Everyone's got Austin here from the Shopify Solutions podcast. And this week I brought in a guest. His name is Matthew Stafford. Matthew, why don't you tell us, what you do and what you know about Shopify and your expertise?

My expertise is, Shopify, CRO and, we we've termed the coin revenue optimization because we believe, basically as a store owner, your conversion may it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is how much revenue you keep and take home.

So, some of the numbers, you can find them to make them look fancy, but at the end of the at the end of the day, what you really care about is, your revenue.

Revenue and profit. Right. I like the way you said take home there. That's a really good qualifier. So, just for those who don't know, can you define the acronym CRO?

Yeah, it's conversion rate optimization. And so essentially what you're trying to do is, conduct UI and even backend tests that will, help raise your conversion rate. For example, you know, the average Shopify owner converts around 2%, which means for every 100 visitors that they get, they make two sales. And so way back early in my journey of being a Shopify shop owner, I was very good at traffic, but not really good, at understanding the data, and, and even conversion rate.

And so, when I started looking at those numbers, I thought, this doesn't make any sense. If I had 100 people come to my site that wanted what I have, because they clicked on the ad or even googled that. Why am I only converting two of them? And so instead of buying more traffic, which I was very good at, I thought, let me figure out how to get two or more of those people that laughed, to buy.

And that would double my store and the same amount of ad spend. And that would, give me the lion's share advantage over my competitors. If I could buy for four sales for what it cost, to buy two sales for, then I would be able to dominate my market. And that's really what started my journey down CRO.

Now about nine years, ten years ago.

So you threw out a couple numbers. And I know they're just examples, but I do want to ask the question. If a store is doing 2% and they haven't done a lot of on site optimization, is doubling their conversion a realistic expectation, or is that the exception?

No, I think that's very reasonable. I think the one caveat to that would be, what is their average order value? Obviously, the higher your average order value goes up, the lower your conversion rate is. And so, you know, we have stores that have a $3,000 average order value. We have some that have and their conversion rates less than 1%.

We have ones that are, you know, $160 and their conversion rate is 2.5. And that's really good. So I just it really depends. I would say typically anything under, $100 average order value, if you're not getting at least, 4% conversion rate, then you've got some work to do and, and some things that are probably broken.

It's funny because I always say that 4% is great conversion rate. And for you, that's, you know, table stakes. It sounds like

Well, it depends if it's under $100 or average order value. Yeah, for 5%. Should be for us. What we consider would be normal. Yeah.

Excellent. Now, you talked about using data in your analysis as we, you know, talk about Shopify store owners and new Shopify store owners or, you know, not not large teams, right. You know, they're not, you know, a $10 million brand. What should a Shopify store owner be setting up for data, and what should they be measuring when they first start out on this journey?

Yeah. I think the enhanced Google Analytics, is going to give you a lot of, information for sure. It'll give you enough, to start getting best practices implemented and making sure that, they're helping your site, like your most visited pages. Checking the speed time on them and, making sure that those pages are working effectively.

A lot of times people don't realize it, but they have, certain things that are broken out in those pages that making a call to a server at times out, and it creates page load errors and bunch of other things. So there's that. Also, what we used to reverse engineer as a store is basically look at your percentage of add to cart, and then the percentage of proceed to checkout and then the percentage of actual sales.

And we believe, under $100 average order value, you know, you're going to want your add to cart to be between 8 and 10%. And then, typically anything, less than a 50% drop off. We consider that, it's working well. And so essentially, if you had 100, add to cart that you would have at least 50 of them make it to proceed to checkout.

And then from there, at least 25 sales. And so those are our health metrics. We know if any of those are off, you could then go, okay, I have some issues in my cart or okay, I have some issues on my, information order page.

Now, you mentioned speed and how that does affect conversion. And you mentioned measuring it. What tool do you use to measure site speed or using search console? Using Lightspeed? What are you doing

We use Google's tools, Google, because we want, we want our signals to be good in Google because we know that when they're good, they actually give us quite a bit more organic traffic. And so, typically we'll cross-check them with some other ones. But, the ones that we actually really care about is making sure that Google approves that.

So is that inside Search Console? Do you mean

Right. It's like Google Analytics. Nope. You can go ahead and tag Google Analytics and look at your site speed and then do it per page.

I always look, I usually use the search console, a good metric. You know how many what percentage of pages are good is the way I usually make that.

certainly do that. We get a little more granular just because, I think for me, and this is for sure dealing with, stars who have smaller teams, if we make it too complicated for them, it's, they tend to not do it. So it's a good idea. And, they have every intention of doing it, but they have 80 other things on their plate that they don't have to learn, that they just have to get done.

And so sometimes that learning curve prevents them from actually taking action.

Yep. That makes sense. It's, you know, the common problem with store owners, especially small, is they they hear the thousand different things, and you know, which out of they weren't today and which things are they going to work on?

Yeah. Obviously when we first got started, we didn't work with the really large brands. And so, I still think a lot of that DNA of the small start on there, matters to me. And plus, you know, we we actually just started our own brand, a few months ago, another brand. And, so going back through those, new store, thoughts and processes and all of that, just reminds me that, it's it's easy to get, to speak above the head, of the smaller store owners and actually even forget some of the, the daily things that they're going through.

And so, I totally agree with what you're saying. They have so many things going on that sometimes it's a little difficult to, add new things on their plate.

Well. And for me. With. With my clients. Because you. I deal with mostly small stores, as I'm frequently talking them out of a great idea because, you know. Hey, we're still working on this other great idea, right? We've got this project. Let's finish this project before we move on to the next one. That is also completely valid. But, you know, we can only do so much at a time.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's very easy to have 4 or 5 ropes, 80% of, you know, lifelines, 80% of the way. And, none of them actually, producing any blood flow. And so I always say, and get the, get the money coming from one and then move on to the second one and then move on to the third one.

But only after that, you know, after the lifelines connected.

Yeah, I totally agree in doing. I'm a big fan of doing things literally one at a time. And I always tell my clients it's like by the time we're finished with this project will be so much smarter, we'll know what the next project should be and we'll be able to make better decisions about it. So.

Yeah. The one thing, that I always do with the smaller store owners is start. But we start. We start this way everywhere. But this is where it'll help the small store owners mindset as we always start at the checkout. So, any improvement that you make on the checkout means more revenue. More profit. If I fix your home page, fix your category page or any of those things, there's still 4 or 5 more steps that clients gotta go through in order to give you money.

And so if we get your check out and then your cart, functioning at a very high rate, you're going to start making more money from day one. And then every change we make on the site is going to generate more money, not just, more visitors that take action to get to the next page.

Yeah, that makes sense. Start at the bottom of the funnel and improve that conversion right there. So we've got a new store owner. Let's say. And their their first task should be driving traffic to their store. And you just said, you know, there is a point where adding more traffic isn't the problem. It's onsite conversion. So where's that threshold.

You know, do you have do you have a threshold or a rule of thumb to use? Like when do we, you know, stop optimizing or focusing on traffic acquisition and start focusing on on site experience and conversion.

I would I would say, you know, obviously the new store owners that they're typically working with smaller budgets. So, I would run a few hundred dollars worth of traffic and see what happens, look at the data, and then make some changes, and then and then do it again and do it again. That first section like, our particular store, that we're working on right now, we're about six, seven weeks into it, and now we're making, you know, about one one and a half sales a day, two sales a day.

And so it doesn't, you know, everybody thinks like, oh, man, if you know all this stuff, it's going to be amazing right from day one. Well, sometimes like it's a brand new ad account. So our daily budget is only $50. Otherwise we would be making a lot more sales. But, I would go through and make sure that you have best practices, in your store before you run a lot of traffic, because otherwise you could be getting a bunch of false negatives and thinks something's broken or you're targeting wrong, when really all it is is your stores.

That's really hard to navigate.

And I love the fact that you're honest about, you know. Hey, we've been doing this, you know, new store for six, seven weeks, and we're only getting, you know, a couple sales, like, because you're like. You're right. So many people do expect this overnight kind of thing. And it is just hard work. And it's always hard work to to build any brand.

you know, we want to be making 100 sales a day by a six month mark, eight month mark. And then from that point, we can scale, but, you know, you got to make sure all your systems and your customer service and all the different things that you deal with are in place and, and battle tested before you can just start hammering at, we've actually made the mistake of people that had a really good idea, good product, and traffic and we optimize their store and then all sudden, you know, they created customer service problems or inventory supply problems.

And so there's there's a lot of aspects, that go into this. And certainly once you get the conversion metrics at a place where you can scale, that's just the very beginning.

Yes. Yes. So you mentioned, you know, when the new stores starting out, they should, you know, put some best practices in place. What are some, some of the best practices that you've seen for Shopify stores.

I would say,

the check out, one of the things that we do is we make sure the farm fields, have the proper texts, and them. And what I mean by that is like where you ask for their email. We put email required for order confirmation, and we know that that increases our conversions. That we've tested a ton of times, you know, people can take advantage of the fact that, you know, when we run a test, we get hundreds of thousands of visitors, you know, on these tests on our stores over a week or two.

And so over time, over the last nine years, we've developed a set of best practices that works every single time for increase and one of them is, in your farm field on your checkout, putting in that text email required for order confirmation, your order confirmation emails opened 85% of the time. And so when they when you tell them that's why you need their email, and it's one that they're going to go look at.

They usually give you their best email. So we've seen that our abandoned cards actually went up. I trained in that farm field text

Because you got valid email addresses. Is that the reason?

And it's usually there. Good one I didn't go into their secondary folder that they look at once a month. The other thing that we do is where phone is we put required for shipping notifications.

Everybody wants to know and their product is shipped. We get their phone number and, SMS recovery is the number one source of income for your store. It will recover more money and generate more revenue than anything else you do. And so, by putting that there, it's helped our SMS recovery and collection much, much, you know, better.

The other thing that I would say is, a lot of people just have like this generic name for their logo and their checkout. We make sure that we upload an image so that it looks nice. It actually has a customer service phone number or email in it. Because this is a point where they're getting ready to give you money.

And so by putting that in there, putting that image in there, that is all formatted nice, just makes them feel like, oh, okay, this is professionally done or, you know, it's okay. I'm going to hit submit. Another thing that I would say to do as a new store owner is make sure that the button color in your checkout is the same as your store.

You'd be shocked at how many of them. That's not. And so what happens is they go through and they've clicked 3 or 4 buttons to get to your checkout. Now I've said, and it looks like this. It's just generic text for a logo. And at the bottom the button color is different. It feels like a different site.

And it's like, oh, I don't know. And the person doesn't even they might not even logically wonder that, but like so there's all kinds of subconscious things going on. And we've done, you know, just an enormous amount of research around that and then use those for our test ideas. And so we want trust to be one of the number one things.

And so we want everything to look very congruent from the front of the end. The other thing that I'll tell the store owners that, a lot of people get wrong, they think that the button color is important. It's not the button color that's important, it's that the button color stands out from everything else on the page.

So if your theme is black and yellow, you don't want a black or a yellow button, which is what most people end up doing. You actually want something that's totally different than anything else on the page, and the reason for that we call it the hierarchy of focus. And so what you want the person to do when they land on the page, they they need to understand the next most important action that you want them to take is a click the button.

Yeah. That makes total sense to me. I always. Well, let's take a step back here and explain a couple of things for Shopify store owners. The first one is when you're in theme customization, the checkout experience is actually customized in kind of a different place in theme customization in Shopify. And it's going to change even more with the new, checkout that's coming this summer.

But just because you do your branding and update it in your store, it doesn't mean it's done it in the checkout. You have to actually go to the checkout part of the customization and do all those branding elements.

Yeah. And then the form field language would be under languages. You go under languages and added it there. It's all, you don't need Shopify Plus for any of the things I'm talking about.

Yep, yep. And so in that language, this thing like my favorite one is to change the word or so you got the, the quick buy buttons, which I'm not a fan of the way they're right there, but we can't control that. And right below that, it says the word or. And I just add to that or use your credit card.

Right. Because it's kind of confusing to people. So you know, going in you have, you know, any word you see in the checkout, you have the ability as a store owner to go in and change that wording. So you just got to go into that languages. And it's kind of difficult sometimes to find because there's depending on you're seeing so many different text strings, but you can find them.

And then you know, make them whatever you want them to be. And true to your brand and your customer experience.

Yeah, 100%. And the words on the buttons matter, too. We always. We don't use quick buy or add to cart anywhere except for the product page. We will put add to cart, but we actually don't use Quick buy anywhere. We've never found that that actually increases conversions typically. And the way that I always introduce it to the store owners is okay, your products $80 or $100, does the customer have enough information to buy with that little snippet of information that they give you with a quick buy below it?

And they always say, no, I make. So, they're going to be afraid to buy when they don't have enough information to do that. So they're either going to go backwards or they're going to leave. That stops them from the shopping experience. What you really want to do is learn more or more options, things like that. You want to get them on to the product page where you have enough information to then sell them your product or, persuade them why it's worth the amount of money that you're asking.

You know, I always see a whole bunch of people try to sell on their home page of 100, 200, $300 items. And I'm always like, man, like you don't realize how many people are leaving because they think your products are 100, 200 and $300 and they don't know why it's worth that much money when maybe they came there thinking it was only worth 80, because that's average.

But you have a premium product, but you never get to tell your customer that because they never became a customer, because you get rid of them before they do.

I'm not in my head on, like, a dozen things you just said. And I just want to, like, go off on. On how much I agree on all of them. And. But two things I'm going to point out. One is, on the quick buy, you know, totally agree that the customer doesn't know enough and you need to, like, take them down the funnel and make them aware, you know, in too many store owners that I talked to, they're like, oh, my repeat customers.

I want to make it easy for them. And what they don't realize is 85% of their customers are not repeat customers. Or I think it's 85% of your purchasers only purchase one time. Right. And you already said it's a 2 to 4% conversion rate. So the number of repeat customers in your store in a month is minuscule. And you need to optimize your experience, not people who love your brand, but for the people that don't know your brand.

And to even think about their, their, their top 1% of their customers when they need to think about the other side of it, when their optimize their experience.

care about a quick buy button anyways. They're not going to just go up. I happen to find the product that I wanted on your home page. No. They're going to go to the search bar or they're going to click, you know, their past purchases or whatever, and then order it again. The quick buy is absolutely, it's a conversion killer.

And what I'm you know, what the store owner has to realize is, Shopify developers are not CRO specialists. Their job is to build, inventory management system or an online store catalog. Well, online store catalogs and inventory management systems convert on average about 2% or less. And so if you want 2% or less conversions, then don't, you know, don't optimize your theme for how someone actually goes through your store.

If you want 4 to 6% conversions, then, that's where the stuff that you're now talking about matters a lot. It makes a difference.

Yeah. Totally makes sense. And, you know, I, I the way I always say it is. You know, most stores just show their products and they don't make a decision engine out of their products. And too many people think about selling on their homepage. Going back to the second point, right. I really want to stress this idea that I love what you said is, you know, I'm a big believer you don't show any products on your homepage in less.

You know, news is important in your store, or you have three or less products in your store. The whole purpose of the homepage is not to people to buy, but get people to their second page where they can be more informed and more educated and make a smarter decision. And too many people just, you know, and if you're doing your store right, not many people are coming through your homepage anyways.

But I see so much focus on home pages and buying experiences where that's to me, not not the right focus.

Yeah. We say that the homepage has to two things. Trust. Like, did I land on the right page? And do they sell what I want? Like, what's your unique value proposition? And then easy navigation to what you're looking for. So you could have categories are your main money making links and you're not in your main menu.

I see a lot of people have like eight things on their main menu or 100 on these mega menus. The truth of the matter is, every time that we eliminate those and just put it into categories, their conversions go up because all of that selling on the very first page or trying to, show them everything the on, overwhelms them.

Filters. We've seen filters on $1 million a month site. They had no filters. Their new arrivals section had about 2400 products on it. As a large store, obviously. Within 12 months, we had about 5 million a month. One of the main things that helped more than anything else was search bar and then filters on their category page.

And so the moment we could get them to the filters, the people that used the filters converted that 3 to 500% higher. So, literally tripled, five x conversions. The people that used the filters to find what they were looking for, compared to an average visitor.

Yeah, that makes sense because they're. They engage people, they're actually motivated and, you know, responding

And then when you have 2400 new arrivals, when you're scrolling too wide on your phone, after 100, you're going to be like, yep, I don't see what I want. I'm gone. But if you can go, oh, I'm a size seven. And, I want blue and I want it to be a sunrise. Boom. But now you have 13 options and you can scroll through them, and you have a much better chance of buying.

Absolutely agree. Absolutely. I always say you need to get the consideration set down small enough that people can make a decision. So, so many store owners think that. And here's a real example. If you have a client, you know, talking to last week and she's got one product in five colors and she's got it as five separate products because you're trying to make her store look bigger.

And I said, you're doing a disservice to your customers. You need to combine those and use variance for the color choice so that people know that that one product comes in those five colors and they've only got, you know, it's it's roller skates she's selling. Maybe you only have, let's say, ten roller skate sets. You know, you know, choices.

That's an easier one to make than 105 to choose from on the landing page.

have the one with the variant and then do, like, a bundle. Like pick three or pick two and get a savings. As a separate product, but that. Yeah, I 100% agree with you. Paradox of choice is actually another thing that we've realized. Hurts conversions. So the more colors that you offer, typically hurts conversions.

So if you have a one product that has 13 colors of a t shirt, we know for a fact that we can get it down to 3 or 4. That will double or triple the conversion of that t shirt. Just by not having so many colors. And so that paradox of choice, they're like, oh, well, I like this shade of pink and that shade of pink and oh, and this red one.

And, I like that one too. I'm going to come back later and decide, when I'm not at work or when I'm not, you know, busy, and then you're going to end up paying that person to click on your ad 3 or 4 times, before they make a decision. And now that sale that probably would have been profitable on day one is now no longer profitable.

And it might be one of the 85% of people that only buy once, not the 15% that buy two, three, four times. And so typically we know for a fact, literally have never had it test wrong. Eliminating colors has never hurt the conversion rate of the product.

Yeah. If someone likes blue and you only have one blue, they buy it. If you have six blues now, they have to choose which one they like the best. And I always say any decision you make your customers make is going to decrease your conversion. So now now you've made them choose which of the blues they like. And that's going to decrease your conversion.

Yeah. Before I got into the optimization side, when I was just running ads, I sold t shirts for about three years before I started building Shopify site, and then I sold about $15 million for the t shirts. And so, I created chart of, like, what are the highest converting colors, highest converting fit? And, cut, whether it's a V-neck or, crewneck or long sleeve, short sleeve, unisex, etc..

And, we know dark colors always sell more than lighter colors, unless it's a heather gray. So heather gray sells a lot, depending on the style of the shirt. But otherwise, like Navy's reds, black will always be the top sellers.

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everybody looks at Amazon. Right. And and that's you know obviously the number one e-commerce platform on the planet. But it's also the worst shopping experience on the planet. You go you go there to buy a spatula and it takes you 45 minutes to buy a $12 spatula.

That is not a good shopping experience.

Yeah. Shopify is, very natural. Amazon people go there with buying intent. They're not going there to look at a whole bunch of things and decide what they want. They go there to get a particular product. And so, it's a totally different scenario than it is when you pay interruption marketing to interrupt someone to go look at your stuff.

People don't Google spatula, find your Shopify site, then go on there and pick from your two choices. When they Google spatula and and Google. Amazon's coming up.

Yeah. And the other thing that you know, that the best practices and you've kind of alluded to it a couple of times that exist out there in the internet, that everybody's so focused on. And I know it's not what you need to think about. They're always thinking about how many clicks they are to the cart. And what I tell them is you need to be exactly as many clicks as it is to make the customer have confidence in their purchase, because too many people are focused on moving that button up like you're saying they're selling products on the homepage, or they've got quick buy on the collection page because they're going to be two clicks

to cart. And I'm like, that's a best practice that works for stores that are selling one product on a landing page, and that's all they're selling, but not in a Shopify store or the full catalog of products.

Yeah. It's always the next most important action. So we we are very specific about see more, learn more, more options as you get them to, product page. And it is add to cart. It's not anything else. Not quick buy. It's not PayPal. It's none of those. It's add to cart when you get in the car, then it's proceed to checkout.

And then when you get to the checkout it's continue to shopping and then proceed to payment. And then you know, by now or by and that's literally what we do. We take them through the micro decisions. What the next action on the next page is going to be. Not it's a you're not buying until you get to you've already entered all your information, you've chose your shipping, you've added your credit card, then you're buying.

Before that you have a whole bunch of other steps that you're doing. And so if you take them through those really, really gently and and literally the micro commitments, you'll be shocked at how much that changes how far people get, compared to quick buy or get Buy now or any of those things because they're not actually ready for that.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I like the way, you know, you're saying, you know, step at a time. You had a word for it. I forget what it was, but it was like. It was. It just clicked. It's like you said. Like they're making one decision. Just the next decision. The next decision kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. Micro commitment.

commitments that I like that.

Now on you know, we talked about the checkout. We talked about the home page. Let's move up from the checkout. Are there any best practices that you see in the cart, in the shopping experience that people need to think about?

Yeah. Too many people are trying to sell add on products, that are not, no brainers. And so when you do that, if the person has to click on it or to leave the cart to go, look at that product, you've literally just stopped a buying decision and made them a browser again. And, people don't realize, yes, your average order value will go up a little bit because you're making less sales, but you're adding, some upsell items and then you're, you're actually getting less sales.

Even though your average order value went up, you're getting less sales. And so for us,

every time we've tested it, you're not actually winning downstream. You're losing. You have less people to market to less. Number of sales to less people on your mailing list, all of those things. So for us, we consider I mean, we actually even created an app for it, where it'll allow them to add things on their product page, into the cart, but not once you're in your cart.

The only one that we've ever seen that tested really, really well is a big brand that we deliver called Choose Muse, which is, meditation device, and it's a $280 device. The only upsell that they have in the cart is add a case. The case is like $29 and it's an 80% take rate. So it's a no brainer.

I don't have to go, oh, I need to go look at this case for this $280 head piece I just bought. That's $29. No, I want to protect it. I'm going to get it. And you can see it's, you know, the shape of the thing. So it, like, fits in it. It's it's done really well. You don't have to think about it.

You don't have to leave the page to make the decision. And so things like that are the only upsells on the cart. So that I would ever recommend.

So keep the cart cleaner. India. Have you seen a preference on what type of cart? You know, it's a

Yeah. The side side for sure. Works better than anything else we've ever tested.

Side slide.

Yeah. So where it slides in from the side ads. Yeah. That works. Much, much, much better than anything else we've ever tested.

Usually when I see that you have to scroll to get to the add to cart button, do you have it like permanently at the top or to the proceed to checkout button? Do you have

While that's the only way you would have, you would not see the proceed to checkout in hours as if you had multiple items in there.

Yep.

So you do still have it at the bottom when they scroll to get to it.

No, they don't have to scroll. It's usually going to show because you just have, at the at the time you have one, one item in there, which is what probably again, you go back to, how many people buy two or more items. Probably less than 10%. And so you're going to have one item, plus your proceed to checkout.

Now, I have a lot of clients who are very concerned about the. Once someone is added some to the cart, they wanted to continue shopping. So the promoting things, when they're in the cart or, you know, you know, the continue shopping experience. Is that an important one? Because I heard you just say it's actually not. I want to confirm that again.

No. You definitely want, them to see the continuous shopping button. Actually, it's a link. We don't do it as a button. We do it as a link. And then, proceed to check out as a button. Yeah. You got to give them a way to exit out of the cart in order to. If they do want to keep shopping, you want to make it easy for them to do that?

But you don't. That's not the next most important action. The next most important action is complete the sale, and it's off for us in that cart, there'll be a link that says continuous shopping, and there'll be a button, that stands out from everything else that says proceed to checkout.

Yep. And then if we move up from that on the funnel now, or to the to what I think is the most important page is just the product page. I'm sure you have, you know, hundreds of ideas and suggestions there. What what are some of the key ones that are frequently missed?

I would say, a lot of times people have big walls of text. We talk about their shipping and talking about, you know, materials. Return policies, all those different things. We know for a fact that, like progressive disclosure or tabs, convert much higher, and it's because you're not forcing the person to read all of the stuff to find the answers to the questions that they're looking for.

If shipping is important to them, then go right to the shipping tab. If, the materials is important, then go right to other materials. And so, being very careful how you, describe everything, make it scannable. Give them all the information, but make it where they can browse through it very quickly and pick out what they're looking for.

But the other thing is, and everyone should know this, high quality images, matter. And then the other thing is, a lot of times, the issues we see is people have way too many thumbnails. And so that creates a whole bunch of clicking, without adding a whole lot of value. And so we always say like pick the ones that add value.

And then maybe a lifestyle shot and that's good. Like you don't need eight images to show them a red sweater. It's a red sweater. Show it on someone front back. And that's it. Otherwise what happens is people do a whole bunch of clicking and they actually get frustrated, especially on mobile, which is now 85, 85 to 90% of your traffic to start with.

And they leave.

I see stories because, you know, product photography is expensive. So you spend a whole bunch of money in the photo shoot. Like, at for all my photos. Like, know that that 15 degree angle change you just did doesn't really help much.

Now, only if they provide value. And so, yeah, if you really think you need more photos, take one of them. That's really good. And turn it into an infographic. But like what the hem is and what the material is, and, you know, the length or all the different things that make that, particular piece, unique. And then that adds value and helps people make a buying decision.

Now, do you see the infographic in the thumbnails, or does that

yeah. And, we'll actually put it in several places. So, damaging admission. When we first started, when we would find a win, we'd be like, oh, great, that one that. Let's go find something else. And what we realized was, anytime that we have a winning test, a win is a win. And that leaves clues.

And so now we take that win and we place it multiple other places on the page, one at a time. But, we keep doing it until we no longer get any lift. And so then it becomes a diminishing return. Then we go on to the next test. So a lot of times, like infographics can be on your page in 2 or 3 spots, and every single time, it will increase conversions because not everybody goes through your site exactly the same.

And do you see video helpful with the product page?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Video sales.

And what kind of video would that be? Is it more of a demo of the product or is it someone explaining how to use it?

Both. It just depends. You know, some products take education, some, you know, they want to see the look and feel. Could be an unboxing video, but yeah, videos. Those thumbnails get clicked on a lot. And if they're done well, they convert a much higher than the normal thumbnail.

So what I'm hearing is a content heavy product page from you, but one designed so that people with different attitudes or the way they consume content can quickly find, you know, I like videos or

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, you've nailed it. That's exactly what I mean.

Excellent. Excellent. And then we've already talked about, you know, up the funnel from that on collection pages. You mentioned how important filters are in a search experience. Is there anything else in the collection page that we didn't cover there?

No, really? Really. A collection page is, a filter in itself. Depending on how many products you have. Adding the filters down the side matter a lot. Otherwise, what we do is, on the homepage, we make sure that search is actually on every page all the way until you get to the cart. We make sure that search is top centered as a page.

Accessible for people, because we know that the people that use search, typically convert twice as high, if not a little bit more, and they're worth double the value of a, of an average visitor. And so, we want as many people to use search as possible.

Does that mean you put a search bar inside of the header?

Yes. Yeah. It looks just we do it on every one of them. Yep. Same as if you look at YouTube, Amazon, you know, that search bar is top dead center. And, that's exactly what we want people to use. And that works. We've had, sites that got as high as 7% of their visitors use the search, and, it accounted for 31% of their revenue.

Now, on that collection you mentioned the filters on the side. What do you do for filter placement on mobile.

You can still have those, we use a product search, product search and filter app. And you can customize them.

The Shopify one.

Yeah, yeah.

that put it at the bottom of the collection page.

No, you can you can, have it go down the side. Yep.

I've never actually done that on mobile. I have to check that out.

what do you see about you know, you already mentioned with the top nav, less is more. I weren't I wasn't sure if you were like anti mega menus or you just see people be too excessive with mega menus.

I am anti maga menus. I am, I am anti maga menus. I think that, you can if you deal with men and women, you can have, a selection to men or women to start with. And then, shirts or tops, pants, accessories. Get them another section down every time that you can, get them to click another section.

That's a category. Your conversions will go up when you give them 80 choices or even 20 choices, your conversions are going to go down because now you're saying, hey, you have to go through and browse through all 20 of these and see that it's labeled exactly what you're looking for. So that you know which one to click on that's going to hurt your conversions.

Yep. Now let's use it for men and women. Example. If they click on women, do you take them to a what I call a list of collections page where they're making another decision of tops, bottoms, outerwear.

yeah, yeah. And then from there then, then you would take them to a category page that would have all your hats or all your tops or all your outerwear or whatever, and then let them filter from there. Yes.

Now, on the filter side, we're sorry. We're going up and down the funnel now. I'm on the filter side. Is there like less? Is more also or is there. Can you have too many filters?

No, I don't think so. Not if it's done well, because you can do those with progressive disclosure, too, so you can have them all folded up and then they can click on the ones that are appropriate, the different items. And with the product search and filter app, you can have different filters on different collection pages.

So, you know, because one of the things I usually do is, is like, I'll. I'll consolidate my colors to be just Roy Beach of. Plus usually, you know, black, brown and pink or what I add above and white above Roy G. Biv color. So any any shade of red just goes to red. But is it okay to have Burgundy and ruby and that kind of thing?

I mean, I don't know, and I would just be guessing if I said that, I would think, I would put it under the shades so red would consider all the reds, blue would consider all the blues, etc.. Yeah, that's how I would, that's how I would probably set it up for sure.

So you've talked a lot about how you're using data and you're testing. What does that look like and feel like, you know, how does a store and or go about doing a test and then measuring that?

Well, it's if it's a small store. In all reality, it's going to be very difficult for them to test, because it's going to take a long time for statistical analysis. We have a community of store owners that are not very large, stores. And so we came up with our set of best practices for that.

And the things that I've shared with you, just doing that alone will make if they just listen to your podcast over and over or take notes and go through and do those changes to their site, there will be a big enough difference, that at that point they could, you know, hire someone to, segment their data and they could learn how to use that data to then, move forward.

But until you get to that point, most probably 99% of stores are, are not actually going to be able to conduct, an actual test.

And what sort of traffic volume should a store have before? They do have the ability to, you know, do statistical relevance and get the data that is actionable for.

That's a loaded question. And the reason why I say that is because, if I'm doing a card test, it's going to take a lot longer on a site that has a thousand visitors a day than a site that has 100,000 visitors a day, because, a lot more people are going to get to the cart on the one with a lot more visit.

If you're making, like, our brand new store, you know, it's making one and a half to two sales a day. That means only 4 or 5 people are seeing the cart, per day. And if that's the case, you know, it's going to take several months. If I'm doing a card test to figure out which ones are actually going to win.

And so it really it really is. Depends. What I'm going to say is once you get the best practices in there and you know, you're at, you know, two, three, 4% conversion rate, then you're buying, you're probably at that point you're buying some serious traffic and you can actually run, real tests.

Yep. Yep. And if the stores are running their own real test. And let's say they're doing $1 million a year in revenue. What? What are they testing? You know, I heard you say before, measuring conversion rate can not be the right way to do it. Like, what

Yeah. You know, I can get your conversion rate to go up. Just put your products on sale. You're going to have a higher conversion rate. It's going to it's definitely going to go up. But that's not really what the goal of it is. The goal of it is, depending on what you know, when you run a test, every test isn't.

Oh, we're going to make more conversions now, a test on your product page is you're going to make more add to cards. Test on your home page is you're going to get more people. Click into the categories, a test on your checkout is going to be more conversions. And so a lot of times people think like, oh, I want to make more sales, I'm going to change this thing on my homepage.

They don't see any Martina that I got that test didn't win. But what they didn't realize is the people that clicked on the one test, they went to the filters page is way more or, you know, they got three steps into the final farther. So there's always downstream. It really depends. And you need to be very granular about what you're actually testing.

You're not actually testing for more sales. And every test you're literally testing for, what action are you trying to get them to take over the normal one?

Yeah, that makes total sense. And I was. I was thinking, like you're saying that everybody's guilty of doing. I was like, an end to end. Like how you measure the whole thing, and you're saying, no, you're on this page. We're going to measure. Do they get to the next page?

Yeah, yeah. So if you have 80 people, get to your homepage. And now the test, that you ran, gets 90 people. Well, that's the one that you want.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes that makes sense. And I used to love how I forget what Google's tool was, but their AB testing tool was just kind of fun until they got rid of it for us. Yeah. So are you using tools like that now that in the replacements to Google optimize?

Yeah. We used convert. We used, convert before optimizely and then started using Optimizely. And hopefully they'll bring it back. Another one. I think they are, it's going to be AI powered, which will be nice.

Yep. Yeah. It's always fun with Google. You know, you get great tools for free and it's awesome. And then they change them or they go away. But that's that's just part of the free free life. So we got to live with that.

What what are like, the three worst things or the whatever the right number is? You know, the most egregious things that people are doing, the common things that they think are right, that they should think, you know, immediately stop doing that and change ginger root.

I would say, doing their own customer service and then, taking every single complaint and trying to go fix it on the website. So what we notice is when we go to new sites that we start working on, 95% of the time, they have a customer journey that is built off of all the customer complaints.

And so now every single person that lands on their website has to go through everything that they think is important in order for them to make a sale, instead of focusing on the 20% that created 80% of the sales. And so they actually, convoluted and make their site more difficult. That's probably the number one.

Can you be an example of that? Because I'm trying to visualize what you mean that a store is doing. Getting, you know, slowing down the progress.

Like putting, the wrong information on the wrong page, by now on the homepage or, or all of your products on the homepage. It looks like a flea market. It doesn't help people convert more, you know, turning your site into, funnel, matters, and it helps, helping them take micro commitments instead of saying, hey, here's everything that we offer for sale.

Go find what you like and then buy it. The second thing that I would say is most store owners look at their site as, how do I make more sales? And the moment that they can switch to the paradigm of being the customer. And how do I find what I'm looking for, or how do I find the solution to my problem?

That little paradigm shift will make their store look drastically different than someone that's just trying to make more sales. And so, doing that matters a lot. You'll get rid of a lot of stuff that, basically distracts them from easy navigation, which is one of the most important things that you can have for conversions.

That. That's a total light bulb for me when you said that. Because, you know, what I'm visualizing is store owners trying to push their goals onto the customer instead of empowering the customer to make their own decisions.

100%. And I'm telling you that one shift will drastically change how your site functions and looks and operates and answers questions.

Yeah. I like that a lot. Is there any other ones like that? I asked for three, but you don't have to give three. But.

Yeah. Just the paradox of choice, you know, offering too many choices. That always hurts conversions more than anything else. People think more is better. More is not better.

Now is revenue optimization a project where it has a fixed start and end date? Or is it a mindset?

It's a mindset, a website, you know, e-commerce is not the same as it was eight years ago. It's always I always say that your website is your conversation with your client. It's the one that you can't have. And so your your website can have it 24 seven. And the better it is at conveying the message or at answering their questions, the more sales you're going to make.

And so, e-commerce is maturing just like anything else. You used to be able to do all kinds of things that worked really well, that now you'd never get away with because your competition's way better. So I think it's an ongoing process never ending. We have some of our long term large clients. I'm with us seven, eight years.

We're still, you know, running tests and and, you know, finding wins and changing user behavior and adding new products and new layouts and evolving with ecommerce.

And growing revenue in that whole time.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Has to be otherwise, you know, you're keeping.

Now, you mentioned trust early on in our conversation, but you haven't mentioned brand much. Beyond that is, how important is brand in this conversation?

I don't think it matters at all. If you're a small store owner, no matter how much you love your logo, no matter how much you love your products, you don't have a brand. If you have a brand or if you think you have a brand, you don't run any ads and see how many sales you make.

Because a brand, a brand, all our brand is, is, product that people trust and know. And they'll buy it without seeing an ad. That's all the brand is. How do you make a brand? You make a lot of sales. And so, if you really think you have a brand, shut off your ads, tell me how many sales you make.

Till then, you don't have a brand. Stop worrying about your logo and all the colors and all the other stuff. Figure out how to make more sales. The more sales you make, that's how you create a brand.

Makes sense. Makes sense. So if someone you know is getting to the point where they need professional help to do this, right? How do they find it? There's you. Right. And your company and others. What things should they be looking for when making that decision on a partner?

Yeah. Honestly, I think, there's a lot of people out there that are good at, you know, what they do, get references. See if they have a track record. Yeah. Look at how much. Yeah. I think, it would be really dumb for me to say, oh, we're the only ones that can do it, or you're the only one that can do it.

We know that's not true. Find someone that you like to work with, that you trust and and go after it because you're. I mean, what you're asking for is testing and data and all these things to make our sales. It's not a magic bullet. Sites are contextual. And so, yeah, find someone that you enjoy working with because this is your livelihood.

And, you want it to work as good as possible. We actually, like, before we'll actually take, the larger brands. We put them through an eight week, vetting process where we go through and do a bunch of best practices, before we'll take them on as a client, because we like coming to work and we like what we do.

And the last thing that we want to do is work with someone. That's really difficult and doesn't want to change anything. When the data supports that.

I totally agree on the the relationship side of it. Right. Even if you're aligned in the goal or you know they're willing to do the work, you have to like each other. Human beings

We spend more time at work than we do with our loved ones. And so if this is somebody that you're going to, be trusting with your website and how it converts and how it looks and functions, all that stuff like that doesn't happen in one hour a week, like you're going to spend some time with them. So yeah, I do believe that the relationship is very important.

Totally agree. Totally agree. So how do people reach out to you if they want to, engage with you?

Build grow scale.com or they can always email me and I read all my emails and Matt at build gross. Qualcomm and yeah. Well take a look and get you to the right place for sure.

Fabulous. Fabulous. I totally enjoyed this conversation. I love the way you're thinking about that shopping experience. And I think a lot of people can benefit from, from listening to to your point of view.

So thank you I enjoyed it.