Your Conversion Rate Is Lying to You: The 4 Numbers That Actually Predict Revenue

Steve Hutt:
You’re listening to eCommerce Fastlane, the podcast show to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify. Listen to real conversations with partners and subject matter experts as they share proven, practical strategies, platforms, and the best Shopify apps to help you accelerate your business. The time is now for you to improve efficiencies, grow revenue, profit, and lifetime customer loyalty. Please welcome your host, startup founder and strategic advisor, Steve Hutt.

Anthony Morgan:
Well, hey there.

Steve Hutt:
Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I am your host, Steve Hutt. Now, if you’ve been in this game for more than a minute, you know this feeling, especially with BFCM just passing. You’ve poured a lot of budget into Meta and Google, you’re fighting tooth and nail for attention, there’s a lot of competition out there, and you’re likely getting a lot of traffic, but the revenue doesn’t always follow the same curve.

Steve Hutt:
I think there’s this typical knee‑jerk reaction: “Hey, let’s change the button color,” or, “Let’s copy Amazon’s layout because clearly they’re doing something right,” or, “Let’s install a countdown timer.” There’s always something people want to bolt on to try and fix performance.

Steve Hutt:
That’s the reason why I have my guest on today, because he believes this typical playbook is fundamentally broken. My guest is Anthony Morgan. He’s the founder and CEO of a company called Enavi — that’s E‑N‑A‑V‑I.co. Anthony has built quite a reputation; I did a little research before recording. He’s a bit of a contrarian in the optimization space. A lot of agencies try to sell you on velocity testing, whereas Anthony argues that maybe 80% of the work should happen before a test even goes live.

Steve Hutt:
It’s quite interesting. He has some great methodologies around what he calls human‑obsessed CRO. He has a very strong diagnostic framework. I don’t want to get into it too much because I want to hear it from him. I’ve got my notepad open here because I feel blessed — life‑long learning is my mantra — and I’m dying to learn more about his contrarian approach and what we can both learn together. So, hi Anthony, welcome to the show.

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

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, this is wild. CRO is something any marketer knows makes sense, but I really want to hear a bit about your bold claim that CRO is broken. We’ve all seen the “top 10 Shopify hacks” content — I’ve even produced some of it — trying to figure out how to improve conversion rate. You’re saying that mimicking other brands is actually a trap. Can you talk about what you’ve learned and how you’re positioning your company and methodology?

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, for sure. So quick high level: at Enavi, our approach to CRO is what we call human‑obsessed CRO. What that really means is, when it comes to improving your onsite performance — and your performance in general — getting into the mind of the customer is crucial.

Anthony Morgan:
We want to understand why customers buy, why they don’t buy, and then leverage that to improve your onsite experience and carry those learnings into other marketing channels. They shouldn’t be siloed to your website; they should extend well beyond it. In many cases, those learnings can be disruptive in a good way. They can change the trajectory of the business, how you think about who your customer is, and how you position your product. There’s so much you can do with that insight, and that’s core to our approach.

Anthony Morgan:
To get there, you need research. To really learn about your customer, you need research to back your knowledge. You can’t base it on assumptions, gut feeling, or even your own experience if you were once the customer yourself.

Anthony Morgan:
Let’s say you’re the founder and you built the product for yourself. As you scale and grow, you usually get further and further away from who your core customer actually is, even if you originally built the product to solve your own problem. That’s the core thing we believe. That’s where the “80% of the effort comes before you launch a test” idea comes from. That’s the research. We believe research needs to drive how you think about improving performance, especially when it comes to CRO and onsite optimization.

Steve Hutt:
What’s interesting is that a lot of tools in the market talk about what your conversion rate actually is. 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. You feel that single number is very misleading. Can you talk a little more about that? I want to unpack it, because a lot of people say, “Oh, what’s your conversion rate?”

Anthony Morgan:
“What’s your conversion rate?”

Steve Hutt:
“Oh, I’m at 1.8. If I was at 1.9 or 2.0, that would equal X in additional revenue for me. What should I do to improve it?” But that’s not always the right way of thinking about it.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, exactly. I think there are two big things when we talk about conversion rate as a vanity metric.

Anthony Morgan:
The first is that, like with any data point, a single metric on its own is kind of useless if you don’t have the context of other metrics to inform what you’re looking at. I could look at a brand’s top‑line revenue and say, “Wow, you did 150 million.” But if I have no context for their bottom line, they could be negative 20 million in profit. The top line looks nice and pretty because it’s nine figures, but only in context with other data points can you understand the full picture.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s the first thing: conversion rate on its own is really useless. It doesn’t tell you anything by itself.

Anthony Morgan:
The second thing is that conversion rate is, I’d say, 95% of the time affected mostly by variables beyond the actual onsite experience and the changes you make there. If you turned up your paid social ad spend today and then looked at your conversion rate over the next week, you’d likely see it plummet, especially if those campaigns are prospecting to colder audiences. The intent of the user shifts, and as a result, your conversion rate shifts.

Steve Hutt:
I see.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s a variable that massively affects conversion rate. So often it’s influenced more by things you can’t control directly and that are outside the onsite experience.

Steve Hutt:
Interesting. I’ve also heard — through the grapevine and from others I’ve interviewed recently — that many marketers don’t feel confident in their data. They see Shopify showing one thing, Meta or Google showing something else, GA showing something different, plus third‑party pixel tools. There can be 20–30% disparity between systems.

Steve Hutt:
What’s your mindset around what’s going on there? Where is the true source of truth? I want to understand how you think about CRO while still feeling the data you’re looking at is accurate enough to be a source of truth.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, I think if you could solve that for the eCommerce industry, you’d be a billionaire. The reality is it’s never going to be perfectly solved, and it’s probably only going to get more complicated and harder to have perfectly accurate data.

Anthony Morgan:
Privacy changes and everything that comes with them have had a massive effect on the quality and clarity of data we see. So what we do at Enavi is use particular platforms for specific types of data.

Anthony Morgan:
For example, if I’m looking at order data — let’s say I want to understand which products are commonly paired together in orders — the best place for that is going to be Shopify. It gives a really clear picture, and frankly, I could use Sidekick and write a good prompt and get a great report.

Anthony Morgan:
But if I want to look at our intra‑site funnel approach and how users navigate through the site, Shopify is very limited. It doesn’t get granular enough to really understand performance. One example is Shopify’s purchase journey report. It doesn’t even show users who view an item and get to a product page; it skips directly to add to cart.

Anthony Morgan:
So you have this giant gap around product discovery. You don’t know, for users landing on your homepage, how many are actually viewing a product. For users landing on a collection page, how many are going on to view a product? There’s a big blind spot there. If you’re just looking at Shopify for onsite performance, you’re missing that whole piece.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah.

Anthony Morgan:
You just can’t go as granular as you can with a tool like GA4. So it really depends on what you’re trying to uncover as to what should be your source of truth.

Steve Hutt:
I see. I know a lot of people use something like Triple Whale, sometimes for the paid ad side, or tools like Northbeam, Hyros, ThoughtMetric — there are a few out there. These are fairly deep, multi‑touch attribution tools.

Steve Hutt:
And the reality now is customers are not coming in on your homepage anymore, so stop thinking that’s what they’re doing. They’re all over the map. They’re coming in mid‑funnel, which I think is interesting and maybe a good segue into your core framework.

Steve Hutt:
You have this concept called “metric on fire,” and the whole idea of an intra‑site funnel. I want to make sure we get that out into the wild and educate people, because I agree with you: CRO in isolation is a vanity metric. It doesn’t make sense; you don’t see the big picture. So let’s talk about how you’re educating people and executing with this intra‑site funnel concept.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, it honestly goes back to that first question you asked about conversion rate being a vanity metric. When we think about onsite performance and conversion rate, we like to view it through the lens of what we call the intra‑site funnel.

Anthony Morgan:
Ultimately, the intra‑site funnel takes the key steps or metrics that lead to a purchase and breaks them into isolated stages so we can see how users move from point A to point B.

Anthony Morgan:
The first step is landing to product view. For each metric we have a target baseline based on our internal dataset — we’ve set target ranges for each step. For landing to product view, the target baseline is 50–70%. That means 50% of your users who land on your site should be viewing a product. Fifty percent of the users who land on your homepage should view a product.

Anthony Morgan:
Then we go further down the intra‑site funnel: product view to add to cart, add to cart to checkout, and checkout to purchase. There are target baselines for each of those as well. That’s the “global” intra‑site funnel. We then take it a step further by segmenting it, which I’m happy to go into, but I’ll pause there, Steve, in case there’s anything you want to talk through first.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, that’s a really good idea. So it’s landing page to product page view. That’s the initial friction point. Typically, like I said, people aren’t going to the homepage, reading the messaging, and then browsing. They’re dropping straight onto a product page a lot of the time. That’s usually step number one in your core steps.

Steve Hutt:
Then, from there, is it product page view to add to cart? Is that typically the next step?

Anthony Morgan:
Yep. So we’ve got landing to product view.

Steve Hutt:
Okay.

Anthony Morgan:
Then product view to add to cart. That’s the percentage of users who land on a product page and then add to cart.

Steve Hutt:
I see. So now I can see where you’re going with this. Instead of saying, “My conversion rate is 2.5%,” you can say, “Okay, my conversion rate is 2.5, but my add‑to‑cart rate is 6%,” and you can start monitoring these individual metrics. That makes a lot of sense.

Anthony Morgan:
Exactly. It gives you clarity and focus. You can prioritize your efforts. If you just 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 improve it.

Anthony Morgan:
The first step is isolating these metrics so you can see, “Okay, users are getting to product pages just fine, but they aren’t adding to cart at the ideal rate.” In our benchmark, we want product view to add to cart at 12–18%. So we want at least 12% of users who view a product to add to cart.

Steve Hutt:
I see. So people are finding the product but deciding not to add to cart. There could be a lot of objections or reasons that happens — price, product information gaps, trust issues, a million different things. Because you’re isolating that particular metric, that’s where the human brainpower of your company goes, right?

Steve Hutt:
If that’s the target and here’s where we are from an add‑to‑cart standpoint, then you can start building a list of things to improve and test to see if they move the needle.

Anthony Morgan:
Exactly. When it comes to improving conversion on any metric — say we want to improve add‑to‑cart rate — we know that if more users add to cart, there’s a positive downstream impact: more users check out and more users purchase.

Anthony Morgan:
When we think about improving conversion, there are really two levers: increasing motivation and decreasing friction. Anything we do on the onsite experience to improve conversions is going to pull one of those levers — either increasing motivation or reducing friction.

Steve Hutt:
I see. So we have landing page to product view, then product page view to add to cart. Once that step is handled, the next step is: did they check out or not? Has checkout been initiated? Is that right for the third stage?

Anthony Morgan:
Exactly. The third step is add to cart to checkout.

Steve Hutt:
Okay.

Anthony Morgan:
Our target baseline for that is that we want 40% of users who add to cart to initiate checkout.

Steve Hutt:
I see. And we’re dealing with similar objections again — something may have stopped them from initiating or completing checkout, which is a form of cart abandonment.

Steve Hutt:
We see a lot of the same issues: surprise costs, especially in Canada with duty and tax suddenly appearing in the cart; forcing account creation; complexity at checkout. There’s a whole list of things that might be happening. You want to help remove friction and motivate someone to initiate and complete their checkout.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, exactly. What we often see brands do is, when they see high cart abandonment, they say, “We need to improve our abandonment flows and emails. We need to improve checkout. We need to improve the cart. Maybe we need to send more emails, more frequently.”

Anthony Morgan:
Can that have an impact? Sure. Is it going to make a significant impact? Usually not. What we really need to understand is: why is the customer experiencing friction here? Why are they lacking motivation? Most of the time, if they’re abandoning cart, there’s some type of friction. It can be motivation‑related too, but understanding the root cause is what we’re after.

Anthony Morgan:
You can throw a bunch of ideas at the wall, and maybe something sticks, but you won’t actually understand what made the difference. You won’t know what friction you truly reduced. If you instead go and conduct research to understand what’s behind the abandonment — and there are several things you can do — you can get to that root cause.

Anthony Morgan:
The first thing I’d recommend is qualitative voice‑of‑customer research. That could be one of three things I’ll mention — some are easier than others. The easiest is review mining. Most brands have a lot of review data, so you can go in and understand what customers highlight: what really motivated them, what made them excited about the product, or what themes keep coming up that you’re not talking about enough on the site.

Anthony Morgan:
The second thing is customer support ticket logs. What questions are they asking? Those are friction points. Can we better address those on the site, on the product page, maybe even in the cart?

Anthony Morgan:
The third thing would be post‑purchase surveys, where you ask targeted questions to customers who bought. You could simply ask, “What almost stopped you from buying today?” Or you could add a survey in your abandonment flow for a period of time to learn why users aren’t completing that next step — initiating checkout and purchasing.

Steve Hutt:
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I guess the final step is: checkout has been initiated. At this point, if they complete it, that’s a successful conversion. Someone starts typing in their credit card information and billing address, and somewhere in that flow they might drop off.

Steve Hutt:
I think Shop Pay has helped a lot by reducing friction there. But that’s the fourth step, right?

Anthony Morgan:
Yep. The fourth step is checkout to purchase. We shoot for a minimum of 45% of users who initiate checkout to complete the purchase.

Anthony Morgan:
There’s one thing I want to talk about around checkout abandonment. What we often see is brands default to testing checkout first when they start A/B testing. They default to running tests on checkout — adding checkout blocks, tweaking layouts, all kinds of random ideas.

Anthony Morgan:
The thinking is, “We’re closer to the dollar, closer to the purchase, so if we test here, we’re more likely to have an impact.” They also see, “Wow, 55% of users are abandoning checkout. That’s a massive number; we need to fix it.”

Anthony Morgan:
Honestly, the juice often isn’t worth the squeeze on checkout. If you address issues further up the funnel, you can have a much bigger impact. You can address the problems preemptively, before users even get to checkout.

Anthony Morgan:
The brands that struggle with checkout and don’t hit that 45% baseline — most brands do hit it — are usually the ones with unexpected shipping costs, unclear delivery times, or a big international cohort getting surprise duties and taxes at checkout. Those are the brands that truly struggle with checkout to purchase.

Anthony Morgan:
For the average Shopify brand, we typically don’t see a big struggle at checkout. That’s usually an area you can mostly ignore and focus elsewhere when we evaluate their intra‑site funnel.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, it’s amazing. I was chatting recently with a 3PL, and one of the comments they made was about the massive increase in international revenue they’ve seen — going into Canada, the UK, Australia. Canada was up something like 300% for a lot of American brands.

Steve Hutt:
Part of that is CRO‑related things like using Shopify Markets, or platforms like Global‑e with merchant‑of‑record models, and proper duty and tax in the cart. That takes out a friction point, especially for Canadians — I’m Canadian myself. That’s the first thing we look for.

Steve Hutt:
I agree with you on the familiarity of Shopify’s checkout and the logged‑in Shop Pay experience. That’s really important. But showing duty and tax in the cart is key, and clearly communicating delivery time so the customer feels confident. If you’re shipping by DHL or FedEx Express and you give them solid delivery options and an SLA, they feel warm and fuzzy about the decision.

Steve Hutt:
You’re implementing tools already available in Shopify — not just for Plus merchants, but really for anyone using Markets — and removing that friction.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, totally. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to buy something on a brand’s site, got to checkout really wanting the item that week, and thought, “I have no idea when I’m going to get this.”

Anthony Morgan:
I know I could dig through their FAQs to see if they talk about delivery time, but my default is, “Let me go check if this brand is on Amazon,” because if they’re Prime I know I’m getting it in two days or less.

Anthony Morgan:
If you’re a brand selling both on Amazon and your DTC site, you’re competing against that. There’s huge value in communicating delivery times clearly, and not just clearly but in a somewhat competitive way. Does it have to be two‑day or same‑day? No. But something competitive, for sure.

Steve Hutt:
Just to add to that, since we’re on shipping — Shopify just announced their connection with Uber and Uber Direct. If you run a retail location on Shopify and want to expose a one‑ or two‑hour delivery option through Uber Direct, you can now have that as a shipping option.

Steve Hutt:
Your inventory is synced with Shopify at the local location, and if the customer is within the local delivery radius, all the backend tech is dialed in. So if I’m in Langley, British Columbia, and there’s a retail store I want to shop at, I can select Uber Direct. It’s so neat: they pick up in your store and bring it straight to your customer.

Anthony Morgan:
Right.

Steve Hutt:
It’s pretty wild.

Anthony Morgan:
That definitely reduces friction.

Steve Hutt:
For sure. So my next question is more around case studies. I love being “warm and fuzzy” about what other people are seeing. I went to your website; you have quite a few case studies.

Steve Hutt:
Is there any one of note you want to talk about? Something like, “Here’s what life was like before working with you and your team, here’s what we implemented — maybe following your four‑step framework — and here’s what great looked like on the other side?”

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, I think a good example is Grubbly Farms. Before working with Enavi, they had worked with at least one CRO agency, so they understood the value of A/B testing and validating impact. They’re very data‑driven.

Anthony Morgan:
They’d just gone through some big shifts on the paid social side — they needed to switch partners and bring in someone to level up their onsite experience. That’s when we came in. They had a lot of traffic that wasn’t making it to product pages, so we focused on product discovery first.

Anthony Morgan:
We invested a lot of effort into improving how users navigate through their homepage, their navigation, and their collection pages. Even blogs — and blog traffic can be hard to convert into product views because of varying intent — but there are still things you can do to move more of those users into a shopping experience.

Anthony Morgan:
That was our first area of focus. We spent the first 90 days or so on product discovery. As the program evolved, we got their baseline intra‑site funnel performance above target ranges across the board. There were maybe some underlying segments still underperforming.

Anthony Morgan:
One thing we haven’t touched on yet is how we really like to segment the intra‑site funnel to get further context. We might see landing to product view underperforming globally, but if we segment, we can understand why and what’s causing it.

Anthony Morgan:
Some of the segments we look at are device type — mobile vs. desktop; landing page type — homepage, collection, product page, blog; user type — new vs. returning; and channel or source/medium. Email traffic is going to behave very differently from organic search traffic or paid social.

Anthony Morgan:
Understanding that context can inform where the opportunities are and where to focus effort. Globally you might look fine, but a specific segment could be dragging you down.

Anthony Morgan:
With Grubbly, we focused on underperforming segments and continued to improve. Eventually, we were over a year into the relationship. This is a brand where 60‑plus percent of revenue comes from recurring orders.

Anthony Morgan:
We started focusing on subscriptions — improving first‑time subscriber acquisition, the rate at which users opt into subscriptions. There was a massive improvement. When we started, their subscription take rate was around 15%. Now it’s close to 45%.

Steve Hutt:
Wow.

Anthony Morgan:
Massive improvement, and with very little negative impact on churn — churn has pretty much stayed the same. We then shifted efforts further down that journey, focusing on churn and opportunities there: increasing subscriber LTV, keeping subscribers longer, getting them to upsell into bigger subscriptions.

Anthony Morgan:
Now we’re focusing more narrowly on new customer acquisition and helping them scale. They’ve scaled pretty significantly over the last two years with us, and now we want to push that further. That means targeting audiences that are further from their core customer as they scale, and figuring out how to speak to those personas well.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s where we’re building landing pages that do a good job of marrying the pre‑click with the post‑click experience. That was a lot, but that’s the journey we’ve had with that customer, and you can see how CRO evolves over time. We’re not only looking at conversion rate; we’ve covered a lot of ground.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, 100%. You’re almost like a business partner. You’re looking holistically at the business and all the levers, but drilling down with this intra‑site funnel concept, which completely makes sense.

Steve Hutt:
I’ve been at Shopify a long time and I understand add‑to‑cart rate and some of these metrics, but I never really took the intentional time — or encouraged my merchants — to think about things this granularly.

Steve Hutt:
You can’t see the forest for the trees. Marketers tend to look at a lot of vanity metrics that get rolled up to the C‑suite, the director of eCommerce, or the founder. They push on those, but I think marketers listening today can get some really good takeaways from what we’ve discussed so far.

Steve Hutt:
I really appreciate what you’re sharing and what you’re doing. It’s no surprise there’s been a lot of success with the businesses you work with. I’ll put this case study in the show notes, and there are many more I can see where people have been wildly successful executing your framework.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, we’ve actually been terrible at creating case studies.

Steve Hutt:
I know, but you’ve got a few good ones.

Anthony Morgan:
We have a few on the site, and honestly it’s an area we need to level up. We have a lot of incredible clients with incredible results. We’re big on long‑term relationships, and Grubbly Farms is an example of a brand we’re about to hit two years with.

Anthony Morgan:
Not many agencies reach that kind of length, especially CRO agencies. CRO agencies are often seen as, “Hey, three to six months, wave your magic wand, and boom, my conversion rate doubles,” which isn’t how it works. So it’s cool to have that type of multi‑year relationship, and Grubbly is just one of many.

Steve Hutt:
That’s amazing. So what about BFCM? There’s been a lot of hype around it. We’re recording after BFCM, there’s still holiday traffic, and a lot of people are planning their Q1 initiatives and how to maintain momentum.

Steve Hutt:
Is there anything you noticed from the brands you work with — anything about the 2024 or 2025 Q4 customer that felt uniquely different? I’m always wondering if there’s a shift in customer expectations: how they want to do business with brands, how they want to interact with websites, customer support, multi‑channel, and so on.

Steve Hutt:
I’d love to get your headspace on what you saw in Q4 and how we can apply that to Q1.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’d say the customer hasn’t changed that much over the years, but market saturation has. There’s more competition, and the cost to get a user to your site has gone up.

Anthony Morgan:
When we think about performance during Black Friday–Cyber Monday, it’s really important for your website experience to be different from your evergreen experience — especially during BFCM, but also during other promotional periods.

Anthony Morgan:
Users are often coming in driven by some type of promotion, especially if you’re running one. Your experience needs to be crystal clear about what that promotion is. You need to easily and effectively navigate users to the products you’re promoting.

Anthony Morgan:
If you have a larger catalog, you want to show them a lot of products, because seeing more products generally leads to higher average order value. Product discovery is a massive component of that. So one of the key things we stress is that your BFCM website should look and behave differently than your site the rest of the year.

Anthony Morgan:
Even on Giving Tuesday, the day after Cyber Monday, if you’re not carrying on promotions, there should be a shift. I’m not talking about a massive rebrand where the customer says, “Who is this?” but things like navigation tweaks, added nav links that drive users to specific promotions, and helping them think through holiday gifting.

Anthony Morgan:
Your homepage during that period might be more sales‑focused than brand‑focused. It’s hard to take that whole structure and apply it directly to Q1 because the mindset is different, but for BFCM specifically, don’t be afraid to have an experience that’s different from how you run the rest of the year. I’m not sure how well that answers your question, Steve.

Steve Hutt:
No, it does 100%. It makes me think about how a lot of brands still believe the expected flow is: I go to a landing page, I add to cart, I buy. We know that flow.

Steve Hutt:
But the reality is, someone might click an ad to a product page, then go to Google and search for reviews, then go to Amazon for a price check, then to Instagram to see tagged photos. This may sound crazy, but I suspect a lot of people are doing exactly that, then returning to the site to buy.

Steve Hutt:
Customers are “tab switchers” now. They’re looking for external validation. I guess part of your job as a CRO agency, especially with your intra‑site funnel, is saying, “We don’t want people tab‑switching because we haven’t answered their questions.” How do we create more trust, more UGC, clearer shipping times, guarantees — all the things we’ve talked about — so they don’t feel the need to leave?

Steve Hutt:
Given that they are going out for external validation, what do you say to that?

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, that’s reason number one why conversion rate optimization is so important. For a large percentage of your business — and the smaller you are, the larger that percentage usually is — you’re relying on direct response performance marketing. You’re trying to drive an action and get that conversion, and for many brands, especially DTC, you’re trying to get that purchase on the first visit.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s where CRO is so valuable: answering the questions that users would otherwise go search for elsewhere, or compare on a competitor site. If you can answer those questions effectively and clearly — typically on the product page or a custom landing page, depending on how your traffic flows — you’ll have far more efficient paid social performance.

Anthony Morgan:
All the shifts we’ve seen in the ecosystem — more competition, more options, the ability to buy your product both on your DTC site and on Amazon — make it even more important that your site communicates what the customer needs to hear.

Anthony Morgan:
When a customer lands on your site, the ideal reaction is, “Where has this product been? I’ve needed this.” If they’re saying that, you’re winning. They don’t feel the need to go elsewhere for validation.

Anthony Morgan:
Some customers will always go to Reddit or Amazon because that’s just how they shop. But even then, it doesn’t devalue CRO. If your site already does a great job speaking directly to your core customer, then them going to Reddit is just a natural shopping behavior. They can come back to your site and still have a full understanding of the product the way they need it.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s what I’d say: it’s incredibly valuable to have a well‑done site that speaks directly to your core customer.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I think people really need to internalize that. One of the things I’ve been teaching for a while is that it’s not always a price objection. A lot of founders panic and think, “My conversion rate isn’t great because I’m not competitive in the marketplace.” That’s not always true.

Anthony Morgan:
No.

Steve Hutt:
Before you start discounting, I think you hit the nail on the head with the idea of an information gap. Does this thing actually fit? Does it work for my use case? Does it ship for free? People may just not know. They might be confused or feel there’s some risk — that it’s not going to work for them.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, that whole price objection thing you brought up is so important. We see brands default to, “We need to lower price or discount more,” when they see price come up in feedback.

Anthony Morgan:
We see this a lot when we run surveys and ask, “What almost stopped you from buying today?” or similar questions to understand friction. Price will often rise to the top, even when the product is actually low‑priced or at the bottom of the market.

Anthony Morgan:
That doesn’t mean you need to discount more or lower the price. It’s just the default response humans give. That’s why we like to tweak the question. Instead of “What almost stopped you from buying today?”, we’ll ask, “Besides price, what almost stopped you from buying today?”

Anthony Morgan:
By adding “besides price,” you force them not to default to price. Otherwise, you’ll get a bunch of responses saying price is the main objection, and it’s usually not true. There’s something else underlying that. If you can uncover it, there’s huge value for your onsite experience and all your other marketing.

Anthony Morgan:
You can speak to that objection in your retargeting, in your new customer acquisition ads, and in your email marketing. There’s a lot of value you can squeeze out of that learning if you do the work to uncover it.

Steve Hutt:
Right. Okay, I have one final question, sort of. CRO is important, and I understand how you break it down now with your intra‑site funnel. I’ve got my notes to prove it, and I’m going to put this in my book that I’m writing right now because I think it’s important. I’ll make sure you’re referenced, because this is a really important framework.

Steve Hutt:
But there’s still going to be a large percentage of people — let’s be realistic — who leave without opting into any kind of communication.

Steve Hutt:
What’s your view on tools like retention.com, OpenSend, Customers.ai — tools that, at least for American consumers, can “unhash” the website visitor and reveal their email address? Then you can send a message like, “Hey, thanks for visiting.”

Steve Hutt:
Technically they haven’t legally opted in, but in the U.S. it’s more of an opt‑out model. As long as you have a legal opt‑out, you can email anyone. What’s your mindset around these visitors who leave, but you have a tool running that gives you the email address and their full onsite journey — add to cart, checkout, where they dropped off — and you know who they are?

Steve Hutt:
They haven’t given you explicit permission, but they’re in America, so the thinking is: “We should say thanks for visiting and share our brand story.” Some people are totally all‑in on this and wildly successful; others say, “No way, I would never do that.” Where do you land?

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, I’d say this: if I think about my agency, we have Retention’s B2B side connected to our site, so we can see LinkedIn profiles for somewhere between 10–20% of people who visit.

Anthony Morgan:
We don’t immediately go message them on LinkedIn, but we might connect with them if we’re not already connected, or add them as a target account or someone to reach out to in the future. So I can’t say I’m fully against the approach, because we kind of do a version of it ourselves.

Anthony Morgan:
That said, I think it has to be done tastefully for eCommerce. I actually don’t shop that much on websites myself, so I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly gotten an email from a brand I didn’t subscribe to. I don’t fully know what that feels like as a consumer.

Anthony Morgan:
I have gotten stuff as an agency owner where I thought, “I didn’t subscribe to this,” and it definitely feels weird. So you have to think about that and be tasteful with it. Ask, “If I’m the one receiving this, how can I do it in a way that leads with value?”

Anthony Morgan:
That sounds like such a B2B line, but I think you can do it in B2C and DTC without it feeling off. The average consumer doesn’t know how you got their email. They might not even think about it. Some might just say, “Oh, I guess I subscribed to this,” and not realize they didn’t. Others will mark it as spam and move on.

Anthony Morgan:
So I’d just say: be tasteful.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I totally get that. I think there’s a difference between a normal opt‑in — “Thanks for signing up, welcome” — and this other type of message. There has to be a tasteful way of doing it, maybe more like, “Thanks for visiting,” because clearly they were on the site.

Steve Hutt:
Maybe they didn’t know you had a newsletter or a first‑time buyer bonus. Maybe your exit‑intent pop‑up didn’t fire. The value for some brands is: “Hey, you clearly had some desire to buy these shoes. We now know who you are. Thanks for visiting. Here’s our brand story. Feel free to opt out if you don’t want more messages.”

Steve Hutt:
That’s the email side. But you can also use those email addresses for paid social, retargeting, even direct mail if you append postal addresses — sending a catalog or postcard.

Steve Hutt:
I know for a fact brands are doing this. Even my wife recently said, “I visited this website and now I’m getting emails. That’s interesting.” Even a major VPN I won’t name is doing it. We went to their website and then emails started coming. It’s clear they’re using this kind of technology.

Anthony Morgan:
Right.

Steve Hutt:
And it works.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, there’s a reason it exists and a reason brands use it — because it does work.

Anthony Morgan:
I think, like anything in marketing, you just have to be tasteful and thoughtful.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah.

Anthony Morgan:
Don’t do something you’d cringe at as a consumer, especially if you want to represent your brand well.

Steve Hutt:
100%. So what do you think some of the next steps are? We’re nearing the end of the show, but I feel there have been a ton of learnings.

Steve Hutt:
There are lots of different people listening — some early‑stage folks who can take DIY steps with what they’ve learned today about the intra‑site funnel and the four areas that need to be tracked, and then be strategic about how they implement that.

Steve Hutt:
For mid‑market to enterprise brands, what do you think next steps look like? How should they interact with you?

Anthony Morgan:
A great next step would be to follow me on LinkedIn. I’m usually pretty active there and I like to write content that’s actionable and applicable.

Anthony Morgan:
Another good step — which I can share with you, Steve — is our CRO Upgrade Kit. It’s a page with a series of resources you can use to level up how you approach your onsite experience.

Anthony Morgan:
Inside that kit, we have a one‑click Looker report that pulls up your intra‑site funnel using your GA4 data. When you click through the link, you’ll land on a page with the Looker report link. You click that, select your GA4 property, and it will populate with your intra‑site funnel data. You’ll see how you’re performing across the four metrics, and it even breaks things down by the segments we talked about.

Anthony Morgan:
That’s probably the best next step if you’re not familiar with the intra‑site funnel or haven’t used that report before. Go do that, and we’ll include it right there in the CRO Upgrade Kit.

Steve Hutt:
Lovely. Okay, I’ll have that in the show notes — the case study, the link to the kit, everything will be there. I appreciate that. It’s very cool to be able to sync everything through Looker and GA and get a good snapshot of where you’re at.

Steve Hutt:
From there, the business conversation can start: where are you today, what are you happy with in‑house, where can Enavi take over some responsibilities, can we run a three‑month test and see what happens. I think that’s really cool.

Steve Hutt:
Thank you again, Anthony, for coming on the show. Like I said, I have two pages of notes. I wish I had my camera on to prove it, but I’ve written a ton. You’re going to be in my book, by the way — “Thriving with Shopify.” You’ll be in the CRO section for sure, flagged as the inventor of this intra‑site funnel concept.

Steve Hutt:
So thanks again for recording today, and have yourself a lovely afternoon.

Anthony Morgan:
Yeah, thanks, Steve.

Steve Hutt:
All right, have a good one.

Steve Hutt:
Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. It’s my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms — all with my personal goal to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify.

Steve Hutt:
Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey.

Steve Hutt:
Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.