Blend Commerce Wins Global CRO Agency of the Year 2026

Blend Commerce has been named Global CRO Agency of the Year 2026 at the Global Agency Awards, and we don’t mind admitting we’re going to take a moment to enjoy that.

Only a moment, mind.

But for a team that’s spent nearly a decade obsessing over customer behaviour, A/B testing, UX, revenue per visitor, average order value, repeat purchase and all the unsexy little details that make ecommerce conversion rate optimisation work, this one really does mean a lot to us.

It’s the first time Blend Commerce has won a global award, and being recognised as Global CRO Agency of the Year 2026 gives us something we’re very proud to say: Blend is now officially recognised as one of the best CRO agencies in the world.

We’re also comfortable saying the quiet bit a little less quietly: if you’re looking for literally the best Shopify CRO agency in the world, we believe Blend deserves to be in that conversation.

Of course we’re not saying awards are the whole story - far from it, and we’ve been clear on that before. But because this award reflects the things we care about most: delivering work that has a measurable impact on our clients’ business performance, and completing it to an exceptionally high level of quality.

Subscribe to the Shopify CRO newsletter

What Winning Global CRO Agency of the Year Means to Blend

For us, this award isn’t a finish line (don’t worry; we’re not going to say “We’re just getting started” 🤖). More like a high water mark.

We’ve always aimed high at Blend. That’s never meant trying to be the biggest agency, the loudest agency, or trying to be all things to all clients with a monster list of services. Actually we deliberately went the other way years ago now.

Blend Commerce is a specialist Shopify CRO agency with a focused team of 11 senior digital specialists. We have stayed intentionally small because we believe clients get better outcomes when the work stays in experienced hands.

That’s shaped almost everything about how we operate - and believe us, that is very clearly defined (we love a good SOP). Our clients don’t get passed from a senior strategist in sales to a junior delivery team after kickoff. Our CRO work is led by people who understand Shopify, ecommerce behaviour, analytics, UX, experimentation, development constraints and the commercial realities behind growth.

Winning Global CRO Agency of the Year 2026 is validation that our model works.

It also matters because Blend is genuinely international. We support Shopify brands across the US, UK, Europe and Australia, so global recognition is more than a fancy title. It’s real, incontrovertible proof for ecommerce teams looking for a top CRO agency that can work across markets, time zones and ecommerce niches.

The Judges Understood What We’re About

The judges’ feedback meant a lot because it recognised something very specific about Blend:

Blend Commerce demonstrates that genuine impact is a product of strategic clarity, not headcount. With a lean team, the agency has structured a compelling offer and delivered remarkable results for clients, with revenue metrics and turnover rates that would be impressive at any scale, let alone this one.

You have to love it when someone else holds up their portrait of you and it really is like looking in the mirror. This is bang on what we’re always striving for - maximum impact with maximum efficiency.

We’ve never believed that bigger automatically means better. In CRO, bigger can sometimes mean more handovers, slower decisions and less accountability.

Our model is built around exactly the thing the judges highlighted: strategic clarity. We look for the revenue constraint first, then we work backwards. It always starts with a CRO audit, and usually leads onto structured Shopify CRO implementation, but the form that takes will also vary according to the specific circumstances of the brand and its site.

The important thing is every recommendation connects to a commercial outcome.

Why We Think Blend Is One of the Best CRO Agencies in the World

We’re trying to say this without sounding like we’ve started wearing sunglasses indoors and shilling make-a-million-overnight courses on LinkedIn.

But if you win Global CRO Agency of the Year, have multiple award wins across the UK, Europe and global agency awards, and can point to the kind of CRO client results Blend has delivered, it’s sort of allowed on some level, no?

Look, we’ll say it plainly, because in a weird way it feels like we’re slightly removed talking about the team: we genuinely believe Blend Commerce is one of the best CRO agencies in the world because our work is built around measurable ecommerce growth, not posturing and vanity metrics.

Our framework is simple: help Shopify customers buy now, buy more and buy again. We call that the buy trifecta.

It means we’re not interested in conversion rate in isolation. A higher ecommerce conversion rate is not automatically a good result if it comes from discounting away margin, lowering AOV or attracting customers who never come back. Good CRO should improve the overall quality of growth; not just increases in one isolated metric.

That’s why our work looks across:

• Conversion rate
• Revenue per visitor
• Average order value
• Subscription adoption
• Repeat purchase behaviour
• Customer lifetime value
• Checkout progression
• Product discovery
• Customer confidence and trust

If you want the practical version of that thinking, our guide to key CRO metrics and how to calculate them explains how we think about performance beyond headline conversion rate. It also explains our focus on revenue per session as a north star metric.

The Work Behind the Award

Awards are only worthwhile if they’re won on the strength of your work. The entry that won us this award included results from multiple Shopify CRO programmes, including a +136% year-on-year revenue increase across five clients, a 79% client retention rate, and continued progress in how we use AI to accelerate research workflows without compromising quality.

We’re really proud of that last part. We use AI because it helps us move faster through research, analysis, synthesis and documentation. We don’t use it just to say we’re using it, and we certainly don’t use it as a substitute for strategy, judgement or customer understanding.

The goal is better CRO, implemented more efficiently: sharper analysis, stronger hypotheses, more useful recommendations and a clearer route from insight to implementation.

You can see examples of that approach in our public A/B test library, where we document real ecommerce experiments, including tests on PDP trust signals, mobile navigation, subscription pricing, search behaviour, urgency messaging and a ton of other CRO techniques both well-established and unique to Blend.

We recently did some internal analysis and found that our average A/B test win rate over the past 12 months across clients was 59%.

For context, large-scale analysis from Optimizely has previously found that the global average win rate on an experiment’s primary metric is far lower, with 40% considered representative of an excellent agency.

Successful experimentation isn’t about finding a guaranteed win every time - while A/B testing isn’t strictly a science, that’s where its roots are, and good science is about finding the truth; not just being proven right every time. But, a key difference between A/B testing and pure science is that what we do has commercial ramifications, so good decision-making is critical. And that’s what the win rate shows. Sometimes a losing test protects revenue by stopping a bad idea from being rolled out. Sometimes a flat test teaches you where not to spend development time. And sometimes a win is just a big juicy win that you can roll out everywhere.

The Results Are the Real Proof

The strongest evidence for Blend as a top CRO agency is not the award itself. It’s the client work that got us here.

For example, our case study on CRO for Stone Creek Coffee shows how structured CRO implementation improved conversion rate, revenue per visitor and subscription performance in just three months.

Our Aeromotive long-term CRO case study shows what happens when Shopify migration work is followed by ongoing CRO rather than treated as a one-off launch project.

A Remote Team, a Global Award and a Very Real Moment

Celebrating as a remote team is a bit different.

The Blend team is spread across countries and continents, including co-founder Peter in Australia, so there was no magic Oscars moment where the whole team rushed onto a stage together while confetti rained down and pyros went off (alright, not sure they have pyros at the Oscars but we’d have liked them).

Some of us were at the awards ceremony, while others raised a glass from home. We all came together properly on our usual all-company call to talk about what the win meant.

At some point we’ll all get together in person, but for now we managed to have a collective moment where you could see every member of the team appreciated the accolade, and Adam said some very nice and very true things about just how good this team is.

Being named Global CRO Agency of the Year 2026 is a morale boost, a credibility signal and a marker of how far Blend has come since Adam Pearce and Peter Gardner founded the agency in 2017 as one of the early UK agencies specialising in Shopify development.

Since then, Blend has evolved into the world-conquering specialist Shopify CRO agency we are today.

What Comes Next

We are proud of the award, but we’re not about to become insufferable about it. Or we’ll try not to.

The next step is the same as the last one: keep working on ways to do CRO better and get amazing results for ecommerce brands.

That means continuing to refine our CRO delivery and experimentation, and it means continuing to share what we learn. We do that in a load of ways already - through our CRO case studies, our A/B test library, our research on ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks, and our practical articles on Shopify CRO strategy. Maybe most of all through our Shopify CRO newsletter, where Peter gives away a frankly troubling amount of what we do. But it’s because we want Blend to be useful before a brand ever speaks to us.

Ready to Find Your Shopify Revenue Leaks?

If you’re wondering how your Shopify store compares to industry benchmarks, where your revenue is leaking, or what your team should do about it first, Blend can help.

Start with our AI CRO benchmarking tool to get a quick read on your conversion rate, AOV and returning customer performance. It’s free, it takes two minutes and you don’t even have to talk to anyone.