An online store re-merchandised for conversion, down to the right photos for each color

The client is a small, family-run brand selling dog-themed apparel, toys, and home goods on a hosted e-commerce platform, with part of the catalog imported from a print-on-demand partner. Traffic was starting to arrive, but the store was not doing the basic work of selling.

Its strongest offer, free shipping on every order with no minimum, was not stated anywhere near the top of the page. The homepage hero led with a casual family photo and soft copy. The featured products row pointed at an empty collection, so the most valuable spot on the homepage showed nothing. Most products had no category at all, which meant there were no useful collections to browse.

The product pages had a stranger problem. On imported products, each color's photos had been added as generic images, with random numeric file names and no labels. One tank top carried 42 photos across seven colors, and whichever color a shopper picked, they still scrolled through 36 of them.

All theme work happened on an unpublished copy of the live theme, so the live store stayed untouched until the owner reviewed the work and pressed publish.

• Offer up front. The announcement bar now opens with free shipping, no minimum. The hero was rewritten with a direct headline, a line on free shipping and the brand's giving pledge, and a "Shop Bestsellers" button.
• A hero that fits every screen. The source photo was being cropped through the dog's face and legs on wide monitors. We composited a true wide banner, with the dog centered on a blurred, brightened extension of its own background, so it reads cleanly from phones to ultrawide displays.
• Trust where decisions happen. A trust bar after the hero (free shipping, the giving pledge, secure checkout) and a short trust line placed directly under the buy buttons on every product page.
• An email list with a reason to join. The footer's thank-you block became an email signup with a 10% welcome code, which we created live in the store.
• A catalog you can shop. Product types on all 42 products, six collections, a curated best-sellers row on the homepage, and rewritten descriptions for the eight hero products.
• Small things the owner disliked. A hover effect that swapped product photos unexpectedly was traced to a single theme setting and turned off sitewide.

The color galleries were the interesting engineering problem. The platform allows only one image per product variant, so attaching photos to colors could never produce a gallery of six red photos when a shopper picks red. And the imported photos carried no color information at all.

So we put the color information into the photos themselves. For the template product, we downloaded all 42 images, built a labeled contact sheet, and classified each photo against the seven color options. Each image's alt text was then set, through the platform's admin API, to the exact name of its color option. Finally, we rewrote the theme's gallery template: when a product has a color option and its photos carry color labels, the gallery shows only the photos whose label matches the selected color, plus any unlabeled shared images such as size charts.

Products that have not been labeled yet fall back to the previous behavior, so the catalog never breaks while the rollout moves through it one product at a time. We verified it live: red shows six red photos, black shows six black ones, and switching colors swaps the gallery.

We also checked the reviews widget, which was installed correctly. "No reviews" meant there were genuinely none yet. Rather than seed fake ones, we wrote a review-request kit with personalized emails for the brand's first real customers.

The owner published the reworked theme, so the new hero, trust bar, free-shipping messaging, email capture, collections, and color-grouped galleries are all live on the store. A shopper now sees the offer at the top of the page, can browse by what they are shopping for, and sees the photos for the color they actually chose.

The remaining work is mechanical: labeling photos for the rest of the multi-color catalog, product by product, using the template product as the pattern.