w/ Paul Reda co-hosting
New episode this week and its a fun one. Listener-favorite Paul Reda is back in the co-host chair, always spicy. We’re kicking off with some fresh-off-the-press news and updates in the Shopify world. Then, we'll let you in on what we've been working on. Got questions? Good, because we're diving into a Listener Q&A segment where we answer your questions. Throughout, we're handing you some practical Black Friday advice.
Show Links
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
October 2023 AMA
Paul Reda: So, how many Frankenstein movies have you watched this month? Because I’ve watched seven.
Kurt Elster: I only watched Bride of Frankenstein.
Paul Reda: Which is the best one by far.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I don’t need any others.
Paul Reda: No. I need the full Frankenstein canon in order to kick Halloween off right.
Kurt Elster: I want to hear your Frankenstein impression.
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: Smoke!
Paul Reda: No. I’ll go, “It’s alive!” Because that is Frankenstein. I believe you’re talking about Frankenstein’s creation, or monster, when you’re saying-
Kurt Elster: Frankenstein’s monster.
Paul Reda: When you’re saying, “Smoke. Good. Friend.”
Kurt Elster: Friend. It blew my mind when I saw the 100-year-old Frankenstein movie and discovered the cartoon stereotype of the stiff legged monster being like, “Fire. Bad.” That wasn’t an exaggeration. That was just straight up how Frankenstein’s monster was portrayed by Boris Karloff.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. I mean, all of our concept of the monsters and how they act is from those movies from the ‘30s. It was those movies that were in the ‘30s, they were big hits, they were played endlessly on TV in the 1950s, and boomers watched them on television, and they broke boomers’ brains, and that’s now just what all those things look like.
Kurt Elster: Like the Invisible Man, obviously a guy in bandages.
Paul Reda: A guy in bandages. Yes. Dracula is like, “Bleh,” like has that accent. Like, “Oh, yeah. That’s how Dracula acts.” Frankenstein’s got a flat head. Duh. Mary Shelley, she was like, “And he had a flat head.” Yeah. That’s exactly why.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Why does he have a flat head? He’s pieced together from other corpses.
Paul Reda: Well, because they had to put the brain… You’ve never seen one. Have you seen one?
Kurt Elster: I have, but what do I need that for? I’ve got Bride.
Paul Reda: And Bride is so good. Yeah, because he’s gotta put the brain in, and so obviously they cut off the top of the skull, put the brain in, and then-
Kurt Elster: And then what, put a dinner plate on top?
Paul Reda: Yeah. They just had to put something on top to get the brain in right.
Kurt Elster: It’s like, “All right, be gentle with this.”
Paul Reda: Well, you know, it’s like you’ve taken things apart, you love doing handy stuff around town. You know you take something apart, and then when you put it back together, it doesn’t fit as well as it did before you took it apart.
Kurt Elster: Or you’re like, “Hey, I got it back together except there’s extra parts.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Are these bonus spares?
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s what happened. Frankenstein had some bonus parts. Dr. Frankenstein had some bonus parts leftover, and he ended up having to give the monster a flat head.
Kurt Elster: I want to know what it is that’s in there that resulted in the flat head. And I’m going with dinner plate.
Paul Reda: Anyway, I watched all the Frankensteins. I had no idea. The OG Frankensteins from the ‘30s made by Universal, not like the Hammer Frankensteins or later ones. And I was shocked at… They’re a serial. They’re like a franchise. Like how we think of the horrors of the current franchise hellscape in movies, they did it. Every movie followed another, like where Frankenstein was at the end of the last one, he is at the beginning of the next one. Different characters are in multiple ones. There is a series.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. All the Universal Monsters in the ‘20s are in one coherent universe.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s the ‘30s and ‘40s, but okay.
Kurt Elster: Close. Well, when you go that far back, you know, plus or minus 10 years. It’s fine.
Paul Reda: But yeah, it’s all one coherent universe, like they did it. They made the MCU, the Monster Cinematic Universe, and it was a big hit, and then they tried to do it again in 2016 and it was a huge disaster. It’s just awesome that they pulled it off 100 years ago and then couldn’t do it ever again.
Kurt Elster: And then we reinvented it with Marvel and claimed that this was some big original concept. Nope. Universal doing it a century ago.
Paul Reda: Universal Monsters did it.
Kurt Elster: So, I assume for Christmas, for those Black Friday deals come around, you’re just getting nonstop Blu-rays?
Paul Reda: I have been disc pilled, yes, as we’ve discussed, and I think I’m getting… You know, it’s weird to me. It was a dark day. I think Best Buy announced they’re no longer selling physical media.
Kurt Elster: They did. No more physical media in stores.
Paul Reda: In Q1 next year. But they said they might still sell physical games. But they’re not gonna-
Kurt Elster: It would make sense for games to still be around for a little while.
Paul Reda: But you know-
Kurt Elster: I almost sent you that article, but I was like, “There’s no way he doesn’t know.”
Paul Reda: No, I knew. It’s odd to me because as part of disc culture-
Kurt Elster: Disc culture. Wow. Okay.
Paul Reda: You know, if you’re a real spin head, that’s what we call ourselves-
Kurt Elster: This is not like vinyl. No.
Paul Reda: For many movies, especially genre movies, and I looked on it today, like oh, what’s on sale today? There’s a great website, Blu-ray dot com, for some reason is just a website that tracks Blu-ray prices across multiple stores, and you can search. It’s got great search options. It’s the best. It’s how-
Kurt Elster: It’s one giant affiliate scheme?
Paul Reda: It’s just a giant affiliate scheme. Yeah. It’s awesome. But they’ll be like, “They Live. Okay, They Live is on sale.” I think they just did a new 4K release of the John Carpenter film, They Live, starring Rowdy Roddy Piper. So, there’s the normal one, but then Best Buy has the special steel book with the cooler cover and the extras inside.
Kurt Elster: Oh, they got the limited edition.
Paul Reda: That is consistent through the years. You go through like, “Oh, when was this released on 4K? Oh, it was released on 4K in 2016.” There’ll always be the standard release and the Best Buy exclusive steel book. And it’s just like it’s so odd to me that Best Buy is like, “Never mind. We’re out.” They had their own SKUs being made for them for these cool high-end limited editions.
Kurt Elster: You know, if you’ve gone in a Best Buy recently, they’re nice again. I like Best Buy.
Paul Reda: I did. I actually needed a new mouse. My mouse at home broke. So, I walked into Best Buy to pick up the mouse I bought on their website.
Kurt Elster: Their media area is like one small, sad new releases area for Blu-rays.
Paul Reda: Fingers crossed that they do liquidation sales, but I know that’ll never happen. Liquidation sales nowadays are garbage.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, you just sell the stuff online.
Paul Reda: Well, because they say, “Liquidation,” and then they just don’t lower the price. Counting on the sign to get people in.
Kurt Elster: We have about a month until Black Friday. We’re now down to the wire where you need to be prepping, planning, preparing, having at least decided on what your upcoming campaigns for Black Friday are gonna be.
Paul Reda: Oh, you should know what your big hitters are gonna be by now. I think you should. Because you gotta be priming people for the big hitters starting November 1st at the latest. So, you should have your Black Friday plan, like okay, you don’t need every single email written right now, but you definitely need to know what you’re going to be doing.
Kurt Elster: I think that starts with like I’ve got… I think it starts with a calendar. What dates are we gonna run promotions? And just because we say it’s Black Friday, I still… I love the idea of the early sale. It’s like November 10th. People who have made one-plus purchases in the past get an email, “Hey, we’re doing an early Black Friday preview.” And it’s just an excuse to run an early storewide sale or whatever it is.
Paul Reda: Clear out some old inventory.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You know, you got some Blu-rays that are driving you crazy, just eating up space on the shelf.
Paul Reda: It’s like why is it even here? Who buys these?
Kurt Elster: Everybody streams this. What are these, coasters? Get this garbage out of here. And then boom, 40% off. You know, I wouldn’t even do 40. I think 35% gets you the same effect.
Paul Reda: I think 40% is a lot for anything.
Kurt Elster: Well, it’s like what’s the percent threshold that gets you out of bed? Where do you start to pay attention? 5%? Who cares? 10? All right. Better than nothing. 15? I’m listening.
Paul Reda: I think 10, if I’m like, “Ooh, I really want to buy that, I really want to buy that,” and I’m like 1 millimeter above the mouse button but I just can’t do that one last millimeter and then I see that 10, I’m like, “I’m in.” Just the knowledge of you’re getting a deal is enough for me.
Kurt Elster: I think a lot of people just want like, “Did I save $1 more than the average, than the retail?”
Paul Reda: Yeah. The threshold between 0% savings and 5% savings is huge I think. Now, is that enough to push non-buyers into buyers? I doubt it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If I already want to buy, give me the excuse.
Paul Reda: If I already want to buy, 5% guarantees I buy. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Okay. You’re like, “Hey, we’ll give you…” Oh, I want this fridge. It’s $1,000. “I’ll give you five bucks off.” You’re like, “Yes! Deal!”
Paul Reda: I wouldn’t go that far.
Kurt Elster: So, we need… The threshold is still 5%. I’m not gonna trick you.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s just like, “I got you a dollar.” That doesn’t help.
Kurt Elster: Discount. Bad. Every year, analysts look at their crystal balls and say, “Here’s what we think sales are gonna be this year.” And of course, I could go back and figure out what the predictions were versus actual and decide who was fairly accurate. I did not do any of that. The numbers we’re seeing here predicted are like 5% to 15%.
Paul Reda: I feel like you could say that every year, though.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And they always go, “It’s dependent on category.”
Paul Reda: You could be like, “Well, between 5% to 15% just every year.” Okay. And you’ll be right 90% of years.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Well, it’s gonna do like better or worse, one of those two.
Kurt Elster: But I think Adobe is the one I like. What did they have? Adobe said 4.8%. Deloitte went really wild with… What did they have? 10 to 13% increase year over year. But again, I think this is so dependent on what your category is.
Paul Reda: Well, that’s true, and it’s also like you said. Well, I’m not gonna go back and see how they went last year. Yeah. You’re never gonna. It could be negative 10 this year and Deloitte’s not gonna get hurt by that. Oh, they were off by 20%. No one knows.
Kurt Elster: You could easily figure it out. I’m just not gonna do it.
Paul Reda: I’m saying. No one’s gonna do it.
Kurt Elster: We were talking about plan your Black Friday. Plan your Black Friday promo. I saw a tip from Jessie Healy, who was on the show, and I think she shared this in the episode.
Paul Reda: She did.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. She said make a Black Friday… If you haven’t already, put up an SEO holding page for your Black Friday deals. And by that, a collection, whatever the landing page is gonna be that you’re gonna send people to, so either a collection or a page template, just put up literally anything with Black Friday in the title for the sake of get Google to index it so that later if your customer Googles… You know, like you’re their favorite brand, they’re looking for the deal, they can’t find it, whatever. They’re gonna search brand name, Paul’s Blu-rays-
Paul Reda: Black Friday deals.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Now we know it’s gonna show up.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We got liquidated Best Buy steel books.
Kurt Elster: But if you waited to publish that page until like the day before the sale runs, there’s no way Google’s gonna have that indexed and appearing.
Paul Reda: I think she even said this during the episode too. She said when you start rolling in November, fill that page with content and rotate the content in and out depending on where you are in your Black Friday content scheme. So, it’s like that page is now the…
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah, yeah. She did.
Paul Reda: And they go to the page. They’ll still have the new thing; the new thing will be… And they send another email, but they liked the email from 10 days ago. They’ll click through and then that page will still have relevant content on it.
Kurt Elster: So, I could even do this with a URL redirect. I send everyone to Paul’s Blu-rays dot com slash Black Friday, and then in Shopify I set up a redirect for slash Black Friday, and then that goes to whatever I want. The current deal is-
Paul Reda: Of the week, let’s say, or whatever you want to call it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: But does that negate-
Kurt Elster: I don’t get that SEO tip.
Paul Reda: I was about to say, does that negate our SEO strategy? Yeah. I don’t know about that then.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it does.
Paul Reda: All your deals. You could have all your deals just live on there throughout the course of the season unless it’s stuff that has FOMO timelines on it, like this is 48 hours only or whatever. Then that won’t live on the page forever.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Gotta get that FOMO going.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, I need… Again, it’s you need to give people reasons to buy. When was it? So, back in 2019, is that when we discussed?
Paul Reda: No. I looked this up. So, Ken Courtright, famous recurring character on this podcast, convicted fraudster Ken Courtright. We don’t have to say alleged anymore because he’s convicted.
Kurt Elster: Yes. He used to be alleged-
Paul Reda: Fraudster Ken.
Kurt Elster: Alleged Ponzi scheme.
Paul Reda: Now he’s truly… He’s a fraudster. He committed fraud. He was a guy that Kurt went to lunch with who was running a bunch of Shopify stores and then Kurt was like, “This is weird.”
Kurt Elster: My spidey sense was tingling.
Paul Reda: And it was like, “This is not how things should work.” Because he was like, “Yeah, we got hundreds of Shopify stores. It’s fine. They all make money.” And Kurt’s like, “Do they?” And he’s like, “Yeah, sure. They all make money.” He’s like-
Kurt Elster: How do you manage hundreds of Shopify stores?
Paul Reda: And he’s like, “We got 10 people and a .csv.”
Kurt Elster: We got spreadsheets.
Paul Reda: It works.
Kurt Elster: The answer was spreadsheets.
Paul Reda: So, we were like, “You’re weird. We don’t want to talk to you.” And then six months later he got raided by the FBI for running a Ponzi scheme where he would take people’s money, invest it in stores, but really just use that money to pay back the previous investors with guaranteed returns, and then he embezzled a bunch off the top.
Kurt Elster: And then he started towards the end just paying his mortgage with it.
Paul Reda: He was paying his mortgage. He was making like quadruple payments on his mortgage on his big house in Minooka, and paying for private school tuitions, and boats and stuff. But anyway, he got convicted in federal court in July, so he’s going to jail.
Kurt Elster: Seven counts.
Paul Reda: Seven counts of wire fraud. He’s going to jail. He was supposed to get sentenced October 5th, but I have not found anything that he was sentenced to. But that stuff gets postponed all the time. But yeah, I think given the number of counts and the amount of money involved, he’s definitely doing federal time. Probably gonna go to FCI Waterloo, which is where ex-Illinois governor George Ryan was hanging out for a while. We had two governors in a row go to federal prison.
Kurt Elster: I was gonna say. Where did Blagojevich go?
Paul Reda: I don’t know. I don’t know where Blagojevich was. But George Ryan was in Wisconsin and that’s probably where Ken’s going too. You know, it’s not too bad. But yeah, go back through our podcasts to learn the journey of Ken Courtright, the dude who committed crimes, who we talked to once and decided we thought he was committing crimes, and we were right.
Kurt Elster: I was like, “This is odd, and I question the legitimacy of it.” At no point in my head did I go, “This is a $100 million fraud.” Which is what he was convicted of.
Paul Reda: Well, we thought, “This is a shady dude who cannot be trusted.” Agree?
Kurt Elster: Yes. I did not want to pursue a relationship.
Paul Reda: Then we talked to a dude that we kind of knew that worked there and you said on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of this is legit and how much is it a fraud? And he said, “I think it’s mostly legit.” He did not say, “It is legit.” He said, “I think it’s mostly legit.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: So, we thought some fraud.
Kurt Elster: I talked to another guy who… I don’t think he had to testify. I know he got interviewed by the FBI. That’s just bad, scary stuff. But you know, we could close the chapter on that. The trial happened and he was convicted.
So, we did… Man, we’ve been busy. We built a custom theme for Montana Knife Company, who makes really sweet knives. I’m proud of that one.
Paul Reda: Do they make chef and Rambo? Those are the two grades of knife.
Kurt Elster: Yes. The purposes of this conversation, yes. They have extraordinary chef’s knives, like real flashy stuff, and hunting knives, like real deal hunting knives. I have a little one from them and I admire it and don’t use it because it’s so nice. We got that up. They have such great content that that site really shines.
Paul Reda: Well, I think the thing to talk about here is they do limited edition knife drops, like they’re dropping a new knife every week.
Kurt Elster: That model works. It still works.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We had to set up countdown timers, and countdown timers that they can edit, and set what the new time is for the next drop, and all this. It all auto populates across the store. And I think we had to do a later modification for them, where they wanted certain collections to have a different timer than the main timer running across the site.
Kurt Elster: But you could still… We could grab the date/time metafield. Store that stuff. And it pulls it from a metafield.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I think that’s how it works on the collections.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so it’s just a really fancy theme feature.
Paul Reda: But yeah, they do limited edition knife drops.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That model works, you know? Because they have an audience who’s hungry for the product and there’s… It’s a high end, handmade product. And so, they use that drop model to great effect. I mean, it really… But even when they’re not doing the big knife drops, in between you can… Once you’re in that model and people are trained to it, you can even do regular accessories, and so they did just like, “All right, here’s an apparel release.” And of course, it goes crazy.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah. They do like sheaths and stuff too.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah. They have the fancy… The Kydex Sheaths. We did that one. Triple 60, which is a private equity… a billiards website called Seybert’s. If you’re into pool cues and stuff, Seybert’s is a great site, and they bought a manufacturer called… Or their parent company did, called White Carbon, rebranded it to Triple 60, you know, 60 degrees being the angles in the rack, the pool rack. Yeah. It’s been a while since I’ve played pool. You can tell. And then we built a custom theme for them on that. And then that one, I made a bunch of the content. So, that was fun. I like that one.
But the big one, the one-
Paul Reda: They have a lot of metafield work on that one of various numbers and schematics.
Kurt Elster: It’s very specs driven.
Paul Reda: It’s very specs driven because, you know, you’re buying a high end… The people that buy these are buying high end tools.
Kurt Elster: This is not just a pool cue. This is a precision item.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s a precision instrument that you’re paying through the nose for because you’re like that kind of guy. And so, we gotta sell you on how precision this instrument is.
Kurt Elster: Those numbers were meaningless to me beyond like, “Well, that’s the length of it. That’s right. It does appear to be about that long.” But I understood the value in it, so yeah, it’s a lot of metafields.
Paul Reda: They call me Mount Prospect Fats.
Kurt Elster: Because you’re from Mount Prospect? When was the last time you played pool?
Paul Reda: Well, I’m about to stick it up your nose. My grandfather was actually like a pool shark, and he always had pool tables in the basement of every single house he lived in, so I would play pool in my grandfather’s basement a lot when I was a kid.
Kurt Elster: So the answer is what, 20 years?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Probably.
Kurt Elster: But the big project, the one I’m really proud of that the whole team worked on, we all had to pitch in to get it over the line, we migrated Navage, which I’ll explain what Navage is in a moment, from BigCommerce to Shopify.
Paul Reda: It’s a power washer for your snots.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. All right-
Paul Reda: You don’t really need to go deep into it.
Kurt Elster: I don’t care who you are, you got boogers. Everyone listening has boogers. How you gonna get those boogers out? Pick them? Foolishness! You just pressure wash those out with Navage, which is like… It was an As Seen on TV product. They still run commercials but not like they did. And so, they were previously on BigCommerce.
Paul Reda: Boo.
Kurt Elster: I know. Where’s my eww button?
Sound Board: Eww!
Kurt Elster: They were previously on BigCommerce. They moved to Shopify. And doing those migrations isn’t terrible, but there are definitely some gotchas. And so, if you can get the data out of whatever platform, you can generally get it into Shopify. And so, like orders, products, customers, that stuff, pretty much everything is gonna have some export as spreadsheet, and then you can wrangle it, manipulate it, get it into the new system, and that part’s not terrible. It’s just time consuming. And there’ll be a few small things you gotta know to avoid.
Where it gets tough is some things don’t export, so how do you recreate those? And so, we had to come up with a clever solution to get all the page content out, which… To get titles, H1 tags, handles, or URLs, et cetera, scraped it from the site with a Python script, created those, and then you and I spent half a day just copying and pasting the missing HTML content.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That was fun.
Kurt Elster: So, no matter what, there’s some manual level of effort that is going to happen with some of these SEO migrations or some of these store migrations. The big, scary one is subscriptions. I used to think that realistically migrating subscriptions was not practical. As of this migration, it is 100% doable.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Subscriptions are a big part of their business, so they really needed that subscription.
Kurt Elster: No one wants to give that up.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And so, yeah, we found a way to do it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We worked with Loop Subscriptions on this one. And their team, really helpful to make that happen, and it depends what platform you’re coming from, what service you’re coming from, but absolutely migrating subscriptions across platform and keeping that payment tokenization, as long as you can get access to that, you’re pretty good. And so, we were able to do it working with them, maintain these subscriptions across the platform.
And so, I am now so confident and so thrilled in how we’ve leveled up our skillset on doing store migrations.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and this is not our first migration from BigCommerce, right?
Kurt Elster: No, certainly not.
Paul Reda: But it’s the biggest and the hardest.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Biggest and toughest.
Paul Reda: So, all we’re saying is we’re ready for more BigCommerce migrations.
Kurt Elster: I’m sure BigCommerce was fine, but when I log into it now, it’s like, “Whoa.” This thing’s been in maintenance mode for years. It just feels dated. And so, my new mission is if you’re on BigCommerce and you’re Shopify curious, let’s go.
Paul Reda: We’ll make it easy for you.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And then the other thing with that, with any migration the big question is like, “Well, what about my SEO?” Because you always have that moment of eventually it’ll work itself out, but how long is that gonna take? How much organic search traffic am I gonna lose for what period of time? And in the previous episode with you, we really hammered on SEO agency retainers. We worked with a guy, Gert, and his agency, SEOLeverage? What was it? SEOLeverage, yeah, is his agency. They’re totally legit. They’re really good. And they were so helpful and instrumental in nailing this. And I think the takeaway, the learning is if you’re concerned about SEO and the store migration, the goal is to minimize as many changes as possible.
I don’t like big changes. Humans generally don’t. Well, it turns out Google doesn’t either. So, if you can minimize those changes, and like everybody knows, you set up URL redirects. Fine. But in addition to that, you also want to maintain the content as close as possible. So, migrate everything, even if it’s a manual process like you and I had to go through. But they went so far as we made sure the SEO title, meta descriptions, and the H1 tags across all the content matched, so that when Google saw it, it did not… It went, “Oh yeah, this seems familiar. I know what this is.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s the same thing.
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay. And then combining that with URL redirects, and then not losing any content, sweet. And then finally, the site, international. They had a US and Canadian version. Using Shopify Markets Pro, we got that to work, including with a French language version. I can’t believe how good Shopify Markets Pro is. It made it so easy to set up internationalization. Really, I just assumed it would be hard. It seems like something that should be hard to do.
Paul Reda: Well, we’re just that good. It’s hard for normal people.
Kurt Elster: It’s true.
Paul Reda: All right. I see you have DMCA abuse.
Kurt Elster: DMCA abuse.
Paul Reda: Shopify wading into the litigation waters.
Kurt Elster: Well, I’m thrilled that Shopify is just tackling this head-on.
Paul Reda: All right, so wait. We gotta talk about what it is.
Kurt Elster: What is the DMCA?
Paul Reda: The DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Kurt. It was passed by congress I believe in 1998.
Kurt Elster: I’m a Millennium.
Paul Reda: It’s a ‘90s era law, because there was copyright infringement occurring on the internet before, in 1998, so this is like before .mp3s, and part of the law that we’re worried about here is if you, Kurt, post a bunch of Mickey Mouse stuff on Shopify that you’re selling Mickey Mouse products, that’s being hosted on Shopify. Even though Kurt posted it and Kurt’s running the store, it’s been posted on Shopify. Shopify is collecting the money. Shopify is getting a cut from it. Shopify is profiting off of it. So, at the time the question was, “Well, who do you sue? Do you sue the people that are doing the technical back end for it, or do you sue the guy that did it?”
And the way that the law works is the person on the hook is the person that did it, that uploaded it, and in this scenario Shopify would not be sued if they comply with a takedown request to remove it. So, it’s not-
Kurt Elster: That’s where the problem comes in.
Paul Reda: It’s not Shopify’s fault because you told them something was bad and so they took it down, so you can’t go after Shopify for it. So, what this means is generally the way it goes is you issue a takedown request, the host takes it down, then the previous person, the person who put it up appeals, and there’s this whole process or whatever. But in order-
Kurt Elster: And this is codified into law.
Paul Reda: This is codified in the law. But obviously these big hosting providers, they don’t want to get sued. They’re just trying to cover their asses. So, if you send them a request, they’re just taking that stuff down. They’re not even thinking about it most of the time. So, apparently what was happening with Shopify is fraudulent DMCA requests, takedown requests, were being sent to Shopify, and Shopify acting like every other host, pretty much, would immediately take the stuff down. Because they don’t want to wade into like, “Well, technically that’s not infringing because of XY and Z.” Now we’re entering into a legal ruling and they’re just like, “No, we’re taking it down. Leave us alone.”
And that was a problem because those were fraud?
Kurt Elster: Yes. Fraud, false positives. I mean, there were either services or law firms that would say, “Well, we’ll enforce your rights over your intellectual property. You give us terms.” Let’s say you’re Nike and you say, “Hey, only these authorized sellers are allowed to sell. Here’s the list of authorized sellers and everybody else is probably selling counterfeits.” And so, some third party service contracted on down the line would scrape the internet, find all these potentially illegitimate listings, compare them against the list of we know these people are fine. It’s like, “Oh, Foot Locker, we’re gonna ignore them. Take them out of the list.” And then everybody else, we’re gonna try and automate sending a DMCA request on Nike’s behalf over this.
And so, you would get people who were like, “No, no, no. I’m perfectly legitimate to sell.” But now the burden is on that seller, on me-
Paul Reda: On me. Just some schlub and not some giant law firm or a multibillion dollar company.
Kurt Elster: To be like, “Hey, this isn’t legitimate. The request isn’t legitimate, and I have every right to sell this.” And you know, who knows how that goes for you, and even if it does work out for you, it was certainly stressful.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That’s one case. A misunderstanding. Those for sure happened. The other problem is there are definitely people who figured out, who it occurred to them, “Oh, I can abuse this.” And people who took it so far as just full on bad actor, “I’m going to clone your store, take your entire catalog of print on demand stuff, start selling it myself, start running ads with your product, and then I’m gonna send a DMCA takedown request for your catalog, and now I have eliminated the competition I ripped off.” And now that person has to defend this ridiculous request. Insane.
And with… You know, Shopify has millions of store now, and so we have no way of knowing, but how often would this have been happening? How much effort are they supposed to put into trying to decipher what is and isn’t legitimate? And so, we had this happen to clients. We had this happen to listeners. We saw people post about it in our Facebook group. We knew this was occurring, where someone legitimate would get a takedown request that was either one of these misunderstanding ones, in which case they were usually able to work it out, or one of the illegitimate ones, which, those are scary. Because the person on the other end is not…
Paul Reda: Well, and even if it worked out, how long were you down? You’re down like a week, maybe more?
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah.
Paul Reda: So, it’s just like, “Well, you’re done. You just don’t have a store for two weeks.”
Kurt Elster: Well, and you have-
Paul Reda: Hope you get it back.
Kurt Elster: Generally what we saw, the way they were set up is like, “All right. Your store is offline now. The frontend is offline. You have access to the backend. And you have until X date before the account’s just closed and you lose access to it.” So, better export your stuff while you can.
Bad news, you know?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Someone reached out to me and said, “Hey, this just happened to me. It happened again.” And they had tweeted about it. And so, that time I went. I quote tweeted it. I said, “This isn’t isolated. We’ve seen this before. This happened to other people.” And then within a week, two weeks of that, we saw Shopify noticed and took it very seriously. And they said, “Hey, the end of DMCA abuse is over.” The original guy who had the complaint, Tobi replied to him and said, “Hey, I’m gonna look into this.” Like, “All right. I appreciate that. Let’s see where this goes.”
Sure enough, not only did they say, “All right, we’re not gonna tolerate DMCA abuse requests. Here’s an email, a direct contact if you have one of these fraudulent claims made.” And I guess they identified one of these bad actors who was using the DMCA loophole to abuse the system, sued them. Going after them to stop it.
Paul Reda: Good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I am thrilled to see Shopify do something about it and go after these DMCA abusers.
Paul Reda: Well, and now they need to do the ADA abusers.
Kurt Elster: It would make my day. That would be the most fabulous Christmas present.
Paul Reda: Because that’s how you stop the ADA lawsuits too, is that you need to make it too expensive for the crappy law firms that are doing this to do it. I mean, as soon as they have to defend every single one in court and expend lawyer hours to make it into a real case, they’re not gonna do it anymore. I read about this. This is what the hotels did. All the hotels-
Kurt Elster: They did.
Paul Reda: All the hotels were getting these abusive fake ADA lawsuits. They all banded together, and they said, “We’re gonna get a law firm and our law firm is just gonna defend after all these and we’re gonna treat it like a real thing. Okay, you think you were honestly injured by this? Great. Let’s go to court and work it out.” And then they stopped. They stopped going after the hotels because they don’t want that. They want the quick settlement money.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They want you to go, “How about we just cut you a check and we move on?”
Paul Reda: You don’t actually want me to fix my site. You just want me to give you a check for 5 grand and go away.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And that’s-
Paul Reda: It’s extortion.
Kurt Elster: What’s funny is over time, the settlement amount, like if you just ask, off the record people are happy to talk about this. The average settlement amount that people have told me has gone down over the years.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Now it’s like $3,000-$4,000 and they’ll just go away. Because they don’t actually want the money. Or they don’t actually… You know, it’s not about fighting for what’s right. They’ve just found similar to the DMCA people, well, here’s a loophole we could abuse.
Mark asks, “What’s something you see store owners stumble over all the time?” He’s looking for those common stumbling blocks.
Paul Reda: I think this could be us talking about our own personal pet peeves.
Kurt Elster: Well, let’s see. Britney asks, “What’s your biggest pet peeve on eCommerce sites?”
Paul Reda: Yeah, so this is both.
Kurt Elster: Let’s combine Mark and Brittany’s question here.
Paul Reda: Well, I say this all the time. Once you’ve crossed a certain threshold of competence on your store, we rapidly reach diminishing returns. Like, “Oh, well, I don’t like that here it says add to cart, and I really don’t think the T in to should be capitalized, so can we fix? That needs to get fixed.” And you know, it’s just like, “The border on this needs to be lighter. I think the border is CCC and I really want it to be EEE.” You know, that level of stuff.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Diminished returns where they’re now obsessing… Just straight up obsessing over details that no one but them would notice.
Paul Reda: But yeah, but they have the absolute blinders on and they’re just like, “Well, I’m just gonna stare at it all day long and just let every little pixel just poke me.”
Kurt Elster: What’s funny is the content, the message is the thing that matters.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah. Content, they don’t care about content. They’re running 50 different apps. They haven’t sent an email in four months. But those pixels, that drives me up the wall.
Kurt Elster: I talked to a merchant this morning who was looking for just brainstorming ideas, like, “Hey, what’s some stuff we could try?” And I brought up like, “Here’s a newsletter campaign you could do.” And their response was, “Oh, I just sent a newsletter last week for the first time. I can’t believe how successful that was.” I didn’t know they weren’t sending newsletters. That would have been my first suggestion.
I think my pet peeves are like where people stumble with their sites, setting up a main menu, like if your catalog has…
Paul Reda: Oh, I was waiting for you to say main navigation.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If you’ve got more than a few dozen items, you will quickly make yourself insane trying to figure out how to properly organize that. I’ve been doing this for a decade, and I think I’m only now comfortable at figuring it out.
Paul Reda: Well, and that goes to one of my other ones, which is stores nowadays, it’s really common for us to have clients where the 90% of the traffic is mobile. It’s 90%. And not mobile tablet. I’m talking phone. 90% phone. And if you’re… I think even 75% phone is probably the floor.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. 70/30 would be… That is the absolute… There’s something strange has happened that that is the minimum mix.
Paul Reda: 75% phone. Damn it, every single time, the store owner is sending me screenshots of full 1920 wide browser window on their huge 30-inch desktop monitor.
Kurt Elster: I have full screened the website on a 30-inch monitor.
Paul Reda: I have full screened the website, 1920 pixels wide on my desktop monitor, and they’re like, “It looks a little strange here.” No one’s ever seen it like that. No one has ever seen it like that. They never will see it like that.
Kurt Elster: Everyone else scrolled through it halfheartedly on their phone on their couch, while also watching TV.
Paul Reda: Oh, they never look at it on their phones. Store owners, here we go. This is it. Everything I said, negate it. This is it. Here’s my answer, right now. Store owners never look at their stores on phones. Never, ever, ever. Because they’re at work when they’re screwing around with their store, and when you’re at work, you’re on your work computer, which is a desktop. That’s never how any of your users are using it. They’re looking at it on their phones. I can’t tell you the number of times I have worked on themes, worked on designs for store owners, and I get endless rounds of pain in the ass feedback about the desktop layout. They never shut up about it.
Kurt Elster: And then we don’t get any-
Paul Reda: And then I do the phone layout, never talked about. Never asked, never say anything, don’t even notice. The phone, “Oh, by the way, it’s been six months, and I looked at it on the phone, and I noticed that I installed all these apps and there’s actually 3 widgets on the bottom of the phone screen that’s covering up the add to cart button, so that probably should get fixed.”
Kurt Elster: That anecdote is based on a real story.
Paul Reda: That happens all the time. They just keep adding these stupid little widget apps, and little chat widgets, and all this other stuff. It covers up all the content on the phone screens and they’re like, “It looks good to me.”
Kurt Elster: I had someone say, “Hey, my conversion rate dropped precipitously. What do I do?” And I went and I was like, “All right, let me help.” I’m getting ready to do my thing. And I load the site on my phone, and I said, “Hey, I think I found the issue.” And there were a bunch of sticky widgets, and they had a drawer court. The sticky widgets all covered up the proceed to checkout button. You could not click checkout on a phone because of the number of widgets. And they were 100% unaware because they’d never looked at it on a phone.
Paul Reda: They never do it. Because they’re at work. And when you’re at work, you’re sitting at your desk looking at the computer. So, they just sit there and look at it on their full screen desktop monitor and they’re like, “That’s right. That’s my website.”
Kurt Elster: It’s easy to go, “Yeah, I’m gonna take mobile seriously. I’m gonna pay attention to it.” Because of what you’re explaining, it’s like you’re working, so you’re on a laptop. You’re on a desktop. You have to make a conscious effort to check stuff on mobile. Make it your New Year’s resolution. I’m gonna use my own site on my phone.
Paul Reda: Don’t even look at your site on desktop. Who cares?
Kurt Elster: Mobile is where the action is at.
Paul Reda: Yeah. People made fun of Ron DeSantis for this. Ron DeSantis put up some fundraiser page. He was trying to quickly cash in on something. And the fundraiser page was literally a single column that was 400 pixels wide.
Kurt Elster: Because it was formatted for phone.
Paul Reda: It’s just formatted for phones. And everyone’s like, “What the hell is this?” And I’m like, “All right, obviously-“
Kurt Elster: But a political campaign, they would have sent an email. Well, where do you check your email? On your phone!
Paul Reda: Yeah. People were making fun of it, and you know, I understand. Making it look the same, making it look nice on desktop and mobile is not that big a lift. It’s fine on desktop. And it certainly was made for mobile. You could do worse things.
Kurt Elster: Have no issues with a narrow single column if it’s text on desktop. I don’t know why people are like, “White space is bad.” It just needs to be a giant collage of insanity. No, it doesn’t. Just scroll. It’s okay.
Paul Reda: Guy wants to know-
Kurt Elster: I think it’s Guy.
Paul Reda: I think it’s Guy LaFleur, famous hockey player Guy LaFleur, listens to the show. It’s awesome. Starting a new side store from scratch and wondering what folks are building off of currently. I know Kurt you used to be heavy on Flex. Is that still the case? Thanks.
Another pet peeve I have. What theme should I use? Who cares? Just buy one from the Shopify store. That’s it. They’re all vetted. They’re all checked. I don’t understand this whole thing where they’re like, “Great for fashion.” It’s like, “Oh, damn. If I put my knives on this store I’m gonna lose money.” Doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Just get a theme that is vetted by Shopify, works fine, you’re done. It doesn’t matter.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think if you’re asking me what theme should you use, I will give you the exclusion. Anything that is not from a developer in the Shopify theme store, you are rolling the dice. You’re playing with fire. Those ThemeForest themes, it got to the point where we said, “We refuse.” We will not work on those anymore. Versus if it is in the Shopify theme store, it went through such an extreme audit, and ongoing, that you can have faith it is going to be up to date and have all the features and do what you want.
I think in worrying about like, “Well, what theme is right for what?” When you’re looking at these themes, so many of them for at least their demo, they just rely on a bunch of fancy splash photos. Can’t I get fancy stock photos? Can I get a friendly merchant to let me use their great product photos in my store? And so, really you’re just comparing stock photos.
Paul Reda: Take it back to the pet peeve thing. “Well, I want my store to look like this. Look how great this store looks.” Okay, cool. They hired a professional photographer.
Kurt Elster: And that’s what did it. Yeah.
Paul Reda: For thousands of dollars to take all these photos. And they’re like, “Well, how come my store doesn’t look like that?” It’s like, “Well, because you gave us shitty photos.” All the photos you gave me were 700 x 700 pixels wide, and you apparently don’t have anything bigger than that I guess, so that’s what you get. Because you gave me crap photos, so your site looks like crap.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, garbage in, garbage out is what’s going on there. Yeah. A theme really… Obsessing about the theme would be like obsessing about a photo frame. The photo is the important part. The frame… I don’t know. Does it work?
Paul Reda: Does it hold it? Yes?
Kurt Elster: That’s fine. Do what you want. Go on a desk or on a wall. I don’t know.
Paul Reda: John wants to know, “Homepage changes keep visitors engaged.” He’s got a business in their first year. Should he be changing the look of the homepage every so often to keep returning visitors engaged? I would say no unless you have a reason to. So, it’s like do you have a new product line? Are you having a big sale? Is there something going on that people need to know about? Then, all right, cool. Change that splash image. Change the featured collection on the homepage. Change the product on the homepage. Do something. That’s fine. But just being like, “We need to have a new photo and we need to completely change the layout of the homepage every three months.”
Kurt Elster: For the sake of it. Yeah. I don’t think so.
Paul Reda: I don’t think you need to do that.
Kurt Elster: Let it be driven by necessity. You have a new product. You have a promotion. Whatever event or catalog change is occurring, that gets represented on the site. On the homepage. Otherwise, I would not feel the need to be going through here. Now, I’ve heard people say, “Google likes fresh content.” But to what degree? And is changing a hero image, changing a paragraph on a homepage gonna make that difference for Google? Probably not. In this case, I wouldn’t sweat it. You’re gonna know when you need to change your homepage based on what’s going on.
Paul Reda: All right. I like this. This is the speed round. Michael. He would like to hear about current and future solutions against fraudulent orders and chargebacks. “I’m selling a high ticket, low margin product mainly and it only takes one or two chargebacks to really hurt my business.” So, he is also in Australia. I don’t know how that’s different. Kangaroo dollars?
Kurt Elster: No. Well, what’s different is not all payment providers are available in all countries. Payment methods can change in other countries. In the U.S., we’re like bank transfers, what do I look like, Rockefeller? Whereas, in other countries a bank transfer is not weird. And oftentimes, we’ll recommend a service or feature that’s only available in the U.S. And that’s frustrating for international listeners, but it’s also… I mean, it’s just impossible for me to keep in my head what is and isn’t available outside our borders.
Paul Reda: I mean, if he’s in Australia, and if he’s not an Australian-specific business, he’s doing a ton of shipping. Brutal international shipping.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: I mean, obviously there’s the Shopify fraudulent orders, right?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Shopify has… There’s a fraud risk analysis that’s just in the order. There’s Shopify… They have a whole suite of fraud features, but not all of them are gonna be available outside the U.S. is the problem. Our big stores that process a ton of volume and have experience, they’ve been around the block, I don’t know that any of them actually use a dedicated fraud filter solution. They use automations to flag the scary stuff. And so, they’ll use Shopify Flow and Shopify’s just built-in order risk analysis, where it’s like, “All right, if order risk analysis high, automatically hold this order, flag it for someone to review.” Or hold this, cancel it, restock it. And they’ll do, “If risk analysis is medium, flag it for someone to review. If risk analysis is low but the order is over $500, flag it for review. Or order is $500, no matter what, flag it for review.”
We see a lot of that, where it’s like, “Okay, as soon as it’s risky, try and verify it.” Can you call the person and get ahold of them or does the number not work? Are you able to verify anything about this order and this person? That can help just reducing a lot of this by just flagging those and checking them. But in his case, if you’re the manufacturer and it’s a less expensive item, not so bad. But let’s say you drop ship bikes, an expensive item that costs you a lot of money, and you don’t get a ton of profit. And now due to fraud you’re out the money and the product?
All right, now potentially you’re out thousands because of one fraudulent order.
Paul Reda: And that’s what he says here. He says one or two chargebacks to really harm the business. I mean, I don’t know what you do about chargebacks.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, and chargeback fraud is a problem. I mean, when I think of this fraud, I always assume a bad actor in the form of like I bought credit card numbers from the dark web. I stole. I’m using a stolen credit card number to buy my goods. That’s what I’m thinking of. And so, those are easier to identify because if I call and the number is not for the same person, if I can figure out that none of this matches up, I’m gonna cancel it. Versus if I’m just… If Kurt Elster is placing an order with Kurt Elster’s credit card and sending it to Kurt Elster’s house, and then it gets there, and then I go, “Oh, I didn’t get it.” Now, you have to prove that I did. And I’ve heard that story so many times for merchants.
You know, one person told me, and I love this, they’re like, “Oh, we go through their social media. We go through their social media and see if…” They’re like, “Because half the time, they’re so proud they posted photos with the item.” He’s like, “If you can get that and include that with your chargeback…”
Paul Reda: Denial or whatever?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. When the chargeback happens they go, “All right, the person has made this claim. Now provide us evidence to the contrary.” And most of the time they’re gonna side with the person making the chargeback. If you can give them really strong evidence, especially if it’s like, “Here’s a photo of them with the item two days after we shipped it.”
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. They post-
Kurt Elster: Like, all right, boom, you’re good.
Paul Reda: They posted on Instagram #lovetosteal. Does that help?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And then they sold an eBook about chargeback fraud. I think the answer is use automation to identify the risky orders, look for patterns, and determine the level of risk that’s acceptable to you. Ooh. All right. Taig asks about my office hours. Are you enjoying doing your office hours again? Has there been a common theme in the aspects you’ve been improving across the different sites/industries?
Paul Reda: So, Kurt has a thing I call Kurt’s friend chat.
Kurt Elster: Kurt’s friend chat. I call it office hours.
Paul Reda: A random person can call Kurt and talk to him on the phone for like a half hour just to chat about whatever they want to chat about.
Kurt Elster: And I charge $1.
Paul Reda: You charge $1 to make them do it, because too many people were ghosting you.
Kurt Elster: When I did it for free, people would book it and then they’d just reschedule endlessly, or just not show up at all, which got frustrating. So, I’m like, “All right. The moment they have to type in a credit card number they lose interest if they’re not serious,” so I charge a dollar for it.
Paul Reda: I was talking to my friend Ken about something we could do with those credit card numbers.
Kurt Elster: That’s not the kind of wire fraud. Common theme. You know, I think everybody wants to know what’s the sentiment, what’s the trend, how are people doing year over year? And my answer is always the same. It depends on category. It depends on timeline, like where are you in that journey?
Paul Reda: They want to know where they are in the race. They’re like, “Hey, so how’s everyone doing?” And it’s like, “Oh, we’re doing bad.” And then in their head they’re like, “But I’m doing good. I’m better than everyone.”
Kurt Elster: Run your own race, man. I learned that from Bluey. Run your own race. It depends on the industry and the category. 2020 through 2022, shooting fish in a barrel. The government’s handing out money and interest rates are like negative. It was just ridiculous. And so, certainly the consumer sentiment is not what it was, and so it’s harder to make a sale now than it was before. And so, I think year over year, the people who are positive are happy about it. But if you’re off-
Paul Reda: Generally, they are.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You know, if you’re off from that, I wouldn’t freak out. It’s pretty normal.
Paul Reda: If things have gotten harder for you in the last year-
Kurt Elster: You’re in good company.
Paul Reda: You’re probably average. You’re in with everyone else.
Kurt Elster: That’s one common theme. The increase in return fraud or chargeback fraud has come up several times, where it’s just customers who are bad actors and are like… You know, Amazon trained them that no one is checking on these returns.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Amazon’s like, “Yeah, whatever. It’s fine.”
Kurt Elster: Amazon, I could just stick a brick in a box and mail it back to them and they’re like, “All right, return granted. Done.” And so, people expecting that same treatment from small businesses on Shopify, and that’s frustrating. Or they’re like, “Oh, I got an empty box.” Please. That’s a common one.
And I think outside of that, everything was really about bespoke features, like I talked to a guy who was selling vintage Star Wars toys, which was really cool. I love that stuff. And he was talking about like, “All right, well, I’ve got current… How could I make point of sale work with a different currency? How could I make a make an offer button?” I thought that was kind of cool, do a make an offer button on a Shopify store.
Paul Reda: I think just have it… I mean, the jankiest way to do that, I think, is just popup an email form. It’s like do the back-in-stock form.
Kurt Elster: That was my suggestion. I was like… It’s really just a form.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Just have it pop up an email specifically for that product and be like, “50 bucks,” and that’s it. And then you could reply back to that email.
Kurt Elster: And send them a draft order. Draft order invoice is perfect for that. Or like people just are like, “Hey, just throw some the outside the box ideas on marketing at me.” Just trying to figure out, like, “Is there anything we should be trying that we’re not doing?” That kind of thing.
Paul Reda: But yeah, the problem with that is you would never say, “Do a newsletter.” So, they would never… If they weren’t doing a newsletter, they would never hear that then.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, you know, you don’t want to talk down to people. You don’t want to mansplain.
Paul Reda: A lot of the time, people that are asking for outside of the box ideas never tried the inside of the box ideas.
Kurt Elster: True. True. Yeah. All right, if you’re not sending a weekly newsletter, and you’re looking for ideas, there’s your low-hanging fruit. Figure that out. It keeps you top of mind. You’d be surprised at how effective that is.
You know, to your point about like, “Hey, you need the better photos,” I think leveling up your content more so than the theme, or apps, or features, or campaigns is the thing that people just tend to overlook. Hire a copywriter. Get really banging product descriptions.
Paul Reda: You know, it goes back, I love watching all those old Gordon Ramsey cook… All the fix-it shows where someone shows up in your business and fixes it. I love those shows. The Profit, Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, all of them.
Kurt Elster: What’s the one with the… Bar Rescue.
Paul Reda: Bar Rescue.
Kurt Elster: John Tapper. Show up, start yelling at you.
Paul Reda: And it’s always the ones where it’s like… Did you ever notice why like all the fries, why is every beef now like Wagyu beef, even though it’s not Wagyu beef, they’re lying to you. And it’s like all the fries come in cones now. Why do fries come in cones? And every… We don’t say olive oil. We say EVOO on the menu.
Kurt Elster: Is that what it is?
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s extra virgin olive oil, you dumb dumb.
Kurt Elster: I had no idea.
Paul Reda: And all that is is so that instead of charging you $6 for the burger, they can charge you $18 for the burger, because they just made it sound a lot nicer.
Kurt Elster: It’s the presentation.
Paul Reda: It’s the presentation. And so, that’s what your store needs to do. Your store is not just like buy this. It’s really more pay this price for this. You want them to go, “Wow, this is only 70 bucks? I’m getting a deal.” And so, you do that with ultra high-end, high quality photos. Ultra high-end content that sells the product. Going over the pool cue specs about all the cool materials the pool cue is made of so that they-
Kurt Elster: Telling a story.
Paul Reda: So they can justify in their head why they’re paying twice as much as they should for this thing. And then go, “Wow. This is worth it!” That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole friggin’ ballgame.
Kurt Elster: You’re right.
Paul Reda: But they don’t care about that.
Kurt Elster: Value is subjective.
Paul Reda: But the pixels are too dark.
Kurt Elster: Oh, my border colors are wrong! Like, “Sorry, that’s not changing your conversion rate. It just isn’t.” Pumping up this product description, that might have an impact.
Paul Reda: Getting baller ass photos in a light cube, and then other photos of people screaming in joy using the product, yeah, who cares about that?
Kurt Elster: People are like… Yeah, the reaction shots. They’re just losing their minds. Are these people all right?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Every photo on your store should look like a YouTube thumbnail.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And when I suggest that the answer is always, “Nobody reads.”
Paul Reda: Oh, okay.
Kurt Elster: All right. We’ll end it there. All right. Thank you for listening. Join our Facebook group. Leave a review. Whatever it takes. Whatever you need.
Paul Reda: Tell everyone how good we are. On the street. Just stand on the street corner screaming about how good we are.
Kurt Elster: And if you got a friend who needs to be done with their BigCommerce store, Ethercycle dot com. Refer them to us. I would love it. Thank you so much.