We rebuilt a legacy store into a conversion machine.
This UK kitchen units & doors retailer had a category-leading product trapped inside a 2000s-era Zen Cart store. We migrated the platform, redesigned around real sales-team insight, and ran a structured experimentation programme on the product page.
Kitchen units & doors e-commerce · Direct-to-consumer, UK · ★ 4.9/5
A great product, held back by its platform.
The client sells UK-made kitchen units, doors and accessories direct to the public at trade prices. The demand was there. The store wasn't keeping up.
The site ran on Zen Cart, legacy open-source PHP from the early 2000s. No A/B testing. No custom configurators. Every UX change meant bespoke PHP development. The design was dated and the mobile experience was broken.
The free USP was invisible
A free door, handles and hinges came with every unit, but the offer was buried on the product page, so shoppers underrated the value and the price felt steep.
A cluttered product page
No clear hierarchy and a buried call-to-action. Many shoppers hesitated. Some gave up and rang the sales team to order by phone instead.
Broken on mobile
The store wasn't mobile-optimised. A growing share of traffic met a layout that simply didn't work on a phone.
Imagery undersold quality
Product photography didn't reflect the real craftsmanship of UK-made units, weakening trust at the exact moment of decision.
We started by listening.
Before a single pixel moved, we interviewed the people closest to the customer: stakeholders and the sales team fielding daily calls. Their frustrations became our roadmap.
Stakeholder interviews
To align on goals, margins and the made-to-measure offer.
Sales-team interviews
Surfacing the six recurring friction points behind phone orders.
Funnel & behaviour review
Mapping where intent was lost on the product page.
“Customers were ringing us to order because the website made a simple size choice feel hard. We knew the demand was there. The journey just got in the way.”
Client sales team · research interview
A new platform, a new store.
We didn't just redesign a page. We replaced the foundation, rebuilt the store around real customer insight, and shipped it.
Zen Cart → WooCommerce
Moved off legacy PHP onto WordPress + WooCommerce, unlocking A/B testing and custom functionality.
Oct 2025Research-led rebuild
A clean, modern, mobile-first design shaped directly by stakeholder and sales-team insight.
Oct 2025The new store goes live
A faster, mobile-first store on a modern stack, shaped by everything the research surfaced.
Oct 2025The relaunch moved the numbers.
The redesigned store didn't just look better, it sold more. In the most recent quarter, every core metric grew against the previous period.
Mar to May 2026 vs previous period (Nov 2025 to Feb 2026)
892 orders in Mar to May 2026, up from 729 in the previous period, a fifth more transactions, quarter on quarter.
Source: client WooCommerce store · Mar to May 2026 vs previous period (Nov 2025 to Feb 2026)
Four tests. Two clear winners.
With the new store live, the platform finally made A/B testing possible. We ran a programme of four experiments on the kitchen unit product page, the store's most valuable surface, one hypothesis at a time. Two produced decisive wins.
Kitchen unit PDP: surface the free door, handles & hinges
The client's biggest USP (a free door, handles and hinges with every unit) was barely visible on the unit product page. Shoppers didn't realise how much was included, so the price felt higher than it really was.
Adding a prominent section that clearly spells out everything included free with each unit will raise perceived value and lift the add-to-cart rate.
We designed a dedicated “what's included” section on the PDP, calling out the free brushed-steel handles, soft-closing hinges and height-adjustable legs that come with every unit.
Buy CTA above the fold, plus a trust badge
The top of the page was packed with text, pushing the main “See prices and buy” CTA below the fold. Shoppers had to scroll before they could act.
Reorganising the above-the-fold content to surface the CTA, adding a star-rating review badge for trust, and dropping a shortcut into the image gallery will cut friction and lift conversions.
We moved the buy CTA above the fold, added a 4.9/5 review badge beside it, and placed an “Order Sample Door” button inside the image gallery so shoppers could jump straight to the sample-order section.
What this unlocked.
Your platform is a constraint
You can't optimise what you can't change. Migrating off Zen Cart turned UX from a dev ticket into a weekly testing capability.
Make the value impossible to miss
The free door, handles and hinges were the strongest selling point and the most hidden. Spelling out what's included free lifted add-to-cart by 125%.
Put the action where the intent is
Moving the buy CTA above the fold, adding a trust badge, and shortcutting to sample orders won another 5% on conversion rate.
The sales team is research gold
The people answering the phones already knew every friction point. We just had to ask, then build the fixes.
Test 05 is running.
We never stop testing. Right now we're putting a long-held hunch to the test: that nothing sells a kitchen quite like a real one.
Do real customer kitchens build more trust?
Showing real finished kitchens from real customers, alongside their testimonials, will build trust and lift conversion.
Want results like this on your store?
We run research-led CRO programmes for e-commerce brands: migrate, redesign, and test until the numbers move. Book a free CRO teardown and we'll show you where your store is leaving money on the table.
- 30-minute teardown of your highest-value page
- A prioritised list of test ideas, yours to keep
- No pitch deck, no obligation
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