With more than a decade of experience, we've seen the power of aligning efforts among profit-centric, business analysis, iterative split testing, and practical development for sustainable growth in e-commerce. By contrast, we have also seen the tremendous waste that can occur when ownership of success across these three pillars is fractured and then further obfuscated by splitting these efforts across a suite of expensive, myopic apps.

Iterative Split Testing

Iterative, hypothesis-driven split testing is the only way to make decisions with data—but most testing programs are statistically broken.

We’ve spent over a decade designing testing strategies that balance statistical rigor with real-world marketing tradeoffs. The vast majority of testing we see when we begin an audit is fundamentally flawed—plagued by incorrect conclusions, sloppy implementation, or outright statistical malpractice.

Common problems:

• Tests stopped early due to “peeking”
• Over-segmentation that inflates noise
• Up-funnel goal metrics that don’t result in purchase behavior
• Ignorance of second-order effects on customer behavior and conditioning
• Tests treated as isolated wins instead of part of a broader strategy or insight

Without Analytics

• Testing has no context for how the business actually generates profit and focuses on surface-level metrics

Without Development

• Tests are designed without implementation in mind and only add to site complexity

Profit-centric Analytics

Separating the signal from the noise is a fundamental requirement for success. Until we understand significant and actionable differences between traffic segments and customer cohorts, in relation to our ability to scale or influence their behavior, all efforts to improve performance are simply shots in the dark.

Without Testing

• Only tells you what happened—not what to do next or what will happen when you make a change

Without Development

• There is no context for what to do if you want to affect what you’re measuring

Lean Development

If Proteus was an ice cream flavor, we'd be vanilla. We only build things that make money and have intentionally assembled our team from some of the best Shopify developers we've ever worked with. As a result, our testing strategies are designed with implementation and day-to-day operations in mind and capitalize on our expert knowledge of platform features, apps, themes, and available API functionality.

Without Testing

• Developers build for the sake of building with no idea if these efforts are actually moving the needle

Without Analytics

• Over-emphasis on “features” but not how they contribute to new customer acquisition or profit

Because our goal is to increase your revenue, and the most effective way to achieve that is to view your business as a buyer.

🧪 Mock Example // Analytics & CRO Audit ⬅️

Understanding How Your Business Generates Profit

If we were acquiring your business, one of the first things we want to look at is how your customers and the products they purchased generate profit.

• Which products have the greatest gross margin?
• Which products are the most likely to be repeat purchased?
• Are there product categories that correlate with the highest lifetime value?
• What incentives are financially feasible for us to leverage?
• How do shipping and returns fit into the equation?

Anyone not laser focused on understanding the past, present, and future answers to these questions is frankly unqualified to be running a testing program.

Understanding Your Scalable Methods of Acquisition

Similarly, we must also know where your new customers are acquired, and how much concentration risk your business has across channels, campaigns, and offers.

• How does customer lifetime profit compare against cost to acquire cross channel?
• Which sources of traffic are growing or shrinking?
• How does seasonality affect the businesses ability to acquire new customers?
• How homogenous is customer lifetime profit? (Are some cohorts negative?)
• Which channels appear to be tapped out in terms of spend?
• Which channels are we struggling to get spend to increase for?

Customers Generate Profit, Not Sessions or Even Orders

Your brand is building a relationship with a customer. That customer will generate profit for you over their lifetime with your brand. The conversion rate of sessions and average value of orders fail to capture the complex web of interactions you’ll have with your customer and says nothing about that customer’s quality.

Traditional testing software (and unfortunately most of the people using it) is overly focused on showing you wins by capturing surface level behavior—this is because running a business is harder than making UX changes and claiming victory on cherry-picked traffic segments. We’ve spent the last 10 years partnering with business owners to achieve real success through the analysis of complex behavior such as:

• Discount Conditioning
• Price Sensitivity
• Return Mitigation
• Loyalty Incentives
• Subscription & Bulk Order Lifecycle Targeting

Our Analysis and Testing software is built backwards from the insights gleaned from this enterprise-level work.

Segmenting Performance by Channel, Entry, and Offer

Websites don’t have conversion rates—acquisition channels, page types, and first-order offers do based on their stage in the customer’s journey.

This context is almost always completely lost in testing and most business analysis. Over the last decade of working with enterprise client partners, we've learned what to watch out for, how to measure it, and how to visualize it best over time to know if you're looking at an anomaly, statistical noise, or a real opportunity to capitalize on.

At best, even most expensive tools give you general targeting and analysis abilities that rely on pristine UTM parameters, event data, and product tagging that has never changed over time—which is to say they never work as you’d hoped in practice.

Testing From Where You’re Measuring

The fatal flaw of testing software is that it lives outside of where ongoing business analysis is performed. Your tests say there is impact, but you can never seem to measure performance in a way that reflects that impact back on the business.

Similarly, no one can ever seem to draw any actionable insights from their analysis software. This is because at best analytics does the job of a historian. You can measure what happened, but you have no inherent way of knowing what to do next, or what will happen when you make a change.

Our approach closes the loop by allowing us to perform business intelligence analysis, target test experiences directly to those same segments, and then report back using the exact same measurements from within the original report. For example:

• Analysis: Customers from this campaign have a repeat purchase rate that is 20% lower than the rest of our traffic from this channel.
• Test: Change the offer to require more commitment from the customer and evaluate trade-offs among conversion rate, first order marginal revenue, and repeat purchase rate after the test is concluded.
• Follow Up: Observe this campaign’s repeat purchase rate, using the original report, before and after the change is implemented to ensure the results hold over time.

What We Do, You Do, and You Don’t Do

We intentionally built our team to independently provide everything needed for success. While we’re genuinely excited to partner, strategize, and share the vision with you. Our goal is to create net-negative work for you and your team by reducing unnecessary workload through testing and taking on additional responsibilities where we are experts in the field.

Weekly Meetings & Ongoing Communication

Weekly meetings are 30 minutes long and on Wednesdays. These are for strategy, review of testing results, and planning the upcoming roadmap. Asynchronous communication and handoff for approvals, etc. are handled via Slack where our team is ready to jump in to answer questions or help with anything you might need.

Existing Teams and Workflows

Do you have internal designers and developers for us to collaborate with? No problem. Do you use git hub for managing your theme code? We're happy to submit full requests as necessary. You don't have any of this? No worries, we've got it. We've worked with every combination of existing teams and partners imaginable, and are flexible to feel like a natural extension of your team.

Longterm Partnership Rooted in ROI

We work with our client partners for as long as they are interested in driving important business decisions with data—which is to say practically in perpetuity. We've been working in some of our most successful partnerships for years and now have a pleasure of calling many of them friends. Because incredible ROI is at the core of what we do, our goal is to ensure confidence in the impact of our work early on and shift to guiding our client partners through important business changes like product line growth, rebrands, and growth into new channels in an ever-changing landscape.

Flat Retainer Model

We like to keep things simple. "Performance based incentives" often deteriorate into complex math to try to separate market forces, channel fluctuation, new product releases, etc., from the impact of iterative testing. This is often not aligned with the practical needs of the business and we find it as much more straightforward to set a fixed monthly retainer that gives our team the resources we need to do incredible work and ensures that the return on the investment for our client partners is shockingly easy to defend.

Our work is scoped by "testing themes" which is defined as general hypotheses and business needs that are addressed each month or quarter. This is designed to give us the flexibility to adapt to opportunities and needs as they arise.

Ongoing Fit and Scaling with Your Needs

As businesses grow so the need for additional resources to capitalize on new opportunities. Our goal is to create an engine that produces results and alleviates uncertainty to the degree that we are more often than not asked if we can increase scope to do even more.

Our work speaks for itself and so accordingly we keep our agreements on a simple ongoing 60 day out for either party to ensure incentives are aligned for a great working relationship in both directions.