Learn the SCRIPT Formula for high-converting PDP's.
In this episode:
Our guest today is Josh Frank, Founder & Head of Optimization at Test Triggers, Josh has helped countless eCommerce businesses boost their revenue with conversion optimization. Running close to a thousand A/B tests have helped Josh to distill the true optimization tactics from the b.s.
Josh Frank: Get your images right. Make sure everyone understands the parts and pieces, what’s in the box, and then answer all that what-if questions. You know, returns, shipping, or whatever. If you can do those things, so you’re like… You’re batting at a much higher average than most.
Kurt Elster: I love it. So, today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, Josh Frank from Test Triggers is going to explain to us how to optimize our product detail page! Fabulous. If your eardrums are still okay. Josh, all right, so what’s the thing? What happened where you went, “Man, let’s go deep on product detail pages.” Because certainly, you were doing fine just with general split testing and traditional CRO.
Josh Frank: Yeah. It was really born out of a repeated question I kept getting, which is I would talk to brands and they would say, “Hey, maybe we don’t have enough traffic for A-B testing, or we’re not ready for a full CRO commitment, but is there any way you could get in and look at how to optimize our store?” And so, I really started to focus on, “Well…” Let’s say if you want to do something super small, I can check out your product page, give a couple of tweaks, and you can implement those, and that’s gonna be a pretty high leverage place to optimize.
But when I started doing these, I realized I was saying the same things over, and over, and over again. And I was calling on these examples of stores that were doing a really great job and thinking to myself, “Why aren’t we all just taking these tidbits from these really great product pages and implementing them on stores?” Many of them are not specific to some market, or some only if you sell X, Y, or Z. And so, started going through and kind of specced out a bit of a framework on if you can nail down these things, you’re doing a pretty darn good job as it comes to product pages.
Kurt Elster: And… Well, let’s start with mistakes. Where are we screwing this up? Where are most of us getting this wrong? Like you load up a page and you’re like, “Oh my God.”
Sound Board: Ew!
Kurt Elster: What are we doing wrong here?
Josh Frank: Boring, run of the mill copy, and even worse is when brands try to sound so much smarter and self-important than they actually are. Now, I’m not saying this to poke fun at brands or anything like that, but this me, me, me type of copy is just pervasive throughout product pages. Now, let me stop anyone before they start thinking, “But Josh, people don’t read.”
Kurt Elster: I was. That’s what I was about to… I was gonna play devil’s advocate. Go, “Josh, but people don’t read.”
Josh Frank: And I’m sure, Kurt, you’ve looked I’m sure at your fair share of visitor recordings, and heat maps, and things like that, and what you find is that we all tend to accidentally look at the average of everyone that uses a site and go, “Well, if the time on site is this, how can people possibly be reading?” And you go, “Well, those that buy spend more time on the site and do read.”
And that’s certainly backed up when you look at visitor recordings and heat maps split by people that actually buy versus those, by no fault of their own, the product’s just not right for them. And this is maybe one large overarching thing, is trying to understand there are those where your product is even in the realm of being right for them. Let’s worry about those people. There are plenty of people who are on your page and they’re evaluating, and they’re going, “You know what? It’s just not right for me.” But we don’t need to focus on them. There are 95% of them that are just… It’s just not right for them.
But there’s a smaller section that needs some answers, some reassuring, and it’s your product page’s job to do that. Now, we don’t do that with silly hacks like pretending that there’s some urgency that there really isn’t. Only one left!
Kurt Elster: The fake urgency.
Josh Frank: Fire emoji!
Kurt Elster: And scarcity apps. Yeah.
Josh Frank: Or you know, Jane from Delaware just bought this. Maybe it’s the last one! There’s really no need for that. So, the true things about improving these product pages is again, for those that are ready to buy, let’s get out of their way, get them to add to cart, and for those that need a little help, let’s make sure that we have a product page that helps answer their questions. And first and foremost, showcase the value that our product will provide to them.
Kurt Elster: And so, I heard copy, copy, copy. You talked a lot about copywriting, product description. Is that where we start?
Josh Frank: Yeah, so really, it’s about… We’ve developed this framework called the script framework, so script for… and we’ll start with S as in story. Each letter obviously corresponds to a part of the framework and story is the first one. Now, when I say story, I don’t necessarily mean that your product page has to follow a Joseph Campbell hero’s journey, or have some clear beginning, middle, and end, but it’s about understanding that the person on our page wants some outcome. They don’t want a nonstick frying pan. They want to make eggs easily in the morning with something that rinses off really… that cleans up really easily.
So, understanding your product, the outcome that your user is trying to get when they’re on your product page, and selling it in that way, as opposed to we just tend to see one of two things, let’s say. One is just overly boasting copy about we’re the greatest solution for this, and we offer best in class X, Y and Z. Phrases that people have heard a million times. Or just going feature, feature, feature. This hair dryer has X amount of watts and it’s this size. It’s like, “Well, those aren’t things that help tell the story or sell in any way.”
That’s number one, so looking at your copy in terms of is this telling any sort of story? Is this helping anyone achieve the outcome that they desire?
Kurt Elster: So, we’ve got a framework for the product detail page. Do we have one for copywriting specifically? I always go, I look at Copyhackers. I look at other frameworks for like sales letters tend to work really well.
Josh Frank: Yeah, so I would say let’s talk about a couple of external resources and then some of the ways that we generate copy ideas, because I will put my hand far, far up in the air that for me, sitting down with a blank page to write copy, you wouldn’t want to know the things I’d rather do than that, okay? That is just not a place I want to be.
Kurt Elster: Let’s go to the dentist and get our teeth cleaned. Yay!
Josh Frank: 100%. So, one is I tried not to do that by other ways to kickstart the copy, but first I want to call out a couple of people that I think are great follows in this department. One is one that you mentioned, which is Joanna Wiebe over at Copyhackers, who has been doing this at the top forever. I mean, she… Copyhackers’s stuff is fantastic. Peep Laja over at CXL has a lot of great resources on copywriting. Those are two good places that I would start.
Now, on the other side, which is how do you start with a paper that’s not blank, right? With no blinking cursor and nothing there. Go through your reviews. Go through any feedback that customers have given you. If you have live chat transcripts, go through those. Start just pulling things your customers have already said about your product and weave that into your story.
Kurt Elster: This is such a good… This is like if you take no other advice from this episode, that’s the one that will just pay dividends forever.
Josh Frank: It is incredible how few brands do this and then run around saying they’re data driven. So, data is not just numbers. There’s qualitative data, as well. So, again, your reviews, support tickets. The way that your customers speak. First of all, besides just what to say, it’s a great lesson for how to say it. Speak like your customers speak.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. How they talk about your stuff is probably different than how you talk about it as the owner.
Josh Frank: It most certainly is. It most certainly is. And if we go, so we talked about the script form, script framework. Number two is clarity. What we say about clarity is just avoid using cliché, overused terms, sounding overly boasty about your product.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, you want to avoid cliches like the plague, of course.
Josh Frank: Well, absolutely. You don’t have a ba-dum-tss in the sound deck yet?
Kurt Elster: I need a rimshot for that one. Oh well. You know what? I’ll just talk about myself instead.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: There we go.
Josh Frank: Well, one of the things, so the way to trick yourself into doing this is pretending as if you’re simply writing to a friend, right? If you were texting a friend about your product, or an email to a friend about a product, it’s so much easier to write that way, and then if you feel like you need to “add a little professionalism” you can do that, but it’s better to do that than start from… What people tend to do with copy is they write it, they look at their Google Analytics and they go, “Oh my goodness. 60,000 people a month on this site.” And when they write their copy, they imagine… It’s almost like they’re standing on a stage to those 60,000, having to speak to all of them.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re speaking to a stadium.
Josh Frank: Right, which is-
Kurt Elster: You want it to be one-on-one.
Josh Frank: Absolutely, right? Because there’s only one person on your website at a time, right? You’re not trying to speak to 60,000. You’re trying to speak to one. And so, again, reframing how we write copy as writing it to a friend, that’s how we inject clarity, and not… There’s always this phrase of like clear over clever. I’ve done a lot-
Kurt Elster: Clarity trumps clever is how I always said it.
Josh Frank: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Clear over clever is more clear.
Josh Frank: And that has been A-B tested to the hilt, and trust me, when in doubt, go clear over clever.
Kurt Elster: Oh, 100%. So, we got… We want to tell a story. We want clarity. We need to use our customer’s language. We want to write it you-focused, so talking more about the outcome for the customer. What their benefit is, what pain they’re probably experiencing before they buy the product, what’s gonna happen. We want clarity. We want to use the language the customers use by mining reviews for a lot of this information or maybe customer interviews. What have I missed?
Josh Frank: Well, we want to talk about the R in script, which is reviews. And everyone knows, everyone will just say, “Oh, I know reviews are important. I know. I know. I know they’re important. We gotta try and get more reviews. Okay.” First of all, from the start, do a great job of soliciting reviews, even if you do things in the beginning that don’t scale, like personally reaching out to every customer, asking them, “Hey, I’d love to know your thoughts on this product.” When that email comes from the CEO or founder of the company, it means a lot.
And when you gather reviews, then don’t just put them stuck at the bottom of a product page in tiny little link next to the stars. Grab a couple of great reviews and feature them higher up on the product. So, feature them in your buy box. Feature them… We’ve had a lot of success actually featuring them on the lower third or lower quarter of product images. Just a little overlay with a review. And a particularly great review-
Kurt Elster: Like take an excerpt from a great review and just make it part of the image.
Josh Frank: Bingo.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Josh Frank: And a particularly great review is something… is one that expresses some doubt that was eventually overcome. So, something like with this product, I was initially afraid that X would happen, but then I opened the box and Y. Right?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It always starts with what was my initial doubt before buying this product.
Josh Frank: And then how that’s overcome.
Kurt Elster: Those are the just absolute gold.
Josh Frank: Gems. When you get those, you need to be stashing them away.
Kurt Elster: Because it speaks to… If they had that objective, other people did too.
Josh Frank: Absolutely. And a quick call out for something I’m sure we have discussed on a previous podcast, but if you have a tool like Hotjar, or FullStory, or something similar, you can be simply asking customers on your site, “Hey, what’s your number one doubt or hesitation about this product?” You can also go back in Klaviyo or your email tool and ask people that bought your product, “What was the one thing that nearly stopped you from purchasing?”
Kurt Elster: If you didn’t make a purchase today, why not?
Josh Frank: Right, but actually there’s an important distinction here, right?
Kurt Elster: That one’s too broad, though. You’re right.
Josh Frank: Because that one is too broad, and you talked to people that didn’t buy. Right?
Kurt Elster: Ah.
Josh Frank: So, now we’re talking to… We’ve brought all these people in that maybe the product was just never right for and then we’ve asked their opinion and first of all, overwhelmingly they just say price. Too expensive, too expensive, too expensive.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Too expensive. But really, the flip side of that coin is they didn’t see the value, and that’s my fault, or just whatever circumstance they’re in, where it’s like it just doesn’t make sense for them.
Josh Frank: I mean, we should spend more time qualifying people out of our funnel, right? This product isn’t for you if X, Y, Z. That’s okay. There’s no shame in that. But the way that this question gets a lot of gold is when you go to the people that did purchase, qualified purchasers, and you say, “Hey, what was that one thing that nearly stopped you?” And those are a lot of things that we can say, “Okay,” those are things you can objection-bust on your product page.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Anything else I need to do with reviews? Any tactics on getting the reviews? I know like personally asking them is huge. Recently, someone asked me, “Hey, how’d you get-“ We have 200 reviews on our podcast. They said, “How’d you get it?” I said, “Anytime anyone said anything nice about the podcast, I asked hey, would you mind leaving a review?” And that’s where a lot of the reviews came from is I had to ask for them one on one.
Josh Frank: And that… I don’t have a miraculous answer for this other than one, you should have an email workflow set up to ask people that purchase in X amount of weeks. By the way, set that to like when you think they might have found value in the product, right? So, maybe not a day after if you sell a supplement that helps you sleep. It might take a couple weeks for someone to realize if that works or not.
Kurt Elster: Well, they gotta receive it in the mail.
Josh Frank: They have to receive it and then-
Kurt Elster: And then they need to take it out of the box, and then use it, and then have time to adjust to it. You’re right. You gotta… The review timing is the number one thing we’ve been able to mess with to increase opt-in rate on reviews.
Josh Frank: Yeah. I’m just a big fan of the do things that don’t scale and just like you said, ask people. When people say nice things, say, “Hey, would you mind adding a review?” I know that people go, “That’ll never work when I’m selling X amount.” When you’re selling that many, you probably have enough numbers that the review workflows and email are getting a decent amount of action on them. And the no duh answer is make a great product.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, of course.
Josh Frank: You want reviews? Have a product worth reviewing.
Kurt Elster: Certainly helps. Just have something really, really good that people want, and want to pay for, duh! Very easy. Okay. We’re at story, clarity, reviews. We got IPT left in the SCRIPT system.
Josh Frank: We’ve got IPT left. And the I in IPT is what I’ve been a little obsessed with lately, which I feel is one of the more underutilized parts of the product page right now, and that’s your image gallery. So, advice from maybe eight, 10 years ago is what matters in an image gallery is that you take high quality photos and that you have a lot of them. And if you can toss in a video, that’s great too. Now, that’s not bad advice at all, but what I tend to see sometimes is it’s a product, beautiful product image, great photo, but there are 40 of them at just a slightly different angle. It’s like, “Well, that’s not really helping me understand much, because you’re just giving me the same picture at a slightly different angle.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I got a 360-view divided into 10 photos.
Josh Frank: Exactly. And you’re just making me go through all of them. So, and products, pictures around your product, yes, great. But there are a lot of other things that we can do to help these other initiatives, to help tell the story. So, I know, obviously, Kurt, you’re familiar with Tactical Baby Gear.
Kurt Elster: TBG. Beav Brodie.
Josh Frank: TBG. They sell diaper bags mainly to guys who want a more macho-looking diaper bag, right?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so diaper bag with poly webbing. I have one. I used it as a laptop bag for a while, too. After it was no longer a diaper bag.
Josh Frank: If you go to their site, they do a great job with their product images on several points. One, each picture sort of answers a question, which is they show it open with stuff inside it, like here’s where the diapers go. They show a picture from the side with the diaper wipe holder. Okay, cool. I’ve got wipes. They show it with the diaper pad, and they do something that not enough brands do, which is they annotate the images. They add a little arrow that says, “Built-in diaper bag.” Or I’m sorry, “Built-in changing pad.” Changing pad.
So, it’s like, “Oh, great. I know that that’s included. I don’t need to.” Now, as someone is going through in their mind, all right, so I’ve got the kid, I’m at the store, by myself, need to change a diaper, they can look through those pictures and go, “Ping, ping, ping, ping. They have everything that I need.” So, annotated images is a great way, especially if you have a technical product. If you have headphones, point to here’s the Bluetooth connector switch, connects to up to two devices. These types of things that are also going to be duplicated as benefits in your product description, you can add them on the image, as well.
I know earlier we talked about taking the bottom third or the bottom quarter of the page and just overlaying a testimonial or review. I have one client who kept getting the question, they sell kids’ dishes, basically. Stainless steel kids’ dishes. And they kept getting the question like, “Are these dishwasher safe?” And it said dishwasher safe in the description, but what they simply did was took a picture of their products in a dishwasher, added it to all of the product image galleries. They don’t get this question as much anymore.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If you’re gonna be-
Josh Frank: Show me, don’t tell me.
Kurt Elster: If you’re gonna say, “Well, people don’t read,” well, then a picture’s worth a thousand words and you need to show me. And where you see really good examples of this is Amazon listings. If you’re an Amazon seller, that one listing page is everything you have. That’s like the entirety of your sales opportunity. And so, you’ll see on Amazon listings, they often will have like the second image is going to be the product with the features and benefit just written right over it. And I’ve always wondered why Shopify sellers don’t take advantage of the exact same tactic. And here you’re saying, “Well, they should.”
Josh Frank: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And it works.
Josh Frank: They should, and it works. Yeah. You can put… Some brands I see putting an Instagram post from one of their customers in their image gallery. Again, when you have someone… Another lesson learned from heatmaps is when you look at a product page and you see the next image button just red, red, red hot, people open up and just give me that next image, next, and this is an opportunity to tell and sell your story in these images. And if all you’re gonna do with that is again, 40 pictures of your product at a slightly different angle, it’s like you’re just not making the most of that.
So, again, annotating the images to show, point to specific benefits on the product, showing it in its lifestyle habitat, right? Show it as-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, you want that action shot.
Josh Frank: The action shots. The SNOO Smart Bassinet, right? The smart crib. The $1,400 smart crib. Their product image gallery is a work of art. It’s these beautiful pictures, the mom and dad doting over the crib. Things that may not even happen in real life, but I mean, you’re crazy if you don’t think that’s the life I want. I want that beautiful house, I want that… It’s great. It’s so great.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You want to hold up a mirror. But not just any mirror. We’re talking like Harry Potter mirror, where you’re gonna show the customer a 10% version of their life as it is. And that’s the stuff that really connects.
Josh Frank: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: The SNOO Smart Sleeper. Their product page is really good.
Josh Frank: It is incredible.
Kurt Elster: TBG’s is good, but I’m biased, because I designed and built it. But I’ll include links to both of those in here.
Josh Frank: Yeah. They’re both… They’re two great examples. Next up is sort of an obvious one that just tends to get a bit overlooked, particularly for more complicated products, and that’s… So, the P in SCRIPT stands for parts and pieces. Pretty simple here. We just want to tell somebody in the description what exactly is coming in this box when I open it.
Kurt Elster: Spell it out for me. I want that what’s included so bad.
Josh Frank: Spell it out. Spell it out. Now, think of things like electronics. I know one example I use is from a site called Crutchfield. They do audio and electronics.
Kurt Elster: Oh, Crutchfield’s good. Yeah.
Josh Frank: Yeah. And so, for instance, if you go to like… Confession, I was looking at drones the other day.
Kurt Elster: Oh, thank God. Good for you.
Josh Frank: And as somebody who isn’t that familiar, I’m thinking, “Okay…”
Kurt Elster: It’s intimidating.
Josh Frank: Yeah. What does it come… When I open this, am I going to be able to fly this drone? Or do I have to buy some extra cord, extra charger, extra adapter, and when you go to a product page that has the what’s included section, it’s like, “Okay, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.” Everything I need, like when I open this box, I can have the outcome I desire without having to go buy something else. So, and also if you have little perks that you pack in the boxes, if you… There’s like a cultural love for unboxing, right? I’m not saying you have to do some special unboxing video, but just tell people exactly what they’re gonna get in there, so that they know what to expect.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. And I actually… I have a client who sells aftermarket electronics for cars, like radios and head units and stuff, and one of their portfolio sites, a site that they look to, is like these guys really… If we could be more like them, that’d be great. It’s Crutchfield. And you know, we’ve taken inspiration from Crutchfield and other sites for this, but you’re right, I think one of the things we didn’t do that we should have was really spell out what’s included, like flat out use the words what’s included, because that’s what my brain’s looking for, and then also a photo.
And what’s interesting, like I’m looking at Crutchfield, they’ve got the DJI FPV drone combo, it’s this $1,300 drone, it’s brand new. Toby Leutke from Shopify even tweeted about this thing. I want it! But if I’m spending $1,300 on something, I’m going through every aspect of this product page. I want to know what’s included. I don’t want to be missing stuff. First picture on here is highlights, it’s like the three core items you get. Second picture is every single item in that box laid out in a flat lay.
Josh Frank: Kurt, are you suggesting that if you were gonna spend $1,300 you would read the product page?
Kurt Elster: What? But that’s impossible! You don’t… No one reads!
Josh Frank: No one reads! But yeah, that’s a good point, though, is that in addition to just answering those questions of like what’s in the box, when you spec out that there are 17 things that come in this box, you’re also sort of a bit like value anchoring this product to say, “Yes, it’s a lot of money, but you are getting all of these things in the box.”
Yeah, and also, for the more technical products that say like, “All right, I kind of have to have the boring information there.” That’s totally fine. As a general rule, we go from general information at the top to specific information at the bottom. So, when you say like how can you fit all this information on the page? It’s okay to have detailed information that you might have to scroll to. It’s okay. Like Kurt just said, I’m scouring that page if I’m reading this thing to find exact size, exact specifications. It’s okay to have that stuff. Everything doesn’t have to be jammed up at the top.
To say another thing just about Crutchfield and sites that do a great job like them is the things they do take a fair bit of work. All of their top best seller pages have blurbs that were written by an employee.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They didn’t copy and paste the manufacturer description.
Josh Frank: Bingo. And it has the employee’s face and says like, “Bill from our gear department wrote this.” And you would suggest that, and people would go, “Oh, that sounds like a lot of work.” It’s like, “Well, Crutchfield has a lot of product.” This is… It’s a tough and competitive environment and the higher we climb, the thinner the air gets. You gotta do the extra steps.
So, touches like that are important, and they also get a unique SEO advantage from having-
Kurt Elster: Unique content. Yeah. Unique long-form content. Lots of longtail keyword phrases in these very… I would imagine this drone page, pretty technical. You know what’s actually… And they say, “Oh, people don’t read.” I’m going to copy and paste just the overview description from Crutchfield’s page about this product. And I’m putting it into a word count tool, so we’re gonna see just how much people don’t read. Let’s see all of the content they’re not reading. It’s 1,200 words. Yeah, and that’s just the overview description. There’s some other tabs in here. Oh, there’s reviews, Q&A, and articles. I did not include those.
Josh Frank: I guess a quick call out, I didn’t put it in my notes to talk about, but I think that… and this is probably something that’s happening downstream from Amazon is having a review section in addition to a Q&A section is really quite helpful. Because a lot of times, people are scouring reviews to answer a question, but a nice Q&A section is really helpful, as well, and even if some of that content doubles up, that’s totally okay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s all… That’s another thing that is a… I think a variation on people don’t read is, “Well, we stated this once on one page, therefore it can never be stated again anywhere.” And that’s just not true. Just reinforce it. Make it obvious. No one’s gonna be mad that like, “Oh, I read that twice! I’m never gonna get that time back!” That’s just not gonna happen.
Josh Frank: No, it’s definitely not.
Kurt Elster: In fact, what you’ll get is fewer people asking you the silly questions that make you think no one reads. So, we’ve gotten through SCRIP. Now we’re down to T. What’s the T in SCRIPT?
Josh Frank: Just the T left. T stands for terms. And when we say terms, I mean like answering all of those what-if questions. So, what if the package shows up and it’s damaged? What if it breaks after two months? What if I opened it up and I just don’t like it? So, it’s your policies, but how are you stating your policies? How up front are you with your policies? If you’re not up front with your policies, is that because they’re pretty stinky policies? You know, might be time to review those and say, “Okay, maybe a seven-day return window isn’t enough.” Maybe a 10-day warranty isn’t enough. There’s a lot of competition there, as well.
And what this is not is this is not having a stock icon and putting, “Satisfaction guaranteed.” That is not going to help anyone to buy your product. We go back to clarity, we go back to these overused cliché terms, that is going to get skipped over so quickly, it’s not gonna matter or mean anything. So, if you have a really good warranty policy, if you have a 10-year warranty, if you have… There are products out there with lifetime warranty. If you have one of those, this goes back to what we were saying before. Mention it 10,000 times. Mention it everywhere. That’s unique. That is actually a… That is a pattern interrupt. It is not what someone is expecting to see when they come to the page. They’re expecting to see, “Satisfaction guaranteed. Easy returns.” What does easy returns mean? So-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. What the heck does it mean?
Josh Frank: I was sure hoping it wouldn’t be hard. I don’t know… And when Zappos first did this and said, “Free shipping both ways. 365-day returns.” It got… Do you remember the amount of PR they got just for that? That was like that was their entire marketing strategy.
Kurt Elster: It was. They were famous.
Josh Frank: And they put it everywhere.
Kurt Elster: People were like, “How? How do they possibly do this?”
Josh Frank: And so, it was not something people expected to see, and so therefore it worked. So, make sure you have the answers to all those what-if questions. Try to write them in a way that’s plan English, and also review your policies and make sure they are actually something that are beneficial to a customer without you obviously losing money. But also, track that and make sure that that’s really the case. People say, “Oh, if we went from a 30 to 45-day return policy, we would lose so much money.” Well, couple of things to consider there. One, is that true? Two, is there something wrong with your product or your product detail page and the way you sell this that people keep buying the wrong thing, or something that they think is gonna solve problem X and it doesn’t?
So, terms is the last one. Solving these what-if questions is vital. Those are the objection busters.
Kurt Elster: And how do you uncover the objections? Are we talking about consistent objections, like what’s returns and exchanges? Or do we also include some other category or product-specific objections in there?
Josh Frank: So, I would say if you have… If you’re like direct to consumer, you have a unique product that has… You can bundle in there things like… What’s an example? Let’s talk about Supply Razors. It’s like a single blade safety razor, I believe, but like that product itself, the blades last longer, the razor itself is meant to last a lifetime. Those product-specific things are good to put there, right? Where you can badge them and make them their own value propositions.
Those types of things can kind of earn their way into this section where you’re answering these what-if questions.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I’ve got some follow-up questions for you here now that we’ve gone through SCRIPT, which is story, clarity, reviews, images, parts and pieces, and terms. So, for good examples, the stuff that’s inspiring you, we talked about SNOO, Tactical Baby Gear, Supply. Any other examples of sites that you’re like, if you’re thinking about your product detail page, these are the ones that are so good they’re gonna make you cry? You’re gonna be like, “Wow, I’m wildly inadequate.”
Josh Frank: Yeah, so I’m gonna talk about one that actually we borrowed some of these concepts for a client of mine. They’ve been working fantastically. And the good news on this is that it has to do with something that a lot of stores internally see as a problem, which is like inventory management. What happens when something goes out of stock? And you sort of have a couple of options there. One, you can just make the add to cart button grey, do nothing else. That’s the least ideal. In a collection page, seeing a sold-out product, there is some sort of, “Okay, there’s some demand here.”
Kurt Elster: Create some scarcity. Yeah.
Josh Frank: Sure, sure. But in the least, you want to do an email drop, “Hey, notify me when it’s back in stock,” right? Now, the other option I’ve seen for a long time is, “Okay, now you can preorder it.” Okay, now I can buy it. That makes some sense, too. But I saw a brand called Caraway. They sell nonstick ceramic pans. And it’s clear that they’re doing pretty well, they’re selling out in their stock. Now, I would imagine behind the scenes it’s like, “Oh, man. When are we gonna get this inventory management right? This is sold out and that’s sold out.”
But what they’ve done is they’ve taken that, flipped it on its head, and made it into a positive. So, right now when you go to their product page for one of their products that is sold out, it says, “Reserve now.” So, instead of preorder, it says reserve, which is just better. It’s just better than saying preorder. And they’ll also-
Kurt Elster: Pretty good.
Josh Frank: Yeah. They’ll also just be upfront and say, “Our next shipment is coming in on this date and it’s already 26% sold out.” It’s transparent.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s so good.
Josh Frank: It’s true, right? It’s true. It’s not… There’s no BS there. Sure, technically, could they be making all that up? I suppose. But it’s not the countdown ticker, order in the next four minutes or you never know if you’ll ever see this again.
Kurt Elster: The fire emoji. If you have a fire emoji-
Josh Frank: Yeah, fire emoji.
Kurt Elster: … in the product form of your PDP, we’re no longer friends. That’s how that’s gonna work.
Josh Frank: But I took this concept and one of my clients, they’re called Ahimsa. They sell stainless steel, this kind of really cool looking stainless-steel dinnerware for kids. But they also are like, “This color’s sold out, and that color’s sold out. What are we gonna do here?” We tried a couple of different things. But then I saw this example and I said like, “Wait a minute. Why are we not… It’s okay that these things sell out. It means a lot of people want them. Let’s just be as clear as possible. Hey, our spring shipment is expected to arrive this day, we’re getting this many. Here’s how many have sold out. If you’d like to get yours in this batch, reserve it. If not, it might be a while.” Let’s just be upfront and honest. And this worked so well. They had this kind of strategy going where their ads were doing better, everything was doing better, because first of all they said, “You know what? We don’t feel bad now. We can send traffic to this page.” Before, they were shutting ads off because there was no product to sell. When in reality, there is, it’s just gonna take a while. And if someone decides, “I don’t want to wait,” that’s fine. But plenty of people have said, “No, no, no. Listen, if so many people are buying this, I want to jump on that train, as well.”
It’s a really neat way to handle things that internally can be viewed as inventory management issues and spin it on its head and make it a positive.
Kurt Elster: I would agree with all of that. One thing I want to pick your brain on is tabbed descriptions. You can… Because people don’t read, apparently the solution to that is you jam everything and hide it behind a tab, or you put it in an accordion menu, which is just a horizontal or vertical… I don’t even know anymore, variation on a tab. Where do you stand on the tab, accordion, or neither debate?
Josh Frank: Yeah, so I don’t… I’m not a big tab person. Well, I guess first and foremost, using some of the things we’ve talked about in this podcast, talking to your customers about what’s important to them, let’s try first to go through all of the content, and without any pre-judging, establish like what is really important here, what is helping to sell this product, and then like we said before, it’s okay to have long content that scrolls. Let’s just organize that from general at the top to specific at the bottom.
Now, if you must have some sort of open-close type apparatus for your content, one way we’ve found that tends to get around this and work in a pretty decent way is an accordion style, but the first 20% or so is always open.
Kurt Elster: Aha!
Josh Frank: And then there’s like a little read more link, or if you click anywhere on it, it just opens it up. But you’re giving people a peek view into, because first of all, you know what people sometimes hide behind there? Reviews. Why are we hiding-
Kurt Elster: That drives me crazy. That’s one of the optimizations when we get pulled in on an existing site. I’m like, “Let’s just take those reviews out of the tab there, buddy.”
Josh Frank: Yeah, so now a compromise of sorts would be open that up, open it up a little bit, so you can at least see one positive review, and then anywhere you click inside of it opens it more. Same thing for again if you have a specifications tab, or accordion, or whatever. That works as a nice way of saying, “Okay, because of our design, our theme, our whatever, it “has to be this way.”” That’s a nice way to sort of give people a peek into what’s behind, because you just… You do not want to be hiding reviews in any manner. It just doesn’t make any sense at all.
Kurt Elster: So, during the pandemic, I bought a lot of stupid crap. What is your favorite thing you bought during the pandemic?
Josh Frank: This is gonna be… This is so silly. I bought a coffee frother.
Kurt Elster: How does that work?
Josh Frank: Okay, so it’s like a little, battery operated, tiny, tiny whisk. So, like my coffee now is getting a little complicated. It’s got like… I’ve done some of the butter in the coffee, and the MCT oil, and the vanilla and whatnot. But I used to do this in a blender. It’s such, such a mess, but you can’t just stir it with a spoon. It doesn’t… You know. So, you use this frother. It just stirs it like crazy and makes… Everything looks like a Starbucks drink when you’re done with it.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I love it.
Josh Frank: It cost like 12 bucks, but then you can use it, like anything you drink where the powder gets kind of yucky, doesn’t stir enough, frother. Done.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Oh, I already… I got some matcha green tea. I think it’d be perfect for that.
Josh Frank: Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It gets a little chalky if it’s not stirred up all the way. The coffee frother is the way to go on that.
Kurt Elster: When you think about success, who comes to mind? Someone popped into your head immediately.
Josh Frank: My grandpa.
Kurt Elster: Ah.
Josh Frank: My grandpa came to my mind.
Kurt Elster: Wait, why?
Josh Frank: And I thought like, “Oh, that was kind of a…” But, so came over here from Italy when he was seven, family lived in West Virginia, like in the coal mines. I’m from Detroit, so when they heard that Henry Ford was paying $5 a day, that was them. They came on up here. Moved. He realized he was never going to work in factories, so he started his own barber shop. And I look back on that, one, it was my first job, was sweeping up hair in a barber shop. But I remember even back then thinking, “This is… My grandpa doesn’t just cut hair. He’s like an entertainer. He’s like a friend.” And that’s why I think it’s part of why I’m so obsessive about storytelling in these things. It’s like it’s all that matters, right?
So, I look back at that and I go, “Man, what a neat way to do your life.” He loved talking to people, so he opened a barber shop and talked all day. And cut a little hair, too.
Kurt Elster: That’s cool. I really like that. I’m glad I asked. What are you most excited about right now?
Josh Frank: I am most excited about people getting vaccinated.
Kurt Elster: Me too.
Josh Frank: I’m not gonna lie.
Kurt Elster: I can’t believe it’s finally happening.
Josh Frank: I am thinking about this summer and how much I have missed being with a decent size group of friends, and I’m really, really looking forward to doing that again in hopefully no short order here.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. 100%. I’m with you on that one. Final question, if you had to delete all but three apps from your phone, which three do you keep?
Josh Frank: Oh, this is very good. Okay. All right. Give me-
Kurt Elster: And we’re assuming messages and phone.
Josh Frank: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ones that stay are the ones that are there. Okay. It would have to be Overcast, so that’s my podcast app, so I can listen to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast every week. That would definitely be one. I’ll be honest, YouTube’s gotta stay on there. The amount of times I throw the headphones on with the dishes going and watch a little YouTube, that’s gonna stay if only… I only have three. I only have three. Oh, my goodness, this is tough. You know what? And the other one, for sake of my own productivity, the app Freedom.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I use Freedom too!
Josh Frank: Yeah, so-
Kurt Elster: Freedom.to is actually the website.
Josh Frank: Yeah, Freedom.to. It blocks me from any distracting websites every day from like 6:00 AM to 11:00 AM, so that morning block, I cannot go on Reddit, I cannot go on Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. With those three, I feel like I could get by.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s quite… Freedom, especially with the pandemic, and just being isolated at home, I really… The distractions are tough, and so I started using Freedom like… I used to do it like, “Oh, I gotta get some stuff done and there’s a shiny object I want to research,” so I’d use Freedom. Now, it’s just it’s part of my daily routine. It’s on a schedule, Monday through Friday, and it works across devices. So, I know, we’re completely plugging Freedom, but it’s really good if you find you’re like-
Josh Frank: It just works. And-
Kurt Elster: If you’re one of those people wants to just go down Reddit or YouTube rabbit holes like me.
Josh Frank: Well, and the thing about it is you don’t realize how often when you are even just slightly procrastinating an email you don’t want to write, that you just open that tab and go right to Twitter, Reddit, like you don’t realize how often you do it until you block it and you go, “Oh my goodness, I was doing it that much?” And then it really does help to break that pattern. I mean, it just does. So, we plugged that quite a bit, but it’s good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, it’s super legit. Josh, where can people go to learn more about you?
Josh Frank: Yeah, so my CRO agency is TestTriggers.com, T-E-S-T-T-R-I-G-G-E-R-S. You can find me @JoshFrank on Twitter. And my email is Josh@TestTriggers.com if you have questions or you’d like me to take a look at your product page, because apparently that’s just what I do now.
Kurt Elster: You know, it’s such an important space to answer questions, and you know, now that this is in my head, I already… I’m sure you’re gonna be getting referrals from me. More so.
Josh Frank: Well, yeah, and it really is like we talked about at the very beginning of this call, it is something… I have been telling people forever, “A product page is so important, so important.” But then it wasn’t until I just sat down and looked at a ton of them in a given couple weeks and I was like, “Boy, we’re just not getting the most out of these.” There are just so many ways to optimize.
Kurt Elster: It’s a missed opportunity. Yeah.
Josh Frank: For sure.
Kurt Elster: I have one of my favorite clients, I’m always like, “We gotta get conversion up. We gotta get conversion up.” I’m like, “All right, well, we’ve smoothed the funnel, every possible road bump’s gone, but please, can we get someone to just write really awesome descriptions for our top 10 products?” And I’m like, “That’s the thing that’s missing.” And you know, it’s often a hard sell internally in organizations, which I think is funny. Because it’s… Copywriting has been around for so long, and so we’re just not thinking about it as like the exciting tool that it is.
Josh Frank: There are things that are really, really helpful and profitable, but just need some rebranding. Like copywriting is one of them. As soon as you say it, people’s eyes glaze over. When I talk about user research-
Kurt Elster: But if you talk about like machine learning, like AI-
Josh Frank: Oh, baby. Where can I write a check? Let’s go.
Kurt Elster: AI copywriting, that, suddenly everybody’s like, “All right! A robot’s gonna write my copy! I’ll use that!” What? You want the robot to do it? It’s just using Google searches. Oh my God. Just write it yourself! Oh well. On that note.
Josh Frank: But it’s true.
Kurt Elster: Well-
Josh Frank: Always a pleasure.
Kurt Elster: We’ll end it there. Oh, Josh, thank you. This has been great.