Shoppers were abandoning their carts. The trouble started before checkout.

The challenge

Precycle, a zero-waste grocery store in Brooklyn, had 78% mobile cart abandonment, and the homepage had the highest number of exits.

High cart abandonment usually sends a team to the checkout. Before redesigning anything, the owners and investors needed evidence of where shoppers were really getting stuck, so they could decide what to improve first. The redesign also had to last: the owner and team needed to maintain the store themselves, keeping its existing data and the research behind the design decisions.

My contribution

I led the project from UX research through the design and development of the Shopify storefront.

The friction started before checkout. I began with Google Analytics, comparing devices and looking at where people left the site. Mobile brought more visitors but had weaker engagement, and the main exits were on the homepage and in search results, before shoppers ever reached the cart. Two questionnaires, with 94 responses in total, added perspectives from recent online customers and the wider Precycle community. Six customer interviews across the project explained the patterns behind the numbers. Interviewees described checkout as generally straightforward once set up. What took effort came earlier: they lost their place moving between categories, couldn't tell whether a missing product was sold out or listed elsewhere, and sometimes found pricing units unclear. They valued Precycle's products and its commitment to reducing waste; it was the everyday shopping tasks that got in the way.

That changed what to fix. Instead of the checkout, the work became helping people find the right products and know enough to put an order together. I focused a heuristic evaluation on navigation and product availability, rating issues by severity. I then brought the findings together in personas, empathy maps and prioritized recommendations. Owners and investors got a documented basis for the redesign and a reference they could return to as the store evolved.

Organized around how people shop for groceries. I reorganized the storefront around familiar grocery categories and checked the structure through card sorting. With a mobile-first approach, I designed seven main categories, clearer navigation, a prominent search bar and breadcrumbs so shoppers could keep their place. Visible stock status, repeat-purchase support and add-to-cart from product listings addressed the practical needs of a recurring grocery shop.

Built and tested it myself. I customized the Shopify theme's code across navigation, search, product pages, stock visibility and the cart, and ran A/B tests on specific changes to see what worked. The finished storefront connects to live inventory and can be maintained by the owner and team, while the research keeps the reasoning behind the design for future iterations.

Methods

• Google Analytics review of shopping behavior and purchase drop-offs.
• Two customer questionnaires with 94 responses in total.
• Heuristic evaluation using five of Nielsen's usability principles, with issues rated by severity.
• Six customer interviews, research-based personas and empathy maps.
• Research synthesis and prioritization of recommendations.
• Information architecture and card sorting.
• A/B testing of specific changes.
• Shopify theme customization and code-level implementation.