Richard Forbes-Simpson @GraftStudio

Saw a virtual try-on demo this week: point your phone, see the piece on you. For fashion brands on Shopify, the number I'd watch isn't conversion. It's returns.

A two-hour fix that takes three weeks to reach your live store didn't cost two hours. It cost three weeks of sales.

Scope the data before anyone shows you a homepage. Weighing up a move off Magento? DM me.

Most brands stay on an old platform because leaving feels riskier than staying. The risk is real. But it's rarely in the design. It's in the data: accounts, order history, gift cards that still have to work at the till.

Ireland's biggest salon group is off Magento and no longer paying £3,000 a month just to keep the old store standing. 22,495 customer accounts and 8,000+ orders came with it.

Being ready for AI shoppers is cheap now. Expensive later.

Most brands treat AI search as a marketing problem. Usually the gap is in the product data. AI never sees your design. It reads titles, sizes, materials, stock and price.

A $100M Shopify Plus brand raised AI search with me last month. I didn't bring it up. A shopper asks ChatGPT for the best running shoe under £150. It names three brands. If yours isn't one, you never see the sale you didn't get.

A new theme won't stay fast on its own. Before Black Friday traffic lands, make sure someone owns what goes on the page.

When a site feels slow, most brands buy a new theme. This one had. Then came more photos, more video, more reasons to buy. Each made sense on its own. The total didn't.

A UK haircare brand's product page made every phone download 21MB to show one bottle of shampoo. I cut it to about 6MB.

The fix was two settings. No code. If your ad spend looks normal and your sales don't, ask one question: what is Google actually being told to count?

When ad spend stops paying back, most brands change the ads. This time the ads were fine. Google had been told to count a sale that never fired.

A UK brand spent £3,500 in five weeks paying Google to chase sales that could never happen. Nothing looked broken. The ads kept running. The money kept going out.

Open your own ad on your phone and count the scrolls to the Add to cart button. If you have to scroll at all, fix that before you turn the budget up.

Product pages get signed off on a desktop. Shoppers arrive on phones. Reviews, icons, one more banner. Each one pushes the Add to cart button further down, and nobody notices until the clicks stop converting.

You're paying for mobile clicks that never see your Add to cart button. A UK skincare brand had theirs two full screens down on a phone. We moved it onto the first screen. Mobile add-to-cart rate went up 16%.

Black Friday is seven weeks away. After 15 years of them on Shopify, the pattern is the same: the brands that have a bad one knew about the bug in October. If there's a known issue on your product page right now, that's the week's job. Not the homepage banner.

A luxury fragrance brand on Shopify Plus was giving every free sample away free. Three stores. Nobody noticed because nothing looked broken. The expensive problems on a store aren't the ones that break. They're the ones that keep working, slightly wrong, in a corner nobody owns.

Twice a week, the hardest part of my day is over before my daughter wakes up. I'm up at 4:30. Espresso, a scan of the headlines, and out the door for a 5:30 jiu-jitsu class. Brazilian jiu-jitsu is hard. Really hard. The 5:30 crowd is founders, CEOs and tired dads from all walks of life. Nobody gives anyone an easy round. Iron sharpens iron. But we always shake hands at the end. When I get home, my wife and daughter are still asleep. Nothing else that day is going to be harder than surviving those rounds and I'm more than ready for the day ahead.