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.
Toronto, ON
Conversion Rate Optimisation in Toronto, ON
A structured test programme on the two things that actually cost GTA stores revenue: cross-border cost surprise and an unbelievable delivery promise.
Delivered remotely for brands across Toronto and Canada.
Grow · Toronto
Why Toronto brands come to us for this
- Currency clarity tested where it actually costs you: the moment a US visitor realises the price was CAD
- Landed-cost and duty transparency tested on the PDP, not left as a surprise at the final checkout step
- Free-shipping thresholds set and tested per market rather than one number converted from the other currency
- Winter delivery promises tested as specific carrier plus cutoff, against the vague estimate that loses in this market
- Every readout segmented Canada versus US, because a blended win frequently hides a loss in one of them
Run the funnel of a typical Toronto store and the leak is rarely where the founder expects. It is not the hero image. It is a US visitor who has been reading CAD prices without realising it, or a Canadian one who reaches shipping and discovers the free-shipping threshold was written in US dollars, or a buyer in Calgary who watches tax appear at the last step and recalculates whether they still want it. Cost surprise is the dominant abandonment cause for cross-border stores and it happens at a specific, testable step.
The second is the delivery promise. From roughly November onward, Canadian buyers approach shipping estimates with earned scepticism — postal disruption and winter weather have taught them that a stated date is a suggestion. A vague 'ships in 2-5 business days' converts noticeably worse in this market than a specific carrier, a named cutoff and an honest estimate, and that is a straightforward thing to test on a product page rather than argue about in a meeting.
Everything else runs as a normal programme. Quantitative research to find where revenue leaks, session replay and on-site polling to explain why, a backlog scored on impact, confidence and effort. Sample sizes are declared before a test starts, not once it starts looking promising. We report the losers in the same detail as the winners, and we segment every readout by market, because a change that lifts your Canadian conversion rate and drops your American one is a losing test that looks like a winner in the aggregate.
Local context
Segment every test by market or you will misread it
The single most common analytical error we find in Toronto accounts is a store optimising against a blended number that averages two different customers. Your Canadian visitor already knows the brand, may have seen it in a Queen West shop, converts on a domestic delivery promise and is used to seeing tax added at checkout. Your American visitor found you through paid social, has never heard of you, is comparing you against US brands with two-day shipping, and abandons the moment a customs question enters their head. Those two respond to opposite treatments — trust and duty transparency for one, speed and familiarity for the other. We split every experiment readout by market from day one, and where traffic supports it we run separate tests per market rather than one blended test whose result tells you nothing you can act on.
Scope
What Conversion Optimisation includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Toronto 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 Toronto store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Toronto 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 Toronto — your questions
Test where the revenue and the friction are, which is not always the same segment. US traffic usually has the volume and the worse conversion rate, so it reaches significance faster and has more headroom. Canadian traffic often has higher repeat value. We usually start with the US market because the cross-border friction is more testable, then bring learnings back into the Canadian experience deliberately rather than by assumption.
It lowers the rate at the point you show it and raises completed, kept orders. That trade is almost always positive because a refused cross-border parcel costs you outbound shipping, return shipping and the customer. We measure it on revenue per session and on refusal and return rates rather than on checkout-start rate, which is the metric that makes transparency look bad.
We do not run a test through one — a carrier interruption is exactly the kind of external shock that invalidates a result. We pause active experiments, note the window in the programme log so nobody later compares against contaminated data, and use the time for research and build work instead. Resuming with a clean baseline is worth more than salvaging a compromised test.
Around forty thousand sessions and eight hundred orders a month is where testing becomes statistically viable, and splitting by market effectively raises that bar. Plenty of GTA brands in the one to three million range are below it. If that is you we will say so and put the same research effort into a redesign-and-instrument programme instead, which produces gains you can actually attribute.
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 Toronto 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.