Case Study: Smoke Cartel boosts page speed, search rankings, and average order value with Shopify Plus

What Selling Bongs & Being Stubborn Can Teach You About Page Speed & Average Order Value

Smoke Cartel is an online headshop that sells bongs and glassware and faced steep obstacles from day one: advertising bans on Facebook and AdWords, difficulty finding reliable payment processing, and fragile products that broke in transit. Founder Sean Geng responded by doubling down on organic search and page‑speed improvements as the primary growth channel.

The company upgraded to Shopify Plus (with SSL and consolidated global servers) to speed up pages and improve SEO, lifting CTR from 0.8% to 1.2% and earning top search rankings for key products. Smoke Cartel also added Amazon‑style product recommendations to raise average order value and used Shopify’s discount and gift‑card APIs to drive social sharing with unique coupons—changes that increased conversions and made Shopify Plus the business’s core revenue platform.

Smokecartel

Geng

Smokecartel