Fame on Central Shopify CRO Case Study: Results After 3 Months

The Approach

Fame worked with us through Blend's Hybrid CRO model, with our team providing the strategic direction, prioritisation, high-fidelity UX/UI, A/B test setup and analysis needed to keep the programme focused on commercially meaningful opportunities.

The engagement began with CRO 30 during the first month.

From there, Fame chose to accelerate the programme, allowing us to move through the opportunities identified in the CRO audit at a much faster pace over the remainder of the period.

That change in pace was important.

Rather than treating the audit as a static list of recommendations, we used customer behaviour and commercial impact to decide what deserved attention first.

Our PECTI prioritisation helped sequence opportunities across discovery, product pages, cart and checkout according to the strength of the evidence, likely impact and effort involved.

Just as importantly, we chose the right method for each problem.

Where customer behaviour exposed clear usability friction, we could move decisively. Where an apparently sensible change still relied on an assumption about how Fame's customers would respond, we used A/B testing to validate it.

That distinction became one of the most useful parts of the programme.

Some changes performed strongly. Others challenged assumptions that looked reasonable on paper. The purpose of CRO was not to fill the store with ecommerce “best practice”. It was to identify what helped Fame's customers buy and remove what did not.

We also introduced Rebuy as an enabling platform for parts of the cart and checkout experimentation programme.

What The Data Revealed

The audit showed that the biggest commercial opportunity was not concentrated on a single page.

It was the relationship between several stages of the buying journey.

High-value discovery behaviour was being underused. Search customers were considerably more valuable than the site average, yet very few visitors were using search. Valuable category routes on the homepage were also appearing later than much of the audience was scrolling.

Mobile represented the biggest opportunity by volume. With 65% of visits coming from mobile and performance trailing desktop, small interaction improvements had the potential to affect a significant proportion of Fame's traffic.

The PDP was where a large amount of purchase intent was being lost. Customers were reaching product pages and engaging with product information, but too few progressed from consideration towards Add to Cart and checkout.

Friction existed before checkout as much as inside it. Improving the final checkout experience alone would not address the broader problem. Customers first needed a clearer route through discovery, evaluation and cart.

That led us to prioritise changes that could improve the commercial value of each session: help shoppers find relevant products faster, maintain momentum while comparing them and remove unnecessary effort as purchase intent increased.

Making High-Value Search Easier to Access on Mobile

One of the clearest opportunities came from a feature Fame already had.

Only 3.66% of users were using site search. Yet those shoppers converted 50% above the store average and added to cart 17.43% more often.

On mobile, that high-value functionality was hidden behind a search icon.

With mobile accounting for 65% of visits, our hypothesis was that making search permanently visible would shorten the route to relevant products and allow more customers to use a discovery behaviour already associated with stronger commercial intent.

We tested the original search-icon experience against a permanently exposed search field across mobile.

The exposed-search variant delivered:

• +31.30% Revenue per Visitor
• +19.62% Conversion Rate
• +10.50% Checkout Begin Rate
• +1.31% Product Page View Rate

The test reached approximately 97% statistical confidence after one week and the exposed search experience was rolled out permanently.

Revenue per Visitor is particularly useful here because it shows that the test did more than increase interaction with search. The visitors exposed to the new experience became more commercially valuable.

The wider learning was equally important.

Fame did not need more search functionality. The valuable functionality already existed. Making it easier to access was enough to change behaviour.

Turning Cart Intent Into More Valuable Sessions

Cart-to-checkout progression had been one of Fame's priorities from the beginning, making the cart another important place to look for unnecessary friction.

We tested two express-payment treatments.

One variant displayed payment icons, providing reassurance that alternative payment methods were available. The second introduced a functional Shop Pay button directly into the cart drawer.

The Shop Pay treatment was significantly stronger.

It delivered:

• +69.30% Revenue per Visitor
• +47.75% Conversion Rate
• +19.33% Checkout Begin Rate
• +14.59% Average Order Value

The result reached statistical significance, and the Shop Pay treatment was rolled out permanently.

The first variant was useful too, because it helped us understand the mechanism behind the stronger result. Payment icons increased Conversion Rate, Revenue per Visitor and AOV, but Checkout Begin Rate fell by 7%.

For Fame's customers, simply showing payment options was not as powerful as actually removing a step.

At a high-intent stage of the journey, utility outperformed passive reassurance.

That is an important distinction in CRO. Two treatments can be built around the same broad idea while producing very different customer behaviour. Testing allowed us to identify which version genuinely made the session more commercially productive.

Making It Easier to Continue Shopping From the PDP

The audit identified the PDP as the main point of journey leakage, but improving product-page performance was not only about changing the information shown around Add to Cart.

We also looked at what happened when customers wanted to continue browsing.

After opening a product from a collection or search journey, shoppers could lose the context of the results they had been exploring. Returning to compare alternatives introduced unnecessary backtracking and made it easier to lose momentum.

We tested a contextual Back to Results control designed to return shoppers to the relevant collection or search journey.

The variant produced:

• +33.60% Revenue per Visitor
• +37.16% Conversion Rate
• +6.92% Add to Cart Rate
• +15.78% Checkout Begin Rate
• +2.15% Collection Page View Rate

Average Order Value was 2.60% lower, but the strong increase in Revenue per Visitor showed that the overall commercial effect remained positive.

Mobile reached statistical significance independently. Desktop did not reach significance on its own, although performance moved in the same direction and the overall variant led.

The experience was rolled out permanently.

The test highlighted an often-overlooked part of ecommerce behaviour: shoppers do not always progress neatly from collection to PDP to cart.

Some need to move backwards before they can move forwards.

Reducing friction in that reverse journey helped customers continue considering products rather than forcing them to effectively restart their search.

Testing Social Proof at the Point of Highest Intent

As the programme moved further into checkout, we tested whether concise social proof could add confidence without distracting a customer who was already close to completing their order.

Using Rebuy, a customer review and star-rating treatment was introduced within Shopify checkout.

The variant recorded:

• +30.6% Revenue per Visitor
• +27.5% Conversion Rate
• +7.1% Average Order Value

The treatment was approved for permanent rollout.

The test involved 575 visitors, so we treated the outcome as a strong directional signal rather than assuming the same uplift would automatically persist at a much larger sample.

Strategically, the result supported a wider theme emerging through the programme.

Reassurance could work at a high-intent stage, but it needed to be relevant and restrained. The aim was not to put more content into checkout. It was to understand whether one carefully placed trust signal could increase confidence without introducing new friction.

Bringing Category Discovery Higher on the Homepage

Homepage behaviour highlighted another mismatch between useful functionality and visibility.

While 96% of visitors reached product recommendations, only 54% continued far enough down the page to reach the existing subcategory section.

The category routes were useful. Too many customers simply were not seeing them soon enough.

We tested a cleaner, text-based subcategory treatment positioned much earlier in the homepage experience.

On mobile, categories appeared above the hero. On desktop, they appeared directly below it.

The merchandising order also reflected Fame's commercial positioning. “New” was prioritised, while “Sale” appeared last, improving discovery without turning discounting into the main route through the catalogue.

The test recorded:

• +8.36% Revenue per Visitor
• +5.66% Conversion Rate
• +2.55% Average Order Value
• +1.00% Add to Cart Rate

The test reached 70% confidence and was called during the accelerated programme before our usual decision threshold. The updated experience was subsequently rolled out across desktop and mobile.

The outcome supported a useful design lesson for Fame.

Better discovery did not require more imagery, more promotional content or a busier homepage. In this case, making existing category routes easier to see was enough to improve commercial performance.

Strengthening Product Decision Support Without Adding Unnecessary Complexity

Because product pages represented the largest point of funnel leakage, we also prioritised a package of changes aimed at reducing evaluation effort.

The work included:

• product image thumbnails to make imagery easier to navigate;
• a featured customer review positioned closer to the purchase decision; and
• a sticky Add to Cart treatment to keep the primary action accessible as shoppers moved through longer product pages.

These changes addressed clear behaviour observed during the audit, so their strategic value was in strengthening the wider PDP experience rather than assigning a standalone uplift to each individual implementation.

The experimentation programme also helped us identify where adding more was not the answer.

One test introduced additional value propositions directly below Add to Cart.

The hypothesis seemed reasonable: if customers needed reassurance, giving them more reasons to buy at the decision point might improve progression.

Instead, the variant recorded:

• -4.35% Revenue per Visitor
• -3.57% Conversion Rate
• -2.42% Add to Cart Rate
• -5.95% Checkout Begin Rate

The treatment consistently trailed the original experience and was stopped.

That result was commercially useful.

It challenged the assumption that more reassurance is automatically better and suggested that adding content around Fame's primary CTA risked increasing decision load rather than reducing it.

The original experience was protected rather than allowing a plausible but weaker idea to become permanent.