More sales from the traffic you already have
Shorter entries from the diary: habits, checklists and opinions formed after many audits.
Merchants keep treating checkout abandonment as a trust problem when the more measurable cause is field count and flow length, and the difference matters because you fix those two things differently.
Quick buy, slide-out cart, stock counters, back-in-stock alerts, pre-orders and shoppable hotspots — a walk through what the Fuse theme puts on the path between a product photograph and a completed order.
Merchants keep asking which checkout fields they can rearrange on the entry-level Shopify plan, and the honest answer settles on price tiers and transaction rates rather than a list of drag-and-drop options, because that is what the pricing page actually documents.
This piece settles what a merchant can actually check before swapping a Shopify theme, because the setting most people search for called theme A/B testing does not exist as a section in Dawn or Horizon, and the real decision has to lean on Core Web Vitals data and Theme Store minimums instead.
No testing tool, no agency, no budget line. Just free instruments, published research and one quarter of disciplined work. This is the exact sequence I would run on any store that has traffic and nothing else.
The formula is one line of arithmetic, orders divided by sessions. Yet GA4 and Shopify Analytics run it on the same store and print two different numbers every single day. Here is exactly where the two counters diverge.
GA4 already tracks a nine event path from product list to purchase. The sanity trick is ignoring most of it: one funnel exploration, five steps, closed mode, compared by device. Here is my exact setup.
Mobile brings three quarters of ecommerce traffic and converts at barely more than half the desktop rate. That scissor gap is where most stores leak money, so it is where every one of my audits now starts.