What does a CRO agency deliver?
A CRO agency delivers a conversion program on a monthly retainer: an initial audit, user research such as interviews and usability sessions, hypotheses, designed variants, test builds in the store's testing tool, and a reporting cadence. Good agencies bring research skill, design capacity and pattern knowledge from many stores, and they can build a testing culture where a store had none.
The scope is the retainer's hours. The audit is a document from the start of the engagement; the drop-off map is not refreshed daily; and reporting practice, especially on when a test is read and how a loss is described, varies from agency to agency.
What does a Conversion FTE deliver instead?
A Conversion FTE on ftes.ai delivers ownership of the conversion function: a drop-off map refreshed daily from the store's own analytics, hypotheses ranked by revenue at stake and evidence, every experiment proposed with the previewed change, the sample-size plan and the stop rule, launched only on approval, read only at sample size, and reported with confidence intervals and losses named. It is reviewed on revenue per visitor in the Targets tab.
The function runs every day. A theme update that breaks a checkout step is in the next morning's brief; a test that reaches its sample size is read that day; the next ranked hypothesis is waiting when the current test concludes.
Where does the agency win?
The agency wins where the work is research and design. User interviews, moderated usability sessions, a redesigned product-page template with real craft, and the judgment of a strategist who has seen a hundred stores: those are agency jobs, and a Digital FTE does not replace them. The Conversion FTE proposes variants within the design system it is given and reads evidence the store already produces; it does not interview customers.
The agency also wins for a store with very low traffic, where valid tests take months and the better investment is qualitative research and a considered redesign, honestly labelled as such.
Where does the Conversion FTE win?
The Conversion FTE wins on continuity, discipline and honesty. On continuity: the funnel is watched daily, not audited once. On discipline: every test has a sample-size plan and a stop rule set before launch, and nothing is read early, whatever the interim numbers look like. On honesty: a loss is reported as a loss, no result is annualized, and price and checkout changes are always gated so no test quietly becomes a pricing decision.
It also wins on the record. Every experiment carries who approved it, the preview, the plan and the result, so a store can answer what was tested, when, and what happened.
How do the costs compare honestly?
The costs are on different units. An agency retainer is a fixed monthly fee for hours and deliverables. A Conversion FTE is metered in tokens from the organization wallet on ftes.ai, shared with any other roles the store runs, with a visible balance and a hard stop at zero. The store pays for work done and can see the spend per experiment.
Which is cheaper depends on traffic, test velocity and how much research the store needs. For a store with the traffic to run tests continuously, daily ownership usually costs less per valid result; for a store that needs research and redesign more than tests, the retainer may. Neither vendor should claim otherwise without the store's numbers.
What is the strongest pattern for a store?
The strongest pattern is both, with a clear split. The agency or the in-house designer does the research and builds the design system and the flagship templates; those become the assets the Conversion FTE proposes variants within. The FTE then owns the daily function: the map, the ranked queue, the proposals, the disciplined reading, the honest monthly review. The owner approves each test and keeps every pricing and checkout decision.
That split keeps research and design with people and daily operation with the Digital FTE, which is the division every ftes.ai role is built on.