Reframing the E-commerce Storefront Around Professional Buyers

The redesign ran alongside several business changes at once. The company was rebranding, migrating to a new technical platform, and narrowing its portfolio toward flooring, tile, carpet, decking and related building materials.

The storefront itself had evolved without a clearly defined primary customer. It served everyone from a homeowner making a one-time purchase to a contractor ordering several times a month.

Improving the experience for all of them equally kept making the problem broader. So before redesigning screens, I went after a more strategic question: who were we actually designing for?

With limited access to direct customer research, I combined Google Analytics, sales data, Hotjar, internal interviews and competitive analysis to understand who relied on the storefront and what they needed.

The same request kept arriving in the support inbox, and it was for something the site already offered.

One segment stood out. Across three years, professional buyers never accounted for less than 63% of total sales, rising to 91.6% in the strongest year. They were also a meaningful share of site traffic, and where a consumer buys once, a Pro buyer came back several times a month.

A homeowner might buy flooring once, for one renovation. Contractors, developers and designers came back several times a month for active projects, and sales interviews said the same thing: Pro buyers were the company’s most frequent and most valuable customers.

They also shopped differently. Rather than browsing for inspiration, they usually knew what they needed and wanted to find the right product, confirm it met the project’s requirements, and buy it.

That gave us a direction: prioritise the customers who drove the majority of the business and used the storefront most often.

Competitive research put most of the category on one side of that question: six of the eleven retailers here run one storefront with a Pro layer on top, and only two run a genuinely separate Pro site. We could have built the second storefront, but two would have needed their own development, merchandising, content and operational support, and the business was under pressure to focus investment and improve profitability.

On the customer and business evidence, we made a cross-functional decision: optimise the primary experience for professional buyers while keeping it usable for individual consumers. My part was to bring the behavioural and research evidence into the room, make the difference in Pro buyers’ needs concrete, and turn that into product priorities with Product, Sales, Marketing, Category Management, Engineering and leadership.

That gave us a much clearer definition of better.

Two principles carried the work, and every decision across navigation, discovery, product detail, sampling, checkout and performance was judged against them.

The old navigation reflected an inconsistent internal taxonomy. Related products appeared under different categories, the terminology did not always match how customers described materials, and important distinctions were buried deep in the hierarchy. For a buyer who already knew what they needed, that meant searching for it anyway.

I worked with Category Managers to restructure navigation around clearer product families: vinyl, wood, laminate, decking and carpet.

The hierarchy balanced three inputs.

We also surfaced distinctions such as rigid-core, glue-down and waterproof where they directly changed which product someone picked. The goal was never cleaner navigation on its own. It was to shorten the distance between “I know what I need” and “I found it”.

Hotjar showed engagement dropping sharply as customers moved down the old product page: under 30% reached the Product Overview and 12–16% the specifications, which sat near the bottom.

Google Analytics said the same thing about the end of the journey: of the sessions that reached checkout, about 95% did not complete an order.

Sales interviews explained why that mattered: customers called Sales because they could not find the information they needed to make a decision. The scroll map and the funnel in the reframe are where those numbers come from. We reordered the page around what a professional buyer needs first.

We ranked what the page had to answer, in order: product imagery, price, size and variation options, material and colour, specifications, purchase actions, sample ordering. Less decision-critical metadata such as SKU and style was visually deprioritised. An earlier concept put the specifications inside accordions to satisfy stakeholder content requirements, and usability testing showed the extra interaction discouraged people from looking at all, so we surfaced the essentials directly instead.

If information is necessary to make a purchase decision, customers shouldn’t have to work to reveal it.

For flooring, customers often need to see and feel a product before committing to a large order. BuildDirect already offered free samples, and the programme was so hard to find that some employees did not know it existed.

We moved sampling from a secondary feature to a core shopping action. Customers could request samples directly from the listing or product page, complete a sample order without creating an account, and tell free samples apart from paid products during checkout. The point was not feature visibility. It was to shorten the path between finding a product and being confident enough to buy it.

At first the issues looked unrelated. Users asked whether their sample had been added, whether it was actually free, where to find shipping information, and whether the order had gone through at all.

Nineteen of them, in four kinds — and underneath, one problem wearing four faces: customers did not trust what the system was doing.

Rather than closing each comment as its own usability ticket, I framed the next iteration around a single principle: confidence-first checkout.

We added clearer sample confirmation, separated free samples from paid products, surfaced shipping and costs earlier, clarified the line-item breakdown, and made the order summary and progress feedback persistent.

For a high-value building-materials order, transparency was not simply helpful information. It was the thing that let a customer move forward.

The redesign ran during a platform migration, while the existing business still had to keep trading. Design saw a chance to improve the shopping experience meaningfully; Engineering’s immediate priority was a platform stable enough to launch on.

We could not build the ideal experience at once. Richer product specifications and filtering would have improved discovery, and the engineering investment was too high against available capacity, so those improvements were deferred. We prioritised the core purchase journey, platform stability, and the changes that delivered the most customer value without putting the migration date at risk.

One constraint could not be deferred: page speed. Competitive analysis showed other flooring storefronts loading three to four times faster — Lowe’s at a speed index of 3.2 and Home Depot at 4.4, against 13.8 here — and the investigation pointed at product imagery.

Category Managers uploaded merchandising assets straight into the catalogue, and the system let large original files reach the storefront unoptimised. That is a workflow problem as much as a technical one, so we addressed both: automatic image compression with Engineering, and image guidelines I wrote for Category Managers so assets arrived consistent in the first place.

Together those changes contributed a 50%+ improvement in page-load performance without a much larger performance programme. Sometimes improving the customer experience means fixing the system under the interface.

The work needed Sales, Category Management, Engineering, Marketing, Product and leadership. My role was to hold the customer, business and technical views in one place and turn them into a coherent experience.

Qualitative feedback pointed at a second shift. After launch Sales reported fewer questions about navigating the site or placing standard orders, and more conversations where their product expertise could add value. The goal was never to remove Sales from the journey. It was to let the storefront handle standard purchasing so Sales could spend their time where it counted.

Launch was not the end of the project. With the new platform live, I kept working with Marketing, Category Management and Engineering on what the live site taught us.

We also evolved the SEO banners and homepage merchandising so Marketing could run content without a developer. The redesign was a stronger foundation rather than a finished answer.