I've spent twenty years plus in ecommerce, most of it running the trading and web performance side of t brands you'd recognise if you sell in the same categories. Along the way I've had a hand in over £250+ million of online sales across the UK and US. Shopify, Amazon, eBay, paid media, email, the lot.
I built Convo Commerce because I got tired of watching good traffic disappear for nothing, and I got sick of the usual "standard answer" when sales were down; spend more on ads and squeeze the same 1-2% of visitors a little harder.
The 98% problem
The average DTC brand converts 1 to 2% of the people who land on its site. That means 98 out of 100 visitors show up, look around and leave without an email captured or a conversation started.
You paid for that click. Ads, SEO, an influencer post, whatever got them there cost you real money and 98 times out of 100 you got nothing back for it.
The industry's response is what bothers me most. CRO agencies, popup vendors, the whole conversion rate optimisation world exist almost entirely to fight over improving the 1-2% who were already going to buy: button colours, checkout field order, the shade of a "buy now" button, tested and retested at the very bottom of the funnel where the outcome was mostly decided anyway.
The 98% who left with nothing captured get nothing back either. No follow-up, no second chance, and "conversion rate" as an industry metric was never built to see them. It measures the people who converted and has nothing to say about everyone else, which is most of your traffic.
I watched this happen on my own brands, not in a deck. Perfectly qualified traffic walked in the front door and out the back with nobody having said a word to them, while agencies pitched me another round of CRO tests to nudge the top-line conversion rate from 1.8% to 2.1%, useful work aimed at the wrong problem.
Ads keep getting more expensive, and nobody's fixing the leak
The other thing that pushed me here: paid acquisition costs go up every single year I've been doing this. iOS privacy changes, more competition for the same inventory, platforms getting better at extracting maximum spend for the same result. The traffic that cost you £1 five years ago costs you £2 or £3 now, and the usual response is to spend harder to get the same volume back.
That's a losing game if you're only ever trying to squeeze more out of paid media while ignoring the fact that most of what you already paid for is walking straight past you unrecognised. Spending harder into a leaking funnel doesn't fix the leak, it just makes it more expensive to run.
The fix is capturing the opportunity already sitting in the 98%, before it leaves, not another ad platform or another attribution model.
Why "Convo Commerce" means two things
The name is deliberate. Convo Commerce stands for two things at once, and neither works without the other.
Conversation is the mechanism: WhatsApp, SMS, on-site chat, Instagram DMs, a well-timed popup with a real question behind it instead of a generic "Sign up for News and Promos" box. Channels where a visitor can tell you something about themselves, rather than being tracked silently and hoped at.
Conversion is the point of it. A conversation that doesn't lead anywhere is decoration. Every conversational touchpoint we build moves someone from anonymous visitor to identified lead to customer, using what they've told us to make the next message relevant instead of generic.
Put those two together and you get something the CRO industry was never built to deliver: a way to capture the 98%, learn what they want through zero-party data instead of guesswork from a pixel, and open a real, ongoing conversation with them across whichever channel they respond to.
What this looks like in practice
Practically, that means multiple entry points for capturing intent rather than one email box at the footer, and treating what a customer tells you, what they're looking for, when they're likely to buy, how they'd rather be contacted, as an asset that gets pushed straight into the systems you already run, whether that's Klaviyo, your CRM, or wherever your team works. The conversation then continues on their terms, on the channel they prefer, rather than everyone getting forced down the same generic email flow regardless of what they said.
Why I'm telling you this now
If your growth plan for next year is spending more on ads and hoping the conversion rate ticks up, sit with the 98% number for a minute. It means 98 people showed up and nobody said a word to them. That's the number worth solving.
This is the first post on this site because it's the argument everything else here builds from. Everything I write next, whether it's about zero-party data, WhatsApp versus email, or what to ask a customer before they buy, comes back to this same point: stop fighting over the 1-2% and start talking to the other 98.
If you want to see where that gap is costing you specifically, that's what the Conversation Audit is for: a straight, written read on where your traffic is leaking and what a real conversation layer would recover.