Steve Hutt:
Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I’m your host, Steve Hutt. If you’ve been in this game for more than a minute, you know this feeling—especially after BFCM. You’ve poured a lot of budget into Meta and Google, and you’re fighting tooth and nail for attention. There’s a lot of competition out there and you’re getting traffic. But the revenue doesn’t always follow the same curve. There’s this typical knee-jerk reaction: let’s change the button color, copy Amazon’s layout because clearly they’re doing something right, or install a countdown timer. There’s always something people want to try.

That’s why I have my guest on today. He believes these quote-unquote best practice playbooks are fundamentally broken. My guest is Anthony Morgan, founder and CEO of Enavi. Anthony’s built quite a reputation as a contrarian in the optimization space. While a lot of agencies push velocity testing, Anthony argues that 80% of the work should happen before a test ever goes live. He’s developed human obsessed CRO methodology with some excellent diagnostic frameworks. I don’t want to get into it too much because I want to hear it from him. My notepad is open. I’m excited to learn. So, Anthony, welcome to the show.

Anthony Morgan:
Thanks, Steve. I’m excited to dive in.

Steve Hutt:
This is great. CRO makes sense to any marketer, but I want to hear about your bold claim—that CRO is broken. I’ve even produced top 10 Shopify hacks about improving conversion rate, but you’re saying that mimicking other brands is actually a trap. What have you learned, and how are you positioning your company and methodology?

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, so at a high level, our approach to CRO is what we call human obsessed CRO. What that means is when it comes to improving your on-site performance—getting into the mind of the customer is crucial. We get into the customer’s mind, understand why they buy, why they don’t buy, and then leverage that to improve your on-site performance and take those learnings into other marketing channels. These learnings shouldn’t just be siloed to your website—they should extend well beyond. And in many cases, those learnings could be disruptive to your business trajectory and how you’re thinking about who your customer actually is. There’s so much value in that.

That foundation is research. To learn more about your customer, you need research to back your knowledge. You can’t base it on assumptions, how you feel, or even if you were the customer yourself. Let’s say you’re the founder who built this product for yourself. As you scale and grow, you become further and further from who your core customer actually is—even if you built it to solve a problem you had. That’s core to our approach. That’s why I mentioned 80% of the effort comes before you launch a test. That’s where research comes in. Research needs to drive how you’re thinking about improving performance, especially when it comes to CRO and on-site performance.

Steve Hutt:
What’s interesting—I watched a YouTube video with you where you were very clear that conversion rate is actually a vanity metric that hides the real story. That single number is misleading. Can you talk more about that? A lot of tools talk about what your conversion rate is, but that seems fundamental.

Anthony Morgan:
There are really two things to think about when we talk about conversion rate being a vanity metric. The first thing—and this applies to any data point or metric—is that a single metric on its own is useless without context from other metrics. I could look at a brand’s top-line revenue and say, “Wow, you did 150 million.” But if I have no context for the bottom line, they could be negative 20 million. That top line looks nice because it’s nine figures, but in context with other data points, you get a fuller picture.

Conversion rate on its own tells you almost nothing. And the second thing is that 95% of the time, conversion rate is affected more by variables outside your on-site experience and changes you make to your site. If you turn up your paid social ad spend today and look at your conversion rate over the next week, it’s going to plummet—especially if those campaigns are targeting prospective, colder audiences. User intent shifts, and conversion rate shifts with it. That’s a variable massively affecting it. It’s affected more by variables you can’t control and that are outside the actual on-site experience.

Steve Hutt:
I’ve heard from other founders I’m interviewing recently that marketers don’t feel confident about their data. Shopify shows one thing, Meta shows something else, Google shows something else, and third-party pixel tracking tools show something different. There’s a 20-30% disparity between all these systems. What’s your mindset about where the truth actually is? How do you think about CRO when there’s so much data conflict?

Anthony Morgan:
If you could solve that for the e-commerce industry, you’d be a billionaire. The reality is it’s never going to be solved and it’s probably only going to get more complicated. Privacy changes have had a massive effect on the quality and clarity of the data we can get. What we do at Enavi is we try to look at particular platforms for specific types of data. If I’m looking at order data—like what products users commonly pair together—Shopify is the best place to look. It gives you a really clear picture. I can use Sidekick and create a good prompt that gives me a solid report. But if I want to look at how users navigate through your site, Shopify is very limited. It doesn’t go granular enough.

One example: Shopify’s purchase journey report doesn’t show users who view a product page. It jumps directly from site visits to add-to-cart. That’s a giant gap in product discovery. You don’t know how many homepage visitors actually view a product, or how many collection page visitors actually view products. You have a massive blind spot there. With GA4, you can go much more granular. So it really depends on what you’re trying to uncover—that determines which platform should be your source of truth.

Steve Hutt:
A lot of people are using Triple Whale, Northbeam, High Roast, there are a few others. I read recently that customers aren’t coming in on your homepage anymore. Stop thinking they are—they’re all over the place, landing in the middle of the funnel. That seems relevant here. You have this framework you call the Intrasite Funnel. I want to make sure we get that concept out there and educate people on the differences. CRO in isolation is a vanity metric, but let’s talk about your Intrasite Funnel framework.

Anthony Morgan:
It goes back to your first question about conversion rate being a vanity metric. When we think about on-site performance and conversion rate, we view it through the lens of what we call the Intrasite Funnel. The Intrasite Funnel takes the key steps that lead to conversion—to a purchase—and breaks them up in isolation to show how users get from point A to point B. The first step is landing to product view. We’ve set target baselines for each step based on our internal dataset. For landing to product view, the target baseline is 50 to 70%. That means 50% of users landing on your site should be viewing a product. Then we go further down the funnel: product view to add-to-cart, add-to-cart to checkout, checkout to purchase. There’s a target baseline for each. That’s the global Intrasite Funnel. We take it a step further by segmenting it, which I’m happy to go into. But I want to pause here and see if there’s anything we want to talk through first.

Steve Hutt:
That makes sense. The first friction point is getting users from the landing page to a product page. They’re not going to the homepage, not reading messaging there. They go straight to a product page. That’s step one. Then what happens?

Anthony Morgan:
Product view to add-to-cart. That’s the percentage of users landing on a product page who actually add it to their cart.

Steve Hutt:
I see. So instead of saying, “My conversion rate is 2.5%,” you can say, “My conversion rate is 2.5%, but my add-to-cart rate is 6%.” You can start monitoring these specific metrics. That makes a lot of sense.

Anthony Morgan:
Exactly. It gives you clarity and focus. You can prioritize your efforts. If you come in and say, “Our conversion rate is 0.9%, we need to improve it,” but you have no idea where the bottleneck is, good luck figuring out how to fix that. If we isolate each metric, we can understand: users are getting to product pages fine, but they’re not adding to cart at an ideal rate. Our benchmark is 12 to 18%—that’s where we want to be. So minimum 12% of users viewing a product should add to cart.

Steve Hutt:
So people have found the product but decided not to add it to their cart. There could be lots of reasons—price, product information gaps, trust issues. Is that where your company’s focus goes? You isolate that metric and then you start building a list of potential improvements?

Anthony Morgan:
Exactly. When improving any metric, let’s say add-to-cart, we want more users to add to cart. When we do improve it, it has a positive downstream impact—more users check out, more users purchase. There are really two levers when thinking about improving conversion: increasing motivation and decreasing friction. Everything we do on the on-site experience to improve conversions uses one of those levers.

Steve Hutt:
So we have landing to product view, product view to add-to-cart. Now someone’s added to cart. What’s the next step?

Anthony Morgan:
Add-to-cart to checkout. Our target baseline for that is 40%—we want 40% of users who add to cart to check out.

Steve Hutt:
So there are similar objections here. Something stopped them from initiating or completing checkout. This is cart abandonment. I’ve seen it a lot—especially in Canada. Surprise costs, duties, taxes in the cart. People see that and leave. Or forced account creation, complexity. There’s definitely a list of things to address around motivation and friction.

Anthony Morgan:
Exactly. What we often see brands do is notice high cart abandonment and immediately think they need to improve their abandonment email flows, improve the checkout flow, improve the cart flow, maybe send more emails more frequently. The reality is that might have some impact, but not significant impact. We need to understand why the customer is having friction. Why are they lacking motivation? Most of the time, there’s friction. It could be motivation too. Understanding that root cause is what we’re trying to solve. You could throw ideas at the wall and something might stick, but you won’t actually understand what made the difference or what friction you reduced.

If you conduct research to understand the root cause, you’re in much better position. I’d recommend one of three things, in order of ease. The easiest is review mining. Most brands have review data you can mine. Look at what customers highlighted, what motivated them, what made them excited—or what are they talking about that you’re not addressing on the site? The second is customer support tickets. What questions are they asking? Those are friction points. Can you address those better on the site, on the product page, even in the cart? The third is post-purchase surveys where you ask targeted questions to customers who bought. You could simply ask, “What almost stopped you from buying?” Or add a survey in your abandonment flow to understand why users aren’t completing checkout and purchasing.

Steve Hutt:
That makes a lot of sense. So the final step would be—checkout is initiated, they’re typing in credit card info, billing address. If they drop off during that, that’s the fourth step?

Anthony Morgan:
Yes. Checkout to purchase. We shoot for a minimum of 45%—45% of users initiating checkout should purchase. One thing about checkout abandonment I want to mention is that often brands default to testing checkout. They’ll run A/B tests there—adding checkout blocks, random ideas. The thinking is, “We’re closer to the dollar here, so we’re more likely to have an impact.” They see 55% abandonment and think, “That’s massive, we need to fix that.”

Honestly, the juice often isn’t worth the squeeze on checkout. If you address issues further up the funnel, you’d have way more impact. You address them preemptively before users even get to checkout. The brands that struggle with checkout to purchase—and most hitting our 45% baseline, especially with Shopify checkout where everyone’s familiar—usually have unexpected shipping costs, unclear delivery times, or a big international cohort facing duties and taxes. Those are the brands struggling. The average Shopify brand doesn’t struggle with checkout. Usually, you can ignore it and focus elsewhere.

Steve Hutt:
That’s interesting. I was talking with a 3PL recently who mentioned the massive increase in international revenue they’ve seen. Canada, UK, Australia—Canada was up 300% for a lot of American brands. That’s part of the CRO thing. Are you using Shopify Markets? Global and Merchant of Record handles duty and tax in cart properly. That removes a massive friction point, especially for Canadians.

Anthony Morgan:
Exactly. The familiarity with Shopify’s checkout and Shop Pay login experience is really important. But showing duty and tax in the cart is key. And delivery time. When you feel confident you’re getting it by DHL or FedEx Express with proper SLAs, that service level gives you confidence. That’s where tools available in Shopify—not just for Plus merchants, but for anyone—like Markets, are valuable.

Steve Hutt:
I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to buy something, got to checkout, really wanted the item, but didn’t know when I’d get it. I’d have to hunt through FAQs to figure out delivery time. My default is checking Amazon because I know Prime gets it in two days or less. If you’re selling on both Amazon and your DTC site, you’re competing against that. There’s massive value in communicating delivery times clearly and being competitive about it. It doesn’t have to be two-day or same-day, but something competitive.

Anthony Morgan:
Completely agree. I’d add that Shopify just announced a connection with Uber and Uber Direct. If you run a retail location on Shopify, you can expose one-hour or two-hour delivery through Uber Direct as a shipping option. Inventory syncs through that local location. If it’s within local delivery, the backend technology is dialed in. That’s powerful.

Steve Hutt:
So if I’m in Langley, BC, and there’s a retail store or location, I could select Uber Direct. They pick up in-store and bring it to my customer.

Anthony Morgan:
Right. That reduces friction for sure.

Steve Hutt:
It’s neat. My next question is about case studies. I like being warm and fuzzy about what others are seeing. I saw your website has several case studies. Is there one you want to talk about—how their business looked before working with you, what you implemented using your framework, and what success looks like after?

Anthony Morgan:
A good example is Grubly Farms. Before Enavi, they’d worked with another CRO agency. They value A/B testing and validating impact. They’re data-driven. They went through big shifts on the paid social side, needed to switch partners, and needed to level up their on-site experience. When we came in, they had a lot of traffic not getting to product pages. That’s where we focused first—product discovery. We invested heavily in how users navigate the homepage, navigation, collection pages, even blog traffic.

Blog traffic is hard to improve product view rates because it has low intent. But there are things you can do to get more into a shopping or buying experience. Over the first 90 days, we worked on this. As the program evolved, we got their baseline Intrasite Funnel performance above target ranges across the board. Though there were underlying segments—which is something we haven’t touched on yet. We really like to segment your Intrasite Funnel by different segments for even further context.

You might look globally and see product discovery is underperforming. But if you segment down, you get even further clarity on what’s causing it. Some segments are device type—mobile versus desktop. Landing page—homepage, collection, product page, blog. User type—new versus returning. Channel or source medium—email behaves differently than organic search or paid social.

Understanding that gives valuable context. It can help inform where to focus efforts. Globally you could be fine. We focused on segments that were underperforming and made improvements. After over a year into the relationship—this is a brand where 60% of revenue is from recurring orders—we shifted focus to subscriptions. We improved first-time subscribers, the take rate on subscriptions. When we started, it was around 15%. Now it’s near 45%. Massive improvement. And interestingly, churn stayed about the same. So we shifted efforts further to churn, trying to increase lifetime value, keep subscribers longer, upsell into bigger subscriptions.

Now we’re focusing narrowly on new customer acquisition to help them scale further. They’ve grown tremendously over two years with us. Now we want even more scale, pushing into audiences further from their core customer as they scale. We’re building landing pages that marry the pre-click with the post-click well. That’s the journey we’ve had with this customer. You can see how CRO evolves over time. We’re not just looking at conversion rate. We’ve covered a lot of ground.

Steve Hutt:
That’s it. You’re almost like a business partner, looking at the business holistically and many levers. But drilling down and using the Intrasite Funnel concept makes complete sense. I’ve been at Shopify and I never really took intentional time to educate merchants about these granular metrics. I understand add-to-cart rate, but I never really took the time. The forest-for-the-trees problem happens with marketers a lot too. They look at vanity metrics and roll them up to the C-suite. But marketers listening can get real takeaways today. I really appreciate what you’re sharing and what your team is doing. No wonder there’s such great success with brands. I’ll put this case study in the show notes. There are other good ones on your site too.

Anthony Morgan:
We’ve been terrible at creating case studies, honestly. We need to level up because we have incredible clients with incredible results. We believe in long-term relationships. Grubly Farms is hitting two years with us. Not many agencies reach that length, especially CRO agencies often seen as, “Three to six months, wave a magic wand and double my conversion rate.” That’s not how it works. It’s cool to have that type of relationship, and we’ve built many multi-year relationships.

Steve Hutt:
That’s amazing. So what about BFCM? There’s been hype around it. We’re recording after BFCM. There’s still holiday traffic, and people are planning Q1 initiatives. How can they maintain momentum? Did you notice anything unique from your brands during Q4? I ask because I’m wondering if there’s a unique customer expectation about how they want to interact with websites, support, omnichannel. What did you see in Q4 that we can apply to Q1?

Anthony Morgan:
That’s a good question. Customer behavior hasn’t really changed that much over the years, but market saturation, competition, and the cost to get users to your site have shifted. When it comes to Black Friday Cyber Monday website performance, it’s really important to have an experience different from your evergreen one.

Steve Hutt:
Right.

Anthony Morgan:
During promotional periods, especially BFCM, users come driven by promotion. Your experience needs to be crystal clear on what that promotion is. You need to easily navigate the user to products, communicate the promotion, show them products. If you have a larger catalog, showing more products increases average order value. Product discovery is massive. That’s one key thing—your BFCM website will be different from your regular website. Even on Giving Tuesday, the day after Cyber Monday, if you’re not carrying promotions, there should be somewhat of a shift. I’m not talking about a massive change that makes users think, “Who is this brand?” But navigation, added links driving to specific promotions, holiday gifting, your homepage being more sales-focused than brand-focused during that period. It’s hard to apply that directly to Q1. But it’s valuable to not be afraid to have a different experience than you’d approach the rest of the year.

Steve Hutt:
That makes sense. It makes me think—the current expectation a lot of brands have is, “Land on a page, add-to-cart, buy.” But the reality now is the customer probably lands on a product page, then does a Google search for reviews, goes to Amazon for price check, checks Instagram for tagged photos. It’s tab-switching. People want external validation. Maybe they return to your site and buy. That’s the reality. How does that fit into your Intrasite Funnel approach? How do we reduce tab-switching and build trust so they don’t leave?

Anthony Morgan:
That’s reason number one why CRO is so important. A large percentage of your business—especially the smaller you are, the larger that percentage—is direct response performance marketing. You’re trying to drive action, trying to get that conversion. For most brands, you’re trying to get that purchase on the first visit. That’s where CRO is so valuable. You’re answering questions they’d otherwise search for elsewhere or compare with a competitor. If you can answer those questions effectively and clearly wherever the user lands—predominantly the product page or custom landing page—you’ll have far more efficient paid social and marketing performance.

Everything that’s shifted in the ecosystem—more competition, more options, maybe multiple ways to get your product not just through DTC but Amazon—that’s where you need to do an effective job communicating what the customer needs to hear. When they land, you want them thinking, “Where has this product been? I’ve needed this.” If that’s the response, they don’t need external validation on Reddit. Some customers will do that—that’s just how they shop. But if you do your site well, them checking Reddit is a natural response, and they can come back with full understanding of the product the way they need it as your customer. That’s the value of good CRO speaking directly to your core customer.

Steve Hutt:
I think a lot of people need to hear this. I’ve been teaching that it’s not always a price objection. Founders panic thinking the issue is being uncompetitive in the marketplace. That’s not completely true.

Anthony Morgan:
No.

Steve Hutt:
Before discounting, I mean, you hit the nail on the head about information gaps. Does this thing fit? Do they know it ships free? There’s so much they just don’t know. They’re confused. They feel risk about buying because they’re not sure it’ll work.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s so important. We see brands default to, “We need to lower price or discount more.” We do surveys asking, “What almost stopped you from buying today?” And price rises to the top—even for products priced low or at the bottom of the market. People still say price. That doesn’t mean you need to discount. It’s just the default human response. Instead of asking, “What almost stopped you from buying today?” we’ll ask, “Besides price, what almost stopped you?” That forces them past the default. Otherwise you just get, “Price was the issue.” Usually it’s not. There’s something else underlying that’s valuable to uncover. It affects not just on-site experience but all your other marketing—retargeting, new customer ads, email marketing. There’s so much value if you uncover it.

Steve Hutt:
One more question. CRO is important and I understand your Intrasite Funnel breakdown. I’ve filled pages of notes and I’m putting this in my book because it’s important. You’ll be referenced. But here’s the reality: a lion’s share of people leave without opting in to any communication. What’s your mindset on tools like Retention, OpenSend, Customers AI that can unhash website visitors and reveal email addresses, then send, “Thanks for visiting”? In America, as long as you have legal opt-out, you can email anyone. What’s your thinking on this? Some are all-in and wildly successful. Others won’t touch it.

Anthony Morgan:
If I think about my agency, we have Retention connected to our site and we see LinkedIn profiles of maybe 10 to 20% of visitors. We don’t immediately message them, but we connect and maybe add them as a target account or future outreach. I can’t say I’m against it because I do it myself, kind of. But I’d say it has to be done tastefully for e-commerce. I don’t shop much online, so I’ve never gotten an email I didn’t subscribe to—at least knowingly. As an agency owner, I’ve gotten stuff I didn’t subscribe to, and it feels weird. You have to be tasteful. If you’re getting it, how can you lead with value? That sounds B2B, but you can do it in B2C and DTC without feeling odd. The average consumer might not even think about how you got their email. They might think they subscribed. It definitely feels weird. Be tasteful.

Steve Hutt:
There’s a difference between an opt-in and a welcome. There’s a tasteful way to do it. You could say, “Thanks for visiting—clearly you have some desire to buy these shoes. I now know who you are. Thanks for visiting by the way. Here’s our brand story. Feel free to opt out if you don’t want more messages.” That’s the email side. You could still use those emails for paid social, rehash data, get postal addresses, send catalogs or postcards. There’s interesting stuff happening. I know for a fact even my wife recently visited a website and is now getting emails. Even some VPN and Shopify brands—I won’t say who—are doing, “Hey, thanks for visiting.” And it works.

Anthony Morgan:
But not for everybody. There’s a reason it exists and brands use it. Because it works. Like anything in marketing, be tasteful and thoughtful. Don’t do something you’d cringe at as a consumer, especially if you want to represent your brand well.

Steve Hutt:
So what are our next steps? We’re wrapping up, but there’s been a ton of learning. There are early-stage people here learning DIY things about the Intrasite Funnel, understanding those four areas and being strategic about implementation. For mid-market to enterprise, what are the next steps? How should they interact with you?

Anthony Morgan:
A great next step is following me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there, write content you can take away and apply. Another good step—we have a CRO upgrade kit with a series of resources to level up your on-site experience. We have a one-click Looker report that pulls your Intrasite Funnel using GA4 data. Click through the link, go to the page, there’s a link to the Looker report. Select your GA4 property and it auto-populates with Intrasite Funnel data. You can see performance across those four metrics and breakdowns by the segments we talked about.

Steve Hutt:
Okay.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s probably the best next step. If you’re not familiar with the Intrasite Funnel or haven’t used the report, go do that. We’ll include it in the CRO upgrade kit.

Steve Hutt:
Lovely. I’ll have that in the show notes. Everything will be there—the case study, the link. I appreciate that. You can sync everything through Looker and GA4, get a good snapshot of where you’re at. From there, a business conversation can start: “Where are you today? What are you happy with in-house? How can we take over some responsibilities? Can we run a three-month test to see what we can do?” It’s really cool.

Well, thank you again, Anthony, for coming on the show. I have two pages of notes. I wish my camera was on to prove it, but I’ve written a ton. You’re going to be in my book—Thriving with Shopify. You’ll be in the CRO section for sure. I’m flagging you as the inventor of the Intrasite Funnel. So thanks again for recording and have yourself a lovely afternoon.

Anthony Morgan:
Thanks, Steve.

Steve Hutt:
All right, have a good one. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to personally thank you for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. It’s my hope that this podcast offers you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms. My personal goal is to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify. Thanks for investing time today. I’m proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.