A question that circles every founder meeting, every strategy session, every end-of-month review where the numbers didn’t quite land where you needed them to. It sounds productive. It sounds like leadership. It sounds like exactly the kind of thinking that built the business you are running today.
What more could we be doing?
More channels. More campaigns. More content. More ads. More influencers (‘what even are we doing about TikTok?!?!’). More bundles. More launches. It feels like momentum. It feels like action. But after 25 years working in ecommerce, watching brands scale and stall and sometimes collapse under the weight of their own activity, I want to make a case that this question is costing you more than you realise.
Because the honest answer, most of the time, is not more. It is better.
The brands that compound their growth are not doing more things. They are doing the same things with relentless, systematic improvement.
Why the ‘Do More’ Instinct Becomes a Growth Trap for Ecommerce Founders
I understand why founders ask the more question. It worked before. When you were starting out, doing more was the only lever you had. More products. More platforms. More effort. And it got you here. To six figures, maybe seven. To a business with real customers, real revenue, real overhead.
The skills that built the business are not always the skills that scale it. And at a certain point, adding more activity without optimising existing activity creates a very specific kind of problem: you get busier without getting better. Your team stretches. Your margins thin. Your focus fractures. And all the while, underneath all that noise, the leaks in the system keep draining what you have worked so hard to fill.
- A brand spending four figures a day on paid acquisition with a checkout abandonment rate of 70% does not need more traffic. It needs better conversion.
- A brand with a beautifully curated email list and open rates that make other founders envious, but a click-to-purchase rate that barely registers, does not need more subscribers. It needs better flows.
The question is not what more we could be doing. The question is how much more impact we could create by doing what we already do better.
Why an Optimisation Mindset Beats Constant Campaign Launches in Ecommerce
What makes optimisation genuinely hard? Why do most brands default to adding rather than improving? Optimisation is not a task. It is a mindset. And like any mindset, it has to be trained.
Launching a new campaign feels like progress because you can see it. There is a brief. There is a creative. There is a go-live date. There is a result. The feedback loop is clear and the narrative is satisfying, even when the numbers are not.
Optimising an existing product page is invisible work. You change a headline. You reorder the images. You rewrite the delivery information section that nobody reads but everybody notices when it is wrong. You test. You wait. You measure. The feedback loop is slower, the narrative is quieter, and the win looks smaller when it arrives.
Except it is not smaller. It compounds.
A 3% improvement in conversion rate across every product page in your catalogue, compounding week after week as your traffic grows, is worth more in twelve months than most campaign launches you will run this year. The improvement does not reset when the campaign ends. It does not require renewed budget to maintain. It just keeps working.
Optimisation creates assets. Campaigns rent attention. Only one of those compounds.
The Compounding Marginal Gains Principle:
How Small Improvements at Every Customer Touchpoint Compound Your Ecommerce Growth
In sports science, the idea of marginal gains became famous through British cycling. The theory is simple: if you improve every element of performance by one percent, the cumulative gain is transformational. The same principle applies to ecommerce, and with similar results when applied consistently.
Think about every touchpoint in your customer journey. Your product pages. Your email welcome flow. Your post-purchase sequence. Your checkout. Your returns process. Your packaging. Your customer service response time. Your category navigation. Your search results page. Your ad creative. Your site speed.
Now ask yourself: when did you last systematically improve any of those? Not rebuild them. Not replace them. Improve them. Small, deliberate, measurable improvements based on what your customers are actually doing, not what you think they should be doing.
Most brands, when they audit this honestly, find that large parts of their customer journey have not been meaningfully optimised in months. Sometimes years. They have been maintained. They have been updated when broken. But they have not been improved with intent.
That is not a criticism. It is a reality of running a growing brand with limited resource and a founder who is being pulled in seventeen directions. But it is also an enormous opportunity, because your competitors are in exactly the same situation.
Why Someone Must Own Optimisation in Your Ecommerce Business
Here is where the mindset conversation becomes an operational one. Because even if you are convinced that optimisation thinking matters, the pressures of running a growing ecommerce brand will pull you back toward the more question within a week. The campaign needs launching. The product needs listing. The supplier needs chasing. The team needs managing.
Optimisation does not shout. It does not land in your inbox with a subject line that demands attention. It sits quietly in your analytics, in your customer feedback, in the small gaps between what your brand promises and what your customer experiences. And if nobody is listening for it, nobody will hear it.
This is why somebody needs to own the role of optimisation champion in your business. Not as a job title. As a responsibility. A standing agenda item. A monthly review that asks not what you launched but what you improved, and what evidence you have that the improvement worked.
In my own practice, and in the brands I work with closely, this looks like a structured optimisation rhythm. Every quarter, we audit the customer journey. Every month, we identify the highest-leverage improvement opportunity. Every week, we measure, iterate, and document what we learned. It is not glamorous. It is not the kind of content that goes viral. But over twelve months, it creates a compounding advantage that acquisition spend simply cannot match.
Improvement compounds. Busyness does not. The brands that win long-term build the habit of getting better, not just busier.
A Practical Example of Applying the Optimisation Mindset to an Ecommerce Brand
Let me make this concrete. Imagine you are running a supplement brand doing around half a million in annual revenue. You have a Klaviyo account with a list of 12,000 subscribers, a Shopify store with twenty product pages, and a paid social strategy that is generating acceptable ROAS but nothing transformational.
The more question leads you toward launching a new product, testing TikTok Shop, or bringing in an influencer. All of which might be the right call. But before any of that, the optimisation question asks something different.
What is the open rate on your welcome flow, and when did you last rewrite it? What percentage of your product page visitors add to cart, and do you know which element is causing the drop-off? What does your post-purchase sequence say to a first-time buyer, and does it actively create the conditions for a second order? What is your average time between first and second purchase, and what would happen to your revenue if you reduced that by two weeks?
These are not theoretical questions. They are the questions that, when answered systematically, build a brand that grows not because it is doing more but because every element of what it already does is working harder.
The more question will always have an answer. There is always another channel, another campaign, another tactic. But the optimisation question has a finite and very valuable answer: here is exactly where our biggest untapped opportunity sits, and here is what we are going to do about it this month.
How to Start Shifting from ‘Do More’ to an Optimisation Mindset in Ecommerce
If any of this resonates, I want to offer you a practical starting point. Not a framework with seventeen steps. Just three questions to bring into your next review session.
First: what is the single touchpoint in our customer journey that, if we improved it by ten percent, would have the greatest impact on revenue? Not a new touchpoint. An existing one.
Second: do we have a named person whose responsibility it is to improve that touchpoint, with a clear measure of success and a deadline?
Third: when we improve it, how will we document what we learned, so that the next improvement builds on this one?
That is the beginning of an optimisation mindset. And over time, it becomes the habit that separates brands that grow with intention from brands that grow with chaos.
This article is part of The Optimisation Mindset, a series for ecommerce founders who want to build sustainable growth through systematic improvement.
Written By:
