FashionBrand had a product people loved and a website that was getting in the way. Conversion rate on mobile was 0.8% — well below the industry average of 2.5% for fashion e-commerce. Cart abandonment was north of 80%. And their best-performing products were buried three clicks deep in a category structure that made sense to their warehouse team but no one else.

**The Brief**

The ask was straightforward on paper: redesign the e-commerce experience to increase mobile conversion and reduce abandonment. The reality was more complex. FashionBrand had seven years of product photography, a loyal customer base with strong opinions, and a development team that needed to maintain the site independently after handoff. The redesign had to work with what existed — not against it.

**Discovery**

We spent two weeks in the data before touching a single design tool. Heatmaps showed visitors spending time on product images but scrolling past the size guide almost entirely. Session recordings revealed a consistent pattern: users added items to cart, hit the checkout page, and left at the point where they were asked to create an account. Exit surveys showed 41% of respondents cited “didn’t want to make an account” as their primary reason for abandoning.

The insight wasn’t about design — it was about friction. The biggest conversion lever wasn’t a better hero image or a different colour button. It was removing the forced account creation.

**What We Built**

Guest checkout as the default. A sticky product bar on mobile that followed the scroll and surfaced the size selector and add-to-cart button without requiring a scroll back to the top. Rebuilt category navigation structured around how customers describe their clothing (occasion, season, fit) rather than internal categories. A social proof layer — real reviews, real photos — integrated directly into the product page above the fold.

**The Results**

Three months post-launch: mobile conversion rate moved from 0.8% to 2.3%. Cart abandonment dropped from 82% to 61%. Revenue per visitor increased 187%. And the development team shipped their first independent feature update six weeks after handoff, without needing agency support.