How Fishwife Grew Revenue Per Visitor by 25% While Its Ecommerce Traffic Tripled

A Brand Expanding Faster Than Its Testing Setup

Fishwife has become one of the more recognizable names in the DTC food space, stocking shelves at leading grocery chains and big box stores while building a loyal direct customer base online. E-commerce accounts for a significant portion of their revenue blend, and the site has to work for a wide range of visitors: someone discovering the brand for the first time, someone who's bought at retail and is now shopping online, and a repeat customer looking for what's new.

For most of Fishwife's early growth, that site had been managed with only minimal systematic A/B testing. When Anna Parmelee joined as Head of Growth just over a year ago, one of her first priorities was building a CRO program from scratch.

"There wasn't a lot of rigorous A/B testing going into it yet," she recalled.

The first couple of months went toward digging into traffic data and mapping which pages deserved attention first. From that emerged a strategy of targeting fewer, bigger tests rather than a high volume of small tweaks. For a brand growing massively year over year, the signal had to be worth the investment.

Why They Needed a Tool Built for Shopify

Fishwife started their testing program with a different testing platform. The tool was familiar to Anna and therefore a logical place to start, but it soon proved too "general purpose" and began creating friction for the fast-moving Fishwife ecom team.

"In theory it's supposed to be this very easy way to do quick testing, like moving a section up or tweaking a PDP layout, but I found it often created challenges," Anna explained.

Page-level redesigns and layout changes require reliable, native execution on Shopify, and the team was building workarounds just to get their first tests live. When Anna shared that frustration with their agency on/Sight (Shopify Premier Partner) and they recommended moving to Shoplift.

The switch addressed the core problem. Shoplift is purpose-built for Shopify, and the interface gave the team what they needed: the ability to set up meaningful tests in a familiar environment, break results down by segment, and make decisions based on what the data actually showed.

A Testing Roadmap Built Around the Business Calendar

Fishwife's testing program runs on a six-month roadmap, revisited at the halfway point when Q4 planning starts to come into focus. Revenue per visitor has anchored the program from the start, not because it's the default, but because it reflects how the site actually functions. Each test is also read against a primary and secondary focus; currently conversion rate in the lead, with average order value behind it.

"The main function of the website is still revenue," Anna said. "We have 15 or 16 SKUs and there's no retailer that's going to have all of those. The site serves as a home for people who want to try something that's not available wherever they shop."

The team watches the full suite of metrics when calling a test, with a critical eye toward which signals can mislead. In a recent accordion vs. slider test on the PDP, engagement was strong for one variant, but revenue told a different story, and the variant they shipped delivered a 5.8% lift in revenue per visitor. That kind of interpretation shapes how results are used, not just recorded.

The Result That Defines the Year

In 2025 and early 2026 Fishwife saw sessions grow between 77% and 171% year over year. Growth like that normally dilutes conversion, because each new wave of visitors arrives with lower intent than the last. Holding conversion flat through a traffic surge would be a win. Fishwife grew it every single quarter.

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Conversion climbed against every quarter's traffic surge. Even the steepest increase still carried a 6.9% conversion gain, and as the growth rate settled through Q1 and Q2, the conversion gains widened. Revenue per visitor accelerated at the same time, from +7.9% to +19.1% to +24.9%, the driver being conversion, not discounts and sales. Orders per session rose 18.5% in Q1 and 18.7% in Q2, with average order value static in Q1 and up 5.4% in Q2. The site is converting more of its visitors, and doing it while volume expands. 

"Fishwife's traffic grew 77 to 171% year over year and conversion went up every quarter. That's rare — traffic scaling that fast usually pulls conversion down. Keeping the site converting as the brand scales is the job, and we've done that with the right tools and approach to CRO. Shoplift's support has been crucial to this performance." — Diego Castro, STRATEGIST — on/Sight (Shopify Premier Partner).

The Tests That Moved the Business

Mobile PDP: Lift Where the Traffic Lives

The program started on the product page, because that's where high-intent traffic lands for Fishwife. The first major test, a full redesign of the PDP run from June to August 2025, moved mobile add-to-cart up 11.2% while desktop stayed roughly flat.

For a site where the majority of traffic is mobile, that segmented result did two jobs at once: it delivered lift on the page where high-intent customers spend the most time, and it told the team exactly where to keep pushing. Subsequent tests refined the desktop variant and established a stable baseline.

"The breakdowns are just so intuitive and easy to navigate in the interface," Anna said. "When I call a test, I can immediately dig into: what's happening by traffic source, by desktop versus mobile. What do I keep? Where do I continue testing?"

Q4 Homepage: Running Tests When the Traffic Is Actually There

Going into Q4, the team made a deliberate choice to run homepage tests during the season rather than before it. For a brand that sees a significant spike in gifting traffic during the holidays, the added throughput meant increased testing signal quality. The wins would also apply to peak volume instead of a quiet shoulder season.

The test, run September through November 2025, combined two changes aimed at helping a visitor from paid or direct traffic orient quickly: swapping bestselling products for a collections layout just below the fold, and adding a sticky header with clear navigation to gift and fish categories. The collections layout lifted clickthrough 10.1%, and the sticky navigation drove an 8.9% gain in revenue per visitor. All this during a quarter where Fishwife saw sessions increase 170% year over year.

"Q4 is a really critical time for us. We get so much increased traffic, a lot of people coming in for gifting. The combination of those changes drove some really nice lift at a very early stage in the funnel," Anna said.

Using Analytics to Prioritize What to Test Next

Part of what shapes Fishwife's roadmap is how they use Shoplift's analytics to understand where new customer traffic is actually landing. Breaking results down by channel, direct visitors behave differently from paid social arrivals, and seeing those segments side by side shapes both test interpretation and future prioritization.

That analysis surfaced a clear picture of which pages matter most. The homepage leads, followed by a handful of specific, top-selling products. Three of the top five landing pages are products that disproportionately attract new customers.

That insight produced one of the program's biggest recent wins: an alternate landing experience for the Fly By Jing collaboration, built to work more like a homepage for someone encountering the brand for the first time, which lifted revenue per visitor 24.5%.

Stacking from Here

After a year of major page overhauls, the foundational work is done, and the focus has shifted to compounding gains on the pages carrying the most traffic.

The PDP is still the center of gravity. The team built a new multi-SKU product page so Fishwife can feature their 3-packs the way the catalog is built, reworked a handful of elements off the standard template, and is testing it live now.

"We'd like to see if we can get 2-5% conversion lifts [on different tests] and stack small wins on top of each other," Anna said.

Conversion rate is hard to grow when volume expands this quickly, because each new wave of traffic is lower intent than the last. Growing it anyway, in every quarter, is the clearest sign the program is working. That's what a mature CRO program looks like at this stage of growth: not a single breakthrough test, but a site that keeps converting better even as the brand scales and a compounding record of decisions made on evidence.

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