A zero-downtime replatform that lifted conversion 31%
A heavily customised marketplace theme had become unmaintainable: 6.4 second mobile load, thirty-one installed apps, and a merchandising team who filed a developer ticket to change a hero image. We rebuilt it section-first on Shopify Plus.
- Timeline
- 9 weeks build, 90 day measurement window
- Market
- Canada
- Published
- January 9, 2026
- 3.9%
- Conversion rate
- 1.4s
- Mobile LCP
- +18%
- Average order value
- 0 min
- Migration downtime
+31%
from 6.4s
bundles
The challenge
Traffic was healthy and paid media was well run, but mobile conversion had been declining for four straight quarters. The theme carried thirty-one apps, eleven of which injected render-blocking scripts, and every merchandising change required an engineer.
What we did
Audit before design
Funnel analysis and session replay isolated the drop-off: product page load time and a variant selector that failed on smaller viewports. We fixed the diagnosis before proposing a rebuild.
Section-first theme architecture
Rebuilt on Online Store 2.0 with composable sections so the merchandising team can build a campaign landing page in an afternoon without touching Liquid.
App consolidation
Replaced eleven apps with native functionality or lightweight custom code, cutting third-party JavaScript by 71%.
Bundles and rehearsed cutover
Introduced Shopify Bundles with a curated room-set merchandising rule, then ran the migration twice on staging before a Tuesday 2am cutover with a rollback plan nobody needed.
The result
Conversion rate moved from 3.0% to 3.9% within ninety days on flat traffic. AOV rose 18% on bundle attach. The merchandising team has shipped forty-plus campaign pages since launch without a single developer ticket.