A store doing R500,000 a month in GMV at a 1.4% conversion rate gets roughly 14 buyers per 1,000 visitors. Move that conversion rate to 2.4%, a single percentage point, and you're at 24 buyers per 1,000. Same traffic, same ad spend, same product. That's R357,000 more per month without acquiring a single new customer.
This is not a rounding error. It's the difference between a store that's growing and a store that's treading water while paying for traffic it doesn't convert.
Why most agencies don't get you there
Conversion rate work is slow and incremental. It doesn't photograph well. You can't screenshot a heatmap and put it in a portfolio the way you can screenshot a redesigned homepage.
What makes a good case study is the visual stuff. A new homepage. A redesigned product page. A section the founder saw on a competitor's site and wanted for their own. These things might help. They might not. Without a hypothesis to test, a way to measure whether it worked, and the patience to iterate when the first version doesn't land, you're spending money on decoration.
What we actually look at
Before writing any code on a new engagement, we sit with the store's data. The four questions that matter:
Where in the funnel are visitors leaving? Product page exits are usually the biggest leak, but checkout step 2 and cart abandonment both deserve a look.
Is mobile converting below desktop, and by how much? In South African stores we review, the mobile gap runs 50-65% below desktop. The fix is almost always structural, not visual.
Which traffic sources produce buyers and which produce browsers? A store where paid traffic converts at 0.4% and organic at 3.2% has a very different problem than one where both convert at 1.8%.
Is there a price point where conversion falls off? If your R450 product converts at 2.1% and your R850 product converts at 0.6%, the price ceiling is doing work that no layout change will fix.
The answers tell you where to build. Evidence first.
The compound effect
The data compounds. Month 1, you establish the baseline. Month 3, you know what moved. Month 6, you know enough about how your customers behave to predict what they'll respond to before you build it.
A developer who builds and leaves resets this to zero every time. The institutional knowledge about what works in this specific store, with these specific customers, at this specific price point, walks out the door with them.
Want to know your store's conversion opportunity? maturity assessment.
We'll review your store against the Commerce Maturity Framework and tell you exactly where the highest-leverage conversion improvements are — with a specific, honest assessment of what reaching the next level is worth.