Designing & Building Your New Shopify Store: What to Consider During a Migration

Designing the New Shopify Experience

This phase of the project should balance three priorities:

• Creating a better shopping experience for customers

• Building a scalable, flexible Shopify architecture

• Ensuring operational efficiency through integrations and automation

This section contains a list of areas you should definitely take into account when creating your new ecommerce store on Shopify.

UX opportunities during migration

1. Navigation improvements

Many legacy ecommerce sites suffer from overcomplicated navigation and inconsistent taxonomy (classification of products). Shopify migrations provide an opportunity to simplify and modernise how users browse products.

Areas to review include:

• Main navigation hierarchy

• Collection structure

• Search and filtering functionality

• Product tagging strategy

• Internal linking between collections and content

• Mobile navigation usability

• Mega menu implementation

A cleaner information architecture can improve both conversion rate and SEO performance by making products easier to find and crawl.

1. Mobile optimisation

For most brands, mobile traffic now represents the majority of sessions. Yet many ecommerce experiences are still designed desktop-first.

Key mobile considerations include:

• Thumb-friendly navigation

• Sticky add-to-cart functionality

• Faster page load times

• Simplified product pages

• Mobile-first imagery and media

• Optimised forms and checkout flows

• Reduced pop-up friction

• Streamlined account and login experiences

Remember - every additional interaction on mobile introduces friction. The best Shopify storefronts reduce the number of decisions and steps required to purchase.

1. CRO improvements

Migration projects create an ideal window to implement Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) improvements that may have been difficult on a legacy platform.

Common CRO opportunities include:

• Improved product page layouts

• Stronger calls-to-action

• Better product imagery and video

• Social proof and review integrations

• Improved merchandising

• Personalised recommendations

• Bundling and upsell functionality

• Clearer shipping and returns messaging

• Trust signals and payment icons

• Smarter cart experiences

Rather than simply rebuilding existing templates, brands should collect data and insights - use customer behaviour data, heatmaps, analytics, and user testing to identify areas for improvement.

1. Faster checkout journeys

Checkout friction is one of the largest causes of cart abandonment.

Shopify’s accelerated checkout ecosystem provides opportunities to reduce steps and improve completion rates through a whole host of mechanisms:

• Shop Pay

• Apple Pay

• Google Pay

• PayPal Express

• Dynamic checkout buttons

• One-page checkout optimisation

• Address auto-complete

• Guest checkout improvements

You should also review:

• Discount code behaviour

• Shipping logic

• Payment gateway setup

• Checkout extensibility requirements

• International checkout experiences

• B2B purchasing flows (if you have a wholesale element to your business)

The goal is to minimise cognitive load and remove unnecessary barriers between cart and conversion.

Theme strategy

Off the shelf theme or custom theme?

Choosing between an off-the-shelf and a custom Shopify theme boils down to your budget, launch timeline, and brand requirements. Here’s an overview of both, and some of the pros and cons of each option.

1. Off the shelf theme

These are pre-built templates that can be bought (or downloaded for free) from the Shopify Theme Store.

They’re fast to market, cost-effective, and easy to manage. Updates are delivered by the theme developer.

But, you’re constrained by the theme’s layout and features. Plus, your store is likely to look similar to those of other brands that are using the same template.

1. Custom theme

These are built from the ground up by designers and developers (at agencies like Radiant) to create a unique ecommerce presence to showcase your brand.

This gives you control over the layout, user journey, mobile version, plus you can integrate more complex business logic and custom code for a faster, sleeker experience.

But, this costs design and development time so the project will be more of a financial investment.

Accessibility considerations

Accessibility should be treated as a core requirement, not a post-launch enhancement.

An accessible ecommerce experience improves usability for all customers while reducing legal and compliance risk.

We will be releasing a comprehensive guide to website accessibility, available to download on our website. For the scope of this migration guide, however, we’ll briefly touch on some of the key things for you to consider.

1. Navigation and interaction

• Keyboard navigability

• Logical focus states

• Accessible mega menus

• Clear button states

• Skip-to-content functionality

1. Visual accessibility

• Colour contrast compliance

• Readable typography

• Responsive font scaling

• Avoiding text embedded in images

1. Screen reader support

• Semantic HTML structure

• ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) labels where appropriate - these are special HTML attributes used to provide descriptive text for user interface elements

• Alt text for imagery

• Proper form labels

• Accessible error messaging

1. Checkout accessibility

• Clear form validation

• Accessible payment flows

• Mobile-friendly inputs

• Reduced motion considerations

You should aim to align with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards and include accessibility testing throughout your QA process, not as an afterthought just prior to launch.

Content Management and Merchandising

One of the great strengths of Shopify is that it allows brands’ internal ecommerce teams to update and manage the platform without dependence on developers (unlike other platforms such as Adobe Commerce).

When developing your site, keep in mind that you want it to be as easy to manage as possible post-launch, so consider the following factors:

• Flexible landing page creation for future campaigns

• Collection merchandising controls

• Future promotional content

• Reusable content blocks

• Blog functionality

• International content managements

• Product recommendation logic (you may use a third party tool for this)

The aim is to create a future-proof Shopify store that evolves with your business, post-launch.

Built doesn't mean ready to launch

Once your new Shopify store has been designed, developed and configured, there's one crucial stage before it can go live: testing.

A migration touches everything from customer journeys and checkout to integrations, tracking, SEO and back-office processes. Thorough QA helps make sure all of those moving parts work together as expected before real customers start using the new store.

In Part 7 of The Radiant Shopify Migration Guide, we'll cover how to test your new Shopify store, what should be included in your pre-launch QA process and how to prepare for a smooth launch.

The complete Radiant Shopify Migration Guide is also coming soon, bringing together everything you need to know about planning and delivering a successful Shopify migration.

If you're planning a move to Shopify and want to create a new ecommerce experience rather than simply replicate your existing store, get in touch with the Radiant team.