Rivergate Supply wasn't short on visitors. People were finding products, browsing the catalog, and adding items to cart. The store just made it hard to finish the purchase: slow collection pages up front, a checkout that lost people at shipping.
- Platform
- Shopify
- Starting point
- 2.8s collection load, high checkout drop-off
- What we touched
- Theme, checkout flow, post-purchase email
The problem
2 things were costing Rivergate sales.
Collection pages took 2.8 seconds to load, worse on mobile. Large uncompressed images, theme code doing more client-side work than it needed to, and a render path that waited on JavaScript before showing any products. Every extra second was a shopper deciding whether to keep waiting.
Checkout was worse. Shoppers got as far as the shipping step and stopped. Too many shipping choices, unclear pricing, and a page layout that buried the total added up to enough friction, at the exact moment someone was ready to pay, to talk themselves out of it.
Performance
We rebuilt the theme rather than patching around the slow parts.
- Stripped JavaScript the collection pages didn't need
- Compressed and resized product images
- Simplified how collections rendered, moving work off the client where Shopify allowed it
- Fixed mobile layout shifts that were delaying largest contentful paint
Collection load time went from 2.8s to 0.9s.
Checkout
We redesigned the checkout flow. Every step either helped someone finish buying, or it got cut.
- Cut shipping options down to what most orders actually use
- Moved order total and shipping cost above the fold, before the shipping step
- Fixed a mobile bug where the primary button sat below the fold on smaller screens
- Simplified the visual hierarchy so price and next action were the only things competing for attention
Checkout drop-off fell 32%.
Cart recovery
By week 3 the storefront was faster and checkout was cleaner, but some shoppers still left before paying. We turned on automated recovery emails for abandoned checkouts: timed sends with a working link back to the cart, no discount-code spam. Recovered cart revenue is up 41% since.
What changed
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| 2.8s collection load | 0.9s collection load |
| Checkout drop-off at shipping | Drop-off down 32% |
| Abandoned carts, no follow-up | Automated recovery, 41% more recovered revenue |
