Stone Creek Coffee had strong website traffic and ambitious ecommerce goals, but its customer journey was not consistently turning interest into coffee purchases. Over six months, we established a structured CRO programme that made product discovery easier, strengthened buying confidence and helped the brand convert more new and returning customers.

The Problem

Stone Creek Coffee is an independent, B Corp-certified specialty coffee roaster with deep roots in Milwaukee. Its Shopify store serves customers purchasing coffee, subscriptions, merchandise and brewing products, while the wider website also supports people looking for information about its cafés and brand.

Stone Creek wanted to turn more of its substantial website traffic into ecommerce orders. It also needed to move beyond reactive, break/fix development and establish a reliable A/B-testing capability that could support better commercial decisions over time.

The challenge was not simply that conversion rate needed to improve. Stone Creek attracted a mixed audience, including café visitors, brand researchers and customers actively shopping for coffee. The ecommerce journey did not always help higher-intent shoppers find the right products, understand their options or build enough confidence to complete a purchase.

Our CRO audit identified friction across several stages of the journey.

Search users converted at twice the site average, but only 2% of visitors used search. Customers landing on collection pages converted at 12%, compared with approximately 5% for homepage and product-page landings, yet only 29% of mobile users accessed subcategories.

There was also friction closer to the purchase decision. Important reassurance, including Stone Creek’s Happiness Guarantee, appeared too far down the product page for most customers to see it. Only 4% of visitors reached this content. Size and grind options required interpretation, while several competing purchase and payment routes risked distracting shoppers from the main product-selection process.

Coffee beans represented Stone Creek’s clearest ecommerce growth and margin opportunity. Improving performance therefore meant reducing the accumulated friction between customer intent, product discovery, purchase confidence and checkout - not simply changing one page or applying assumed ecommerce best practices.

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What We Did To Help

The Approach

Stone Creek had not previously had an established website A/B-testing programme. We began by auditing the customer journey and translating the findings into a prioritised CRO roadmap.

Rather than treating every recommendation as equally urgent, we evaluated the strength of the supporting evidence, its likely commercial impact and the effort required to test or implement it. This helped us focus first on the areas where customer friction and commercial opportunity were most closely connected.

The programme established a regular cycle of:

  • Reviewing quantitative and behavioural data
  • Identifying specific points of customer friction
  • Forming clear hypotheses
  • Designing and developing test variants
  • Evaluating performance across relevant devices and customer segments
  • Rolling out successful experiences where the evidence supported doing so

This operating rhythm was an important part of the engagement. Stone Creek moved from isolated development requests to an ongoing process of research, testing, learning and implementation.

What The Data Revealed

The audit showed that Stone Creek’s conversion opportunity was spread across the customer journey.

Product discovery was one of the clearest priorities. Search users showed strong purchase intent, and visitors who reached collection pages converted more effectively. However, search and subcategory routes were not prominent enough, particularly on mobile.

On product pages, Stone Creek already had strong brand messages and purchase reassurance. The issue was their placement. Content designed to answer customer concerns was often appearing after the point at which the customer needed it.

The experience also contained several competing actions. While additional payment and purchase choices can appear convenient, they can also distract customers who are still choosing their coffee, grind or purchase type.

These findings shaped the central pillars of the CRO programme:

  • Make coffee and category discovery faster, particularly on mobile
  • Bring reassurance closer to the point of purchase
  • Simplify product selection and the primary purchase path
  • Use device and segment data to guide rollout decisions

Building a Stronger Product Page Experience

Stone Creek’s product pages needed to support several customer decisions at once. Shoppers had to understand the coffee, choose an appropriate configuration and decide whether to make a one-time or subscription purchase.

We tested an alternative product-page treatment designed to strengthen the merchandising and purchase cues surrounding these decisions.

The strongest variant delivered:

  • 41% increase in conversion rate
  • 26% increase in revenue per visitor
  • 9% increase in add-to-cart rate
  • 50% increase in subscription revenue per visitor
  • 117% increase in subscription orders per visitor

Average order value decreased by 10%, but the wider commercial result remained positive. Revenue per visitor increased alongside conversion and subscription participation.

This was an important strategic learning. A stronger commercial outcome does not require every metric to rise. In this instance, more customers chose subscription products at a lower average unit value, while the store still generated more revenue from each visitor.

Moving Reassurance to the Moment It Mattered

Stone Creek already had meaningful reasons for customers to trust the brand, including its Happiness Guarantee. The problem was that only 4% of product-page visitors reached the content in its original position.

We tested moving stronger key value propositions immediately below the Add to Cart area, where shoppers were more likely to be considering whether to continue.

The winning experience produced:

  • 11.93% increase in revenue per visitor
  • 6.41% increase in conversion rate
  • 8.35% increase in add-to-cart rate
  • 5.19% increase in average order value
  • 48.33% increase in subscription orders per visitor
  • 42.91% increase in subscription revenue per visitor

The result reached statistical significance, and the successful experience was made permanent.

The test showed that Stone Creek did not necessarily need more reassurance content. It needed to present its existing proof at the point where it could answer a genuine customer concern.

Turning Mobile Navigation Into a Commercial Lever

Only 29% of mobile visitors were accessing subcategories, despite the stronger conversion performance of collection-page traffic.

We tested two alternative mobile category-menu experiences designed to give customers a clearer and faster route into Stone Creek’s coffee range.

The winning variant delivered:

  • 18% increase in conversion rate
  • 28% increase in revenue per visitor
  • 8% increase in average order value
  • 4% increase in collection views
  • 6% increase in subscription revenue per visitor

The result reached statistical significance, and the successful menu was rolled out permanently.

This demonstrated that mobile information architecture was not simply a usability consideration. Helping customers understand the range and reach the right category more quickly had a measurable effect on commercial performance.

Using Device Data to Guide Subcategory Rollouts

We extended the product-discovery strategy by testing circular and pill-style subcategory widgets on collection pages.

The hypothesis was that visible shortcuts would reduce the number of steps mobile shoppers needed to take before reaching the products most relevant to them.

On mobile, the circular experience increased:

  • Conversion rate by 11%
  • Revenue per visitor by 12%

The result reached statistical significance on mobile, while desktop performance declined.

Instead of applying the experience across the entire store, we rolled it out on mobile only. The test did more than identify a positive variant. It showed where the interface solved a genuine discovery problem and where it added unnecessary content.

This device-specific decision retained the benefit for mobile customers without exposing desktop visitors to a weaker experience.

Simplifying the Product Purchase Path

Express checkout options are often assumed to make purchasing easier. On Stone Creek’s product pages, however, they also introduced competing actions while customers were still configuring their coffee and considering their purchase.

We tested removing the express checkout options to create a more focused route through product selection and Add to Cart.

The simplified experience increased:

  • Conversion rate by 13%
  • Revenue per visitor by 20%
  • Add-to-cart rate by 10%
  • Average order value by 6.29%

The test showed strong directional confidence at 86%, and the simplified version was implemented permanently following client review and approval.

This challenged the assumption that more visible payment choices would automatically improve the buying experience. For Stone Creek’s customers, reducing distraction helped more shoppers progress through the primary purchase route.

Making Subcategories More Visible

We also tested more prominent subcategory shortcuts to help visitors move from broad interest into relevant coffee collections.

The strongest pill-style treatment increased:

  • Collection views by 19.41%
  • Conversion rate by 8%
  • Revenue per visitor by 9%
  • Average order value by 1%

The treatment was rolled out following the test.

This was a relatively contained interface change, but it addressed an important behavioural barrier. Stone Creek already had customer demand across its coffee range. The opportunity was to make that range easier to find and explore.

The Results

The six-month case study period compared performance from 1 July 2025–31 December 2025 against the previous six months, 29 December 2024–30 June 2025.

During this period, Stone Creek’s US ecommerce store handled more than twice the number of sessions excluding bot traffic recorded during the previous comparison period.

Despite serving a significantly larger and more acquisition-heavy audience, the store also converted that traffic more effectively.

Conversion rate increased by 14%, total orders increased by 17% and new-customer orders grew by 36%. Returning-customer orders also increased by 13%, even though the greater volume of new customers reduced returning customers as a percentage of the overall order mix.

Improvement was visible across several connected stages of the funnel:

  • Add-to-cart rate increased by 12%
  • Reached-checkout rate increased by 10%
  • Checkout completion rate increased by 4%
  • Average order value increased by 14%
  • Conversion rate increased by 14%
  • Total orders increased by 17%

The way these metrics moved together is significant.

More visitors added products to their carts, more progressed into checkout and a greater proportion completed their orders. This is consistent with a programme that reduced friction across several linked customer decisions rather than relying on one isolated test or page change.

The individual experiments also produced commercially useful learning.

Stone Creek learned that clearer mobile navigation could improve both conversion rate and revenue per visitor. Existing brand reassurance became more effective when moved closer to Add to Cart. Simplifying the product-page purchase path outperformed an experience with more visible payment options. Device-level analysis also prevented ideas that worked on mobile from being rolled out indiscriminately to desktop shoppers.

The six-month period included holiday trading and a substantial change in traffic volume and customer mix. The aggregate improvement should therefore not be attributed solely to CRO activity. However, the results suggest that the programme helped Stone Creek convert a much larger audience more efficiently while increasing orders from both new and returning customers.

Just as importantly, Stone Creek moved from reactive development and no established testing capability to a repeatable Shopify CRO process built around evidence, prioritisation, experimentation and implementation. This gave the team a stronger foundation for continued optimisation beyond the initial six months.

  • 14%

    Increase in Conversion Rate

  • 17%

    Increase in Orders

  • 36%

    Increase in New-Customer Orders
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Get in touch with the Shopify CRO experts at Blend Commerce

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Here’s what to expect:

  1. After you get in touch, one of the Blend Directors will reach out within 1 business day.
  2. We'll ask for more detail about your business to assess whether Blend is the right fit, and if not, we'll recommend someone who is.
  3. If it looks like we can help, you’ll be invited to a call to dig into the challenges you’re facing and the numbers behind them.
  4. From there, we’ll outline clear steps to help get things on track.