E-commerce / Shopify
Shopify marketing where the apps you added are the problem.
Shopify removes almost every technical barrier to launching a store, which is its great strength. The consequence is that most of the problems in a mature Shopify store are things the merchant installed themselves, one useful app at a time.
How do you improve marketing performance on a Shopify store?
Most Shopify performance problems come from accumulation rather than architecture. Apps add scripts to every page, themes are customised past the point anybody remembers, and the store that loaded quickly at launch takes several seconds on a phone two years later.
The structural work that matters is collection and product organisation, because Shopify's default structure is built for merchandising rather than for search, and tag based collections create duplicate paths that dilute the store's own pages.
Measurement needs its own discipline. Shopify's analytics, the ad platforms and the payment processor will all report different numbers, and reconciling them to the figure the business actually banked is the first step before any optimisation.
Every app is a script, and scripts are cumulative.
A Shopify store typically begins fast. Then a review app is added, then a popup, then an upsell widget, then a chat tool, then a loyalty programme, then a currency switcher, then an analytics layer that somebody wanted for a specific report.
Each is defensible individually and each injects code that runs on pages it has nothing to do with. Two years later the store loads slowly on a mid range phone, nobody can point to a single cause, and the answer is usually that there is not one.
Read the full breakdown: Every app is a script, and scripts are cumulative.Hide the full breakdown: Every app is a script, and scripts are cumulative.
The audit is straightforward. List every installed app, identify what each actually does for the business, check whether its scripts load on every page or only where needed, and remove anything that is duplicating a function the theme or another app already provides.
Uninstalled apps frequently leave code behind, which is the part merchants miss. A theme that has had six apps installed and removed over three years often still carries fragments of all of them.
This work costs engineering time rather than media budget and it improves the return on every channel simultaneously, which makes it the highest leverage thing available in most mature Shopify stores.
What to measure, and where.
Google publishes these thresholds directly, and the percentile discipline is what separates a real measurement from a reassuring one.
SourceGoogle, web.dev, Core Web Vitals thresholds
Interaction to Next Paint is the one Shopify stores most often fail, because it is affected by the volume of JavaScript running on the page, which is exactly what app accumulation produces.
Shopify's default organisation is merchandising, not search.
The platform will happily let a store create dozens of overlapping collections, and it will not tell you what that does.
Automated collections built from tags are convenient and they multiply the number of URLs that describe the same set of products. Search engines then have to decide which is canonical, and the store's own pages compete with each other for the same queries.
The corrective is a deliberate hierarchy: a small number of collections that correspond to how customers actually search, each with its own written content, and a clear rule about which ones are indexable. Filtered and tag combination views generally should not be.
Product URLs are the other quirk worth knowing. Shopify can serve the same product through multiple collection paths, and getting the canonical handling right prevents a store from splitting its own signals across several addresses for one product.
Collection pages deserve real content rather than a heading and a grid. They are the pages with the best chance of ranking for category terms, and most Shopify stores leave them entirely empty above the products.
Choices made at launch that cost conversions later.
Most of these are invisible until the store has traffic, which is why they are rarely revisited.
| Decision | The convenient option | What performs better |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage hero | A large auto rotating carousel | One clear image and one message |
| Product imagery | Uncompressed, uploaded as supplied | Sized and compressed for the display |
| Variant selection | A dropdown | Visible swatches where the range allows |
| Shipping information | In the footer | On the product page near the price |
| Reviews | An app loading on every page | Loaded where they are shown |
| Popups | Immediate, on every visit | Delayed, once, and dismissible |
None of these are Shopify's fault. They are defaults a merchant accepted at launch and nobody has revisited since the store started taking real traffic.
Four systems will give you four different numbers.
Shopify's own analytics, Google Analytics, the ad platforms and the payment processor will each report a different figure for the same period, and none of them is lying. They are counting different things with different attribution windows and different definitions of a session.
The practical approach is to pick one source of truth for revenue, which should be the one the business banks against, and to treat everything else as directional. Ad platform conversion counts in particular will collectively exceed the order count, because each platform claims what it believes it influenced.
Read the full breakdown: Four systems will give you four different numbers.Hide the full breakdown: Four systems will give you four different numbers.
Blended acquisition cost, meaning all marketing spend divided by all new customers in a period, is crude, cannot be double counted and is far more useful than a stack of platform reported figures that do not reconcile.
A post purchase survey asking how somebody first heard of the store is the single most valuable addition to a Shopify measurement setup, because it produces a signal no pixel can and it frequently contradicts the dashboard in instructive ways.
Set that up before optimising anything, or the optimisation will be aimed at whichever platform reports most generously. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
What applies to a Shopify store.
- The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. It covers buying reviews, writing your own, and suppressing negative ones. Every review we help collect is first party, requested from a real customer, and never gated on the rating they intend to leave.
- Any material connection between you and someone endorsing you has to be disclosed clearly and close to the endorsement. Paying, gifting, discounting or employing someone all count as material connections.
- The FTC's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule requires a seller to have a reasonable basis for any shipping time it advertises, and to ship within 30 days where no time is stated. A dispatch promise in ad copy is a legal representation.
- Automatic renewal and cancellation requirements are moving. The FTC's negative option rulemaking record is public and has been through both litigation and fresh rulemaking, and several states impose their own automatic renewal rules on top. Treat the renewal disclosure as a legal question with a marketing surface, not the other way round.
- Email and phone follow up carry their own rules. CAN-SPAM requires accurate headers, a physical postal address and a working opt out honoured promptly, and calls and texts to consumers sit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Follow up sequences get built to those rules rather than retrofitted to them.
Review apps deserve specific attention. Several offer features that gate requests by predicted sentiment or that import reviews from other sources, and both sit inside what the FTC rule addresses. Check what the app is configured to do rather than assuming it is compliant because it is popular.
What an order is worth on Shopify, and how to tell the work is weak.
Shopify makes revenue easy to see and margin easy to ignore. Contribution after cost of goods, fulfilment, payment fees, returns and media is the figure that determines whether growth is worth having, and the platform does not calculate it for you.
Define the acquisition target from that number. Two stores with identical return on ad spend can be in opposite positions depending on margin and return rate, which is why a single benchmark figure is close to useless in this sector.
Read the full breakdown: What an order is worth on Shopify, and how to tell the work is weak.Hide the full breakdown: What an order is worth on Shopify, and how to tell the work is weak.
Repeat rate is the other half. First orders acquired through paid channels are frequently break even, which means the business is made on the second and third, and a store that has never calculated its repeat rate is guessing at what it can afford to spend.
How you tell it is being done badly: a report built from platform reported return on ad spend, no contribution figure, an app list nobody has audited in two years, collection pages with no content above the grid, and a popup firing on the first second of every visit.
The vanity metric is sessions. A Shopify store can grow traffic substantially through content that reaches people who will never buy, and the analytics will present it as progress.
Add one operational number that sits outside the platform entirely: how long it takes to answer a customer question. In a store competing against sellers with instant chat and next day delivery, response time is part of the product, and it is the kind of thing that shows up in reviews long before it shows up in a dashboard.
Five checks to run on a Shopify store before spending anything.
These take an afternoon between them and they routinely find more available revenue than a budget increase would.
The app list
Every installed app, what it does, whether its scripts load on every page, and whether it duplicates something the theme already provides. Then check the theme for code left behind by apps that were removed.
Speed on a real device
Measured at the 75th percentile of actual page loads, segmented by mobile and desktop. Interaction to Next Paint is the threshold Shopify stores most often fail, because it reflects how much JavaScript is running.
The collection map
Which collections exist, which are indexable, and how many URLs describe the same set of products. Tag based collections multiply quietly and nobody notices until the store is competing with itself.
See the remaining steps: Five checks to run on a Shopify store before spending anything.Hide the remaining steps: Five checks to run on a Shopify store before spending anything.
The checkout, on a phone
Complete a purchase on a mid range device on a poor connection. Count the fields, note where shipping cost appears, and see whether autofill works. Most merchants have never done this on anything but their own laptop.
Reconcile the numbers
Shopify, the ad platforms, the analytics and the payment processor, side by side for one month. The gaps between them tell you which reports can be trusted for which decisions.
None of this requires media budget, and all of it improves the return on whatever the store spends afterwards.
What we would do.
Shopify Design and Development
Theme work, app rationalisation and a structure built for search as well as merchandising.
Website Speed Optimization
Undoing two years of accumulated scripts, measured at the 75th percentile.
E-commerce SEO
Collection hierarchy, canonical handling and content above the grid.
Conversion Tracking Setup
One source of truth for revenue, reconciled against what the store banked.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Product page and checkout work, which raises the return on every channel.
Your website works alongside the store platform you already run.
We do not replace your store platform, we do not migrate it, and we do not ask you to change it. The site links to it from the places a customer is ready to act, and embeds the vendor's own widget where the vendor publishes one. Being plain about the mechanism: that is all it is. Nothing is synced, nothing we build reads or writes your records, and the names below are systems our clients run, not partners of ours. A Shopify store already owns checkout, accounts and the cart. Anything we build lives around those rather than replacing them, because a custom checkout is a liability and the platform's own is not.
Store platforms
The platform owns the cart, the checkout and the customer account, and it should keep owning all three. A custom checkout is a liability and the platform's own is not, so we build around it rather than over it.
- Shopify and Shopify Plus
- WooCommerce
- BigCommerce
- Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source
- Ecwid by Lightspeed
Subscriptions and repeat purchase
The subscription tool owns the hardest page you have, which is the one where somebody manages or cancels. We do not replace it. We do argue for making it easy to reach, because a cancellation somebody cannot find becomes a chargeback instead.
- Recharge
- Bold Subscriptions
Email, SMS and reviews
These already own the messages and the review requests. What the site controls is what they have to work with: whether a product page earns the signup, and whether reviews are shown on the page and marked up rather than left sitting in a dashboard.
- Klaviyo
- Attentive
- Mailchimp
- Yotpo
What we actually change
Not the system: the path to it. Where the button sits on the page, whether it says what happens when you press it, how many taps it takes from a phone, whether it appears again at the point a customer has finished reading and decided, and whether somebody who is not ready yet has a second way to reach you. That path is ours, it is measurable, and in most store audits it is the part doing the damage.
Where the handoff is only a link
Some vendors publish an embeddable widget and some publish nothing at all. Where there is nothing to embed and no deep link worth pointing at, the site sends the visitor to your booking page or your login and stops there. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather say so than describe a seam we cannot remove. What we can do is make the destination unsurprising, so nobody arrives wondering whether they are still dealing with you.
Get a Shopify store review.
We audit the app stack, measure speed at the 75th percentile, look at your collection structure and reconcile your reporting before recommending anything.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Why has our Shopify store got slower?
Almost always accumulation. Each app you have installed adds scripts, frequently on every page rather than only where the feature appears, and the effect is cumulative and invisible until it is measured.
Uninstalled apps often leave code behind as well, so a theme that has had several apps come and go is usually carrying fragments of all of them.
How many collections should we have?
As many as correspond to how customers actually search, and no more. Automated tag based collections multiply URLs describing the same products, which makes the store compete with itself.
Decide deliberately which collections are indexable, keep filtered and tag combination views out of the index, and give the collections that matter real content above the product grid.
Our platforms all report different revenue. Which is right?
None of them is wrong, they are counting different things. Pick the source the business banks against as the single source of truth and treat everything else as directional.
Ad platform conversions will collectively exceed your order count, because each one claims what it believes it influenced. Blended acquisition cost is cruder and cannot be double counted.
Are review apps safe to use?
Check what yours is configured to do. Some offer features that route requests by predicted sentiment or import reviews from other sources, and both sit inside what the FTC's fake reviews rule addresses.
Popularity is not compliance. The configuration is the merchant's responsibility rather than the app developer's.
Should we use a page builder app?
They solve a real problem and they are frequently the largest single contributor to a slow store, because they generate markup and scripts far beyond what the page needs.
If the store is already slow, that is the first place to look. A well built theme section usually outperforms a builder generated page on both speed and maintainability.
What should we measure first?
Contribution after media, repeat rate and blended acquisition cost. Shopify shows revenue readily and none of those three, which is why so many stores grow revenue and not profit.
Add a post purchase survey asking how somebody first heard of you. It is the most valuable single addition to a Shopify measurement setup.
Should we move off Shopify to fix performance?
Very rarely. Most Shopify performance problems are accumulated apps, uncompressed imagery and theme customisation rather than the platform itself.
A replatform is expensive, risky and frequently reproduces the same problems on new infrastructure. Audit the app stack and the theme first.
How do we handle product variants for search?
Decide which level is the canonical page and keep it consistent. A store that serves the same product through several collection paths splits its own signals across multiple addresses.
Filtered and tag combination views generally should not be indexable, while the collections that correspond to how customers search should be, with real content above the grid.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google Search Central: ecommerce site structure best practices (opens in a new tab)
- Google web.dev: Core Web Vitals (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: product structured data (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: complying with the Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: .com disclosures, how to make effective disclosures in digital advertising (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.