Boosting E-commerce Sales: Insights from Shopify Optimization Expert Matthew Stafford

And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Schoma and Ken Wilson .

Matthew has a keen eye for obstacles on the customer journey and his great at interpreting data to find the diamonds in the rough . He also has the ability to see things from a business owner's perspective , having run his own companies for the past 27 years .

On today's episode , we are diving deep into conversion rate optimization and how online sellers can use this metric as a measuring stick for success . Welcome to the show , matt . Welcome . Glad to be here , thank you , thank you . So can you please share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and your path in the e-commerce world ?

I was in a service business , I had a commercial concrete company , and so we traveled all over the country doing Manard Home Depot's , walmart's , lowe's , big Box stores , and I signed up for a Tony Robbins event and went to the Tony Robbins event and bought a kind of date to me , but he was selling a DVD series called Money Masters and in there the very first

month that I received it was a DVD from Frank Kern on how to sell e-books , where you could teach your parent how to talk , and I thought , wow , that's crazy , you can use online , you can use the internet to sell stuff and have this big audience .

Because for me , I was on the road about 200 days a year pouring concrete and if it was raining we didn't work , if it was bad weather , too cold , we had to do a whole bunch of extra work . All these different things . I thought , man , if I could build something online , my income would be a lot more scalable without having to go through all the problems .

And so I started listening to that and that's kind of what took me into the online world .

And so it's kind of , yeah , eye opening , and so let's get right into it . I love conversion rate . I think it's one of the top KPIs for e-commerce . I think it should be one of the top KPIs for most businesses . But what are some of the top ways that ? What are some of the most effective strategies for improving e-commerce conversion rates that you know ?

And that's not what the customer comes to your site thinking how do I go find a site to spend money on ? They actually come to your site and say I have a problem , I'm looking to solve that , or I have a need and I'm looking to find you know a way to fill that need . And if you can go to your site as a customer and think like , oh , what are they ?

What are they looking to solve , or what are they looking to buy , how easy is it to do that ? And what you'll find is that little shift will show all kinds of things on your website that aren't working or that are confusing or that are slowing down the process for them to get to what they want to find .

What would be something like on the homepage or the landing page that you would recommend , like a high-level design on , like what you said ? When someone hits your site , they have a problem , they're looking to solve their problem , and so how do you , how do you help them do that ?

So if you have , if you have a water bottle site , so you have I don't know 30 colors or 20 colors and four or five different designs . When they come there , that's like paradox of choice . So if they can go , oh , I want a pink one .

And or if they come to the home page , go , oh , I , like you know , I want a bigger water bottle , or I want to travel size or whatever kind of . Break it down into categories and get them onto the category page where you have filters .

So once they can filter it down now , instead of having 50 choices , they have four or five they can find what they're looking for and they'll convert much higher . So we know everything that we do is data driven . The two most valuable sources of traffic on your site are the people that use the search bar and the people that use the filters .

Those two people convert higher and are worth more value per session than anyone else that ever comes to the site .

And so , by taking those two elements , essentially what you're doing is you're taking this big top of funnel area , you're bringing it down to the three or four things that interest them , based off of their them choosing , and then they convert much higher .

We could just lower the price of your product and your conversion rate would go up . That doesn't necessarily help you . It might actually even hurt you .

So the reason why we coined the term revenue optimization is because we really want to make profit , and so if your whole site is built in a way that from when they land on it till they check out , they have a good experience , that's actually where you're going to achieve . You will get a higher conversion rate .

Or you could actually even offer we've raised the price and raised conversion rates before , so we try different things , all the different ways .

rate and you're trying to move the needle , what are you focused ?

You know it's user friendly now where you can kind of look at the entire shopping experience . Are you guys using those tools as well , and do you recommend someone that's not deep into optimization on their site to even scratch the surface on that and just take a look at the metrics there ?

We have about 30 people on our team and we run tests and are constantly trying to optimize , and I would say probably half or more of our tests fail , like it either gives no lift or it's worse , and that's us doing this every day .

So a regular store owner if they're not using data , they're really not going to ever know if they change a couple of things , if it's helping , hurting , whatever , they're just going to be on this loop of not understanding . And so the data , yeah , you have to use it .

What I would say would be a really good thing to do is just set up a report that gets like emailed to you once a week from Google . Then it can have like your average site speed on your most landed on pages .

So just checking your homepage which is what a lot of people do they go , oh , I want to check my site speed , and they put in their homepage URL that's the site speed for your homepage , that's not the site speed for your site , and so every page has it . So just find out like what are your hero products . So it might be four or five URLs .

You plug those in , have it email you once a week . The landing page speed is . Another one would be average revenue per user which they'll give you are repeat customers and first time buyers , and so once you start looking at those , you'll see trends . Is my page , is my site , getting slower ? Or all of a sudden , this one page drop .

Now you can go look at it and find out what's going on much quicker . Otherwise you might just go yeah , our conversions down , but we have no reason . We don't know why , because everything looks good . The problem is a browser could do an update , so it might be .

Chrome on an Android device is where your , your market is and for some reason that's not displaying good . When the new update came out and you would never know that if you're not tracking , you know your higher landing pages .

If you send it to yourself once a week , that's more sustainable to take a look and go , okay , I'll spend that five minutes and do it .

I would much rather have someone looking at it once a week or even once a month , then getting it every day and then all of a sudden becoming none to that email , not looking anymore , and otherwise all that work that you set up was for nothing .

So we have a brand that sells products that are in multiple designs , like say , like 40 different designs and so we kind of split it up to test out what it . We thought like , hey , how can we get more sales ?

Let's , let's try to test splitting this up into maybe eight designs here of like best sellers , maybe eight here that are on clearance , and kind of like split it up into like five different test groups .

And so we ran those and then after two weeks none of the all of the data was where our sales were down between 30 and 50% on across the board , and so we reverted , we backed out . So you and your team do a lot of tons of testing with clients up .

What is your like usual , your minimum testing period and when do you say let's pull the plug and revert back ?

Honestly , most websites don't get enough for statistical significance , and so their tests have to run quite a bit longer . There's a few different ways that you can . You can use what's called design of experiments , which is a mathematical formula to help make predictive probably more complicated than the majority of people would want to try to do .

Yeah , I would say seven days minimum .

The one thing that was always in the back of my mind was time period bias . So , for instance , if that two weeks was included , Black Friday , it may appear to be performing way better . And also there's a lot of different moving parts . So , for instance , maybe you go out of stock .

What I would think you could do if I was trying to think through this myself . There's something called paradox of choice , and so the more choices that you give people , the lower your conversion is , and if you think about it , they'll come and they go .

Oh , I like this one , I like that one too , and I kind of I don't know if I like this one I have three up .

My boss just walked up , I got a closed tab or up , the kids just came , and so what's happening is you almost have this click that where the more things that you give them to click on , or the more choices to make , the longer it takes , and then they go .

I'll just come back when I have more time , and so what I would do is I would not just separate the 40 that you have , 40 designs that you have . I would look at the 40 designs that you have and find out which four of them made 50% of the sales , 60% of the sales and I would find a way to put that in a category and then the other ones doing it .

That way , I think that you're going to increase your sales for sure , because people don't want to be the first one to try something out , and so they know that this one has a bunch of reviews , or this category has the best sellers , et cetera . You can create that process in their head of not having to be the first one to buy it .

So you could have 14 different choices and colors . You drop it down to three or four and you'll more than double your conversion rate . It's just insane . People think more is better , more is not better and it has never proven to be better for us ever .

They're doing , you know , 5,000 , 10,000 a month and they've never ran any split , any testing on it at all . Split testing , ab , whatever , nothing for conversion rate . What would be the top first thing to focus on for that ?

Most of them they're answering their own customer service in the beginning too , and so every question they get , they think that's a problem and they go put the answer on the website . Well now , what they've done is they've really made their site navigatable for the 20% of people that have the problems and excluded the 80% of the people that had no problem .

And so what they've really done is now , all of a sudden , for somebody to find what they want , they have to go down this huge list of stuff just to get to where they're going , and a lot of times that's not necessary .

The biggest lifts we ever get in conversion nine out of 10 times for the first three , four months we work on a site is actually finding what's on the site and removing it that nobody's using . Basically simple is better . Yes 100% .

That little search icon is not actually good enough , so they should put the word search under it , just like under the hamburger icon they should put menu , because , if you think about it , before COVID only about 10% of sales were done online . During COVID it got as high as 33% , and now that we're back to normal it's about 27% .

People don't realize that online shopping is still . Actually . We're in the early stages of it . People are just getting online all the time and figuring this out , and so all the things that we take for granted that we understand , they don't . And so that's what I mean by . Does Homer Simpson know what this little circle with a dash on it means ?

Does he know what these three lines mean ? No , so just put words there . If it says menu , how hard is that to understand ? Oh , that's the menu , oh , that's the search , and by just adding those little things , you'll be shocked at what it'll do to your conversion rate .

Like if I want to ask my parents or some of my siblings , who do not have an IT background , they're not going to know what a hamburger menu is , and so putting that menu there sounds complicated . It sounds like why should we have to do that ? But you're right , would Homer Simpson be able to know what a hamburger menu is ? Probably not , so I like it .

One last question here , and I love statistics and probably people listening to this are wondering what is a good conversion rate , and so I'll preface that with a lot of our listeners sell on Amazon , and so we're anything 10 or below , we troubleshoot . Anything 20 or higher , we are happy . But e-commerce stores Shopify WordPress , whatever different story .

So can you maybe give a high level of what is a good conversion rate ? And if you're below this because I know it depends on product type . It depends on a lot of stuff , but what is an average industry specific for e-commerce , and if it's below a certain point you should troubleshoot , and if it's higher , then you should be happy ?

I would say it depends on your average order value . So if you have an average order value of 50 bucks , you probably can convert 5% , 6% . Average e-commerce is about 2% . So most people don't , but most people obviously haven't went through and simplified their site and cleaned it up and understand all the principles that we're talking about here .

So I would say let me just give another caveat . People go to Amazon to buy . They're not going on . They know , hey , I need this . They go on and it's basically they're selecting a choice of which product they're going to get to buy . They're not going on there to cost compare and all that other stuff . They go there to buy .

They don't do that with your store . They typically will visit two or three competitors , find out who they trust , who they like . Amazon is taking care of all that for them , so they're not doing that in that environment . So back to the conversion . If you get up to about $100 , then I would say 4% is really good . 3% is okay .

Anything below that you know that you can improve it fairly significantly . And then about $150 average order value , I would say that you should be converting at 3% . It would be really good . 2 to 2.5 would be okay .

If you get two more of those , you doubled your business . So why not do that ? First become a lot more profitable and then you can go buy more media than your competitors can and you win .

Most people ignore the fact that if they spent more time fixing the site first and buying traffic second , they would be able to buy a lot more traffic and definitely a lot more than their competitors . I totally agree .

When they go to Amazon , they're there to buy and they know I can trust Amazon . What can you do on your own e-commerce store to get customers to trust you ? What are a couple of ways ?

When you try to make it blend in with the color and the theme , it doesn't stand out as like oh , this is like Amazon , which is what you really do want it to seem like . The other thing that I was I meant to mention earlier when we were talking about different practices don't make your button colors match your theme colors .

A lot of people , if their site is purple , they make their button purple . Well , the problem with that is you want to always . You want the button to be the next most valuable action that they perform .

Like , if they're on your product page , you want them to hit the add to cart , if they're on the cart , you want them to hit the proceed to checkout and so on , and so always make the button color different than everything else on the page , because then it always stands out .

So when I'm on the homepage and I go to my category and I get my filter and then I go there . All those buttons should all be the same color but not match anything else on the site , and that kind of leads them through without them figuring out what to do . I like that . Is there a specific color that gets a higher click ?

No , the only thing that I can tell you that we've tested and it doesn't work well is red . Red online typically signifies there's an error or stop , and so we tend to default to green , because green just means go and most people's theme colors aren't green , and so it stands out and it works .

For instance , like when I'm communicating with our graphics department , I always like to point them in the direction of anchor Lulu lemon in dollar shape . I really like those websites and from a graphic standpoint they do an excellent job , and so do you have any examples of large brands that do a really good job here ?

And he continues to work on clarifying and making the site better , better , better , and it uses all of the best practices that we talked about . Very nice , and that was Anson belt Yep and S O N B ? E L T dot com .

What's the best way to address that ? Where , where there's an intermediate step that would require like measuring or something like that ?

And so what we did is we take a poll of all their customers and ask them what was , what was a friction point or what was one thing that almost kept you from buying . And when we got all those answers and we tabulated them , we ended up going and answering those on that homepage Like one size fits all . That confused a lot of people .

How can one size fit all ? Well , it's because when you trim it and you put it into the buckle , it's a ratchet belt and so it has every quarter inch it's micro adjustable , so there's no holes in it , so it's always the right size . But people didn't , you know without me explaining that how do you do that on a website ?

Well , we put a little see how they click it . A little window comes up and he plays a video showing how you trim it and size fits up one size fits all . And he does that with multiple different things . So essentially , what you have to do again . Go back to that . Homer Simpson , you understand what you're describing as the seller .

Go to your page and look at it as a buyer and be like , okay , am I going to actually understand this , or is it going to confuse ?

information before I can make a purchase , instead of leading them through the sale . You know , if you're trying to say quick add to cart on the homepage , let me ask you a question like and you see it all the time , even on big site do you have enough information on that product to make a buying decision ?

When it's a quick add on the homepage Unless you're a returning visitor , which is only should only be about 30% of your customers then no .

If you're buying traffic , you know 30% returning is good because you're always sending new people there , but if a lot of those things like people don't understand , you're , when you say quick add to cart , that's seller , a store owner trying to get someone to make a buy . That's not a customer going . Oh , I want to make this decision with no information .

Yeah , I'll do that .

And tablet is the same as desktop . So not mobile and tablet , it's mobile , which is a phone , and then desktop and tablets , and desktop and tablet will convert twice as high . Using those metrics , you can see if one is underperforming or not , performing well or not .

As far as graphic , I would say , if you don't have an entire team to help you with it , I would almost , I would certainly neglect desktop first , because 80% of your traffic nowadays is mobile . When we first started this 10 years ago , it was 80% was desktop , 20% was mobile and now it is literally almost exactly flipped .

In fact , I would say that tends to be about 83% , 84% mobile now instead of 80 , 20 . But so , for sure , that's where you need to focus . If you have an entire team , then then you can kind of take what's working on mobile and figure out a way to do it on desktop .

But you have so much more real estate on desktop to work with , you don't have to worry near as much about things being perfect .

so much growth left in e-commerce penetration . It feels like we're in like inning two or inning three and so we have a yeah , we're like we're in a good space , right , and so , yeah , 80% of sales you're seeing coming from mobile . That's pretty incredible .

So it's like was what we're we're kind of sharing with our team is design for mobile and just make sure desktop works , and so , just like what you just said , and so I like that .

So , moving on a little bit of a deeper question here , can you define customer segmentation and then can you share with the audience like is this something you would recommend doing and only if you had paid media or organic traffic ? Can you dive into that a little bit ?

I would segment your data by how many times someone has bought from you , so people that bought five or more , people that bought four or more , three or more each one of those is is a different level of fan , and so you can treat them differently , and you can ask the people that have bought from you five or more times great questions that will help you make

your site work better . One of the actually , I'm going to give you a little nugget and then I'll go back to this . I would tell you that one of the smartest things that we've ever done is put a little survey on the thank you page that asks the question what is one thing that almost made you not buy ?

And what happens is all the people that just spent money with you will answer oh well , this or oh well that . Right , this wasn't clear .

And when you do that , they are telling you what to go work on on your website in order to make more sales , and some of our largest wins on the majority of our sites come from the answers there , because those are your buyers and they're telling you what was hard for them to understand or what was a friction point .

So now , going back to how you segment , you can ask them questions and you can treat them differently . One of the things that I notice is oh , we'll give our first time buyers 10% off . To me , I think in my head , if I'm a customer and I come back and I see that I've already bought from you , why are you not giving me 10% off ?

You're willing to give that to a stranger , but not someone I'm coming back to buy again . So , like wording things different or finding a better way to offer discounts , I would much rather give the discount to the person that's bought five or more times than the first time buyer . You could say free shipping on your first purchase .

Then you haven't devalued the cost of your product , but you've given them an incentive that doesn't say , hey , we're just going to mark down our profit because we have it and it's already baked in there for us to do that .

So there's a lot of different things that you can do During that segmentation , I would actually treat each level of customer better than the previous one . Right Give them more options to do business with you .

Treat those people really good . That's your highest profit margin . Your first time customers most of the time you're breaking even on them .

I was feverishly writing down here we're not doing that on the thank you page , which we're going to be doing that soon , and then also on our VIP emails . We're not asking them questions , which they have the most experience on our site checking out and shopping . So I'm going to create a form and send it out to the VIPs .

What could we do better and get that automation ? Because they have the most experience purchasing right .

So they get social capital with their friends because they've included a brand that they know , like and trust when they told their friends about it .

If you were to ask a pediatrician , like if you draw a pie chart of what people come in for , they'd probably say , okay , strep throat , the flu and a physical for school makes up 80% of why people come to see me , and so I think you've got a really cool perspective in that you're looking at .

You have a lot of patients , meaning you have a lot of websites that you're looking at . So what would be those top three for issues that , when people come to you , you're like this is , this is what's wrong .

I would say simplicity . So for sure , if you have a form that takes 30 pages to fill it out , you know when you get there how happy are you going to be by the time you see the doctor , you know it's just pain in the butt . And so if your site is a pain in the butt to work with or to find what they're looking for , that's going to be an issue .

So I think navigation is key . The second thing that really helps boost conversions is high quality pictures . So if they can see what they're buying and it looks like a very good quality picture , they're going to automatically trust and insinuate okay , this is good quality . If you have fuzzy pictures or you have way too many .

So I go to a lot of sites where I see they have like 30 thumbnails or 20 thumbnails and people think again , more is better . Actually , what you're doing is you're hurting because they're clicking on all these different thumbnails to think , oh , what am I missing ? What have I not seen ? Why do I need to see so many ?

So have your product , maybe have a lifestyle shot of it and then maybe some technic , technical things about it that are unique value propositions . So between those that gives you the ability to one , it looks high quality , to easy navigation , and probably the third one would just be functionality .

Like it's amazing how many sites we go to and you hover over the menu and all sudden it covers up half the site . Or you click zoom and it's like showing you the right shoulder and when you try to move it around , like you can never get to the center where you're trying to look .

And so a lot of times people they're looking at their site on desktop and it works great , but if they would go look at it on mobile they would realize it's it's horrendous , and so that's the other thing . Stop checking your website on the desktop and start looking at it on your phone .

So people always say , like you know what platforms like , so we have Wix , shopify , woocom or Magento all of these platforms that you can have your e-commerce store on . Is there one that you recommend that you've worked with so many clients that maybe one platform stands out that just crushes it ? Or is it easy to you know , bring up conversion rates ?

What is your thoughts on that ?

Why does that happen ? It's the same site . What's going on ? Well , maybe it's so . Many people have already purchased with the standard navigation of you know , add to cart , proceed to checkout , enter your information , then your shipping , then complete the sale .

They're comfortable with that process and so when you have a different platform that's customizable or different , they now have to think through the steps and every time that you make them think that's an exit point , that's a place where there's friction and so prototypical does matter .

Your menu navigation should be in the center and it should be money making links , not about us . And you know all these other things that people put up their home button . You know those things are all distracting . People know if they click on the logo they're going to go to the home .

Having another home button , you're literally giving rid of , getting rid of some of your most valuable real estate , which should be money making links , and so Shopify has done a really good job of making things very simple , and their new 2.0 themes are great . Yeah , I would just say for sure , if you're getting started , shopify is a great place to start .

We focus a lot on organic traffic and we drive content and we drive social media all to our WordPress site and WordPress seems to work better with Google Analytics and ranking , and so , in your experience , if migrating clients from WordPress to Shopify , what happens to organic ranking and traffic ? Organic traffic yeah , we're .

That's monthly and what you do in that group it's a Shopify store owners . The majority of them are Shopify store owners . We teach them what we're doing and what's working right now . So we're using the principles and tactics that we're finding on the larger brands and then sharing that in the in the group of store owners .

That couldn't you know , they really can't have us five guys on their team and spend the money to do that , and so a lot of times those store owners grow up and become our partners later on down the road .

by Jeff Wilson , excellent . What are your hobbies ? I like to cycle . I definitely . For a lot of my life I was into skydiving . I have about 500 skydives and motorcycles .

There's a lot of days that I don't feel like doing it , and if you do it anyways , those are the days that matter the most , and so the ones that I see that succeed have discipline , and they follow that discipline rather than their feelings , because we never say , hey , you know , do this and you're going to make a million bucks , because there's a lot of do

this that you have to do , and so you just have to have the daily discipline to do it , and that's what's going to make you successful over time . Excellent advice .