Meridian

Engagement · HVAC retail

The catalogue had drifted from the equipment it described.

An active e-commerce store, already taking orders, on WordPress and WooCommerce. The work was catalogue accuracy, search, and the honesty of what the product pages claimed.

Sector HVAC equipment retail

Relationship external client

Platform WordPress & WooCommerce

Store live and transacting throughout

The situation

The shop customers browsed was not the real store.

The shop page had at some point been replaced by a hand-maintained page listing products manually. The actual catalogue — categories, filters, live prices — was not what anyone was looking at. Listings carried model numbers, images and efficiency ratings that no longer matched the equipment being sold, and some product images carried another retailer's watermark.

Underneath sat a harder problem specific to HVAC. A SEER2 efficiency rating belongs to a certified pairing of outdoor and indoor equipment — not to a condenser sold on its own. Multiple listings advertised a single fixed figure for equipment whose real rating depends entirely on what it is matched with.

Diagram of the hand-maintained shop page: no filters, and a single fixed efficiency figure asserted on every listing
Before — a hand-maintained page, no filtering, and one fixed efficiency figure asserted per listing. Diagram, not a client screenshot: naming permission has not been recorded.

The work

Four changes, in the order they mattered.

Accuracy first. A faster store that sells the wrong specification is a worse store.

01

Shop restored to the real store

The hand-maintained page was removed and the shop returned to the platform's own product archive — so every product, category and price is read live from the actual catalogue.

02

Search and filtering built

Search by model, SKU, tonnage or equipment type. Filters for category, type, tonnage, heating capacity, furnace efficiency, refrigerant and price — a rail on desktop, a drawer on mobile.

03

Product data normalised

Attributes populated from verified manufacturer and distributor sources. Where a value could not be verified it was left empty and flagged rather than estimated.

04

Efficiency claims corrected

Every customer-facing claim across the catalogue inventoried — titles, descriptions, attributes, cards, search text — and classified as verified, or pairing-dependent and therefore unverifiable as a single number.

Diagram of the rebuilt catalogue: a filter rail on the left, verified attributes shown in green, unverifiable attributes left visibly empty, and efficiency labelled pairing-dependent
After — the real catalogue behind a filter rail. Verified values shown, unverifiable values left empty rather than estimated, and efficiency stated as pairing-dependent.

The decision worth recording

Unsupported numbers were removed, not replaced with better-looking ones.

The easy version of this job substitutes a flattering figure and moves on. Every unsupported efficiency number was deleted instead. Legitimate fixed ratings on packaged units — which genuinely do carry one certified figure — were kept exactly as they were.

Limits of this case study

No business outcome has been measured. No revenue, conversion, traffic or ranking claim is made here, because none has been measured against a baseline. What is documented above is work performed and verifiable in the live store.

The client is described by sector and state rather than by name, because written permission to name them has not been recorded.

Start here

Something in your business described this accurately.

If a catalogue, a process or a report has drifted from reality, that is the conversation.

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