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.
Chicago, IL
Conversion Rate Optimisation in Chicago, IL
Same sessions, more revenue — through a structured test programme built around how Midwest buyers actually decide.
Delivered remotely for brands across Chicago and Illinois.
Grow · Chicago
Why Chicago brands come to us for this
- Freight and dimensional shipping cost surfaced earlier and tested on revenue per session, not clicks
- Warehouse-derived delivery dates tested against generic estimates for Central-US ground reach
- Reorder and quick-order paths tested for returning trade buyers, where LTV actually lives
- Winter freeze-hold and cold-pack messaging tested as its own December-to-February programme
- Segment readouts split by DTC and logged-in B2B accounts, because they behave nothing alike
Conversion work in Chicago rarely looks like conversion work in Los Angeles. The highest-value tests here are almost never about hero imagery. They are about shipping cost visibility on a twenty-two pound cast-iron item, whether a case quantity is legible before the cart, and how many clicks it takes a returning buyer to repeat an order they have placed nine times.
There is also a buyer-behaviour difference worth naming. Midwest customers, particularly in categories like tools, housewares, grills and food, do more comparison and less impulse. They check the freight number twice. They read the return policy. They abandon at the delivery step more than at the payment step. Testing programmes that assume an urgency-timer response tend to produce nothing here except a slightly uglier page.
So we run the programme properly: instrumentation first, then quantitative research to locate the leaks and qualitative work to explain them, then a backlog ranked by expected revenue against engineering cost — with B2B and consumer journeys scored separately, because on a Chicago store they rarely fail in the same place. Tests run to a pre-declared sample size. Losers get published in the same detail as winners, because a method that only produces wins is not a method.
Local context
The delivery step is where Chicago carts die
Two structural facts shape testing here. First, a lot of Chicago merchants ship heavy or bulky goods — grills, cookware, furniture, cases of beverage — so the moment a real freight number appears is the moment the cart is decided. Moving that number earlier, into the product page, usually lowers add-to-cart and raises revenue per session, which is exactly the sort of result that makes untested best practice look silly. Second, the metro's central position means ground shipping reaches most of the country in two or three days from a warehouse here, and almost nobody says so on the product page. Testing an accurate, warehouse-derived delivery date against a generic estimate is one of the first tests we would put on the roadmap for a store shipping out of a Chicago warehouse. Winter adds a third layer: from December through February, hold-for-weather and freeze-protection messaging changes both conversion and refund rate, and it deserves its own test window rather than being switched on by instinct.
Scope
What Conversion Optimisation includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Chicago 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 Chicago store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Chicago 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 Chicago — your questions
Below roughly 40,000 sessions and 800 orders a month, formal A/B testing takes too long to reach significance and you get better value from research-led redesign and analytics fixes. That describes a lot of Chicago industrial sellers. We will say which of those two situations you are in before you sign, and scope the research-led path without apology if that is the honest read.
Anything that removes uncertainty about the delivery. Real freight cost shown before the cart, curbside versus threshold options made explicit, dimensional and weight information formatted for someone deciding whether it will fit through a door. These beat social proof and urgency mechanics consistently in this category.
Only on Plus, where checkout UI extensions and Functions make the page genuinely testable. Standard Shopify seals it, so the work moves upstream to the cart and the delivery decision — which for a Chicago seller is the right place to be anyway. The friction in a housewares or CPG cart is almost never the card form. It is a shipping cost that appears late, a free-shipping threshold the buyer cannot see how to reach, and a delivery date that is visibly a guess. All three are testable on any plan and all three move more money than a checkout button ever will.
It sets it. We avoid running structural tests through your peak — holiday for food and gift, spring for grill and patio — because the traffic mix distorts results and the downside risk is real money. Chicago's off-peak windows are excellent testing periods precisely because they are quiet, and the winners are then hard-coded before demand arrives.
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 Chicago 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.