Optimise Your Way To Next Stage Ecommerce Growth
One short optimisation tip every weekday, straight from the work I'm doing with ecommerce brands right now. Simple enough to act on today. No theory, no agency required.
Free, every weekday. A two-minute read. Join and get the Optimisation Audit straight away.
Big growth challenges, solved by ecommerce optimisation
You've built something that works. Now what?
You have the product, the customers and a team. Revenue is healthy. Getting to the next level feels harder than getting here did, and the easy answer on the table is more budget: more ads, a bigger retainer, another app. Acquisition costs keep rising, margins keep shrinking, and spend alone stops paying back.
The brands that break through work differently. They learn exactly what persuades their customers to buy, then make small, data-backed improvements across every step of the journey, week after week.
I've done this hands-on for 28 years, and I still do it every week with the five brands I work with. I also speak with two or three founders every week about the challenges holding them back, and those conversations shape what I write. How To Optimise opens up that process, so you and your team can run it with confidence. And when you want someone alongside you, I coach founders and teams through it.
Ecommerce Optimisation In A Nutshell
Three small gains. £361k a year.
Take a store that turns over £1m a year: a million visitors (about 2,700 a day), converting at 2%, with a £50 average order. No discounting and no growth hacks. Just a steady process of learning what makes people buy.
+£125k
Conversion rate
2% to 2.25%. One extra buyer in every 400 visitors.
+£112k
Traffic
10% more of the right visitors, arriving at a store that now converts better.
+£124k
Average order value
£50 to £55, through bundles and upsells that suit a more confident customer.
+£361k
a year on a £1m store. More than a third more revenue from three modest gains. Then content and retention keep the gains compounding.
How it works
One tip. Every weekday.
Each morning you get one thing I've done or spotted in client work, kept short. What I found, why it matters, and the one thing to do about it today. If I haven't done it myself, I don't write about it.
01
The moment
What came up in this week's work.
02
The insight
What it tells you about how customers buy.
03
The action
One step you can take today, usually in under an hour.
Some days it's a change in a tool I use, like Google's new AI Brief. Same rule applies: what it means and what to do about it.
How it's done
Data. Technology. The human touch.
Next stage growth comes from getting full value out of what you already have, and adding a new tool only when it earns its place.
01
Data
Decisions made from your own numbers and your customers' own words. Know which customers are worth most, and why they buy.
02
Technology
Shopify, AI and the right tools, set up properly, connected, and kept optimised as you grow.
03
The human touch
The copy, offers and experience that build trust, so people stop hesitating and buy from you.
Free when you subscribe
The Optimisation Audit
Where is your next stage of growth hiding? Twenty-five questions, about seven minutes. See how well you're testing and improving your ads, content, product pages, order value and Klaviyo flows, and find where a small change will make your biggest gain.
Subscribe and get the auditExample result
- Traffic
- Content
- Conversion rate
- Average order value
- Retention
Biggest marginal gain: retention. Start there.
Latest daily briefs
Who's behind it
Ian Rhodes. 28 years of ecommerce optimisation.
I'm a practitioner. Since the late 1990s I've worked hands-on across conversion, search, email, ads and retention with more than 750 ecommerce brands, and built and sold one of my own.
Today I work with five established brands at a time as their fractional growth director, and coach founders and teams to run ecommerce optimisation in-house. Every tip in How To Optimise comes from that work.
My portfolio and credentials at EcommerceGrowth →750+
ecommerce brands worked alongside
28
years in ecommerce
1
ecommerce brand of my own, built and sold
Ready for the next stage?
Free, every weekday. One short tip from real ecommerce work, so you and your team can do what you already do, better.
Every tool in How To Optimise is there because it solves an optimisation problem. Where I have an affiliate relationship with one, I'll always say so.