SOG Framework
Stabilize, Optimize and Grow your Shopify E-commerce Business
Every Shopify business that scales successfully gets three things right: a technical foundation that holds up under pressure, a storefront that converts the traffic it gets, and a marketing channel mix that acquires customers for less than they spend.
Most brands we meet struggle with one of these three pillars, preventing them from achieving their full potential.
- A site with weak technical fundamentals breaks as soon as you try to grow the business.
- A stable site that converts poorly will waste your marketing budget.
- A stable, well converting website stalls if you don’t bring in new customers.
We call this the SOG Framework. It lets you break down challenges in your Shopify business into one of three categories and gives you an order in which to fix them.
Stabilize
Your store needs to make it easy for customers to find, buy and receive your products. This is simple on the surface but requires you to get a variety of things right:
Theme and codebase. A fast, adaptable and regularly updated theme is essential. We recommend Shopify’s free Horizon theme. On top of the theme, you need a development pipeline that allows you to develop & test new features without breaking your live site.
Speed. You need to pass core web vitals to make the shopping experience enjoyable for your customers and show Google your site is worth ranking.
Integrations. ERP and inventory sync, 3PL and warehouse handoffs, subscriptions, B2B price lists and dealer intake, tax. These make and break your backend. The better the integrations, the less error-prone and manual your processes are.
App sprawl. Each installed app costs you money, load time and process friction. App bloat is a unique issue for Shopify merchants that is worth solving immediately.
Tracking. Your website needs solid analytics to make any decisions to optimize and grow your site.
Optimize
Your visitors need to understand, desire and buy as much as possible of your products. Optimization of your Shopify website solves these three challenges based on data you collect from your customers.
You optimize your website by working on:
Value clarity. A visitor should know what you sell, who it’s for, and why it’s worth the price.
Friction. You want to remove as much friction from your website as possible. You need a clean navigation, collection & product pages, cart and checkout. Clean means easy to understand and navigate.
Order Value. By incentivizing your customers to add more products to their cart, you optimize for order value. This can be by presenting complementary products or letting them unlock additional value such as free shipping or gifts.
Trust. Your customers need to trust that you will deliver the product on time and it will solve their problem as advertised. You do this with testimonials, reviews, guarantees and easy to understand policies.
Grow
Growing your business covers every channel that brings a customer to your site, either as a first time buyer or for a repeat purchase.
These channels break down into three types:
- Organic. SEO, AEO, content.
- Paid. Google, Meta, TikTok, etc.
- Owned. Email, SMS, direct mail, memberships.
A working channel mix passes three tests:
Positive customer lifetime value. Blended across all channels, a customer spends more with you over their lifetime than it costs to acquire them, on contribution margin, not revenue.
Consistency. Customer acquisition holds up month to month without a single channel or a single creative carrying the whole business.
You can run it. Your team and your processes can manage every channel in the mix comfortably.
How we help you
We start by diagnosing your challenges and slotting them into the SOG framework.
Stabilize challenges are usually one off projects that we solve by updating you to the Horizon theme, setting up a development & testing pipeline, fixing integrations and app sprawl clean up. This makes your site easier to use and creates seamless backend processes.
Optimize challenges can be one off projects like a site redesign or adding new features. Beyond that, we help you constantly identify new improvement opportunities and implement them for you, constantly increasing your conversion rate and average order value.
We handle owned media for you, such as subscriptions or email and sms marketing. If you need a competent paid media or SEO partner, we can refer you to someone in our network.
Our services.
Free tool
Can AI search find your products?
Run your domain through the audit. It checks bot access, structured data, and product data quality, then shows you exactly where your store fails for AI assistants like ChatGPT.
Common questions.
What is the SOG Framework?
Where do most brands start?
What does a Stabilize project usually involve?
Do you run paid media and SEO?
How do we get started?
Let's talk about your project.
Book a 30-minute scoping call. We'll go through your requirements, answer your questions, and follow up with a clear proposal and price. No commitment until you see the scope.