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.

As of 29th August 2025, the US has suspended its de minimis exemption, which previously allowed parcels under $800 to enter duty-free.

For UK brands selling into the US, this is more than a minor policy change. As duties and related clearance costs now apply to lower-value items, they are already seeing the direct effect on margins, operations, and customer experience.

There’s a certain kind of pain you only feel when you’ve outgrown your ecommerce setup.

Not a dramatic failure. Not a checkout disaster. Just a creeping frustration that builds up day by day. Clunky processes, outdated systems, and workarounds that rely more on habit than logic.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone! Which leads to the real question:

At what point is it painful enough to move systems, and when does it become too painful not to?

When you make a change to your ecommerce setup whether it’s a UX update, an app integration, a new product bundle layout or a whole new checkout flow the instinct is often to launch, move on, and hope the numbers follow.

But if you’re not measuring what happens before and after, how do you know whether the change had the intended outcome?

I’ve been tying my shoelaces wrong for 40 years.
Not in a metaphorical, life-lesson kind of way—literally. A quick comment from my partner as we got ready for a walk turned into a humbling realisation: I’d been looping the wrong way for decades. It wasn’t just inefficient—it was contagious. I’d even passed the method down to our kids.

It got me thinking: how many other small, everyday habits do we just accept because we don’t know there’s a better way? And more importantly—how often does that happen in business too?