Jake Casto’s Post

Something that surprised me when I started working with Shopify stores is how little time big brands spend optimizing the order of products on a page. In earlier stacks like SFCC or Magento, control over sort-orders was great. Merchandisers lived in those tools. CRO was about moving products up and down, testing what showed first, and learning what drove clicks. On Shopify, even enterprise-level merchants often skip this. It’s not that they can’t control it; they just don’t. Instead of optimizing collections or search results, teams are running experiments on graphics, layouts, and price ladders. There’s nothing wrong with that until you realize what’s being ignored. Merchants are testing the cart page before they’ve tested what gets people to the cart. We’ve jumped straight to offering testing and upsells, skipping past the moment when a shopper is choosing what to buy. That blind spot starts showing up in other ways, too. Stuff we used to call “Ecom 101”, you know, the things I learned as a junior dev from brand marketers, is now optional knowledge. Sometimes absent entirely. That loss has made it easier for anyone to start a store. But it’s made it harder for Plus merchants to grow without friction. Shopify made ecommerce accessible to anyone. That’s a good thing. But it’s also erased some of the basics that used to separate strong merchandising from weak. And IMHO, the sort-order is still the first CRO lever worth pulling.