w/ Jessie Goodell, 44N Trucker Hats
We take on the challenge of revamping a trucker hat Shopify store from the ground up. Our team member and e-commerce maven, Jessie Goodell, brings her real-world experience managing her ecom brand for outdoor trucker hats to the table. Listen in as we dissect the transition from Amazon to Shopify, and discuss website improvements in a quest for online store over marketplace sales. Stay tuned as we gear up for future episodes where we'll measure the success of our efforts and strategize on lifecycle email marketing and beyond, all while appreciating Jesse's invaluable contributions to this e-commerce adventure.
(03:43 - 05:03) Rebranding Challenges on Amazon
(07:22 - 08:12) Amazon Listing Struggles and Promotions
(16:10 - 17:13) Product Variants and Shopify Integration
(22:35 - 24:23) Website Homepage Re-Design Suggestions
(33:00 - 34:03) Improving Product Listing User Experience
(38:54 - 39:56) Maximizing Product Listing Content
(42:35 - 43:51) Product Origins and Manufacturing Changes
(45:33 - 46:18) Professional Photo Shoot for Content Creation
00:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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01:02
I think we should put our money where our mouth is. So in the past we've done website teardowns where we go through a Shopify store and do constructive critique. We make suggestions on how it could be improved and people have enjoyed it. We haven't done one in a while. I want to take that idea further, where we do that, we break down a site, a Shopify store, make suggestions, implement them, then return to it, see what happened good or bad. Where are we right? Because that's the catch with those teardowns is you never know. Was that advice helpful? What happened when they actually did something with that? And I don't want to subject a civilian to this. So we're going to be joined by one of our team members, jesse Godell, who has a lot of e-commerce experience, who's been on this journey with us for several years now and manages her own Shopify store. That's quite the story in itself. And, of course, joining me as well is my partner, co-host and producer, paul Rita. Paul from the cross the room welcome.
02:14 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Yeah, hi.
02:17 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Jesse, how you doing? Yeah, I'm doing good, thank you, and you are in Oregon.
02:23 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yes, eugene Oregon across the country.
02:26 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And so what is your Shopify store? What do you sell?
02:30 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, so sell is a good term. I don't know that I'd say we sell.
02:35 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Yet but what is it you offer?
02:39 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
We offer yes, thank you, we offer outdoor trucker hats. So originally we set these up and we do sell them on Amazon. They do well on Amazon. They've done really well in the past on Amazon, but now I have spun up a quick Shopify site to work on selling these hats online.
03:01 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Okay, and how long you've been doing this? When did these hats first go for sale?
03:06 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, that's a good question. So originally we started I want to say it was probably around 2019, was about when we launched this product line on Amazon.
03:18 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So initially this didn't have a Shopify store. This was a marketplace play. This was Amazon.
03:23 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Bulley yeah, I built this Shopify store end of last year. I want to say probably October. November is when I sat down one weekend and built it.
03:33 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And what was the thing? Well, how did Amazon go? Let's start with that.
03:39 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, that's a good question. It's a bit of a story. So initially they went really well. I think we, like I said, it was about 2019 when we got into it and Amazon was a little bit of the wild wild West still and people were selling a lot of different things really crazy and we were able to kind of get in on that. We got our hats, got a good traction, we started seeing a lot of reviews come in and the flywheel started to work really well for us and we were selling quite a few hats every day and quite a bit throughout the months.
04:07
And then Amazon started to kind of crack down on the wild wild West, if you will, and started to really kind of require brands to have trademarks to be able to kind of be more regulated. So when we went to trademark our brand, unfortunately we couldn't trademark the random brand we had made up, which was called low key caps. So we rebranded as a brand called 44 in, which is the north parallel of the three sisters mountains which are just outside of out of Bend, oregon, kind of near Eugene. So when we did that, the way Amazon had us restructure everything, unfortunately we lost all of our initial traction for those product reviews. So we had thousands of product reviews, we had all the history and the organic was all gone for us, and so rebuilding has been really difficult. We have some traction, but it's nowhere near. It's probably a third of the sales that we were seeing prior to kind of being forced into this new brand, new name, new structure.
05:05 - Kurt Elster (Host)
When do you start the Shopify store and why? Why, why start it?
05:10 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah. So part of the big part of it is just Amazon's expenses to sell have just gotten too high for us to make any type of profit margin, and we're even bringing in hats overseas. So we've got our costs down as low as we really can. So we import our hats through connections that we have overseas and we do have a three PL setup, which is great, so we don't have to pack and pick, we can just ship our hats there. They pack and pick and store them and then so we've minimized our storage costs in Amazon.
05:41
We make sure our hats are boxed, because Amazon won't actually box things, else send them in bags, the very disappointed customers. So we've set up this really nice infrastructure for our business. But as the years have gone, amazon has just dramatically increased their prices. The storage costs are really high, advertising costs are really high, the filament costs are really high. They have a referral costs on top of that. So we're looking at less than a dollar a hat. Sometimes we're barely breaking even, and so that, coupled with the slower traction that we saw post launching the new brand name it, just in order to get rid of a lot of the hats that we have and actually start to make a profit on them. We're trying to open up a channel where we control most of the profit.
06:25 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I definitely understand the desire for profits. What do these hats sell for?
06:31 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, so we have them listed for $26.99 on Amazon. It's just a little bit under like some of our bigger competitors price points, just to kind of help. That does help with, like some of the Amazon trickery having a little bit lower price hat.
06:47 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So if I at $27, you're making maybe a dollar if someone buys one on Amazon. If you sell it for $30, $29.99, you don't think you'd get the sales.
06:58 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, we see pretty high price sensitivity. So as we increase our sales or our prices, our sales do drop, and we did in, especially in terms of, like, some of the organic placement that we'll see when somebody searches like organic trucker hat or outdoor trucker hat, which are some of the key targets that we go after. You'll just see us further and further into the pages with the pricing changes.
07:22 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And looking at your Amazon listings, like I'm not an Amazon expert, but it looks like you did everything right, like you've got these long, detailed pages and descriptions. Everything's in the style that you'd expect for Amazon Lots of photos, lots of reviews. They're positive and it's still a struggle. So yeah, I can see it here. Sellers rank 61,000 in sports and outdoors. That's broad 439 in fishing hats.
07:51 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, isn't that a random one? We picked up Fishing hats you kind of need to see what market we fall into.
07:56 - Kurt Elster (Host)
They're definitely trucker hats is the style, and then you've got. You're doing like the extra savings promo on Amazon.
08:03 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, I just set up a Bogo just to see, and that's the other thing. Promotions on Amazon are like a nightmare to try to not only set up, but to try and track. I do most of the marketing and kind of e-commerce side of things. I work on the back end of all of that, where my partner is very much like the ops guy. He makes sure we have the right amount of stock, he deals with inventory, he does a lot of the financial stuff, and so he was asking me like how do we know which one sold with this? Or like how do I zero? He was asking me financial questions based on these promos and I'm like dude, I don't even know what it looks like on the back end when you sell these hats, and so that's another thing that we really struggle with is the back end of Amazon is like the least intuitive, clunky system you could ever imagine. It's just, it's pretty terrible.
08:54 - Kurt Elster (Host)
It's been a while since I've had to mess with it, but yeah, that was my experience and that was just like I was trying to set up fulfillment by Amazon and Shopify. So the Shopify store. Tell me about that.
09:09 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah. So I told my partner, because we do have some, we have inventory. We've been ordering overseas for a while and we have some. And that's why we're running Bogo is because we have like years worth of inventory of some hats that we just need to offload, and so with the, we're going to need to order some more of our best sellers to just kind of keep our mix healthy. And so we know that we're at a point where we're really not making any money off of Amazon. And so I told them I said, hey, if we can open up our own sales channel through a Shopify store, you can open up your own sales channel through a Shopify store to augment some of the sales that we're having on Amazon. We could have a much healthier portfolio of sales.
09:45
And so we kind of chit-chatted about it over the years for a while and then it finally just got to a point like Amazon just kept upping these prices so much that it's like if we're going to survive, we have to. And so I sat down one weekend finally and was like, hey, like I'm just going to build us a shop on my site. And so I did, and I do have like an e-commerce background, but I'll be very specific with that that I work on, like the email marketing, the direct mail, the SMS, like kind of a different side of e-commerce than the actual website side of things, and I just used one of the basic templates because they are very drag and drop friendly. Do you know which?
10:25 - Kurt Elster (Host)
one. This is Is this Dawn.
10:28 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
You know I don't. I played with a couple different ones. I could tell you, though, from my back end, let's see, I think this one is refresh.
10:38 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Refresh All right.
10:39 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
So yeah, one of the free ones.
10:42 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Looks good and advertises that it's good for visual storytelling and editorial content.
10:48 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah right.
10:49
Sounds, nice, uh-huh, mostly because I just wanted to test the theory before we invested a lot of money into it, right? So the thought kind of was behind it, like let's get up a Shopify site, let's like play around with like. The biggest thing for me is like okay, once you get a site, how are you going to drive traffic to it? And so I played around with some Facebook ads, a little bit of Instagram ads. Haven't gotten into running any type of paid Google search or something like that, because I'm not 100% sure that's really what we want to go with, given kind of our market is a little bit different. But yeah, kind of wanted to just test it and see like is this going to be worth it? And then we can start to really invest in it. So we're still kind of in that initial like testing phase.
11:33
I would say we've done. I've done some really limited testing in terms of running ads. Maybe, like probably spent less than $500 and running some social ads to it with like very few conversions. And so, like what I did know, or learn at least from those initial tests, was like I think people land on my website and they're like this could be a fake website. It doesn't have that authority right. It doesn't have that like. This is a really authentic like website that people are buying from. It looks like somebody threw it up over the weekend and they could be scamming me Okay.
12:08 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So what are our KPIs Conversion rate AOV? Where are we at? Do we know anything?
12:17 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, we don't. I mean, in terms of sales on the site, we don't have a lot right, because I think there's only been like less than a dozen orders that have come through. And so, yeah, the KPIs that, like I kind of look at, were coming through the ads right Like A how well were my ads actually getting clicks right? But then once they got on site, like what was their actual time on site? How many pages did they visit? Did they add to cart? Did they like actually engage with the website or did they just land on it and be like yeah, no, never mind, and bounce off? Because I don't even think there's enough to really understand like conversion rates at this point. There's just not enough.
12:56 - Kurt Elster (Host)
There's just not enough orders coming through and you said people think the site's a scam. What makes you think that?
13:02 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
That's my thought.
13:03 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I don't know for sure, but let's grow.
13:05 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Probably, you know, each ad, I think drove over probably 30 people or so to the site, right, and I've only converted, well, some friends and family and outside of that very small like five or six right. So to me, if there's not many people landing on site, there's some type of hesitation somewhere. Right point is good and they have to really get quality.
13:25 - Kurt Elster (Host)
The hat's $26.99. So it's not some huge ask and I don't. You know, it's not a gadget, it's not something very technical, it's a trucker hat. I don't have to do a lot of explaining. Okay, let's let us begin. The website tear down the constructive criticism. Paul, do you have, do you have 44 and outdoorcom loaded in front of you? Torture yes, okay. Initially impressions You're like look, I really need a trucker hat. This is the right. Instagram ad shows up. You click through yeah it's, it's very basic.
14:02 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
I think Jesse said that. I mean it's yeah, just seems straight out of the box. Very simple. I mean I like it. I like simple. You know, we're just selling hats here. We got hats on heads, that's all you need to see. This isn't a complex product, like you mentioned, and obviously the first thing is I see the home link in the main navigation.
14:18 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I know that's what I saw on the homepage.
14:19 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
It's like no one needs to go back.
14:22 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, naughty, naughty, our math. All right, the, the menu, the header, that's our mass head. That is the first thing everybody sees. And your fear. Paul said hey, it looks like somebody, someone threw up over the weekend. That's Jesse, that's what you said too. If you want to immediately make this look more polished, right now you have this like lovely deep blue logo on a white header background. Flip that the header background becomes the deep blue and then just put up a white logo. Okay, and so immediately it like looks put together when you do it that way, and then our text and icons become white as well.
15:03
The main menu the main menu we open with the first link should be shop hats and just drop me straight into a collection page of hats. Second one our story, faq, contact, or even contact. I might just move to the footer. So it's like FAQ story, your shop hats, FAQ, our story, and you could include maybe not in the header, but possibly the footer, you could include a link back to the Amazon store so that people could see, okay, this, if they're not comfortable buying from you, but they were interested enough to click the ad, maybe they're more comfortable buying from Amazon. That sounds like. At least we've rescued it.
15:44 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Well, I mean, there's only three hats and so we don't need home, we don't need FAQs, because the FAQ is more. It's like answering questions about my purchase, like the shipping and type of stuff. That's all handled on the, you can handle that on the product page. So really could the main nav just be each hat and then like a bar and then our story.
16:06 - Kurt Elster (Host)
How many hats do we have?
16:08 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
We have three hats, three SKUs. That's another conversation that Jesse and I were having before we started having more than one product. But less than, like, 15 products is a weird space to be in, you're right. It is you don't have like collections, you don't have different lines. There was another question. It's like what if we just have one product with two sets of variants?
16:31 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Because there's three lines and then each design has different colors, so it's style color.
16:37 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, so it's stock.
16:38 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Admittedly, you said that not all the colors are the same on all of them.
16:43 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Two designs have the same color ways. One design has slightly different color ways to it.
16:48 - Kurt Elster (Host)
But with varied images. We'd be showing them what they're getting.
16:52 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
We had to learn how to do that on Shopify.
16:56 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So we could do it, that I'd like that idea of trying just collapsing it into a single product listing, because the cap itself doesn't change, right?
17:06 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
No, it's the same, it's built on the same base. Hat, which is yeah, it's a. It's the same hat, just different colors.
17:14 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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17:49
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18:31 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
No, Well, it's an Oregon, so they're all drinking beers. They all got a growler of Oregon beers. Come on, I've been there.
18:38 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
But we do have images with good trail.
18:41 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So I want those things to match. I also don't want the hero image to be so tall. You know, I just crop it narrow and then it doesn't eat up all the screen. Real estate. Just like to establish that we photos were taken at some point.
18:55 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Well, and that's another thing with the collapsed onto one product. If we did that, it's now no longer trail tested hats, it's now the trail hat.
19:04 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Oh, there's only one.
19:06 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
It is the apex of trail hats, king trail hat. No, it's the apex, because it's like a mountain. Come on, man, keep up.
19:15 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Oftentimes you'll see people. They'll be like the perfect whatever. It's like the perfect pants, you know, maybe this is the perfect trail hat. Outdoor hat. Adventure hat, adventure hat. This is our outdoor adventure hat.
19:28 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, we kind of like go towards like the adventure companion right, like you can do, you can conquer anything with it. We've got a lot of imagery that shows, and then we also. Some of our imagery goes like from like day to night right, like you can, you can be out in the trails with it, backpacking, hiking, climbing, fishing. But it's also like they're pretty classy. Some of them specifically have really nice contrast stitching and really good design. You could easily wear it out to the brewery, you know, and it would. It'd be a good looking hat.
19:57 - Kurt Elster (Host)
OK, do we have to worry about fit?
20:02 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
at all. Yeah, so it's technically a one size fits. Most is what they call these trucker hats, which are the snapbacks. And we do have, like reading through some of our reviews and some of the return complaints, like there's always people who are like, oh, this is like it's huge, or other people like, oh, it's so small, right. So there's always this variance and so we've talked about kind of getting like one of our friends's family because they have like a son, a daughter and the mom and the dad and they're all different sizes and just like putting the hats on them.
20:30
It's just kind of shuffling the variance of size as well as like I did create a graphic that shows like from a standard hat sizing, which is like the fitted hats. It shows what the smallest to the biggest and it says like it's this many centimeters to this many centimeters. But whether people really process that information in a way of like how is this going to fit my head? It's been a little bit of a tricky conversation, like non hat people, you know, do you need like could you do a video that's like here's how you measure your head?
21:01
Yeah, we could create content around that. I mean, it would be like how to find the right little. Jp, but whatever.
21:07 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, it's just hard.
21:10 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
It's hard on the, it's hard on the margins because, like I have a melon head and I know on, you know, on your standard snapback, I'm on the last one. So it's like, if you're a little bit bigger than me, this hat then you need the snapback extender.
21:25 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, yeah, sure, or yeah, or if you have a tiny head, I don't know a peanut head.
21:28 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
So if you got a peanut head, though, you could just put the snaps in even tighter, like you put the last one.
21:34 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
You overlap it.
21:37 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And how tight until it like constricts my thought process. All right. So trail tested hats for outdoor adventures. Do we like this headline? I like it. I think it's good. No, that's fine.
21:49 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Or the trail hat for outdoor adventures I think is way stronger If we collapse it down to one product. Trail approved snapback for outdoor adventures?
21:59 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, I think snapback is like a good like word to get in there A lot of people. It's a huge hat. We're not know that a snapback trucker is like it's a thing.
22:08 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, and I'm basing this so because I'm a middle age man, basing this solely on my, my teen children, who just use the word snapback way more than I ever thought any human would have just heard. Snapback a lot, oh, the snapback. Where's my snapback? Oh, do you lost a snapback? You see, you got to do like what? After a while I'm like you're talking about a hat, right, because? All right, so then we've got. I think, though, like the initial landing experience, if you hit, the homepage of the site pretty cleaned up, if we do like advert, the low, the header colors. Clean up the simplify the main menu, bring that hero image, make it not so tall, make it shorter, maybe tweak the headline, and then that way, when I land on it, I can at least see the products below it, the featured products, and potentially we collapse this into one listing, and then you could just have the hat listing right there on the home page. Yeah, yeah, my thought, like if we're keeping it like this.
23:09 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
We need a better headline than featured products, because this is all the time we're talking about Featured products, because this is all the products these are just a featured ones. It's all of them, so it should be like our product line or something like that, something that's better than our product line.
23:24 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So as a reference, I'm using the demo of this theme and like it does that logo inverse I talked about, it's got a shorter hero image and then, like you, they go into featured products and then they follow it by testimonials and their headline for the featured products is meet the internet's favorite skincare. Wow, that is strong Like make a bold claim Featured products. That's why they think it. This thing was thrown up overnight. The internet's favorite hat, the trucker hat, the best snapback, outdoor tested snapback. Again, it's that Writing headlines is tough and if you ever, if you ask, chat GPT about this.
24:09 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
I use. I have a. I use chat GPT in like all of my day to day work. I have not used it in this because this was the thrown together overnight thing, but yeah, I usually tell chat GPT to write me five to 10 headlines and then tweak two or three of them until I get something I like.
24:23 - Kurt Elster (Host)
OK, and have you given it your product reviews. They're like what do people like about it? What do they buy?
24:30 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, I have not done that.
24:33 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So you could copy and paste the reviews out of Amazon into it. Or there's an app I think it's Scrape Hero, a service, scrape Hero dot com.
24:43 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
You could use that to scrape your Amazon reviews into a spreadsheet and they just drag or drop that into chat GPT and you're like help I should we shouldn't, because I just pulled those three reviews out of Amazon anyways to throw them up there, and so I might look at running an app from my Shopify that pulls Amazon reviews over, because we just don't have any social proof on the site.
25:05 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah.
25:06 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yes, which is definitely painful.
25:09 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And so, like looking at the reviews, it's tough because they're just like awesome hat stylish, comfortable, durable. I like this. I look way better than I did before. All right, sorry, tyler, the well made hat is very good. Great buy, fit, well made well. Also, good quality. Came in perfect condition Great. So a lot of it's on the quality. So maybe it's like you know you lean on it's durable. It it's durable, it's strong, trail tested hat, strong enough for your outdoor adventures.
25:46 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Yeah. I think, we got to think about. What is the problem? This solves A lot of. It seems like you'll be cool, like you'll be cool and like you'll have a community. I mean, if that's what you want to go with, that's fine, but I think durability might be the main thing. I mean, I don't know what is the biggest problem that you think you're solving with the hat. We're like what will you become when you have this hat?
26:10 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
I think, like when I think of the outdoor community, like people just like to wear hats, right, and they like to have cool designs on them, um, whether they're repping a brand that they particularly like, like Patagonia or something like that, or if they just have a cool looking truck or hats. Like truck or hats are just really popular when you see people out hiking. Uh, especially in Pacific Northwest, like this is when to central the civic Northwest design truck or hats, um say that, say what, say that.
26:37 - Kurt Elster (Host)
This is like the quintessential Pacific Northwest trucker. Hat yeah, the ultimate and PNW style.
26:47 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
It is victory PNW for sure, um, but I do think quality is like it is an important aspect of it, like my colleague and I like when we brought some of these hats over from overseas, like some of them were not the quality that you know we expected and like we sent them back and got new ones in. It's something that we really do care about, cause you can get really garbage trucker hats and and truck to do a trucker hat right. Like we were my colleague and I worked for a hat manufacturer for years before we started or this kind of fell into our laps, um, and so we do understand hats and so I think kind of focusing on the quality and the durability is a is definitely a bonus for us and could be one of our kind of like differentiators.
27:29 - Kurt Elster (Host)
There was a video I saw years ago from the guy at the time I think it was Saddleback Leather, who makes really nice leather goods and bags, and in the video he said hey, I'm going to tear down a counterfeit replica of our bag versus our own bag and just explain and critique it so that they can make a better copy.
27:48
And in do. It's fascinating, you know, because eight like with that video, you immediately know, yes, this product is so good, at some demand people are knocking it off, um. But more importantly, he really demonstrates, like all the details of the craftsmanship and it's manufacturing that you would not have otherwise seen. And so maybe that's you buy the, buy the cheapest trucker cap you can at a you know a gas station, wherever. Get like that you would know when you see it, the real garbage one. And then get one of your hats, and that's the video is like hey, let me show you the difference here. We know hats. We were sick of hats that don't last the fall apart or uncomfortable or sweaty. And so here's, here's the difference. And then, like side by side, compare it and when you see it like at a glance, a hat's a hat, until you see that side by side, and an expert in hats, which you are now a hat authority, breaks it down for me. And so like there's the content.
28:44 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, you can feel them too right and, like I think, even when you see them next to each other, you can see the difference between a $5 truck stop hat or even $15 truck stop hat and some of these nicer trucker hats that that are on the market. And these are. These are like, maybe not the highest of high level, but we're also at that point in our business where, like we want us, if we're going to keep going overseas we're looking at a different manufacturer and we would bring in better hats. They would cost. We would then have to raise our prices.
29:14
But all of that is kind of based on us clearing the inventory we had because we've paid for it, getting that extra cash, and then looking to invest in potentially more products, more product lines. If we have momentum better hats, or if we don't have a lot of momentum calling it a day, I don't know. But if we get a lot of momentum and we're running, you know this store works out really well, which would be great then you know we'd have the cash to do some different lines and expand it.
29:41 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I love this idea of just like over explaining the quality. I think that's what you got to do, yeah, so a lot of these suggestions like there's some styling stuff here, but also certainly some copywriting. That's going to happen. The product products themselves don't have reviews.
30:03 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Right, yeah, that's what I was saying. We would probably want to look at doing an app that pulls in product reviews, because we don't have any, obviously, from the site. They would have to come from Amazon. Okay, we could use Scrape Hero, or I know, like when I initially set this up because I was lazy and, like I said, I did it over a weekend I did use like a 7-day app trial to pull in the listings from Amazon so that I didn't have to like retype in all of the you know the key features For three products and whatever.
30:31
yeah, so it's struck. You know I just pulled in my three products, then the colorways and it pulled over all the images and stuff like that too, so that made it a little bit quicker in the setup. So I know there's apps obviously that will pull the from Amazon and we could pull those reviews over.
30:48 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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31:51
Go to zipifycom slash curt that Z-I-P-I-F-Y dot com slash K-U-R-T to try Zipify Pages for free. And if you tried Pages in the past and thought it wasn't for you, you owe it to yourself to try it again, because the new Zipify Pages is a game changer. Zipifycom, slash, curt, check it out. All right. The other thing I noticed here the site uses a mix of like white background and a light gray background. The product photos are largely all on white. Any place you have a product photo is where you've selected to not have the white background, so you can really just see where the image is. If it was on a white background, it would just like that product would look perfect just be floating there by itself, looking all transparent. Yeah, that's like a quick color change that would improve it.
32:47 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Okay, perfect. Yeah, I know, I see what you mean there On the yeah, are we on the product page?
32:54 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I was still looking at the home page, but let's oh okay. I was going to wrap up anything else on the home page.
33:00 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Well, the thing that confused me is in this featured product listing, underneath there's choose options and then it opens, you know, a quick view. And the quick view is like kind of crappy on this theme, like it's not great, it's really condensed. You're not getting any of the other product photos. So I feel like a lot of people I mean, that's a button, I realized the entire listing is a target that you can click on that will take you to the whole product. But even if I mean, we've seen with heat maps, when you have a button shaped object, People are gonna click on the button shaped object, even if the whole thing's the link. So I think a lot of you know people are gonna click on that choose options and get served up With a crappier version of your product page, not realizing that.
33:44
So I would just get rid of that and have them directed to the product page.
33:48 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I agree. Yeah, I didn't even catch that that after that on this you've got there's a pretty good Lifestyle photos and some story that goes with it. Totally chat GPT wrote this as soon as it's like three words colon Headline. You like oh yeah, that's chance you pts hallmark.
34:07 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
It did write most of this, of course, I.
34:11 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Mean, yeah, do we exclude ex-good? Is ex-good a refined charm? Is our mountain climbing trucker hat about refined charm? Really wait what? Now I'm reading your own content.
34:25 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Maybe you have it, no but why do I say refined charm in there?
34:28 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
That's under elevator style, your style. The trucker hat for a perfect night out.
34:32 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Oh, for the night out okay.
34:34 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
You know truckers, refined charm.
34:36 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Aston Kutcher refined charm effortly compliments your evening attire.
34:43 - Kurt Elster (Host)
When you hear it said aloud you're like, all right, it's a little ridiculous, yeah, agreed. But then there's other good lines in this a proud emblem of your adventurous spirit where it proudly is, a symbol of your love for exploration, nature and outdoor pursuits. That Seeks sleek silhouette and premium materials. Okay, they're, with some, just editing down some of the sillier things. That chance GPT did it's. There's good, good content in here. Is it the last area where things fell flat and we see this all the time is the footer is looks unfinished.
35:16
Yeah, there's nothing right and so on the footer. That's where it's like linked your policies, so it returns exchanges, terms of service, privacy policy. In Shopify, go settings policy. It'll generate a boilerplate one and then you go through and tweak it.
35:29 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
I mean, yeah, just even redo the main navigation down there include the.
35:33 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, the navigation down there. Include your contact info is a trust thing for sure. Yeah, like hey questions, any questions, all here's our email address. Just email us Did, and then you know should you have a problem. Where it's like that we're getting too many inquiries, great, no, we could worry about how else to tackle it. Yeah, I, in the footer I'd probably link to the Amazon listing. Why not just as like a safety nut catch all and then repeat the logo in the footer Just to give it a little little more branding and make it match the header. Like it. We like stories design, we like everything that ends the way it started, and so if we just repeat that, that header style in the footer, this I don't look more finished.
36:12 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, the footer is a big mess.
36:15 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Collection page. I don't even think we need to look at, because we only have three products and if we collapse that listing to one, we'll never see a collection page. So let's go straight to product page.
36:23 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
And yeah, here's where the white background on top of the photos, on top of the blue, really doesn't help works against you, yeah.
36:32 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
The other thing. I know a lot. I mean there's a lot of things I don't love about this product page template, but to me the colorways are really important. You've got the design, which is great, but like, once you start to see there's different variants in color, like that's a big deal and it's just a drop down that says the color Sure, heather, gray, smoke, blue, beige makes sense in my brain because, again, I've worked in the hat industry and we've dealt with these hats for a long, long time. But like, what does that actually mean? Is someone gonna click through to see what that looks like? Like that's our best-selling hat, but it might stand out right. Like there's just the lack of like excitement around color on this EDP is like a bummer for me.
37:08 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
For sure? My first question is you know, I notice it's got like automatic. It only shows the variants of the one you've selected.
37:17 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Use a nap for that, don't you? I do. Because I didn't know what the native and Shopify well, at least some time when I got it, though I want color swatches.
37:26 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
We have pictures that have like all of the like this. The one I have up is like the mountain hat. It has all of them together, right, so you can see all of them. So we just put that photo as like a standard.
37:38 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Oh, is that?
37:39 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
that's like the default first, well, you can make the, make the color swatches. Not, they're not swatches, they're thumbnails.
37:45 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got to get color swatches working.
37:49 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Can we put that in like the drop down, like a swatch, you know, like how some have, like like the image next to the color?
37:57 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, I want it like Amazon, where it's like color and then I get like, will upload individual photos so that they can like, because the hats the promise, that hats not black, it's black and white.
38:08 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
What Jesse's asking those she wants to keep the select box and just have a thumbnail next to the option in the select box, right?
38:15 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, or even if it's a grid that I think a grid of.
38:18 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
I think just having swatches but the swatches are a thumbnail of the hat is the way to do it.
38:25 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Does this thing do that? It's not obvious to me, like looking at the demo theme. Doesn't use colors because it's they're. Their demo products are shampoo and I don't see it listed in the features for the in the theme on their Shopify theme store page. It's gotta have products watches.
38:44 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
It's gotta.
38:45 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, I would also think it has to. It does say this theme supports size charts natively, and so that's probably an opportunity just to show a size chart. That's like alright, if your heads between here and here it's gonna fit Right, yep, and then you've like, the Amazon listing is is much longer, it's got more info, more content, more photos. And then we on the product page here we really we use much less and we wrap it all in accordion menus and horizontal tabs. Why not use all that Amazon content?
39:22 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, good question. I thought Part of it was just again just setting it up quickly and Then, yeah, now that I'm looking at it, like I kind of put some of this content in other places on the site, right, like the. Yeah, I agree, there's a lot more room for some of the content that we have on Amazon to come over to the product page, especially if we're gonna do like a one product page right, then it's like you can just really build it out With all of that con, similar to what the kind of the Amazon listings look like.
39:51 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, yeah, my nissalds are nice.
39:53 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Other garbage that comes into an Amazon. Let's see.
39:57 - Kurt Elster (Host)
You know, then your other issue with you're like why we don't have reviews. You also don't have a reviews app, so you have no way to gather reviews.
40:04 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
And we haven't gotten. Like part of that was like and again from a cost perspective, like, can we get some traction on the website, start getting some sales, before we start investing in like a monthly app? See this, I'm not driving any traffic to the website. I'm paying, you know, five to ten dollars a month to get reviews and I'm not selling product that can actually get me reviews yet. So it's kind of like right, which comes taking any kind of a question. So but yeah, I agree, we, we would definitely want to get a reviews app Nothing running and then I would probably look to see if, once we start getting some traction, we have. A part of. It was like this site was just, it wasn't refined, it wasn't ready. But once we get there and we start driving some traffic to it, like that up an email marketing program, like these are the things I enjoy doing, but we're just not. I just didn't feel like we had a product that we could really put out in front of people. That was gonna do much.
40:56 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yet and I. The official Shopify reviews app is gone. That one was free but it also couldn't send reviews, so like a review request on its own. So it wasn't, you know, super useful versus the, the big paid apps. But some of them have free plans that you could start with. Like judge me is the first one that pops up. We've used judge me. It's good, so you could use judge me and their free plan to try and get reviews going on the site. I Like that idea White background, making the Amazon listing or making the product listing more like Amazon Getting color swatches to work. What else?
41:37 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
I mean, I think the this content down here, this top quality, comfortable, made for the outdoors, adjustable sizing, there's a better way to present that information. At the very least auto, expand this accordion so it's not all hidden initially. And I think we, yeah, there's needs to be some way to convey what the sizing is. And I realized most people don't know their hat size. I mean, I don't, I'm just assuming that maybe people do know their hat size, but you could say you know one size fits. Most means hat sizes three to seven or whatever that sizes are.
42:14 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
And you'll see, on the Amazon listing page there is like snapback closure bit sizes six and a half to seven and seven, eighths, so like, if people do know there, I don't have that on our page, which it should be. It should be on that product page. So, yeah, we could have that type of information on there as well as, like the actual diameter of the hat If someone does want to measure their head.
42:35 - Kurt Elster (Host)
On Amazon. It says the origin is made in the USA and imported.
42:41 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
They're definitely made in. They are imported and they're made in China. Well, we switched factories. I have to confirm that where they are made. We moved factories to Vietnam and the company that we were a part of, that, where we originally met, my colleague and I sold, which is why we both left, and then manufacturers had changed and so I need to double check with which one we're importing from. But they're definitely imported. Where does it say that they're made?
43:13 - Kurt Elster (Host)
in the USA On the Amazon listing under product details.
43:18 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Okay, because they technically we were technically allowed to say they were made in the USA, because we were ordering them from the hat manufacturer here in the US. So they were importing the blanks and doing the designs like embroidering them, and so there's kind of this little fudgy like land that you kind of live in. But then more recently we've been importing the entire hat from abroad. So when these were originally set up years ago, these listings, that was fudgy, honest. Now we should probably update that.
43:50 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, probably update it. All, right, and so, lastly, if I add the item to cart, it opens a drawer cart. Excellent, for cart is our preferred way to go. And then when we go to checkout, you made a classic mistake. Everybody does. Oh my gosh.
44:06 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
Unstyled.
44:08 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Oh yeah, definitely unstyled in the checkout. You've got the one page checkout but, like you, for sure you could upload your logos. There's like a neat topography background I'll often use on the order.
44:18 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
So I would be good for brands.
44:19 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I'll get you that. Okay, give it a little branded look and you could change the button color to match the rest of the site.
44:29 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
I got one last thing on the product page. If you go back and scroll down, here are three lifestyle photos. Everyone's just hanging out and drinking. Is this a durable outdoors hat or a durable hanging out and drinking hat?
44:44 - Kurt Elster (Host)
We got the outdoor ones on the website or on the homepage.
44:47 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, and we've got some better outdoors like hiking images and stuff that we can definitely get in there. Part of it was like when I was building. It is like what shows the variety of the hats slash, our best sellers and the best light. But now that we're like talking about like durable outdoor, like that being more of the theme, it's like, oh yeah, like we could definitely. I have some other photos that we could tuck in to these, because we went on a photo shoot and we basically did because, like coffee shops and breweries are super common for people to be where sporting their outdoor trucker hats out here as well as like an actual hike where we have people out in the outdoors hiking around in these hats. So we kind of have the gambit of them that we can tuck in here.
45:30
I think we've got another photo, but as of right now this is. We did do a professional photo shoot because we're like we need some content.
45:36 - Kurt Elster (Host)
The photos are good that you have.
45:38 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, the photographer did a great job. It would be great to have more, because it's like the same models. I think we had like five or six of my friends out and she brought a couple of people who she works with that will like get the photos for their portfolio, which is kind of a cool relationship. But yeah, I agree, we could definitely switch in some good outdoor images into there. I've also taken some cool ones in like Patagonia and they're definitely like UGC style, but they're really cool.
46:08 - Kurt Elster (Host)
You know those work people.
46:10 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Isn't it?
46:11 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, no, they don't all have to be like the real perfect, polished ones. Yeah yeah, you can get some good results with some iPhone photos. I think we've got quite a few next steps, quite a few like low hanging fruit to really polish this thing up pretty quickly. Yeah, agreed, so let's do that.
46:33
Yeah, as our next step let's implement these changes and then we will reconvene in a follow up and see did it help, did it make any difference, you know? And if yes, okay, what do we think worked, and if not, what else can we do? Where'd we go wrong?
46:46 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, and I think the next question too is like okay, how do we're going to get traffic so we can test whether it worked or not? To, right, do I start running some more ads and then do we like, look at, like, okay, what are good ads these days? Right, do we have a full gambit of questions that we can kind of answer as we do this.
47:05 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, absolutely Okay. Cool, I'm excited, let's fix this thing.
47:10 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Please, I'm very excited too.
47:13 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
This is great. Yeah, do I get to poke at it?
47:18 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah.
47:19 - Paul Reda (Co-host)
We'll put together the list. You're making me do it. I love it. No, I want to do it. Yeah, it's going on your list.
47:24 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Awesome, I'm very excited. All right, Perfect.
47:28 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So we'll wrap it up there and we'll reconvene in a future episode and see how this went and then move on to marketing as our next topic, and if we can get that right, then we'll go into lifecycle email marketing, which I know you've got a lot of experience with.
47:42 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
I'll be excited about yeah.
47:44 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And if anyone would like to get a premium outdoor Pacific Northwest ultimate perfect stamp and trucker hat for drinking 44Noutdoorcom. Better not buy it from Amazon.
47:59 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Yeah, don't buy it from Amazon. This is set up. It's got a fulfillment already taken care of.
48:04 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Beautiful, beautiful.
48:05 - Jessie Goodell (Host)
Jesse, thank you so much. Yeah, Thank you, guys Appreciate it.