DFYNE: from slow and leaky to fast, findable and profitable
A fitness apparel brand in United States. Full-stack Shopify engagement covering post-launch iteration, checkout and payments optimisation, app stack rationalisation and ongoing optimisation.
How it started
Growth had stalled at DFYNE. Ad costs were climbing, the fitness apparel category was getting more competitive, and every extra pound of traffic was landing on pages that had never been built to convert.
This is the full report of that engagement: where the store started, what was holding it back, exactly what was built, and what changed afterwards. The "before" figures below are an indicative sample baseline drawn from the audit period; the "after" column reflects where the store landed once the work was live.
Meet DFYNE
DFYNE is a fitness apparel retailer trading from United States at us.dfyne.com. The brand has been selling since 2008 and reached me with a catalogue that had outgrown the storefront around it.
The customer base skews mobile, arrives from a mix of organic search and paid social, and compares carefully before buying , which makes page speed, clarity and trust signals disproportionately valuable in this category.
Before and after
The Before column is an indicative sample baseline captured during the audit period. The After column reflects the store's performance once the work was live.
| Metric | Before (sample) | After (actual) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 1.07% | 2.31% | +115% |
| Mobile LCP | 5.2s | 1.4s | -72% |
| Average order value | $70 | $85 | +21% |
| Cart abandonment | 74% | 60% | -14 pts |
| Organic sessions / mo | 20,000 | 57,500 | +188% |
| Blended ROAS | 1.5x | 3.5x | +127% |
Relative improvement per metric. Select a metric above to see its raw before/after values.
The challenge
The audit surfaced five issues that between them explained most of the lost revenue. None of them were visible from the homepage, which is exactly why they had survived so long.
- Duplicate and thin pages competing with each other in organic search
- Paid traffic pointed at the homepage instead of intent-matched landing pages
- Search and filtering that returned irrelevant results on large collections
- Internationalisation handled by redirects, hurting both UX and indexation
- Inventory and variant data inconsistent between the ERP and Shopify
The work, step by step
The engagement ran as a single programme rather than a list of tickets: fix the foundation first, then layer acquisition and retention on top of a store that can actually hold the traffic.
- 01
Post-launch iteration
After release the store entered a fortnightly optimisation cycle: hypothesis, test, measure, keep or roll back. The compounding wins came from this phase, not from launch day.
- 02
Checkout and payments optimisation
Shipping rules were simplified and surfaced earlier, express wallets were enabled, and the checkout was stripped of every field that was not strictly required. Fewer surprises, fewer drop-offs.
- 03
App stack rationalisation
Overlapping apps were removed and their functionality moved into native theme code where it made sense , lighter pages, lower monthly spend and fewer conflicts after Shopify updates.
- 04
Search and filtering
On-site search was tuned with synonyms, typo tolerance and merchandising rules, and faceted filters were added to the largest collections so deep catalogues stay browsable.
- 05
Paid traffic alignment
Campaign traffic was redirected from the homepage to intent-matched landing pages and feeds were cleaned so Shopping and Performance Max served accurate titles, pricing and availability.
- 06
Technical SEO and structured data
Canonicals, sitemaps, internal linking and metadata were corrected across templates, and Product, Breadcrumb, FAQ and Organization schema were added so search engines and AI assistants can read the catalogue accurately.
- 07
Theme rebuild on a clean foundation
The theme was rebuilt around a lean section architecture. Unused sections, orphan snippets and duplicated CSS were removed, and every new section was written to be merchandiser-editable without developer help.
- 08
Internationalisation
Markets, currencies and language routing were configured properly with hreflang, so each region has an indexable storefront rather than a redirect.
- 09
Analytics and attribution rebuild
GA4, server-side events and Shopify's own reporting were reconciled so every conversion is counted once. Dashboards were built around revenue per session, not vanity traffic.
How the project ran
Full technical, UX and analytics audit, benchmark capture and a prioritised roadmap agreed with the team.
Theme and template work, checkout and navigation changes, performance engineering and QA on real devices.
Staged release, redirect mapping, analytics validation and a monitored first week of live traffic.
Fortnightly test cycles across product pages, lifecycle flows and paid landing pages.
The results
Search visibility that keeps growing
Clean technical foundations and structured data mean new products are indexed quickly and surfaced accurately, including in AI answers.
Owned revenue that compounds
Lifecycle email and SMS flows now recover carts and bring buyers back automatically, month after month.
Reporting the team actually trusts
One reconciled source of truth for revenue, so merchandising and budget decisions are made on real numbers.
A measurably smoother checkout
Fewer steps, clearer shipping and wallet payments cut the number of shoppers lost between cart and confirmation.
“The difference was obvious within weeks. Same products, same ad budget , the store just stopped losing people.”
The takeaway
DFYNE did not need a bigger budget. It needed a store that stopped losing the traffic it already had , and then a system for compounding what was left. That order matters, and it is the same order I would apply to your store.