A storefront rebuild that stopped losing people two clicks from paying.
Live, and run day to day by Nebula’s own merchandising team.
· What it moved
+ 0 %
Conversion rate
Sustained across the first quarter
- 0 %
Checkout abandonment
Against the six-month baseline
0 s
Largest contentful paint
Down from 4.3s on mobile
0
Weeks, brief to live
01 The brief
Nebula were selling well despite their storefront, not because of it. Six years of theme edits had left a five-step checkout, a product page that took over four seconds to load on mobile, and a merchandising team who had to raise a ticket to change a banner.
They arrived with one number: 71% of people who added to basket never paid.
02 What we did
We started in their analytics rather than in Figma. Two weeks of funnel data and session recordings showed the drop-off was not spread evenly — it was concentrated on the single screen where shipping cost appeared for the first time.
So the rebuild pointed at that. Shipping is estimated on the product page now. Checkout is one screen. Addresses autocomplete. Everything else — the design system, the headless front end, the CMS the merchandising team actually control — was built around keeping that path short.
The front end is Next.js talking to the Shopify Storefront API, which left their order and inventory operations untouched. Nobody in the warehouse had to learn anything.
03 How it landed
Conversion rose 38% in the first quarter and has held there. Checkout abandonment fell by nearly two thirds. Largest contentful paint went from 4.3 seconds to 1.1.
The part Nebula bring up most, though, is that banner changes now ship in minutes, by them, without us.
· The work
· How it ran
The whole thing took 6 weeks, with Nebula in the room for every phase.
Week 1
Funnel analysis, thirty session recordings, and interviews with the merchandising and warehouse teams.
Weeks 2–3
Product page, basket and a one-screen checkout, plus the design system underneath them.
Weeks 3–5
Headless front end against their existing Shopify back office, running in parallel with design.
Week 6
Staged rollout at 10%, then 50%, then everyone. No downtime and no order lost.
What Nebula said
They rebuilt our storefront in six weeks and conversions went up 38%. The handover docs were better than our internal ones.
· Still running
Live, and run day to day by Nebula’s own merchandising team.
Next project
Orbit Finance
· More work
Same studio, same thread, different problem.