We took on Maze a few years ago and went about building them a custom Shopify store to match their luxury brand aesthetic. Right from day one, we had to juggle three big things: making the site super quick and SEO optimised, matching it to their brand with nice high-def images, and getting it ranked up there with the giants like IKEA and other more established furniture places.
Although Maze is by no means an IKEA equivalent (they are considerably higher quality and luxurious), they still share similar keywords such as outdoor furniture Dubai for example. Not everyone states luxury or high end when searching on Google, so you still have to compete on those big, broad search terms anyway. Trying to outbid massive retail conglomerates on pure ad spend is financial madness for an independent business, so getting the organic search and website performance right from the ground up was the only sensible way to go about it.
Custom Liquid Over Bloated Shopify Apps
Right, so to start, our attitude was and still is to build things custom when we can and avoid heavy Shopify apps. You find with so many stores, especially the self-built ones, that the sites load like ten apps per page. One for filtering, one for a sales icon, one to display other photos on hover, and an app for a floating WhatsApp button. Every single one of them charges something like £10 or £15 a month for simple features that we can just build once directly into the theme and never pay for again. On top of the monthly bills, every single app you install injects another pile of third-party JavaScript into the theme header, and before you know it, mobile browsers are choking just trying to download basic page assets.
So things like their WhatsApp, contact, and map directions floating buttons were custom. Their hover images and sale stuff, all custom. No bloat and no fat third-party code loaded on every page. Sounds nerdy and unnecessary, but when there are maybe thirty images on a page, every bit of fat cut pays out. We built a sticky bar pinned to the bottom of mobile screens with pure SVG icons and clean CSS. Tap WhatsApp, it opens a direct chat with their sales team. Tap the map icon, it loads driving directions straight to their showroom. Zero recurring software fees for the client, and zero extra scripts phoning home to external servers every time a customer clicks a product.
Matching the Al Quoz Showroom Aesthetic
Next was matching their aesthetic. Maze has a super plush showroom in Dubai, so the website needed to be plush too. Creams, pastely colours, and no fast-moving animations that cheapen the look. They have a graphic designer in-house who gave me the vision, and we made it a reality in the code.
The trick with luxury furniture websites is handling the media properly. High-end buyers want to see the details up close, like the rope weave, the aluminium joints, and the fabric textures, so you have to use high-resolution images. If you just chuck big image files onto a Shopify page without thinking, mobile layouts start stuttering and jumping around while the photos load in. We hard-coded fixed aspect ratios and proper image sizing rules into the theme so the layout stays completely still while people scroll. Customers can flick through photos on their phones without the page twitching or jumping under their fingers.
Useful Content That Answers Real Questions
The SEO side required careful thought. We needed, and still do need as we still work for them, to create useful content for their customers so the Maze range is clear to them. What is teak wood for example, how long is the warranty and what does it cover, how do you care for teak in the heat and so on. Then the pages themselves had to reflect similar info and signpost accordingly.
Dubai has extreme weather where summer temperatures easily hit forty-eight degrees, so people buying furniture for a garden or a roof terrace have very specific concerns. Instead of writing fluff articles that nobody reads, we built practical guides answering the exact questions people were asking. Things like whether teak wood splits under direct desert sun, how powder-coated aluminium frames hold up against salty coastal air, what kind of warranty covers sun fading, and whether certain loungers can sit submerged on shallow pool ledges. We then tied that advice directly back into the relevant product pages so customers get the facts right where they are browsing.
Catalogue Graft and Editing Metadata
Maze has loads and loads of products, so sorting out the catalogue was just hours of manual graft. A lot of collections were sharing similar copy that basically said the same generic stuff about weather-resistant aluminium frames. When Google crawls hundreds of products and collections that all use the exact same boilerplate paragraphs, it gets confused about which page is actually the main authority, and your rankings drop across the board.
We went through and edited every single title tag, meta description, and product write-up across the store. We changed vague headings like "Sofas" to specific titles that people actually search for in the UAE, like aluminium corner sofas or outdoor dining sets, which stopped different collections from fighting each other in Google results. It took weeks of sitting at the laptop rewriting category copy and cleaning up product tags for ranges like Capri, Como, and Porto, but putting the graft in meant search engines could finally tell the collections apart.
Running Sales Without Ruining the Store
When they want to put on a sale or clear out seasonal stock, we just code it straight into the theme instead of adding another discount app. You see so many stores using cheap popup apps that jump into the middle of the screen the second you open a page, covering up the products and driving mobile users mad. We built custom clearance tags that sit directly on the product photos, along with lightweight sale banners that slide in neatly without taking over the whole screen. We hooked them up to browser session rules so if a customer closes the banner once, it stays shut and doesnt keep popping back up on every single page they click.
Google Ads, Meta Ads, and Showroom Tracking
We run their Google Ads and Meta Ads as well. High-end furniture isn't like normal ecommerce where someone clicks an Instagram ad and buys an AED 14,000 sofa set on an impulse. Most people browse on their phone during the week, send a WhatsApp message to ask about stock or fabric colours, and then drive over to the Al Quoz showroom on the weekend to sit on the cushions before paying.
If you only look at standard Shopify cart checkouts, your advertising numbers look completely misleading because very few people punch their credit card details into a website for thousands of dirhams without seeing the furniture first. So we set up custom event tracking in Google Tag Manager to record WhatsApp clicks, phone calls to the sales team, and Google Maps direction clicks alongside the regular checkout purchases. That way, the client can see exactly which ads and search terms are driving real footfall into the showroom and turning into actual sales at the till.
We're still managing the site and the search work for them today. It takes steady graft to keep an independent brand ranking alongside massive retail competitors, but keeping the code clean, avoiding useless apps, and sorting out the basics properly makes a huge difference.
If you're looking for custom Shopify Website Development, get in touch.