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Today, I have my good friend Chris Shaffer on the show. Chris works with Scott Voelker over at Brand Creators, and he consults with dozens of e-commerce companies and owns a bunch of his own as well.
Chris always brings a unique perspective on what’s working in e-commerce, and he’s the type of guy who always gets his hands dirty. In this episode, we discuss what’s working and how to maximize your marketing budget.
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What You’ll Learn
- A better way to grow your sales outside of driving more traffic
- The number one mistake that most ecommerce business owners make
- How to grow your business as efficiently as possible
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Transcript
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Today, I have my good friend Chris Schaefer on the show. Chris works with Scott Volker over at Brand Creators, and he consults with dozens of other e-commerce companies. Now, what I like about Chris is he does the work himself and has low-level knowledge on how to do everything. As a jack of all trades, today, Chris and I are going to talk about how to grow your business as efficiently as possible.
00:29
But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And the Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business
00:57
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events, so the seller summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.
01:24
The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th of 2024. And right now, this is the cheapest tickets will ever be and the prices are actually going up very soon. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. And you can still get my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand.
01:53
and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifeclutterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifeclutterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.
02:14
Welcome to the My Wife Clutterjob podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Chris Schaeffer on the show. Now, Chris is someone who I’ve known for a long time now, and he’s actually helped run the masterminds over at Seller Summit for as long as I can remember. And he actually spoke at my 2023 event last May. Now, Chris consults for dozens of e-commerce businesses. He’s got a bunch of his own brands as well. And what I like about him is that he always brings a unique perspective on what is working in e-commerce.
02:43
And he’s also the type of guy that gets his hands dirty. He actually does the hard work. So in this episode, we’re gonna talk about what’s working in e-commerce and what’s not, and maybe some of the trends that he’s seeing. with that, welcome to show, Chris. How you doing? Good, man. How are you? I’m good. I’m so glad that both you and Scottie V were able to attend the Seller Summit. Always makes me happy. I know. It’s always nice to see you. It’s so weird because…
03:10
You and I don’t interact that much. We’ll message back and forth on Facebook or whatever. So it’s nice to see your smiling face or hear your smiling voice, I guess, if we’re listening to the podcast. But it’s always good to connect, Well, I’m kicking myself because I looked in the archives. don’t think I’ve had this your first time, right? I think so. Yeah. Something wrong with that. It’s my bad. I should have you on over Scottie V any day of the week. So any time you want, man, just let me know. I know some of the people listening.
03:40
have probably seen you online through your association with your outspoken business partner. Are you two still doing brand creators together and how are you allocating all of your time with all the different projects that you got going on? So the nice thing is that a lot of the stuff that I do in the e-commerce world has set me up from a systemization standpoint and the fact that you can automate a big chunk of that, which I know you’re a big fan of, has given me enough time
04:09
to be able to do a lot of the things that I want to do with brand creators. We’re absolutely still doing it. We’re still cranking over at brandcreators.com, the Rock Your Brand podcast, all of those kinds of things. We do a live video at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, depending on what it is that we’re doing over on the brand creators YouTube channel. And the whole point of that is to help people take what is a side hustle stream of income and turn that into a full-time income, whether they want to replace their income, whether they just want more money to pay their bills, whatever that is. And a lot of that does revolve around.
04:38
but it also involves a lot of the things that make e-commerce tick like content creation, some of those kinds of things and a lot of the nerdier things like you and I were just talking about diving into the numbers to understand how different platforms like Amazon work. How does Etsy work and how can we leverage those to our advantage as either people who have an e-commerce business, which everybody listening to this podcast either has one or wants one or take an existing side hustle. have like a niche website, right? A website that is a contest.
05:07
content-based website and not just monetize with ads, but add e-commerce as a component to that to really shore up that income stream and start to grow that without having to constantly create more and more content. Now we both know that selling on the marketplaces like Amazon has just gotten harder and harder over the years. And I know you have some clients that are selling on Amazon, have their own brands and that sort of thing. What are you focusing your efforts on right now in helping those companies with?
05:36
What’s working versus not working right now? Yeah. So the biggest thing, and I think this applies to Amazon, it applies to Walmart, it applies to Etsy. People think mostly about traffic in those ecosystems because that’s the one number they feel like that they have control over. And what we’ve been able to do in the companies that I consult with is not increase traffic, but increase conversion rate. And as a result of that, we’re up
06:02
247 % just this year without having to spend any more on ads, without launching more products, without SEO-ing my brains out on a daily basis. I know I just use SEO as a verb, right? Like without going in and changing keywords all the time and trying to find that one keyword that’s gonna make us rank perfectly and do all of these things. We’re focusing on the thing that actually drives the highest quality traffic from our platforms. And that’s made a huge difference for us in the people that I’m consulting.
06:31
So interesting. So when you say traffic on these platforms, you’re specifically referring to keyword research, right? And ranking, right? Well, when people, when, yeah. So when people think about how do I get more sales on Amazon, how do I get more sales in the Walmart marketplace? How do I get more sales on Etsy? The there’s kind of two things people feel like they have control over. The first one is going to be how much traffic is coming to that listing, right? If I find a better keyword with a better keyword research tool,
06:58
then I will rank for that keyword and all of the people typing that in will come to my listing and I can get more traffic, which means I can get more sales. The other side of that is I can turn on ads, right? I can run sponsored product ads. I can run Etsy ads. I can run ads inside the Walmart marketplace. And that’s another way that I can drive traffic. And those are all fine and good. I love traffic, right? I’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on pay-per-click across Amazon, like every platform that you can imagine. But at the end of the day, if that traffic isn’t
07:28
the right person coming to your listing, Amazon’s not going to care. And if you really want to rank highly on these platforms on the organic side, which is really where everybody wants to rank, right? You don’t want to spend all of your money on Etsy ads, Amazon ads. You want to get that organic traffic coming in from Amazon, Etsy, Walmart to that listing. If you can get that, that’s what everybody’s after. And what they think they need to do is find that perfect keyword. But the goal of any search engine is to serve the user.
07:58
Right. And if you think about something like Google, if we’re creating content for Google, the best piece of content that we can create for Google is something that completely answers the question that the searcher has. Right. So if somebody types in Ken chickens eat cherries, they want to know obviously Ken chickens eat cherries, but they’re also going to have a bunch of follow-up questions. So if we’re creating a blog post to rank on Google, that’s the route that we need to go. The marketplaces, Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, they don’t function like that. Their goal is not to answer your question in that way.
08:26
Their goal is to show you as the person searching on the platform, the product that you are most likely to buy. Does that make sense? You know, what’s funny is what you said is people think that they can control the traffic or they believe they control the traffic. I have the complete opposite position. Like you have full control over your listing and making it and getting it to a high conversion rate. You have very little control over the keyword research and the keyword rankings. I mean, concrete. Yeah.
08:54
And yet what do you see people do every time you talk to somebody about selling on Amazon, selling on Walmart, selling on Etsy? What do you hear people asking about? They say, what’s the new keyword research tool that’s going to help me find that one keyword that’s going to help you rank higher on the platform. And what they’re missing is the volume, the demand for those keywords. One, any of these keyword tools, no matter how good they are. And there’s some really good ones out there. They don’t know that data, right? It’s usually based on estimates. And so it can give us good directionality, but
09:24
They’re forgetting that not all traffic is good traffic. That’s number one. And number two, if we think about the goal of the search engine itself, whether it’s Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, right? Somebody’s typing in to the search bar. That’s their search engine. What is their goal? Their goal is to show the product that is most likely to result in a sale. If we think about it that way, then what is out? What is the best way to do SEO on these platforms? It’s not.
09:51
to worry as much about those keywords. And I’m not saying keywords aren’t important. Don’t, don’t misquote me there. But if the goal is to show the product that’s going to sell and our product or our focus is then on conversion rate. And that’s what they’re looking at. Then if we can improve our conversion rate, we give them the signal that they need to say, Hey, Steve has red t-shirt in his title. Chris has red t-shirt in his title. Awesome. If we’re both equal in that.
10:21
Then that moves us down the chain to the other things that they’re looking at. Right. We both qualify to show for that. So then how does Etsy, how does Amazon figure out who to show? They’re looking at how many of those people are turning into sales. Some people refer to that as like traffic efficiency. The easiest way to think about that is conversion rate. If I get nine people out of a hundred to convert and you get eight people out of a hundred to convert for red t-shirt, I’m going to rank higher than you for red t-shirt because Amazon is saying Etsy is saying Walmart is saying
10:51
hey, this is the listing that’s most likely to sell. When somebody wants a red t-shirt, they want Chris’s listing. They don’t want Steve’s listing to the same extent. So when someone comes to you and says, hey, my conversion rate isn’t that great, what are the first things that you look at in order to fix that listing to increase that conversion rate? So the first question would be, what is a good conversion rate? And the answer is, in typical Chris Schaefer fashion, if you guys know me, it depends, right? It’s going to vary from platform to platform.
11:20
What I’ve seen on Amazon is that if you’re in that 10 to 15 % rage, you’re doing pretty good. Although I have some listings that are doing 20 to 25 % pretty consistently and hit 30 % plus last year. And if you guys aren’t familiar with where to find conversion rate on Amazon, they in typical Amazon fashion, don’t call it conversion rate. Like everyone else in the world, they refer to it as unit session percentage for whatever reason, because somebody that’s very engineering minded, I guess, was in charge of creating the analytics dashboard for sellers.
11:49
I don’t know. Etsy will refer to it as your conversion rate. Um, but you can also just calculate this by looking at the number of people that have seen your listing and the number of units that you have sold. Amazon will give you that. So on Amazon, you’re seeing 10 to 15%. I would say a really good listing is converting at 20 % plus on something like Etsy. 5 to 8 % is kind of that high end of average. The average that I’ve seen there is about three, but if you can get it above 8 % on Etsy, you’re doing pretty well. And Walmart kind of falls in between those two, at least in my experience,
12:19
Um, I’m a little bit less experienced with Walmart as a platform. I’m only about a year into playing with that, but I’m seeing it kind of falls somewhere in between those two. Amazon tends to be the highest converting then Walmart, then something like, like an Etsy. And so the question then becomes, okay, if we’re not in that range, we’re above that range, awesome. Like I’d say turn off this podcast, but I’m sure we’re going to get into some other things, right? You don’t need to worry about conversion rate, but there’s going to be some other nuggets that you’ll pick up out of this. If you’re below that range, then what is the reason?
12:48
that it is low and it really boils down to one of two things. The first thing is, are you getting the right traffic? So you’re getting traffic, but they’re not converting. And this is where it gets a little nerdy for a lot of people. And they will tend to just say, I don’t want to do that, but there’s a very easy way to understand this. You need to look at. If you’re on Amazon, your ads report, right? What keywords are driving traffic to that listing? And there is a search analytics report in your brand dashboard. If your brand registered.
13:17
I haven’t found that to be very useful, but it can at least give you some directionality. Like because they also include things like where you’re suggested as a product, as the keyword, it’s not quite as useful as what you’ll find on other platforms, but the ads data will tell you the keywords that are driving traffic. And so our very first job, go ahead. I was just going to say, you know, I think we’ve covered Amazon on this podcast plenty. Just curious how you do this on Etsy.
13:43
So it’s the same, the same process, right? So for Amazon, for Etsy, you’re going to look at your paid ads data. And on the Etsy side of things, they actually have a really in-depth dashboard now. It’s their beta search results report. I think it’s called beta search analytics. And that will give you the organic keyword data in the same report format type that you’re getting for the paid side of things. So if you’re getting organic traffic on Etsy, you get a little bit of a better glimpse.
14:11
And so whether we’re looking at Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, right? Walmart has what they call, I think it’s the search insights report is the name of it on Walmart. We’re going to look at that. And our very first job is just to say, is this keyword relevant? Right? Especially if we’re running ads, the, all of the marketplaces tend to open up a lot when we’re running ads to say, Hey, I know that this is a water bottle, right? This is an insulated water bottle, but maybe somebody would refer to this as a coffee mug, right? Just on the off chance. And if Steve is willing to pay for it,
14:40
Chris is willing to pay for it, then we’ll show it for coffee mug. And if he’s willing to keep paying us for it, then we’ll just leave that there. Well, do most people in your mind as the person selling the product think that a coffee mug, which I would type in for like a ceramic mug and a 64 ounce insulated tumbler that you could also use for coffee or the same thing, probably not. So our first job is to say, okay, if we’re running ads on these things, let’s turn those off. If those things are in our title, if we’re saying coffee mug and it’s not a coffee mug,
15:09
because we know that there’s search volume there and somebody could put coffee in our insulated Tumblr, then we need to take those out of the title, out of the description, out of the supporting keywords or out of the tags if we’re talking about the IT ecosystem. So if the conversion rate for that is, let’s say, 5%, would you keep it on there? Like, what are your thresholds for just keeping a keyword on there in the listing itself just for that traffic? And so the answer here is it depends. And it’s a little bit of a gut feel.
15:36
Right? So if we’re getting, if we have one click on an ad, one visit and one sale, I’m gonna leave it on, right? Like, I don’t care about that one visit. What we’re looking for are signs that it’s either well below our average conversion rate. And that’s why we need to know that number first. How well does our listing convert on average? And if it’s dragging down that average, then we need to say, is it relevant? If it is, then we leave it for now. And we can address that at a, at a later date. When we start looking at the listings, if it’s not like coffee mug for coffee Tumblr,
16:06
that’s converting at 5%. I think you said, and our listing converts at 10 % on average. I’m probably going to turn it off on ads or remove it because it’s not converting as well as the rest of the list. The only exception to that would be if that’s driving like all of my sales, right? That’s driving 80 % of my sales. Then I probably wouldn’t touch it. And I’d figure out how to make the listing more about a coffee mug. But the general rule of thumb would be if it’s dragging down the conversion rate, you at least want to seriously consider it.
16:34
Even if that 5 % is still results in a profit overall for that particular keyword? Potentially, right? And that’s why I said consider it. if we think about a different example, are you familiar with what they call flip-flops in Australia? In Australia? They’re different from flip-flops in the US? Yes. It’s another word for women’s underwear, right? It starts with a T, right? And so if…
17:03
That is driving traffic to our listing and that’s not the majority of the traffic. It’s not converting at the same rate. I’m probably gonna take that out if I’m a US based seller. Why? Because when somebody is typing that word in, that’s not what they’re expecting to see. And if I’m paying for that and it’s dragging down my conversion rate, I really need to take that out. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So the optimizations that you’re talking about for conversion rate right now is really just weeding out your highest converting keywords.
17:30
And then focusing on the keywords that are actually generating a high conversion rate for your listing, right? Yeah. So the first step there is, we getting the right traffic? Right. And so if we find something, if even if it is the right traffic, but it has low conversion rate. So coming back to the stainless steel Tumbler example, if that’s driving a lot of traffic, but it’s converting below our average conversion rate, that’s literally what the product is. And that then means we have a different problem. And it most likely means, and I’m, I’m bunching a bunch of issues into this.
17:59
But it means that we’re not meeting customer expectations. Right. So they get to the listing. They say, Hey, I’m looking for a 64 ounce insulated tumbler. That’s what it looks like in the photo. That’s what the title says it is. And then they get in and either it’s not 64 ounces or whatever, or there’s something that they don’t like about it. For example, the one that I’m holding right now has a plastic lid. Some people have a massive aversion to plastic, right? So they’d want only a stainless steel.
18:27
64 ounce tumbler. If that’s the case, we can’t really help them with that. But our job then becomes how do we craft our listing to more clearly explain and show what the product is and meet all of the customer expectations. And the biggest place where I see people struggling with this, there’s three main places. One is the title. And typically what we see, and I think, was it three years ago now where Amazon rolled out new guidelines and they said, Hey, can you please just write your titles this way? And they actually created a format.
18:57
where you were supposed to put things in a certain way. But yet it still says water bottle, insulated water bottle, tumbler, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. And I don’t know if you know this, Steve, but Scott and I over at Creator, we actually ran a survey of buyers on Etsy. We surveyed a couple hundred buyers to get their opinions. And what I’ve noticed is this doesn’t just apply on Etsy because it’s e-commerce shopping behavior. It applies on Amazon, it applies on Walmart. And it corresponds with the changes that I’ve been making over the last year to the Amazon accounts that I work in.
19:25
to see that increase in conversion rate. And what buyers said on Etsy, 68 % of people said that they always look at a title and they rely on it to inform their click. So basically what they’re saying is I read the title before I click. And I think that’s what I want by the time that I get to the listing, 68 % of buyers. So they’re not just looking at the photo, they’re looking at the photo and the title. And if they can’t understand what the title is, or it’s confusing to them, they still might click.
19:54
But then when they get to the listing, it’s not going to match their expectations when they look at the supporting images, when they look at your product description, right? The other downside of that is if it’s not human readable, we’re writing it for the SEO robot, then you lose out on a huge portion of the people clicking through. So they don’t even make it to your listing to be able to convert because they go, I don’t know what an insulated water bottle, water bottle tumbler is, but I know what an insulated water bottle is. And even in 2023,
20:21
So many sellers make the assumption that Amazon is Amazon Etsy Walmart are operating on SEO from 1997 where you have to tell it everything and that they don’t understand plurals, that they don’t understand misspellings, that they don’t understand how to combine words. And I think a lot of that comes from the Amazon ecosystem where Amazon doesn’t really tell you how anything works. Right? Like all of this had to come out by trial and error. That’s how Scott and I met. We met in a, a S an FBA seller Facebook group.
20:50
back in 2013, 2014, um, because that was the only way you could figure out stuff. say, Hey, I did this test and this is what happened right now. There’s all kinds of podcasts that we talk about this stuff. Etsy on the other hand, if you read through their documentation, they very specifically spell out what’s in their search engine algorithm. They tell you what matters and we can then backwards engineer that to apply to everything else. And Etsy who is kind of the smaller player in this says, we understand plurals. We understand misspellings.
21:20
We understand that blue could be blue or any variation of blue, right? Cyan, like what I, I’m sure I just screwed up colors and offended everybody, but like any of the 900 variations of the word blue or shades of blue, they understand synonyms and antonyms. And so we don’t have to try to squeeze all of these things in to please the SEO algorithm. If we focus on creating a human readable title and a human readable product description, and we’re using relevant keywords, even if they’re not the exact same things we’re finding in keyword research tools.
21:49
as long as we’re selling well, we’re going to rank for all of the different variations of those keywords. And so the biggest thing I see or the most obvious thing comes up at the titles. And then there’s two other ones, but it sounded like you had a quick question. I think there’s different schools of thought here, right? So we were talking about ads and of course you don’t want to pay for keywords that aren’t converting, but then on the organic side and the order of the words matters on Amazon, right? Cause so recently I just- on Etsy as well.
22:20
I did an experiment with a data dive, which is Brandon Young’s tool. And I started entering in kind of titles like what you said, and it actually grew that listing almost 200%. Because it’s getting more organic traffic, I’m not paying for it. And maybe the conversion rate, who knows what the conversion rate is for those keywords are because Amazon doesn’t tell you unless you’re paying for them. But it did make a difference, right? Because you’re getting that traffic and you’re getting visibility, which you might not otherwise have gotten. Yeah.
22:49
The question in that case would be, all right, let’s look at your data, right? And see which of those keywords was driving that traffic if we can do that. And chances are, and I would be curious what it is, right? But if you look at Etsy, for example, basically what they do is they take the title and they break each word down into its own word, right? So instead of, if you typed in insulated water bottle, they treat that as two words because there’s a space in between them.
23:17
Which would mean if somebody typed in bottle insulated, you’d pass that test of qualifying, right? Cause you have both of those words. They typed in insulated bottle. You’d pass that test as qualifying. It’s then just a matter of how well you qualify based on the other factors. Does that make sense? And so with, with Etsy specifically, they talk, they have kind of a two tiered system. So the, the first way that it works. And I think I have a feeling just based on having sold on Amazon that they work fairly similarly.
23:45
where the very first thing is like a swipe yes, swipe no Tinder test of are you relevant or not based on the keywords in your title description and tags or title description and keywords, right? If we’re talking about Amazon and all they’re doing is they’re looking to say, do you have the words that the person typed in somewhere in your listing? If yes, then they move on to how much traffic do you have? What’s your conversion rate? What’s your average sell through? What’s your price point? What are all of the other, what are, are the personalization factors that we’re going to take into consideration?
24:13
Have they bought from you in the past? Where should we fit you in? If you pass that yes or no test, that’s when the rest of their algorithm kicks in. Amazon seems to work the same way.
24:25
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24:54
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.
25:05
So in your example that you just gave, insulated bottle, if someone typed in insulated bottle and your listing had bottle insulated, the insulated bottle listing would have a leg up over the bottle insulated listing. Potentially. So what Etsy says in their documentation, I, like using your- one knows, but yeah, yeah. Right? Etsy specifically says in their documentation, and it’s a very, you know, it’s a typical like tech company phrase,
25:35
half legal, half almost helpful. It says something to the effect of keywords towards the beginning of the title are weighted more. How close to the beginning of the title? Like how many, what is the beginning? Is it closer than the first half? We don’t know, but what is the most accurate way to describe this? And if we can use that, then as long as we have the other keywords or the other variations of those keywords in our title, description, tags somewhere, search terms.
26:04
then we’re likely to be relevant for it. And that’s when they really start to look at conversion rate and some of the other kinds of things. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. All right, so we lost track. So we’re looking at the listing and it still wasn’t converting well, even though people were searching for insulated bottle. Yeah, so the first thing is to take a look at that title, right? Is it written in a human readable format to the extent possible, right? I’m not saying don’t include keywords, but.
26:33
Don’t just write insulated bottle, insulated bottle, insulated bottle, insulated bottle, thinking that that is going to be helpful. Right. If there’s 15 different ways to say insulate, you know, uh, 64 ounce insulated travel mug, uh, thermos, if it’s the thermos brand, right. Like any of those kinds of things, just write it in a human readable way where I could read it and have it make sense as a sentence. And then you’re 90 % of the way there in terms of SEO optimization for the title.
26:59
The other two things, and it’s weird to me that this is still such an issue, but Steve, what is the biggest problem with buying something online versus buying something in store? The being able to see it, touch it. Yeah. See a video. it up. Right. Like even, even people who are hyper, uh, aggressive about our future of e-commerce, which I’m one of these people says that you’ll never get rid of retail stores. The difference will be
27:28
Best Buy will stop being a place where you go to buy a TV and they will break it up into the Apple section, the Samsung section, the Sony section. You can actually see this in a lot of places outside of the U S where they have like a brand rep who’s it’s, it’s not the best buy guy. It’s the Sony guy and he stands in the Sony section and he explains to you all of the benefits of the different Sony stuff. And then they send you somewhere else to buy it. They send you to sony.com or they send you other places. Um, that will happen, but we’re also on the e-commerce side of this. And so how do we address that problem?
27:58
There’s two ways that we can address that problem. And both of these are, in my opinion, are criminally underutilized on the marketplaces because quite honestly, they’re kind of annoying when you’re creating the listings. The first one is your images and that same buyer survey that we were talking about on the Etsy side of things. So on a scale of one to 10, in terms of how much it influences the buyer decision, they were rated a 9.23 out of 10 in terms of their influence on it’s the number one thing that influences above price, above shipping costs.
28:28
Above pretty much everything else, that was the thing that drove the biggest influence on their purchase decision. And it’s the only way for people to experience the product online. So instead of just throwing up one picture or a bunch of lifestyle pictures that don’t really tell us anything or give us any more information other than, look, I can carry it while I’m jogging, right? Lifestyle photos are nice, but is there a way that we can use that to tell the story of the product? Can we show them?
28:57
in a product image that our bottle is 100 % stainless steel. has no plastic. Can we show them the inside? Why is that important? Well, what would you do if you were somebody who was very plastic averse and you were going to go buy a water bottle at the store? You’d take the top off and you’d look at the inside to go, this one’s lined with plastic. You’d screw the top back on, put their little product insert back in, and then pick up the next one and do it. I know because I’ve done it, right? The same thing applies to a t-shirt or handkerchiefs or whatever, right? They need to know
29:27
what it is and how it’s going to benefit them. And that translates both from the photos and the product description. And the biggest thing that I see people doing wrong on product descriptions is one, they’ll write like one sentence, right? Or two sentences, they’ll say it’s a 16 ounce insulated water bottle. They’ll basically repeat the title and the, you know, the product features, like the bullets from Amazon. And that’s pretty much it. The downside to this is that the only details you typically get about a product on an Amazon listing are like the technical details.
29:57
So Steve, could you explain to me fabric weights and how that matters? Probably. Do I have any idea what the difference is between two different weights of fabrics? No, unless I can pick them up, feel them and touch them. So too many people write feature driven copy. It has this weight. It holds 16 ounces instead of it keeps your stuff cold for 48 hours, right? Or
30:22
It’s made from this kind of fabric so that you can wash it hundred times and it’ll feel like the first time you ever put it on, right? It’s not that you don’t want to include the details about the product, but you have to include the benefits side of it as to why it actually matters to the customer. They’re not going to know what your special fabric weight is, but they are going to understand that they can wash it a hundred times and it’s going to feel like the first time they put it.
30:44
And if we can take those few small steps that can massively increase conversion rate because then they don’t go, I have no idea what this fabric weight is that they’re talking about. Or I don’t know what a cotton poly blend is. I don’t know what keep cool technology is, but I do understand it will keep my, my water cold for 24 hours. I do understand how it feels when I put it on and that’ll stay feeling like that. So there’s this popular water bottle. And the reason why it became viral was because in the listing, it said fits a full wine bottle.
31:14
and we’ll keep the wine cool all day. That was it. So when you mentioned like 16 ounces, I mean, this thing holds a bottle of wine, which apparently is what a lot of people want, I guess. I think I actually got one of those at similar someone. Did you? Yeah. And I like it. But then then the question becomes what size bottle of wine, right? Like a real wine person would say, well, does it hold a magnum? Does it hold a 750 milliliter bottle? Does it hold a you know, but
31:43
That comes down to what matters and how can we translate it to our customer? And what I see too often on all of the marketplaces, be it Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, wherever. And I also see this more on people’s websites, although it appears to be a little bit less of an issue on your own e-commerce store for some reason, is that they’re saying, okay, it has, you know, it’s made of this type of stainless steel. It will do this. It has this, whatever. And none of the benefits side
32:11
And if I can’t pick it up and feel the difference between yours that has one weight and the, you know, Scott’s that has another weight, which I would do in the store. I’d pick up both t-shirts and feel them. pick up both handkerchiefs and feel them. I’d rub them against my face to see how it feels. Right. Um, then I don’t have any idea what that means. And simply writing something like stain proof technology, right. Doesn’t tell me what that means. But if you show me a photo of somebody pouring red wine all over your handkerchief and then
32:40
you know, do a split screen on the other side of the photo with it coming out of the dishwasher, dishwasher out of the washing machine, perfectly clean. That explains the story to me, and I can then understand this isn’t something that’s going to stain and it makes it easier for the person to make the purchase decision. And that’s that’s really our job as people selling on whether it’s our own website or any of these marketplaces. Our job is to make it as easy as possible for somebody to buy from us. And when we’re not doing a few of these basic things, we’re making it significantly harder.
33:08
because then they have to go through the decision process of, this exactly what I want? And the answer is usually no. And that’s why we see even on e-commerce websites, well-optimized ones, abandoned cart rates around 70%. Why is that? Well, sometimes it’s because their cats build their coffee all over their keyboard or their baby’s crying in another room. But in a lot of cases, it’s because we haven’t answered all of their questions and we haven’t given them what they need to be able to make the purchase decision. And they’re worried that if they buy the product, it won’t meet
33:37
their expectations. What are you seeing in terms of the role of video in improving conversion rates? So that was something that was kind of interesting, at least in the Etsy ecosystem. They only rated that a four out of 10 in terms of importance. OK. I think the reason for that is at least within that ecosystem, it’s not very well used. And what we’ve noticed is when you have a video, at least in that ecosystem, they replace your thumbnail in search with the video.
34:07
which automatically draws some of these eyes in the search results and brings them to your listing. So as long as you’re doing the rest of these things, it’s not as important from a conversion rate perspective on Etsy yet, but it’s extremely important from a click through rate perspective, meaning the people who see your listing in the search results and click on it. If you’re the only one that has movement there, you’re much higher likelihood that they’re going to click on your thing versus just the standard boring product photo. In the Amazon ecosystem, I’ve seen video play a little bit of a bigger role. What I’ve noticed just on e-commerce in general,
34:37
is one of the things we added into our abandoned cart sequences for people who have their own websites are like FAQ videos. So instead of writing out all of the FAQs, which you can still do and you should do in that abandoned cart sequence, if you have a video about a specific product or just generally about your store, that’s a good enough place to start to down record three, four five frequently asked questions about what’s your return policy? You know, what’s the minimum order in the case of you, Steve, like what?
35:06
What are the things that people forget or don’t think about when they’re buying a product? If you have a specific product, then you can focus on answering some of the questions you’ve gotten specifically about that product. Like, look, you know, this water bottle keeps it cold for 24 hours or whatever it is and just reiterate that information. And we then just send that as a link in one of our abandoned cart emails. And we’ve noticed that’s our highest performing abandoned cart email, even over and above some of the like save 10%.
35:35
type coupon offers that you’ll typically see because what are we doing? We’re addressing the questions that people still have, which is the reason that they haven’t purchased yet. If we were standing together and I was looking at all of your, beautiful handkerchiefs, then we could have that conversation. You could say, Hey Chris, this is why it matters. This is why it feels this way. This is what will happen if you stain it. All of those kinds of things. have to figure out a way to have that conversation online and video is an extremely easy way to be able
36:01
So interesting, you use those types of videos in your abandoned card sequence? Huh, okay, I’m not doing that. Might be worth trying. What my suggestion would be, and I tend to see people massively overcomplicate email as well, they’re like, oh, I have Klaviyo or I have Drip and I can create all of these segmentation, start generic, right? Like start with return policies, start with whatever you think would be the reason that people are holding back, and then drill down to like the specific product level. If you have two or three products,
36:31
it’s really easy to do that at the product level. If you have 500 SKUs, it’s a little bit harder to do that at the product level. So for those people, I start a little more generic, just plug that into the sequence and see what happens. I’m curious what else is on the survey. So we talked about the image. Uh, we just talked about video now. Where did the title fall into that? So titles, uh, 68 % of people said that they always read the title and it’s one of the most important factors. I can pull up all of the, all of the data.
37:00
I’m just curious what the highlights are that survey, because it sounds like a pretty cool survey that you guys ran. Yeah. And we got a couple hundred buyers. One of the things that was the most interesting and it specifically pertains to Etsy, although I have seen similar behavior on Amazon, was one of the things that you’ll see is like, no one cares about your storefront because most of the traffic is coming from search to a specific listing. And one of the things that we noticed from that survey data was that actually people massively care.
37:30
about your storefront. It’s not where it’s not what’s going to drive the initial conversion, but if you have something that’s a repeat purchase or you are serving somebody with multiple products. So we have not only the water bottle we have, you know, let’s say it’s for a runner. have a, an armband. We have a bunch of other things that they can buy from us that they are coming to the storefront before they’re actually searching to see if they want to buy from that seller. And I want to pull up the number here. If I can find it.
37:58
just to see exactly what that data was. But essentially it was over 80%. And I think it was 96 % of the most frequent buyers said that that’s where they start. So one of the pieces of data that we asked for was the very first screening question was how many purchases have you made? If somebody said zero, they were screened out, right? If they said 14, I think it was 10 plus, I think is where we left off, which basically means one a month, maybe it was 11 plus.
38:28
Right? So they’re, coming and they’re buying on the platform once a month or more. Those people, the highest value customers were starting at the store front and saying, I’m much more likely to buy from somebody that I already know, because I don’t want to go through the process of trying to find that perfect product. I bought something from you and it’s perfectly logical. If you think about it, right? You’re, buy something for somebody, you know, your dad’s really into fishing, right? And you find a really cool fishing thing on Etsy. find a really cool fishing thing on Amazon.
38:55
something he’s talked about for the last six months since Christmas. Do you think you’re gonna go back to that store for his birthday gift? Probably, right? Do you think you’re gonna go back to that store the next time you need something fishing related? Probably, and that’s the same buyer behavior that we were seeing in the survey. There was a stat that I saw on Amazon, you know, with all the knockoffs and everything happening. It was like something pretty high, like 70 something percent of people actually look at the brand page outside of Amazon before making a purchase on Amazon.
39:24
So it’s pretty page, meaning their website, the website, yes, the website, they click into the brand. They actually check the website itself to see it’s legit before making a purchase decision on Amazon. I mean, I guess that makes sense. Um, yeah, yeah. It supports what you were just saying. And it’s, it really is a conversion rate issue then. Right. And it’s the same thing. They’re checking to see if it’s legit. And I I’ve seen the other thing happen as well. Right. Um, Steve, you’ve probably talked about like Lyft, Amazon associated Lyft.
39:51
where people run like national TV campaigns or they’ll get retail placement or they’ll run Facebook ads and all of a sudden their Amazon sales take off. It’s because they go to your website, they go, I’m not sure if it’s safe to buy from here. And then they go over to Amazon, they see that your product is on Amazon. I’ve even done this, right? Like, I’m getting a weird vibe from the website. You go over to Amazon, you’re like, I’ll buy it from Amazon because I know I can return it. I know I’m going to get it in two days. And I know that they’re not going to do anything weird or shady with my credit card. So it makes sense that that would happen the other way as well.
40:18
Yeah, there’s the halo effect for sure. Incidentally, this is why we always price our stuff cheaper on our own website though, because of that. So the hope is they’ll come to our page and maybe buy from our store, even though they feel more comfortable buying on Amazon. In most cases, people buy an Amazon, they just buy an Amazon, right? But sometimes, wait, Steve, you mean you don’t price it exactly the same on Amazon as you do on your own website and your cost restriction long ago. So I had a phone call last week with a pay with Amazon.
40:48
Yeah, with their team. Uh, we’re rolling that out on one of those sites that I consult for. And they were very offended that it was not priced the same. You know, like we can install this extension for you where it’ll, it won’t pull it from your website. It’ll just pull it from whatever the current price is on Amazon. They made it seem like it’s this big. like, it’s two clicks of a button people like it’s gotta be fine. Um, but you know, we, we do that just because of the difference in fees and the cost of fulfillment, right? Additionally, we offer subscription on most of the people that I, that
41:18
that I consult with, right? The vast majority of my day in the e-commerce world, at least, is spent with companies that operate on a subscription model. Yes, we sell one-time products, but we also have subscription products that people can buy. As much as I like Amazon and I like Subscribe and Save, I’d much rather they subscribe and save on my website. And so our standard pricing is lower than it is on Amazon, and our subscription pricing is lower than our subscribe and save pricing on Amazon.
41:43
And what we’ve noticed is there’s actually a lot of crossover between people who buy single purchase on Amazon and then end up buying and subscribing on the website. So what ends up happening for us is that people might buy one of our products on Amazon, but then they’ll buy bulk from our website because we give special treatment to them. But there was another question I wanted to ask you based on something you just said, why install that pan Amazon button? So we’re just testing it. There there’s three brands under that company. One of them only has two skews.
42:13
And so we figured, Hey, why not? They’re, bugging us about it. Like they’ve been calling us nonstop. I want to see because I’m a conversion rate nerd. Is it going to boost my conversion rate? And if it boosts my conversion rate from paid ads, from email marketing, from all of the stuff I’m doing on my own website, then we just have to make the decision of, well, is it worth it for the little bit of the extra that we pay on Amazon to have them fulfill it? Um, now, since you’re not paying the referral fee or any of those kinds of things, you’re just paying the fulfillment side of it.
42:43
It comes pretty close and we charge for shipping. We charge fixed rate for shipping. So it actually is essentially a wash, um, in terms of our cost. it’s, it’s at least worth the conversion rate test, uh, just to see. It’s been a while since I’d done this because, cause the new button is different than the old button. If you remember, there was a pay by, I can’t remember what it’s called anymore. Uh, did a test pay by Amazon or something. Now it’s a buy with prime or something like that. Right.
43:12
Buy with Prime, Yeah, now it’s Buy with Prime. Anyway, before, very few people were even touching that button. Because people who shop on Amazon, shop on Amazon. People who shop on your store, shop on your store. So I’m very curious what your experiment is like with the Buy with Prime button. Because it seems like, you’re right, from a cost perspective, it’s like a wash. But you are giving Amazon all your data. And it kind of makes them maybe go back to Amazon the next time. I don’t know.
43:40
I’m curious to see what potentially, but the upside of that is unlike somebody who buys from Amazon directly, I get all of that customer data. So they’re still going into my email database. They’re still able to be marketed to directly by us. Right. So to me, if it, if it increases our conversion rate slightly, it’s probably not worth it. If it increases our conversion rate, half a percent, 1 % from paid ads, that makes a huge difference. And then they’re in our ecosystem. And typically the reason
44:10
I can only really think of two reasons people would use that button. And it would be because they want to be able to get two day shipping, right? Or they just don’t quite trust your website, which I think would also be resolved with Google Pay, Apple Pay, right? Some of those kinds of things. But in a lot of cases, those only show on mobile unless you specifically set it to show on mobile and desktop. And all we’re looking at is, is there a way to increase the conversion rate? We know that when we added PayPal, a PayPal,
44:38
Single button option, which is essentially the exact same thing, right? It was the pay with PayPal button versus the pay with Amazon button or buy with prime. The naming at Amazon, you’ll need to you’ll need to figure out the buy with prime thing. You know, it’s essentially the same type of a thing. We saw a big lift like a 20, 20 % lift in our conversion rate with that. And it wasn’t that we lost people paying credit cards. We had essentially the same number of people buying with their credit card.
45:07
We just had a big chunk of people who didn’t feel safe giving their credit card information that said, I’ll do it with PayPal because I know I can cancel it at any point and it’s not going to be a problem. Especially with something like subscriptions, people are really weirded out. Even if you have in big bold letters all over the website, here’s how to cancel. We’ll cancel at any time. We really don’t care. Just let us know. We make it as easy as possible. We send you an email before your subscription is over that says, click this button to cancel it. We try to make it as easy as possible for people.
45:32
but people still have gotten burned once or twice. And they say with PayPal, I know I can just go into my dashboard and click the button and cancel it there. And I don’t have to jump through any hoops. I don’t have to worry about it. So if we see a similar lift with the buy with prime stuff, then I would roll that out to the other sites. But I don’t know that I’m expecting that it was really just to say, Hey, let’s try it. It’s like five lines of code and we have the product at Amazon anyway. Let’s see what happens. And then let’s see how our inventory levels are affected. If it does.
46:02
That is my biggest concern with it. Um, because as well as we are converting, we have trouble keeping inventory in stock at Amazon because there’s like a thousand units at any given time that are just floating around their ecosystem, not available to be sold. And so if we, if we do see a big jump in the number of orders from the website, you’re talking to another, you know, at 20%, 20, 30, 40 units a day that would be coming out of the Amazon inventory. That then becomes a potential issue that we would have to have to deal with. Cause
46:30
the last thing I want to do is run out of inventory on Amazon and have them not be able to buy it on the website where they already are looking to make the purchase. So it’s interesting. PayPal is actually a third of our sales, I would say, because people don’t want to type. But did you know, and I just kind of discovered this to hardware, I didn’t realize that PayPal charges three and a half percent when people pay by PayPal, unless you negotiate that down.
46:57
Which is not surprising. Yeah. They’ve always been high. I thought so they charge. Okay. Yeah. So commercial transactions is a 3.5, right? Yeah. And then if you’re just sending money, it’s the, the like two, two and a half or whatever. 2.9. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can negotiate all that stuff. I just went through this because I thought I had great rates with PayPal. It turns out like right before the pandemic, they raised the rates and
47:24
Apparently I didn’t get the email. I was thinking that, and I don’t audit my credit card reports all the time. I just negotiated a really good rate. Yeah. That is something that is hidden money for people. That’s something we did this year in two of the three brands that I was just talking about. And it was kind of a fluke because it wasn’t something we were thinking about doing. And then I started digging into the report and I said, these fees seem really high. And so we went to a bunch of different people and we’re now paying, I had to look at the number, but it’s less than, it’s less than 1%.
47:54
Um, and all it was pressing to a, yeah. Now when you, when you actually add it up, right. Because typically what you see is you’ll see like the Stripe, which is, know, 2.49 plus 20 cents or whatever it is. Right. When you go to break it out, there’s the actual credit card processor. And then there’s the merchant account fees, Stripe, uh, Braintree, like they’re all integrated. So you’ll see that as a flat rate, but I think with everything added in, it added up to like.
48:24
1.9 or 1.2 that sounds about right. You’re on interchange plus pricing probably. Yeah, and we’re just using Wells Fargo now because that’s who we had a business relationship with and it took an extra 30 seconds to set up because we already had a merchant account and so we’re just using them to handle the credit card transactions and they were even willing to negotiate on some of the things like charging you for failed payments. Right? So they
48:52
And want to say it was 20 cents, I think is what they were charging for like any credit card attempt. Is it well, like, okay. So we, run on a subscription basis. If you guys don’t correctly update the credit card information, when they have a new card, that’s going to run and that’s going to cost us 300 bucks a month. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but 300 that’s $3,600 a year. Like that’s a substantial amount of money, especially if you’re a smaller business. And I said, oh yeah, let us, let us look at that. And so we, you know, we weren’t able to get it to zero, but we were able to get it down on failed payments.
49:22
And on a few of the other things where we said, look, like there’s a chance that it’s going to run two or three times before they update it. If you don’t actively update it, like you can do in Braintree and Stripe, they’ll automatically update somebody’s card with your number when it’s issued. Wells Fargo wasn’t so sure if they were going to be able to do that. So we were like, that’s going to be an issue for us because that’s $3,600 out of our pocket plus the lost order. But a lot of that stuff was able to be negotiated. And honestly, it was probably an hour’s worth of actual work to do. And I don’t know about you, but I
49:49
I’d like to save $3,600 a year or whatever it is. I think in our case, we reduced it by almost one and a half percentage points overall. Yeah, we reduced it about a 1 % and that’s like, you know, that’s like tens of thousands of dollars every year. The only reason why I brought up this up in the first place is if you get a lot of PayPal payments because of what we just both talked about, go with Braintree because then you can actually negotiate your PayPal rates in addition to your credit card rates and they do offer interchange plus pricing.
50:16
which is hilarious because they’re owned by PayPal now, right? Exactly. It’s the same company, but they don’t talk to each other. But that’s, I like Braintree. I’m a fan of Braintree. I’ve used Stripe in the past. Braintree just seems to be a little bit easier to use. And you have some of the advantages like the built-in ability to use PayPal without having to have a separate account and worrying about that and the ability to negotiate some of those fees. So yeah, yeah. I’m a fan. Yeah. Chris, I don’t want to take up too much.
50:45
more of your time here, but that was great. Is there anything missing on that survey that you wanted to mention before we shut this down? So I’m scrolling through it right now just to see. Oh, so reviews. This is a big one on, uh, on Amazon, on Etsy, wherever they rated a 7.69 out of 10 in terms of how important it is for conversion. However, only 60 % of people say that they always read reviews.
51:12
41 % of people said it depends on the product. So if they really want the product, they’re not going to look at the reviews. If they’re kind of on the fence about it, then they’re going to do it. Shipping costs would be another big one, right? 70 % of people said that they would absolutely be willing to buy a product if they had to pay for shipping. So it’s not a huge deal. And what we’ve noticed, at least on our own website, is we’ve done the best with flat rate shipping. We charge a flat $5 for most of that stuff.
51:42
And we, we raised it. was, I think was 3.99. So it was $4 a year ago. No effect on conversion rate, no effect on anything. Not a single, we even sent an email to our entire, a transactional email, letting people know that the shipping costs were going up. Didn’t get a single reply to it. Nobody even blinked at it. And it hasn’t affected our conversion rates moving forward, even with brand new customers. And so if you’re afraid to charge for shipping, don’t be, just make sure that it’s part of the value of the product.
52:11
Right. You may see a slight decrease, but people are not that worried about it. Pricing, uh, 80 % of people said price is only one factor that they consider. So a huge mistake that I see people making is that they want to be the lowest priced option, or they do some price trickery, right? They’ll offer some variations and
52:33
They’ll put in a low price variation that they know no one’s interested in just to have that be the price that shows up in the search results, right? Where it’ll say from $4 and 99 cents. And then you get in to buy your t-shirt and you realize it’s a, it’s a baby small or whatever that no one is actually ever going to buy because it’s a t-shirt about drinking beer. And that’d be a really weird thing to buy for your toddler. But they do that. You don’t need to do that. Only 13 % of people said it’s one of the most important.
53:01
And about 5 % of people said that they’re not worried about it at all. Um, we had, we, we did talk about the likelihood of visiting a seller page, 73 % of people, uh, or sorry, it was, uh, yeah. How likely are you to visit was 73. So 7.35 out of 10. Um, that’s just the, like the, generic about page, right? So your shop, but then if they had purchased from you, that jumped to an average of 85 % where they were coming in, looking at the shop.
53:30
So 8.5 out of 10 on how likely they are to come visit a shop they have previously purchased from. Where that gets really interesting is where you and I started talking about this and I wanted to pull up the data. I wasn’t just making it up. It was 96%. So people who bought one to five times on the platform were 80.2 % likely to purchase from a shop they had purchased from previously. If they made six to 10 purchases, that jumps to 89 % likelihood. And 11 or more purchases in the last year, 96.3%, right?
53:59
So if you don’t have more than one thing that somebody can buy from you, you’re making a huge mistake. it is that you’re selling. think the, uh, I think Bain and company did a similar study. If they bought once, they’re like 65 % more likely to buy again, which is kind of in line. Your, your, your stats are higher, but it seems to be in line. Yeah. And again, it could be sample size. could also be how generic the question is. Right. And if you’re talking about something like Etsy,
54:27
The shops are either very generic, right? Where they sell every t-shirt ever made or they’re very niche specific. And if they’re very niche specific, there’s a higher likelihood that somebody can come back and find the thing that they’re actually looking for. And that’s one of the reasons I think it is, it probably skews a little higher on Etsy than it would somewhere like Amazon or just market in general. But you’re talking well over 50 % of people who buy from you want to buy from you again and want to buy other things from you. And if we can
54:54
offer those, then that’s automatically going to increase our conversion rate and our sales because they’re coming back and they’re starting by looking at our storefront. And I’m just going to say this is kind of conclude here. I think in the way you make an e-commerce business profitable is through your repeat business and cross-selling of the products because it costs a lot of money to get that first purchase. And it’s through getting that first purchase and just, we’ve been doing this for years. Most of our sales actually comes from people who who’ve already purchased from us. So
55:23
You’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re just selling a single product and not keeping track of your customer’s info. Correct me if I’m wrong on this to you, but didn’t you a few years ago, go back through your entire database and just try to figure out who your best customers were. Yep. Yep. That was us. Yeah. To figure out how and why these things matter. Yes. I know there’s a way to do it in Klaviyo, but Drip just rolled out something a couple of months ago that I think is really cool in their analytics tab. And I actually moved.
55:53
I’ve moved a few people from Klaviyo to Drip specifically so I don’t have to dig around. like another one in itself. For the metric. Um, because they have really good analytics that are actually human readable now, which is like mind boggling to me. Um, and I know you can get it. Let me see if I can find it. Uh, uh, and they call it, uh, they call it champions. And so they give you a breakdown inside of your, your Drip dashboard now of exactly.
56:24
how many people are driving what percentage of your revenue and how like what the breakdown of your database is in terms of top customers versus average customers. And it gives you a really good baseline to say 80 % of my revenue is dependent on 2 % of people or, whatever it is. And that was one of the realizations that I have, you know, our, our customer champions, which were the top customers were, I think it’s, 7 % of the database. And that was like 80 % of the revenue, which is, wow. It’s a little skewed, right? Yeah. And
56:52
But it’s because it’s subscription, the longer they’ve been in the database, the more revenue that they contribute. So I was like, okay, I feel a little less weird about that. Right. Cause the people who have bought from us once probably haven’t had even a chance to subscribe yet. We just ran a massive promotion that brought in a whole bunch of new customers, all of these kinds of things. But the, the analytics inside of drip give you a really easy to read breakdown of that for people who aren’t numbers people where it says, here’s how many orders they have. Here’s how many orders a regular person has. Here’s how much revenue they’ve generated. Here’s how much revenue.
57:22
an average person generates. And here’s the percentage of how that makes up for your store. And that gives you at least a baseline to operate off of. So I thought that was kind of cool. Nothing against Klaviyo love Klaviyo, but the fact that it’s that easy to see in a very easy to understand dashboard format inside a drip, I thought was, was really cool. Um, and it makes my job a lot easier cause I don’t have to go build reports and do any of those kinds of things. Yeah. Just focus on the thing, which is making more people high value customers and keeping fewer people as one off orders.
57:51
Cool. Well, Chris, man, thank you so much for coming on the show. I learned a lot actually from talking to you. And the stuff that we talked about here really applies to all marketplaces and all stores. So thank you for that. Absolutely. And I did want to ask you one last thing. Where can people find more about you, the work that you do, the content you create, or if they just want consulting from you? Brandcreators.com, the Brand Creators channel on YouTube or the Rock Your Brand podcast are all great ways to get in contact with me.
58:21
support at brandcreators.com. If you have any questions about the data, any of those kinds of things, or if you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on on Etsy, you’re interested in that. If you’re trying to figure out what’s going on with Amazon, you have a question. More than happy to answer it there as well. Cool. Well, thanks a lot for coming on, Chris. Appreciate you. brother.
58:39
Hope you enjoyed that episode and I hope Chris gave you some tips on how to make more efficient use of your time and how to maximize your marketing dollars. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 507. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you ever want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com.
59:07
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifeputterjob.com 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.
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