Dive deep into the Black Friday frenzy + AMA
Black Friday 2023 wasn't just big – it was record-breaking, with Shopify merchants alone pulling in a whopping $4.1 billion in sales.
Dive deep into the Black Friday frenzy, dissecting the data and sharing real-world insights from the Shopify ecosystem. From Adobe Analytics to Shopify's own press release, we cover it all.
Key Highlights:
Kurt Elster:
You buy anything on Black Friday?
Paul Reda:
Yes. I bought 4K Blu-rays. I dunno if you heard about these. You
Kurt Elster:
Bought 4,000 Blu-rays.
Paul Reda:
I bought 4,000 Blu-rays. Yeah, that must've
Kurt Elster:
Been expensive.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, I added a new wing onto my house. I had to do some excavation. Didn't file a thing with the city.
Kurt Elster:
I'm not in a permits
Paul Reda:
Either and so I just like they're
Kurt Elster:
Taking away my
Paul Reda:
Freedoms. I took a jackhammer to a sidewall of my basement and just build another room under my yard. Yeah, because it's safe.
Kurt Elster:
The neighbors will love it.
Paul Reda:
Yeah. No, I bought a bunch of 4K Blu-rays. I bought Matrix, all the matrixes. One of those is good. Bought four. Indiana Jones Box set. Three of those three. Those are good. I bought the Godfather Trilogy. Two of those are good.
Kurt Elster:
The only thing I bought was a washing machine because mine after seven years decided that it had enough.
Paul Reda:
Did you go to APTT for that?
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, I did actually buy it from APTT Electronics.
Paul Reda:
Because you're a Chicago suburban dad. Yeah.
Kurt Elster:
The dream is to buy an appliance at aptt if you're a dad in the Chicago sun.
Paul Reda:
Yeah. If you don't live around here, you don't know the absolute mental hold APTT holds on all men over the age of 40. That's all they want is to go to aptt. It's like Dad amusement park.
Kurt Elster:
It is a very cool store and independent, but I don't love it's low credit. I actually do all my app shopping online. They will deliver my on sale washing machine.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, you got to go to to aptt.
Kurt Elster:
There's a lot of art and fountains.
Paul Reda:
There's different stores inside of it that are all owned by aptt.
Kurt Elster:
It is quite the thing.
Paul Reda:
I truly think that the reason it holds such a mental hold is because they let you haggle a little and you always win. They just go, you just go, Hey, come on. You give me a better deal on this. Let's work with me. And then they'll go, okay and take off 10% and you're like, yes, and you feel like you've won
Kurt Elster:
No greater dopamine hit than that. Yeah. Everything's at full retail and you're like, alright, what can you do for me? They're like, I'll be right back. And then it's just like it's 10% off. You add the sales tax on there and it cost the same, the
Paul Reda:
Same amount. Yeah, but you're always like, I got a good deal on it. Oh, I got a good deal. Every man over the age of 40 that lives in Cook and Lake County has said the sentence, I got a great deal on it and apt every single one.
Kurt Elster:
That's like a Midwestern modesty thing. Look what I bought, comma, I got a good deal on it. That's like the apology for owning it. Whatever it is. It looks like a lot of people made Black Friday purchases.
Paul Reda:
Sounds like a lot of people got a lot of great deals. That's it though. You only by the washer dryer. Come on.
Kurt Elster:
I know I'm lame.
Paul Reda:
Well, we knew that
Kurt Elster:
In the past I've bought more stuff. I dunno. This year my wife did the gift shopping for the kids and the gift shopping I did was for her. I bought entirely used items off eBay. Not because this is some great moral declaration, just she's into vintage Barbie this year and so I bought some vintage Barbies kind of into Barbie. Now
Paul Reda:
You are really into Barbie.
Kurt Elster:
I didn't expect that to happen, but my wife was like, look, a bunch of vintage toys are in our house now. I'm like, oh
Paul Reda:
Kurt plays with Barbies
Kurt Elster:
Might be good for me. I mean I have some Robocop figures. I made fight with her Barbies and yeah, okay, you enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. She did not. She was like, that's nice, now go put that away. Oh
Paul Reda:
Yeah, but Black Friday was banging according to all analytics we have.
Kurt Elster:
Yes. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so we got Adobe Analytics, Shopify's for general e-Commerce, Shopify's own press release for their Black Friday analytics and some anecdotal stuff like Jonathan Palm Loop returns shared some things. We've got our own client data that we can look at and also these economic reports, things are going strong GDP up and then they're like, oh, we revised it. It's actually better than we thought when we thought it was good. Quite incredible. We had that early indicator in October that GDP was strong and so that was like, alright, that's a good indicator that make November Black Friday could be good. And sure enough, not only it was good, it was better than the previous year. We have again, set records here and as an anecdote, someone in our Facebook group, Chris had shared for a small biz, I think we won Black Friday.
Seriously, I hope you're all crushing it. I knew Advantage Plus campaigns would do amazing short term, but they're scaling to the moon for us, so not only we saw people with great blended ROAS numbers. We're going to talk to Sean Reyes from Shock Surplus in December and I think he said they were doing 20 x blended roas. So PPC ads can work their back. They're working. Adobe Analytics said we're seven and a half percent increase from previous year's sales for I think it's for US sales, 71 billion global online sales. It was like four out of five is all on mobile and buy now pay later up. Alright. That's where we're getting our credit from. BNPL. I don't love that, but also a sign that if you're not offering installment payments, consider it.
Paul Reda:
Yeah. Well and if 80% of sales are on mobile, the default version of your website is your mobile website.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, you're right. That's version one. Desktop's version two,
Paul Reda:
Confidential to the client that I figured out last week. They were looking on their website on their 25 60 by 1600 widescreen monitor and being full screen and it being like, oh, it looks a little off here.
Kurt Elster:
You're in the minority here. My
Paul Reda:
Land, no one in the history of the world has ever looked at this website like that. Only you. Yeah, I
Kurt Elster:
Don't get doing that. You a giant eight K monitor, full screen, the browser.
Paul Reda:
Why do clients love getting giant ultra wide screen eight K monitors and then looking at their site, full screen on it. Why do they love doing that?
Kurt Elster:
I'm switching to exclusively using an old 11 inch MacBook. Eric. Yeah,
Paul Reda:
I don't get
Kurt Elster:
It. I'm going to have to squint Adobe's analytics numbers. Were like all that's like the
Paul Reda:
World. Yeah,
Kurt Elster:
It was 9.8 billion in the US up 7.5%, 71 billion global and then we could break it down to what the Shopify platform did from their press release. 22% increase in sales over 2022, same period. Average cart price, $110. That's a pretty good A OV one 10 and then they said top selling countries, us, uk, Canada. Well that makes sense. I assume that's
Paul Reda:
Where Shopify penetration and then Jonathan from Loop Returns, they have 3,100 shops with year over year sales order volume up 12% average order value up 3%. So really no move there,
Kurt Elster:
But it was 1 23 which so that kind of backs up
Paul Reda:
Shopify. That's bigger than Shopify's. I feel like if you have loop returns running, you're kind of the s and p 500 of Shopify. You're a much better cohort than just all Shopify
Kurt Elster:
Stores at the moment. I need a third party app to help manage the volume of my returns indicative of that. I have quite a few orders. Yeah, it was kind of interesting. Some people broke it out by vertical and Mr. Poma Loop did as well where they had cosmetics up 20 jewelry up, 17 apparel up, 15 apparel is the one we saw or if the apparel brands did well and then he said the challenging verticals, electronics, footwear, swimwear, swimwear was really kind of unchanged.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, swimwear is unchanged. I think electronics is, everyone still had some free cash burning a hole in their pocket last year.
Kurt Elster:
I bought a lot of dumb gadgets is what
Paul Reda:
I'm saying. Gadgets. Gadgets last longer. Gadgets are kind of a capital investment. You're not buying a new TV every year. It's going to be down
Kurt Elster:
My TV's from 2019 and still has smoke stains on it. I forgot to open the flu on the fireplace and anyone knows how to get soot off a television, just let me know. So yeah, a strong year within our clients where I took top 20 stores, most of them were plus and looked at this, it was similar. It tracked with this, I think for sure the apparel stores were around this consistently. We saw this with, I don't know that I necessarily saw these results with cosmetics. I don't think we have any electronics people. I wish we did. I'd love to do an electronic store.
Paul Reda:
We got that application yesterday for the store with one product.
Kurt Elster:
Oh, I was thrilled. I
Paul Reda:
Was so excited. I want to do a store with one product so bad
Kurt Elster:
And it was electronics. Yeah. Yeah, that would be fun. The winner among our clients, we had moved Navage Nasal Care. It's a pressure washer for your Yeah, I'm sure they love that description, but we're
Paul Reda:
Going to keep using it. I
Kurt Elster:
Love Netty pots. I like rinsing out my sinuses. I'm one of those people so I think this is a great product. We moved them for BigCommerce to Shopify and they're Black Friday sales among everybody we worked with. They were the winner.
Paul Reda:
And you talked to Ezra Firestone this morning?
Kurt Elster:
Esther Firestone. I did. I talked to 'em about it and I said, what do you credit to? And he said, Hey, better platform.
Paul Reda:
Because we moved them on to Shopify. They were on BigCommerce last
Kurt Elster:
Year. They went from BigCommerce to Shopify and did custom theme and then if you're doing that, okay, a bunch of content gets updated. I think the offer was probably good. It was like, Hey, here's a bundle. Here's our starter kit or whatever it was at x percent off. It wasn't a huge percentage. So fundamentally by not doing storewide sale, you end up controlling that average order value and then I think we'll talk about successful offers and then they were more sophisticated. They sent more emails this year than in times past, but that led to all those things combined. They were of everybody we worked with, they just had just huge, huge numbers. I was really impressed with that and thrilled. We put so much effort into it
Paul Reda:
Over the last six months and they got new owners, so the new owners must be jumping for joy. I would hope I
Kurt Elster:
Would. One would think so of the offers I don't think free gift did as well this year.
Paul Reda:
I remember you mentioning that to me. Free gift didn't do well, but
Kurt Elster:
I think free gift still works. I think it just didn't
Paul Reda:
Work as well. Didn it as well as we thought, but a lot of the people we talked to that were doing free gift, were using it to clear out unsold inventory.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, you're overstocked on something that's a free gift now
Paul Reda:
Let's be honest. It was a product that no one wanted to buy anyway and so adding it on as a free gift isn't really as big of a mover as it could have been.
Kurt Elster:
Right? Yeah. When we've seen free gift really rock is when it's like this is a limited edition product that you can only get as a free gift. Yeah.
Paul Reda:
It needs to be exclusive as the free gift a thing no one ever has ever seen before. Not here's crap that's been on our store for a year that no one bought. Guess what? You could have one for free now. Oh thanks.
Kurt Elster:
If you did storewide sale, you did well except you had to do, you phrase it as up to 60% off and really it like 20, 40, 60, 60
Paul Reda:
When you spend more than $200 or something.
Kurt Elster:
I like, well actually you bring up tiered discount. I love tiered discount because anytime I'm discounting, I want to make sure that average order value's not killing you. Yeah, not killing me. And all these stores I looked at, the ones where they were up year over year always had average order value was up over the previous year. Conversion rate was consistently up, meaning people wanted this offer and so then you would see order revenue up the interior discount. Not tough to do in Shopify with an automatic discount if a product discount applies, if you like two product discounts, 20% and 40% and they both apply to a product, it doesn't combine them. It takes the higher of the two makes it. You just set one that's like this discount starts when you spend a hundred. This one starts when you spend one 50 and that's like 20 versus 40% and so people will spend more to get the bigger discount and so you really offset some of that eating up that profit by just juicing A-O-V-L-T-V and overall revenue spend. Good stuff. I think for navage that worked in that. It was like, hey, you got to buy this bundle. You're buying the full,
Paul Reda:
I think the bundle, the full product going back, why did I buy four Indiana Jones movies when only three of them are good? Because it was the bundle bundle and the bundle was cheaper and it's hard. I bought Jurassic Park, just Jurassic Park one even though Jurassic Park three underrated is pretty good.
Kurt Elster:
Two is the bad one. Natural
Paul Reda:
Trilogy, well two and then all the recent ones are also bad, but the problem is they want to sell me five and I'm not paying for five to get two. I'll pay for four to get three of 'em. That's also currently a problem with Ghostbusters in that they want to give me four Ghostbusters movies when only two of them are okay in any way. Ghostbusters two I don't think is that bad.
Kurt Elster:
I think you treat these promos as a two-sided deal. I'm going to give you a discount, you're going to spend more.
Paul Reda:
I word it the other way. You spend more and I'll give you a better discount. Alright,
Kurt Elster:
We'll take that. You're right. In the past this could be a pain to do on Shopify, but now automatic discount, you could just say, Hey, to qualify they have to buy three items from this collection. Okay, great. Well people can now have a choose your own adventure bundle like BOGO teas. That's a bundle, isn't it? Right, and that juices average order value and scripts is going away, but they gave us native bundles now. So you install the Shopify bundles app and then you could create, you say, all right, group these together. This is the discount. So much easier to do these things now on Shopify than in the past. I like those.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, I think if you could really key it in, so it's like, well, I know people are going to spend normally a hundred dollars on this site, so you set the next tier of discount at one 20 or something like that and if you get that locked in, they're not going to walk away from spending an extra 20 bucks to get the bonus discount. They're going to do that all day long. So if you could key in the amount line and the percentages so that they are spending more money, feel like they're getting a better deal, but in the end actually giving you more money, that is where the magic really lies.
Kurt Elster:
And so you could, and then if you're overstocked on something, I could throw a free gift in there, spend X to get X discount or do a bundle. I think the mistake people can make, and I almost started to slip into it, was having too many offers where it gets confusing.
Paul Reda:
You really want to keep it simple.
Kurt Elster:
If I can't describe this in a subject line so narrow it fits on my iPhone, that's a problem.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, you got to keep it simple. I remember it was something a couple of weeks ago. A lot of times you don't know this because you don't know about sport, you know about basketball. Have you heard of basketball? Yeah. Oh, okay, good. I
Kurt Elster:
Like the Lakers.
Paul Reda:
That's only because of an HBO O show. You like the eighties Lakers.
Kurt Elster:
Yes.
Paul Reda:
I
Kurt Elster:
Like the bulls too. The nineties
Paul Reda:
Bulls. The Timberwolves had a lot of teams will have a thing where you're like, you'll get a free thing if the team scores a hundred points and the Timberwolves had some insane one where it's like, okay, well if the Timberwolves score 90 and the other team scores 80, you could get 10% off at the gas station when you also buy $20 worth. It was just
Kurt Elster:
Like, yeah, halfway into that, my eyes glazed
Paul Reda:
Over. It's just like this is the most complex dumb giveaway in the world. If the Bulls game, it used to literally be, if the bull score a hundred points, you get a free Big Mac. That was it. There you go. Easy.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, if you can't explain it as quickly as that, the promo is too complicated.
Paul Reda:
So don't be the timber wolves.
Kurt Elster:
What else? Any other Black Friday learnings.
Paul Reda:
The Oppenheimer 4K just came out and Christopher Nolan was at some event and he was just like, you should buy Oppenheimer on 4K, so a streaming service can't take it away from you one day. And that triggered everyone. They sold out. They didn't print enough of the discs of this best picture winner or will be nominee made hundreds of millions of dollars. They didn't make enough of the discs. It sold so well,
Kurt Elster:
So we had celebrity endorsement and sub scarcity.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster:
Was there a free gift with purchase?
Paul Reda:
There was a free gift with purchase. You get a free mini of a little boy or well it's like two. Did you get the little boy and then you got to buy two. It's like a variant cover for a nineties comic. You got to buy both in order to get both the toys. Oh,
Kurt Elster:
The variant covers are a huge deal. Now I've heard from a few people who sell comic books, they'll do live selling for these variant covers. It's a whole thing. Yeah. Okay. I don't think we could do any more reading of numbers on Black Friday. We do have, we've got some a questions from people in the Facebook group if you want to do that for 20 minutes.
Paul Reda:
Alright. Jason wants to know how often should a business communicate with customers, especially if the product is purchased once or twice a year. If is once a month reasonable without risking being blocked or ignored. That's too much. I'm going to say that's too much depending on what you got to say.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, this one is so
Paul Reda:
Very open-ended. I can see a scenario where it is a special. Alright, so how about a world where I only buy this thing once a year. However, it is a special item that changes on a year to year basis and is reconfigured every year, but I buy it every year once a year. Okay. Maybe you do want to email those people as you walk them through the process of it being changed and updated every year and that gets them excited for the big release when it finally comes out once a year there I could see that being fine, but if it's like I buy 200 rolls of toilet paper and now they're going to email me once a month about my toilet paper purchase, leave me alone.
Kurt Elster:
Alright, how about this? Five years ago I bought a bathroom vanity from a website. I think it was Vanities Depot. There you go. Free plug if you need a bathroom vanity. They emailed me yesterday. I don't know. There's no way I stayed on that newsletter or I think they just never emailed me. I was baffled. I got an email for the first time from them that was like, Hey, sales been extended. What in case of just replacement vanities.
Paul Reda:
That's my favorite Black Friday thing is inevitably I have to end up making accounts on a lot of our clients' stores, so I get Black Friday emails from our clients and so I would never get emails from any of them and then all of a sudden I'm getting inundated with emails and the best is when a client we last spoke to two years ago, all of a sudden I get an email from their email list on Black Friday and I'm like, what? I've been on this email list for two years and you've decided to send one Black Friday email finally after two years I haven't heard from you.
Kurt Elster:
And then what'd you do with that email? Deleted
Paul Reda:
It immediately and unsubscribed.
Kurt Elster:
Okay, that's the thing you want to avoid. That is the danger.
Paul Reda:
That's true
Kurt Elster:
To not emailing people
Paul Reda:
King. Never email me. The problem is if you never email them and then email them once they go, what the hell is this? And then delete it right away and unsubscribe
Kurt Elster:
In the what now? Vanity Depot, what is this? Yeah, it took me a moment to like, how am I on this? I dunno. I would just say safe answer shoot for once a month, but if the content isn't relevant, if you really can't come up with anything, that's the thing
Paul Reda:
Is
Kurt Elster:
Don't send it.
Paul Reda:
It's hard one, it's easy for us to say don't do it unless the content is relevant and interesting,
Kurt Elster:
But it's a low
Paul Reda:
Bar unfortunately. Also, you don't know if your content is relevant or interesting. It's your store and you are completely locked into it. You are looking at it on a 2,500 wide monitor going, yeah, this is how it looks because you
Kurt Elster:
Are, that's the customer's want. Yeah, because
Paul Reda:
You're just locked in the box so you think Of course. That's interesting. You're too close to it. Yeah. You have no idea.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah. It's easy for me to say, Hey, just make some content and it should be good. And also send that weekly, monthly to weekly. What's the problem? Just
Paul Reda:
Do good. Just send them a good email once a month. I don't understand what's so hard about that. Just
Kurt Elster:
Send 'em the good stuff. Yeah, it's a hard thing to force, but you are disadvantaging your business and the easiest marketing channel you have by not trying to work out emails you could send at least monthly.
Paul Reda:
I think it the, yeah, I'm not happy about getting an email once a month, but I don't think an email once a month is going to make people go like, ah, get out of here and get mad at you
Kurt Elster:
When we're at Black Friday, November, maybe your normal cadence is like four to six emails a month, whatever your normal cadence is,
Paul Reda:
That's definitely too many by
Kurt Elster:
November. I want double it. I want 10 to 12 just, and if you never send emails, just warm it up. Just start September, October 1st, then start coming up with reasons or if you've sent emails in the past, look at what's worked in the past. Look at customer questions, try and come up with anything. The email in no way, no one's expecting. Perfect. It just has to be vaguely relevant. It has to be relevant enough that I don't make the effort to unsubscribe. If it's semi relevant, I'm just going to delete it, not unsubscribe. All right. I think we handled that one. Mel asks, what are effective marketing ideas for small businesses that lack the budget for extensive advertising and choose not to use discounts, free gift with purchase. Use your newsletter. You don't want to spend on PPC and alright, you said no extensive budget. I'd still be doing remarketing ads. Oh yeah. And then in November, just extend the length of the window to 180 days.
Paul Reda:
And I still think doing not quite discounts, but if you can do bundles, do bundles where the bundle ends up being 15% less or 20% less than the individual price of all those items individually kind of not technically a discount, but also we
Kurt Elster:
Obfuscate the
Paul Reda:
Discount and so then it's like people feel like they're getting a deal. Your average order value goes up, everyone wins.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah. That's what I would do. Otherwise you could try a different value add. It's like, oh well we'll do a one-to-one consultation call for some brands for some products that can make sense. Maybe there's a digital download you add to it if makes sense. That's a great
Paul Reda:
One. Digital download that's free money.
Kurt Elster:
Create it once and then you just keep adding that to the orders. That's a free gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, that's how I'd handle it.
Paul Reda:
Robert wants to know, many gurus suggest hammering all channels 20 times a day. Don't do that. While I probably agree that's better for organic reach, those of us with limited budgets are also likely to have to be efficient with our time. Our relentless X and IG posts, it's Twitter, don't call it x IG posts. Really time well spent or should we focus almost entirely on short form video?
Kurt Elster:
This is a tough one. A don't bother with Twitter.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, who caress. Do not use Twitter. It is a complete waste of your time for
Kurt Elster:
Advertising a consumer product. I don't think Twitter's ever been useful.
Paul Reda:
No, never.
Kurt Elster:
The Facebook ads meta more consumer driven social networks. So alright, immediately if we're throwing out some social networks, LinkedIn is not going to be relevant to you. Twitter's probably not relevant to you. Facebook and meta are, TikTok is, I think this and you're limited on time. The solution here is to repurpose content. Reuse content. Yeah. This
Paul Reda:
Thing, well, our relentless IG posts really time well spent or should we focus on short form video? TikTok and Instagram, they both got essentially the same product. Reels. Yeah, reels. It's all the same thing. If
Kurt Elster:
I have one successful portrait video, that's an Instagram story, that's a reel that can be posted to Instagram and Facebook that and that's my TikTok story
Paul Reda:
And it's an Instagram or my TikTok dated and those are all ads that you are promoting
Kurt Elster:
And then yeah, I could promote those as sponsored posts. That seems pretty
Paul Reda:
Good. Yeah. Why is it all either or? It's like you got to think about stop thinking about the channel, think about the ad deliverable that you're creating and then how that deliverable can apply to all of the channels. So really you're only making one thing and then pushing it out. Not this thing where it's like, well I got to make an Instagram reel and I got to make a T TikTok video and I got to make a Twitter post and I got to make this kind of thing. No, just make one thing and then just push it all out everywhere.
Kurt Elster:
Now video content is much more time consuming to create versus like, I made a single image, I made a single text post. And so I think if you have a topic that works, a subject that works, once you've identified that hit, alright, can I recreate that? Can I turn that into other forms? Can I repurpose this? Anything you could do to create additional successful content, and I think people highly resistant to reposting, but who's going to remember something you posted six months ago or it's not necessarily that you have to repost it, remake it, same concept, but the hard part was the first time you came up with the idea and shot it. We'll always two and a half times as long as when you try to redo it now you know what you're looking for. You move through it much faster as I think the other option here is try to be consistent with the content. Have one setup and just really limit barriers to action for yourself. You need a little content studio plus. I mean, at the same time, if you don't love it, it's tough. Some people love doing this
Paul Reda:
Stuff. Yeah, no, not good for me. Don't put me in charge of that.
Kurt Elster:
I enjoy it, but I could see where it could quickly turn into a grind. Trevor asks, is it feasible to have a multi-brand cart that allows for one checkout process across two different Shopify sites?
Paul Reda:
No. Yeah, don't do
Kurt Elster:
That. I'm sure it's plausible where you could make this work. It will be a fragile nightmare. Don't do it.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, you do some API bullshit where
Kurt Elster:
You need a middleware connector.
Paul Reda:
Well, it's like one store is like the base store is the store that has the checkout and then the other store takes you to cart and when you click add to cart, you hijack the add to cart to do an API call. Well, okay, so then all the products need to be on the store with the checkout from both stores need to be on the checkout store. The other store you hijack the add to cart click and you do an API call and inject and tell what products to add to the cart, to the checkout store and then push them into that checkout and then some. I
Kurt Elster:
Get why people, this is not the first time I've heard this question. It's
Paul Reda:
A terrible idea.
Kurt Elster:
I don't know why you want to do this alternative. The way you could misuse Shopify markets to do this because Shopify markets will let you show different content in the theme depending on what the heck, what the sub-domain is, so what country we're in, or if they're a B2B customer, I bet you could misuse that to pull this off. So it's not multiple stores, it's one store, but it can have considerably different content inside the theme. Maybe like, alright, that's a more realistic alternative to what you're trying to do here. Or if it's just like, Hey, we want different brands or different looks but want different cart. Okay. Theme customization where change styles, depending on URL or what I'm looking at.
Paul Reda:
He's working on the Hardee's slash Carl's Jr account.
Kurt Elster:
Well I think for that it's a switcher. Are you a Hardee's man or a Carl's Jr. Man. Which one is ours? Hardee's.
Paul Reda:
We are in Hardee's territory. Yeah, Carl's Jr. Is like West Coast. Okay.
Kurt Elster:
I've never been to either. No.
Paul Reda:
I have higher standards for myself. I say as I wear my work hoodie and haven't shaved in a week.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, that hoodie does not leave this office because our
Paul Reda:
Office sometimes it's 60 degrees just randomly and we can't control
Kurt Elster:
It. Yeah, a little unpredictable weather in here.
Paul Reda:
James wants to know, are there any updated guides on adding third party scripts to Shopify's new checkout? Especially for services like Microsoft Clarity? I don't know. Tell me Kurt.
Kurt Elster:
No, I'd love to know. Oh
Paul Reda:
Geez.
Kurt Elster:
I think the right answer here is you're supposed to use, oh shoot, what's it called? Shopify something
Paul Reda:
Shop something.
Kurt Elster:
Shopify pixels. Yeah.
Paul Reda:
Shop pixel
Kurt Elster:
Pixels. Shopify Pixel. Pixel Fi. No customer events I think is the name of the feature, but Shopify has a feature for handling scripts, but he's not particularly user-friendly. You have to be a developer to be able to mess with this thing. I think that's how you're supposed to do it. I would love the answer to this. It's like, okay, what is just the consistent, straightforward way? If I want my heat mapping pixel to fire inside the checkout in the past if I had access to checkout liquid and it past done, I don't anymore.
Paul Reda:
See, the problem with that is the point of heat mapping is to expose issues. Troublemakers, well issues in the user interface. We don't control the user interface in the checkout. I could see, so what do we gain from that? We see a thing that Shopify screwed up in the checkout and is confusing users and we go, well guess that's broken and then we can't do anything. That's
Kurt Elster:
A good point. Are you torturing yourself here?
Paul Reda:
Yeah, Shopify's not going to let us change it. And it
Kurt Elster:
Would be interesting that one page versus three page, give me a heat map and on the one page scroll map, how far do they consistently get through that page? And then is it payment, is it, or is it shipping? That is the stopping point. Oh now I want to do it.
Paul Reda:
Alright.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, I just talked myself into it. James, thanks for bringing that up. So jury's out on that one.
Paul Reda:
Monica wants to know, does anyone know if there's an option to add a checkbox to the checkout process or when items get put on the cart that I can use to say quote, I'm aware this is a digital product and no physical product will be emailed to me. You answered this in the Facebook group already. I did. And your answer was right. A lot of themes have a terms and conditions box.
Kurt Elster:
I agree to terms
Paul Reda:
It's on the cart page and you could turn it on and off in the theme settings. They also usually have something in languages where you could change languages, you could change the label on things instead of being like go to checkout, you could change to proceed to checkout like the wording of various elements and you can sometimes change the wording of that box. So fingers crossed if everything works, you could go into your theme, turn on the terms and conditions box on the cart, go into your languages, find the label for that and change it to, I'm aware this is a digital product. Boom. Problem solved. If your theme does not have those abilities, you got to get someone, but they could totally put a checkbox in your cart page form that would do that. But you got to find someone who knows how to add form elements and knows how to make those form elements. Block the submission of the form unless it's checked.
Kurt Elster:
It is. For a competent theme developer,
Paul Reda:
It's very fast. It's easy.
Kurt Elster:
This one's a walk in the
Paul Reda:
Park. It's easy for someone who knows what they're doing, but chances are you don't know what
Kurt Elster:
You're doing. Yeah, and there are apps that'll do it. I found one will do it. I would recommend Skip an app on this one.
Paul Reda:
Skip an app. Yeah. Oh, please skip
Kurt Elster:
An app. Pay for this one as a theme customization or ideally the theme supports it already. We got some homepage design questions. Max asks are hero images and carousels above the folds still considered ineffective? Why does this break people's brain?
Paul Reda:
Because
Kurt Elster:
No one wants to give up carousels
Paul Reda:
Because they see people doing it's alright,
Kurt Elster:
But major retailers aren't doing it particularly anymore
Paul Reda:
In the NFL how everyone punts on fourth down. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I know. Even though consistently the math has shown for over multiple decades, you should almost never punt on fourth down. You should always go for it. And even though the math is settled, always go for it. On fourth down, it is only slightly increased that teams now go forward on fourth down maybe like 15% of the time because no one wants to be the guy that goes forward on fourth down all the time. Same thing with shooting free throws in basketball. The best way to shoot a free throw in basketball is unquote granny style where you put the ball between your knees and throw it up like this. Oh really? Yes, it's shown that's the best way to do it. That consistently no one's going to do that because you look
Kurt Elster:
Stupid. Well, because you named it granny style. Well, if you call that going beast mode, then that's how everybody would
Paul Reda:
Shoot. So it's like no one wants to be the guy that gets rid of the carousel and then because of random reasons outside of your control, revenue went down 10% last month. It's going to be like you got rid of the carousel.
Kurt Elster:
So this is an easy one to split test and to see in screen recordings. People only ever see the first slide. The reason carousels get used is because it's an easy way to settle arguments on what should be featured on the homepage. What's
Paul Reda:
The most important thing? Well, we'll add it to the carousel. The
Kurt Elster:
Carousel means, oh, I don't have to make a hard decision. I can just jam whatever nonsense. Like 10 slides in there and now everything's important.
Paul Reda:
And it's so funny that you mentioned that because it just crossed my mind. Now we've had clients that don't run their stores in the most efficient manner and have a lot of internal strife and power grabs.
Kurt Elster:
Oh, that's the worst.
Paul Reda:
The internal power grabs and all of those stores consistently have homepage slideshows with six things in them, seven things in them. It's like, oh yeah,
Kurt Elster:
Yeah. It's seven different people going, this is what needs to be in there. Yeah. Here's silly about it. Over the last 10 years, all experiences move to infinite gazing, pool of forever scrolling, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all of them. Twitter trained. You
Paul Reda:
Just keep going. You're just going
Kurt Elster:
Down. You just keep scrolling my man. None of them are like go left to right or my favorite. I'm just going to stare at this for five seconds until advances to the next slide. Who do we think is doing that? Who does that? No, no one's doing that. So it's like you can have as much as you want, just stack it so they can scroll through it. That's all we're saying. The carousel just hides stuff. That's why it's ineffective
Paul Reda:
Above the fold. It's got to get above the fold. People don't want to to scroll. Even though every single social media site that every single human spends 90% of their goddamn day on, they're just scrolling all day long. But when they get to my website, they forgot how to scroll. They don't know how to do that. It's got to be able to fold. Holy shit, blow my brains out.
Kurt Elster:
How many offers do you have? Right? Even if I'm stacking individual images, I could still do three offers. If this is, I could show three offers. I don't think it's a problem. I could come up with layouts that do this
Paul Reda:
Well and they're like and above the fold. So I'm asking a question above the fold. I care about the fold, this amorphous thing that doesn't really exist. Also, I need a hero image
Kurt Elster:
Here. He says hero images and carousels.
Paul Reda:
So the hero image is huge. It takes up most of the space above the fold. Why are you pushing more stuff below the fold if you care about the fold? It doesn't make any sense.
Kurt Elster:
No, no it doesn't. Does it?
Paul Reda:
You know what, and when I read this question, I was like, what is Amazon doing right now? What is Amazon doing at this second? And I went on Amazon's website and it did have a hero image on Amazon's website. Do you know how big that hero image was? No. It was like six to one aspect ratio. It was like maybe 200 pixels high. It's a banner. 1200. It was a banner. It was not a quote hero image. It was nothing. And no one ever makes one that size. It's always got to be these giant 16 by nine things.
Kurt Elster:
They want the cover image where it looks like a poster. Yeah, it looks like a wallpaper.
Paul Reda:
It looks like a magazine. Those things that people read all the time.
Kurt Elster:
I like the homepage is a catalog. It should be a catalog. I think catalog layout is the way to go. When we looked
Paul Reda:
At, that's going to his next question. What are some alternate strategies for homepage design? You recommend just do a collection listing. Just show me the categories. Oh, you got four major categories of products. Get me into one of the categories as quickly as possible. Get me down the funnel as quickly as possible.
Kurt Elster:
Neck breaker tees, they have had the same website as far as I could tell, for at least three years. I've got no association to these people. You land on the site and it just says buy three, get one free. It's always some offer. And then below that is a grid of products. That is the whole homepage. That's it. The entire homepage's purpose is to be like, here's the offer, take it or leave it. This is what we got
Paul Reda:
In my head. The best possible performing homepage is a banner declaring, here is our cool new product. Here is the sale. We're currently having some important piece of temporary information that might change below that is either a collection grid of the products or a grid of the different categories of products to move people down in the funnel. That is it. I have no scientific evidence that that is the best homepage. No one will let me do it one day. Someone will let me do it and I will prove everyone wrong. I will never be hoisted upon my own home. I will receive no comeuppance. I will be right.
Kurt Elster:
I enjoy your confidence. But it tracks because it is straightforward, it is simple, it is understandable, and it's all offer. Everything takes you to a product or a category. That's all it's got to do. And I could see it at a glance, just scrolling through it versus hiding stuff. But yeah, like Walmart, best Buy, Amazon, target, crate and Barrel, Lowe's Home, all these sites. I went to 'em. That was how they're all set up. It wasn't a giant hero poster image with five slides. It was what you described. It was a short banner, a thin
Paul Reda:
Banner.
Kurt Elster:
A thin banner that was like, Hey, there's some stuff on sale. And then a series of tiles that were all featured promos, departments, offers or products. There wasn't an about page on any of them. Here's our story. That stuff could be valuable, obviously like a big box retailer.
Paul Reda:
No, very different. We talked, yeah, don't recon previous episodes, dude, we've talked about how important about pages are, but the reason about pages are important is because
Kurt Elster:
They don't know you.
Paul Reda:
They don't know you. And it's to build confidence in the store and telling your own story that can be integrated into the product page. It definitely doesn't need to be on the homepage.
Kurt Elster:
You just get them into the homepage is one job. Just get me shopping.
Paul Reda:
Get them to sign on the line, which is dotted. Why is it so hard to get them to that?
Kurt Elster:
Let's see. Alright, one final question. Very easy. Kate asks, what heat tracking or similar software do merchants favor for improving website conversion rates? You
Paul Reda:
Got opinions
Kurt Elster:
You can't beat Microsoft Clarity. It's free and it does everything. They're just put that script on your site. We're stealing your data, buddy. That's fine. I'll take that trade off. I'm not paying them. I like Clarity. I used to use, oh shoot, I even forgot the name of it already.
Paul Reda:
What was it?
Kurt Elster:
I think Heat was in the name.
Paul Reda:
Yeah, heat was in the name.
Kurt Elster:
Well, sorry
Paul Reda:
Guys. I don't know. There was a heat mapping tool that you liked a lot and then they super jacked up the
Kurt Elster:
Price. They didn't add any features. They took stuff out of the plan. So I was like, okay, we're done here. And Lucky Orange is popular. That's always been popular for Shopify stores. They just have an app. They make it easy. Do everything in your Shopify admin. But for me, clarity. So I'd say Clarity, lucky Orange. And there's probably another one with heat in the title.
Paul Reda:
I don't know. But don't use them.
Kurt Elster:
And that's it for today's episode. I hope everybody's Black Friday sale went well and it isn't over.
Paul Reda:
It's not over. People are buying. Get those last minute
Kurt Elster:
Gifts. You have another solid two weeks and now you don't have to lean on discounting. Just here is the last
Paul Reda:
Day. Get Yeah. Now they're scared to get the sale. They're running scared now
Kurt Elster:
Or the last day to get it in time for the holidays and here's left in stock. And so it's just scarcity urgency. And if you're feeling generous, you could do like, all right, we'll upgrade your shipping or we'll do free shipping over X. Yeah, there we did it. Another successful episode in the can. That's amazing.
Paul Reda:
Wow.
Kurt Elster:
We're so good at
Paul Reda:
This. It's like 500 weeks in a row. Who could top the streak? Nobody.
Kurt Elster:
We got, I've lined up a bunch of guests, we got some good stuff, some good people coming up
Paul Reda:
In December. You got to record those and I got to edit them so we can not work the last two weeks of the year.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, by December 15th. I'm not hearing from anybody until January 3rd.
Paul Reda:
I got to admit, on Sunday, I got the Sunday scaries. It was like we had Black Friday, it was now Sunday. And I was like, wait a minute, I got to go back to work. We're done. We're done. December is usually half-assed, but I was like, I got zero ass. It's over. I was really looking forward to my December off and society is making me work now and I can't.
Kurt Elster:
No, you've got to go till at least December 15th. Oh my God. Whatever the shipping deadlines are. Alright, we're out. I hope this was useful.
Paul Reda:
Alright, bye-Bye.