Your category pages are the store, and most of them do not exist
E-Commerce & Retail: web design, development, and search visibility from a team in Mississauga working across Canada and the US.
An online store has two kinds of page that bring in strangers: the product page for someone who knows what they want, and the category page for someone who knows roughly what they want. The second kind is where most of the searchable demand sits, and on most stores it is a filtered view with no address, which means it is not a page at all.
The problem this sector actually has
Retail search has split in three, and a store built for only one of them leaves money on the table. There is the specific product search, which is a product page problem and mostly a structured data one. There is the browsing search, a category and facet problem, and the one that is usually broken: filters held in JavaScript with no URL, or the opposite failure of several thousand near-identical filtered pages eating the crawl budget. And there is the assistant, increasingly asked to compare options, which can only weigh a product whose specification is text on a page rather than a value inside an image. The platform decision sits underneath all three, and it should be made on the catalogue and the operations rather than on which platform the agency prefers.
Who this is for
- Stores getting traffic on branded searches and nothing on the categories they sell
- Catalogues where filtering by size, brand or price never changes the address bar
- Retailers on a platform they have outgrown, or on a custom build they cannot edit
- Anyone whose paid spend is carrying the whole channel because organic never arrived
What we build
- Product pages built for both conversion and search visibility
- Checkout flows audited for drop-off points
- Inventory, shipping, and payment integrations that fit your catalog size
What the engagement covers
Category and facet pages that are real URLs
The facets people actually search get promoted to addressable pages with their own titles and copy, and everything else stays a query parameter with a canonical. That is the line between being findable for how people browse and generating a few thousand thin duplicates.
Product pages built for both jobs
Specifications as text rather than inside an image, product and offer markup that states price and availability, and enough written detail that the page can answer a question rather than only display a thing.
Checkout audited for where it loses people
The measurable half of this work. Step-by-step drop-off, forced account creation, surprise shipping costs, and the mobile keyboard problems that quietly cost more than any of them.
The platform decision, made on your catalogue
Shopify solves tax, shipping, payments and PCI better than a custom build will, and for most catalogues that ends the argument. A custom build earns its place when the product model, the integrations or the operations do not fit a platform. We will tell you which one you are.
Feeds and the assistant surfaces
The same product data now feeds shopping surfaces, comparison answers and traditional search. Getting the source structured once, correctly, is what keeps those consistent instead of maintaining three versions of the truth.
Built for this sector
Questions this sector asks first
Shopify or a custom build?
Shopify, for most stores, and it is not a close call. It solves payments, tax, shipping and compliance for a monthly fee that is less than what maintaining those yourself costs. A custom build is the right answer when your products are not really products, when the buying flow is genuinely unusual, or when the store is one part of a larger application. Those cases are real and they are rarer than agencies suggest.
We rank for our brand but nothing else. What is that?
Almost always missing category pages. Branded searches find your homepage because nothing else competes for your own name. Non-branded searches need a page about the thing being searched for, and if your browsing experience is a filter panel with no URLs, there is nothing for those searches to match. That single structural fix is usually the biggest available win.
Do you have an online store in your case studies?
Yes. Velvéa is a Mississauga gift basket store we built and launched in 2026, and it is live at velvea.ca. It has a Stripe checkout with provincial tax, delivery priced from the postal code, customer accounts, gift cards and an admin panel the owner runs. On the search side it has a page for every occasion, recipient and category, a delivery page for each of eleven GTA cities, and every basket's contents written out as text. We also set up the Google Business Profile and Search Console and made the launch videos, so it shows the whole job rather than only the build.
How does an assistant decide which product to recommend?
From what it can extract and compare. A specification inside a product image cannot be weighed against a competitor's, and a page with a photograph and a price gives it nothing to reason about. Stores that write real detail and mark up their products are the ones that end up in the answer, which is the same discipline that has always worked for search, applied to a new reader.