Conversion Research Sprint
Funnel analysis, session replays, heatmaps, on-site polls and user tests across your top revenue templates. Output is a ranked list of friction points with revenue attached.
Baltimore, MD
Conversion Rate Optimisation in Baltimore, MD
Structured testing for Baltimore stores where the conversion decision is usually about delivery, not about the product.
Delivered remotely for brands across Baltimore and Maryland.
Grow · Baltimore
Why Baltimore brands come to us for this
- Delivery-date certainty tested as a primary conversion element, not treated as a shipping-policy footnote
- Cold-pack and overnight shipping cost tested for placement and framing — surprise at cart is the top abandonment cause in perishables here
- Trade-buyer funnels tested separately: compatibility confirmation, account pricing visibility, freight quoting
- Results read split by the Washington corridor and the rest of the region, because price sensitivity genuinely differs across forty miles
- Research tooling configured for Maryland two-party consent and MODPA before any session is recorded
In most categories the conversion question is whether the buyer wants the thing. In Baltimore's biggest online categories it is whether the thing can get there, intact, on the day it needs to. A shopper choosing overnight crab for a Saturday feast is not comparing your photography to a competitor's — they are trying to work out, from your page, whether Saturday is actually possible. If that answer appears below the fold, or after the cart, or nowhere, you lose the sale to whoever put it above the add-to-cart button. Delivery certainty is the primary conversion element in this market and most stores here treat it as a shipping policy link.
The trade side has a mirror-image problem. A buyer at a rigging contractor or a lab knows exactly what they want and abandons because the site cannot confirm compatibility, will not show account pricing until after registration, or quotes a parcel rate on something that ships by pallet. Those are not persuasion problems and no amount of urgency copy fixes them. They are friction points with a revenue number attached, and they are testable.
So we run this as a research programme before a testing programme. Funnel analysis to find where the drop actually is, session evidence to explain it, exit intercepts to hear it in the customer's words, then a backlog scored on impact, confidence and effort. Tests run to a pre-declared sample size and every result is reported, losers included — which matters more here than usual, because seasonal traffic makes it very easy to mistake April for a winning variant.
Local context
Maryland is a two-party consent state, which changes how we do research
Session replay, heatmaps and form analytics are standard CRO instruments, and Maryland's wiretap statute is one of the strictest in the country on recorded interactions. Combined with the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, which took effect in October 2025 and leans harder on data minimisation than most state privacy laws, that means a research stack assembled carelessly is a liability rather than an asset. We configure replay tools with consent gating, aggressive input masking and field exclusions before we record a single session, and we keep the retention window short and documented. The second local wrinkle is seasonality: a test that starts in March and ends in May has run across a season opening, and the variant did not cause that lift. We set test windows inside stable demand periods, hold seasonal launches out of test traffic, and read results split by the DC corridor versus the rest of the region, because those two audiences buy at different price sensitivities and averaging them hides both.
Scope
What Conversion Optimisation includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Baltimore brand’s realities.
Full service detailPrioritised Test Roadmap
Every hypothesis scored on impact, confidence and effort, with the projected revenue and required sample size stated up front. You always know what runs next and why.
Experiment Build & QA
Tests built and QA'd across devices, browsers and your app stack, with flicker-free rendering and no measurable hit to Core Web Vitals.
Statistical Analysis
Pre-declared sample sizes, sequential-testing guardrails and segment-level readouts by device, traffic source and new versus returning. No peeking, no calling a test at 80%.
Checkout & Cart Optimisation
Cart drawer, shipping thresholds, payment options, express checkout placement and post-purchase upsell, tested against AOV and revenue per session rather than clicks.
Monthly Programme Report
Tests run, results in full, cumulative revenue impact and what the results taught us about your customers. Losers are reported in the same detail as winners.
Scoped and quoted for your Baltimore store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Baltimore engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Measure
We instrument the funnel properly first. Most stores have broken or double-counted events, and you cannot optimise against numbers you cannot trust.
Research
Quant tells us where visitors leave. Qual tells us why. We combine analytics, replays and direct customer input before writing a single hypothesis.
Prioritise
Hypotheses are scored and sequenced so the highest-value, lowest-effort tests run first. The roadmap is shared and you can reorder it.
Test
Two to four concurrent experiments depending on traffic, each run to a pre-declared sample size. No test gets stopped early because it looks good on day three.
Implement & Compound
Winners get hard-coded into the theme, losers get documented, and every result feeds the next round of hypotheses. The programme gets smarter each month.
Proof
Conversion Optimisation results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Premium Skincare (DTC)
8-figure DTC brand, ~140 SKUs, US + CA · Shopify Plus (migrated from Magento 2)
Magento 2 cost $9k a month in hosting, extensions and emergency dev before a single feature shipped. Mobile LCP sat at 5.4 seconds and mobile converted at less than half the desktop rate across 68% of sessions. The named constraint: 11,412 indexed URLs and a top-3 organic position on their hero category, so a migration that lost rankings would cost more than the platform ever saved.
+41%mobile conversion rate1.62% to 2.28% over the first 90 days post-launch
5.4s → 1.8smobile LCP75th-percentile CrUX field data, not lab
+27%organic sessionssix months post-migration vs. pre-migration baseline, branded queries excluded
$108k/yrplatform cost removedhosting, extension licences and the standing emergency dev retainer
Performance Apparel (DTC)
~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus
Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.
+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
In their words
Clients on this work
CVR 1.9% → 2.7%
“We'd been running our own tests for a year and calling every 3% swing a win. The first thing they did was tell us our sample sizes were garbage, which was not a fun call to sit through. Six months later we're getting wins that actually hold up when you re-measure them. Sitewide CVR went from 1.9% to 2.7%.”
Founder & CEOApparel DTC brand, ~$12M/yr · Los Angeles, CA
Verified client, 2025FAQ
Conversion Optimisation in Baltimore — your questions
You can, but not across the opening. A test spanning a demand shift is uninterpretable, so we run experiments inside stable windows and treat the opening weeks as a hold-out rather than as sample. The upside is that seasonal peaks give you enough volume to reach significance fast, so we schedule the highest-value tests to run just after demand stabilises rather than before it arrives.
With the right configuration, yes. Maryland's two-party consent rules and MODPA mean the default settings on most replay tools are not appropriate, so we gate recording behind consent, mask all input fields, exclude payment and account areas outright, and set a short retention period. We also document the configuration so your team can answer the question if it is ever asked, rather than discovering the answer later.
Shipping cost and shipping date discovered too late. In perishable and freight-heavy categories the buyer's core question is operational, and stores here routinely answer it after the buyer has already invested effort in a cart. Moving delivery-date selection and an honest rate estimate up to the product page is the first thing we test in most Baltimore accounts, and it is rarely the thing the client came to us about.
No — averaging them produces a number that describes neither. We segment logged-in account traffic from retail traffic and run separate hypotheses, because a trade buyer wants price and stock visible immediately while a retail buyer needs the gifting and delivery story. Where traffic volume allows, we test the two paths concurrently rather than sequentially.
Around 40,000 sessions and 800 orders a month is where a testing programme becomes statistically viable. Below that, tests take months to reach significance and you are better served by research-led redesign work and analytics fixes. We will tell you honestly which bucket you are in.
The first test goes live in week three, after research and instrumentation. Meaningful cumulative impact typically shows around month four, once six to ten tests have run. CRO is a compounding programme, not a one-month fix, and anyone promising otherwise is selling best practices.
Some do, and that is normal. A loser is still information: it rules out a hypothesis and sharpens the next one. We report losses in the same detail as wins because a programme that only ever produces winners is one that is not being measured properly.
Next step
Conversion Optimisation for your Baltimore brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.