Shape
A merchant with a dated storefront that had grown by accretion across markets and currencies. Each new locale duplicated effort, mobile performance had drifted, and the team wanted to commission a rebuild without setting it up to fail.
What the engagement looked at
- Collection and category architecture — where the current taxonomy had over-grown, where it was actually under-defined, and what shape would scale across markets without breaking merchandiser workflows.
- Theme structure considerations — the trade-offs between owning a custom theme and adapting an off-the-shelf one. The Assessment doesn’t pick the theme; it surfaces the criteria for the merchant’s research.
- Markets and locales approach — how to handle currency, language and content variants without forking the theme each time a new market opens.
- SEO hygiene — the structural questions (canonicals, hreflang, redirects) that need to be answered in the brief, not figured out mid-build.
What was handed over
A written architecture read and a sized phased outline the merchant could hand to the delivery agency they eventually engaged. Build was the agency’s; the scope and the questions were the merchant’s, shaped by the Assessment.