When an ecommerce business comes to us wanting a new store or a significant overhaul, the first thing we do is not open Shopify. We don’t start looking at themes, talking about colour palettes, or discussing which apps to install. We start by asking a set of questions that most agencies skip entirely.
Questions like:
- Who is your customer, (really, not just demographically), but what do they care about, what do they worry about, and what makes them trust a brand they’ve never bought from before?
- What is your store currently doing well, and where is it losing people?
- What does success look like in twelve months, and what would your store need to do differently to get there?
This is the strategy phase. And in our experience, it’s the part of the process that makes the biggest difference to whether the store that gets built actually works.
What happens when you skip strategy
Most ecommerce store projects start with a brief that focuses almost entirely on the build: what platform, what design style, what features. The strategy (the thinking about customers, positioning, conversion, and growth) either gets folded into the brief informally or doesn’t happen at all.
The result is a store that is technically functional and visually presentable, but not really built around how its customers think and buy. The homepage looks good, but doesn’t land clearly on what makes the brand worth choosing. The product pages are well-designed but don’t address the questions customers actually have. The conversion rate sits at 1%, and nobody is quite sure why.
This isn’t a failure of execution. The build is usually fine. It’s a failure of foundation.
When you build without strategy, you’re making hundreds of small decisions about messaging, layout, content, calls to action, without a clear framework to make them against. Some of those decisions will be right. Some won’t. And you won’t know which is which until you’re live and the data starts coming in.
What the strategy phase actually involves
Strategy doesn’t mean months of workshops and lengthy documents. For most ecommerce businesses, it means getting clear on a focused set of things before the build begins. Here’s what we work through.
Who the customer is and what they need from the store. Not just age and location, but what they’re looking for when they arrive, what questions they have, what would make them trust the brand, and what would make them hesitate. This shapes everything from the homepage headline to the product page layout.
Where the current store is losing people. If there’s an existing store, we audit it before we touch it. Where does traffic drop off? Which pages have high exit rates? Where in the checkout process are people abandoning? The data tells a story, and that story shapes what the new store needs to fix.
What the store needs to communicate and in what order. The hierarchy of information on any page (what you see first, what you see second, what’s there when you need it but not in the way when you don’t) is a strategic decision. It determines whether a visitor feels oriented or confused, confident or uncertain.
What success looks like and how we’ll measure it. A store built to improve conversion rate looks different to one built to increase average order value or drive repeat purchases. Being clear about the primary objective shapes the build in ways that matter.
What happens after the sale. Post-purchase email sequences, review requests, loyalty mechanics shouldn’t be afterthoughts to bolt on once the store is live. They’re part of the commercial model, and they’re worth designing into the project from the start.
Why most agencies skip it
The honest answer is that strategy is harder to sell and harder to scope than build work. A client can see a design. They can click through a working store. They can compare themes and evaluate features. Strategy is less tangible, and some clients are impatient to get to the visible stuff.
There’s also a commercial incentive at play. An agency that builds quickly can take on more projects. Strategy takes time – time spent asking questions, analysing data, thinking carefully before touching anything. That’s time that doesn’t produce a deliverable the client can see until it’s reflected in the build.
We’ve made a different choice. We don’t start building until we’re confident we understand the business well enough to build the right thing. That means some projects take a little longer to get started. It also means the stores we build tend to perform significantly better than the ones that went straight from brief to Shopify.
What this means for you as a store owner
If you’re thinking about a new store or a significant overhaul, the most valuable question you can ask before you brief anyone is: do I know clearly what I want this store to do, and why it isn’t doing it now?
If you can answer that in detail (specific pages, specific drop-off points, specific customer objections you know aren’t being addressed), you’re in a strong position to brief a build. If you can’t, the strategy work isn’t a delay. It’s the thing that makes the build worth doing.
A store built on clear strategic foundations costs roughly the same as one built without them. It just works considerably harder.
The questions worth answering before any build begins
If you’re preparing for a store project (or just trying to understand why your current store isn’t performing) these are the questions we’d start with:
- Who is your primary customer and what does buying from you feel like from their perspective?
- Where in the current journey are people dropping off, and do you know why?
- What does your store communicate in the first five seconds, and is that the right thing?
- What is the single most important action you want a visitor to take, and is the store built around making that easy?
- What happens after someone buys, and is that experience good enough to bring them back?
If you’d like to work through these with someone who’s done it for a lot of ecommerce businesses, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we start with. Get in touch.
