What Three Years Working with Emily McCarthy Taught Us About E-commerce Growth
Some client relationships stay transactional. Others become genuinely collaborative — the kind where you stop thinking about individual projects and start thinking about the business as a whole. Our work with Emily McCarthy has been the latter, and a few principles from that partnership are worth sharing.
Data has to drive the decisions
Early in our work together, we established a monthly performance review cadence — top search queries, cart abandonment rates, conversion by traffic source, page-level performance. When we saw which product photography drove meaningfully higher conversion rates, that informed budget allocation for future shoots. When we identified a consistent drop-off point in the checkout flow, we fixed it. The discipline of regular measurement is what makes improvement systematic rather than accidental.
Speed is a revenue lever, not a technical nicety
We implemented image compression early in the engagement and measured the impact on load time. A sub-second improvement in page load time is the kind of change that’s easy to dismiss as marginal. In practice, fractions of seconds compound across thousands of sessions and show up in conversion data.
Discount discipline is a brand decision
One of the more counterintuitive things we’ve reinforced in this partnership is the value of limiting promotional events. Frequent discounting trains customers to wait for sales, compresses margins, and erodes perceived value. Limiting major promotions to once or twice a year — and coordinating them with PR moments for maximum impact — protects brand equity while still creating genuine excitement when a sale does happen.
The team around the store matters as much as the store
The insights from the photographer and PR specialist on this project reinforced something we believe strongly: e-commerce performance is a cross-functional problem. Great photography makes every conversion optimization effort work harder. Strong PR builds organic awareness that reduces dependence on paid traffic.