So, you want to improve your eCommerce offering but don’t know where to start?
Elizabeth Pardoe, Solutions Consultant from Rod Barlow Consultancy, offers some helpful tips for navigating an online shop refresh, with practical examples from clients they’ve worked with – including Kettle’s Yard online shop which was shortlisted for the 2025 Cultural Enterprises Best eCommerce Initiative Award. Read on and be inspired to start your own online shop refresh!
1. Outline the Areas for Improvement
Refreshing your eCommerce setup is exciting—you’re full of ideas and ready to bring your vision to life! But before diving in, it’s important to understand why your current site isn’t meeting your needs. Breaking it down into four key areas can help:
- User Experience and Site Design
- Customer Conversion and Retention
- Site Maintenance – how easily you can manage your site without needing a developer.
- Customer Engagement – newsletters, promotions, email marketing etc.
Perhaps your online shop is difficult for visitors to navigate or isn’t optimised for mobile—an issue in a world where more and more people buy on their phones and tablets. To pinpoint these challenges, try seeing your site through the eyes of your customers. Walk through the entire journey—from searching products to checkout—and get feedback from your team, wider organisation, and even friends or family. Honest insights can highlight key areas for improvement, helping you build a platform that truly works for your customers.
The National Trust for Scotland wanted more control over their online shop, particularly the freedom to refresh its look and content without relying on a developer for every small change. The high operational costs and lack of flexibility left the team feeling stuck. On top of that, the site’s navigation was clunky, and the checkout process was frustrating, hurting user experience and limiting sales. Rubber Cheese’s 2023 Annual Visitor Attraction Website Survey Report revealed that unnecessary checkout steps costs organisations up to £225,000 per year in lost sales—a staggering amount.
The answer? A more standardised platform that the team could update and manage themselves. Shopify, a software-as-a-service solution, proved to be the perfect fit for their needs, offering the flexibility and ease of use they were looking for.
In Spring 2024, Kettle’s Yard noticed online sales were faltering and identified the need for change. They invested in a refresh of their Shopify site with three key goals: improve customer experience and functionality, develop marketing opportunities, and improve the look and design of the site.
2. Define Your Ambitions and Expectations
The next step is to clearly define what you want to achieve with your new site. This will likely include these key areas:
- Higher Conversion Rates – Driven by a robust, efficient checkout process.
- Future-Proofing – A site you can easily maintain and update yourself.
- Enhancing User Experience and Design – A platform that’s intuitive, visually appealing, and easy to navigate.
- Strengthening Customer Engagement and Retention – through targeted marketing and personalised interactions.
By setting clear goals, you’ll create a site that’s aligned with your long-term vision.
We worked with Kettle’s Yard and National Trust for Scotland to create more contemporary, image-led site pages, which were easily customisable in-house. Both wanted a clean mobile view, so we ensured that the design scaled to smaller screens.
Easier site navigation was a key ambition for both organisations. This was achieved by fine-tuning their menu structures and highlighting collections and products. Adding customised filtering further enhanced user experience.
To boost customer engagement, we helped Kettle’s Yard create custom Shopify Email templates, giving them more control over the content and frequency of their shop-specific newsletters. Their first templated campaign on Museum Shop Sunday, featuring a free shipping offer, generated over £800 in sales. Since then, marketing email open rates and click rates have increased, proving the strategy’s success.
3. Find Inspiration and Create Your Wish List
Now it’s time for the fun part—building your wish list! Consider the features and factors we’ve covered so far and use them to shape your vision.
For inspiration, explore other online shops in the sector (everyone does this—it’s not cheating!). What features and functionality stand out to you?
- Integration with the main site – Is branding and design consistent between the main website and the online shop?
- Page Layouts – How do the homepage, collections pages, and product pages look and flow?
- Search Functionality – Are search recommendations and filtering options helping customers find what they need?
Take notes, get inspired, and start shaping the next version of your online shop!
4. Explore Solutions and Partners
Whilst an eCommerce refresh can be a daunting task, these top tips can help you define your requirements and ambitions, easing the process.
Now you can confidently search for potential software solutions or partnerships to help make your requirements a reality.
At Rod Barlow Consultancy we work with organisations of varying sizes to improve their eCommerce offering. We offer a range of services including technology strategy and selection, Shopify new site builds, migrations, and refreshes as well as ad hoc Shopify technical and UI/UX projects and support packages.
