Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. This podcast is dedicated to rapid growth in eCommerce. Our guest has been on the podcast prior. If you want to check it out on our website, it’s Episode 216. It’s been a while and I’m looking forward to speaking with him. Chase Clymer is the Co-founder of Electric Eye where he and his team create Shopify-powered sales machines from strategic design and development decisions. He’s also the host of Honest Ecommerce, a very good podcast, and a weekly podcast where he provides online store owners with honest and actionable advice to increase the sales and grow their businesses. It’s been a while, my friend. Chase, welcome to the podcast.

I’m excited to be here. I’m going to even go and check out our old episode to see if I am any better at talking.

There’s a good comparison there to see how far you’ve come. Well done with the podcast, I’ve listened to it a few times. Sometimes you go to conferences and you are the podcaster at conference, big conferences. Good stuff. What have we missed? It’s been over five years. How are you?

I’m doing well. The podcast, I don’t know how we’ve done it, but we put out at least an episode a week for the last forever. We missed one along the way. We’ve done that and we’ve also started doing a lot of bonus episodes. The podcast itself though, these days, the main feed is me interviewing brand founders and asking them exactly how they did it.

I’m talking to multimillion dollar brands and they’re telling me where the idea came from, how they validated it, how they found their first customers, how they scaled it, and what the heck’s going on. It’s conversational and fun. I do believe I’ve listened to some of the first dozen episodes of the podcast and compared to now, you can get better at something you’re bad at. I believe we put out some pretty cool content in that regard.

Go check it out. Type out Honest Ecommerce on your favorite podcasting app. Let’s jump right in. Do you want to give people a little bit of your backstory so people have some context? For those people who are lazy and who don’t want to necessarily check out the previous episode, introduce yourself. You’re the Co-Founder of Electric Eye, a fantastic CRO and web experience agency. Who is Chase? 

I am earning all of my gray hair. Shawn and I, my business partner, we’ve been running Electric Eye for over eight years now. We’ve done everything under the sun at the agency. As agencies grow, they learn what they like to do. We narrowed our focus into the front-end of Shopify themes. We’re doing a lot of work on Shopify themes, optimizing them, and migrating people from poopy platforms to Shopify.

Holler at me if you hate being on Magento, we can help you get over to the truth over there on Shopify. We do a lot of design projects and also ongoing CRO stuff. It’s all front-end in the theme stuff. That’s what we’re up to down at the agency. Years ago is when I started doing the podcast. These days, it’s a lot of helping people make their website better and it’s a lot of fun and I enjoy my job. That’s what I’m up to.

Do you focus on any vertical or industry with the designs and themes or are you cross-industry?

It seems we have a lot of experience in apparel, lifestyle, goods, and fashion accessories. We’ve gotten into supplements a lot. For subscription, we got a lot of stuff in there. We’ve dabbled in some digital stuff. We’re not necessarily super specific to any specific vertical because we get bored and it’s more like what excites us and can we help somebody?

In most recent times, what’s been your most exciting project from a web experience standpoint?

We’re bidding on a project with a famous producer to help them build out a new digital-download-type product for audio plugins. That one is exciting from my history and background of being a musician. A lot of what we’ve done is a lot of upgrades to 2.0 and within those processes, adding cool features and functionalities that are going to raise their average order value or raise their conversion rate. We’ve done a few migrations from some interesting platforms to Shopify.

I can remember a WooCommerce one right off the top of my head. Squarespace ones are pretty straightforward. It’s funny how many merchants start on Squarespace and realize how limiting that platform is and need to move over. It’s around the million-dollar mark, they’re like, “Squarespace sucks.” I’m like, “Yeah.” One of the common themes with people that reach out to us is they’re like, “We’ve built something cool.” I’m like, “You have. This is awesome business you got here.” They’re like, “What do we do now? How do we make this better? How do we make the experience better?” I didn’t have an answer for that years ago when we first spoke, probably.

These days, we do have a better answer for that and we walk them through what we call our Shopify diagnostic. What I find with merchants is they’re passionate about their product or the problem that product solves. They’re not nerds. They don’t understand the customer journey. They don’t understand how to get rid of blockers in the buying process. Conversion rate optimization is just not their bag. They’re like, “I know how to talk to customers and make a cool product.” We come in and we do the more fun-to-us and nerdy stuff on helping them raise that average order value and conversion rate or revenue per visitor is the big one.

You’re still in the design phase and then you’re in the optimization phase also. You offer both services if I’m getting you right. 

Design is a funny word, which means many things to many different people. On the front end of a store, that is a design and there are choices made within the design that impact the performance of your store, not necessarily from a page speed perspective but from helping the customer put the product in their cart faster or whatnot. We can get into the weeds on what is conversion rate optimization and what’s the thought process behind all that stuff. All of it goes back to design and understanding how to make it easier for your customers to answer their own questions and buy the thing they want.

I’ve been meaning to ask you this question, Is Electric Eye based on the Judas Priest album?

Absolutely. Everyone google Judas Priest Electric Eye and there’s a YouTube video from them playing some huge festival and the drum risers is twelve feet tall, it’s hilarious.

Let’s jump right into the meat of this. We’re talking about customer journeys. What are the first principles? I always like to get into the fundamental principles of any disciplined readers should be aware of when they are crafting their customer journey, and I’m talking about the front-end customer journey because that’s where you guys specialize in. Do you have any tenets or rules that are immutable?

The Shopify diagnostic, we divide it up into three things. The first thing would be the UX, the user experience store. We’re looking specifically at pages that are most impactful in that customer journey. The first page is going to be the home page and that one’s a little more generic because within the homepage, we’re specifically looking at the navigation of this website like their menus, the linking, and all that stuff.

We’re looking at the footer and we’re looking at the more generalized overarching elements and choices made within how this website works and the branding. Here’s a big thing that we find on these websites, you’ll land on a new prospect website. This is why I love getting new prospect forms on my email because usually, the first time I’ve ever seen this website, I click on it and I look.

If you can’t understand what they are selling, either on desktop or on mobile, and what is the product, a lot of people have some fancy copy and a picture that doesn’t make sense and you’re, “Are they selling shoes or are they selling bags? I can’t figure out what they’re selling here.” That right there is a big no-no. If you’re spending $10,000 or $100,000 a month on ads to bring new people to your website and when they land on your site, they can’t immediately understand, “They’re selling shoes,” that’s a big oversight there.

Customer journey, back to what we were talking about. The pages that we look at for defined things or opportunities as we call them would be the homepage and then the collection page, the product page, cart or side cart depending on how their store is built out, and then into checkout. Those are the most important pages because those are closest to the money. You could argue there are some other pages that matter and maybe I’ll give you an example of that but those are going to be where the meat and potatoes of optimization can happen.

Your points on the homepage chimes in well with Donald Miller who wrote the book Building a StoryBrand. He was talking about calories and how we as humans, for survival, have always liked to preserve our calories. If you’re trying to make a proposition to us and we’re burning too many brain calories trying to figure out what it is, you’ve lost the plot. Keep it simple. Let people know exactly what you do the moment they get on your homepage. It’s good points, which I chime in well with.

My other point was more around the four key types of pages merchants should be paying attention to like the homepage, as you alluded to, collection, the PDP, product description page on the checkout, and the cart to checkout experience. Where do you focus your attention from a platform standpoint? Is it mobile, tablets, or desktop? Given the 80/20 rule, where should merchants start this introspection, more or less, in their experience?

If you have limited resources, be it time, budget, or whatever to invest in this, you want to get as close to the money as possible, which means probably is going to be on your PDP of your most popular product or your most popular bundle, which you should know what that is. You then need to do it on the most popular view of that page. What I mean by that is there’s mobile versus desktop, it’s probably going to be mobile but it’s easy to check that stuff in the backend of analytics.

One thing I like to point out when we’re doing our Shopify diagnostic is you can go to conversions by device, an easy view to pull up in Shopify, and you can see the delta between sessions. In settings, go to sessions by device and then you can add conversion rate. You can see, “This store, in general, is converting at 2.5% on desktop but only 1.75% on mobile.”

There’s always a delta between desktop and mobile but if you’re getting ten times more traffic on mobile, there’s a huge gap there to close and all of that is profit that you’re leaving on the table. To your question, what would I look at is I would probably look at the mobile experience on the most popular product page to find opportunities.

Those are good points with regards to the mobile experience, optimizing for that first and then getting into the other aspects of the website. With the real estate on a mobile device, it’s quite limited. What customer behaviors are you seeing on the homepage? Given the fact that this is a customer journey, how are you seeing at scale customers behaving on a homepage? What do they do and how do merchants prepare on the other end to meet those expectations?

The homepage design is more important to the founder of a brand than anyone else. I shit you not, they’re not scrolling down that page. They’re clicking on your menu and going somewhere else. Also, it’s 2024. If you have a slideshow in your homepage hero, that’s wasted effort and probably wasted performance. They’re seeing that first thing and they’re going somewhere else. By the way, everything I’m saying take with a grain of salt because you should test everything. Because some guy on a podcast says it, it doesn’t mean it’s true. Your business is unique.

You can easily install a heat mapping software and see how far down the page someone is scrolling. If most people are only getting 25% down the page, the rest of that page arguably is useless. Maybe there’s super crucial information 3/4 of the way down the page that you need to get up into that top 25% so people see it and it helps resolve any fear, uncertainty, or doubt they have about your product or solution. I lost myself in your question. Did I answer it for you?

You did. You also talked about the most popular PDP, product description page. What behaviors are you seeing there? How are customers scrutinizing product description pages in order for you to squeeze that conversion or squeeze as many conversions as possible?

I alluded to fears, uncertainties, and doubts, that’s why people aren’t buying from you. Here are some more global things. If your website looks like trash, the fear there is, “This isn’t a legit company,” or the product isn’t going to be as good as they say. There is this underlying power of design. Why people spend thousands of dollars on iPhones is because the design is great. You could argue that it’s the same product as Samsung but that’s the power of design and it’s the perceived value behind it.

If you have a bad looking website, that’s probably leaving some stuff on the table. To get a little nitty gritty, some fears that people have about buying stuff would be like, “Will I get this in time?” If it’s a time related product, here’s an example. You sell sunscreen and the customer might be going on vacation, they probably want to know how fast that can be shipped to them. It’s February 13th, 2024 and I’m going on vacation in one week, it’s like, “A free two-day shipping. Guaranteed delivery by the 18th.” I’d be like, “I’m buying this right now because that solves my fear. I’m going to get this product.”

Another thing to think about is some products, especially here in America, people would love made-in-America stuff. If you have a made-in-America product and your demo would respond to that type of stuff, don’t hide that, be proud of it, and put it on the PDP. Put it in a navigational banner or something like that.

On the product page, you need social proof, and you need other people talking that this thing solved the problem that they need to solve. You mine your reviews to find people talking about the problems this solves in their own language because that language will resonate with other customers. You get those social proofs like video unboxing stuff or testimonials, all of that stuff helps resolve these fears, uncertainties, and doubts about the product solving their problem. Other things would be like return policies and I already talked about shipping. That should probably arm any reader that hasn’t done any CRO on their product page with a lot to do.

Those feelings you mentioned are very visceral in nature. It’s down to what drives us as humans. FOD drives us. Whether it’s in politics, trade, raising our children, or doing a new thing, we’re always scared but we need to lean into that fear. If your website helps them lean into that fear or it eliminates that fear on time and on certainty and receiving it and doubt if we’re legit, that principle just sinks in quite deeply in everything. That’s how you mentioned the return policy and the expectations that they’re going to receive it at a specific time, particularly with the sunscreen example, which I found quite good. Good stuff there.

You mentioned pathways in Google Analytics for diagnosing problems with platforms, whether it’s mobile versus desktop and seeing if there are any conversion rate discrepancies and seeing where to start your fixes from. With that in mind, I’m also seeing merchants removing Google Analytics and Google products from their websites and seeing site speed performance increases. They’re saying, “I need to see my customer journey metrics on Shopify,” and they get the job done. Analysis in what you do is important. Are there any other analytic tools outside of Google Analytics that merchants can use?

I know the question you want me to answer and it’s what the readers want. They want me to talk about the tech stack that we use. They’re nerds. They want to know specific things. I get it. I have a podcast too and those are the things people want to hear. We’re using Intelligems. For A/B testing, Intelligems is awesome. We’re using that for all of our clients that want to do split testing. It gives you a lot of analytics. It gives you the statistical significance for wins when you’re doing split testing. That’s great.

Do you know what we’re not using? We’re not using Google Analytics at all. We don’t tell our clients to get rid of it, I feel like that’s a big choice that certain brands can do at certain levels. We don’t do any marketing or advertising either but our efforts definitely play into that. If that’s something that someone’s leaning into, I got to shout out my boys here from Columbus, Ohio, Triple Whale is usually what we’re recommending to people. Maxx, his brother, went to high school with my business partner. It’s a small Columbus, Ohio group of eCommerce nerds around here. There are some other great solutions out there for both of those things. Those are our preferred solutions to your questions on analytics around CRO.

I got to say, Shopify is lackluster but it gives you enough to do what you need. For a six-figure merchant, it’s more than enough. For a seven-figure merchant, it’s more than enough probably. Eight and nine, you can afford some more customized business intelligence solutions that are specific to your profitability from tip to tail. You’re looking beyond just your front-end elements. You’re looking into sourcing and per-level product stuff.

I didn’t realize that Triple Whale was in Connecticut. Let’s jump into product pages. You’ve already spoken to the FOD on product pages. Are there any other key points in the customer journey in regards to product pages readers should be aware of?

This goes hand in hand with product page because it’s about the product. It goes back to there are three driving factors behind your store as far as how you’re making your money.There’s your conversion rate and your sessions. Basically, the marketing advertising job is to get eyeballs to your site. There’s your average order value and that goes back to your offer. You can’t manipulate your offer without thinking about your product.

This is where things get more interesting and creative and there isn’t a one size fits all solution but you can increase your conversion rate by having a better offer. You can also increase your average order value by having a better offer. This all comes down to what is your product? Where is the price point of your product? What type of product is it? Is it more luxury or more commodity? Let’s go to the commodity angle.

You’ve got a CPG brand, food or something like that, something that’s consumable, you can build an offer that’s like buy more and save more and then you should play around on your product page of testing those solutions of, “What is the default amount that we’re presenting to customers on this page? How do we present these savings to the customer? What resonates with them more?” Is it money off is the savings or free product is what resonates?

By the way, free product usually resonates better than money off sometimes. Split test it. There’s a lot of stuff to test there. Let’s say it’s bags of chips, which are an interesting product to sell online but you don’t just want to send one bag of chips because it’s like a $4 item, that AOV. You’re going to pay more on shipping than to get that thing there. You’re probably bundling this thing up into a case. You’re probably going to have a half a case or a full case and you give them some awesome savings in the full case.

Also, into something like that that’s consumable, I would say this goes more towards revenue optimization for lifetime value. If you don’t have subscriptions set up, you’re leaving money on the table. There are going to be some customers that will let you send them chips every month. There’s a lot of optimizations around how much products someone is receiving in a given time if they can get more of that product faster.

On the flip side though, if you’re talking about something that is not a commodity, more of the product is a good idea. If I’m buying a couch online, I don’t need more than one couch, more than likely. In that angle, you got to think about, “How can I drive up the perceived value?” A good example of this is I’m going to use mattresses. For the longest time, one of the big mattress brands was Purple. They were famous for never discounting. What they would do with their sales is they would throw in these luxury sheet sets if you bought the product. It was a value add and they weren’t discounting but that made me feel like I was getting the deal so that incentivized me to buy.

All of this conversation is around manipulating the offer to increase the average order value of the site or increase conversions of the site. That’s a 200 level CRO. 100 level is manipulating what’s on the page and 200 is more getting into the strategy and psychology around the offer. That’s where you can make a lot of money.

I always think offer stacks. When you stack the offers up, think about it like a hamburger or something, it’s stacked up. It’s super interesting. I like the dichotomy you painted here from commodities and luxuries and then also LTV optimizing for lifetime revenue versus wanting to make all the money upfront because the next time they’re going to come would be maybe ten years from now.  

With the cut to checkout experience, what are you seeing work, particularly on mobile devices given the fact that Shopify is a bit rigid in that bit of the experience? I know that there is some flexibility with the checkout GS or library. I’d love for you to just shed light on transitioning converted, more or less, added-to-cart segments towards checking out and eventually purchasing as quickly as possible. Does Shop Pay have anything to do with it? 

This is a great question to ask as a follow up to what we talked about because we’re talking about offers. You have a customer that puts something in their cart, now they are more likely to put more stuff in their cart. That is a fact and that is not an opinion. There’s a bunch of data out there to back up what I just said. You have this customer that has something in their cart and one of the more common things we find that are overlooked is they are not doing any upsells or cross sells after the fact.

I feel a lot of founders don’t want to be salesy or pushy and it’s like, “Take it back.” Imagine if you’re standing in a bodega selling your product to a customer and you know they put product X in their cart and product Y goes perfect for them and they need it. In that moment, if you present that extra offer to that customer, they’re not going to be mad but they’re going to be happy because you’re helping them.

If you take that mindset and put it into your store and you want to present good offers and put more things in a cart that are going to help them with their problem,thecustomers are happy to buy but they don’t like to be sold. It needs to match the experience of the site, the offers need to make sense, and a lot of merchants just aren’t doing any upsells. Every month, when we’re onboarding a new client, this is not something they’ve ever looked at.

The best place to put it would be before checkout in your side cart. It has to make sense for your product and your offer and what’s in the cart. Shopify has some cool out-of-the-box features of their APIs that you can use to help power some of these things. There are some awesome apps out there in the ecosystem that also help you do this stuff.

Going back to the commodity example, if I put one bag of chips in my cart and I go to checkout and it’s like, “Add two bags of chips for the price of one more.” If that offer upsell isn’t in the side cart before I go to checkout, I’m leaving money on the table. It’s like, “I’m already going to do it. That’s a pretty good deal.” You’re going to see a good redemption rate and that’s free money.

Another place that is free money is honestly post purchase. They have already completed the purchase and you just ask them if they want to add more to their cart. They’ve already given you the money. There’s no way they’re going to cancel that because you present them with another offer. That is a place that is often overlooked. These days, depending if you’re on plus or not, etc., you can actually present these offers within checkout.

All of that plays into the average order value gamification of these strategies. It’s less about conversion rate but raising your average order value directly increases your return on ad spendif that’s a metric that you care about or your marketing team cares about. I had another thing I wanted to say, which is Shopify has released a one-page checkout versus the multi-page checkout that they had. We’re yet to see a big report where that mattered. Shopify’s checkout, everyone was used to it.

That is the thing about when people get used to how things work. There is a point where it doesn’t matter anymore. To that, maybe it’s a good transition to talk about you need to be testing for testing’s sake because not every test is a winner. Some tests will lose you money and most tests won’t do anything. It won’t make you or break you any money. There’ll be that one test out of every 5 or 10 tests that truly impact these KPIs that we’re talking about and that’s what makes it worthwhile.

I like that. It’s a mindset thing. Environments in which you’re punished for mistakes, you would not want to experiment. There’s going to be a sanction there. If the culture, no matter how small or big you are, encourages experimentation, by all means, keep what Chase is doing and love those failures. Eventually, you find those winners that make the impact. Chase, thanks for that.

One point I wanted to ask is conversion rates. Typically, you find industry benchmarks that talk about conversion rates being 3%. Typically, eCommerce conversion rates are 3% but that’s very nuanced. How would you view conversion rates? It’s certainly not an apple-for-apple comparison depending on the businesses. What’s your take on an expected conversion rate? 

Don’t compare yourself to anybody else. Conversion rate would be like going to your gym and asking what is the average bench press of a male my age and they’re going to give you something maybe higher than what you have. Are you immediately going to be able to get there? Absolutely not. You have to put in work to figure out how to improve yourself to what that industry standard is.

What these benchmarks can do is help you identify, “Is there opportunity to improve this KPI with my business?” Maybe but it doesn’t matter because your starting point is your starting point and that’s all you need to worry about. You’re going to start at whatever your number is and iteratively improve from there. There are no magic bullets out here. You start where you start. I do use these benchmarks when I’m going through these diagnostics with people and I’m like, “This seems low for these reasons.”

I’ve been in the game for so long. I’ve had clients with similar products at similar price points and they were more like this. I feel like there’s opportunity there because of that reason. Also, here are a laundry list of things that we know are wrong with the website that might be impacting this KPI being lower than what the benchmark is. Comparing yourself to a benchmark is not a fruitful use of your time. It’s like, “Now, get started on improving it.”

I agree. What about adding a wide dimension on price points? In the past, let’s say the average order value was $125 on a website. This is a hypothetical scenario. Your team was able to maximize through up sales, cross sales, price increases, and quantity bundles. You managed to increase it to $190 so $130 to one $190. The initial $120 conversion rate was 3%.

Now, the average order value is $190 to $200 mark. You’re seeing conversion rates not being 3% and they dip to 2.5%, 2%, or something like that. As you tweak things, up cells and cross cells, does that affect conversion rates all in all? I’d like to understand that relationship between AOV and conversion rates. Are they correlated? Is there any causation there? Are they two separate metrics we should be optimizing for regardless?

That’s a great question. Are they correlated? Let’s start there. All of these numbers are correlated and they all are interrelated because none of them exist in a bubble. Here’s a quick example. I can double your conversion rate on any website out there with this one simple trick. Cut your average price in half and that will double your conversion rate. Now, is that going to help sales? No, you’re probably going to go out of business. You can increase your conversion rate by steeply discounting.

There are a lot of factors out there that can increase your conversion rate. One that I like to talk about sometimes to people is like Acts of God, basically. Kanye West wore your brand’s t-shirt,awesome. There’s no way you could have planned for that. You’re going to sell out of stock. There’s also no way to have that happen again. That’s a strike of lightning. I would say that maybe even the Shark Tank effect is something like that as well.

Obviously, you can work towards it and get on Shark Tank but sustainable growth from that is something that’s harder to capitalize on. I would say you got to go back to still doing the basics after a while in increasing these things. To back up to your question, If AOV goes up and conversion rate goes down, what does that do? There’s a simple formula and it’s just multiply them together with your sessions and you can see what the delta is and what the winner is.

Some brands, for cashflow reasons, want more money upfront to be able to reinvest back in inventory and customer growth. Other brands would prefer to convert more customers because they understand their lifetime value is higher so they’re okay at the beginning to make less money. All of these definitely play in with your marketing and advertising efforts. Retargeting is always going to be good but top of the funnel, net new customer acquisition strategies, that’s where you’re going to see a lower conversion rate because people aren’t as familiar with your brand.

If you double your advertising spend on a winning campaign, you’re going to see your conversion rate drop because there’s a lot more people that are net new to the business. You could argue that’s going to grow the business over time when you start retargeting those people and it’s going to be net positive at the end. The game here is there isn’t one right solution to do all this. It all matters to your business, your margin, and your risk profile as an entrepreneur. There are a lot of ways to do it.

Terrific answer. When you mentioned the fact that you can double confessions by reducing price, if you were to reverse that where you increase price, it would reduce conversions with that example. If we keep traffic the same, it holds true given what you said about having price.

Something ancillary is Intelligems lets you do price point testing on their app. Not only with your products price points but they’ll let you do shipping threshold tests and they’ll also let you do custom bundle testing. This whole level of pricing testing is super interesting and Intelligems empowers you to do it if you’re on a Shopify store. I’m a big fan of the product.

A few years ago, I wrote about the next frontier being pricing testing in real time and it’s great to have that feature in Intelligems. Chase, you’ve spoken a lot. One of the points I wanted to make is what’s your preferred payment gateway?

Because I’m a Shopify boy and that’s all we do all day long, Shopify Payments makes everything a lot easier because everything should be natively integrated with it. I understand there are reasons why you can’t use that gateway in certain scenarios.

What your second be? 

We don’t even have one. That’s a funny question because when people reach out to us, they’re building a business in maybe a vice category Shopify Payments. If anyone doesn’t know Shopify Payments is white labeled Stripe so it’s against Stripe’s terms of services and it’s against Shopify terms of services for Shop Pay. If they’re building something in CBD or even supplements and stuff like that, you can’t use Shopify Payments.

If they’re coming to us and they want to help building a net new business or net new store, one of the first questions we ask is, “Do you have a payment gateway yet? Do you have a payment provider figured out?” If they don’t, it’s a red flag. They haven’t even investigated this far enough to realize that these types of products are banned by the platform of choice that they’re going after. It depends on how they respond to that information. If they go out and get a payment gateway and come back, that’s all good. I’ve had some people argue with me about this and it was an interesting conversation.

It’s just so smooth. When I shop as a consumer, it’s not like I’m on the lookout for the Shop Pay icon in any way. It’s pleasing to see the fact that I get a mobile notification in the same card that’s on file gets charged so it’s like a PayPal of sorts to me. It speeds up the checkout experience. You did mention something about post purchase upsells or cross sells post purchase.

In the world of information marketing, when you’ve provided your information product marketing, when you provide your credit card details at checkout and this thing happens, you don’t need to provide it again. It’s like a confirm button that charges your card. Are there any solutions similar to that in Shopify? Is it achievable with Shop Pay? What’s the post purchase experience with Shop Pay or in Shopify would you recommend?

There’s a bunch of them out there that do exactly what you’re talking about. You’re talking about Russell Brunson’s click-funnel-style-upsell-tripwire stuff. All that exists in Shopify these days. Two that we use a lot would be Rebuy or AfterSell. Also, Checkout Blocks do some interesting stuff. Not sponsored by any of those people but they will allow you on that post purchase side. To your direct question, you do not have to re-enter your credit card information. It’s going to modify the original order or create a separate order using the same credit card information. It’s like a one-click upsell, no additional information, and nothing to stop adding stuff to the cart. It’s fantastic stuff.

At a payment gateway level, would it still be Shop Pay?

It’s still Shop Pay. Maybe over a year ago, Shopify forced everyone to move to the checkout API. All of these apps integrate directly with the payment gateway through an API versus taking over the payment gateway was what they were doing historically. It allows you to do all this stuff in token cards on files and all that jazz. It’s still to Shop Pay.

The final question, buy now and pay later, BNPL, would you suggest them in almost all cases? What’s your take on conversions with these services? 

If you have a luxury product that’s a higher price point, that’s something you should probably look into installing. If someone can’t afford a $50 thing and you want to give them something like that, are they the best customer for you? Are they going to give you a charge back at that level? I’d probably keep those things in mind. I do know that Shopify Payments has their own buy now pay later thing. It might be in partnership with a firm. We don’t have a dog in that fight. We’ll let our clients do whatever. We’re going to lean towards the easiest one to set up, which is the one that’s natively integrated within Shopify.

Chase, we can go on and on and on. Thanks for the rundown on customer journeys, we enjoyed it, and Shopify. For those who want to find out more about what you guys do, it’s ElectricEye.io. How would you suggest readers reach out to you and team?

If you like what I say but you don’t necessarily have a project that you want to work on or anything like that, go subscribe to the podcast and listen to me interview brands and learn how they did it. I also interview awesome subject matter experts all the time as bonus episodes so you’ll soak up knowledge that way.

As far as the agency, it’s ElectricEye.io. If what I’m saying resonates with you, if you’re a brand and you’ve got product market fit figured out but you’re looking to find those gains when it comes to average order value or conversion rate, reach out. The Shopify diagnostic that I talked about throughout this episode, I’m allowed to give away a few of those for free until my business partner yells at me. Normally, we do charge for them. Click on the Contact button, schedule a call with me, and we’ll see if you qualify for one of those. It would probably be the best way to do it. Please, definitely say that you heard me here and that’s why you reached out so I can tell my business partner that this is all worthwhile.

Any parting piece of advice? Any parting words? Anything you want to say?

This was fantastic. I enjoyed it. Something that’s a little more common on those diagnostics that we didn’t talk about was when we jump into the code and performance stuff.

We didn’t talk about performance and page load times and that’s super important.

It’s important. A super common thing we see is if they are on a legacy theme that isn’t 2.0, we go, “There’s your optimization. Upgrade to the new thing because everything you’re doing is technical debt. Everything new can’t integrate with this old thing.” Something we’re doing quite often is upgrading people to that 2.0 thing too. That was top of mind.

With 2.0, what other new areas in development does it give you access to?

They’re super performant. Out of the box, all the 2.0 themes are more performant than the legacy themes unless you got something super custom that was well taken care of. Be honest with yourself, it probably wasn’t. You probably installed a bunch of apps and all that code is still in there and it’s a spaghetti mess and nobody wants to fix it.

Out of the box, these themes are a lot more performant, sections everywhere. Now, with how Meta fields integrate in objects, you can do cool stuff on these new themes as far as having data be sourced from specific areas and have stuff automatically populate. All of that is useful for solving all these interesting problems that are specific to your use case and your customer.

Does that mean it helps with personalization?

Absolutely.

I see where Shopify is going.  It’s amazing. Chase, we can go on and on. A quick question, what book are you reading now? Are you into books?

I love books. I’ll give you two answers. What I’m reading is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. I try to make myself read a business book every here and there. Beyond that, I also am a big fantasy nerd and I just finished the Red Rising trilogy by Pierce Brown, which was a fun change of pace.

How are your reading sessions like? Do you read every day or weekly? Would you set time over the weekends?

I read every day. I’m an audio book guy. Usually, when I’m out walking the dog, I’m listening to an audio book, also when I’m cooking, or when I’m trying to wind down before going to bed. I’m reading every day and trying to learn something new.

Another question I had is what are your prospects for 2024? How’s 2024 going to compare to 2023? 

Things are looking up compared to 2023. 2023 was an interesting year because there was that huge growth from the pandemic where there was a lot of extra money going around and all that consumer spending made it into the professional services realm. We had some great years. Everyone was talking about the economy and everyone was holding onto their budget. That was an interesting year but this year is already looking wild. We’re talking to a lot of cool companies about doing some cool things on the business side of stuff. We’re trying to build cool websites and work with cool partners to do CRO.

A random question, what’s your favorite meal? 

Tacos, for sure. I have a taco tattoo.

Chase, I can go on and on. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. We should do it more. Thank you again for coming on the 2X eCommerce podcast. 

Thanks for having me.