Trust before the checkout.

The existing shop could take payment, but a template-led presentation made the brand difficult to distinguish. Visitors needed to understand the products, inspect supporting lab reports and find the right shelf without already knowing the catalogue.

The commerce architecture had a real constraint. The retailer’s products had to remain with its established self-hosted checkout and payment arrangement. A redesign that moved everything to a convenient new checkout would have solved the wrong problem. We needed a new experience around the commerce system that already worked.

A specialist wellness retailer with an established catalogue, an existing payment setup and customers who need help choosing.

We built a new storefront that reads the live catalogue, with product detail pages, variants, reviews and a cart handoff to the existing shop. Content lives in an integrated publishing system with posts, media and site settings. The front end never takes card details.

The visual rebuild replaced a busy template with a restrained editorial layout, genuine light and dark themes, clearer product cards and a consistent navigation system. Seasonal promotions became small overlays on a stable base instead of a reason to rebuild the whole design.

A three-question product finder and goal-based search help someone start with their need. Product pages connect the selected variant to its imagery. A certificate library and product-level links make lab reports reachable. A Stories area separates video, articles and press, while a substantive science page links claims to sources.

The live commerce API remains the catalogue source. The cart sends selected items directly to the canonical checkout address, preserving the retailer’s processor. The content system manages editorial material separately, allowing the site to explain products without creating another catalogue to reconcile.

The migration checked the full source media library rather than relying on a short file list. It ultimately imported all 22 certificate PDFs documented in that build. Product matching prefers showing the full report library over attaching a certificate to the wrong product.

We also aligned the less visible surfaces: page-specific metadata, canonical addresses, structured product data, newsletter states and cross-tab cart updates. The later trust pass added sanitised content rendering, rate limits on email routes, associated form errors and announcements for assistive technology.

The most consequential checkout defect looked fine in code. An add-to-cart request went through a redirect that could add the same line twice. A real order exposed it. We changed the handoff to the canonical checkout address and checked each line-item response rather than assuming the batch succeeded.

Content needed the same discipline. An advertised discount had no matching coupon, and another promotion had no funded offer behind it. We removed the unsupported promise and kept optional promotions disabled until they could be honoured. Health-related copy needed sources and careful scope, rather than confident claims the retailer could not support.

Ordinary success signals missed other gaps. A migration reported success while omitting PDFs. Pages returned a successful status while their images were broken behind a preview gate. The work required comparing counts and inspecting the rendered journey. Those checks became part of verifying the customer journey rather than trusting a successful response alone.