#6: The Anatomy of an eCommerce Website, Part 2

This is the second in a two-part series that I've been doing with the founder of Cartzy, my business partner Sean Agnew, who knows more about e-commerce than pretty much anyone I know. 

So if you haven't seen the last episode yet, episode number five, make sure you go back and have a look at that. In episode number five, we spoke about things that you can do on your eCommerce store to help get the best out of it to really make sure you're optimizing conversions and so on and so forth. It was an absolute treasure trove of information. So you want to check that one out. 

Now in this episode here today - what I want to talk to Sean about - conversion elements that you can add to your store or things that are just nice to have on your eCommerce store. So we'll talk about things you can do on the back end, behind the scenes. We'll talk about the interesting sort of gizmos and so forth that you can put on the front end that can help with conversions. I think by the end of this, you should have a ton of value and ideas about how you can improve the conversions on your store. 

And as always, you'll be able to get notes, show highlights, transcriptions and all other kinds of other bits and pieces and resources at thegrowthbooth.com. Just head over there and find episode number six. 

AIDAN:

So Sean, with all that said, thank you so much for joining me here today. 

SEAN:

Yeah, thanks for having me again. 

AIDAN:

So, Sean right off the bat - what is one of the biggest bang-for-your buck things that you can add to or should be added to any kind of an e-commerce store to boost conversions? 

SEAN:

Great question. I think there are probably a few. So if I was gonna give you my top three, they would be in-cart upsell, okay. somebody adds an item to their cart, and usually nowadays, the best sort of converting carts will have like this slider cart come out. You guys have all seen this and you click the Add to Cart button and that slider comes out. In that slider, you'll see like an upsell right there. 

So let's say we keep the theme with these headphones. You buy the headphone that slides out now like maybe below the headphones, they say, “Would you like to add this fast-charging cable for $29.95? You get it now 50% off,” and many people will just sit there and be like, “Yeah, why not. I need a charging cable for this thing, It's only an extra 30 bucks. I'm already spending $100 on these headphones anyways,” so they click the button. Now what you've done is you've just increased your AOV, your average order value. If you're running ads, you haven't spent any extra dollars to get that extra sale. So right then it's a conversion booster. 

The next one would be also an upsell but it's a post-purchase upsell. What happens now is the individual has bought these headphones, and after they purchase the headphones, instead of going to a receipt page to show them, “Here's the item you bought, how much it costs and so on,” you offer them again, an opportunity to buy an item for an upsell. 

Now in my experience, you can sometimes see upwards of like 40 to 50% uptake on that offer, and what's cool about these is usually they're one click. So when somebody buys the item they're taken to now a one-time offer page all they need to do is click “Yes” to buy the item. They don't have to enter in their payment details again, they simply click the ‘Yes’ button and boom, they've now purchased another item to the store. 

So those two things right then and there are going to be critical for increasing your average order value. 

The next thing, the final thing in my top three list would be having an abandoned cart sequence. I think in psychology, it takes something like five to seven exposures usually to your business before somebody buys an item from you. So you're going to have a ton of abandoned carts. 

You're going to have people come to your store, they're going to look at these headphones, they're going to maybe get to the checkout and they add and don’t buy, they get busy, or I don't know, they're like, “Man, I'll buy it later when I get home,” or whatever their decision is, they don't buy it. You want to follow up with those individuals through what's called an abandoned cart email sequence. So you'll email them within two hours of them leaving your store again 24 hours later, again, 24 hours after that, and you have a really smart sequence, and if you do it properly, you might even be able to get the sale without even ever having to offer an additional discount, just simply reminding the user, “Hey, come back to the store, you left this in your cart.”

So those three things I think are super valuable, almost critical on your store to your store to boost your conversion. 

AIDAN:

So the thing that I love about all three of these items is if you're using paid traffic, you're spending money to get your visitors, by implementing these things, you're not spending another dime. It's not like you are scaling through adding more money; you are scaling through optimizing traffic that already exists. So not only do we make more sales, but your profit margin should increase as well. 

I think these are just complete no-brainers and, depending on what shopping platform you can use, the more powerful these features are, normally, the more different developers make you pay for the functionality. For some shopping platforms like Shopify, you might be able to add on apps that can cost hundreds of dollars a month. For others like Cartzy, which is our proprietary system, then we've got a lot of all of these things built-in there, out of the box just because, as Sean said,  we've identified these as being must-haves, mission criticals in any store. 

Now you mentioned abandoned cart emails. What other types of emails could someone program in to the backend to go out in an automated fashion?

SEAN:

Just to piggyback off your last point before I answer that question, the one thing about Cartzy that we pride ourselves on is we built a lot of these conversion boosters right into the store, so you don't have to pay the hundreds of dollars on apps on top of whatever you're paying. Something like Shopify – I love Shopify, but you can get your bill run up there, you know, sometimes $1,000+ by the time you add in all these apps.

AIDAN:

The last Shopify Store that I had was costing me $1,300 a month. I'm not going to keep beating this over the head, but it really can add up there, and I was fine paying that. I know you've got stores that were similar, Sean. When you're making a lot of money, it's fine to pay that but if you could have an out-of-the-box solution where you don't have to pay that, then even better.

SEAN:

Other than the abandoned cart sequence, which we have that built right into Cartzy, so you don't have to pay anything extra for that, having a thank-you email sequence is really good. I think that your previous customers are going to be your best buyers, right? Especially if you email them right after purchase. 

They've already bought something foreign from you, so a good thing to have, and you can set this up with third party email platforms, and we don't get this advanced in Cartzy, but if for example, somebody buys these headphones, it'd be really cool to have a targeted email sequence to the buyers of these headphones for like a fast charging cable or some sort of accessory or a case, because the case for these things is horrible. So maybe like a third-party case, something like that that's relevant to something they already purchased. 

It kind of almost works like a post-purchase upsell in the email sequence. I think those are very powerful. Having a newsletter, you can just simply stick in your footer a little email box for somebody enter in their email and they can be added to your list for you to just email them maybe just once or twice a week. It could just be something as simple as like a blog post “top five reasons to buy noise cancellation headsets” or “top five trends during Black Friday”, and then you have a blog post that shows like your five best products and things like that. I think both of those would be very powerful sequences to add to your list. 

AIDAN:

I think the more you tend to communicate with your customers or your visitors if you've got their email address or somewhere contacting them, the more money you make, there's a direct correlation there. It doesn't mean that you're making money off every single email. You might not be trying to sell something every single email, but if you've got a store that sells lots of products, then why not send out emails? 

You can tie them to different events throughout the year, different holiday seasons, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Halloween. There's always an excuse to be sending out an email and you can do it in a way that really is a value add and can be perceived in that way. 

Okay, we've spoken about abandoned carts, we've spoken about regular newsletters, email sequences. How about dropping a pixel and being able to retarget people in that way? 

SEAN:

Pixelation is very powerful. Not to keep plugging Cartzy, but one of the things I liked that we did there is we really made it simple to add your pixels on to our platform. So there's actually a script section inside of Cartzy, and you can add like your Facebook, Microsoft, Pinterest, Walmart Google, I think I got them all. Pretty much everyone, you can just drop a pixel - like snap your fingers easy peasy, and you can literally send data out to you know, six, seven, eight different ad platforms like that. 

Two of your highest ever ad campaigns are going to be retargeting and brand campaigns, so advertising, somebody goes to your store let's say Aidanstore.com, you always want to have an advertising campaign on something like Google or something. So when people go to Google Aidanstore.com, he comes up. 

That's going to be a very profitable ad campaign, but equally as profitable will be retargeting. Again, this just goes back into the science of it takes something like five to seven exposures to your business before somebody makes a purchase. Sure you will have impulse buyers who come to your store and they buy on the very first time, but many of your buyers will come after they've seen you four or five, six, seven times. Retargeting is always going to make you money, like almost always, I don't want to use the word always, but like 99 times out of 100, it’s going to make you money. 

Simply by just putting, like your Facebook or Google Pixel on your store, when you run an ad and you set up a retargeting ad, people have now already seen these noise cancellation headphones, and they may not purchase for a wide variety of reasons. Now they go home, they log on Facebook, they log on Instagram, whatever, sometimes even if you retarget in a way where they go to like CNN or Fox or whatever, they see your product there, they're reminded of it, and it's really inexpensive advertising as well because you're only targeting people that have seen the product in the past. These are hot potential buyers, and now they click on your product and they make the sale. 

I think it's another powerful way. If you're not even doing advertising at all for whatever reason I would imagine most people watching this podcast are or have done advertising accounts, you're definitely going to least want to set up just a $10, $20, $25 a day retargeting ad because it's going to be super powerful and then it's going to get you sales.

AIDAN:

I think one of the big misconceptions about retargeting is that anytime we stop talking about a pixel, people's alarm bells go off. “That's going to be really complicated. What's a pixel? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that?” It's really simple. It's just a simple piece of code, whatever shopping platform you're using, but particularly in Cartzy that you can add that in and it can be simple to then sort of communicate with the ad platforms. Don't worry about trying to understand exactly how this works. Just know that it does work. It's a conversion mechanism that you should look at leveraging because that works really, really well. 

SEAN:

And honestly, just to add on that point, even the ad itself could be just a simple image of your product and some sort of tagline that says, “Did you leave this behind? Here's an extra 10% off.” You can even go that far, but very, very simple. one line of code, image with a simple tag – done, easiest ad you’ll ever write. 

AIDAN:

Keep it simple and you will get results and then you will probably find out that hey, you know you can do a lot more but just get started with the most simple thing so that you can get some momentum there and you'll be able to make more sales. 

Now there are lots and lots of other sort of conversion mechanisms that I see on e-commerce stores. Some of them are coupons, other things like spinning wheels, you've got things like countdown timers. Let's talk about some of these things that you can add on to your store. I'd like to get your opinion about which ones you think are sort of the best if you like, the best bang- for-your-buck, and when to use them like we've discussed in the last episode. 

If you've got a dozen different conversion elements all happening at the same time, you have like a spinning wheel over here a coupon over here cannot over there, it's just going to be overwhelming and counterproductive. What are your thoughts on those types of conversion elements? 

SEAN:

Yeah, like I said in the beginning of this podcast, I think your top three bang-for-your-buck are going to be in-cart upsell, post-purchase upsell and your abandoned cart sequence, but a couple other ones that I really like, I really like the wheel app.  I think it gamifies your store and makes it fun. And for those who don't understand what I'm talking about, you've probably seen this: you go to a website and you're about to leave, you're about to click away from the website. The second you’re about to click that X, boom, a wheel slides out, says “Wait! Before you leave, would you like to spin for a discount?” and most people are like, “Oh, this is kind of fun.” 

So they press the button and it spins and spins and spins and little does the consumer know you can configure this wheel on the back end so they never win the $200 cash prize or whatever, but it says it on the wheel. By the wheel spins and you configure it so the user gets a discount and that can keep a lot of people on your store. It's fun, it's not intrusive. So I really like… 

AIDAN:

It's kind of a no brainer, because it's going to appear when people are about to leave anyway, you can configure these things and lots of ways. It could be the cursor is about to leave or if they're on a mobile device, when they scroll down a certain amount, things can happen, but yeah, seems like a no brainer. 

SEAN:

I wouldn't say on mobile, you want to test it because I've honestly tested in the past and I've seen it actually decrease conversions because it's weird. It's supposed to be an exit intent app. On the desktop, it's great because somebody's moving their mouse to the X button and then the second it gets there it slides out so it's not ever intruding them on the purchasing process. But sometimes on the mobile just the way they scroll, they could be scrolling and about to press like a Buy Now button and this app just slides in and they’re like, they get all annoyed. You want to test, so maybe try it on a product with like 100 clicks without it and 100 clicks with it and see if it works for you. Everybody's going to be different, but generally speaking, I like that app a lot. 

There's another app I like. Amazon has this on their store as well. It's not a game part upsell but it's like a recommended products app. Okay, again, just keep using these headphones. Imagine this is the product page and then underneath the image you could say like “people who purchased this product also bought this” or “similarly viewed products” or something like that. I think you have like your lightning charger, your case or whatever. 

You have like two or three products listed right below it, again, just giving that psychology to the potential buyer that you know “Hey, I want to buy these but for an extra 20 bucks, I could get this lightning cable.” It just increases your chances of getting an extra sale without spending any advertising dollars on it. 

AIDAN:

It increases the average order value and also increases profits, and anytime I see Amazon doing anything like that I'm like these guys do it a gazillion times, so it must work, and then when we test it, sure enough, you know, it does work. 

What about little pop-ups and things that say “Someone in Minnesota just purchased this”? What's your take on that kind of conversion element? 

SEAN:

Yeah, I think when that came out, the company's name now slipping my mind, I think when that first came out that was very popular. I don't think it's as powerful as it used to be because I think everybody sort of jumped on board and started doing it. The same way like I was saying in the last podcast with discounts, everybody was saying “These headphones are $500. Now they're $100.”  

I think it's just a little overplayed if I was going to cost money and I hada handful of apps to choose from, I think that would definitely be one that I would not choose. That goes with a countdown timer too. The countdown timer, you got to be careful. Is it a real countdown timer? Is your sale actually ending? Don't have fake countdown timers on your website, because again, that's a good recipe to have like an ad platform shut you down. 

So again, I think you have to think from a customer standpoint, like what do customers believe nowadays? Customers are wise to these countdown timers and pop ups and things like that. I think they're kind of gimmicky. I think if something looks gimmicky to you, it's probably gimmicky to your customer and you probably want to avoid it. 

AIDAN:

Yeah, also you have to look at building an e-commerce store through a longer term lens where you're thinking, “Oh, how can I make the most money today?” because you're building a real business. You don't want to be that guy who's scamming people into spending a bit of extra money because you can have people spend extra money just by using best practice ecommerce strategies. 

In fact, talking about scarcity and things like that in an e-commerce shopping cart, the one that I prefer over a countdown timer is that there are a number of items that are left because if you're selling physical products, then there is a limited supply and sales could also be limited. 

Like if it's a Black Friday sale then yeah, sure, go crazy. Put your Black Friday timer on. It's real. But in just general instances, an average Tuesday instead of having downtime, I would much prefer to have “Hurry four items left in stock” and depending on the way that you've got your store set up that could be based on the inventory that you've actually got available. So it's a real deal. Legit. That's how many items you've got. 

As an ecommerce store owner, you do have the opportunity, if you want or the possibility to put in whatever stock quantities you want. You can say that you've got four left when in reality you might have 4 programmed into your store but in reality, you've got 400 more at the supplier, and it's up to you whether or not you want to do that. I don’t think you really need to do that for the most part because normally you will have items that are running low on inventory anyway and you can sort of boost them up. Just a couple of my thoughts there on the scarcity play. 

What about chat widgets, communication channels that can pop up, those types of things on an e-commerce store? 

SEAN:

Yeah, chatbots are good. I don't think that they're going to add value to your store in the very beginning and it's going to cost you a lot of time. Well first of all, you can obviously program your chat bots with answers and then if the answer is not there, you get it out, or the better way to do it is actually have somebody in the live chat. 

You can actually pay somebody and you can find virtual assistants to do this for pennies on the dollar. I mean you can get a virtual assistant in the Philippines for a few hundred bucks a month to do this. So again, I think this strategy works better at scale even but if you actually had somebody live to actually answer, if somebody says, “I'm interested in these headphones. Do you know how long does it take to charge them?” versus them having to go find it in the frequently asked questions, if you have somebody live that says “Hey, it takes 30 minutes to charge these headphones and they stay charged for 72 hours,” or whatever, that's going to increase your chances of getting a sale. 

If you have a chatbot that has that ability, I think it's extremely powerful. I still think it's powerful if you have a chatbot that can have those questions readily available, but if you actually think about the amount of time and effort it's going to take to program your chat bots, and that's smart enough to answer questions about all the products on your store, you're literally going to have to program hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of questions into that thing to make it powerful enough to actually be of any value. 

I've tested it in the past where I've had an actual live agent. They work really well, but you have to have the budget for that because you're going to have to have a few employees on. They definitely work for sure. They're great. 

AIDAN

That’s one of those things when your business grows and you're sending enough traffic, you're going to get enough engagement and it's going to absolutely just be a no brainer to have someone working on something like that. 

The last thing that I really wanted to get your take on today was split-testing, managing your analytics and your stats and all that. It's not always a conversion booster just looking at your stats, but I think it's good to know what people are doing on your website, bounce rates, so on and so forth. 

Specifically with split testing, you don't want to be split testing a product that gets very little traffic, that wouldn't make any sense. But if you've got a home run product that's doing $10,000, $100,000 a month, at that point, I think it does make sense to split test. What are the first couple of things that you would split test? 

SEAN:

The first thing I like to split test is increasing my price. Say these headphones and I'm selling them for $100. I'm going to say the conversion rate on my stores is like 4%, which is fantastic, right? Anything of 2% is sort of average conversion rate on a product. Let's say I'm getting 4%, wonderful. I'm crushing it. The next thing I want to do is increase my price to $110 and then $120 and then so on and increase my price as far as I can push it to that point where my conversion rate starts to drop. 

You know what I mean? I might go all the way up to $150 and now I'm only getting like a 3.2% conversion rate. Then I back it down to like $130 and I'm like 3.9%. I'm like “Okay, well $130 is kind of my upper limit how much I can sell this product for.” I think that's the most important thing you can split test because if you're making good money at $100, can I make money at $120? $130? $150 and so on? 

AIDAN:

Those increases are all increases to the bottom line at that point, just the cream on top.

SEAN:

All things being equal, I don't change anything but the price. This is another point I want to make too. You only one ever want to test one thing at a time. I don't want to change my price, change my headline, change my image, change the button color, change five different things. I don't know what's driving the change. I might increase my price and then change my button color and I might just tank in conversions. But was it the price increase, or was it because I changed my button color from green to red, right? Leave everything alone and just change your price. 

From there I would probably start to test different products in the upsell process. The lightning cable that I was suggesting as an example, I might get like a 20% uptake, but then I suggest a case and that gets taken up 30% of the time. Well now I know that my upsell product, the case is better. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to split test things that are going to increase my average order value. Those are going to be the most important thing to test, all things being equal. 

Now once I've tested price points and upsells and all of those things that are going to increase my average order value, I'm going to go to conversion booster testing, maybe testing my headline, changing the words a little bit, maybe testing my image, split testing image one versus image B, definitely testing my button colors and my button text, those sort of secondary conversion boosters, see if I can get my conversion rate up from 4% to maybe 4.5% by changing some of those small different things.

Those would be the things I would start off with, like just very simplified to two things. Start with the things that are going to increase your average order value, and then move on to sort of your secondary on-page button/headline image type of things. That's what I would do split testing, and again to your point, I would only do this on my winning products. I’m not going to do this on every single product. 

AIDAN:

If you're using a good store design, which hopefully you'll get out of the box with regard to whatever platform you're using, hopefully you'll have something that's good out-of-the-box, then that a lot of the split testing has been done. For example, with different store designs that we use and that we've got built into Cartzy, we've done testing on like millions and millions of visitors to get to that point. 

I think a problem that a lot of people have when they're using other store platforms, Shopify is an example of a great platform, but there are thousands of different themes that you can use. If you're just choosing the prettiest theme, that's not necessarily going to be the one that converts the most. So all of these other elements like the positioning, the size of the font, the layout and so forth, you should ideally start using an e-commerce platform where that heavy lifting has been figured out for you but you can still get great bang for your buck through testing things as Sean said, like price as a starting point. 

If you are going to be testing multiple things and I would only recommend us to an absolute and power seller, then I would say check out Visual Website Optimizer, vwo.com. We've used that a lot in the past when we've done testing, and that will actually allow you to do what's called multivariate testing, where you can test four or five things at the same time.

Again, word of warning, don't go down that path unless you know what you're doing. You can apply the 80/20 rule to get the most bang for your buck just by making simple changes. Start with the price, and there's actually a formula where you can look at and say “Okay, I'm raising my price. I'm raising my price,” and maybe the conversions are coming down a little bit, but even with a lower conversion rate, because you're raising your price, you're still making more money and you can accept that conversion starts to drop. Keep that in mind. 

If you increase your price by 20% and conversion rate drops by 10%, do the math. That might still mean that you're better off versus when you started.

Sean, really appreciative of your time here. Thank you so much for just coming on here and doing a brain dump. The past two episodes have been amazing. To anyone who hasn't seen the last episode, head over to thegrowthbooth.com and check out episode number five. 

There's lots, lots more of this kind of discussion about e-commerce stores and I think everyone can use this to earn more from the e-commerce stores in 2022.