What is CRO and How Do You Do It on Shopify?
What is CRO?
CRO is conversion rate optimization. So, what does that even mean? It’s the practice of understanding and managing how people navigate through your online store to influence sales. And just to be clear, we’re not talking about some kind of dark marketing or secret psychology. Good CRO starts with focusing on your basic site design and layout. You might try some site-voodoo after the basics are covered, but you must first tackle the simple needs of CRO.
You use CRO to study customer behavior and make decisions based on the data you’ve discovered. Your goal is to determine what elements on your site are guiding customers to checkout and what is stopping them. The more you learn about how your customers think, the easier it becomes to increase the number of visitors who complete an order.
Industry data shows that the average ecommerce conversion rate stays between two and three percent. This means that out of every one hundred visitors, only two or three buy something. The goal of CRO is to improve this conversion rate. That way you can increase revenue without needing more traffic and you’ll get more value from the traffic you already have. If you’ever tried to get traffic to your site, you know how difficult a process that can be. Making the most of the traffic you have is cheaper and easier.
How Do You Know If You Have Bad CRO?
You can often sense when your site has poor CRO because your traffic does not seem to match your sales. Are you seeing a good amount of site visits each day, but you’re not getting many orders? That’s a sign. Or maybe you’re spending a lot on advertising but your revenue does not change at a proportional rate (or it doesn’t move at all.) That is also a bad sign.
When your conversion rate dips below 2% or 3%, it tells you that your visitors are leaving without buying. This should be your first signal that something in your store’s checkout journey is creating customer doubt. If you’re getting a lot of abandoned carts, that is a warning sign of this customer hesitation. If customers add items to their cart but don’t finish the checkout, you need to work on your process.
Other warning signs to look out for are long loading times on product pages, confusing layouts, missing information, or payment options that do not match customer expectations. If a large percentage of visitors leave after viewing one page, it often means the page does not answer their questions. Your site statistics should be able to reveal these places where customers hesitate or lose confidence.
Don’t forget to check your site’s mobile responsiveness too. This is often one of those hidden problems leading to poor conversion. More than 70% of ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices. If you’re not testing and optimizing your site for mobile, then you probably have CRO issues. If your mobile experience is slowing customers down, then you can expect your conversion rate to drop. Even small mobile issues like slow loading, unclear buttons, long forms, or crowded layouts have a huge impact because customers have less space on their mobile devices. Fixing these issues will increase the number of mobile visitors who reach checkout. Mobile CRO becomes one of the fastest ways to raise conversions because so much of your traffic depends on it. Hopefully we’ve got you thinking about your mobile responsiveness right now.
Benefits of Good CRO
Is CRO really all that important? Yes, it is! Good CRO increases your revenue because more visitors are completing a purchase. Even small gains make a difference. A one-point increase in conversion rate can raise sales by 20% to 30% even if your traffic stays the same. You’re lowering your acquisition costs because you’re earning more from the visitors you already have. That’s one of the biggest benefits of good CRO.
Strong CRO leads directly to increased sales in other ways too. Good CRO supports other parts of your business because an easier shopping experience builds trust and makes customers more likely to return. Studies show that reducing friction during checkout can increase completed orders by more than 20%. Streamlined product pages, faster site speed, and clear calls to action create the strongest lifts in revenue. Each improvement works together to create a more predictable flow of sales. This is the cornerstone of conversion optimization.
It takes time for the benefits to appear though. Results usually take a few weeks because you need enough traffic and data to confirm whether a change is working. Most tests begin to show early patterns in 7 to 14-days, but a full test often takes about a month. That’s because you need time to measure the behavior across different traffic sources and buying patterns. If your store already has high traffic, then results can come faster. If your store has lower traffic, tests take longer because you need more time to collect traffic data.
You may see some quick early wins from simple fixes like clearer calls to action or improved product placement. These changes often raise conversion rates within the first month. Larger gains come from ongoing and testing a more efficient customer journey. Brands that commit to continuous CRO usually see steady lifts over 3 to 6 months, with long-term changes in conversion rate, average order value, and overall revenue.
The key is not to get too impatient. You want the data to tell you the truth before you roll out changes across your store. You want to take a structured approach that produces reliable results and leads to long-term growth.
What Does CRO On Shopify Look Like?
By now, you’re probably wondering how all of this applies to your Shopify site. Is it even possible to optimize your Shopify site? Yes you can, good CRO is applicable to any ecommerce site. Start by looking at your Shopify store the same way a customer does. Pretend you're a customer and try to complete a checkout on various devices. You may even want to time yourself and see how quickly you can complete a purchase. Then you’ll want to compare your times to that of new customers. Study session recordings, heatmaps, and analytics to understand where people click. You want to understand where they pause and where they exit. Google GA-4 is a great tool to help with this. If you’re not running GA-4 then don’t worry, Shopify provides built-in analytics that show your top conversion paths and highlight problem areas. You can then run controlled tests to try different page layouts, CTA copy, navigation changes, and checkout adjustments. Only change one element at a time so you can see which version performs better.
Start by reviewing your Shopify analytics to see which pages attract attention, and which pages lose visitors. This will tell you which part of the funnel is slowing people down. You may need to use your GA4 Analytics in conjunction with your Shopify conversion reports to see how many customers reach your product pages, add items to the cart, abandon carts and complete checkout. These reports help you see where you should focus first.
Then, improve your product pages by making the information clear and easy to understand. Use high-quality images, detailed product descriptions and add social-proof like product reviews. These elements help your customers make product decisions faster. The product page is where you should focus most of your time as all customer decisions are made there. The decision to buy or skip hinges on what the PDP conveys to the customer.
After you focus on the products, move on to the entire site layout. Use your Shopify themes to test different layouts and flows. Use the different themes to test how customers respond to new designs. Shopify lets you create different themes where you can adjust the layout, spacing, button placement, and content sections. You can then publish the different themes and compare how each version performs in add-to-cart rate, time on page, or completed checkouts. If the new layout converts better, you use it as your main theme.
Get Some CRO Help
If all this sounds like too much work or too confusing, then don’t worry, we’re here to help. Sunrise Integration supports your CRO process by giving you a team that studies your customer journey and manages testing for you. We can provide you with support that includes analytics reporting, UX research, A/B testing, session analysis, and funnel optimization. You gain an implementation partner that can apply improvements directly to your Shopify site and measure the results. Sunrise Integration works with Shopify and Shopify Plus stores that want more revenue from their current traffic and need a long-term optimization plan. You get a clear roadmap and continuous improvements. We help raise your conversion rate over time.
Sunrise Integration provides CRO as part of our monthly Shopify Success Plans. This service gives you a dedicated team that studies your customer behavior, and applies updates to your store. These plans give you ongoing support instead of one-time fixes because CRO requires steady cycles of review and refinement. Each month, our team tracks how customers move through your funnel, identifies friction, and we help raise your conversion rate over time. You receive continued adjustments to layouts, product pages, navigation and checkout so your store becomes stronger with each round of testing. Our plans give you the freedom to focus on your business while we handle the technical work.
When you want long-term revenue growth and a store that performs better with each test cycle, our Shopify Success Plans give you the ongoing CRO program you need.
