Today, I’m thrilled to announce a new text on how to get started with design for your store. It’s called Store Design, and it’s out now.

You are never “done” designing your store. There’s always new customer insights to gather, new things to fix, new issues to uncover. This is the most exciting part of design! Once you’re done fixing all the low-hanging fruit, that’s when your job gets really interesting.

At the same time, we’ve found that most people don’t know how to peel back these layers. They think design is just the surface layer of the store. Maybe more sophisticated store owners think design is the layout of the buy box, or the placement & treatment of upsells.

We take a more expansive view of design – because after a decade of hands-on experience, we’ve come to realize that “design” is often the right answer to the question. Store Design gets you in the right mindset – by redefining what you think “design” is, making the case for a clear design process in any store, and providing some clear next steps for you to take.

Last week, we mentioned an improvement to teardowns for store owners. Here it is: if you’re a store owner, buying a teardown also gets you a half-hour strategy call for free. That also means: if you buy a teardown on behalf of a store owner, they get a half-hour strategy call for free.

That’s it. Please clap.

This week, for paid members

For those of you who subscribed because I wrote about a sandwich eight years ago, I have written about a sandwich again. You may wish to subscribe to text to read it.

On the Draft front, we’re improving our teardowns. More on that shortly. Reply if you’re interested in being a beta tester.

This week, for paid members

This week, for paid members

• Our paid lesson takes a brief shift away from mindset issues and talks about segmentation. How do you figure out what segments are likely to have an impact on your conversion strategy, and how can you thoughtfully research for them?
• And our design of the week discusses the weirdest use case we’ve ever seen on a product detail page.

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for clean beauty brand Elate.
• Our design of the week is all about an, uh, interesting link target from a home page masthead.
• This week’s paid lesson discusses when & how to resource for new initiatives. What does communication look like? How about turnaround? What would a home run look like when hiring for your business?

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

I’d like to thank everyone for their interest in our relaunch of Draft Revise. In the process of sifting through questions, I realized that I put together something over our holiday break, but I never posted it here.

We think a lot about optimization maturity here at Draft. Optimization maturity is the level of experience, sophistication, and process that you have with researching customers, careful experimentation, and revenue recapture.

Your familiarity with optimization dictates our ability to execute. And it also affects the sort of consultative education that we need to do on a day-to-day basis. We put together a spreadsheet that shows how optimization maturity progresses over time, and you can download it for free here.

We tend to find that organizations improve in their maturity by the time we’re done working with them, but only in a linear basis: they increase in maturity in a predictable fashion, moving from one set of expectations to the next.

Early spring is the right time to begin optimizing your store. We’ve been saying so for 8 years now. So it’s probably not a surprise that spring is when we always do our big launches.

We have one thing left that we’d like to talk about today: Draft Revise.

Draft Revise is our flagship consulting service, operating continuously since August of 2012. Slowly but surely, Draft Revise has evolved into what you see now: a research-first, design-driven optimization practice, proven to get results.

The constraints

The subject line pretty much says it, yes? Enrollment wraps up for these two courses at 5pm CDT today:

• Draft Analysis
• Ecommerce Email Mastery

Don't sleep! Ping us if you have any last-minute questions, we're around all day.

Some updates

• We cleaned up the place a little. New colors, better buttons, spicier home page, overhauled nav.
• Enrollment in Draft Plan is ongoing.
• We have 1-week turnarounds for teardowns. This is the lowest it can get, don’t sleep!
• Thanks to some updates on our merchant’s end, we now accept instant ACH payment for all of our products, as well as several major third-party payment providers. You can buy our stuff with Apple Pay now! The future!
• Due to gestures grandly, we have had to change the list of countries that we deliver our books, zines, and posters to. In short, if your country can’t accept international priority mail packages, or if delivery logistics have become too complex to reliably guarantee arrival, we aren’t going to be able to ship there for the time being. For those who still want to receive our shipments (as well as other shipments from the States), we suggest Earth Class Mail as an affordable way to accept & forward our books in the future.
• Finally, as we mentioned earlier, we’re going to be pausing sales of some of our older courses. Enroll in Ecommerce Email Mastery and Draft Analysis before 5pm CDT on Friday, April 22.

This week, for paid members

I’m deeply grateful to everyone for their interest in Draft Plan this past week. Before registration closes, I wanted to answer some questions that people have had:

What should I hope to get out of this?

Ideally, you will radically shift your work practice to embrace value-based design principles. If you’ve read our book but are stuck on the how, or you already have an existing practice but are curious how to take it to the next level, Draft Plan is for you.

What if I’m not DTC?

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Howdy! One last heads-up that teardown prices will be changing at 5pm CDT today.

As usual, we’re handling all teardowns first come, first served. Buy one now and you’ll lock in the current price.

And as always, reply to this email if you have any questions! Appreciate all of your support, now & always.

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Note: This week's letter was sent with last week's subject line. This one is fixed – sorry about the flub!

Let’s say you’re working with a store owner. Its conversion rate is, by everyone’s estimation, “bad.” So you want to improve it. What do you do?

You could read some blogs, find a roundup or two, and see what others are doing. You could find a list of “best practices.” You could rip off a competitor. You could take the advice of a trusted friend. You could look at Amazon. Amazon is full of smart people, right?