Most Shopify CRO starts in the wrong place
Conversion rate optimization on Shopify usually means apps: upsells, pop-ups, A/B tests on the hero banner. Those can work — but an A/B test on a product page with a missing size chart is optimising a broken page. The cheapest conversion gains are defects: things that are objectively wrong, and that nobody on the team has seen because nobody browses the store like a first-time shopper.
Tower finds them for you. Its agents walk your store as your personas would and report what costs you conversions, each finding with its screenshot, its severity and its estimated impact.
What typically costs a Shopify store conversions
The defects below are the categories Tower's agents look for on every run. None of them requires analytics to spot — only someone who browses with intent.
Collections and navigation
Products filed in the wrong collection, collections unreachable from the menu, filters that hide what the shopper came for, a back button that resets their filters.
Search
Shopify's search, and the apps that replace it, can return nothing for a product you sell under a slightly different name. Tower's search walker runs neighbouring queries against each other to catch exactly that.
Product pages
Missing images, variants without a photo, descriptions pasted from the supplier, specs that contradict each other between two similar products, delivery time and returns absent where the shopper hesitates.
Cart and checkout
An account wall with no reason given, a surprise at the cart, effort demanded without explanation. Agents stop before payment, enforced in code: 0 real orders placed, ever.
Locales and markets
Selling with Shopify Markets? Runs render your store in your market's language and currency — a French title on your English store is exactly the kind of defect they flag.
From finding to fix
A CRO audit is only worth what ships. Every Tower finding promotes into a user story with acceptance criteria, exported to Linear, so your developer or agency can take it without rewriting it. You judge each finding first — actionable, false or noise — and your verdicts train the next run.
Tower runs on a schedule because one pass is not enough: measured on a real store, one audit finds about 65% of the defects present and two reach about 90%. Findings are deduplicated from run to run, so each audit adds what is new.
No Shopify app, no theme change
Tower does not install anything on your store. Agents read your public pages exactly as your theme serves them — no app, no script tag, no access to your Shopify admin, customers or orders. Traffic is throttled to stay polite, and the user-agent identifies itself so you can filter it from your analytics.
Where Tower fits in your CRO stack
Keep your analytics: they tell you where shoppers drop. Keep your A/B testing tool: it tells you which of two good versions wins. Tower answers the question in between — what on this page is wrong — so the pages you test are worth testing.
Request your free first audit, or read how the audit works on the e-commerce UX audit page.