After Taylor Swift wore one of their dresses, Little Lies went through exponential growth almost overnight. From the outside, it looked like every founder's dream. From the inside? Little Lies founder, Jade Robertson, was drowning.

If you do a quick competitor sweep in your category, you’ll probably see the same patterns repeating. Same layouts. Same offers. Same “trust” blocks stacked on top of each other.

When conversion rates dip, it’s very tempting to go straight into fixing mode - change the product page, run an A/B test, make a plan. But CRO without diagnosis is just guesswork and it happens a lot. Brands start optimising too late, in the wrong place, or for the wrong reason.

The site you launch today is a snapshot of your business right now: your range, your pricing, your tech stack, your priorities. Six months later, any of those might have shifted. That’s just the nature of ecommerce. The challenge is when the store gets treated like a static brochure. It can end up a bit fragile.

Conversion rate optimisation has become a bit of a catch-all label. Anything even slightly “website-y” tends to get thrown in: copy changes, colour tweaks, UX fixes, exit pop ups, even which apps you install. But CRO isn’t a single tactic. It’s the result you see when everything else is aligned.

Somewhere along the line, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) has become shorthand for fiddling around on the surface.

A red button might outperform a blue one. But if your pricing is confusing, your delivery offer is buried, or your brand doesn’t feel credible, you’ll still lose the sale.

When people talk about UX, they usually mean the bit your customers see. The site. The checkout. The emails.

But there’s another side to UX that rarely gets mentioned: how it feels for your team to run everything day to day.

Operational UX - the layer that connects data, process and people. When it works, things feel calm and predictable. When it doesn’t, small frustrations build up and start to show up for customers too.

Expanding internationally sounds exciting: new markets, bigger audiences, fresh revenue streams.

But in reality, cross-border growth comes with difficult decisions that directly affect margins, operations, and customer experience.

One of the biggest is this: Do you manage international sales and duties inside Shopify Markets, or do you outsource fulfilment to a third-party logistics partner (3PL)?

Two dye lots look the same under warehouse lights.

They’re not.

A week later, returns pile up and you’re writing off stock.

Or a pallet of pet food sits at the back. Nobody’s sure on dates, so it gets left. By stocktake, it’s past safe sell and you’re binning it.

Batch tracking prevents those losses, once you’ve set up the basics: clear labels, simple rules, and a well-maintained record of product movement.

Most ecommerce set-ups start simple: an intuitive platform, a handful of tools and a system that keeps everything running smoothly. And it works for a while.

But then growth happens.

Orders ramp up, new product lines get added, and suddenly managing it all starts feeling complicated and overwhelming. Stock gets harder to track. Orders take longer to fulfil.

Then someone goes on holiday. They’re the only person on the team who knows exactly where everything is stored. Panic sets in.

That’s the tell.