Luxury Retail · New York · Shopify
This New York luxury lifestyle brand had built something genuinely rare: a product range with real editorial credibility, premium wholesale placement, and a loyal customer base who had discovered them through print. The problem was that anyone who found them online encountered a digital experience that directly contradicted the premium positioning they had spent years building.
Their Shopify store looked like tens of thousands of others. Checkout abandonment was running at 78% — more than three quarters of customers who reached the cart were leaving without buying. On iOS Safari, the checkout broke entirely on the most popular screen sizes. Their custom payment gateway integration had an 11% silent failure rate: cards were being declined with no customer notification, meaning the customer saw nothing, assumed the payment had gone through, and only discovered days later that their order hadn’t processed.
They had engaged two previous agencies before coming to HatchHope. Both had delivered patches that introduced new problems. By the time they reached us, they had a clear requirement: a complete rebuild, done right, with no further tolerance for disruption to a business generating seven figures annually.
Before writing a line of code, we spent the first two weeks in deep diagnostic mode. We ran anonymous user session recordings across 2,400 sessions. We mapped the exact drop-off points in the checkout funnel with heatmaps and scroll-depth data. We tested the payment gateway against every major card type and issuing bank represented in their customer base.
What we found went beyond the symptoms they’d described. There were three categories of failure:
UX failures: The size guide was buried four taps deep on mobile — customers were abandoning rather than searching for fit information. The “Add to Cart” button disappeared below the fold on the most common iPhone screen sizes. Navigation required six interactions to reach a product from the homepage on mobile.
Technical failures: The checkout had been built on a deprecated Shopify API that was no longer receiving security patches. The iOS Safari breakage was caused by a CSS viewport unit bug introduced in a theme update nine months earlier that had never been fixed. The payment gateway was configured with an incorrect webhook endpoint, meaning declined transaction notifications were being sent to a URL that no longer existed — hence the silent failures.
Performance failures: Average page load time was 5.8 seconds on mobile. Product images were being served at full resolution (averaging 4.2MB per image) with no compression or lazy loading. The site was loading 23 third-party scripts on every page, several of which were for tools the business no longer used.
We scoped a complete Shopify rebuild — not a redesign, not a patch, a ground-up rebuild — on a 12-week timeline with a parallel staging environment so the live store could continue trading without disruption throughout the build.
The design system was built atomically: every component — buttons, cards, typography scale, spacing units, colour tokens — defined once and applied consistently across the entire store. This meant that a change to the primary button style updated every instance across all pages simultaneously, which matters enormously for a brand that updates seasonally.
The mobile experience was built first, not adapted from desktop. We tested against 14 device and browser combinations — including the specific iPhone and Safari versions where the previous site was breaking — before any desktop work began.
The payment gateway was rebuilt from scratch. We implemented proper webhook handling with retry logic, real-time payment status feedback in the checkout UI, and tested every integration point against the three most common failure scenarios before going live.
Page performance was treated as a design constraint, not an afterthought. Every product image went through a compression pipeline before upload. We implemented lazy loading for below-fold images, critical CSS inlining for above-fold content, and removed all legacy third-party scripts. The result was a site that loaded in 2.1 seconds on the same mobile connections where the previous site took 5.8 seconds.
“HatchHope didn’t just fix our store — they transformed how we think about our digital presence. The attention to detail, the strategic thinking, and the delivery quality were unlike any agency we’d worked with before. They found problems we didn’t know we had and fixed them before they could cost us more money.”
If your Shopify store is converting at under 3% on desktop or under 1.5% on mobile, you almost certainly have diagnosable, fixable problems costing you real revenue every day. The gap between a store that was launched and a store that was built is measurable in your analytics — and it is almost always larger than the cost of closing it.
HatchHope offers a no-commitment Shopify audit for established brands. We review your checkout funnel, payment integration, performance metrics, and mobile experience and tell you exactly what is costing you conversions and what fixing it is worth in revenue terms. If the numbers justify a rebuild, we scope it with full cost and outcome transparency before any engagement begins.
Book a free 30-minute Shopify audit call. We’ll identify your biggest conversion bottlenecks and tell you what fixing them is worth.
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