How We Approached a D2C E-Commerce Rebuild: A Before & After

This is a walkthrough of how we approach an e-commerce rebuild, told through a representative D2C project - a Delhi NCR home-and-living brand we will call the client. The numbers and decisions here reflect a typical engagement; we share it because the method is what transfers, not any one brand's specifics. If your store gets traffic but not enough orders, the diagnosis below will feel familiar.

The before: a store that looked fine and sold poorly

The brand came to us doing decent ad spend with disappointing returns. On the surface the site looked acceptable. Underneath, the problems were classic. The store was on a heavily plugin-stacked setup that had grown organically over three years, and it took nearly 8 seconds to become usable on a mid-range phone on a normal Gurugram 4G connection. Product pages buried the price and the buy button below long blocks of description. Checkout was a five-step process that demanded account creation before payment. Mobile conversion sat around 0.6% against a category benchmark closer to 1.5-2%, and the cart-abandonment rate was above 80%.

The owner's instinct was to spend more on ads. Our view was the opposite: they were pouring paid traffic into a leaky bucket. The cheapest growth available was fixing the bucket.

Diagnosis before design

We did not start by redesigning. We started by measuring. We ran the site through performance tooling, watched session recordings of real shoppers, and pulled the analytics funnel step by step. Three findings drove everything that followed. Speed was killing the top of the funnel - a large share of mobile users left before the page even rendered. The product page failed at the moment of intent, hiding price, trust signals, and the add-to-cart button. And checkout was haemorrhaging buyers at the forced-account-creation step. We quantified each leak so we could prioritise by rupees recovered, not by what was most fun to build.

The decisions we made

We rebuilt the storefront on a modern, performance-first stack with a headless approach: a fast front end backed by a clean commerce backend, so marketing pages and product pages could be optimised independently of the cart engine. This was a deliberate trade-off - more upfront engineering than a templated theme, but it removed the plugin bloat that caused the speed problem at its root rather than patching symptoms.

On the product page we inverted the hierarchy: price, key benefits, trust badges, and a prominent add-to-cart moved above the fold, with the long description and reviews below for those who wanted them. We added real social proof - review counts, recent-purchase signals, and clear return/delivery information that Indian shoppers look for before trusting a new brand.

On checkout we made the biggest single change: guest checkout by default, account creation optional and offered after purchase. We cut the flow from five steps to two, integrated a fast Indian payment gateway with UPI, cards, and cash-on-delivery, and added trust and security cues at the payment step where anxiety peaks.

The after: the numbers that moved

Performance came first because everything else depends on it. Time-to-usable on mobile dropped from ~8 seconds to under 2.5, and Core Web Vitals went from failing to passing across the board. With the faster, clearer experience in place, mobile conversion roughly tripled, from ~0.6% to ~1.8%. Cart abandonment fell sharply once guest checkout and UPI were live. Because the same ad spend now produced far more orders, the brand's return on ad spend improved without a single rupee of additional media budget - which was the whole point.

Just as valuable, the headless rebuild gave the team an admin experience where they could launch a campaign page or update inventory without a developer, which cut their operational drag and let them move faster on their own.

What this means for your store

The transferable lessons are simple and they apply whether you sell on Shopify, WooCommerce, or custom. Fix speed before you spend more on ads - paid traffic into a slow store is money set on fire, which is exactly why we start with website speed optimization. Treat the product page and checkout as the two highest-leverage screens you own, because that is where intent turns into revenue. Offer guest checkout and the payment methods Indian buyers actually use, especially UPI and COD. And diagnose with data before redesigning, so the rebuild targets the real leaks rather than the owner's aesthetic preferences.

How we would scope it for you

A rebuild like this is not a single price - it scales with catalogue size, integrations, and how much custom design you want. As a rough band, a focused D2C e-commerce rebuild of this kind in Delhi NCR typically runs ₹4 lakh to ₹12 lakh, and for a store already spending meaningfully on ads, the payback usually comes from recovered conversions within a few months rather than years. The right first step is always the cheap one: a diagnostic of where your funnel actually leaks. Once you can see the leaks in rupees, the rebuild decision makes itself.