Case Study · E-Commerce · Website Audit · Streetwear & Activewear
Website & E-Commerce Audit
A forensic audit of a streetwear and activewear brand’s live Shopify store, every product page, policy and checkout step read the way a first-time buyer reads them, plus the launch plan for their women’s range.
StrategyWebsiteE-CommerceCopywritingMarketing
The client is a streetwear and activewear brand with a real point of view, a membership-shaped community, and product people genuinely want. They are not named here, and they will not be. What follows is the work, not the label on it.
What we were asked for
A look over the site before the women’s range launch. A second set of eyes. Something quick.
What we found
A store selling well-made product against copy that could not close. The navigation worked. The collections had real writing in them. And then every product page asked the customer to buy on faith: no reviews, no fabric, no size chart, no explanation for a 27% price gap on the same jacket, while an expired giveaway sat in the meta description Google was serving to every first-time visitor. The audit ran the whole store end to end, the way a buyer runs it: land, browse, read, decide, check shipping, look for the returns policy, and either pay or leave.
The Findings
On a hero product page
- The giveaway was expired and still live. “Drawn 1 August 2026”, eighteen days earlier. Still in the body copy, and still in the page’s meta description, which means it was what Google displayed. A first-time visitor’s first impression of the brand was a promotion that had already closed.
- The scarcity had no counter. “Only the first 150” with no “X remaining”, running seven weeks. Unverifiable scarcity reads as a tactic, which is the opposite of what a membership brand needs.
- The fit notes were not credible. A 191cm model in size medium. A 178cm model in small. A 169cm model also in medium. On the same tee. Nobody can size themselves off that.
The windbreaker, $110 to $140: the most expensive product, the thinnest justification
- Three sentences of atmosphere. Is it waterproof or wind resistant? What is the shell? Packable? Lined? Taped seams? Is the reflectivity 3M grade or printed? None of it is answered. On the single most expensive thing in the range.
- The $110 versus $140 split is never explained. Three colours at $110, three at $140. The customer is asked to pay a 27% premium on faith.
Across every product page
- Zero reviews. On zero products. Site wide.
- No fabric composition on ten of eleven products.
- No size chart anywhere, and none exists. Site search for “size guide” returns no results.
- “Cold hand wash, do not machine wash” on every single product, including gym shorts and a windbreaker. Either it is an unedited copy-paste default, which makes the range look unconsidered, or it is true, in which case they are selling gym gear you cannot machine wash, and it directly contradicts “built to last”.
- A live typo: “shirt is small oversived” on the mesh shorts page.
- The socks page has no description at all.
The buying experience
Done well: navigation is clean, search works, and every collection page has real written copy. That is more than most stores at this stage manage.
Shipping, verbatim
“standard shipping is a flat $15, free on orders over $50. express is available at checkout. orders dispatch within 1 to 2 business days.”
- Clear on dispatch, silent on delivery. No carrier, no timeframes, no metro versus regional, no tracking promise. Dispatch time is not the question a customer is asking.
- The $15 flat rate is a strategic error. Ten of eleven products already clear $50, so the free-shipping threshold drives no basket building at all. What it does do is make the $20 socks unsellable: $15 shipping on a $20 item is a 75% surcharge.
- The returns policy is fair, but the formal refund policy is unedited Shopify boilerplate. It carries an EU 14-day clause on an Australia-only store, refers to sale items and gift cards that do not exist, makes no reference to Australian Consumer Law, and has a broken contact link: the button says
orders@while the mailto points attom@.
The Money Line
Four numbers from the audit that each map directly to revenue the store is not collecting.
0
Reviews, site-wide, on any product
10 of 11
Products with no fabric composition
75%
Shipping surcharge on the $20 socks
27%
Unexplained price premium
What Happens After the Audit
An audit tells a brand what is broken. It does not tell them who they are. That is the next document, and it starts with an intake we send every ecommerce and fashion client before a single line of copy gets rewritten.
Anyone can copy your product. Nobody can copy your reason.
The intake is a set of questions behind the positioning. Answer them honestly, send it back, and Elise builds the document the whole brand then runs on. From those answers come a voice guide, a portrait of the ideal customer, “Your Unfair Advantage”, a positioning matrix against three real competitors, and five content pillars.
Then the public-facing copy comes out of the same source: product page copy, the homepage, the three emails that make the most money, and bios written to fit each platform. Every fix the audit identified, the missing fabric detail, the unjustified price gap, the description that does not exist, gets rewritten from a position, not from a blank page.
The Women’s Range Launch
The second half of this engagement is the launch of the brand’s women’s range: content shoot direction and the marketing plan around it. Shoot direction covers the shot list the product pages actually need, the fit and detail imagery that answers the questions the current pages leave open, alongside the campaign frames the range launches on.
That work is in progress. Imagery to come, and this page will be updated with it once the shoot is delivered. Nothing is claimed here that has not happened yet.
Want This Run Over Your Store?
The Diagnostic Session is a standalone piece of work: sixty minutes on a call, then one page in writing. It is listed on the pricing page. We look over the same ground: every product page, the copy, the merchandising, the trust signals, the shipping and returns policy, and the buying experience end to end. What you keep is that one page, ordered by what it is costing you.
