I’ll admit, I’ve always been a bit of a self-professed nerd when it comes to discovering new ways to unlock just that little bit of extra revenue. Turning visitors into customers, and customers into brand superfans. I’ve obsessed over fonts and colours and the subtle psychological impact they might have, agonised over call-to-action wording and button placement. At the time, it felt like an edge. Something others weren’t paying attention to.
Then I learned there was an entire industry dedicated to this exact thing, called Conversion Rate Optimisation.
I was excited. I thought I’d found my people. Data-driven thinkers who cared about human behaviour, decision-making, and helping businesses show up better for their customers. People who believed small changes, thoughtfully made, could compound into meaningful growth.
But it didn’t take long before I realised that Conversion Rate Optimisation isn’t what I thought it was.
I had assumed CRO was a craft focused on helping store owners, new and established, understand how they show up for customers. How they attract the right people, earn trust over time, reduce uncertainty, and build something that feels human. I believed it was about the full experience: before a customer ever lands on a website, and long after they’ve placed an order.
What I learned instead was that modern CRO is, for the most part, an industry reserved for the elite.
The already-successful stores. The ones with enormous traffic volumes. The brands spending tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, every month on paid acquisition. CRO professionals typically work with businesses that have already “made it”, optimising small, isolated moments on a website in pursuit of fractional gains that translate into massive revenue increases at scale.
To be clear, this makes complete sense. When a store is doing millions in annual revenue, even a 0.5% uplift in conversion rate can mean hundreds of thousands or even millions more in the bank. That’s how CRO agencies justify their fees, and in that context, it’s entirely rational.
But it also means something that doesn’t sit so well with me.
It means that Conversion Rate Optimisation, as an industry, largely ignores small and medium-sized stores.
And that’s where my problem starts.
I also realised something else along the way, something that feels almost heretical to say in marketing circles.
Conversion Rate is a terrible primary metric to optimise for.
Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s incomplete. At best, it’s a narrow indicator. At worst, it’s a vanity metric that gives the illusion of progress while masking much deeper problems. Yes, I said it.
To explain why, we need to step back and get clear on what conversion rate actually is.
What is Conversion Rate?
At its simplest, Conversion Rate is just a ratio: the percentage of visitors to your website who complete a desired action. That action might be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, booking a call, or downloading a guide.
If 1,000 people visit your store and 20 of them buy something, your conversion rate is 2%.
But that’s all it tells you.
It doesn’t tell you whether those customers were profitable. It doesn’t tell you whether they trusted your brand. It doesn’t tell you whether they’ll ever come back. And it certainly doesn’t tell you whether your business is sustainable.
Yet, in Conversion Rate Optimisation, this single number is often treated as the ultimate signal of success.
Why Conversion Rate Became So Important
Conversion rate became popular because it’s easy.
Not easy to do, but easy to measure, easy to benchmark, and easy to optimise in isolation. Tools can track it automatically. Dashboards can surface it instantly. Reports can show it going up and to the right.
For large, high-traffic brands, this is genuinely useful.
If you’re spending £50,000 a month on ads and driving hundreds of thousands of sessions, optimising on-site friction can be incredibly powerful. Changing a headline, simplifying a checkout, removing a field from a form – these are low-risk changes with outsized returns when volume is high.
In that environment, Conversion Rate Optimisation works exactly as advertised.
The problem is what happens when this same thinking is applied to businesses that don’t operate at that scale. Which is most of us.
The Problem With Conversion Rate Optimisation for Most Stores
For most small and medium-sized stores, conversion rate optimisation is either premature or misdirected.
If your store:
- Doesn’t have significant and consistent traffic
- Relies heavily on organic, social, or word-of-mouth
- Has tight margins
- Is still building trust and awareness
Then increasing conversion rate alone won’t fix the real issues holding the business back.
I’ve seen stores increase conversion rate by offering aggressive discounts, shortening decision windows, or adding urgency everywhere, only to end up with lower margins, higher refund rates, and customers who never return.
On paper, the conversion rate improved.
In reality, the business got worse.
A store with a 5% conversion rate that attracts the wrong customers, struggles with retention, and leaks profit far less healthy than a store converting at 1.5% with strong margins, repeat buyers, and a growing sense of trust.
But traditional CRO has no language for that distinction.
Conversion Rate Doesn’t Equal Profit
Conversion Rate measures behaviour, not business health.
You can optimise for conversion rate and still lose money. You can increase the conversion rate by removing friction that exists for a genuine reason. You can “win” tests that improve short-term metrics while damaging long-term brand perception.
One thing I’ve learned is that what most founders actually care about isn’t conversion rate.
They care about profit. Sustainability. Predictable growth. Building something customers believe in and come back to. It sounds obvious, but it’s often overlooked in favour of the metric.
The Buyer Journey Is the Real Optimisation Opportunity
The buyer journey doesn’t begin on a product page, and it doesn’t end at checkout.
It starts much earlier, with a recommendation from a friend, a comment on social media, a review, a previous experience, or a problem someone is actively trying to solve. By the time a customer lands on your website, they’ve already made dozens of micro-decisions about whether they trust you.
And it continues long after the purchase.
Delivery speed. Packaging. Post-purchase emails. Customer support interactions. Returns and refunds. Follow-up communication. These moments shape whether a customer becomes a repeat buyer or ghosts you forevermore.
Traditional Conversion Rate Optimisation focuses almost exclusively on the on-site moment. The click. The session. The page.
But for most businesses, the biggest leaks in the system exist outside the website.
Why Small and Medium Stores Need a Different Approach
If you don’t have a significant volume of traffic, I’ll be honest with you, most traditional CRO won’t work, at least not based on anything meaningful.
Your biggest opportunities usually sit in:
- Clarifying who your product is actually for
- Aligning messaging across ads, social, and on-site content
- Reducing uncertainty before the first visit
- Setting better expectations before purchase
- Creating an experience worth returning to
- Using behavioural science and CRO learnings from larger stores to guide educated decisions
These are buyer-journey problems, not conversion-rate problems.
Solve them, and the conversion rate often improves as a side effect.
Reframing Conversion Rate Optimisation
I’m not anti–Conversion Rate Optimisation. I’m anti-pretending it’s the solution to everything.
Conversion rate can be a useful metric, but it’s a downstream signal. A reflection of how the entire system is working, not something to chase in isolation.
Building a trustworthy brand with a clear message, a great product, and a thoughtful end-to-end experience tends to naturally improve conversion rates.
And when it does, it’s far more likely to be profitable.
Instead of asking:
How do I increase my conversion rate?
A better question is:
Where is my buyer journey breaking down.
Sometimes, the answer is on the website, more often, it isn’t. Or at least not in isolation.
What Conversion Optimisation Should Focus on
Your revenue is actually determined by three main levers working together:
- More Customers
Attracting the right people, not just more people. This means defining who you serve and why they care, then meeting them where they already are (social, search, community spaces, referrals). - Higher Average Order Value (AOV)
Not by gimmicks or aggressive upsells, but by offering genuinely complementary products, thoughtful bundles, and value-aligned solutions that resonate with customers. - Repeat Purchases
This is the real compound interest in eCommerce. Getting someone to buy once is valuable, but getting them to buy again without heavy discounting is where brands become sustainable.
None of these levers live exclusively in a conversion rate metric. They all require understanding the buyer journey end-to-end.
If you improve each of these three levers by just 30%, your revenue doesn’t increase by 30%.
It more than doubles.
Why Small Improvements Compound So Powerfully
Imagine your store has 10,000 customers, an average order value of £30, and each customer buys once per year. That’s £300,000 in annual revenue.
Now imagine improving each lever by 30%:
- 13,000 customers
- £39 average order value
- 1.3 purchases per customer per year
That same store is now doing £659,100 in annual revenue.
You just more than doubled your original turnover without chasing tiny conversion-rate gains or relying on massive increases in traffic.
And the best part? This strategy works no matter what stage of the journey your store is, 100 customers, 1000 customers, 10,000 customers – you don’t need huge traffic volumes to benefit from improving trust, customer experience, and repeat purchasing. These changes compound regardless of scale, because they’re rooted in how humans make decisions, not in statistical significance thresholds.
This is why focusing on the full buyer journey is so powerful.
Where to start
I realise I may have just dropped a bombshell on you, and I can’t end the post here without giving you an idea of where to go next, so here goes.
Increasing each lever requires looking at your full buyer journey, from how you show up in your marketing, socials, ads, email newsletters, to your website User Experience, product offer, price framing and checkout ease, to following up with customers after their purchase.
This is exactly what I do through the Customer Decision Audit.
I analyse your buyer journey end-to-end, before, during, and after the website, to uncover where customers hesitate, lose trust, or abandon ship entirely. You’ll receive a clear, prioritised report showing where your biggest revenue opportunities really are and how to improve the three levers that actually matter.
If you want to grow a profitable, sustainable brand, not just chase vanity metrics, this is the place to start.