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.
Istanbul
Conversion Rate Optimisation in Istanbul
Conversion work for Istanbul exporters, where the biggest leak is usually not the layout but the buyer's uncertainty about buying from Turkiye at all.
Delivered remotely for brands across Istanbul and Türkiye.
Grow · Istanbul
Why Istanbul brands come to us for this
- Test roadmap ordered by uncertainty, not by page: sizing, landed cost, delivery date and returns route first
- Checkout-to-gateway handoff measured as its own step, since a third-party redirect is usually the largest single drop
- Fit and measurement presentation tested per category, because a towel buyer and a jacket buyer need different evidence
- Trust evidence tested as content, not decoration: production photography, named delivery windows, reviews from the destination market
- Test sizing matched to real export traffic volumes, so a modest-traffic store runs fewer and larger experiments
Cross-border conversion has a distinct failure shape and it is not subtle once you look for it. Traffic arrives, product pages get read carefully, more carefully than a domestic store would see, and then people leave at three specific places: the moment they try to work out their size, the moment they try to work out total cost, and the moment the checkout hands them to a payment page that looks different from the store they were just on. Everything else is secondary until those three are fixed.
So the test programme starts where the money is leaking rather than with button colours. Measurement presentation and fit guidance on the product page. Landed cost stated early enough that it is not a surprise at step three. Delivery framed as a date range with the origin acknowledged rather than hidden. Returns explained with a real route, because a buyer who cannot picture sending something back to Turkiye prices that risk into her decision and usually decides no. Each of those is testable, and each has a bigger effect on an Istanbul store than any layout change.
The checkout is its own project. Because Shopify Payments is not available to merchants domiciled in Turkiye, most Istanbul stores settle through a third-party gateway, and that often means a redirect, a different visual language, and sometimes a page that speaks less confidently than the store. That transition is measurable, it is usually the single largest drop in the funnel, and it can be improved with gateway choice, wallet availability, and consistent presentation far more than with another round of copy edits upstream.
Local context
The objection is not price and it is not the product
Istanbul brands routinely have a strong price-to-quality position and still convert below what that position should earn, because the buyer is not evaluating the product against a competitor. She is evaluating the risk of buying from a company she cannot verify, in a country she has no purchasing experience with, at a distance she cannot see across. Session recordings from these stores show the same behaviour repeatedly: the shipping page opened before the product page has finished being read, the returns policy opened from the cart, the size chart opened twice. That is a buyer looking for reasons to stop. Our test roadmap treats each of those as a hypothesis with a page-level intervention, and we sequence it against your traffic so the highest-uncertainty steps get tested first. On a store with modest volume that means fewer, larger tests on the checkout path rather than a queue of small experiments that will never reach significance.
Scope
What Conversion Optimisation includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Istanbul 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 Istanbul store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Istanbul 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 Istanbul — your questions
The gateway page itself is usually outside your control, but almost everything around it is not. We test what the customer is told before the handoff, whether the wallet and card options are visible earlier, how consistent the branding and language are at the transition, and in some cases whether a different gateway performs better. We also instrument the handoff as a distinct funnel step, because most Istanbul stores are reporting a checkout completion rate that quietly includes a drop nobody has attributed.
For most export catalogues, included and stated, but it is worth testing rather than assuming. A delivered-duty-paid price shown on the product page reads higher and converts better than a lower price that grows at checkout, because the second version breaks trust exactly where trust is most fragile. The exception is high-value categories where the duty is large enough that a visibly inflated shelf price loses the click. That is a real test with a real answer per catalogue.
Split testing might be, but conversion work is not. With low volume we start with the diagnostic layer that does not need statistical power: session recordings segmented by country, form and field analytics on the checkout, a heuristic audit against the specific objections a cross-border buyer has, and fixing what is plainly broken. Formal testing starts when the traffic can support it, and we say so rather than running experiments that will never conclude.
Often not, and assuming it does is a common error on Istanbul stores because both markets get lumped into one export segment. German buyers respond differently to price presentation and returns language than American buyers, and the legal expectations differ too, since EU consumers have a statutory withdrawal right that should be stated plainly rather than buried. We segment results by market wherever volume allows and we do not roll a winner from one market across the whole store without checking.
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 Istanbul 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.