at Focus Camera, covering three ecommerce brands — 15,000+ products and around 800K monthly sessions between them. I led the design side of moving all three sites off Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) and onto Shopify Plus, and used the migration as the occasion to rebuild the site architecture and primary sales flow, not just re-skin the old one. We started in June 2025, had the first site live by the end of August, and all three live by end of October.

Duration : June 2025 - October 2025

Software : Figma, Shopify, Magento 2 Backend, Monday.com

My role: UX/UI direction across research, architecture, production UI, and the design system that keeps three sites consistent.

Outcomes (6 months post-launch): Conversion up 25%, average order value up 10%, add-to-cart engagement up 149%, bounce rate down 1.9%.

The problem

Magento 2 kept going down, and it wasn't flexible enough for a web team our size. We'd already tried to fix it twice: a headless Magento 2 implementation that turned out too customizable to maintain, then Hyvä non-headless Magento 2, which cut a lot of what made the site feel like ours — we were basically back to where Magento 1 had left off. By the time we moved to Shopify Plus, I'd lived through what went wrong twice already.

Before the migration, I managed page and content publishing directly in Storyblok and the Adobe Commerce CMS, and ran SEO audits as part of that ownership, so I went in knowing exactly where the existing site's content and structure were weakest.

Research

I was a founding member of the backend migration team, working inside a cross-functional operations group. Ahead of the redesign, I ran competitor analysis and user interviews across all three sites.

Page speed was a consistent problem, and the site wasn't mobile-optimized, which made shopping harder than it needed to be. Checkout under Magento threw random errors on top of the occasional full outage — by the time we got to Shopify, fixing checkout reliability wasn't optional.

Design & architecture

I restructured site architecture and the primary sales flow to improve product discovery and cut friction between browsing and checkout — navigation, taxonomy, product page layout, search and filtering, and (for the first time) a native Shopify checkout instead of a patched-together one.

We started by rebuilding the taxonomy around what we actually sold, and folding in categories that hadn't been pulling their weight. I worked closely with our external dev team through the transition, and having lived through the two failed migrations before this one meant I already knew which decisions to avoid repeating.

I also built the Shopify backend templates myself — brand pages, promotional campaigns, business pages like About and B2B. Shopify gave us a starting template for the homepage, but I reworked it around our actual content and voice rather than shipping the default.

I built and maintain the Figma design system that keeps all three sites visually and functionally consistent while letting each brand keep its own identity — the same system supports Focus Pro Audio's brand pages and other partner-brand work.

Working across the migration

Marketing, operations, IT, content, and the executive suite all had a stake in how the new sites worked, so translating between departments was a constant part of the job. I worked directly with our Google Analytics and Feedonomics contacts to keep data and product feeds accurate through the switch, and used Microsoft Clarity and web vitals monitoring to catch where the new experience was underperforming.

One of the harder stretches was search. The dev team told us it was done and functional, but when I tested it, it wasn't usable or attractive. We went back and forth on Monday.com for a while before it actually met the bar.