Our Place is known for making cookware that people actually want to look at. Their products, including the Always Pan, have built a strong following among home cooks who care about both function and design. The brand operates on Shopify Plus and runs a digital product team that owns the site experience end to end.
The digital product team at Our Place is small and deliberate. They work closely with engineering, manage the experimentation roadmap, and filter requests from stakeholders across the business. Their primary goal is straightforward: grow revenue per session, treating it as a more complete picture of site performance than conversion rate alone.
For over two years, Our Place ran A/B testing on Optimizely. The platform worked, but it was more than they needed. The feature set was built for large enterprise organizations, and the price reflected that. When their co-CEO surfaced Shoplift as an alternative, the team evaluated it against what they actually used and found a closer fit.
The move to a Shopify-native approach
The appeal of Shoplift was not primarily about cost, though that was part of the conversation. What mattered more was how the platform integrates with Shopify. Our Place had been doing meaningful CRO work for years and had a clear sense of what they needed. Theme and template testing, which Shoplift handles natively inside Shopify rather than through a JavaScript overlay, aligned with how their team actually operates.
For a brand that runs a small engineering team with real bandwidth constraints, reducing the overhead of standing up and maintaining tests was a meaningful operational improvement.
How they use Shoplift today
The Our Place experimentation roadmap runs continuously. There is always at least one test active, and the backlog extends well into H1. The team uses Shoplift across three main use cases.
Theme and UI testing. When the team wants to evaluate a new page layout, product detail page treatment, or site-wide UI change, they set it up as a theme test. This gives them a clean comparison between experiences without affecting the production site until a decision is made.
Third-party vendor validation. This is one of the more sophisticated ways the team deploys Shoplift. When evaluating a new app partner, they use A/B testing to validate the vendor's performance claims before committing. Rather than taking a sales pitch at face value, they run the vendor's experience against a control variant and measure the impact on their KPIs. It's a systematic approach to vendor due diligence that reduces the risk of adopting technology that does not perform as promised.
New feature and product launch de-risking. Before rolling out a new feature or product page treatment, the team uses testing to answer a basic but important question: does this do harm? If a test shows no negative impact on core metrics, and the directional signal looks good, they proceed with confidence. The ability to bring that data to leadership and cross-functional stakeholders has made the digital product team's decisions more defensible.
Measuring what matters
Our Place tracks revenue per session as their primary KPI. It tells a broader story than conversion rate, which can move based on traffic mix rather than actual site improvements. Secondary metrics include conversion rate, AOV, click-through rate, and add-to-cart rate.
Over roughly 11 months from April 2025 through March 2026, revenue per session grew approximately 34%. The team attributes this growth primarily to a focused merchandising strategy centered on bundles, using testing to de-risk and validate decisions along the way through a series of coordinated tests.
The team's approach is not to expect a single test to move the business, but to use systematic experimentation to make better decisions consistently over time. Not every test reaches statistical significance within a comfortable window. When significance requires more time than the business cycle allows, they use directionality to inform decisions and support the testing process, rather than waiting indefinitely or calling results they cannot support.
What a mature testing program looks like in practice
The Our Place team would characterize their program as disciplined and consistent. They have an active backlog and would run more tests concurrently if the traffic volume supported it.
What they have built is a program where experimentation is woven into how decisions get made, how new features get launched, and how vendor relationships get evaluated. Testing is not a separate function; it is how the digital product team works.
For brands thinking about what a mature Shopify CRO program looks like, Our Place is a useful reference point. The discipline is in the process, not the outcome of any single experiment.
