plus an LEGO Store teardown
In this episode, we discuss listener-suggested topics: bookkeeping, profitability, and pre-orders.
And then we tear down the official LEGO store.
Kurt Elster: Clapping with my Power Glove.
Paul Reda: I had a question for you. Now I forgot what it was. Oh, I would like to know more about the production history of the movie The Wizard. Because the Power Glove was not a Nintendo product, but The Wizard was clearly a Nintendo movie.
Kurt Elster: For people listening and not watching, I am in fact wearing a Nintendo Power Glove. It is my finest pandemic purchase.
Paul Reda: And Kurt watched The Wizard last week.
Kurt Elster: So, I actually did not end up watching The Wizard. Instead, we watched Super Mario Bros. I’ll get around to The Wizard, but I like hokey bad movies with the kids. It’s fun. But even The Wizard, I was like, “It’s too bad.” The thing’s basically a Power Glove, NES, and Universal Studios commercial rolled into one.
Paul Reda: Okay, but I guarantee you it’s better than Mario Bros.
Kurt Elster: Mario Bros. has good sets, good music, good actors, the story is incoherent. I really think it was like they had a script for something else, got the license from Nintendo for Mario Bros., and they just like, “Do a quick rewrite. We’ll make it work.” Trying to find that movie is impossible in this country, because the World Trade Center is in it and gets damaged, and so I assume that’s why it’s miraculously just unavailable anywhere in this country.
Paul Reda: That’s your hypothesis. Because-
Kurt Elster: That’s my hypothesis. I don’t know. I mean, I know it’s unavailable.
Paul Reda: And it is out on Blu-ray and various things in the UK. So-
Kurt Elster: And in other countries you can get it.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so it’s weird that it’s available in other countries but not in the US. That’s like a decision, that’s not like a music rights issue or whatever. Someone is choosing not to release it here.
Kurt Elster: And that’s a good… I think my hypothesis is good.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: Or alternatively, whoever has the license, you suspect it may be in the end Disney?
Paul Reda: I think Disney owns the rights to it, because they were part of the production, and one of the other companies that was part of the production went out of business, and all of its stuff was bought by Disney, so Disney owns at least two shares.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so they’re like, “Look, should we add the Mario Bros. movie to Disney Plus?” And Bob Iger’s like, “Let’s hold off on that.”
Paul Reda: Get The Million Dollar Duck up there, but we can’t have Super Mario.
Kurt Elster: The Million Dollar What?
Paul Reda: The Million Dollar Duck.
Kurt Elster: What’s that?
Paul Reda: It’s a bad, when Disney did bad ‘70s live action movies.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. The ‘70s live actions stuff, no bueno. Like The Navigator. My wife loves that movie.
Paul Reda: Are you talking about Flight of the Navigator?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, Flight of the Navigator.
Paul Reda: Which is from the ‘80s and is an all-time classic? How dare you. One of the greatest films ever made. I loved that movie when I was a kid.
Kurt Elster: That movie is trash.
Paul Reda: I watched it all the time. I had it on VHS recorded off of TV.
Kurt Elster: All right. Well, you can text my wife about it, because she feels similarly, and I only watched it as an adult, so I’m like, “What is going on?”
Paul Reda: Me and Julie actually text each other a lot about things that we privately like together and you make fun of.
Kurt Elster: No!
Paul Reda: Your wife and I-
Kurt Elster: Like Hamilton?
Paul Reda: … have like a little side text going.
Kurt Elster: No! Should we do this? Are we ready? Enough screwing around?
Paul Reda: Okay. Yeah, sure. Everyone wanted to know how my floor remodeling went-
Kurt Elster: All right. Give it to me.
Paul Reda: And my floors are very nice. I love them. My house is mostly done. In fact, the trash guys came and took all the trash we’d shoved in the garage out today, so I would say my house is 90% done. All that’s left is the terrible screen porch needs to be ripped out in the back.
Kurt Elster: I like that you had someone come out to look at this screen porch and the guy goes, “Not touching it.”
Paul Reda: Well, because he wasn’t like an actual construction guy. He was a landscaping guy, whatever. Oh, and I probably want to get the house rewired, because I tried to install an outlet and one of the neutral wires was hot and caused my sump pump to break or something. So, yeah, my house wiring, not so good.
Kurt Elster: Maybe you just let the neutral go to ground.
Paul Reda: Those are words.
Kurt Elster: All right. I think you need an electrician. On this episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we’re going to discuss some listener-suggested topics from our Insiders Facebook group. We’re gonna talk about bookkeeping for profitability. And then we’ll teardown the official LEGO store. I’m your host, Kurt Elster. Joining me today is my cohost and longtime friend, Paul Reda. Mr. Reda, how are you doing? Where you from? Where you located?
Paul Reda: I’m in our office, which you don’t come to anymore.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m terrified.
Paul Reda: It would be nice maybe if you would come here every once in a while.
Kurt Elster: I come once a week for like 20 minutes to get the mail, water my plants, and then I run out screaming and hyperventilating.
Paul Reda: The mall is bumping today. It is-
Kurt Elster: That’s not a good thing!
Paul Reda: It is packed out there.
Kurt Elster: Well, it’s been brutally hot in Chicago, and now finally it’s cooled off a little bit.
Paul Reda: It was a nice day today, but yeah, it is packed out there. Everyone’s wearing a mask, though.
Kurt Elster: I just got another mask I impulse bought from an Instagram ad. It was from… That’s pretty much my life now. It’s just impulse buying stuff off the internet. A little retail therapy. I got another one. But it was from a Shopify store, so that was nice.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: That’s all I got. All right. I did… I’m not my usual hammy self today, because I did a webinar for Shopify, for Shopify Compass, for an hour, and I wanted to nail it. It’s been a little while since they’ve asked me to do a speaking gig, and so I showed up prepared and pumped and a little anxious, and I did great. They said they’re gonna put up a replay for it. But yeah, it kind of… I can only be an extroverted psycho for so long a day, so I used up some of that energy in the webinar.
Paul Reda: I see you a lot and you seem to be an extroverted psycho for most of the day when I see you.
Kurt Elster: I see you’re getting lonely, as well. I’m ready to go back. Just the pandemic scares me.
Paul Reda: Come back. We sit in the office all day. It’s not like we interact with anyone.
Kurt Elster: And I got that cool sticker on the door to scare people away.
Paul Reda: That sticker, I didn’t want to say anything, it’s dumb as hell. I didn’t want to hurt your-
Kurt Elster: What does the sticker say?
Paul Reda: I don’t even remember. It’s like, “Rub a dub dub, wear a mask.” Like it’s so fucking stupid, and it’s like gold on our wood door, so you can’t even read it. Like you clearly were so fucking proud of yourself, and I didn’t want to be like… I didn’t want to just message you out of the blue and be like, “Hey, buddy. This thing is dumb as shit.”
Kurt Elster: Now I’m leaving it up there out of spite. Only for like a month. Then I’ll take it down out of shame.
Paul Reda: All right. There you go. Yeah, it’s like-
Kurt Elster: Spite will turn to shame.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s like your standing desk. When I made fun of your standing desk and then you realized you immediately hated it, but you kept it up for another week because I had made fun of you too much.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That was my spite desk. I mean, I was very clear. I told you it was a spite desk.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I was like, “This is gonna last one day.” And you’re like, “No it’s not! I’m gonna love it.” And then after-
Kurt Elster: I went in with the best intentions.
Paul Reda: And then after half an hour, quietly in your head you were like, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m built for sitting. It’s okay. All right, so someone in the Facebook group had said that they have been really interested lately in how to manage finances. What program do you use for managing expenses and profit? QuickBooks? How do we make this process easier and more streamlined? How do we look at cutting expenses and becoming profitable? Huh. Any thoughts here, Mr. Reda?
Paul Reda: I don’t know anything about this. I just don’t spend a lot of money, and then I just quietly don’t spend more money than I have, which is not a solution for people.
Kurt Elster: But that’s actually really good advice. I mean, live within your means. That’s what you said.
Paul Reda: But they’re talking about their business, and people were talking about Q4 is coming up, and in order to sell a bunch of stuff during Q4, I need to manufacture a bunch of stuff during Q3, and what if I don’t have the cash to do that? So, then Q4, I never end up selling a bunch of stuff, so then when the next Q3 rolls around, I don’t have the money to manufacture yet again. It’s like how do you get out of that trap? I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so you’re right. You really described the core problem with eCommerce, is you have to pay to acquire the inventory to sell the inventory, and then if you don’t have the inventory, you can’t sell it. How do you forecast it? If you buy too much, what happens? I will tell you right now, this is a problem for all eCommerce businesses that aren’t just pure drop shipping, and it is a problem at all sizes of eCommerce business. It is something you will gain a sense of over time. You could do inventory forecasting, but that is just kind of a core problem to be solved here.
The other question was more around the day-to-day operations, which really is bookkeeping. So, Shopify itself, if you wanted to, you could put in a cost of goods sold for all your products, and then you can get a pretty quick, like, “Okay, here is my profitability in my Shopify store.” So, that is a nice metric, a nice KPI to use to figure out how you’re doing at any given time period. But that won’t work well for accounting and logging it all.
I know a lot of people use QuickBooks. I think QuickBooks is a damnable tool. I don’t think it’s particularly good. And I don’t think doing your own bookkeeping is valuable as a business owner. I think that’s one of the first things you can outsource. We’ve been using for years, we use Bench. I really like Bench. It’s like web-based accounting software and there’s a human behind it who does your bookkeeping. So, it’s connected to our payment platforms. It pulls everything in. And they categorize it. If they don’t know how to categorize it, they ask you. They learn from it. And then the best part about this is at the end of the year, I just get a report that I hit forward on to my CPA, and then he replies back with, “Here’s your taxes.” That’s it. I never think about it. I don’t have to worry about it. And Bench, often months will go by where I don’t have to categorize anything. So, it’s just like my bookkeeping and our taxes, the whole thing’s on autopilot. I love it.
And we’ve been doing this for years now, so for that reason, I’m like just… If bookkeeping is a pain for you, you shouldn’t be doing it. Hire a bookkeeper, CPA, use Bench, get some of them to do it. And I got an affiliate link, because Bench works with Shopify. So, I’ll put my referral link in the show notes, and I don’t know quite what their offer is, but they phrased it as that you’ll receive up to $250 in savings. My guess is like you get a month free is really what happens.
But on being profitable, definitely use the cost of goods sold, but there’s a lot of… Because we’re in online businesses, there’s a lot of really practical ways to save money over time that you should do, and that we use. So, number one, once I have this setup as a calendar event so I remember to do it, once a year, usually in Q4, I review our credit card so I can’t… There’s stuff you signed up for and forgot that you can get rid of, so I’ll cancel a bunch of stuff, and then what’s leftover, anything I’m keeping, I will go through and try and sign up for it annually.
If you really want to go deep in the weeds and be a bargain hunter, every so often I will call some of the services we use and… Like your credit card, your internet service, I will call them up and be like, “Hey, I’ve been a customer for this long. I’ve never missed a payment. Anything you can do to help me lower my monthly bill?” And occasionally that actually works, like I knock $20 off our phone bill. I don’t know. And there’s services that will actually do… They call up and impersonate you and they’ll negotiate on our behalf. I think Billshark is one of those. I used Billshark and it didn’t work great. They reduced my Comcast bill, but I also ended up with a lot fewer channels. It wasn’t the best idea.
Paul Reda: Well, your bill got reduced.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. Because they reduced my service tier. That wasn’t great. The other thing, just like with the annual billing, you’re prepaying. Well, maybe you hire a Shopify developer, you’ve got people on your team that are contractors, 1099 contractors. Ask if you could prepay for a quarter, or six months, or a year. Whatever makes sense for you. And you will get a discount for it. Like 10% on someone you pay four figures a month, okay, in a year that’s considerable savings. So, all of this stuff adds up.
And then lastly, as you’re reviewing your expenses, the mindset to take, and we talked about this before, is expenses versus investments. Try and categorize your expenses as like, “Okay, this is an expense expense. This is an investment in my business.” So, once you do that, then the investments, those are the safe ones, and then the expenses, all right, what can do to reduce those costs or get rid of them? That is my financial advice. I’m not a CPA. Let’s be clear.
Paul Reda: Well, and this came up in the group since you wrote up our outline for this recording, was someone was asking about… There’s like a Shopify loan program that they got contacted about.
Kurt Elster: Shopify Capital.
Paul Reda: Shopify Capital. And everyone pretty much universally was like, “If you have a bank with a business account, they will give you a loan at a better interest rate than Shopify Capital.” Talk to me about that.
Kurt Elster: Okay. So, if we rephrase this-
Paul Reda: Because interest rates right now are nonexistent. They’re just handing out free money.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: It’s like Eddie Murphy in the white man sketch.
Kurt Elster: Is that an SNL throwback?
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. What else would it be?
Kurt Elster: Oh, I don’t know. Eddie Murphy is quite a prolific comedian, sir. He’s been in a few films. Such notable films as The Nutty Professor.
Paul Reda: No, Norbit.
Kurt Elster: Norbit. That’s his best?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I see. I really like Trading Places. I think that’s probably my favorite Eddie Murphy movie. That’s a lot of fun. Oh, so we’re talking about loans. Yeah, the previous question was hey, I’ve got… Really inventory forecasting creates issues with cashflow in an eCommerce business was the core issue there. And so, one of the solutions is loans, right? If you already know that you can sell the inventory, then getting a loan to buy the inventory is really in no way a bad idea. Leveraging debt, you should do carefully and sparingly, but in a business where you’re confident about how the business is operating, I’d be willing to take that bet. Especially, you’re right, given the current low interest rates.
And Shopify Capital is one option, but like PayPal Capital will give it to you. But ultimately these third party internet lenders probably, while they’re convenient, you probably won’t get as good an interest rate as if you just went to the bank where you have your business checking. They will often give you a lower rate, and especially if you use a local credit union, those guys… I don’t know what they do, but it’s like the lowest interest rates you can come up with. But I think as a tool, we have a line of business credit that we’ve never used, but I keep it for a rainy day, in case we need it. And same in my personal life, I keep a line of credit for… Well, because being an entrepreneur, you really don’t know what you’re going to make week to week, month to month. It could be wildly varied, so I’ve always kept this line of credit. So, I think absolutely secure a line of credit. Just because you secure it, you don’t have to use it, but definitely shop around and make sure you get a decent interest rate.
What’s really cool about Shopify Capital or PayPal Capital, the payments are automatic. They just deduct it out of the payments that your customers have made to you, so you never see the payment happen. It’s all automatic. There’s a lot of convenience there. I like that. We’ve had clients and merchants I’ve talked to, many who have used Shopify Capital or similar solutions.
Paul Reda: My thought, I’m obviously not as into the finance aspect of all of this, a lot of this seemed to have been centered around, in the question, was centered around cutting expenses, and I’m more into increasing margins.
Kurt Elster: Yes!
Paul Reda: Like my wife, when she comes home from work, her main chill out show is Shark Tank. She just watches Shark Tank while she slowly zones out from her horror show at the hospital, and she tells me the horrible things she saw that day. And my thing is always like I’m just waiting for them to be like, “All right. Well, what’s your cost to manufacture?” They always ask them. They’re always like, “20 bucks.” It’s like what are you selling it for and they’re like, “30 bucks.” And it’s like, “Well, what’s wrong with you? That’s not good enough margin.”
So, I would look at ways to increase margins, like are your Facebook ads not as good as they could be and you’re just buying money at the traffic store and your cost of acquisition is through the roof? Or is there some way where you could just straight up raise your prices? Maybe raising your prices by 50% don’t cause your total sales to fall by 50%. Your units sold to fall by 50%. Oh, in that trade, you ended up making more money.
Kurt Elster: What about your shipping costs? That’s like the biggest single expense on your individual orders after the cost of goods sold. So, you can mess with maybe… Well, we just tried this app that’s in beta. I think it’s launching by the time this episode comes out. I think it’ll be launched. It’s called ShipScout. There’s a free plug for those guys. And we used it on a Shopify Plus store. It’s really cool in that it lets you split test shipping rates. So, I did like okay, what’s the free shipping rate going for? So, it was just like all orders get free shipping. Zero dollars is the threshold. Then I tested $25 and then $50. And what was interesting about it is the average order value and the revenue per customer or revenue per visitor was the same whether my shipping threshold was $25 or $50, and my conversion rate was almost the same. But then on free shipping on all orders, that had the highest revenue per customer and had the highest conversion rate.
But this may not be true for all stores, depending on how the store is set up. So, messing with your shipping rates or trying to reduce your shipping rates is absolutely worthwhile. There’s even services, like if you use UPS, DHL, FedEx, there are services that will go back through and try and backdate negotiate a lower rate through breakage, through overbilling. They’ll try and fix it for you. And there’s also services where they… It’s like a pool, where everybody signs up and buys their UPS labels through this service, and then by doing that, they have the lowest possible rate. Shipping, that’s a big cost center that you could use to reduce and increase profitability.
I like where you’re going with this. This is good.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and to go to the it’s different from every store, I know the store that you tested that app on. No one’s leaving that store spending less than 50 bucks.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: Everything on that store, you’re spending well over 100 bucks to get their stuff.
Kurt Elster: You got any other… I liked that line you’re going with. You got anything else?
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. No, just look into expanding your margins, like maybe increase prices and find a way to make your product have a better perspective on its quality or whatever. I’m trying to find the right word to say it. You know, the-
Kurt Elster: Oh, so value is subjective, and so if I can increase the perceived value of the product.
Paul Reda: That’s what I was looking for.
Kurt Elster: Which really is like the presentation. Look at sneakers. Is there really that big a difference between a $50 sneaker and a $200 sneaker that Nike sells? Probably not. And why is the secondary market for Nikes… There is at least a dozen pairs of Nikes that you could buy for $2,000 in the secondary market. Are the shoes that better? No, that’s entirely perceived, subjective value, because they’ve got this huge marketing push behind them, and tremendous presentation, and celebrity, and all this great stuff. Well, you can apply those… Nike doesn’t own those ideas. You could apply those same concepts to your store and then justify raising the rate.
At the same time, you could also, if you make your own goods, you could just arbitrarily raise your prices and do literally nothing else. There is nothing stopping you. You’re the boss. You could do it. This is an argument I’ve had so many times with, or a discussion I’ve had so many times with freelancers. They’re like, “Oh, I want to raise my hourly rate.” Okay, go ahead. Why can’t you? “Well, first I have to do this.” Why? Why? You set the rate. You could set it to whatever you want. The same is true of prices in your store.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and I mean if you raise the prices, you’re gonna get people that complain that you raised the prices, but you know what? They can go screw, because I mean if it ends up making you more money it’s not their business. Who cares?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s definitely… Or if you want to keep them, go, “Hey, this is the new price, but for you, here’s a coupon code. We’ll honor the old price for you for a month.” Like go ahead, knock yourself out. And at least hey, you got the sale, they’re happy that you did this customer service thing, and then maybe they’ll be willing to pay more in the future. You really… If you want to, you could try and justify it. You absolutely don’t have to. Also, it’s a sale opportunity. I forgot which merchant did it, but they raised all their prices, and before they did, they emailed everybody and said, “Hey, because as our business grows and our expenses increase and our quality improves, we just… We don’t have a choice. We have to raise our prices, and that’s gonna happen on this date, so go ahead. Place your orders before then.”
And that worked. It’s the opposite of a sale email, but it performed like a sale email.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And to go back to perceived value, I mean, our old… We used to run around a lot with all the mechanical watches, like the fine mechanical watches, we did a bunch of stuff with those businesses. And I mean, those are entirely perceived value. Like Rolexes and all those watches, they keep time like shit. They’re terrible.
Kurt Elster: A mechanical watch, yeah, does not keep time anywhere near as well as a quartz watch.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And all-
Kurt Elster: A Rolex is accredited as a superlative chronometer.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Meaning a superlative chronometer. What is the accuracy on that? A superlative chronometer can only lose or gain 10 seconds a month. A quartz watch, if it were broken, would do plus 10 seconds a year. So, if men could wear diamonds and jewelry the way women could, the Swiss watch industry would not exist. It is based entirely on perceived value. You want to talk about perceived value, can we get De Beers on the phone and explain these diamond prices to me?
Paul Reda: Well, and also don’t forget we’re all carrying around atomic clocks in our pockets at all times that lose no time.
Kurt Elster: Oh, remember when there used to be those articles? That was like, “Oh, smartphones are killing the watch industry. Will they survive?” Of course they did, because it was never about telling time.
Paul Reda: But yeah, diamonds, also worthless. Gold, also worthless.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, what am I gonna do with this?
Paul Reda: So yeah, I would be like… I think you do good base level stuff. It’s like let’s see where my expenses are that are unnecessary, that I could cut. Let’s not cut stuff that actually makes our business better.
Kurt Elster: Makes us money.
Paul Reda: Just to be like, “Well, I gotta cut.”
Kurt Elster: Don’t cut your nose off to spite your face.
Paul Reda: Yeah, but I would… How do I raise my margins? How do I cut my ad costs, raise my margins?
Kurt Elster: Man, just try raising your prices. You can also try increasing average order value, trying to reduce shipping expense, because that’s such a painful recurring expense.
All right, the next question. Preorders is the topic, one near and dear to our hearts. They asked about, “Hey, can you discuss preorder group buy apps, assuming these may be separate, and benefits if any of using them?” Paul, don’t we happen to have a Shopify application for this?
Paul Reda: I know about a great preordering app. It’s called Preorders. It’s by cool dudes-
Kurt Elster: What?
Paul Reda: No. It’s called… What’s it called?
Kurt Elster: Crowdfunder? Crowdfunder!
Paul Reda: It’s called Crowdfunder and it is essentially like a Kickstarter type front end for your Shopify store that turns your product page into a preorder thing with a cool little bar and you could say like, “We’re not doing this unless 100 people actually buy it.” And then you can show how much progress has been made, and your target, and all that stuff. And everyone loves it!
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Actually, it does do pretty well.
Paul Reda: And five star reviews and personal concierge service by Kurt if you have complaints.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. Well, actually my wife fields it. Julie and I tag team it.
Paul Reda: And then he will complain about you to me.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. I’m not gonna complain to the customer. And I’m not complaining to you. I’m venting my frustrations with why can’t I just help everyone?
A lot of our five star reviews and positive reviews come from negative experiences people had where I was able to say, “Okay, here’s what happened. Here’s why. Here’s how we’re gonna fix it.” And then that leads to a five star review. And it was Jay Myers at Bold who taught me that. He’s like, “Every bad experience is just a five star review waiting to happen. And he was right. Those are the people, if you could turn that experience around, those are the people that leave five star reviews.
Anyway, preorders, group buy apps, those things, so yeah, we’ve got this app called Crowdfunder, and it’s a Kickstarter widget for your product detail page. You give it your goal and then it’ll set up that goal with a progress bar. You give it an end date and it has a countdown timer. That’s it. That’s all it does. It’s just a widget. Runs on Liquid code and it just runs through your inventory to figure this out.
The issue with that is I do the support for it, and so I’m well familiar with the problems and frustrations merchants face with preorders. Number one, I can 100% guarantee most merchants wildly overthink how you run a preorder and what’s involved. So, number one, the first problem they get into is they’re like, “Well, we’re not gonna ship it until this date, so we have to hold their funds in escrow.” That’s insane. You do not need to do that. I don’t know why you think you need to do that. If you’re really worried about it, open up a free savings account and move the money there, so that you don’t accidentally spend it, but you’re gonna spend it on producing the thing anyway.
So, all right, if you’re accepting money for a good that you’re not gonna ship later, you just have to overcommunicate that this is a preorder, and this is the expected ship date. And to do that, “Oh, do I need an app? What do I do?” You don’t need to do any of that. The other weird request I get is like, “Well, we have to change the add to cart button to a preorder button.” There’s a Shopify document that’ll tell you, a Shopify how-to guide if you Google it that’ll tell you how to do this. But you also don’t have to do it. And it’s also not what the damn add to cart is doing. It’s still an add to cart button, right?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Nothing’s changing on the back end. It’s just like the label is different that the person sees.
Kurt Elster: Yes. But you don’t need to change it, right? All right, here’s how you do it. This is my solution to you want to run a preorder. Add the words preorder to the product title. The reason is now it will appear as a preorder everywhere anyone sees it, because everything pulls the product title. The order confirmation email. The cart. The checkout. Facebook ads. Everything will then have preorder in the title. If it is in the title of the product, no one could claim you didn’t tell them. Then say, “This is a preorder. The expected ship date is X, but not guaranteed.” And put that, bold, as the first line in the product description. That’s it. You’re done. You now have a preorder. No apps. No customizations. No silly services.
And there is a preorder-related app out there that frequently breaks stores and as a result, and then often people pair it with Crowdfunder, but they put that app first, then install Crowdfunder, and because of recency bias, I get an email saying Crowdfunder broke their store. “Oh, my PayPal button disappeared. Oh, my product form’s gone. Crowdfunder did it.” No, it didn’t! It’s this other stupid preorder app that I will not name that drives me crazy.
So, all right, if you are going to run a preorder campaign and you’re gonna do it in a transparent, public fashion, like Kickstarter style, where you share like, “This is our goal and if we don’t get here, we’re not producing it.” The trick to that is it really is not about your goal and what you’re trying to do there. You want to start below your goal, because it’s social proof. These apps are for social proof. They’re not really for managing your back office operations. That’s up for you to do. And you should be able to do it. You could go in Shopify, and what do you need to do here? See how many orders you got? That’s a Shopify report you can run. Oh, you need to email people about their update? All right, in Klaviyo, make a segment and say just a dynamic segment of just people who ordered this product.
None of these things require additional apps, but it’s social proof. So, like let’s say your goal is 25,000. You should start, you should set your goal at 10,000, because no one wants to jump in on a product that they don’t think’s going to be produced, or that no one else is. The hardest order to get is the first one. So, like that first order, you should place it yourself so that when everyone shows up, there’s at least one in there, right? Send it to friends and family first, then announce it to your customers and do it in waves, and ideally as soon as you get to that goal and you can keep that excitement going, because it will be a full-time job to promote a preorder campaign while you’re running it. Then you will exceed your goal wildly and get to your goal. And I’m not making this stuff up, this is all I got from Andy, master marketer Andy Bedell at KeySmart, who used the beta version of Crowdfunder to run a million dollar campaign on a product that costs 25 bucks.
Paul Reda: It’s the same general rubric the way we think about a lot of other stuff, is you’re overthinking it. Stop overthinking it. I mean, if you want to do a preorder, put preorder in the title of the product, put preorder in the product description, bolded so people read it, done. You’re doing a preorder. I mean, obviously we want to sell you Crowdfunder, because we get some money off of it, but all it does is add a couple extra widgets for social proof. It makes it look nicer. It’s a nice little thing. But don’t let that hold you back from doing a preorder. Just do it by yourself. Who cares?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And the other thing with a preorder, I think the critical to the success is have a low goal, so that you can blow past your goal, because that looks really good. It’s a form of social proof. And focus on social proof. As you get reviews and testimonials from bloggers, like press, influencers, customers, whatever it is, start adding that stuff into your promotion and into the product description. And as you reach your preorder goals, make sure you are sharing those milestones getting hit, because I think the important part is not the preorder aspect of it. It’s the social proof, that this… It’s a group buy. It’s a thing we’re all doing together.
And don’t overthink it, man. If you have to use an app… Honestly, you don’t. You just don’t.
Paul Reda: You don’t have to use an app for this.
Kurt Elster: No. Not for this one. All right, so, best practices for reducing and managing returns.
Paul Reda: Well, I think one is you want to communicate, make as much obvious and easy communication with-
Kurt Elster: Overcommunicate.
Paul Reda: Overcommunicate with the client as much as possible, with the buyer. So, you want those sizing guides on your product pages. You want to measure everything correctly, so everything is the size that you say it is, so they know that it’s correct when they get it. I don’t-
Kurt Elster: You know what drives me nuts? Is when you click the size guide link on… Because honestly, incorrect sizing is probably one of the largest reasons for returns and exchanges, is when you click on the size guide link and it just gives you a universal one for everything, and they’re like, “Yeah, this is kind of close.” It doesn’t help me. I want… What we do for clients is we make it tag-based, so when you tag the product, like sizeguide:shoes, and then that product, when you open the size guide it is for those shoes. I love that one. That makes life much easier and saner.
So, I think number one is overcommunicate. You’re absolutely right. Number two, when you do see returns and exchanges, always figure out the reason, log it, and then try to circle back on finding a way to bust that objection in advance, before they’re returning the thing to you. Because on the top of, “Well, let’s increase profitability and reduce costs and expenses,” well, certainly returns and exchanges are an expense center. And sizing is one of those, is a huge one, so for sizing, do product-specific size guides. You have to do tags to do this. Some themes will support a solution for it. Make sure you’ve got a good size guide that is specific to it, not a generic one. Often, if you’re like printing t-shirts on blanks, you can get the size guide from the manufacturer and use that. The other issue is-
Paul Reda: But I’m talking about like physical goods, as well. If you’re selling a physical good, also give the accurate measurements of that physical good, so people know-
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah, you had an experience there. Tell us about that.
Paul Reda: It’s a very personal issue for me. No, I have this weird nook in my basement. It’s like-
Kurt Elster: It’s not weird. It’s cool. It’s a little display case looking thing.
Paul Reda: It’s like a cutout in the wall, and it-
Kurt Elster: It’s where you put your Venetian bust.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s where you put your Oscar, and it has a spotlight over it and everything, and I was like, “What the hell am I gonna put in there?” So, I found this guy that refurbs old… I like old-timey stuff from the ‘30s and ‘40s, so-
Kurt Elster: I like old-timey stuff! Just say you like Art Nouveau antiques.
Paul Reda: Shut your mouth. So, I bought this vintage tombstone radio from 1937 and I was like, “Okay. Well, the width of the nook is 42 inches or whatever.” And I was like, “I can only get a radio that is 42 inches wide. It’s gotta be narrower than that.” So, I went and spent, and he refurbs these radios, they’re beautiful, they still work. He adds an aux cable to it, so you can be bumping Dr. Dre through your 1937 radio. It’s awesome.
Kurt Elster: But what was the issue you ran into?
Paul Reda: Well, the issue I ran into was that he put the measurements down in the listing and then I bought it, and then it got shipped to me, and the measurements were wrong, so it’s too big for my trophy nook.
Kurt Elster: So, the place you were gonna put it, you couldn’t use it, and now you own what you described as an embarrassingly expensive radio.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You were like, “How much did that cost? That’s cool.” And I’m like, “I’m too embarrassed to tell you how much it cost.” And I’m not telling anyone.
Kurt Elster: 800?
Paul Reda: I’m not saying.
Kurt Elster: A thousand.
Paul Reda: You could just keep saying numbers. I’m-
Kurt Elster: $1,400!
Paul Reda: Yeah. You got it. How’d you know?
Kurt Elster: Oh my God. That’s ridiculous.
Paul Reda: It was not-
Kurt Elster: That was the wrong sound bite. I apologize.
Paul Reda: It was not $1,400.
Kurt Elster: All right. It was $1,500.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so I’m mad about that. Measure your stuff right. And I was like, “Hey, dumbass. You measured this thing wrong.” And he was like, “Oh, I’m old. I’m getting slow. I’m so sorry.”
Kurt Elster: Oh my. Yeah. Okay.
Paul Reda: I’m like, “You don’t know how to work a-“
Kurt Elster: So, you can still sell stuff on eBay, but you can’t work a tape measure. I don’t believe you.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s like you can run an Etsy store and refurb old radios, but you can’t measure things. But whatever.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m not buying it. So, you gotta overcommunicate on everything is the initial promise. Definitely sizing is certainly an issue. Regardless of apparel. 100% you need this for apparel, but for a lot of things sizing is helpful, because I can’t see it in person. I can’t handle it. I can’t measure it. The other issue is the default behavior in most Shopify themes is it defaults to a selection. If you just load up any random product page that’s got variant options, the add to cart button works. You can just click add to cart, because it defaults to a selection.
Paul Reda: Yeah. In Liquid, it’s called… It’s first available variant. It auto populates first available variant.
Kurt Elster: The issue with that is I can see a t-shirt and be like, “Oh man, a Vaporwave Darth Vader sweatshirt.” It’s a real thing I bought last week. Actually… Oh, Pixel Empire is the name of the store, and the guy, for helping him out, he said, “Hey, can you… Here’s a $50 coupon. You could go get something.” So, naturally I got the Synthwave Vader shirt, so thank you Dylan at Pixel Empire. But with apparel, this becomes a problem where I see the sweatshirt, go, “That’s the one I want.” And I get excited. I click add to cart.
The problem is I wear a large and it probably defaulted to small, the first thing in the list, so I don’t notice, it gets sent to me, and now I have to exchange it. That’s a really common problem for apparel stores, so more times than we can count, we have changed that behavior where the add to cart button is disabled until they make a selection.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and I’ve done it on stores where I’ve added like a little field too that auto changes. It’s like, “Your selection,” and then it will say small or extra large next to it and will change depending on if they change it. It-
Kurt Elster: Definitely counts as overcommunicating.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It doesn’t really help. It gets rid of some of them, but there are still people-
Kurt Elster: Slows it down.
Paul Reda: There’s still people that manage to quick add those smalls and then get mad that they got a small.
Kurt Elster: It’s like, “Well, we sent you the thing you ordered.” But no, that’s the solution is to not have it default to something. They have to pick before they can add to cart.
Paul Reda: And one last thing. I mean, if it’s a thing that people are gonna have to figure out how to use, I would have a post-purchase email sequence of like-
Kurt Elster: Yes!
Paul Reda: “Here’s how to use this thing so you don’t get frustrated.”
Sound bite: Major key alert!
Paul Reda: Oh my God.
Kurt Elster: So, on that one, the… What? Do I need new sounds?
Paul Reda: I’m just sick of it.
Kurt Elster: Oh. I love it. What was I gonna say?
Paul Reda: Yes.
Kurt Elster: You lost me.
Paul Reda: Post-purchase emails.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Like if there’s usage to your product or there’s common issues that people have that are easily resolved by reading the instructions, you could set up a product-specific post-purchase flow in Klaviyo, or whatever email automation software, that will… You send them essentially instructions and a usage guide. Outdoor Voices has a really good example of this, where they tell you like care instructions, but more importantly, if you have an issue, they tell you how to resolve it. So, they actually preempt returns and exchanges right there.
If you do get so far as the returns and exchanges, it’s tough to keep it sorted, because they… You gotta find out why, send them a label, they gotta send it back, you gotta refund them or send them something. It can get confusing, so 100% you want to use some kind of CRM to manage it. And the one I really like that we’ve played with is Bold Returns Manager, because you can go in and tell it like, “Okay, these are the different return reasons for my store. Or like in this scenario we pay for shipping, in this scenario the customer pays for shipping.” And then it prints and sends, or it makes and sends the label to them. It’s very cool. And that way the customer can see the status of the return, you can see what returns you have open, and it handles a lot of the back and forth. So, if returns are just a thing you have to deal with, a CRM app like Returns Manager for managing returns is very helpful.
Let’s go get some LEGOs.
Paul Reda: Okay. I know what product I want.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: All right. I’m recording my screen. I’m on LEGO.com, the US store. Do you see this with me?
Paul Reda: I see this with you.
Kurt Elster: And on load, it’s a carousel. It says Exclusive new Brick Sketches.
Paul Reda: Yeah, dude. It’s the LEGO store. I found it.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Excellent. Initial impressions. I know what mine are.
Paul Reda: The first thing I noticed is the main navigation… Well, first of all, there’s a lot of stuff up there.
Kurt Elster: There is.
Paul Reda: It’s like we got a little submenu with about us, VIP, find a store, that stuff. We got your account. I call that the cart cruft area in the theme that I wrote. That’s all your crap near the cart. And then we got the main navigation. The free shipping bar below the main navigation. I feel like it’s getting lost in the shuffle there, even though it’s got a cool little shipper guy mini fig in it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I noticed that last.
Paul Reda: Yeah. The font’s too small, too.
Kurt Elster: Did you see that the LEGO logo redraws itself every so often?
Paul Reda: Yeah, that’s a weird animated .gif that we don’t-
Kurt Elster: Little Easter egg.
Paul Reda: That we don’t need. But the main thing I think is this navigation, which is a series of mega menus, but they all overlap, which I think is like… It’s a different way to shop. You can shop by themes. It’s like I want LEGO originals, I want classic, I want Star Wars stuff. All those different types of LEGOs. Or you could shop by new, popular, shop by age, shop by price. I mean, that way of looking at it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, what’s nice is they gave me so many ways to get all to the same places, like shop by theme or interest. There’s a lot of overlap there. And then that menu is like new, popular, age, price, so I think a misconception merchants have is an item can only be in your main menu once. It isn’t the case. People shop in different ways, especially with a big catalog, and one as big as LEGO’s, so they’re giving me multiple ways to get to the product.
Now, what would make more sense is a giant search box on the homepage. I think that would be smart.
Paul Reda: Well, there is one. I mean, what do you call that?
Kurt Elster: Well, they’ve got the search in the header. I’m talking like I want it as a section on the homepage.
Paul Reda: Oh. Eh, I don’t think you need that. People know where to look for a search box.
Kurt Elster: A couple other interesting things here. The carousel does not auto advance. It has not skipped. It’s on carousel one. It has not skipped to slide two once unless I click it. I think that’s a choice. You don’t see that often.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t have known that they have a giant helicarrier, that apparently a giant M.O.D.O.K. is fighting it? I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: What I like, like right under that carousel, is they’ve got their featured collections, but they’re tiny. It’s not like giant blocks. They’re almost… It’s like they were trying to make life-size mini figs.
Paul Reda: I’m surprised at how small the fonts are on this.
Kurt Elster: It is unusually tiny.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s like really small.
Kurt Elster: So, how should we shop? How should we get to a collection here?
Paul Reda: I think we both know we want Star Wars stuff.
Kurt Elster: Okay. We could agree on that. So, I go, and because they’ve organized it in multiple different ways, I know immediately it’s gonna be under themes.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And sure enough, it’s under there. Now, what’s interesting about this, Star Wars is the only thing that’s in italics. Did you see that?
Paul Reda: That’s gotta be like a requirement by-
Kurt Elster: It’s a weird licensing agreement.
Paul Reda: By Disney or whatever.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I’ll click on Star Wars.
Paul Reda: Oh no!
Kurt Elster: What?
Paul Reda: I want an A-wing. If you’re listening and have too much money, buy me a LEGO A-wing. I love the A-wing. It’s my favorite-
Kurt Elster: It’s backordered.
Paul Reda: It’s my favorite rebellion star craft.
Kurt Elster: We just bought the Harry Potter Hogwarts castle. It’s a work in progress.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And so, the A-wing is backordered. Terrible. Oh, backorders accepted. So, I clicked through. Went to the A-wing. Back-
Kurt Elster: I’m not done with this collection page.
Paul Reda: Oh, but I… No!
Kurt Elster: You’re not getting it. No one’s buying you an A-wing. It’s over. Go back to the collection page.
Paul Reda: I brought it over to… I was gonna bring it back to the topic, though, because it says backorders accepted, will ship by August 13th, 2020. So, all backorder means is you’re not getting it soon, but we promise you’ll get it.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: Which is reassuring.
Kurt Elster: Do they have a preorder app they use for that?
Paul Reda: Nope. It just says backorder.
Kurt Elster: Does the money go into escrow?
Paul Reda: Yeah. I’m preordering an A-wing.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I see.
Paul Reda: It’s just the length of the preorder.
Kurt Elster: But I don’t… What app did they use? On the collection page, what I appreciate is the collection, the sidebar filtering that they have, and you could do something almost identical to this with Product Filter and Search by Booster. Really nice collection sidebar app. And they’re smart. They gave you so many ways to sort this, but rather than overwhelm you, the most common three are defaulted to open, and all the others, like featured, theme, interest, availability, rating, those all default to closed. I think that’s a smart way to do it.
I like these sidebar filters when you have a big collection. This is 82 results. Not crazy, but still, it’s nice that like all right, if I’m buying for a kid and it’s for a birthday present, I could just click age and get to the right age, and that cuts the collection by half. Makes it easier to find my stuff.
Paul Reda: Yeah. This store is not on Shopify, but I would be interested in like… So, the easy way on Shopify, you can go to any Shopify store, type in /collect/all, and that’ll spit out every single product on the store, and so that’s a good sneaky way of seeing one, what their best-selling products are, because you can make it sort by best selling, and two, how many products that store has. And I would love to do that with this LEGO store, because I bet it’s a lot.
Kurt Elster: So, I really want to buy that $800 Millennium Falcon.
Paul Reda: Also backordered. As is-
Kurt Elster: But it’s backordered!
Paul Reda: As is Slave 1, so it’s like what are we-
Kurt Elster: Oh, Slave 1 is backordered?
Paul Reda: What are we even doing here?
Kurt Elster: You know what? Slave 1’s pretty cool. I’m looking for one I should buy.
Paul Reda: I saw one when I was scrolling through. Oh, if you go to the next page, we can get a Y-wing.
Kurt Elster: There’s the smaller Millennium Falcon.
Paul Reda: Eh.
Kurt Elster: For $160. But I don’t want that. That’s the baby one. What am I gonna do with that?
Paul Reda: I think we’re buying a Y-wing, the loserest ship in the rebellion.
Kurt Elster: They got an AT-ST that’s pretty cool. All right. We just need to make a decision here.
Paul Reda: All right. Yeah, just-
Kurt Elster: Oh. Poe’s X-wing.
Paul Reda: All right, fine.
Kurt Elster: I want an X-wing.
Paul Reda: All right. There you go.
Kurt Elster: All right. Poe’s X-wing. Here we go. 90 bucks. Cool, I’m doing this. Landing on this thing, I appreciate that they have breadcrumbs in the upper left. The interesting choice in the borderitis this thing suffers, there’s like a light, light gray background, that if you just made it all white, this thing would immediately look a lot cleaner. I’m not a big fan of borders and background colors for that reason. They just box everything.
So, I like… One question people have is, “Hey, when am I gonna get my stuff?” And so, right under the price, they answer that. It says available now. That’s smart. They’ve got a warning: choking hazard thing here. That’s important. Safety. You don’t want kids choking. If you wanted to do something like that in a Shopify store, you could trigger it by tag, so like every product tagged choking hazard would get this badge and text.
Scrolling down. They’ve got shop by collection in here, where it says, “Shop more like this. Star Wars, space.” That’s smart in that they know I’m browsing a huge catalog and they’re trying to keep me from leaving, so they use that internal linking. They’ve got a cool infographic type thing. 661 pieces. Item number. I think that’s cool. You could build that with tags or meta fields.
Paul Reda: Yeah-
Kurt Elster: A long description, even though everyone says, “Nobody reads.” They’ve got a really long, detailed description here.
Paul Reda: I think that info bar is really useful, because at least-
Kurt Elster: Really nice.
Paul Reda: Because I think when you’re buying LEGOs, I think the main thing you care about is like how many pieces it is, because that’s like how many fun segments are there, like the more pieces, the more fun.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Paul Reda: So yeah, the fact that this is a… Mine says 761. Is it-
Kurt Elster: This one says 761.
Paul Reda: Oh, okay. I thought you said a different number. So, yeah, all right, this is a good one. 761 pieces. Cool. And the VIP points, which I’m assuming is their loyalty program.
Kurt Elster: Loyalty points. Yeah, they’re doing a loyalty program, because this is definitely… A catalog this big, you do a lot of repeat purchases.
Paul Reda: Yeah, but as you scroll down, what do we think of this? Deliveries and returns, so we’re anti hiding content. I think it’s fine to have deliveries and returns hiding content, because not everyone is gonna care about that, but you do-
Kurt Elster: I agree.
Paul Reda: You do want it at people’s fingertips. So, I think having it on the page but hidden is fine.
Kurt Elster: I wish the customer reviews defaulted to open.
Paul Reda: My thought exactly. That’s literally what I was gonna say. I think the reviews should be open, though.
Kurt Elster: And then at the bottom, it’s like, “Recommended for you,” and it’s accurate. It’s all stuff from the Star Wars collection. I don’t know how they define the relationship, but it worked.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s very standard, though. Just like calling other things from the same collection.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. All right, so I’ve added this thing to my bag. This I don’t like. When you click add to bag, it’s just like a message, a tiny message at the top of the screen.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Not enough happens when you click add to bag.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s not at all obvious that it did anything. And why not just take me to my cart?
Paul Reda: It’s so annoying. Why don’t they do that?
Kurt Elster: In the cart, though, they also… They still have the availability, so I had your A-wing added and it did tell me like, “Oh, you’ve got… This is backordered and here’s the date.” And then it’s got the X-wing in here, says, “Available now.” So, I like that we do that. And it does something clever. To bust objections in here, there’s a note. It says, “Help with your order,” and it has a link to shipping and handling and the returns policy. That’s smart. I don’t know that I’ve seen that before.
Paul Reda: They’re both the same page.
Kurt Elster: You’re right. You’re right, they are. I’m guessing that returns link is wrong.
Paul Reda: No, I think it’s both the same probably, it’s just that… Oh, maybe not. It’s just that they end up being on the same page. Yeah, it’s shipping and returns. Now, because this isn’t on Shopify, they got some cart stuff on here that unfortunately you can’t do on Shopify. Correct me if I’m wrong. We got this promo code box on here, on the cart page, when-
Kurt Elster: I’ve seen apps do it, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend or guarantee that you could do this.
Paul Reda: Now, one thing we do do-
Kurt Elster: Ha ha. Doodoo.
Paul Reda: Doodoo. On phones, in Shopify, this area that has the promo code box defaults to closed.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: And that leads to a lot of calls on stores where they’re like, “Oh, I have a discount code, but I can’t put it in anywhere. There’s nowhere to put it.” It’s like because no one clicks on the link to open it. So, there’s a little CSS snippet you could put in there that forces that little box to be defaulted to open so people see it on their phones. Then that solves a common problem if you’re having that problem on your store.
Kurt Elster: Down here, if I look at… It’s got the shipping calculator. I don’t love the shipping calculator. I just think, like I’m adding my zip code in here to estimate it, but I’m gonna do it again in checkout anyway. Not my favorite. What I do like, the checkout button has the lock icon and says, “Checkout securely.” I usually… I like adding the lock icon to the checkout button and I often rename it proceed to checkout, but reaffirming that it is a secure checkout is smart. They’ve got pay with PayPal, so we’ve got out express checkout option in here, similar to how Shopify stores do it.
And then below that, they’ve got this thing that says, “Congratulations, you get free shipping.” I like that, as well. And you could do that in a Shopify store with just a little bit of Liquid logic.
Paul Reda: What are your thoughts on $35 free shipping? I think it could be a lot more.
Kurt Elster: Oh, certainly. It depends on… I usually do it based like what’s your average order value? All right, let’s round up from there. That’s usually the starting point. But again, that’s a thing you could split test.
Paul Reda: Yeah, like going through, maybe I’m the different type of LEGO consumer, but even if you go to just a tiny little like, “Oh, it’s a little gas station in the City town that has two little cars and a little corner of a gas station.” That’s still 50 bucks. It’s 300 pieces and it’s 50 bucks. I mean, it is a rare product on this store that’s under $35, so I don’t know, I kind of feel… Maybe they just don’t want to lose money on the tiny sales, I’m guessing.
Kurt Elster: So, I’ve put in my address and now it’s got me pick my shipping method. Similar to Shopify, it arranges, it orders the shipping rules by price. So, it goes free, express, or express saver, express. Now, the downside of this is it does not tell me what the carrier is, and they’ve kind of made up their times or their names, but I do like that it’s got the transit time, so it’s like, “Well, this is three to five days.” Or you could pay 20 bucks, get it two to three. Or you could pay 26, get it in one to two.
Paul Reda: That’s a lot.
Kurt Elster: Isn’t it?
Paul Reda: 20 bucks for shipping. Jesus.
Kurt Elster: It’s a little wild.
Paul Reda: That’s because you forgot little Timmy’s birthday and it’s tomorrow.
Kurt Elster: Well, yeah. I think they do a lot of gift purchases, or maybe just like weird, rich man children, who need their stuff now.
Paul Reda: Hey!
Kurt Elster: I’ve spent close to a thousand dollars on LEGO this year, so-
Paul Reda: Yeah, whatever. You got a Power Glove, man.
Kurt Elster: I got a Power Glove. Their email opt-in is default to uncheck and says… I put in my email address, my phone number, continue to payment, what’s this thing look like? It’s pretty straightforward. It looks not unlike the Shopify one. Again, Matt, oh my gosh, don’t show people my credit card number. Thank you.
Paul Reda: Wait. You’re actually buying this?
Kurt Elster: I walk through up to place order. All right, I got cold feet. I don’t actually want this X-wing. If it were… It’s Poe’s X-wing. If it were like vintage Luke X-wing, I’d do it. Like if we’re doing X-wings, I want Luke’s X-wing.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If it was in Red Squadron, that’s different.
Kurt Elster: In here, what’s interesting, at the bottom it says customer service, and it’s got their phone number. They should put that at the top. You could just add… In Shopify, you could redo your logo with it. All right. I’m finishing this screencast. That was an exciting adventure.
Paul Reda: In the world of LEGO.
Kurt Elster: In the world of LEGO. It’s a clean site. It works. I think their issue is just having a giant catalog and trying to sort through it, not unlike our MiLB teardown, where it’s, “Hey, you just gotta deal with a huge catalog and help people sort through it.” Not unsurprisingly, LEGO does a great job of it.
Paul Reda: Yep.
Kurt Elster: I think we’ll wrap it up there, fine sir.
Paul Reda: Cool. Sounds good to me.
Kurt Elster: So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so please join our Facebook group. Just search The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders on Facebook. And we’ve had quite a few new folks joining in the last several weeks, so the more the merrier. Come on. Please join us. We’re happy to have you.
Paul Reda: Bye, everybody.