3.2 times the conversion rate in under a year.

The owner of a print shop in Fletcher started CanvasPrints.com in 2019 as a side business. When I came on in May 2020 it had two full-time employees, a developer and an SEO specialist, and it sold one thing: canvas prints. Sales were small and very seasonal, with a big spike at the holidays. The pandemic helped demand. The question was how many of those visitors we could turn into buyers, and what else we could sell them.

The ordering flow.

I designed the whole ordering experience: the user flow, the steps, the buttons, the layouts. I wrote the specs, designed the screens, and set the priorities, and our developer built them. We worked on photo upload, the preview tool, pricing, checkout, and page speed, all aimed at making the order simpler and faster.

The heaviest work went into file upload and the template layouts. A customer could upload a photo and see it the way it would look on the actual canvas, down to the canvas type. When someone can see what they're getting, they're more likely to buy it.

New product lines.

I added 7 product lines in 2020: triptychs (three canvases that form one image when they hang side by side), wall displays, collages, metal prints, woven blankets, fleece blankets, and custom pillows. We added them quickly, so the preview templates had to work for each new product too.

A B2B channel.

I set up white-label printing for two global print-on-demand companies, meaning CanvasPrints printed and shipped orders under their brands. I built the relationships and got the agreements signed.

This is the part I'd tell a prospect about. I ran the conversion work and the new product lines as one plan. A better ordering flow turned more visitors into buyers. New products gave those buyers more to choose from, and the same preview tool showed them each one before they paid. The result was 3.2 times the conversion rate, plus new lines that brought in 40% of 2020 holiday revenue, per the owner.

I'd make the same call for any small online store. Fix the path to checkout and add more to buy through it at the same time, because each one makes the other pay off faster. The downside is that it's a lot to run at once with a small team, and ours had one developer.

Operations grew to keep up. Between May 2020 and March 2021 the business added 3 customer service reps and grew to at least 24 print-shop staff at peak, on top of the developer and SEO specialist who were there when I started.

I left in March 2021 to be home with my family during the pandemic, and moved on to ReSource Network later that year. The white-label agreements were all signed when I left. I don't know how much of that estimated $2M was fulfilled after that.

CanvasPrints.com went on to deliver more than 1 million prints. Hurricane Helene flooded Western North Carolina in late 2024 and the company closed temporarily. Its website says it plans to reopen before Q4 2026.