HappyCow
Affiliate Shop: designing a new shop structure from scratch
2026
Product design
HappyCow's vegan store used to be a link-out to Amazon with clunky, outdated navigation, and not bringing in significant revenue for the company.
We needed to launch a completely new version of the shop: rebuild it as a proper affiliate showcase, where products from a new third-party merchant live inside HappyCow's branded experience and users are redirected to complete the purchase. HappyCow earns commission through the AWin affiliate network.
Check out the shop
Problem
Moving to a proper affiliate catalogue isn't a facelift: it's a different kind of product. There was no navigation designed to help someone actually discover products rather than click through once.
At the same time, the new shop couldn't just become a static gallery. It still had to work like a real store: browsable by category, filterable, searchable, with the same discovery muscle as any e-commerce site, just without the direct checkout parts.
Goals
Design a complete, ownable shop structure, including navigation, category logic, filtering, search, product detail, built for discoverability from the start: someone should be able to find what they're looking for (or stumble onto something they weren't) as easily here as on a mature e-commerce site.
The business case behind it: drive affiliate revenue and organic traffic to the shop, grow engagement with vegan products, and build a catalogue platform that could be reused across future channels — all while keeping the affiliate relationship transparent to the community.
Process
Competitive benchmarking comparable shop and e-commerce experiences to establish the visual and structural direction before designing a single screen
Designing structure and flow, defining shop home, category browsing, product listing pages, filtering, sorting, search, and product detail from a blank page, including every empty, filtered, and edge-case state
Discoverability and navigation — designing the category hierarchy and menu behavior so users can move naturally from broad browsing to specific products, rather than hunting through a flat list
Designing for mobile, meaning rebuilding the full flow set, surfacing states (bottom sheets, drawers, a full-screen image viewer) that only become necessary once you design for a smaller screen
Results
Check out the shop
The shop launched as a fully affiliate-driven catalogue, with the buy button always reading as a redirect and a visible, non-dismissable affiliate disclosure throughout.
For HappyCow, I built an accessible, re-branded design system from scratch, establishing the foundation for all product redesigns. This is complete on the design side, but hasn't yet been fully rolled out across the live product. That's why some screen might not match the live version.
We're now tracking click-through rate on product pages as the core performance signal, and actively exploring ways to improve conversion from browse to redirect.
On the data side, the category structure has grown more complicated than expected. The shop launched with a simple, single-level categorisation, but merchant category data turns out to be inconsistently structured: an intermediate "family" grouping (like Clothing, Shoes, Bags) isn't always exposed as its own level, which makes a cleaner tiered menu hard to build reliably. We're now working with engineering to see it's possible to resolve a more consistent category hierarchy before it reaches the frontend, rather than trying to patch it in the UI.
Shop landing page
Category navigation
Product listing page
Learnings
Discoverability has to be a first-class design goal, not something patched in after the structure is set
A well-designed structure still needs to be stress-tested against real data after the fact, as design and data maintenance are two different phases of the same product
Some UX problems can't be solved in the frontend at all — sometimes the fix belongs upstream, in the data layer
