Your traffic isn’t the problem.
Your conversion rate is telling you something.
I find the revenue your store is leaking, and hand you the three moves that get it back — each one sized in dollars, ranked by what it’s worth. Not a testing roadmap. A number, and what to do about it.
You already know the number is wrong.
You don’t know what it’s costing you.
The traffic reports look fine. Sessions are steady or up. Ads are delivering. And then the conversion rate sits at whatever it’s sat at for the last eight months, and every explanation you’ve been given is a guess wearing a chart.
- You’re paying to acquire people who were never going to buy. The traffic is real and the intent isn’t, and no amount of on-site work fixes that.
- Your product pages answer the wrong objection. They’re built around what you want to say instead of the specific hesitation that stops the purchase.
- Your email is doing the selling your site should be doing, which flatters your email numbers and hides a site problem.
- Nobody can tell you what a customer is actually worth, so every decision about spend is being made on a number nobody trusts.
Every one has a dollar figure attached. You just haven’t been given the figure — or shown how they’re feeding each other.
A test tells you which button won.
It doesn’t tell you why nobody wanted it.
Testing is a legitimate discipline and I use it. But it only answers the question you thought to ask. If your conversion rate is low because your positioning is aimed at a buyer who isn’t the one arriving, you can test headlines for a year and move nothing — and every test will be technically valid.
So I work the other direction. Before anything gets tested, I find out why the number is what it is. Sometimes the answer is a test. Often it’s pricing, merchandising, or the discovery that a channel you’ve been defending has never once produced a profitable customer.
Five layers. Every one of them
has money sitting in it.
CRO goes wrong when it’s treated as a site problem. The site is where the failure becomes visible — rarely where it starts, and rarely where the largest recoverable number is hiding.
Positioning and offer
Who the store is for, what it promises, and whether the person arriving hears the same thing you wrote. The one layer testing can’t reach.
Usually the largest single number
Traffic quality
Not how much, but who. A conversion rate is a ratio, and half of every ratio is the traffic you bought.
Where the stop-doing list comes from
Product pages & merchandising
What the PDP argues, what it leaves unanswered, and whether someone who arrived unsure can find the right thing.
Fastest to move — often live in two weeks
Cart, checkout, drop-offs
Where people leave — and whether that was friction, or a decision already made at the PDP showing up late.
Most over-optimized layer on most stores
Lifecycle and the numbers
Retention as part of the system, then the arithmetic: what a customer costs, what they’re worth, and whether your target is reachable at all.
Decides whether anything above is worth doing
rate
Five inputs, one number. The finding is almost never inside one of them — it’s in what one says about another.
You don’t just get the money back.
You get to see how it works.
People brace for an audit — a list of what they got wrong, from someone who wasn’t in the room. That isn’t how it goes. The most common reaction is relief, then momentum, because for the first time the whole system is visible at once.
A conversion rate was never one thing. Traffic, messaging, the objection that actually stops people, the product, the price — all compounding into one number. Most people have only ever been shown one strand at a time. Nobody hands you the whole braid.
- Decisions get faster — you finally know which number the decision depends on.
- Arguments end — the recurring one usually turns out to be two people each holding one true strand.
- You stop paying for what was never going to work — the most valuable page in the document, and the least comfortable.
I’ve been the client.
That’s the whole difference.
I’ve been selling things online since before there was a word for it — twenty-five years, in commerce since its inception, starting before the first dot-com. I’ve watched every playbook this industry currently sells get invented, oversold, and quietly replaced.
The ecommerce work has run from category giants to founder-led stores — Armani, The Gap, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Karl Lagerfeld. That range is the point: I’ve seen what breaks at $500M and what breaks at $5M, and they are not the same problems wearing different clothes.
Most conversion consultants have optimized stores. Fewer have run one. I was VP of Ecommerce for a PE-held DTC portfolio, where the conversion rate wasn’t a project — it was the number I answered for. I’ve run founder-led stores on Shopify Plus, worked inside enterprise martech at True Fit, and served as an executive at Kibo Commerce — the platform side, which is where you learn what actually breaks at scale.
So when I tell you a merchandising change is worth more than a checkout test, I’m not theorizing — I’m telling you what happened when I made that call with my own number on the line.
Someone builds a store on a signature method, the method is genuinely good, and then the numbers flatten. By the time I get the call, everything has been questioned except the playbook itself — which is exactly where the answer is. The thing everyone is most certain about is the thing worth checking first.
Sometimes the conversion rate is a symptom.
Not everyone arrives with a conversion problem. Some of you have a harder, vaguer one: the business isn’t working the way it should and nobody can say plainly which part is broken.
As an ecommerce consultant that’s the other half of what I do. Same method, wider frame:
- Channel mix and spend allocation — where growth is actually coming from versus where the budget goes. These are almost never the same, and the gap is usually the finding.
- Pricing, margin, and unit economics — whether you’re growing into a structure that works or scaling one that doesn’t.
- The growth target — whether it’s reachable from where you stand, and what would have to be true if it isn’t.
Shopify, and the others
Most of the stores I work with are on Shopify or Shopify Plus, and I’ve run a store on Plus myself rather than just consulting on one. I know where a platform helps you and where its defaults quietly cost you money.
Replatforming, specifically. I run these. Strategy, platform selection, design, content, URL and taxonomy mapping, redirects, the migration plan — and the developers who execute it. What I don’t do is write the code myself. I hire it, brief it, sequence it, and hold it to a plan that protects the conversion rate and the organic traffic you already have. Most replatforms lose both, and they lose them in the mapping, not in the code.
Two ways in, and both are free.
The Ecommerce Conversion Teardown
Fifteen questions about your store, scored out of 45. You find out which of the five layers you have the least honest visibility into — which is almost always where the money is.
No call, no pitch. Just the document and your own answers.
The 30-Minute Conversion Read
Bring the number that’s bothering you and whatever you know about it. We sort your problem into the layer it actually lives in, and you leave knowing which one to attack first — and roughly what it’s worth.
If I’m not the right person for it, I’ll say so and tell you who is. That’s a normal way for this call to end.
Already know you want the full diagnosis? See the Ecommerce Growth Audit →