Hey, Scott Austin here. And in this episode we're going to do something a little bit different. So I was recently interviewed for a podcast called Firing the Man. And what we're going to do in this episode is we're going to show you that podcast interview. So instead of me asking the questions, I'm going to be answering the questions onto that podcast episode.

Welcome back to the Firing the Man podcast, the show where we delve into the journeys of entrepreneurs who have taken the leap to build their own businesses. Today, we're excited to host Scott Austin, a seasoned e-commerce expert and owner of Jade Puma, a Shopify focused agency based in San Diego, California, with decades of experience in e-commerce and technology sectors.

Scott has collaborated with businesses of all sizes, from industry giants to emerging startups. His extensive background has equipped him with a comprehensive understanding of the strategies that drive online success. In addition to leading Jade Puma, Scott is the creator and host of the Shopify Solutions podcast, where he offers practical advice and insights to help Shopify owners optimize and grow their businesses beyond his professional endeavors.

Scott is deeply committed to community engagement, notably through coaching youth roller derby teams. A testament to his dedication to mentorship and development both in and out of the business realm. In this episode, we'll explore Scott's entrepreneurial journey, the lessons he's learned from his diverse experiences, and his expert perspectives on scaling e-commerce ventures. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or an established business owner, Scott's insights are sure to provide valuable guidance on navigating that dynamic world of online commerce.

Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, David. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Really looking forward to to podcasting. I have been a fan of yours from afar. And listen to a couple of your episodes and, which is why I reached out and and invited you to the show. And so this is going to be a great show.

Really looking forward to it.

Now to start things off. You've worked with Shopify stores of all sizes. What are the key traits that separates successful ecommerce businesses from those that struggle to gain traction?

The way I think about businesses and not just ecommerce, right? Businesses as a whole, I think all businesses fail and succeed by the people at them, right?

Businesses are not about products and pricing models and things like that. It's about people. So what I see in e-commerce stores know, because most e-commerce stores are starting, and even the established ones haven't been around for a century, right? So most of them are newer or learning, and it's all about the mindset of the people, whether they succeed or not.

Right. And in the mindset, you know, there's a bunch of different things that can factor in. Like, are you willing to do the hard work? Because none of this is easy for anybody that's tried it, right? Are you willing to listen to your customers? Are you willing to accept the fact that you don't know everything, and then you have to figure out lots of things and solve problems and all that kind of stuff?

So when I see store owners that are willing to listen, that are willing to try new things, that are willing to admit when they're wrong, you know, we we turned the, you know, we should call it the wrong now we call it pivoting and all that kind of stuff. If you have that mindset, then you're in the right place, you know, because this is a long grind.

It's, you know, nobody's successful overnight in e-commerce. If you're lucky, you're successful in a year or two. More likely you're successful in 5 or 10, right? So you've got to have the mindset of, I don't know everything. I have to be willing to try new things, learn from those, listen to my customers, look at my business numbers and adjust accordingly.

And you start out, you know, thinking you're going in one direction and five years later you're in a completely different space. But that's where you're successful because you had that mindset. Absolutely, absolutely. And you and I before the show and you touched on this a little bit, and I'd like you to go into more depth on it. You said firing the man is not for everybody.

And as a host of the show, firing the man, I did not take offense to that. In fact, I completely agree with you. And can you go into a little bit more detail on that? Yeah, a lot of people talk about, oh, I want to be an entrepreneur. Right. And and if I swear in a minute here, it's just because I get so aggravated about this industry that we're in of good advice to, to good, honest people and how deceiving it is.

Right? Because you look on YouTube and you're like, you want to figure out how to do something. YouTube number one, research, you know, place in the world. So you want to see how to get started in a Shopify store. And you'll see a YouTube video that says how to get your Shopify store started in 25 minutes or less.

And then someone's going to one up that and there's this. In 21 minutes or less, someone else is in 50, and soon you can start a Shopify store in three minutes or less, right? And it's complete and utter B.S., right? It is not that easy. Now I can build you a Shopify store overnight, but I've been doing this for over a decade, so everybody thinks it's it's get rich quick and easy to do.

These kind of things, but it's not so

it takes the kind of person that understands that it's not easy, right? You know, you have a podcast, you've had 276 episodes that is a nightmare slog of work to make that happen, as you know. Right. But everyone's like, oh, I'm going to start a podcast and I'm going to be rich and famous because of it.

But you know, you know, all the work that goes behind making all those different episodes and it's not easy. So too many people think that I'm just going to start a podcast and now I'm going to be successful. No, that's just the start of it. Right? And then you can do all the work behind it. Can you wake up every single morning, not hit the snooze on your alarm and figure out what are the most important things to do for your business and motivate yourself to get them done?

Most people I believe, cannot. Now, those that can, the world is, you know, their oyster kind of thing. You know, for me, with my podcast, I don't allow myself to go to bed. So I publish every two weeks. I don't allow myself to go to bed on Sunday night before I publish on Wednesday until my podcast is locked and loaded.

And sometimes that means I go to bed at two in the morning. Sometimes I get it done on Saturday and it's all good, but I don't let myself fail at that ever. Right? If you have that mentality, you can be successful. If you're like, oh, I'm really sick. This week. Oh, my cat's not feeling good. Oh, the Yankees lost.

Whatever your excuse is. It's super easy to find reasons not to succeed. Successful entrepreneurs find ways to succeed. And I think that not everybody is designed that way. I fully agree with that. I fully agree with that. And I'd be if I was building an entrepreneur. And, there have been some common observations that I've made of successful people that I've had on the show, and I'm going to share a couple of these with you, and I'm curious if you have more to add to the list.

But here are just some observations that I have. And if you don't have these characteristics that doesn't mean that you can't be successful. But I do think that these help,

really gritty people, people that don't take no as an answer, I think is is huge.

I have observed that people that come from immigrant families and I can't place my finger on it, but tend to have that grit,

that helps them be successful.

People that didn't have rosy childhoods.

People that have had some sort of struggle or trauma prior to their entrepreneurial journey tend to be pretty well suited for it.

yeah. So those those are some like common observations that I had if I were to build an entrepreneur.

Those are probably some characteristics that, that I would,

include.

So any to add to the list? Well, of course, there's a thousand to add, but you're absolutely right that, you know, the the immigrant one is a great one. It's just because, you know, I believe that, you know, the generation, you know, the first generation Americans of immigrant families, their parents instilled them in a work ethic that we as Americans culturally.

My family's been here since the frickin Mayflower. You know, we're all way lazier than someone who's work to get here, to have the privilege to be here. Where for us, it was a birthright, right? And so there's. You have to be willing to do the hard work. And unfortunately, our culture is designed to tell people it's super easy, right?

You know, the four hour workweek is my favorite example. You know, that book was written in 2008, and it's actually based on some truths in 2008, right? So in 2008, to set up an e-commerce store, you had to invest $100,000 in servers, build your own code and do all that. It was really hard to be, you know, the table stakes was you had to build your own servers and your own software.

And then Shopify came around and all the other solutions. And anybody can build a store in three minutes or less. So the entire assumption of the four hour workweek, which is this is really big home. You got to get over and then it's super easy. There's not a lot of competition. Well, that hump got leveled and now everybody can do it.

Everybody's still working on the four hour workweek concept where like, oh, I'm just going to build this ecommerce store is going to make me tons of money. So, you know, it goes back to the thing, you know, we've been saying so far. This is fricking hard, really freaking hard. It is long. It is a slog. If you're here to get rich quick, move on.

Right. Invest in crypto. Yeah, exactly. I there's something about the phrase passive income, the in e-commerce that have kind of been married up and I don't exactly know why. I have not found e-commerce to be a source of passive income.

And it is it's certainly there are instances, where it may be on the spectrum of very active versus very passive.

Maybe further on the spectrum of towards passive, but I don't have not found it to be a passive income source. And so,

to kind of change the tune of our conversation or turn a corner here,

I'd like to talk about Shopify and, you know, from your perspective, how has the Shopify ecosystem evolved over the past few years and what should entrepreneurs be paying attention to

in 2025 and beyond?

let me just start off with the, you know, I've been working in Shopify since about 2013. I actually got started by building software that was agnostic to e-commerce platforms, and we quickly realized that a Shopify was the best platform for us to build, you know, integrate with, with their whole app ecosystem and be the feature set of Shopify was way better than the competition right back, back in 2013.

You can maybe argue BigCommerce, but, you know, since then, for me, it's been an absolute no brainer. Shopify is the undisputed right first choice for any small or medium sized brand, and I mean 0 to $10 million a year.

If you're going to build your own website and have your own brand, you must be on Shopify, in my humble opinion.

No WooCommerce, no BigCommerce. So and I believe that for now, 12 years,

the crazy thing is, in that 12 years, Shopify has only increased the gap between them and the competition.

I am amazed, having spent 12 years at Microsoft, you know, a big software company.

I am amazed at the level of innovation and product development that Shopify pumps out.

Now, however, I will throw in that it seems to me like Shopify has a little bit of the Facebook mantra of go fast and break things, which is not the kind of thing you want to be doing when you're running the number two e-commerce platform in the world. So I think they're a little bit too loosey goosey, in my humble opinion.

They fix things quickly, but they break things a lot.

Right. Right now I'm going through this nightmare of, you know, users because they're changing

the user account system. And it's just it's just a nightmare right now. But in the end, they end up fixing most of the thing. So, you know, the question is like, you know, what do I think of Shopify?

Where's it going? What's it done in the past few years, in the past couple of years?

Shopify used to be a good e-commerce platform,

you know, or even a great e-commerce platform. Now Shopify is a great website, right?

You used to in the old days, if you really wanted to do a lot of SEO and content marketing, you'd run up a WordPress site to run your blogs because you had a lot more functionality in WordPress and building out blogs.

Now that can all happen in Shopify. And that happened with, you know, sections anywhere. It was like 3 or 4 years ago. So now there's no reason to not have your entire website on Shopify. And the data model has gotten so much richer with meta fields. Meta fields always, always existed in Shopify. As long as I've been using it.

But they've been a lot easier. So now you can enrich your product data. And I believe in enriching product data is an important part of strategic

differentiation between you and your competition.

The more data you have about your products, the easier it is gonna be for customers to find the

right one for them. And Meta Fields makes that super, super easy to do now with all the new tools they rolled out.

So for is always rolling out new things and improving on what they're doing, which I absolutely love.

Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that that you had mentioned was

then being the leader in the space. This is an observation that I've had. If I would have gone to a conference five years ago

and was talking to a private label brand owner, and I'd say like, what platforms do you sell on?

They'd say Amazon, Walmart and Adidas website.

That same conversation now is Amazon, Walmart, Shopify.

And it's kind of like Q-Tip, where when you start referring to the product as the entire industry,

then that's a clear win. And that's something that I've noticed where it's just

when you're talking to entrepreneurs, it is

DTC website. That word is

people use it a lot less, and people just refer to their DTC website as their Shopify store.

everybody's migrating to like I every month I migrate another store to Shopify from every platform there is. Right now, I'm working on a migration from a 2002 SQL server. Guy built his own code in 2002, right.

And he's had it for 23 years. And now we're finally migrating to Shopify. And he's going to have a

much easier life once we're done with that project.

Outstanding, outstanding.

Now

conversion rate optimization is a hot topic

you work with clients on this. And I'm curious, what are some of the most overlooked CRO tactics that can have a big impact on revenue? Yeah.

I'm going to take a step back from tactics and I'm gonna give you a strategy instead. Right. And I fully believe that most best practices you hear in the industry are true for someone in some situation.

And I think as entrepreneurs and as business owners, it's our job to ask ourselves, is this best practice the right one for us? And I give you a real example there in Amazon, right? Number one e-commerce platform in the world, Amazon is the single worst shopping experience for a website standpoint on the internet, except for maybe this 2002 store that I'm upgrading right now, right?

And that's because Amazon has, you know, 4 billion products or whatever. They can't do a good shopping experience. People don't use Amazon because it's easy to find what you're looking for. You go there to buy a spatula. 75 minutes later, you end up with a $13 spatula. You went there because they have every spatula on the planet. They do overnight delivery, if not same day.

And if you don't like it, you can return it at your local U.P.S. store.

Nobody goes to Amazon.

for their e-commerce experience,

But then we look at Amazon as a role model for how to build our websites.

And the difference between an Amazon and but and by the way, I couldn't make Amazon better. I'm not saying they're doing it wrong. They're doing it really, really well with the constraints that they have, which is 4 billion products, you know, in their website. So that's Amazon strength. They have 4 billion products. Your small brand strength is you have 100 products.

So you can build a curated shopping experience for people. Right. So when Amazon when you land on a product page, they have no confidence you're on the right product page. Therefore, on that product page they show at least 75 other products. Right. My best practice never show another product on your product page unless it's part of a bundle that's related to that product, right?

the point being, a lot of websites are a list of products. Amazon list of products. They give you some tools like filters and all that kind of stuff.

small brands have the advantage to do and even larger brands. But you know, not Amazon and aggregators. They have the ability to turn their website into a decision making engine.

And what you want to be doing is educating your customers on the options that are available to them. So instead of having a, you know, a collection, which is a list of all your products with some filters on it,

you wanted to figure out what are the steps in the decision making process in the products you're selling, right?

And that's where you have to understand your customers and understand your products and understand how they shop for your products. Like I have one client. He sells antique posters.

So he's got, you know, one copy of a poster from 1855 or something like that. And when we first started, we put out a whole bunch of different ways that people could shop.

Like, you could look at the language of the poster, the country of origin, the size, the price, the colors, and we just shotgun it, you know, all these different ways you can start shopping and then the ways that people picked. I actually thought Country of Origin was gonna be important. One doesn't matter at all. People care about the art and the color and the the graphic of the poster.

Way more than they care about the language, right?

the assumption we had going in was wrong, and we just did based on that. But we able to make

a decision making engine for them. We found out the first thing they care about is the size of the poster. Is it a small one? Is it a large one?

And then they care about the colors, and then they care about the topic that it is. And we built decision making tools so that they could do that. You know, let's say that you have you know, you're doing supplements, let's say. But right now I'm working on five different supplement brands for some strange reason. And you have a catalog of supplements.

Let's say you have 20 different supplements. A lot of people list their supplements, right? And they're like, hey, user, go figure it out for yourself because Amazon let you go figure it out for yourself. What you should be doing is saying to your customers, like, tell me something about yourself. You know, are you someone who's young and athletic and looking to improve your performance?

Are you someone who's getting a little bit older, and are you looking to age in place and, you know, prevent cognitive decline? Right. Too many people just show all their products. And I've got to go figure out, oh, this is the one for 58 year old man, which I happen to a 58 year old man who are worried about their athletic performance or their, you know, cognitive decline type of stuff.

And then someone else has to come in. It's like, oh, I'm a jock. And I want to have, you know, the best score on my, you know, softball league. And here's the stuff for me, because we don't turn our websites into customer facing questions. Right. Think about when you walk into a good store and someone says, hey, welcome to Acme Corp..

What are you looking for today? And you're like, oh, I'm looking for a gift for my wife. And they're like, oh, what is your wife like? Right. They don't just say, oh, there's women's over there. Because look to buy

too many websites. You're saying there's women's over there. Good luck. Good buy. So we need to do is break down the decision making in our website

so

that our store is a decision making engine, not a list of products.

the way you do that

is you start having, you know, a page for every decision that people are making. Let's just say you're selling clothing and the first decision is men or women, right? You might have men, women or gender neutral. They might have three options in there. And then when they click on men, you might show shoes, shirts, ties, whatever kind of thing.

Instead of just showing the list of all the products. Let people make those decisions. And this goes back to, you know, as I said before, every best practice has a truth to it. Does it apply to you? I talked to so many store owners about this type of strategy and they're like, oh, I have to be three clicks to the Add to cart button because they've heard this best practice.

If you're more than three clicks to the Add to Cart button, you are a failure, right? And hey, that was true probably in 2006. Maybe that was true in 2006 for stores that were selling one product on a landing page. When you're buying an engagement ring and going to spend, you know, $10,000 on the engagement ring. Guess how many clicks you need to make that happen and have the person have confidence in what they're buying?

The answer is it doesn't frickin matter, right? Because that customer will spend as much time as it takes to be confident that they've got all the right aspects, you know, of the diamond ring that they're looking for. They'll educate themselves and make all these choices go back and forth and all that kind of stuff. So you've got to understand your product, understand your audience, and build a decision making engine for them.

That's my conversion rate optimization hack, right? It's not a tactic. It's a complete strategy. And the way you design your website.

I like it, I like it,

I'm glad that you you've pointed that out because a lot of times and I hear this a lot on podcasts where it is a one size fits all.

This worked for person A, this is going to work for person B, C, and D.

And so yeah, I'm glad that you pointed that out. So what what should somebody do?

You had talked about like the decision making process and you use the example of supplements

when somebody is starting out a Shopify store, is it good to look for examples of that, or is there a is there a particular website that you're aware of whether you've worked with them or not, that you think does this exceptionally well?

I think I truly believe you should always look at your competition, right. And I call it soaking, right? You need to soak in your industry. You need to know more about your competition than they do. Which is, by the way, really easy. You know, amazes me how many store owners I talked to that have no idea what the text is in the email that goes out when somebody places an order because they've never tested their own website as a customer.

Right? So if you soak in your own experience and in your competitions experience and you can learn from each other and, you know, I used to work at Amazon. And so I got into Microsoft in 1999 and for like 1999, 2000 and 2001, MSN and Yahoo were the two number one, portals back then. Right? And you could literally see Yahoo tried something, MSN copied it, and then Amazon tried something and Yahoo copied it back and forth, but no one knew what they were doing.

We were all trying to figure things out, copying from one to another. So there's nothing wrong with that strategy. The key is coming up with an idea, copying it and seeing if it works for your audience, right? I mocked a minute ago Amazon and how they do things and how I, you know, try to do things differently in them.

But Amazon did something that I just absolutely loved, right? So I buy little K-Cup coffee pods and they started doing the pricing per pod. Right. So this box of K-Cups is 20 bucks per pod. It's $0.37, right. And I started looking like which one's the cheapest because I'm a cheap S.O.B., right. So especially when it comes to coffee pods, you know, I am very price sensitive.

So because of that, I now add to that to as many stores as I have that are selling things in different sizes. So if you're selling a product, you know, let's go back to supplement. If you have the 30 bottle supply, the 60 bottle supply, 120 bottle supply, I put down the price per tablet and we do a little custom code to make that happen so the people can see the savings they get.

It's obvious you buy the 120 year to save money, but we show them exactly how much, right? Because that motivates people and moves them over the top. So you totally should be looking at your competition, seeing what they're doing, learning from it. But you have to know your customers and you have to watching your business so that when you apply things, you can actually say it worked or it didn't work.

Now I deal with only small Shopify stores. We are not doing AB testing. Many of them don't have significant volume of traffic to do AB testing, and AB testing is way too hard, especially since Google shut down the AP testing tool last year, right? It's way too hard for a small brand to do it. Bigger brands that have an agency doing they can totally do that at is great.

I love them for that. Small brands are not going to be able to do real legit AB testing, but you have to try things and feel, you know, by looking at the data and listening to your customers. Is it working or not working for them? I like it. I like it and and yeah. No, I think that's it.

I'm going to go back and re listen to that response. It was outstanding. And there's a bunch of really good stuff there.

so you work with a lot of smaller Shopify store owners. What are some common mistakes that you see those entrepreneurs make? Oh, I think the biggest mistake is people not

focusing on the right thing.

Right. So the secret to every single business is customer acquisition.

And in most ecommerce stores that I talk to you or potentially ecommerce stores that I talked to, think about their website. The website is a means to an end. The website is not your business, right? Your business is your customer acquisition strategy. And the last piece of that customer acquisition strategy is your website.

So they think about the end of their customer acquisition strategy without thinking about the beginning of their customer acquisition strategy. So I frequently talk to my clients or potential clients out of investing in their website and talk them into investing in customer acquisition strategies, whether that be advertising, social SEO, word of mouth, you know, events and conferences, all those different channels, right?

Too many people think when they build their website, they've started their business. No. You need to start your business by building a customer acquisition strategy and and process and engine. Right. It's why I get into podcasting. Right? So as a Shopify agency, I was getting all my business from the Shopify experts Marketplace, and then I was talking to the Shopify team one day, and she was explaining to me how they were going to change the experts platform.

And I listened to her words and I'm like, oh, I am screwed, right? Because we're going to make it a lot more, cost conscious, right? So was basically going to favor all all the offshore people and, you know, the good old Americans who were charging a lot of money like I am, we're not going to be favored in the future.

And I said, I need a new customer acquisition strategy because the one I'm relying on today is going to change. And that's why I started podcasting, to attract people to my agency services. So you have to always be thinking about customer acquisition. Too many people think about how to monetize the people they have, and they don't think enough about how to draw more people into their monetization monetization engine.

You know, if you've got 10,000 users per month coming to your website and you improve your your conversion by a 10th of a percent and your average cart value is $100, I'm going to pretend that I can do math. The impact of that in your revenues, like $1,000 a month or whatever the number is, right? If you've got 10,000 people, come to your website today and you're making, let's just say, $50,000 a month, if you double your traffic, you're making another $50,000 a month, even if your conversion isn't the best.

Now it isn't as binary is that it's not as black and white. You want to be bringing in more customers at the same time. You're improving conversions. But the net answer to your question, you know, what are people doing wrong or mistakes they're making? They worry too much about their website, not enough about their customer acquisition strategy.

Do you love the flex theme but want more functionality from it? That's exactly why we built flex themed sections. An app in the Shopify store that adds more tools to your flex themed toolbox. We have an always free level, which provides lots of free tools for you to use in your store. Customers love our Brand Guidelines tool, which helps you document your colors, fonts, and more about your brand.

We also have tools to check the images on collections, products, articles, and even more tools beyond that in our All Access plan. We also provide lots of sections to give you more compelling pages in your Shopify store. We currently have over 20 sections in our toolbox and add more all the time. These sections were built based on our customer's needs and have been reused in multiple stores, and provide flexibility for you and your brand.

So go ahead and make your flex theme even better with flex themed sections. Download it today.

I want to dive into this a little bit more, and I'm reminded of there's an excellent movie with Kevin Costner called Field of Dreams. You see, there's a there's a quote in that movie. If you build it, they will come. And I found that not to be true about web sites and which gets to the customer acquisition is that you need to drive traffic.

And it seems like there is seemingly infinite possibilities for sources of traffic. And,

Facebook ads, Google ads, influencers, email marketing, SMS marketing.

And it is kind of overwhelming. The number of choices that that people have.

so I'm curious, or do you point people in any particular direction or out of those

sources of traffic that are listed out?

Do you favor any over others?

Absolutely. Right. So the first answer, like

all of us are going to say, it depends, right.

That said, right. And I got to put that qualifier out there. So if you disagree with me you're absolutely right. Also your answer is also good in general. Here's what I see. And first of all, I just want to correct what you said.

Email is not a customer acquisition strategy. Email is a customer retention strategy. Right. And and I point that out because I have so many people who want to work on their email first. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. When you have an email list of 1000 people, then we'll implement email. Not until right kind of thing.

So

for a new e-commerce store, the way I recommend to do things right, you you build the minimal amount of website that you possibly can. And I think that you need to start investing in SEO on day one. Right now, SEO is not your primary strategy for acquiring traffic, but it is an important one. And it's one of those, you know, free and air quotes, sources of traffic because it takes you a lot of effort up front.

But, you know, I'm today getting, you know, traffic to my website from a blog article I created in 2014 kind of thing. Right. It's the gift that keeps giving forever and ever.

And when I say SEO, another thing I want to add there is SEO is not just Google. Even though nobody optimizes for being or Bing. Right?

Search happens everywhere, right? The number two search engine on the planet. YouTube. Right? Amazon. Etsy, TikTok, Instagram. They're all search engines now. Right? So I think you have to optimize for Google Organic and for YouTube on day one. So in other words, you should be doing video, right? So

number one, you got to start working on a SEO strategy because everybody should be doing SEO for the long term.

And it is a long term game. And you need to operationalize that into your your business thinking. And by operationalizing it, what I mean is you need to have a goal. This is my humble opinion again. Right. You can do a different if you want. You you'd have a goal that says I'm going to create SEO content at a cadence.

Let's say you're going to do one blog article per week or one per month or whatever. You got to do that every week or every month, whatever it is, if you don't start making that part of your DNA from day one, it's one of those things just you just keep kicking that can down the road. All SEOs, you know, long pull.

I'll get to it after I do all these other things. I think you got to start it off early, right? And a lot of my clients, because they're smaller brands, they like doing the

the non-paid stuff first, right? They like the idea of the organic things and for good reason. Right.

So number one, you want to start out with an SEO strategy or start building out content for SEO and knowing what your strategy is and seeing how it works.

Then the number two thing you want to do is you want to do Google Shopping ads, right? So today in Shopify, it's really easy to connect the Google and YouTube channel to your Shopify store, send your product feed off to Google Merchant, and then connect your Google Merchant to your Google Ads and do shopping ads. Now shopping ads.

For those that don't know if you do a search query on Google, let's just say you look for how to repair Nike sneakers right? Google looks at that and says, oh, that's a, you know, research or a DIY query. And it gives different types of ads. It probably does keyword ads for that. Sometimes it'll give, you know, YouTube videos if it thinks it's a shopping query, like blue Nike sneakers size 13, it'll say that's a shopping query.

It shows shopping ads. Shopping ads come from Google Merchant, which comes from your Shopify feed. It's all connected directly, and it's really easy and really relevant. You show up the top of algorithmic search, and you show up at the top of the shopping page. So shopping ads, easiest ones to set up with all the ads in the ecosystem, and they're really relevant.

And all you do is you say, I want to spend $10 a month or $20 a month, you just put down the cost. So it's really easy to see if it's working for you kind of thing.

And then after that you want to do remarketing, right? So you want to have anybody coming to your site. You want to bug them as they walk around the internet for the next two weeks and remind them that you still exist.

So those are my first three steps. When I think about getting started on a store.

Okay, okay, that's in in when you're when you are talking about SEO, you are not talking about, well, let me ask backlinks. That is a topic that often comes up when people are talking about SEO.

do you think that is an essential part of the SEO strategy, or is that just kind of an ancillary topic within SEO?

So backlinks used to be important. Then they became non important and now they're important again. So it has to be part of your strategy. So in the old days right. Backlinks was one of the leading indicators of whether your content was good or bad. And then Google got good enough. And I saw this happen like overnight in around 2019, in some stores where they were ranked really low, get no traffic.

And then Google changed the algorithm and backlinks were no longer as important in and evaluated the content of your website, and had a client who built world class content in the medical space for the stuff they were doing, and he had the worst backlink of all his competition. And then all of a sudden he became number one in SEO because he had the best content.

Right?

But then the world of AI came out,

and now Google, you know, content is everywhere. And, you know, it's just it's just ridiculous. So now Google's going back to the old method of no longer evaluate the content as much or they still evaluate, but they also factor in backlinks. So backlinks

I used to say were not important in 2020 or so.

Now they're important again. So you got to be thinking about that as part of your SEO strategy

I like it, I like it.

Now I want to talk about,

Shopify themes and customizations. And I think this is something that is pretty early on in terms of the decisions you need to make when launching a Shopify store. And so,

how can a business owner strike the right balance between design, esthetics and performance?

And are there any themes that you, you know, like out of the box perform really, really well, for your site, the question you're asking is the balance between esthetics and performance. So my first question is what do you mean by performance? Because I can think of a couple different ways to to factor that in,

the end goal being that the customer buys from you.

so conversion and that I think is important because a lot of people hear the word performance and they're thinking page speed and page speed. It is not it. Speed is important. You cannot have a page load in 11 seconds. But page speed is not important between three seconds and 2.9 in e-commerce. Right. So to many people, you know, it's one of those things.

They focus too much on page speed when they should focus on getting more customers kind of thing. But performance on conversion, I totally love. Right. So that your question is the balance between esthetics and conversion. I believe that most e-commerce stores remember ideal with small brands, right? So I'm not working with, Kylie Jenner Cosmetics, for example. This is not an answer for a brand like that.

I believe, you know, form follows function. And I believe the purpose of your website is to take traffic and move it to the cart so that the customer has confidence in that purchase decision. Remember back that decision making engine that I love so much, right. They have confidence that they finish that checkout process. In other words, I don't care what the esthetics are, what I care as customers get to where they want to be and understand it.

So I focus way more time on the funnel, on the performance of the site. And then, and don't get wrong, esthetics is important. You know, you can't have a garbage looking website, you can't have grammatical errors. But I don't need flashy animations, big fancy videos, scrolling effects, as you know, move up and down the page. I think most of that is just stroking our own egos and a waste of time and energy.

Like, you know, my favorite example with my clients is they want to do a slideshow on the homepage right now. I said, the only people that are going to look at slide number two on your homepage are you and me. Your customers don't care about it. They don't have time for it. They're just scrolling, right. They want to get some results.

They're not going to watch five different messages three seconds apart. It's just we're just doing it for ourselves, right. So, you know, how do I strike the right balance between esthetics and performance performance, performance, performance. Don't fuck up your esthetics. Right. Don't don't look stupid. Don't look amateur. You need to look professional. You need to know what your brand standards are.

These are my colors, right? These are my fonts. You need consistency across the board. I'm, you know, absolutely diligent about that kind of stuff. But if you want a fancy little animation thing that shows the unboxing of the thing, if you're not making $1 million a year, maybe even a month, you're wasting your time. I really like that, and I think that does take a lot of pressure off of the entrepreneur when when getting that minimum viable product to send traffic to, because it does seem like there's a lot of possibilities on things that you could add different modules and whatnot that may not necessarily be beneficial.

And so I really like that response.

Do you have any examples of websites that you think do it really well? And that's something when I'm learning about something oftentimes, going and looking at a website that's doing it exceptionally well or whatever it may be, it's helpful. And so are there any whether you've worked with them or not, that you think do it exceptionally well?

I don't spend a lot of time looking at others. I just look at my clients websites and work on them most of the time and their competition, you know? So as I look at my websites like one of my favorite, favorite clients is, JT from rep to chip rep to chip.com, they sell the most unsexy thing on the planet.

They take coconut, they break up the coconut shell, and then they ship it to you. And you put that in the bottom of your tank for your frog or your turtle. As the, the the bottom, the floor for, for these animals to live in right. Substrate. Yet, you know, there's their products, they have different sizes and different shapes and forms and all that kind of stuff, and different animals, new, different things.

So we've spent the past two and a half years trying to turn his website, which is just a list of 6 or 7 products, into a decision making engine. So if you have a northern diamondback terrapin turtle, we now have a page for that that says, hey, the northern diamondback terrapin turtle. It uses these types of things, and he's actually making videos and an e-book for each animal.

Tigers 275 animal types that he's working on on this website. Right. So that's where you're you're not trying to sell your product. You're trying to help your customer with their need. Right? It's sort of like when you know, whatever car you have, you know, when you go to a car website, you tell them what car you have. Well, if you have a pet website, why don't you tell them what kind of pet you have?

Exactly. And then they answer the questions specifically, right. So I have a 2013 Ford C-Max. My battery dies. Tell me this exact battery fits in your car.

We need to do the same thing in our website for our customer's needs.

I like that I, I think that's a really good practical example. Like the cars. I mean, I think everyone's been on a car website and,

understands that that process of getting you, to where you need to be.

And so this has been an outstanding interview. I think we probably could go on for another couple hours, but I want to be respectful of your time.

At the end of every podcast, we have something called The Fire Round. It's four questions that we ask every guest at the end of the show. Scott, are you ready?

I am ready, let's do this.

What is your favorite book

in the space that we're talking about? Right. My favorite book is The Lean Startup. When I first read that, you know, I think Eric wrote that in about 2008. I think I read it in 2011 when I started my first startup.

So much of it resonated with me and things that I had done in my past, different tactical best practices I had.

But what Eric did is he wrapped that into a whole program and a way of thinking. Right. And the way I summarize the Lean Startup to people that haven't read it, it's simple. Is this with your business, everything you have is an assumption and your job is to validate your assumptions. So basically, your job as a startup is to learn.

It's not to maximize your revenue. Today. It's to maximize your learnings and minimize your unknowns. So the more you learn, the smarter you're going to be about the decisions that you're going to make. And that's what Lean Startup tries to explain to people, is, you know, changing your mindset, as you're starting and growing your business. It's not about, you know, the money you're making today.

It's about how much better you understand your customers. So the product you offer to them tomorrow is better than the one you're offering to them today. I like it, I like it, and I second that. That's an outstanding book.

Number two. What are your hobbies? My hobbies these days are pickleball and my pack of little chihuahuas. Very nice, very nice.

What is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man? There's not much that I miss about working for the man. For me, the biggest one is bureaucracy,

so many large corporations,

you end up, you know, everybody has a veto, right? You know, everybody can voice their opinion and everybody's trying to stop projects instead of move them forward.

What I love about, you know, the entrepreneurial side of things. And one of the reasons I work with only small brands is when we're talking back and forth. We make a decision right then and we move forward. Right. I had a fortune 500 client that I was working with in Shopify, and we'd get on the call, there'd be 12 of them, one of me.

And, you know, two things always happened. The person we needed to make the decision was not in the call, and the person I was going to do the work from the decision was not in the call. And a bunch of, middle managers were just there, you know, drinking coffee or whatever that kind of doing. So,

I love the pace at which you can move, right?

Because it's all about those learnings, right? There's nothing wrong with making mistakes and error. They're not mistakes. They're things you tried that didn't work. Therefore you were now smarter than you were yesterday about those kind of things. I fully agree with that. And

bureaucracy is a very common answer to this one. And so, final question, what do you think sets apart successful e-commerce entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?

Two pieces to that, and they're quite related, right? First is they do the work. Second is they do the right work. Right. So on the they do the work. Right. You know, back to the rep ship example, where they're going to have these landing pages for 275 different animals and they're going to have, you know, videos. They got to do all that work.

Right. And that's hard. You know, in any business that you're working on, there's lots of work that needs to be done. But sometimes people do lots of work, but it's the wrong work. Like they're working on their website instead of working on customer acquisition. Right. So you also have to make sure you're doing the right work. So you need that grit to do the work.

But you also need that common sense or intelligence or awareness of your business, understanding of your customers to make sure you're doing the right work. I think that's an outstanding answer now for people that have listened to this and would be potentially interested in working with you. Who's your ideal client at Jade Puma? So Jade Puma, what we do is we focus and specialize on small Shopify brands and people that want to build a brand versus build an e-commerce website.

Right. For me, that if between a brand and an e-commerce website, e-commerce websites. So products brand sell a brand experience most, most. Your audience probably understands the differences between those. But we're looking for the people just getting started on their business or they've been doing it, you know, for five years or whatever, and they're just not growing kind of thing.

We're not here for your million dollar, you know, a month, people. There's, you know, I'm a small agency, I'm a solopreneur. I've got a couple contractors. Help me if you're looking, you know, to to grow Kylie Jenner Cosmetics from $1 billion valuation to 5 billion. I'm not the person for you. But if you're just getting started or been doing this for five years and kind of stuck in a rut, I am perfect for you.

Very nice. And we will post links to that in the show notes. Scott, this has been an outstanding interview. Thank you so much for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch. Thanks, David. It was a pleasure.