The basics
- Conversion rate
- Of the people who visit your store, the share who actually buy. If 100 people visit and 2 buy, that's a 2% conversion rate. Most of our work is about nudging this number up.
- CRO (conversion rate optimization)
- The practice of changing a store so more visitors become buyers: better copy, clearer pages, fewer reasons to bounce. It's what the studio does.
- AOV (average order value)
- The average amount a customer spends per order. Bundles and thoughtful upsells raise it without needing more traffic.
- Bounce
- When someone lands on a page and leaves without doing anything. A page that answers the buyer's real question bounces fewer people.
- Baseline
- Where your numbers sit today, before we change anything. We measure improvement against your baseline, not someone else's.
- Above the fold
- The part of a page a visitor sees before scrolling. Prime real estate; it has to earn the scroll.
- DTC (direct-to-consumer)
- Selling straight to the customer from your own store, rather than through a retailer or marketplace. Your Shopify store is DTC.
- SKU
- "Stock-keeping unit." One specific sellable item or variant (the 4" pot, the 1oz tin). Each is a SKU.
- CTR (click-through rate)
- Of the people who saw something (a banner, an email), the share who clicked it. "Home CTR" is the click rate on your homepage's main call to action.
- LTV (lifetime value)
- The total a customer is worth over all their orders, not just the first. Repeat-driving work (post-purchase, win-back) raises it.
- MoM / YoY
- Month-over-month / year-over-year. Comparing a number to last month, or to the same point last year. How we frame movement honestly.
Product pages
- PDP (product detail page)
- An individual product's page: the title, photos, description, price, and add-to-cart. The single highest-leverage page in most stores, and where we spend most weeks.
- Benefit-first copy
- Leading with what the product does for the buyer ("survives the apartment you forget to water") before the specs. People buy outcomes, then justify with features.
- Hero / gallery
- The main product image and the set of images beneath it. Order and quality here move sales as much as words do.
- Alt text
- The text description attached to an image. It helps screen readers and helps Google understand the image. Small, compounding SEO value.
- Schema
- Hidden, structured tags that tell search engines "this is a product, this is its price, these are its reviews." Helps you show up richer in search results.
- Upsell / cross-sell / bundle
- Suggesting a higher-tier item (upsell), a complementary item (cross-sell), or a set sold together (bundle). Done well, it raises AOV without feeling pushy.
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Making pages easier for Google to understand and rank, so you earn visitors without paying for ads. Slow but compounding.
- Meta title / meta description
- The headline and blurb that show in Google's search results for a page. Often the first copy a buyer reads, so worth writing on purpose.
- CTA (call to action)
- The button or line you want the visitor to act on: "Add to cart," "See the starter pair." One clear CTA per page beats five.
Email & SMS
- Flow
- An automated email or text sequence triggered by something a customer does. They don't get sent by hand; the store sends them automatically.
- Abandoned cart
- Someone added an item and didn't check out. The abandoned-cart flow is a gentle nudge to come back, usually the highest-earning email a store has.
- Welcome series
- The first few emails a new subscriber gets. It turns "I gave you my email" into "I made my first order."
- Post-purchase
- Emails after someone buys: delivery, how to use it, a review request, a reason to come back. Drives repeat customers and reviews.
- Win-back
- A flow aimed at people who used to buy and have gone quiet. Often the cheapest sales to recover.
- Browse abandonment
- Someone looked at a product, didn't add it to cart, didn't buy. A light follow-up catches interest before it cools.
- List-to-order rate
- Of the people on your email/SMS list, the share who place an order. A healthy welcome flow lifts this.
- Open rate
- The share of recipients who open an email. Subject line and send time move it most.
- SMS
- Text-message marketing. Short, high-open, easy to overuse, so we keep it sparing and compliant.
- Opt-in
- A shopper actively agreeing to hear from you (ticking a box, texting a keyword). Email and SMS only work on people who opted in.
- Reactivation
- Getting a lapsed customer to buy again. The goal of a win-back flow; usually cheaper than finding a new buyer.
Testing & numbers
- A/B test
- Showing two versions (A and B) to different visitors and keeping whichever sells better. It replaces opinion with evidence. We hand you the variant and the setup steps; you (or your tool) run the test.
- Anchor pricing
- Showing a higher reference price next to the real one so the real one reads as a deal. Honest when the anchor is real.
- Free-shipping threshold
- The cart total a customer has to hit for free shipping ("spend $50, ship free"). Set right, it nudges order size up.
- Sessions
- Visits to your store. Conversion rate is orders divided by sessions, so to report it truthfully we need a real source of session data (see GA4).
- Statistically significant
- Enough data that a result is unlikely to be random luck. We won't call a test "won" before it is.
Tools we mention
- Shopify admin
- The back-office of your store where products, orders, and content live. Approved product-page rewrites are published here for you.
- GA4 (Google Analytics 4)
- Google's free analytics. It's the reliable source for traffic and conversion rate. Connect it and your monthly numbers show real movement; don't, and we simply don't show those stats rather than guess.
- Klaviyo / Postscript
- Popular email (Klaviyo) and SMS (Postscript) platforms. We write the copy; you paste it in, unless you've shared a key for us to place it directly.
- Baymard, Shopify Plus case studies
- Published e-commerce research we cite for benchmark ranges. They're industry reference points for stores like yours, not a promise of your specific result.
- BFCM
- Black Friday / Cyber Monday. The year's biggest sales window, planned for well ahead.
- API
- The technical doorway one app uses to talk to another. When we say "we need a Klaviyo API key," it's read-only access so we can place work directly instead of you copy-pasting.
- API key
- A secret string that authorizes that access. We store any you give us encrypted, and never show it back; you can only replace it.