The 5 Storefront Mistakes Killing Conversions

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

If you’ve been inside a Meta Ads Manager lately, you know the vibes. It’s a battlefield.

Traffic keeps getting more and more expensive, and having a powerful storefront that favors conversions—not just a pretty one—is what will make that investment worth it. 

We learned this the hard way with our own storefront.

We spent years growing Obvi, launching dozens of SKUs, and scaling our brand into a household name in the wellness space. 

But while our ads were winning, our home was hiding a major structural flaw.

Every time we wanted to launch a new flavor or a new bundle, we just bolted it onto the existing site, until we ended up with a maze of products, plugins, and legacy code.

It got so bad that we didn't even like sending people to our own website. 

We were terrified that if a high-intent customer from our email or SMS list landed on the homepage, they’d find a broken link or a slow-loading page that hadn't been updated in months.

Eventually, after rebuilding our store with Platter, we were able to turn our storefront from a dump yard into a performance weapon. 

And today, in the interest of helping other founders avoid the mistakes we made, we’re sharing everything: what we did wrong and how we fixed it. 

On the Menu:

Our situation was bad, we’re not going to lie. 

To move forward, we needed a storefront that was easier to use, faster to iterate on, and built to scale with the brand.

So we partnered with Platter to completely gut and rebuild the Obvi storefront from the ground up with design, structure, and performance in mind.

They were optimal for the job since they’re a tech-enabled agency that specializes in designing, building, and optimizing Shopify storefronts that convert better, are easier to manage, and, most importantly, cost less to maintain.

And they don’t just guess at what looks nice. They bring a ton of data to the table:

So whether you are launching a new brand or, like us, need to gut a dump yard of legacy code to find your next level of scale, Platter is the partner that makes it happen.

👉 Learn how Platter helps brands rebuild their Shopify stores here.

If your conversion rate hasn't moved in six months despite better creative, the problem might not be the ad. It might be your storefront. 

Here are the 5 silent killers we identified:

We lost confidence in our core site experience and design, so we started routing paid traffic almost entirely to third-party landing pages. 

It got so bad that at some point, we were sending less than 1% of our traffic to the core site. 

We lost all structure on our product pages. To compensate, we relied on static layouts, often just a single giant image to explain our benefits and ingredients.

Because updating these pages in real-time was impossible, we couldn’t easily test new ideas.

We treated our cart like an afterthought. After years of layering on flavors and product lines, we just put new tools and plugins wherever they fit until the experience became fragmented and unreliable. At times, our cart didn't even work properly.

We reached a point where our storefront was impossible to manage. Every time we wanted to tweak something, it wasn't a quick fix; it was a long debate and a slow turnaround.

In a high-scale environment, if your internal team can’t make changes in real-time, you are paying a friction tax on every single campaign.

We focused on a design we could be proud of, but we ignored the technical metric that actually fuels conversion: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

If the site is slow, your paid media investment is being wasted before the customer even sees the product.

When we were finally ready for a change, we didn’t just want a redesign. We wanted a system that would stop the "dump yard" cycle and give our team the freedom to move fast.

Here’s what changed:

Our team can now toggle these on or off in seconds to match a campaign without touching a single line of code.

By building in "complete your set" logic directly, the experience feels like a natural part of the brand rather than a distracting interruption at the most critical moment.

This gave our team a content management system that is actually easy to use. No more long debates or 48-hour dev cycles, just total control.

The impact wasn't just qualitative; it showed up in the data immediately. 

By moving away from a bloated storefront to a high-performance system, we hit the metrics that made all the difference for our business:

Transforming our PDPs into structured landing pages allowed us to confidently send paid traffic directly to them for the first time in years.

By cleaning up the theme architecture and removing unnecessary apps, our Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) improved significantly.

We now have fewer third-party tools and apps to pay for, manage, and worry about breaking.

Ultimately, we moved from being reactive to being proactive. Instead of constantly patching a broken site, we now have a storefront we can confidently put in front of every customer, subscriber, and investor.