Playceholdr is an ecommerce website design agency working with brands and retailers across New Zealand and Australia.
We design ecommerce experiences for Shopify and BigCommerce, from focused redesigns through to fully bespoke stores: ecommerce UX and UI, information architecture, customer journeys, prototyping and the design systems behind a store that has to keep evolving after launch.
A good ecommerce website does two things at once: makes the brand feel considered, and makes buying feel easy. We design for both.
An ecommerce website isn’t simply a marketing site with a cart attached. Customers are comparing products, checking sizing or specifications, looking for reassurance and making a series of small decisions with a purchase in mind.
That means the design has to do more than look good.
We start by understanding what you sell, who buys it, and what a customer needs to know before they feel comfortable purchasing. From there we look at how products should be organised, where important information appears, and what the current experience makes harder than it needs to be.
For a smaller catalogue, that might mean a clearer path between brand, product and checkout. For a larger retailer, it can mean navigation, collection structures, filtering, search, merchandising and separate journeys across thousands of products.
The objective is the same either way: customers who understand the offer, find what they need, and move through the buying journey without the design getting in the way.
We don’t start by drawing a homepage.
Every project begins with the business behind the website: products, customers, positioning, commercial priorities, existing analytics, and whatever the current experience is costing you.
From there we establish the structure of the store and the key customer journeys before moving into interface design. Depending on the project that includes customer and competitor research, information architecture, journey mapping, wireframes, content hierarchy and feature prioritisation.
Once the underlying experience is clear, we develop the visual direction and UI across the pages and components that matter most. Designs move through reviewable stages, so decisions get made collaboratively rather than presenting a finished website at the end and hoping it lands.
We prototype the interactions where static screens don’t tell the full story. That gives both the client and the development team a much clearer picture of how the finished experience should behave across desktop and mobile.
Good design makes the next decision easier.
There’s no useful separation between a beautiful ecommerce store and one that’s easy to use. The strongest experiences need both.
UX determines how customers navigate, discover and compare products. UI determines how that experience is communicated: hierarchy, typography, imagery, spacing, interaction, brand.
We design the two together, across collection and product pages, menus, search, filters, promotional content, trust information and cart interactions.
It also means resisting the pull towards optimising every store into the same generic template. A premium fashion brand shouldn’t feel like an industrial supplier. A high-consideration product needs more education than an impulse purchase. A catalogue with thousands of variants needs a different experience from a brand selling twelve products.
Conversion matters. But good ecommerce design isn’t applying the same list of CRO tactics to every website. It’s understanding what’s stopping the right customer from making the next decision, and designing around that.
For businesses selling primarily online, the website is where a customer spends the most time with the brand.
We treat visual identity and ecommerce experience as connected rather than as separate layers. Where a strong brand system already exists, we translate it into a digital environment without diluting what makes it distinctive. Where the identity needs more definition, we can refine or develop the visual direction as part of the wider design process.
That extends well beyond the homepage: product pages, collection pages, campaign landing pages, navigation, content modules and smaller interface elements all shape how the brand is experienced.
We also build reusable design systems and components, so consistency doesn’t quietly disappear as new campaigns, categories and content get added by the team managing the store.
We design for the platform the store will actually live on. That matters more than it sounds.
A design can look impressive in Figma while creating unnecessary complexity the moment development starts. We consider how sections will be managed, how products and collections are structured, which functionality should be native to the platform, and where a design decision carries technical or operational consequences.
Because our designers and developers work together, those questions get resolved while the design is still taking shape, rather than becoming compromises during the build.
Bespoke design informed by Shopify’s theme architecture, content model and wider ecosystem, while still creating an experience specific to the brand.
Where the build is complex, our Shopify development team is involved from the design stage.
Storefront design for brands and retailers building or improving their experience on BigCommerce, including catalogues and customer journeys that are more operationally involved than a standard DTC store.
The result in both cases is a design that’s ready to develop and practical for the people managing the store after launch.
Our design work spans fashion, children’s apparel and other retail categories across Australia and New Zealand.
We worked with the Sydney fashion brand to redefine its digital presence through ecommerce UX, UI and visual identity, before developing the new Shopify Plus store. Following launch, Arcina Ori recorded a 41% increase in average order value and a 156% increase in total orders.
Our involvement began before launch, covering ecommerce UX and UI as part of building the brand’s Shopify Plus presence, designed to support the business at launch while creating a foundation that could keep evolving as the catalogue and customer base grew.
Different brands need different decisions. The common thread is building the experience around the customer, the business, and what the store actually has to achieve.
Customer journeys, interaction patterns and store experiences designed around how people browse, evaluate and buy online.
Detailed interface design bringing brand, usability and hierarchy together across desktop and mobile.
Product, collection and content structures that help customers understand large or complex catalogues.
PDP and collection experiences built around discovery, decision-making, merchandising and the information customers need before purchasing.
Reworking existing stores where the experience, visual direction or underlying structure is no longer keeping pace with the business.
Mapping important journeys and prototyping key interactions before development begins.
Flexible systems that let internal teams build new pages, campaigns and content without losing consistency.
Developing or refining the visual direction where the existing identity needs to work harder in an ecommerce environment.
Typically discovery and research, information architecture, customer journey mapping, wireframes, UI design across the key page templates, prototyping of important interactions, and a design system for the components the team will reuse. Scope varies. Some projects are a full end-to-end redesign, others are focused work alongside an existing brand or marketing team.
Design determines what the experience is: structure, journeys, hierarchy, interface and brand. Development builds it on the platform: themes, functionality, integrations and performance. We do both, and the two teams work together during design so technical constraints are resolved early rather than becoming compromises later.
Yes. We can work as the ecommerce design partner alongside an internal or external development team, or carry the project through into Shopify or BigCommerce development ourselves. Where another development team is involved, we design with implementation requirements in mind and provide a clear handover.
Most ecommerce website design projects take around one to three months from discovery through to development-ready designs, depending on catalogue complexity, research requirements, the number of templates involved and whether brand work sits alongside the project. More focused redesign work can move faster, while larger or more complex projects may take longer.
Yes. Where a strong identity already exists we translate it into the ecommerce environment without diluting it. Where it needs more definition, we can refine or extend the visual direction as part of the design work.
You might be launching a new ecommerce brand, redesigning an established store, or trying to solve specific problems in an experience that’s become difficult to navigate, manage or grow.
We can work across the full design process, from discovery and UX through to final UI and development-ready designs, or alongside your existing brand, marketing or development team where the scope is more focused.
The first step is understanding what needs to change, and why.
