eCommerce growth agency
We build ecommerce sites that leave you with better problems
We’re an Adobe Commerce, Magento and Shopify agency for brands doing £2m or more online, mostly selling home and garden, lifestyle, sports and fitness, fashion, health and beauty or pet products. Usually there’s an ecommerce manager or director who owns the number and wants a specialist alongside them rather than more headcount. We work with brands all over the UK, and if you’d rather sit in a room than on a call, we’re an ecommerce agency in Manchester right next to Piccadilly station.
We rebuilt Reliant’s frontend on Hyvä and turnover went up 141%. Within months they were hiring a merchandiser and an SEO manager to keep up, and they’ve been talking about a new warehouse ever since.
Getting there usually starts with speed. Most agencies treat it as housekeeping, but we treat it as the first conversion win, because until your site is fast, every test you run and every pound you spend on ads is landing on slow pages.
Most projects start with an NNP Workshop. If you’d rather have a look on your own first, run the free review. It reads your site the way a first-time visitor would and tells you what’s costing you orders, and it takes about a minute.
Recognised by the industry
What will be your
next nice problem?
What will be your
next nice problem?
Success Stories
Reliant
Hyvä front-end rebuild for UK based technology retailer
Helmet City
Magento 2 Hyvä rebuild with retained CRO & search optimisation
Robinsons of Bawtry
Migration from Aero Commerce to Shopify with ongoing CRO
AutoID
Retained CRO, metadata recovery & navigation rebuild on Shopify Plus.
Our Process
Talk first. Fix fast.
We start with the NNP Workshop. We go through your site and your data, then send you a video walkthrough of what’s costing you orders and what to fix first.
Build it right, build it fast.
Design, UX and development sit in one team, so nothing gets lost in a handover. We pick the platform that fits how you sell, and if the one you’re on is fine, we’ll say so. Whatever we build loads fast from day one.
Optimise what’s live
Launch is where the testing starts. We keep shaving load time and fixing what the data shows, which is how Helmet City got another 9% on conversion after their Hyvä rebuild.
Stick around for the growth.
We stay on after launch for the updates, the fixes and the next round of decisions. Three weeks after Robinsons of Bawtry went live on Shopify they had more orders than they could keep up with, and pushed back their next meeting with us (the best reason anyone’s ever cancelled on us).
How can we help?
The NNP Workshop: findings you'll actually use.
The NNP Workshop is a paid audit of your ecommerce site, and it’s where most of our projects start. We go through your site, your analytics and your customer journey, find what’s costing you orders, and send you a video walkthrough (not a 40-page PDF) of what to fix and in what order.
We watch session recordings to see where people drop out, check speed and Core Web Vitals on a phone as well as a desktop, and benchmark you against the competitors your customers are comparing you with. Every recommendation comes with an estimated return, so you know which fixes pay for themselves first. Most clients come away with three or four quick wins they can put live straight away.
It starts from £3,200. If you go on to work with us, we take half the fee off the project, whether that’s a CRO sprint, a rebuild or a full replatform. If you’re planning a replatform or a big investment and want the whole picture first, the NNP Audit goes further, with working sessions alongside your team, from £8,800.
You’ll find out whether the problem is the platform, the build or the journey before you spend anything fixing it. If you don’t need a new site, it’ll say so. You keep the plan either way.
Magento 2 & Adobe
Magento 2 is an open-source ecommerce platform for brands that have outgrown simpler ones: big catalogues, complicated pricing, and trade and retail customers on one site. Adobe Commerce is Adobe’s licensed version, with B2B tools, content staging and Adobe’s own cloud hosting on top. We’re an Adobe Commerce Bronze Partner and build on both.
We build new stores, migrate brands off Magento 1 and other platforms, set up B2B with trade accounts and customer-specific pricing, and look after sites on Adobe Commerce Cloud. Once you’re live we keep the platform patched and secure, which on Magento is a job that never really finishes.
Our lead developer is Adobe-certified, and we’ve been building on Hyvä since it launched. If your store needs fixing rather than replacing, we’ll tell you, and if you’d genuinely be better off on Shopify, we’ll say that too.
Stay on Magento Open Source if your catalogue and pricing fit what it does out of the box and you’d rather not pay a licence. Look at Adobe Commerce when you need its B2B tools, content staging or Adobe’s managed cloud, and the licence costs less than building those yourself. We’ll tell you which before you pay for either.
Hyvä Partners
Hyvä is a frontend theme for Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce that replaces Magento’s standard Luma frontend with a much lighter one, so pages load faster and changes take less development time. It’s the first thing we look at on any Magento store that’s slow (and most of them are). We’re a Hyvä Silver Partner.
A Luma page loads over 200 JavaScript and CSS files, somewhere between 1.5 and 2MB of them. Hyvä gets that down to two files and about 0.2MB. It’s built on Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js, which are far simpler to work with, so changes take your developers less time as well.
We moved Willow & Hall from Magento 1 to Magento 2 on Hyvä. The site got 80% faster, sales went up 15%, and the daily firefighting over stock stopped, so the team finally had time to spend on growing the business.
You don’t have to rebuild the whole site to get there. We audit your extensions first, keep the ones that work, and replace or drop the ones without a Hyvä-compatible version.
Shopify Development
Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform for brands that want to move quickly without running servers or waiting on a development queue. Shopify Plus adds more storefronts, a customisable checkout, B2B and automation for brands doing serious volume. We’re a Shopify Select Partner and handle new builds, migrations and ongoing CRO.
Most of our Shopify work starts on another platform. When we migrate you to Shopify we bring your products, customers and order history across, redirect your old URLs so you keep your rankings, and reconnect the integrations you rely on. And we learn how you trade before we build anything around it.
Standard Shopify covers more than most brands expect. Plus starts paying for itself when you need more than one storefront, a checkout you can change, B2B pricing or automation that saves your team hours every week. Most brands move to Plus either too early or too late, and if you’re not going to use what it adds, we’ll tell you to stay where you are.
A lot of slow Shopify stores are slow because of their apps. We go through the ones you’re paying for, cut the ones doing nothing, and build into the theme where you don’t need an app at all.
CRO
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the work of getting more of the people who already visit your site to buy, and to spend more when they do. We look at everything from the ad click to the confirmation page in GA4, Hotjar and your own data, fix the friction in the journey and the checkout, and test the changes properly.
On a retainer we run a full CRO audit every three months. We build a plan for the quarter and work through it one priority at a time, measuring each change before we move on. On Magento that’s often the checkout and how people find their way round a big catalogue. On Shopify it’s more often templates, navigation and the mobile experience.
The Skirting Board Shop‘s conversion went up 51% across their Hyvä rebuild and our CRO retainer, and new visitors went up 670%. Once that’s working you stop asking why nobody’s buying and start deciding where the extra margin goes.
Tested before and nothing moved? The site was usually too slow or too broken for a test to show anything. We fix the foundations first.
Ongoing Support
Ecommerce support and maintenance means someone keeps your site patched, secure and moving while your team gets on with trading. We apply platform and security updates, keep you on the right side of PCI-DSS and GDPR, keep your integrations and extensions running, and work through the improvements on your list, on Magento, Adobe Commerce, Hyvä and Shopify.
You get a dedicated account manager and the same team every month, so nobody has to learn your business twice. Retainers run on fortnightly calls, a full CRO audit every three months and a plan for the quarter ahead. Every build comes with CMS training too, so your team can swap a banner without raising a ticket.
Every retainer starts with a full audit and a roadmap of what to fix first, so the hours go on what moves your numbers. You know the time and cost of a task before we start it. On anything complex we spend an hour investigating, then come back with a plan and an estimate, so there’s no surprise bill at the end of the month.
You’re not tied to a fixed size. We review every retainer each quarter, so you can scale up for a big project and back down when it’s done.
We’re certified where it counts
We’re an Adobe Commerce Bronze Partner, a Hyvä Silver Partner and a Shopify Select Partner.







What our clients say
"What impressed us most was how quickly Actuate identified the root cause. Within the first call they'd spotted the metadata issue that had been tanking our traffic. Everything that followed has been just as sharp."
I like working with Actuate because they care about what they do, they clarify the detail to get the job done right. They have worked incredibly hard with our complex needs and have been on hand for help and advice every step along the way...
Without Actuate's help and support, our original website wouldn’t have succeeded. Time was of the essence, and Actuate stepped in to deliver a swift turnaround. The new site has performed exceptionally well ever since. We continue to grow thanks to Actuate. ❤️ Thanks guys!”
Their team leverages their expertise to provide sound opinions and advice to guide the project in the right direction.
I worked with Actuate on the redevelopment of the Pickett London website. Their team is an excellent asset for any company or team, it was a pleasure to work with them - easy to communicate with, easy to reach and always willing to help.
Working with Actuate is a pleasure — they are really trying to help, they listen and offer solutions to solve the problems. Thanks for all your help so far.
We've worked with Actuate for several years and the results have been consistent. Conversion rate up 113%, AOV up, bounce rate down. They know our business inside out, and it shows.
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