(No, we’re not affiliated with Casper. How fancy do you think this operation is, anyway?)

You have a store. You find a theme that looks good, and slap your logo on it. Someone tells you that exit intents convert well, so you put a coupon code on an exit intent plugin. Quick view is a thing, too, so you add that. And you put a carousel on for good measure. And live chat! Gotta have live chat.

You launch, and things go well… for a little while. But your conversion rate isn’t great, it’s plateaued, and it costs inordinately much to get qualified traffic from your ad campaigns.

What’s the deal? People like your store. You’ve done everything right. But others are eating your lunch – not only on conversion rate, but also on mindshare and average order value.

What works?

This is the Whole Point of Optimization

You’re not going to stop using off-the-shelf solutions. Compared to something custom, they’re comically easy to implement. And they offer a solid blueprint for something that did work for somebody, once. That’s definitely better than nothing.

But when your conversion rate stalls and you take a bath over the holidays, or your sale doesn’t perform like you expected, then you’re going to need to improve, somehow. Maybe that involves ripping it out and starting anew – but more likely, you’ll need to optimize to what you already have.

But how do you know what to work on – and what to change it to? Well, you don’t. But you can figure it out – and the best way is to stand on the shoulders of giants. For example, are you selling cameras? It probably behooves you to figure out what B&H and Adorama are doing. Everyday carry stuff? Well, Bellroy & Shinola are doing a lot right.

What if there was a way to dive into how these stores really work, and get actionable takeaways for your business? You’d come away with a solid plan of what to do next – and how to improve what you already have. Presenting Draft Analysis, a series of 25 video critiques of the best & most interesting stores out there.

Final list of stores

Our stores are all B2C, and run the gamut across verticals and AOV:

• Aēsop
• Anker
• Another Country
• Apiece Apart
• Away Travel
• Blinds.com
• Casper
• Coyuchi
• Deciem
• Design Within Reach
• JetPens
• Eagle Creek

• Field Notes
• Harry’s
• Interior Define
• Old Faithful Shop
• REI
• Room & Board
• Snow Peak
• Sorel
• Taylor Stitch
• Uniqlo
• Warby Parker
• Zak & Fox

Valuable & applicable insights

Each analysis is a 15-minute video that ends with several broadly applicable takeaways for your own business. The video at the top of this page is one example – and if you can’t watch it right now, here&srsquo;s what WiperTech’s Vijay Sitaram said:

• I’ve passed this along to my team internally, and we’ve watched a few of the videos. I like how you pick up on small details and non-obvious things that most “CRO analysts” wouldn’t highlight. For anyone serious about ecommerce, I think Draft Analysis is totally worth it. Draft Analysis is a no-brainer.

You’ll also get:

• A tutorial for analyzing online stores, which shows you how to establish criteria and critique on your own.
• The exact Ecommerce CRO Checklist that we used to analyze each online store.
• A summary of each analysis, showing the biggest 46 conversion-focused guidelines that we pulled out of our 24 stores.

Who I Am

I’m Nick Disabato, a designer & writer from Chicago. I’ve previously worked for great clients like The Wirecutter, New Music USA, Double Your Freelancing, and Chicago Magazine. I look like that drawing to the right, there.

In my five years running Draft Revise for dozens of stores – planning, executing, and analyzing hundreds of A/B tests in the process – I’ve learned everything I can about optimizing your site so it captures more wallet-out customers, in your target market, who pay you and like it.

Take Action Today

Don’t base your design decisions on vague hunches: your business deserves better. Get access to Draft Analysis today – and let me know if you have any questions, of course. Thanks!