Reconstructing a sport webshop for conversion

Context

Leo, owner of VS Sport, runs a webshop aimed mainly at local residents of Gouda looking for sports gear, particularly for running and skiing. The project needed to move fast, since the existing website no longer looked representative. Technically, the shop was tied to Lightspeed, meaning the designed elements had to be coded on top of the existing template to actually bring them to life.

Problem

The core issue was findability. Categories were scattered and poorly organised, product pages were unclear, and the underlying structure was messy. As a result, customers struggled to find what they were looking for, which directly affected sales.

Role and approach

The role covered website design, project management, and photography, in collaboration with Wouter (developer). Alongside designing the website, new photography was also produced, capturing fresh imagery of the store and its services, which was then used across both the website and social media. The scope of the project was carefully considered before deciding to focus mainly on findability, since that was the biggest bottleneck. Instead of a full redesign, which the budget didn’t allow for, the existing foundation was built upon further, but with a modern look and feel and a more logical structure.

Decisions and trade-offs

A move to Shopify was considered but rejected, given the time and cost such a migration from Lightspeed would involve. Instead, development continued on the existing Lightspeed template, using Claude Code to speed up coding and efficiently translate the designs into place.

Result

Leo responded very positively to the design, and recently shared that he’d hit a record number of sales in a single day through the website, something he hadn’t seen before. Combined with the social media approach, the improved website appears to have had a clear impact on the webshop’s visibility and findability.