Can you decide with confidence?

The last topic of the local consulting meetup I run was “Risk”.

The main insight from the meetup: the less information you have, the riskier making a decision is.

So, to reduce the risk in a decision you have to get more information on the case.

While preparing for the event, I stumbled upon two concepts from statistics — decision trees and expected value.

Trying to decide if you should hire that Shopify expert or perform the change on your website you’ve been putting off for a long while? Well, decision trees can help you. Take a look, the video is only 3 minutes long:

Running an online store, you have plenty of data. Now you could plug it into a decision tree and see the value of each of your options.

Bonus 1: How do you calculate the chance?

If you haven’t attempted that thing you are considering, in your mind, there may be a 50/50 chance. You’ll either succeed, or you won’t. If so, use that.

If you are aware that your (lack of) previous experience skews chance in one direction or the other, use your gut feeling.

Also, don’t forget to experiment with optimistic and pessimistic values of the skew.

After playing with the numbers for some time you’ll be better off than you started. You’ll know what values you are looking for, so this project becomes a success.

Bonus 2: How does more information skew chance?

This video shows how to calculate the value of using an outside consultant or not. See for yourself:

Have you considered optimizing your Shopify store for speed and conversion? If you would like to explore what would my services help you achieve, contact me here!

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!