The challenge
Zohra's Coffee Shop roasts specialty coffee to order and sells loose leaf tea alongside it, into the US market. Selling coffee online has a problem a clothing store does not: the buyer cannot taste anything before paying, and the catalogue is organised around vocabulary only enthusiasts speak. Single origin, blends, flavoured, decaf, espresso roast, African, Latin American, Asia Pacific — every one of those is a real distinction, and none of them answers the question a first-time buyer is actually asking, which is 'what should I drink in the morning'. Grind makes it worse. The same bag is sold as whole bean, standard, espresso or coarse, and a shopper who picks the wrong one has ruined the coffee before the first cup. So the store had to do two jobs at once: guide a newcomer to a first bag without making them learn the language, and stay out of the way of the regular who already knows they want a coarse-ground Sumatra in 5 LB.
What we did
- Merchandised the catalogue around how the coffee is drunk rather than how it is classified — Morning coffee, Bold & dark and Tea time as their own 'shop by ritual' routes on the homepage, sitting in front of the origin and roast collections rather than replacing them.
- Kept the enthusiast's structure intact underneath: single origin, blends, flavoured and sample packs, the three origin regions, and the cold brew, instant, pods, mushroom, decaf and espresso formats each addressable as their own collection for search and for the shopper who arrives knowing what they want.
- Made grind and size first-class variant choices on every product rather than a note in the description, so the decision that spoils a bag is made deliberately on the product page and carries through to the cart.
- Built the collection pages to filter on the things that actually narrow a coffee decision — availability, price, grind and size — with quick view and add to cart on the card itself, so comparing four roasts does not mean four page loads and four trips back.
- Put brewing guidance on the product page where the hesitation is, not in a separate guides section: the water temperature and dose for that specific product, and how many cups the bag actually makes, so the size choice stops being a guess.
- Gave first-time buyers two low-commitment ways in — sample packs that put six roasts in one box, and a build-your-own bundle that takes any three bags at an automatic checkout discount, which is the cheapest way to find a favourite without betting on a single 5 LB bag.
- Built the repeat purchase into the product page with Subscribe & save on a two, four or six week cycle, stated alongside the ability to skip, reschedule, swap or cancel — because in a consumable category the objection to a subscription is never the price, it is being trapped in one.
- Wired the discovery loops a coffee catalogue needs: frequently bought together with a single add-selected-to-cart, gift routes framed by who the gift is for rather than by product type, recently viewed, and a journal and brewing guides that give the collection language somewhere to earn organic traffic.
- Carried the roast-to-order promise through the whole path — announcement bar, product page and checkout — with the one-to-two business day dispatch window, free shipping threshold and 30-day returns stated where the buying decision is made rather than filed in a policy page.
- Shipped it as a bespoke, mobile-first theme with a region and currency selector, so the same storefront serves the US market it sells into without a second build.
The results
How we would approach yours
Every engagement starts the same way: a free audit of the store as it stands today — speed, technical SEO, checkout friction and paid efficiency — followed by a prioritised roadmap that puts effort against expected impact. You keep the findings whether or not we go further.
From there the work runs in weekly sprints against a live staging link, on fixed scope, with design, development and marketing in one team. That last part is why a conversion problem gets diagnosed once here rather than being passed between two agencies who each think it belongs to the other.