Stop Blaming Your Button Colour: What CRO Is Really About
In our first episode of Open Tabs, Tim from The Bottle Club said something that cuts through years of digital noise:
“The position of the button and the colour of the button are going to have an impact. But…if you’re the wrong price…in the wrong position…and your merchandising rule doesn’t work, then you’re not promoting the products that you need. [Optimising those areas is] more business impactful than shifting a button.”
He’s right. This is the kind of truth that tends to get drowned out by “growth hacks” and design A/B tests. Somewhere along the line, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) has become shorthand for fiddling around on the surface.
Change the colour. Move the CTA. Round the corners. As if user experience was a game of pixel Tetris. The problem isn’t that those things never matter. It’s that they are rarely the thing that matters. 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.
CRO as a symptom, not a solution
There’s a reason CRO consultants often end up acting like therapists for businesses. What most brands call an “optimisation problem” is usually a clarity problem. Tim put it bluntly in our chat:
“There are so many things you need to optimise before CRO becomes a problem.”
Most brands don’t really have a conversion problem. They have a positioning problem, or a merchandising problem, or a pricing problem that is quietly showing up as a UX tweak. The data might tell you users are dropping off on your product page. But it’s rarely because they dislike your CTA colour. It’s more likely they don’t understand your offer, don’t trust your promise, or can’t see the value. You can’t optimise a product into relevance.
The hard part: looking at the whole system
Real CRO work starts long before a designer opens Figma. It sits in the decisions about how products are grouped, how your language explains value, and how your backend data supports what customers see on the front end. This is where a lot of ecommerce brands stumble, because those decisions aren’t glamorous. They live in spreadsheets, not in flashy mockups.
Data is essential, but it is also keeps you zoomed in when you should be zooming out. CRO is a systems problem that often gets treated as a design problem. You can’t fix it in isolation.
The takeaway
If you’re serious about improving conversion, stop tweaking pixels first and start fixing the fundamentals.
Make sure your product taxonomy makes sense. Check your content hierarchy. Make sure the promise on your homepage is actually delivered all the way through to the checkout. CRO isn’t about your button colour. It’s about everything that happens before someone is ready to click it.
This article is part of our Open Tabs series, where we talk to founders about the realities of running an ecommerce business day to day. Watch the full episode with Tim from The Bottle Club here.
