Two Wins from Four Shortlistings at the UK eCommerce Awards 2026

Drink Finder won UK eCommerce Website of the Year 2026. It is an independent Cornish wine and spirits merchant trading for 65 years, with more than 5,000 products across retail, wholesale and trade. Migrating a catalogue that size to Shopify carried real risk.

I designed the entire purchase journey mobile-first before any development began. Bespoke navigation built from scratch so a very large range stays browsable on a phone, a comparison toggle so customers can weigh bottles side by side, and a rebuilt product page and checkout.

Website sales grew 34% and customer numbers grew 32% year on year, in a period when the premium drinks market contracted.

Read the Drink Finder case study

UK eCommerce Website of the Year is the overall award. Rather than judging one sector, the judges compare websites from every category to pick a single winner, and the shortlist included national retailers and household names.

What made this one worth entering was the scale of the challenge rather than the scale of the business. A 65 year old independent merchant, a catalogue in the thousands, three separate customer types to serve, and a platform migration that had to happen without losing the customers who had shopped there for years.

The design work had to hold all of that together and still feel like a premium drinks retailer rather than a database.

More on Shopify migration

East at Home, a DTC food brand making restaurant quality curries achievable at home, won UK User Experience of the Year 2026.

This was a harder brief than a typical redesign, because the existing site already converted well above sector average. The risk was breaking what worked. So every decision came out of a full review of the purchase journey, mapping where customers hesitated rather than guessing, and the product experience was rebuilt mobile-first around how people actually decide what to cook.

A bespoke quantity selector makes the value of buying more visible at the exact moment of decision. The product card answers the questions people ask before they click, so the journey into the product page becomes optional rather than mandatory. There are no countdown timers, no discount pressure and no dark patterns anywhere in it.

Conversion rate rose 14% from an already strong base, and revenue grew 82% year on year. The gains came from clarity, and that is the part I am most pleased to see recognised.

Read the East at Home case study

Both projects were also finalists in a second category. Drink Finder was shortlisted for Food & Drink eCommerce Website of the Year, and East at Home for B2C eCommerce Website of the Year. Four shortlistings from two projects, and a win for each.

See all my Shopify case studies

I suspect a lot of freelancers are put off entering awards. A submission takes real time, that time is not billable, and there is an entry fee on top. When you are running everything yourself, all three of those are easy reasons to leave it another year.

Two wins later, I am glad I did not. I am proud of the work I have been doing since going freelance, and I know how good these two projects are. Not only from a design point of view, but commercially. Both were built to sell, and both do.

That is the case I would make to any other freelancer weighing it up. If the work is good and the results are there, the size of the studio behind it does not change the quality of what was made.

Drink Finder won UK eCommerce Website of the Year and East at Home won UK User Experience of the Year. You can see all the winners on the UK eCommerce Awards website.