360: Idiotic Mistakes We’ve All Made As Ecommerce Entrepreneurs With Kurt Elster

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You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I have my friend Kurt Elster back on the show and Kurt runs the Unofficial Shopify podcast, which is actually one of the few e-commerce podcasts that I actually listen to. If you run an e-commerce store, especially on Shopify, you should definitely check out his podcast on your favorite podcast app. Anyway, today, both Kurt and I are gonna talk about these six most common mistakes that e-commerce store owners make.

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And between the two of us, we’ve seen a lot of mistakes, believe me. So enjoy the episode and be sure to check out the unofficial Shopify podcast. Now, before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text message provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10X bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce.

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and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution converts like crazy and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klavia who is also a sponsor of the show. Now are you working around the clock to build the business you always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it?

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companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion.

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To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way.

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So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcasts on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:37
Kurt Elster, what is going on? It’s been a while since I’ve spoken to you. It’s been a bit and I regret that. That’s my fault. I should really be following up with someone as fabulous as Steve Chow. Well, it’s funny. Last time we hung out was at the Klaviyo conference and we recorded one of these podcasts. Awesome. It a lot of fun. I was going to say, as soon as you said the last time we hung out was at Klaviyo and the first thing that popped in my head was that was so much fun. Like when I think about that conference, that’s really the memory I have is

03:06
recording with you and you Darian and Tony in that like cool and but weird little recording booth set up they had. It was a ton of fun. And what I remember is you guys like busted on me the entire episode and yet I still publish that one. You know sometimes you just have to speak truth to power. All right so Kurt today’s a really exciting episode we’re going to be talking about common mistakes that store owners make and

03:34
Let’s start out with your number one pet peeve. What is that? Obsessing over page speed and now as of today, Core Web Vitals. Yes. So actually, can you talk about Core Web Vitals first and what they are even just in case the listeners don’t even have any idea what that is? Okay. So originally we, Google said, Hey, you got to look at your page speed. And they had like this arbitrary. What I feel is a largely arbitrary metric that much to its detriment.

04:03
gives you a score, grade, it grades your website. And it’s based on what I think is fairly flawed data. And the implication was always, if it doesn’t perform well, at some point, you’re not gonna rank on Google if you can’t get a good score. And the reality is like that, that is an overstatement of what is really happening. It’s a reason, as of now, coming out a Google update is around the corner or maybe like about to publish.

04:33
in which they’re going to take into consideration three metrics from the larger Google PageSpeed score called Core Web Vitals. And probably the most important one there is first content paint. So really it’s like, long does it take? Not necessarily like how long does the entire website take to load? How long until I could see it and use it is really what Core Web Vitals looks at to like simplify it. Right. Because you could be on a website, it starts loading and you can start using it and scrolling.

05:01
before it’s finished, like stuff can load in the background, that’s fine. They don’t actually care about that part. It’s how long until I can use the darn thing? And so people naturally freaked out. And the reality is when they, what’s really going on is if you look at like the fine print of the description of what Google’s saying they’re gonna do, it’s, they’re saying, hey, if we have two sites that rank for the same placement, the one with the better Core Web Vital rating will take priority.

05:30
We’re going to use it as a tiebreaker. OK, so speed is important, but it is not the be all end all lose sleep over it thing that I think it’s being presented as and people are treating it. And really, my issue is I’m so sick of the anxiety and the hair tearing out that’s occurring with merchants needlessly because of page speed. That’s my problem. You know what the problem with it is? It gives you a letter grade.

06:00
zero to a hundred and agents everywhere are trying to get a freaking hundred percent and it really can’t be done without jumping through a lot of hoops and I think I think it was was it your podcast or one post on Facebook where you actually looked at some of the top Shopify stores and all of them had page speed scores under 20. Yes, yeah, yes, yeah. Shopify is making effort in trying to get people to make to have more performant websites and as part of that

06:28
They said, hey, you could see in your store, like here’s a page speed grade. And it’s a little better than like the regular page speed grade because it’s an average of like a homepage, a product page, a collection page. It’s a little more accurate. And then in my partner portal in Shopify where I could see like these are the stores I have access to. These are my client stores. I could rank, just sort them all and see what the scores are. And what’s interesting is very few people get above 30.

06:57
And the stores I have that get above 60, they’re stores that we built like five to 10 years ago and then really haven’t changed. They just worked and that was the end of it. And so I thought that was interesting. So I know part of the issue here is like, is app JavaScript. We’ve done the research here and discovered largely it’s JavaScript, it’s apps, and it’s not deferring the load on that JavaScript that creates the problem. in our like our seven, eight, a couple nine figure stores, all of them.

07:27
are in the low double digits, like 12 is a pretty typical score. And Shopify will tell you like, oh, you score the same as similar stores. So we know for the highest performers, the teens, so like F minus minus if we’re applying a letter grade is the typical average score. You know what’s frustrating about this is that since I teach e-commerce and teach SEO,

07:53
Like I felt like I had to do it for myself. So all my sites are in the nineties now across the board, but it took me three weeks to do that. And I had to jump through hoops and get into the code in order to do that. And I can’t expect a non-technical person to possibly do that, which is ridiculous. Like Google cannot expect you to do this stuff. Right. Would you agree? Yes. No. And the, I just don’t understand. I don’t understand the initiative. I don’t understand the why this has become a priority all of sudden.

08:23
Like I would love to know internally at Google, what is going on here? Is it some altruistic desire to make the internet more accessible to slower devices? It’s got to do with ads. Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. Like I wonder what the real objective is here. Well, here’s my take on that. You know, one of the core web bottles is cumulative layout shift, which is basically whether your website shifts up and down when it’s loading, right?

08:49
Have you ever gone on one of those sites where like you’re trying to click on the next button, but then the ads all of a sudden appears with a next button and you click on an ad by accident. Yep. I think they’re trying to reduce that and click fraud. That’s their motivation. Oh, wow. I like that theory. Never would have occurred to me. And that’s pretty brilliant. Like if you look at how they generate their revenue, that makes a lot of sense. And also this page speed, like if it loads faster,

09:19
That’s more ad clicks. Oh man, you cracked the case. So that’s what I really think this is for. And so they’re trying to automatically algorithmically take out those people who are just trying to scan the system for AdSense. Hmm. This is really good. That’s my take. That’s my take. All right. I love it. So I think the other interesting thing is Brian Dean from Backlinko published data yesterday where they looked at something. It was like 200,000 sites, something nuts.

09:46
And he said there was very little correlation, if any, between UX metrics, which I think they measured. It sounded like they measured in page views and Core Web Vital scores. So obviously, stuff that was way screwed up, it would correlate. But for the most part, it really did not have an impact on UX. I don’t think the rollout has fully happened here. I think they delayed it till like next month, I believe. So we’ll see what happens. But I suspect you’re right. It’s probably not going to happen.

10:16
of effect. It’ll have a similar effect as to what PageSpeed did when it first got announced. So tell me sir, what PageSpeed is clearly the thing that makes me crazy. That’s my big one is every time someone brings up the ghost of PageSpeed I’m like oh here we go. What drives Steve Chow nuts? Okay you know what drives me crazy is when someone comes up to me and says I tried Facebook ads and Google ads and it didn’t work and then I go over to their site to take a look

10:46
and they’re driving paid traffic to a site that just isn’t ready. And we can expand upon this, because I know this is part of your pet peeves too, but how many times has someone said that to you? You go over their site and it’s just terrible. But yeah, but then Facebook ads gets blamed. You can’t blame the traffic store because your site doesn’t convert. Right. And they spend all their time on the copy and all this stuff where they’re just driving it to something that has poor copy. It actually doesn’t even make sense to me.

11:16
Yeah, often the disconnect there is frustrating. really, how often have I been on, or have you been on, I like Instagram, I’m a millennial I suppose. So I like Instagram, I go through my Instagram stories, and then I’ll see an ad for something that looks interesting, I’ll swipe up on it, and I just end up on, either they send me to the homepage, in which case I’m just clicking out, heaven forbid, do not send anyone to your homepage, or,

11:44
I just end up on like an entirely standard unoptimized product detail page with like a one line description. And I’m like, what did you think was going to happen here? And of course it just bounds. Well, you know what my pet peeve is since we’re talking about product descriptions. My biggest pet peeve is when I see a product that has zero likes, zero shares, zero everything, zero reviews, and they didn’t even take the time to hide the zero part. Cause when I see zero, that indicates to me that

12:11
no one’s buying anything and it’s a brand new site. social proof is what you just advertised. Exactly. That’s negative social proof. It is. It actually causes me to leave because that means no one’s bought that product before, And that’s, funny that product reviews apps don’t know to hide themselves, especially like the review stars widget, if there are zero stars. And that’s for most of these apps, that’s a pretty easy customization that we have to go implement. It’s not hard.

12:39
that should just be an option built into them. Because yeah, zero reviews is just like a red flag. If I’m a brand new visitor. Actually, you know, that’s really interesting. So you actually have to muck with the code to fix that? Yeah. Interesting. And then same goes with social proof, right? Like Facebook likes and shares and that sort of thing you you physically go in. I almost don’t you know what I

13:03
almost always scrub those social share buttons because what are the chances that you actually get someone to share a product page to their Facebook feed? That’s a tough sell. agree with you, actually. I had considered removing those altogether because I know from my own site very few people click on those. However, I will say that people do click on the Pinterest button though, since I guess since I’m in the wedding industry. What have you will say, yeah, for some industries, the pin it button, that’s a win.

13:33
But you need to be in the right niche, and Wedding is perfect for that. But beyond that, like, oh, a product page, I’m gonna share this to my timeline. No one’s doing that, it’s just not gonna happen. Interesting, so do you take away those social buttons, actually, for your clients? I do, yeah. At this point, I just strip them out, and then if there’s pushback on it, I say, well, we can heat map it or split test it. I said, but if I heat map your best-selling product,

14:03
you will get flip a coin one or zero clicks. And sure enough, that’s what happens every time. And it was so consistent that I don’t even think about it anymore. I just strip them out, unless it’s in a wedding, in which case, just give me a pin it button and that’s the end of it. What’s tricky about this is the default Facebook buttons always have the number next to it, right? So unless you know how to manipulate the code a little bit, it’s actually kind of hard. I had to code up my own button to do that, to remove the Oh really? Yeah.

14:32
Yeah, most of the time it’s yeah, it’s just like Facebook share and it doesn’t have the numbers. I mean, if people are actually sharing it more social proof, that’s always going to be my priority. If the question is, should we add more social proof? The answer is yes. I don’t think you could do enough. And here’s like an obvious pet peeve. Like it’s intuitive to me, but sometimes I’ll land on the site and I’ll have no idea what the heck they’re selling or why I should buy from them at all. Oh, the story.

15:02
and the description and the positioning and those are the fundamentals. swear to God, all of the fundamentals are in copywriting and that’s including the social proof. Like you got to nail those before you worry about design and page speed. I think that’s my other issue is like, you know, sites with one line descriptions that in no reviews and like we’re worried about our page speed score. You got bigger problems. Actually, you know, I’m actually curious since you work with a lot of clients, what is your hierarchy of

15:32
priority when you land on a site or what you work on. Okay, so a hundred percent. Number one, it needs to be clear. The positioning or the tagline needs to be clear. Cause you said like, I land on a site, I got no idea what they’re doing, why I’m here. That’s a big problem. And if like you saw it, everybody else did too. So when I land on a site, need within seconds, I need to know

15:57
what they sell, why, or at least you’ve been able to spark my curiosity. know, like I land on doglawyer.com and they’re like, oh, that’s not a real site. But certainly like a name like that, I gotta know more. So like sometimes you get lucky and you can get away with not having more of a story initially. But for the most part, like you gotta have a tagline, a headline. You need something to orient me as to like why the heck I just got dropped in here and what I’m supposed to do next. And so I really like the absolute.

16:25
cornerstone of everything is knowing and nailing and communicating that positioning statement. And that needs to be above the Yes, usually it’s like, all right, I want your logo and can we put a three to five word tagline underneath it? Oftentimes, that’s a great way to do it. Maybe you get lucky and the brand name has what you sell and it is obvious. Like, Harney and Sons Fine Tea Company. I’ll give you a guess what they sell, right? So that one, you get lucky. But yeah, I want a

16:54
a tagline, want a headline, I want something that’s gonna make it really clear to me above the fold what you sell. Alright, and then that makes it easy for me as a visitor, as a customer, to go, alright, I wanna know more. Or this isn’t for me, one of the two. But either way, we’re separating the wheat from the chaff. And then from there, okay, tell me a story. I like stories, tell me a story! I want that brand story. And it’s even like in a product description, you still wanna be able to tell a story.

17:22
on an about page you’re telling a story, on the home page you’re telling a story. If you’re not storytelling throughout this journey, you’re leaving money on the table. Like that is the next fundamental. And that really comes down to, right, all of this falls under copywriting. We’re not talking about design or development. This is just, you gotta type on the keyboard and make it make the click clack noise, right? Nobody wants to do it. It feels like homework. So it gets pushed to the bottom. So our mutual friend, think Michael Jammon, he runs Twirly Girl.

17:51
And they sell kids I love Michael Jammin. Girls dresses, very commonplace, very saturated. But their story is so amazing. It was about how his wife was abused as a child and she just wants to express all the… Of course I’m not doing a good job of explaining this. But she wanted to create these dresses to make girls really happy. And he has just really clever videos on his site that clearly express this amazing story. I’m not doing it justice. And that video makes almost all of their sales.

18:20
It’s on the about page, it’s on the front page, it’s an amazing story. Every time I watch it, I want to go buy a dress. They have, well, there’s quite an unfair advantage there in that Michael Jammin is a actual honest to goodness Hollywood screenwriter who wrote for King of the Hill and Beavis at Butthead. mean, guy, it’s just brilliant and hilarious. And he applied, he knew what Hollywood storytelling worked, like what that looked like, what that process was and when it worked. And he turned around.

18:49
and just applied it to copywriting on this website. And the results are million dollar videos. For most humans though, like you should work on your About Us page a little bit. Tell a story, just something about yourself that’s a little bit more personal. Because you don’t want to appear as like a big faceless, big large company, right? You want to be, you want to play off the mom and pop aspect because people want to shop from mom and pop stores. Well, yes. And especially now the, I think in

19:17
the last two years we’ve really seen the rise of conscious consumerism where people want to know who’s getting their dollars and why. Like why should I care? I have at this point I now have what feels like infinite options for just about anything I want to buy. So being able to tell that story that’s the competitive advantage against Walmart, against Amazon. They can’t compete with that. They’re not a person. They’re, you know, Jeff Bezos richest man in the world.

19:45
going to sp- like the guy feels like a super villain at this point, right? You’re not, you’re a person, you could be their neighbor. If they can relate to you and relate to their story, your story, then you are going to get those dollars. People are gonna vote with their dollars and say believe in what you’re doing. And if you keep your mouth shut and never share your story, you guarantee that that’s never gonna happen.

20:10
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

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Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

21:08
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So a common misconception is that people don’t even look at your About Us page, but I guarantee you, and this is for our store, the About Us page is probably the second or third most trafficked page on the site. Because when you’re shopping at an unknown boutique, people actually want to know the people behind the store. Yes. Yeah. Well, think about it. It’s like…

21:36
If somebody jumped out of a parking lot, hey, give me your credit card number. I’ve got these t-shirts. You want to buy them? Give me your credit card. That’s insane. But that’s functionally what a lot of online direct-to-consumer stores do. And so I need to know who it is who’s asking for my credit card number. And that’s why that About Us page is so important. And if you run screen recordings on a site, it’ll probably be true for just about everybody’s. As you’ll see, a fair number of people will add to cart and then go check the About page.

22:05
and then you can see whether or not they’ve made a purchase decision on if they go back to the cart and proceed to checkout. Here’s what I actually like to do. So usually when you ask your friends for an opinion on your site, they’re your friends, right? So they’re going to say, oh, it’s great. It’s great. It’s going to do great. But they’re probably lying to you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. So what I like to do is I’ll use a service like PickFu. It’s basically like a polling service. You can get 50 responses within like 15 minutes. And I did it with my site maybe a year ago and

22:35
You’ll get real unbiased comments like, Hey, I hate the pop-up. I hate this. I hate this. Hello. No, I would not shop there. You just ask a simple question. Like if you landed on this site for the first time, assuming you like the products, would you buy from here? Simple question like that. And you’ll get a lot of answers. How do you spell pick food? P I C K F U. Um, maybe in the show notes, I actually have a 50 % off coupon off of that. Say if you want to try it, it’ll be the best 25 bucks you’ll ever spend. I guarantee you. Sweet.

23:05
No, I know this works because we’ve used, I’m not familiar with PickFu, but I’ve used Hotjar, which will let you do, they call them incoming surveys. Same concept. There’s a lot of companies that do similar things. Yeah. Yeah. lot of like, I don’t use it, but I know a lot of Shopify merchants like Lucky Orange. I think it can do it. Oh really? Okay. I’m not sure. You know what? I shouldn’t say that. I really have no idea. Well, so the students in my class, I have them do it before they submit, before they asked me to critique their site, basically I asked them to do it.

23:35
Ah, and it’s eye opening. It’s eye opening. Well, so this brings me to one of my other pet peeves, not talking to your customers. Yes. Nobody talks to their customers. It’s like, well, in oftentimes you ask, like, oh, why do your customers buy? And they’ll have an answer. And then I’ll say, how do you know? Oh, we just know. So what you just know. That means you that means it’s a best guess and that you might be right. But until you ask, it’s still just a best guess. And that’s what I love about talking to your customers. And one of the best ways to talk to your customers and pick up the phone.

24:05
Call your customer, use phone.app, it’s the best app. Call your customers on the phone and talk to them. And be like, hey, why’d you buy? What’d you hope to get out of this? Tell me about the experience. mean, just talking to a few people’s really enlightening. know, the same, it will have a similar effect to asking your friends. They’re not gonna tell you your face, like, well, it kinda sucked. They might, but they’re less likely. Whereas that instantaneous pop-up, like you’re getting that immediate reaction unfiltered.

24:35
Man, people will tell you the craziest stuff in those pop-ups. But it’s so, it’s incredibly helpful, especially when it’s like, all right, I got a few weirdos, but eight people all kind of said the same thing was their initial impression and it wasn’t great. Oh, all right, so now you know that’s a thing you need to address. You know what I do every time I release a new product? And it’s actually driving my wife crazy. I have an abandoned cart script on my site where if they abandon, like I get emailed saying, hey, this person with this phone number abandoned.

25:04
and I’ll call them up and I’ll say, hey, we just noticed that you tried to check out but you didn’t complete the process. Was there anything wrong and is there anything that I can help you with? And more often than not, they’re actually willing to talk to you and tell you what’s wrong. And then usually what I’ll do is at the end, I’ll give them a big coupon or sometimes I’ll just give them the product for free after that to just compensate them for their time.

25:30
It’s really hard to do this. It’s really hard to cold call. It’s technically not cold calling, right? Because they were on your site and they gave you their It’s not cold calling, but no, okay. But it’s awkward. Who wants to pick up the phone and call a stranger and be like, you tried to buy from my website and you bounced and I want to talk to you about that. Like the first several times you do that, I’m sure was nerve wracking. It is actually, you know what, if you want to make it a little bit more comfortable, what you can do is you can lead to the offer. You can just sit, you can lead with the offer and say, hey, you know,

25:59
We noticed you didn’t check out and don’t worry, I’m gonna compensate with your time with a big coupon or give you the product for free. But I just like some honest feedback on why you didn’t make the purchase the first time. And do you represent yourself as like, I run this site with my wife. Like, do you make it very personal? say, hey, I’m the owner of this business. I run it with my wife and we just launched this product and we just noticed that you tried to check out but you didn’t finish it. And we’re just wondering if you’d give us some feedback on the process. Something very straightforward like that.

26:29
I would say seven times out of 10, someone will probably be willing to talk to you. Interesting. And so, oh, I love this idea. And so when you call them, what kind of objections do you typically hear? They’re like, well, because they’re going to tell you’re essentially saying like, why didn’t you buy? And so that you can then bust that objection for other people in the future. And then you seal the deal with, hey, I’ll give you the thing for free. And now you’ve got a customer for life or like, here’s 50 % off. I’ll just give it to you at cost.

26:58
Right. So I can tell you this because maybe a couple of years ago we launched like a new apron line and sometimes you’ll get a question, you’ll get an answer like, hey, I was on my mobile phone and it just wasn’t convenient to check out, which could be a problem in itself, right? Like maybe you need a better mobile payment system so you don’t have to enter in all that stuff. Like you’re not using PayPal OneTouch or, or. I was going to say, like you need, if you, if you hear that objection and you don’t have an express payment option, now you know what the solution is. Right.

27:27
But so in this particular case with the apron, what ended up happening was the woman was like, know, I, so we sell a mother daughter apron set just to kind of give you some background and there’s sizing for the adult and then for the kids, we just have an age range like two, I can’t remember what the age range is now two to four and six to 10 or something two to six or six to 10. Anyway, the problem was, was that the person wasn’t clear what the size, the exact sizing was for their child because they have,

27:56
like a child who’s larger percentile wise and they weren’t sure that the apron was gonna fit. And we didn’t do a good job of conveying that. And so after talking with her, I was like, hey, so what information would you need? Because we actually have the measurements there, right? We had the measurements in the product description, but what she would have liked to see was like, if my daughter is five foot six or something like that, like a height scale. And so that was something that- Yeah, they want like a table. Exactly.

28:26
Yeah, based on height, not necessarily age because age is ambiguous. Yeah, I don’t like age. You know, like all of my children are tall, but my daughter is in the 98th percentile for height at age four. So people are always like, she’s four. Well, when sizing stuff is based on age, it’s really hard. I found for all of my kids, like just add, you know, plus one or plus two, depending when they use those age sizes.

28:51
And this might be common sense for apparel, but this was the first apparel item that we actually ever carry in our store. So we didn’t know, right? I was okay, because I was gonna say with apparel, the number one objection by far is sizing. Yep. Like will this thing fit me? And then the follow-up objection is, well, if I buy it and it doesn’t fit because this sizing is ambiguous. So I really, a lot of people feel like I’m gambling when I buy apparel online. Still to this day.

29:16
And then so you need to be really upfront with here’s the returns and exchange process if this doesn’t fit. And I flat out like put it in there as what happens if it doesn’t fit? Hey, we’ll pay for the return shipping and we’ll send you a different song. Here’s the rub on this though. So we do personalized aprons. So you can’t return them, which was a further objection. I mean, these are all things that we learned and this might be common sense to people to sell apparel, but we weren’t experienced in that. So these are all things that we learned just from cold calling people.

29:46
Yeah, no, like you, you know, no matter what you do, you don’t know what you don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, and that’s why we’re hammering on. You have to talk to people because otherwise you don’t know. All right. Is it my turn or your turn? Was that yours or mine? I feel like we had the same peeves pet peeves. I have no, I don’t know anymore. All right. Well, so we, made some app recommendations and that leads me to the other issue that I see. And this is like, especially with Shopify stores.

30:16
is people, I call this app roulette and you know, the number, regardless of what platform you’re on, there are apps, plugins and scripts and like tools and there is no end to the amount of really cool stuff you can use on your site. And these are shiny toys and I call it app roulette because it’s like, well, if I just get the right combo of tools, if I have the right tool stack, you know, my conversions will explode. My average order value explode. I’ll make more money. I totally get what’s going on here, but

30:45
I mean, it just becomes detrimental where you end up, you could see the sites that are doing this when you land on it and A, the site takes a while to load. So like, you know that page speed score is tanked. And then it’s like, all right, spin to win, punch the monkey, enter your email. Like I see someone who is familiar with punch the monkey from the 90s. Those 90s flash banner ads, really ages me. And you know that’s what’s going on. Is there like, well, if I could just, you know, more.

31:14
throw more widgets at it, more shiny toys, we’ll fix it. And it isn’t the case, you know, it just, it looks cluttered, it’s confusing. And then, you know, and then on top of it, when they go to exit, my hot jar exit intent survey pops up and they’re like, not another effing pop-up. That’s a real thing that I see when I run those on sites that have a lot of stuff. They’re like, why there’s so many pop-ups? So you probably see this a lot more than I do, but sometimes I’ll open up a student site and I’ll see like 40 apps installed and some of them don’t do

31:43
anything except like install like a small piece of code in there because they don’t want to like touch their theme files and whatnot. Like it literally just inserts a piece of JavaScript. Yeah. Yeah. I edit my theme. Oh my gosh. That’s, know, you may as well it’s like pop the hood and adjust the timing on your distributor. Like it’s a scary thing if you don’t know what it means. So I get why those apps exist. There’s a lot that’s just like, you’re right. It’s just, it, jacks one line of JavaScript code and now you’re paying $8 a month for the rest of forever.

32:10
I do want to say something that I’ve seen and maybe you have more experience in this since you work with a lot of clients, but I’ve seen people uninstall apps thinking that it was clean, but in fact they leave a piece of JavaScript in there and whenever you have a piece of JavaScript in there, they can literally track everything about your site if they want to do that. Right? Have you seen that? Yeah, if they’re in cities. right. So Shopify specifically, when you have an app installed, when you click delete on that app,

32:40
or I think it used to say uninstall, I think it says delete now, but either way it’s a misnomer. Really what it does is it just immediately severs the app developer’s connection to your store. And it’s a security thing, that’s all right, you want these guys out, they’re out, the end of it. And the problem with that is depending on how the app works, some add theme code to the theme. I have four apps and all of them, we just put theme code in the theme. And we do it because

33:09
That’s the most performant option. But as soon as you delete the app, guess what? All that stuff’s still there. we’ll get, our solution is we fire off, immediately we fire off an email, a transactional email to the merchant that says, hey, we saw you uninstalled our app. A, tell us why. So we’re looking for that objection. And then B, okay, if you didn’t remove the theme code, here’s exactly how to do it and you have to do it. And if you don’t want to do it, just hit reply, we’ll do it for you. Like I just, you I don’t,

33:39
want to be part of the problem when it comes to performance. And so we do that. But so you have seen this. You don’t know what your certain apps. Oh, OK. Yeah. Oh, nonstop. And so like when people are called my site slow, former CTO of Shopify, JML said websites get slow slowly. And it’s because of exactly what you described. It’s cruft. It’s barnacles to a ship. It’s this code just accumulates over time. And even though it’s not doing anything.

34:06
You know, the web server’s not smart enough to figure that out, and the browser’s not smart enough, and so it just like, every new site load has to load all this old garbage that you’ve like completely forgot about from two years ago. So let me ask you this, I have students that, like I’ll see this in students’ sites, is there an easy way for them to do it themselves without actually having me step in? Yes and no. you, almost all of this stuff is gonna be sitting either in the

34:35
the beginning or the end of theme.liquid. This is specific to Shopify. So it’s like, I’m just looking for the header and footer that loads in every page and that’s gonna be in theme.liquid. And most of these apps, there’s either gonna be a comment on it or it will be evident from the name what it is. It’s like, well, I installed Acme Widget Popup Builder. And you’ll see a line that says include, single quote,

35:02
Acme widget pop-up builder single quotes. So you know like, oh, okay, that’s that app I don’t have anymore. And so you just safely comment that out or delete the line. A lot of people have theme editing phobia though. They do. But knowing just a little, like you don’t have to be a theme developer, but if you know enough to be dangerous, and that’s the camp I put myself into. So you just know like basic HTML, which is not complicated, and maybe like a little bit of liquid in theme structure.

35:31
you immediately are way better off. There is just so much more you can do that you didn’t realize, especially for like day to day stuff like, you know, add and remove tracking code, verification codes. Like a lot of people recently had to verify their domain with Facebook. So suddenly like you that’s the kind of thing that you would be very comfortable and confident with. Yeah. And there’s plenty of free classes out there like Skillshare has got a ton of stuff you can learn. Just like here’s the basics of how a theme is set up.

36:00
and like I could go learn basic HTML and CSS and you will be in such a better position. Like think about it. You’re a web professional. Think if you are a merchant, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not. And your theme is very much like the face of your business. It’s your full-time salesperson and you want to be able to speak its language. And so if you learn those things, that’ll like, you’ll be able to do this stuff yourself and you’ll be able to talk, uh, have better relationships.

36:27
communication with any theme developer you may hire. You can’t be an online professional without being willing to learn something about the internet or websites. That’s my philosophy. 100%. And like, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up figuring some of this will sink in over time. All Here’s my biggest pet peeve. Going for revenue over profit.

36:52
I once had this student show me their Facebook ads account and they were generating sales, but the return on ad spend was terrible, but they were getting the sales, which was making them happy. But it wasn’t return. Has it happened to any of your clients? I don’t know. Yes, but I think they were more, when it’s happened, they’re more aware of it. They’re like, okay, we got it this far where it’s like, this is a loss leader and we’re gonna make it up on subsequent sales.

37:21
Right? Like, we’ve acquired them as a customer at a loss, which is what like the big DTC brands do, because they’re spending other people’s money. You know, they’re not bootstrapping it. And then, all right, on subsequent sales, we’ll make it up. Or like drop shipping businesses where margins are razor thin and they’re like, well, just revise, revise. We’ll keep iterating. We’ll dial it in. But it’s like, well, all right, how much time do you give it? And I don’t know what the answer is. Well, I think I’ll just tell you story from my store.

37:49
So we’re in the wedding industry, so you would think that we wouldn’t have that much repeat business, right? But 12 % of our repeat business, 12 % of our sales is repeat business, but it actually makes up 30 % of our sales. But here’s the kicker. So our average order value is about 60 bucks, and 50 % of our customers spend less than half of our AOV. But they represent the bulk of our customers. Whereas I think only 10 % of our customers spend 2X of our AOV.

38:19
but they actually make up 50 % of our revenues. So we’re a small business, we’re very small. We have a couple of employees, my wife and I. So where should we be focusing our time? We focus now on those big, we call them the whales. And it turns out that after doing some analysis, that a lot of our cheapie customers were coming from Facebook and we only have a little bit of finite amount of time. So we now focus actually on the big repeat customers that we have in our

38:48
It just made life a lot easier for us. So you’re applying the 80-20 rule, Pareto’s principle there, right? Yes. It’s not quite 80-20 though, but yeah. Right. a similar idea. I love that you’re doing this. I think you could apply that same thinking to all manners and areas of your life. But tell me, when you’re doing that customer analysis where you’re segmenting them, and it sounds like maybe you’re getting to RFM model,

39:18
How do you do that analysis? How are you identifying these customer segments? So we, I can’t remember exactly how we came up with the idea with half the AOV, but we started with the average order value, right? What our average order value was. And then for our business, actually, a good portion of that 12 % that I mentioned are event and wedding planners, right? And as soon as you said we had like 12 % a repeat with a higher AOV, immediately in my head I I bet they’re wedding professionals. And so what ended up happening is,

39:47
We start now looking for anomalies in our sales, and then we pick up the phone, like you said, and we’ll call them up and we’ll say, hey, we noticed that you ordered a lot. Are you a planner? Are you going to order in bulk? I tell you what we’ll do is we’ll give you a special coupon code and a representative from our company that will handle all of your transactions and make sure they arrive at the destination on time. We’ll give you a hand holding, essentially. And after that call, once we have established face

40:16
some rapport, they continue to order from us over and over and over again. And they’re basically a customer for life that orders in bulk. They don’t complain about anything. It’s like the best customer ever. essentially, this is brilliant. So what some people do, they say, all right, I want those wholesale accounts because they have high AOVs. And so they’ll set up a wholesale program, but it’s just like a link on the site and they expect people to go sign up for it. You are proactive about it.

40:41
you’re identifying these people that are wedding professionals. And these are your like, really, these are your ideal customers who have the biggest lifetime value. so, and then, so once you identify them, you call them up and say, Hey, we, we see you and we want to help you. So here’s your lifetime discount code. And we’re going to really like their big fear is a wedding is a mission critical event. So you’re saying, Hey, we’re going to make sure you get yourself. We’re going to look out for you.

41:08
And then as soon as you do that and you were so proactive, I imagine that you just have customers for life with them. The phone call is actually pretty important in this case. Again, real contact. It’s that phone call. it’s like you’re no longer, it’s no longer a brand. It’s, it’s Steve. Steve’s helping me out. Another pet peeve is making a guess at who your real customer is and then writing all your copy to.

41:36
account for that imaginary person when you don’t have any data. I don’t know if that happens. It’s usually like they’re thinking about themselves. Most people, their first customer, they are their own best first customer. And so they’re writing to themselves. The only reason I can talk about all this stuff is because I made all these same mistakes, just to be clear for anyone who’s listening. Yeah, I’m sure we’ve both done some boneheaded things I got an example on this line too. I assume that all our customers are wedding customers.

42:06
The reason I found this out is I was looking at my Facebook demographic data and I noticed that a lot of our customers were over the age of 55. And I’m like, there can’t be people over the age of 55 getting married, like a whole bunch, right? Yeah, this was an outlier. This was an outlier. But it turns out like a lot of those repeat customers are people who just like to collect handkerchiefs, believe it or not. Oh, what? Yes, right? Just like you like to collect old cars. I do.

42:34
Kurt just got a Volkswagen Beetle, 79 Beetle, which is pretty sweet. There’s people who collect handkerchiefs, or they’re crafters, and these tend to be older women who do these things. Huh. And so you had this customer segment that you were not aware of. Did you, once you knew that, was there any like actionable info there? Well. Or anything that you like, you changed? Yes, actually. So in the old days, every single page was about weddings.

43:03
Every landing page was about weddings. And so now we have a special section for weddings now, but the rest of it is just talking about either embroidered blanks for crafting or some of these older ladies who like to collect them. Like the copy has changed, basically. Okay. And so initially, well, we talked about, like you said, the big pet peeve is people just assume they know what the customer’s like, and then they write to that customer.

43:30
What’s the correct method? What should they be doing instead? The correct method is you’re not going to know from the beginning. So you can start with some assumptions. But again, you have to, as you said before, talk to the customer. We have a survey in our post-purchase sequence that asks them what they’re using it for and that sort of thing. And then based on the survey data, we make adjustments. We actually don’t call those customers. I guess it would be just too many. We only call the whales. But yeah, we’re constantly trying to get data about our customers so we can

43:59
do things appropriately. So for SMS, for example, sometimes we’ll ask, what would you like us to carry in our store and what would you use it for? Something like that. And what would you use it for? think that’s the critical question. you like, hey, you’re trolling for product suggestions. Hey, what do you want us to sell? But then like, what, why is really, is the, I think the follow-up question that most people miss. You need to scratch a little bit deeper and figure out what the intent is.

44:28
because that really adds so much, so much info and tone to why they’re making that request. A perfect example of this is my buddy Neville, he used to run an e-commerce store a long time ago and he used to sell rave supplies. So there’s this one product that he sold which were fingertip lights and I don’t really go raving, but supposedly like you twirl these around and you know, whatever. But yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I can picture this. He found that plumbers were buying this.

44:57
these fingertip lights. they could, you know, when they’re under the sink, they have lights on their fingertips. So it’s convenient and they can see what they’re doing. That’s pretty smart. So he wrote, he started writing copy to plumbers and it ended up converting really well, stuff like that. That’s great. Yeah. Oftentimes like there’s things don’t necessarily have to stick to their original purpose. Like you mentioned, oh, Kurt’s got a 79 beetle.

45:24
I have been using, trying to find the perfect mirror to fit behind in this like tight, hard to reach place where I’m adjusting a carburetor. And you know, I bought an automotive mirror, like from an auto parts store, didn’t work. The mirror I found that worked, I’d be using my wife’s compact. I have stolen her compact and that’s actually a much better mirror, it’s much more useful. So that’s like, that’s clearly not the intended use there, but that’s what ended up working.

45:52
Not that I’m gonna go like remarket compacts, like automotive, know, looky-loo mirrors. So you said post purchase survey. What are some of your favorite post purchase survey questions? I’m trying to think. Well, mainly what they’re using it for. then here’s the kicker for ours. This is specific to our business. We asked them if they are a professional in this business. are they buying it for business or pleasure or as a gift? And if they say business,

46:22
then we call those people. That’s actually our primary They have raised their hand as a whale. That’s actually our primary purpose for the survey, actually, for our store. That’s pretty bright. Everyone else has different uses, obviously. But yeah. So I guess sometimes we’ll ask them if they like the product, and if so, we’ll ask them for a review or a testimonial, or have them take photos for social and that sort of thing. That’s what we mainly use it for. Do you do any split testing? No, actually, I was going to talk about that.

46:52
don’t do a whole lot of split testing, mainly because split testing takes forever. It mostly fails. It’s mostly inconclusive. So I’m curious to see what you have to say about that actually. Okay, so you’re right about both things. Any test, like minimum, needs to run two weeks. And that’s a frustratingly long time to wait. And during that time, you know, you’re like sitting there refreshing it, checking it, and you’re…

47:19
your probability to be best just keeps flipping back and forth between the two. So for a lot of stuff, that’s true. really, turns out, I think the conclusion with split testing is for many split tests, design is way less important than we think. The copy and the content and the offer and the quality of traffic, those really are the much more important factors to conversion. And with split testing, I think a lot of people just use it to split test design changes. And that’s why they end up with inconclusive results.

47:49
or either they’re calling it too early or they’re starting them too early where like you just don’t have enough traffic. So one of things that we do is like, I’ll usually use revenue as my primary goal as opposed to conversion. Cause at least now I’m factoring in average order value and conversion by doing that. And I think I’m getting a better signal to noise ratio by using that. I think that helps. Let it run long enough, like two weeks.

48:14
and really try to limit the number of tests you run at once or like the number of variants. Otherwise then the thing really takes forever to get anything conclusive. But for the most part, I think a lot of stuff, you know, really is just like very subjective and that it doesn’t have, you’re just, you need to use common sense on it. But for other things like, man, should we do this? Is this a good idea? Like one phenomenal split testing thing we’ve done is

48:42
figure out what your free shipping threshold should be. And this is a tough one to do. I found an app that’ll do it called Ship Scout and you have to be on Shopify Plus to do it. So it kind of limits who can do this. But it’s really cool where like you’ll, the banner across the top offering free shipping, that threshold will change. And then once you’re in the checkout, the shipping rates will change. And so you could figure out through data, okay,

49:11
Here’s like whether or not you’re leaving money on the table with your free shipping threshold. So like stuff like that, absolutely split test those offers. Cause that’s going to have a real, real difference in revenue on the business. How much traffic would you recommend to even think about split testing? Personally? So our, our sake, I think it’s about 50,000 visits a month. I don’t even think that’s enough to complete a split test unless I do a whole site wide split test in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it’s gotta be, um,

49:39
Well, think the traffic is an issue. And then on top of it, you also need the conversion. So if it’s like a high, moderately traffic site with low conversions, you’re probably not a good candidate. like, yeah, once you get to 100,000 visits a month with at least a 1 % conversion rate. All right, now we’re cooking with gas. And you should be able to split test just fine at that point. I can see the free shipping offer working because that’s like a generic conversion.

50:07
But if I was trying to test some UI change on one page, that one page would have to get a lot of traffic, right? Right, and that’s the issue we get into. I’m running some split tests now, and even on a site that gets, that’s in the 1 % of websites as far as traffic goes, running a split test on an individual product page, it’s never gonna get, it’s never gonna happen. It will be years before I have a statistically significant result. So even on these huge sites, if you make the test too specific,

50:37
you run into issues. So I would say, and you can agree with me or disagree with me here, if you’re running a smaller site, think something like PickFoo is probably better than running a real split. You’ll get results in 15 minutes from people, from random people. 100%. I also find heat mapping. Yes. Where it’s like heat map, scroll map, click map, not click map, movement map, where you can see like where their mouse goes on desktop. Those are very valuable, even on sites that have less traffic.

51:05
Like that, there you go, that’s a heuristics analysis tool you can use way before split testing starts to make sense. And here’s an example of just something, why heat maps and scroll maps are useful. There’s this one student I had which was dead set on keeping their sidebar. Dead set, even though it didn’t look good and it was like compressing like the size of the images on the category pages. And so was like, okay, let’s just run a test and.

51:34
we finally discovered that no one is clicking on anything in the sidebar. No one’s even looking over on the sidebar. And so finally, with that data, they removed it. That’s, yeah. And like we were talking about social buttons earlier. That’s like, that’s a thing that you could very easily use a heat map to figure out like, people messing with this thing or not? Yeah. Well, the heat map says no. Dude, Kurt, we’ve been talking for 50 minutes about pet peeves. You got anything else to add before we wrap this up? You know,

52:01
I think ultimately my pet peeve is not starting. I think you need to get out of your own way sometimes. Ask yourself, what would someone smarter than me do? And then go, turns out you already know the answer, then go do that. I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, the biggest stumbling block is not any of this stuff. It’s just taking action and moving forward. So even if you’re out there making mistakes, that’s great. At least you’re doing something. My pet peeve is not being willing to do like,

52:30
the legwork, the dirty work. got it. Yeah. need to the work. create an online business and think they could just do everything online, but doing stupid things like picking up the phone or actually talking to someone face to face or being a little bit more personal. I mean, these are things you got to do. It’s just like a regular brick and mortar business in that respect. A hundred percent. Mr. Steve Chow, where could people go to learn more about you?

52:54
Yeah, if you guys are looking to get married, can hook you up over at bumblebillins.com. That’s my e-commerce store. But if you want to learn more about e-commerce in general, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com. I offer a free mini course from beginners. It also covers advanced people. If you want to create content, sign up, and that’s a free mini course right there. Fantastic. Thank you, sir. This has been a ton of fun. All right, Kurt Elster, this was a ton of fun. Where can people find you online if they want to learn more about you?

53:23
Oh my gosh, well, I’m best known for my show, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, or head to curtelster.com. That’s got plenty of links to where you can learn more about me.

53:35
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And once again, if you haven’t already, go check out Kurt Elster on the unofficial Shopify podcast. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 360. And once again, I want to thank Clibio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO.

54:03
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I these tools in my blog, and if you were interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com

54:33
and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.