#5: The Anatomy of an eCommerce Website, Part 1

Welcome back to episode five of The Growth Booth. Today we are starting a two-part sequence where we're going to be talking about the anatomy of the perfect ecommerce store. And there's no one better in the world to talk to this thing about, in my opinion, than my business partner, Sean Agnew. 

I may be slightly biased here, but I have worked with Sean a huge amount over the past few years. This is a guy that knows ecommerce and particularly shopping platforms inside and out. So what we're going to do in this episode is dive into talking about the front end of a shopping platform. And by that, I mean everything you can control on your page to help you get more conversions. Then in the follow up episode, we'll talk about a lot of things you can do behind the scenes to increase lifetime value of your customers, conversions and other bits and pieces there.

AIDAN:

So diving into this one. Sean, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to join us here. 

SEAN:

Sure. Thanks for having me. 

AIDAN:

So when we think about the front end and the things that we can control, I really just want to serve up a whole bunch of different ideas to people here, and the first one that comes to mind is the layout of the page. What are your thoughts around the ideal layout of an ecommerce page in 2022? 

SEAN:

So when you're thinking of the layout of your page, I think we're specifically talking about your product page, right? You have your ecommerce website, and that's one thing I want to throw out there, too, is you get a lot of people that focus on making their home page pretty and things like that. That's all wonderful. But it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things of actually converting a product into a sale. 

When it comes to your actual product page, you want to think about it as putting the stuff that is going to get yourself a sale at the very top of the page, and then you sort of have all those other secondary things below the page. The reason why I say that is most of the sales these days actually are coming off mobile devices. So on your phone here, you only have a certain finite amount of space on the screen to actually entice the buyer. Really the most important things are going to be your headline, what is your product called, and I think that's an often overlooked aspect of your product. You sort of want to have a headline that obviously describes what the product is but also lead with some powerful keywords that could increase the chances of somebody buying a product.

You want to have your best product image there as well. Then I like to have reviews if you have them right under the product image. So you sort of have like your title, your image, your reviews and then your price and then you want to have your buy-now button or add to cart button. You want to test the words on that and make it big. The green button or red button usually are your best options, and those are sort of your four or five elements you really want to nail. There are other things, of course we can talk about that are going to help as well. But those are sort of the main ones that you want to nail on your product page. 

AIDAN:

So just going back to headline, this is something that's going to appear at the top of the page. In terms of keywords, is there a rule that you like to follow for like how long should that be? Because I know in the past some people have fallen into the trap of keyword stuffing and having big long titles for a product. What's your sort of best practice here? 

SEAN:

So there are two things to the headline, right? There's a headline everyone sees, i.e., the one that will be on the page when somebody visits your product. So if we're talking about, looking at my desk here, I have these Apple AirPod Maxes. I wouldn't want to call these like black noise canceling, headphones for airplane work and so on and so forth. Just too long, right? So my title, I might call these what it is, Apple AirPods Max, or black Apple AirPods Max or something, maybe four or five keywords. 

But if you are running ads on like Google or Microsoft, there is a way via apps or if you have a certain platform, for example, there is a way to add more keywords into your headline that Google sees that allows you to sort of rank higher in the search engines and in the advertising platforms without the customer actually seeing it.

So on the customer facing end, they might just see like black Apple AirPods Max. But on the back end, behind the scenes, like in your H1 tags and things like that, you can have a way longer headline where you stuff 10, 11, 12 keywords. I think you can get 80 characters if I'm not mistaken in the headline when it comes to selling a product for Google Shopping or something like that. So that's how I would approach it. You want to keep your customer facing headline like short and sweet, but save your keyword stuffing for sort of like the metadata that goes off to Google and the search engines and the advertising platforms. 

AIDAN:

Yes, I think if in doubt, people always need to remember that they're selling to a human at the end of the day. And so as you're building out your ecommerce store or any website for that matter, that should be the first thing that you keep at the forefront of your mind and think, how would you react if you were a visitor going to that page? Would it send off alarm bells about credibility being maybe not all that high, or would it display integrity and trust? 

On that note of integrity and trust, what are the kinds of things that you can add to a product page to help build that up? You mentioned one before about reviews. Now, obviously that's form of social proof. But what else can you do? 

SEAN:

Yeah, I think reviews are generally probably the number one thing you can have on a product. Just because I just showed you, if you're selling earbuds, headphones, whatever, and you don't have any reviews and somebody is selling a similar product and they have like 1000 reviews, well, the person with 1000 reviews is likelier going to get the sale. Especially on price and other things. Consider, let's say the price is the same and the headphones look the same, reviews could be the difference between a sale and no sale. 

But other things that people look for, free shipping, or if you can't offer free shipping, at least make it clear to the customer that your shipping is really fast. People will pay $4.99 for shipping that's going to come in two to three days kind of thing. So if you can offer that, wonderful. If you can offer both fast and free shipping, even better. 

People want to see a return policy. I think it's pretty standard to have a 30-day, no questions asked return policy. Everybody's buying stuff online these days and people want to have assurance that if they don't like the product for any reason, they can just send it back. 

Fast and free delivery, reviews, easy 30-days, no question asked return policy. I think those are the three main ones. And then, of course, having your address and business name and stuff like that displayed very readily on your website so people know that you're not just some fly by night store that is like selling junk from China kind of thing. I think it's also important. 

AIDAN:

So you mentioned a few things about important pages there: About Us, Contact Us. What about having an 800 phone number? Is this something that you like to have throughout your website? 

SEAN:

I think as your store grows, it's nice to have. I think obviously you need to have an email. Somebody needs to be able to contact you. That's quite important. But 1-800 numbers, personally, I think they're a little bit overrated. As you grow, sure, it's wonderful if you can have somebody on staff to take those phone calls, but in the beginning, it's definitely not something that's necessary. You can, of course, set up like an automated service. You can go to Grasshopper. You can get like a 1-800 number. I think it's like $20 or $30 a month. It's really cheap. And you can just set up like an automated voice recording kind of thing that really just tells people your line is busy and to email you. You can do stuff like that.

AIDAN:

When you mentioned Grasshopper, that brought back some memories, because on my very first ecommerce store, must have been about a decade ago now, I remember I had Grasshopper and it was all set up. For those of you that don't know what it is, it's an automated phone system, basically. And the way that I had mine set up was someone would call me on my store and it would always go to an answer phone, but it would give them a menu of options, “What do you want to do? Have you got a sales inquiry? Are you an existing customer?” and then the message would be something along the lines of, “Hey, we are either out of office hours or busy with another customer. Leave a message and we'll get back to you.” So who would leave a message? That message will zap through my email, and then I could press the play button in my email and hear it and decide what I wanted to do with it. 

But a decade ago, this was like, oh, my God, you can actually do things like this, completely automated. You can make it feel like a real store with all kinds of support channels. Fast forward to today, that's just bare basics. You can get very sort of technical with those elements. They're also, I think, a lot cheaper nowadays because there's more competition. I think there's a lot of free options. I think TollFreeForwarding… 

SEAN:

tollfreefordings.com. Yeah, that's one of them. 

AIDAN:

There's lots of them out there. Google search will uncover dozens of them. Something else that we haven't spoken about were displaying the different types of payments that you get. I think that's another one because some people want to pay in a certain way. What are your thoughts on the types of payments that you need to be able to accept? 

SEAN:

Yeah, we've tested this in the past. I have a huge hate for PayPal. I think many people do in the space because it doesn't always have, but they can hold your money, and then you can't get a hold of them. They're just a real pain to deal with in the Internet marketing space.

So I really try. I've tried over the years not to use them as much as possible, but the reality is when you remove PayPal off your store as a method of purchase, it lowers your conversion rates dramatically. You don't want to offer too many methods of payments because then you get the paradox of choice. If you have like seven different payment methods, people get overwhelmed. They don't know what to do. But generally speaking, if you can just offer, at the very bare minimum, if you offer credit card and PayPal, it's going to increase your conversion drastically. 

We have seen some good stuff out of Amazon Pay as well. And of course, now there's a lot of crypto and stuff like that. So I think that's kind of a cool thing to have on your store, people who want to pay with Bitcoin and things like that. But yeah, definitely having at least credit card and PayPal is a bare minimum for your store. You're going to lose a lot of sales. 

I think with PayPal they offer that sort of extra layer of protection. People can open up like a PayPal dispute against you for whatever reason. I've had it even before. No joke. I've had this happen on my store where somebody ordered something like on Sunday morning and then Sunday night I had a PayPal dispute. I was like, what, did you want me to helicopter this thing over to your house? I don't understand how this happened, but I think people, customers just generally trust PayPal to have their back if something goes wrong, whereas they don't necessarily know who you are. You can have all the trust badges on your store and you know that you're not going to scam somebody, but adding that extra layer of protection from your customers by having PayPal on your store, I think a lot of people like to use it for that. And people also, maybe they don't remember their credit card. Everybody knows their PayPal username and password, so it's just easy to check out. So definitely have those two on your store. 

AIDAN:

It's also a case of inserting that little icon that shows Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and whatever else, American Express, just slightly below the Click Here to Buy button because that could be, if you've got a simple payment method that someone is used to using in the past and everyone using credit cards and a lot of people with PayPal, then sometimes that can be the game changer, the deal breaker, and them deciding to buy because they think, “Oh, they've got PayPal. I want to make that decision.” 

It also lends a little bit of credibility to your store because as an ecommerce entrepreneur, if you've got your own ecommerce stores, you'll know that it's pretty easy, it's incredibly easy to be able to accept payments except Mastercard, except Visa and PayPal and so on and so forth, but for the average person who is not an ecommerce entrepreneur, they may think that you have to be real to accept these types of payments. I think it sort of lends a wee bit more credibility there. Something we've done a lot in the past, continuing along this theme of credibility and integrity are trust seals, trust badges. What's your take on these in 2022? 

SEAN:

I think they're like a good secondary layer of protection, having 100% satisfaction guaranteed or if you have like a McAfee SSL certificate on your website, I think those things definitely have some value. I don't think they are going to make or break a sale usually, but it just gives extra trust to the customer. So having things like fast and free shipping and a 30-day no questions asked return policy are definitely going to be much more valuable and increase your sales having reviews as well. But sure, if you can have an SSL certificate, people know that you keep their information private and your checkout is secure, like that, definitely going to help add trust to your website. 

AIDAN:

I think one of the real keys is kind of finding that nice balance between having enough trust elements, enough credibility elements and conversion elements, because you can imagine a page where you've got a phone number at the top and email address below that, you've got like 50 different payment methods, you've got all these trust deals and badges and this and the other, and it would just look like a cluttered mess.

This has been one of the things that we've tried really hard to do with Cartzy, which is our own ecommerce platform that Sean is a co founder of that with me. We've tried to make it so that you've got this out of the box solution really where you're striking that balance of credibility and conversions and design elements and so on and so forth. 

I think that's the thing that a lot of people struggle with and they are aware of so many things you could add to a store which might boost conversions, but when you add them all in together, it doesn't necessarily make it a better solution. If you're thinking about cooking, there's lots of different spices that you might enjoy. If you add all of those spices at the same time to what you're cooking, then maybe what you're cooking is not going to taste that good anymore. It's a little bit like that with ecommerce. So I think you need to take all of these things with a grain of salt. 

Just as a reminder, we do have show notes, show highlights, transcription and links to some of the resources that we're mentioning here over at thegrowthbooth.com, so you can always go there to check this out later. We'll have more details about Cartzy there as well. 

Now, in terms of the product description and benefits, what is your approach to this? Because if you've got a store which may have hundreds of different products on potentially, how do you find that balance between how much is enough essentially for bullets and then description? 

SEAN:

Yeah, this is a sort of multi layered question because if you have an ecommerce store, chances are you have, over time, you're going to have a few hundred products on there, and chances are out of those few hundred products, 80/20 rule, you might have ten or 15 that are actually making you all your sales. A well written product description is going to probably be somewhere in the length of 500+ words. You want to lead with the benefits of the product. 

You made a good point there. You don't just want to list off the features, like this headset is like, it's black, it's big. You want to talk about maybe the noise canceling features and how this is a wonderful thing to have on the airplane because it really… 

AIDAN:

You know, just to jump in there for a second. The thing that I always remember when, and this is one of the best copywriting tips that I ever got, was when I'm writing a product description, if I end with “so that…” it tease me up perfectly to pull out that benefit. So for example, “noise canceling headphones that will block out noise so that you can enjoy the peace and quiet while you travel.” “Soft padded sections around the ear,” that's a feature, but you turn it into a benefit by saying “so that you don't get a sore head when you're wearing these things.” So just that those two words, “so that”, if you add that to the end of whatever you're describing, that always pulls out the benefits. So just a bit of a side note there. 

SEAN:

That's exactly kind of where I was going with that. That's what you want to start with. Before you write your product description, really understand the top three to five benefits that this item will offer a potential buyer. That's sort of where you want to start. Everything after that is almost just filler. People aren't going to sit there and read like 1000 words of the product description. You want to lead with the benefits of why somebody should buy this product right at the beginning. 

Why would you want to have a long product description then? You want to have it from a perspective of if you're ever trying to rank in Google or you want to advertise in Google or Microsoft, for example, they crawl your page. Honestly, too, when you're running Facebook ads or TikTok ads, I think there is some validity to the theory that those who have a better landing page experience, those who have more high quality content on their page, those who have users who click to your page and that users spend a lot of time on your page, that's going to help lower your CPM. It's going to help lower your advertising costs. Having a really well written description when you're running ads, I think is quite important because it's going to lower your costs over time. 

Now, from an actual buying perspective, though, I don't think having a thousand words, for example, in your product description actually does anything. I don't think the user cares. But that's why when you're crafting your description, you want to craft it in a way that leads with those three to five benefits, sort of at the beginning of your product description, so the potential buyer sees that, and then maybe below all that, you would have five, six, seven paragraphs or something that talks more about your product. Those paragraphs should have a bunch of keywords that can help you rank in Google and things like that. So might be a little bit of a long-winded answer there. The short of it is like you want to lead with the benefits and you want to have a few hundred extra words in there below that are going to help you with your ad costs. 

AIDAN:

If you think about the biggest ecommerce store in the world, Amazon, there's a reason why they do it this way. They've got bullets at the top. Scroll down a little bit further and you get into the description. I think the one time when a longer or more detailed description or perhaps product videos and things like that can start boosting conversions is when you start to raise the price. 

So if I'm buying something that's $30, it's an impulse buy, I read one benefit and I'll buy it. If I'm buying something that's $3,000, like let's say I'm buying an e-bike or something, then I may want to really get into the weeds of finding out exactly what that e-bike can do, all the specifications, all the gory details, because I'm spending multiple thousand dollars and it might not be an impulse decision. 

A couple more things here and we will wrap up. I am conscious of the time. One thing I want to say is that in the next episode of The Growth Booth, the second in the series with Sean here, we are going to be getting into some of the things that people get really excited about and could really move the needle. I'm talking about the types of conversion widgets and different bells and whistles that you can add to a store, or if it's a good store platform like Cartzy, it'll already have them built in and we'll talk more about those on the next episode. Make sure that you tune in and absolutely watch the next episode. 

In terms of images and videos, every product needs an image. Is there a time when you would also recommend that a product should have a video, Sean? 

SEAN:

I think videos are always good if you have them readily available. I think just from a perspective, I always think in the future. One of the biggest things we'll probably talk about that in the next call that you can make a lot of money off of is SEO and having your product pages ranked. If I'm trying to sell headphones and somebody goes to Google and types in “best noise cancelation headphones”, can I have my store pop up? Having videos on your page definitely helps with things like that. It definitely could put people over the edge too, showing your product in action and being demo-ed. 

That being said, if there is no video readily available, are you really going to invest the time and the money, quite frankly to either order the product to your house or do the video yourself? Or maybe you get somebody off of Fiverr or whatever to do a product video for you or you procure a customer to send you a product video on every single product on your store. Probably not. 

I would say with your winning products, the products that are actually making you sales, when I gave the analogy before of having 300 products on your store, but maybe only ten to 15 are winners. Those ten to 15, yes. I think there is some value in having product videos. I think they help too. When you go to advertising on Facebook, TikTok is only video. That's an advertising platform that's just been crushing it for me in the last few months. So yeah, on your winning products, I think video is definitely something that would add some value.

AIDAN:

Awesome. One last thing that I wanted to get your thoughts on was around the price. How do you show the price if you show a discount? Where and how do you show the price? And is there anything special that you can do to make that more effective? 

SEAN:

Yeah. So pricing, back in the day… I say back in the day, I've only been in ecommerce for like nine years. It's like 80 years in ecommerce talk, but even just as short as just a couple of years ago, you could do whatever you want. You could say these headphones “Now $99.99 from $699.99!” You could say stuff like that. And not that people would buy it, but advertising platforms and things like that, they didn't care. Now if you say stuff like that, you can actually get your account, your ad account shut down. You can't just have these outrageous fake discounts. 

If you are running a discount on your product, awesome. That's totally fine. Or if you are marketing it down, I would say anywhere up to like 20% or 30%, also fine. You just want to keep in mind you can't make outrageous claims. So if these headphones are $99.99, it's not outrageous to say I marked them down from $149.99, you know what I mean?

AIDAN:

You basically just can't scam people. You have to be like a decent human being. As we move forward in the world of the internet, we're moving further and further away from the wild, wild west where you can just do anything. It's good for people and you just have to I guess be aware…

SEAN

Discounts are fine. You just have to make sure they're real. You can't just make up these crazy-ass discounts you used to be able to do. You can't do that anymore. 

AIDAN:

It used to be kind of like the norm. It was like the standard operating procedure. Everyone did it. It was even on Amazon and all the big stores were like, “Oh yeah, this was $500, now $100.” I think people wised up so even doing that now wouldn't even help your conversions anyway. It's always better to just lead with the integrity and put a real discount if there's a real discount or perhaps to be able to create that real discount you will genuinely sell a product at a couple of hundred dollars on your store for one week a month, and then for three weeks a month it might be discounted or something, but do it in a way that's real so that if you’re ever put on the stand which would hopefully never happen, then you'll be able to say, “Yeah, that's a real discount.” 

SEAN:

If I can add to that, what I like to do now, almost all my products are in the US, so I like to utilize USA holidays and things like that. So you can always have an Easter sale, Memorial Day sale, July 4th sale. There's always an opportunity for a sale where you can do a real discount. 

AIDAN:

Yeah, absolutely. So look, we've been through a ton of things and we're still just scratching the surface, which is why we're going to have Sean back on another episode. For this episode though, you can head over to thegrowthbooth.com and find episode number five. You will see the show highlights. You'll be able to download the transcript, see other resources and get a lot of other bits and pieces there. Sean, thank you so much. We are excited to have you back in the next episode and we'll be able to dive into more.