Core (and Totally Doable) Hacks to Unlock More Revenue Via Your Shopify Site
Bet you’ve done this before - you find a product you actually want, the checkout turns into a three-page slog asking you to create an account before you can pay, so you close the tab. Bye. The brand did the hard part, earned your trust and your intent to buy…then lost the sale over a Shopify setting they could have changed in an afternoon.
That gap between "customer wants to buy" and "customer actually buys" is where a lot of growth-stage brands lose revenue. The product is usually fine and the traffic is usually fine. What's costing them is a handful of small things on Shopify that aren't turned on, aren't positioned right, or aren't there at all.
I talked this through recently with Marcus Ohanesian, owner of Perfect Evolution, a highly regarded Shopify-focused design, development, and CRO agency. In other words, he has fixed and optimized more Shopify stores than most people will ever touch. What follows is the stuff he keeps seeing, fixes that actually drive revenue, and some pitfalls to avoid.
Your store really does two separate jobs
The cleanest way to look at a Shopify store is to split it in half: everything before checkout and the checkout itself. You use the front end to grow the size of the order, and you use the checkout to stop losing orders you've already won. Most brands pour their energy into that first half and barely touch the second, which is backwards, since the checkout is where the money actually walks out the door.
There's a lot of opportunity on the front end with upsells, cross-sells, and bundles, all of it aimed at lifting your average order value. Plenty of merchants do some of this, but they do it without any real intention behind it, and that's where the missed money sits. The checkout is the other half of the story, and it's where most of the loss happens, usually over small tweaks and options that were sitting in Shopify the whole time waiting to be switched on.
Fix the checkout first, because that's where the money leaks
On the checkout side, the single biggest lever is Shop Pay. If you haven't turned it on, turn it on. Completion rates land somewhere around 70 to 80 percent, versus roughly 35 to 40 percent for a standard guest checkout. On mobile especially, the one-tap Shop Pay sign-in removes the typing and the friction that makes people abandon checkout. Then bring in your express and accelerated payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and stack them above the card fields rather than below. Offering them isn't enough. People have to see their preferred way to pay right away, and position is the part most stores get wrong.
From there, the wins are unglamorous and reliable. Consolidate shipping, payment, and review into a single scrolling page instead of the old three-step march. Set guest checkout as the default and offer account creation after the purchase, not as a wall in front of it. Make your pricing transparent, with subtotal, shipping, and tax all itemized before that final page, so there's no surprise or gotcha moment at the end, and a free-shipping threshold progress bar in the cart helps here too, since people can see exactly what they'll pay for shipping before they get to checkout. Get your address autocomplete working, and tune it for your business, residential versus commercial, depending on who you actually ship to. And offer buy-now-pay-later, whether that's Shop Pay's own installments or Klarna and Afterpay, which still earn their place as conversion tools. None of this is hard, which is the point. Shopify made it easy, and plenty of merchants still don't take them up on it. Whenever the checkout feels heavy and multi-step, it reads like an old Magento or bulky legacy platform, and that friction just isn't necessary anymore.
If you're on Shopify Plus, you can go into the checkout and customize it further, which opens up trust signals near the cart summary. Put your discount code field right under the cart summary, and add two to three trust badges that build confidence at the exact moment someone's deciding whether to hand over their card. Some of those are product-related, vegan, gluten-free, made in the USA if that matters to your buyer, and some are the classic reassurances like a 100% satisfaction guarantee. We've all seen these on as-seen-on-TV spots for a reason. They work. If you have the ability to customize on Plus, this is worth doing.
Grow the order before you grow the traffic
Raising your average order value is usually the fastest path to more revenue, because it costs you nothing in new traffic. Marcus's blanket rule is to A/B test everything, so don't copy his setup or anyone else's and assume it fits your store, your customers, your theme, and your site experience. Test it in your own store and let your own results decide.
Pre-purchase bundles are a good starting move, especially for a newer brand. You curate them, so the customer doesn't have to figure out which options go together, and there's usually a small discount attached. A skincare brand might sell a morning routine kit with two or three products - a moisturizer, a cream, and so on - which removes the ambiguity of "okay, what do I actually need to get started." That's the whole job of a starter pack.
The next step up is the frequently-bought-together, build-your-own bundle on the product page, usually with a tiered discount: buy two, save ten percent; buy three, save fifteen percent. Done well, this is an interactive experience rather than a static offer. Marcus pointed to how Magic Spoon handled it, where you add cereal boxes and watch a set of placeholders fill up on the side with the flavors you're choosing, so as your quantity climbs, your discount climbs with it. You end up with a custom product and a little savings for buying more than one item. This works best for beauty, supplements, and apparel, and less so for single-product stores where there's nothing to combine.
The cart itself is the highest-frequency place to sell, because everybody sees the cart. Ideally you're using a slide-out drawer rather than dumping people onto a separate cart page, and inside that drawer you want a "spend a little more for free shipping" progress bar plus a couple of relevant suggestions, the "pairs well with" or "you may also like" items. The progress bar gamifies the experience and nudges people to add a couple more items, and the suggestions turn a passive step into another chance to grow the order.
The most underrated spot of all is the thank-you page. A post-purchase, one-click upsell offered after the card's already been charged carries almost zero friction, because the customer has just proven they trust you by buying. The decision of "should I buy this or not" is already behind them, so it's one click to add the item or they simply close the tab, having already gotten what they came for. That's real incremental revenue every month from a single offer, and most stores leave that page completely blank.
For actually running all of this, Marcus's team works closely with Rebuy, which handles AI-driven bundles, upsells, and cross-sells in one place. Rebuy's smart cart is a gamified drawer with the free-shipping threshold and the upsells and cross-sells built in; they also have a bundle builder, and their dynamic widgets drop onto the product page, the homepage, and the thank-you page. You can lean on their AI or set up your own dynamic pricing rules. Zipify and AfterSell live in the same neighborhood if you want to compare options, and AfterSell in particular has a strong reputation for the post-purchase piece.
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Subscriptions only when the product earns it
Subscriptions get pitched as a magic retention button, and they're not. They make sense when the product is consumable and replenishable on some predictable cadence: think coffee, pet food, skincare, supplements. Repeat-purchase potential on its own isn't the bar. You also need enough order volume and margin to carry the discounting and the infrastructure, and that's an operational call, not a marketing one. And you have to commit to actually merchandising the subscriber experience over time, because it isn't set-it-and-forget-it. Bolting a widget onto the product page does not give you a subscription business. The nurturing that comes after is what makes the program work.
Here's the part brands get wrong. The money in subscriptions is retention, not acquisition. Getting the first order can be easy, but holding onto the customer is the hard part, and programs live or die on two things almost nobody sweats: the quality of the cancellation flow and failed-payment recovery, not how many people sign up.
A generic "are you sure you want to cancel?" popup does nothing. Give people a real, personalized off-ramp instead. Offer a skip when they've simply got too much product this month, or a tier discount if the issue is price sensitivity, so you're changing the terms rather than losing the relationship. That kind of exit path saves subscriptions the blunt version never will.
Failed payments are a different animal. That's involuntary churn, and it's entirely fixable, because you can set up retry logic and backup-card fallbacks to recover a payment that failed for purely technical reasons. Churn Buster is a solid Shopify app built specifically for this, and it integrates with Recharge, Skio, Stay, or Loop to handle that one piece of the puzzle. It's small and it's boring and it's one of the highest-return things in the whole program.
Then there are the basics that a surprising number of merchants skip right past, or don't even realize they're missing. Skip, swap, pause, and cancel should all be one tap on mobile, ideally through a magic link so nobody has to log into an account. Even a simple SMS option, where a subscriber can text "skip this month, I've got too much product," goes a long way. Make it as easy as possible to communicate with you. If your only option is on or off, you shouldn't be in the subscription business, because you're losing people you could have kept with a single button.
Loyalty is a complement to subscriptions, not a substitute, and the two work hand in hand. Smile.io and LoyaltyLion are the default choices, both legacy players in the space, with Smile easier to launch and generally a better fit for small to mid-size brands. Whatever you run, make the point value obvious. The most common failure is customers not understanding what their points are actually worth or how to redeem them, so it has to be easy to earn points and easy to spend them at checkout. And it should reinforce the subscription program rather than compete with it.
A couple of things not to do. Don't launch a subscription whose only reason to exist is a shallow discount. Don't treat the subscriber portal as a support center or a cost center instead of a merchandising tool. And don't ignore failed-payment recovery, which is the highest-return, most-overlooked lever in the entire program.
The three you should know before you touch anything else
Ask Marcus for the one setting people miss most and he'll give you three buckets instead: the most overlooked, the overrated, and the underrated.
The most overlooked is upsells and cross-sells in the cart. It's simple, and a shocking number of stores don't have it. Add a product, open the cart, and if there are no suggestions sitting there, you're passing up revenue on every order that goes through. Your theme probably ships with a basic Shopify product-recommendation tool, and it may work, but it won't be as sharp as a purpose-built tool like Rebuy or Zipify that can serve genuinely relevant, dynamic suggestions people actually click.
The overrated tactic, and this one's a hot take for the digital-marketing crowd, is the immediate discount popup as your main list-growth play. When everybody offers ten or fifteen percent off the second you land, before anyone even understands what you sell, you're starting with a bad user experience and training your whole customer base to never pay full price. It still technically works, in that you capture the email and some people buy for the code, but it skews your audience toward the discount-motivated and makes every one of those customers more expensive to keep. There are really two decisions inside this. First, whether to offer a discount at all, and if you do, how much and at what point in the buyer's journey. Second, the experience itself, whether it's a popup and whether you can at least delay it until people know what you're selling instead of hitting them with it on arrival.
The underrated one is that thank-you page again. Most stores show a plain confirmation and nothing else, while a well-placed post-purchase offer there can lift conversion anywhere from five to fifteen percent at basically zero risk, because you've already earned the trust and the sale. It's about the closest thing to a guaranteed lift a store can add, and most brands walk right past it.
This is the kind of connective work we do at Bravo CPG. We're an embedded operations team for growth-stage food, beverage, beauty, and wellness brands, taking full ownership of the pieces that keep revenue moving, from production, co-man, and 3PL management to demand planning, wholesale orders, and freight. We love connecting our brands with best-in-class resources, hence this article with Marcus.
