01 — Shopify e-commerce
Shopify stores where the feed, the flows and the theme decide the number
Shopify makes launching straightforward and scaling opaque. Once you are spending properly, the result is decided by three things that are nowhere near the theme editor.
Written audit back in 48 hours. No obligation, no pitch deck.
01
The problem
What makes this sector different.
A Shopify store that trades well at twenty thousand a month rarely fails at eighty for the reasons its owner expects. The theme looks the same, the products are the same, and the conversion rate has quietly slipped while the ad costs have not.
What actually decides the outcome is what Google Merchant Center believes your products are, what happens to a customer after the first order, and how fast the page renders on a mid-range Android phone on a mobile connection. None of those are visible from the Shopify admin, which is why they go unattended for years.
02
What usually goes wrong
The four we find most often.
None of these are unusual, and none of them announce themselves. That is precisely why they persist.
The feed is whatever Shopify exported
Product titles are written for the brand — "Aurora Cushion" — while people search for "velvet cushion cover 45cm". Shopping and Performance Max match against the feed, not against your landing page, so a beautifully written product page cannot rescue a title that does not contain the words anyone types.
Performance Max gets the whole catalogue and one target
A single target across every product lets the best sellers subsidise everything else, and the account-level return looks acceptable while a long tail of products loses money on every sale. Without custom labels there is no way to see it, and Performance Max will not volunteer it.
Apps accumulate and the theme slows down
Most apps add script to every page, not only the pages that use them. A theme that passed Core Web Vitals at launch is failing on mobile two years and eleven apps later, and the conversion rate fell so gradually that nothing was ever blamed for it.
Tracking breaks quietly after a theme update
A customised theme loses its tags in an update and nothing announces it. The first sign is Shopify and Google Ads disagreeing about revenue, by which point the bidding has been optimising against incomplete data for weeks.
03
How we handle it
What we do instead.
In this order. Each one is harder to get right if the one before it was skipped.
- 01
Rebuild the feed to match search language
Titles restructured around what people actually type, attributes and GTINs completed, disapprovals cleared, and a supplemental feed for the fields Shopify will not export cleanly. This happens before any bid change, because it changes what the bidding is bidding on.
- 02
Split the catalogue by margin and stock
Custom labels for margin band, stock position and seasonality, so Performance Max can be given targets that reflect what a sale is actually worth. Brand traffic separated out, so it stops flattering the blended figure.
- 03
Audit the app stack against page weight
Every app measured for what it adds to the critical path and what it earns. Several usually turn out to be doing nothing that the theme could not do natively, and removing them is the cheapest speed work available.
- 04
Verify tracking, then build the flows in order
Purchase tracking checked end to end against Shopify’s own numbers before anything is optimised against it. Then welcome, cart, checkout, browse and post-purchase, in the order that earns soonest.
04
What this needs
The work that moves this sector.
Listed in the order they usually matter here, which is not the order they are listed anywhere else.
- 01
Paid Media
Google Ads, Performance Max, Shopping and Meta for growing Shopify and WooCommerce brands. The person building the campaigns is the person on your call, and the account stays yours throughout.
- 05
Email & Lifecycle
Klaviyo flows, segmentation and campaigns for growing e-commerce brands. The channel you own outright, run properly, which is what makes the acquisition maths work at all.
- 04
CRO & UX
Session data, funnel analysis and controlled testing on the pages that carry the revenue. Conversion work compounds with everything else you are running, which is why it is usually the cheapest growth available.
- 03
Web Design & Development
Shopify and WooCommerce builds, migrations and theme speed work. Built on a maintained theme rather than a bespoke framework, so your next developer can pick it up without a rewrite.
05
Questions
Questions we get from this sector.
Answered here rather than held back for a sales call.
What access do you need to a Shopify store?
A collaborator request, which you approve from your admin and can revoke at any time. We never need the account owner’s login, and the collaborator record shows you exactly what we changed and when.
Do we need Shopify Plus?
Usually not. Plus mainly buys you checkout customisation, scripts and higher API limits — worth it at volume or with unusual checkout requirements, and an expensive answer to problems that are really feed and tracking problems.
Should we use Shopify’s Google channel or a feed app?
The native channel is fine for a simple catalogue and gives you less control over titles and custom labels. Once you need rules-based titles or margin labels, a feed tool or a supplemental feed earns its cost quickly. We will tell you which side of that line you are on.
Will you edit our theme directly?
Not on the live theme. Changes are made on a duplicate, reviewed, then published — and recorded in the change log, so a later problem can be traced to a specific edit rather than guessed at.
Do you work with Shopify Markets for international selling?
Yes. The usual traps are feeds that do not split by market, prices and delivery terms that do not match what the ad promised, and campaigns targeting countries the store cannot actually ship to profitably.
Find out what is actually wrong.
Send us the URL and tell us what is not working. You get a written audit back within 48 hours: what we found, what we would fix first, and what we would expect it to do. If it turns out you do not need us, we will tell you that too.