w/ Chase Clymer, Electric Eye
As we approach 2024, the mantra for every Shopify store owner should be 'Build Better, Grow Faster'. But how do you turn this mantra into reality?
Today, we're zeroing in on the theme 'Build a Better Store for 2024'. We're dissecting the critical shifts in e-commerce and how they impact your store's future.
With us is Chase Clymer, a Shopify savant from Electric Eye. He's the brains behind successful store transformations and is here to share his playbook for e-commerce excellence.
Chase dives into why embracing Shopify Online Store 2.0 is a game-changer, discussing its customization capabilities and how it aligns with consumer expectations in 2024.
From conducting thorough code audits to prioritizing user experience, Chase lays out actionable strategies to refine your store. We explore the power of customer feedback and the underrated art of split testing in driving conversions.
As 2024 looms, the challenge is clear: innovate or stagnate. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone aiming to build a better Shopify store in the coming year.
Hit subscribe for more e-commerce wisdom that will help you lead the pack in 2024. Building a better store starts here.
Kurt Elster
Heads up friends, the unofficial Shopify podcast is made by indie entrepreneurs or indie entrepreneurs and may contain material not suitable for all audiences, like swearing or economics. Listener discretion is advised. Forget just chasing revenue. In a world of rising ad costs and thin margins, what truly counts is your profit. Enter Store Hero, your new ally in profit-centric growth. Unifying sales, marketing, and cost data, Store Hero unveils your real profitability down to each order. Now you can scale ad spend with confidence. backed by data, actionable insights from a platform that thinks beyond revenue. And exclusively for you our listeners, mention the unofficial Shopify podcast, and you'll get a free profitability audit for 2024. Ready to step into a new era of e-comm clarity? Visit storehero. ai and discover a platform designed for the profit-driven brand. Oh, new year right around the corner. So I I I already know it. On the mind of every ambitious entrepreneur, every ambitious merchant this time of year is you know new year's resolutions, new year, new you new store This is gonna be my big best year ever. How do I make my store better as a new year's goal? I no shame in it. I think we all have these thoughts around this time of year. And I think part of that, you also you have to reflect on what worked, what didn't, you know, larger industry trends and try and come up with A vision, a plan, or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I don't know. Maybe we should blow everything up and start over. Either way, we're gonna talk through it with someone today. and here uh maybe a a systematized approach to improving an existing Shopify store. And so joining us is Chase Klymer. Chase uh in a very similar position to myself. He's been with Shopify many years. He's a Shopify partner. He's uh uh owns a Shopify agency, hosts a podcast about e-commerce, honest e-commerce. If you like this one, you'll probably like that one. And Uh, he's in the Midwest. So wonderful Midwestern modest values, like myself, maybe. I don't know. I'm actually not that modest. But Mr. Chase Klymer, I'm interested in your expertise on optimizing Shopify stores. You've done quite a bit of that. Chase, welcome.
Chase Clymer
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Uh It's been we've known each other for seven or eight years now, and it's the first time I actually made it on the show. Really? Yeah, yeah. We kept trying. I'm so sorry. It's all right. I'm here now. It's worth the wait. Like in my head, you had been on the show.
Kurt Elster
Of course you had.
Chase Clymer
Well, we have done so much just content together and we've been in masterminds and whatnot. We always see each other. Uh but no, I don't think I don't think I've been on it. Maybe maybe I'm mistaken.
Kurt Elster
So okay, let's talk let's talk e-com. And I think to look forward, if you can, we gotta look backwards. Some hindsight is necessary. So if you were to reflect a moment on the past year, were there any shifts you noticed in e commerce in general or Shopify?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think The one that's just been happening incrementally ever since, you know, COVID, which it is just the cost of acquisition and advertising expenses, have gone really through the roof. Which luckily for yourself and I and what our shops are good at, it has helped these merchants look at where they can become more profitable and eking out all these advantages through conversion rate optimization and raising average order value has become more and more top of mind for these merchants. as they realize they can't just throw more money at advertising to be profitable. That was that was a big thing uh that I've noticed last year and kind of just ever since COVID. Um additionally been a huge rise in shortening uh kind of the advertising funnel and landing pages that's super popular, especially now and right before Q4 was really, really popular stuff, which It's been really fun to to do with Shopify two point zero and we can talk more about that later. Um and then lastly, uh Influencer seeding at the top of the funnel. I don't know why everything that I'm thinking about is marketing and advertising related when we don't do any of that at the agency, but those are the things that are on top of my mind.
Kurt Elster
It's funny, yeah, I do not sell marketing services. We don't do digital marketing at all. And yet I know a ton about it and think about it all the time. But I I think you're right. And I everything is cyclical. Ten, fifteen years ago, it was all about you know bootstrapping and the lean startup was the book on every founder's shelf. And Yeah, we were we were concerned about profitability. And then we had uh low interest rates for a while and we had surplus checks and suddenly, you know, those budget profitability weirdly became less important for a time. And then uh it we're just seeing the pendulum swing back the other way. We're like, hey, let's focus on on profitability and uh making efficient operating choices with our businesses. And I think both are fun.
Chase Clymer
Fancy, I wish I I knew the term, but there's this fancy thing that's basically just like gross margin with everything considered. And it's like if you don't know this number, you're not a real e-commerce entrepreneur, and it's just like, whoa. It's so hardcore now.
Kurt Elster
Immediately I'm skeptical of any advice that starts with if you're like if you're not X, if you're not doing Y, then, you know, anything that presents itself as disqualifying you for not agreeing with the author.
Chase Clymer
Kurt, how am I gonna get internet likes if I'm not just so binary and so combative?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it has to be like this I'm right and you're wrong and everyone who disagrees with me is a POS. Uh that's not point of sale.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I don't know who wrote uh the book on marketing with that as kind of the subject, but it it it works for some people if you want to be that way, but I don't, and that's why I don't have a million Twitter followers.
Kurt Elster
Or X, I guess. So you ever go like, man, if I were just evil, I would be so much more successful.
Chase Clymer
Well, that's that's yeah, psychopathy helps with entrepreneurship, and that's a whole different episode.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, a lot I I had seen those are I think that was floating around in uh Harvard Business Review. That if you're a psychopath, that that could be a valuable skill as a CEO. Oh man.
Chase Clymer
Patrick Bateman. It really helps with sales. Uh empathizing. It's oddly enough, they don't have like the emotions to empathize correctly, but they can mimic, which helps with sales. I don't know. It's crazy.
Kurt Elster
Uh all right, so Stan, psychopaths aside, any uh strategies, tactics, or features that stood out to you this year?
Chase Clymer
Oh man, we Shopify 2. 0 is like fully launched and going and single page checkout. We got all the things that they promised us years ago finally. Uh and I'm so excited about it. And we went Full bore custom for a while was the solution we were going with to solve these problems for merchants. And we just backtracked and ate our words. We're like, you know what? These 2. 0 themes are awesome. We're going this way now.
Kurt Elster
That's the we had the same experience and I suspect a lot of Shopify uh theme developers, agencies, and store owners experienced the same thing. Where in the past it was like, you know, use one theme, customize it, make it do what you want, or build custom templates from the start and then customize on that. Whereas now the flexibility that those online store 2. 0 themes possess means a off-the-shelf theme with custom sections, custom styling in it. It's just incredible. I mean you just get the best of both worlds. And they're they're efficient. You know, they're they're much easier to build and maintain and quicker to build and get to market.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I wrote kind of like a manifesto about that on our on our agency website. If you go and click on design and development and scroll down a little bit, that's just basically all about why we're going to start with a premium theme and why headless or custom are potentially a waste of time, energy and money.
Kurt Elster
I think certainly if we look at this as an evolution of e-commerce, you know, Shopify leads the forefront here. And so how do you think that's going to change the future for Shopify stores now that we have that online store 2. 0 feature set is is here and working as promised.
Chase Clymer
I think that more merchants are gonna be empowered to control a lot of their design and development. Well, not necessarily development, but a lot of their store design themselves. With it not be being gated behind customizations that require like actual code-based knowledge. Um, that's like one of the things we always talk about when we're trying to help merchants is they've got like some crazy custom theme and they're like, we can't even change this headline. It's been wrong for two years. And it's like, yeah, we're gonna empower you to do all that stuff because it it's boring. I don't wanna do that. I wanna do near nerdy stuff. Like we'll we you know, so helping all that stuff live in the customizer is like just lets their team, their e-commerce manager, or whomever uh run with that stuff, so then you can focus on the really interesting stuff
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I wanna I want to build tools for you that let you maintain and run your own store. On things you should be able to do, like basic content changes. Yeah, in the past you'd hire a theme developer's nutty, depending on how the theme was implemented. Where today, I mean, the amount of flexibility you could build into that theme editor and then document it in the theme editor with little notes and tool tips. Oh, I love it. And then combine it with meta fields. I think that it's like that combination of online store 2. 0 plus meta field support. Now I'm like, this feels like a real deal content management system.
Chase Clymer
Well, and with uh meta objects, which is basically uh something WordPress had forever. If you remember advanced custom fields, uh that's basically what it is. And it now it's like if you can dream it, you can build it. But the hard part is uh Building like what that inforta information architecture looks like in your mind, that's takes some conceptual like ideation to do. It's the same kind of problem that you run into with automating. You really have to sit down and think about what's happening and how the data structures need to work before you can do it. And that's why I think it's really hard to sell. you know, automation solutions ca un until you tell specifically what it can do. Cause doing everything is a hard concept for a lot of people to understand. So you gotta like give them really specific examples. So I think it'd be really hard to like run marketing for like Zapia or something. That sounds impossible.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, you'd well, yes, because it is so specific and so um edge casey. That's I like they If you've Googled anything around it, you discover that they have so many landing pages. Um so we talked about Shopify Store 2. 0. We we looked backwards and we're leaning on experience and features. And last year really was a lot of existing stores we did theme setups for and set them up on Shopify Store, an online store 2. 0. And it sounds like you had the same experience. If the theme here is how do I level up my business going into the next year, if you're not on an online store 2. 0 theme yet, I'm suspecting that's like do that first.
Chase Clymer
So we do a glorified audit whenever we talk to potential new clients. You know, we call it a Shopify diagnostic, right? And If we know that you're on a one point oh theme or some weird hacky two point oh theme, which is like this hybrid that there were some early two point oh themes that were yeah that that weren't
Kurt Elster
what they are now.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, yeah. If we notice that, we immediately are just like, you need to get on a two point zero theme. That's gonna be the best advice we can give you sinking you know you know it's just more sunk cost in this old thing that's not going to transfer over. So that's like number one advice is if we know it's a 1. 0 theme Just just update. We're not even gonna do like a code audit or anything. It's not worth it.
Kurt Elster
Um Yeah, you're you're throwing good money after bad, it sounds like if you're investing in the 1. 0 theme.
Chase Clymer
Um, you know, I understand that's in a perfect world though, right? And sometimes it's like, well It's just not in the budget to to do that this year where we have to do main we have to maintain. You know, there sometimes there are realistic reasons why you can't do that and You know, we'll we'll entertain that and we'll talk to people, but you know, the best advice usually is you should just update.
Kurt Elster
I agree with it. And yeah, occasionally there are circumstances circumstances where people go, look, we're gonna limp this thing along. But I think you're you're doing yourself a disservice. It it ends up being more costly anyway. Cause the the online store two point oh theme is faster out of the box. We've got better support. Sections everywhere is a delight. And the good w in the good themes, every almost every element in there you can just drag and drop within the theme editor. And you know, myriad sections. It just gives you a lot of configurability. Plus apps and everything integrate nicely now.
Chase Clymer
Like, there's all that awesome stuff about getting on a 2. 0, but there's also like all the stuff you're leaving behind on usually this legacy 1. 0 theme. They've been on it for three or four years and they've installed and tried 47 different SEO plugins that have turned their spaghetti code into a net rat's nest that nobody wants to figure out. Um, there's just so much stuff in there that starting from scratch and rebuilding it, you know, the right way is gonna just be infinitely easier to maintain.
Kurt Elster
When making that transition, is there an an approach that people should take? Something Yeah.
Chase Clymer
So if you've all right, if you made the decision that updating your store To a 2. 0 theme is like in the cards for you. Um, we the it's a little bit beyond what we do in our diagnostic, but we do it, you know, it's basically how you scope any project, right? Uh and we just did this for a client this week, so it's really top of mind for me. So first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna run through the store and you're gonna make note of anything that's like not typical, right? So you're gonna wanna know Oh, they've got these landing pages here. This needs to be considered in the project. Like obviously you're going to be running through their apps and you're going to do an app audit. You're going to be like, these ones affect the front end. These one, this one can be deleted because it's gonna be built into the new version of the code. Like what is this custom thing here? We have to talk about it. You know, things that are gonna really affect the lift of a project are gonna be like Customizations around bundling, stuff that's happening in the cart, uh, in checkout, post-purchase. Like you gotta kind of understand all the stuff that's outside of just like what you can rebuild within a theme. You also need to really communicate with the client as far as like what scale of customization do they want from like a design perspective. And you have to Position that statement in a way that doesn't sound like one answer is better. It's just gotta understand what the the client wants. And so it's like Uh, you know, do you want to embrace the limitations of the theme and design it within those constraints, which is gonna be a faster project? uh but it's gonna be more kind of like stuck with what it looks like? Or do you want the freedom and ability to do a full design round and really get this design looking how you feel your customers and need to to interact with your store? Uh, so you have those conversations about like how far away the design's gonna get from whatever 2. 0 theme you're gonna use. Um, and you start to basically tackle all of this stuff in a in a Google Doc. Uh you really need to understand what templates outside of kind of those standard templates you're going to need to recreate or collaborate with the client on creating. If you're already on Shopify, it's not a migration, and you have made the decision that you want to go do a 2. 0 theme, Unless you've got some crazy complexity to like your business, it's a pretty straightforward project. And you should be able to knock it out in two to four months, depending on kind of your complexities.
Kurt Elster
I would I would agree with that. It really depends on how how big is this catalog, how many features are here, how big is this content, how much content, you know, what what special features, how many apps, and the the sky's the limit on a lot of that stuff.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, but I could I could like combat you on like some of those things. Like how big is the catalog? They've got ten thousand products, but it's all the same boring product page because it's some warehouse components, right? Yeah, it's one product template. Yeah, that's not a big lift, but they could have twelve products, but every product needs a custom page because it's got a c a crazy story about where the yarn's from. Like so then you there's complexity.
Kurt Elster
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Chase Clymer
Yeah. I think we talked about like if you know you're on an old one point oh theme, right? What's the big project to tackle in Q1 of 2024 is yeah, you should probably do a redesign. If you're not even on Shopify and you're thinking about moving to Shopify, like that's you should start having those conversations now. Uh migrations add A month or two to any project to be realistic. And if anyone is telling you otherwise, they're lying to you.
Kurt Elster
I love doing migrations, but it just a whole whole new can of worms to unpack. January. Everybody, yeah, we work hard November. Everybody kind of knocks off for December. And then January was when the Muppets come out of the woodwork. That's when everyone says, I'm gonna start this project. I think the the smart money is on can you defer that or try and start it in December when I think you'll get more favorable terms versus, you know, everyone shows up at in the service provider's doorsteps on you know January 7th.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I mean if you know that you're gonna do it and you're like, oh like we should just wait until after the holidays, it's You're in the same boat with a dozen other probably qualified projects as well. And you should reach out earlier. And I we are booked fully booked out through January. We can't start a project until February right now. Um and I been telling people, you know, kind of get your foot in the door. How serious are you about this stuff? Because good good agencies and teams, they kind of have a finite capacity. Um, so you kind of gotta they they understand what they're gonna be getting into. Um, but it's just sometimes it is out of uh the the person's control, you know, uh some people don't want to talk about it until the money's in the bank 'cause of, you know, the holiday and whatnot. Uh, so you know, in a perfect world, we'd be building these things all year wrong, but like in reality, there's a huge like disappearance of merchants like between November like basically t between Black Friday and Christmas. Like it is if you're like uh a consultant like me and Kurt Nobody's reaching out about a new project. And it's just the second week of January, everyone's gonna end up land up in our inbox probably.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Yeah, that's how it goes. Um so all right, tell me if you've had this experience. Merchant reaches out to you and goes, well, I need you to make my store better because I know it can be better, but I can't tell you how you figure that out.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, you're the expert. You should know. Yeah, that's that that's I'm sure anyone that runs an agency has experienced some sort of interaction like that, a lot of them it it isn't um a challenge, right? It's like you're the expert, you tell me. It's never like that. It's more like I have money and I have this awesome business and I want it to be better. I hear you're good. Please help. Right? It it's coming from a really earnest place of need. And The immediate answer is I don't know. You gotta like figure out what's going on, right? And so that has been a challenge that we've been dealing with at our agency since we started eight years ago. And slowly, you know, we're starting to figure out how to how to address it. So that's kind of where our Shopify diagnostic came from. It's a just a really fancy term and name. And I'm sure this name's gonna get stolen the second this thing goes live. And I'm sure there's gonna be a million other agencies out there with a Shopify diagnostic. But it's a series of audits where we run through a store to help build an idea of like what direction that we should go with Potentially working together, what the project might look like and things. What should you work on really as with if you have a Shopify business, an e-commerce store? Like these are the things that we think you should work on. Um so the main audits that we're gonna run through is it's gonna be a front-end UX audit. Then we're gonna go and look at their app stack and their technology choices, so an app audit, and then we're gonna look under under the hood, we're actually gonna look at the code. and see what's going on under there. Um and I'll kind of pause there and see which one do you want to like kind of talk about first. So it it's theme audit, app audit. Was there a third one? Yeah, it's front end UX audit, back end code audit, and app audit.
Kurt Elster
Let's start with a boring one. Back-end code.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, very boring, but it's crazy the stuff that you'll notice. So first of all, if it's a theme we've never heard of, we're always interested to learn like, well, how good is this theme? We use senior Shopify developers to get in there. I'm not a developer. I don't I can't tell you one spaghetti from another, but we've got some amazing people that work with us. that can. And so what they're looking for is the technology that was used to build the theme. How dated is that technology? Is it utilizing some of the newer kind of Shopify integrations like storefront stuff. Another thing that we usually notice is like how much customization has been done to this theme. And how skilled was the developer that did that customization. So what's that g what that tells you is how hard is this gonna work be to work on if we were to work together and And is this going to be a situation where you're pulling on a string of a sweater and the whole thing unravels and it something that should have taken a you know a week is now gonna taken a month because something was built the wrong way the first time. Um another thing that actually this is quite popular and this has been happening for the last year or two is we'll see people that have the site speed hack embedded into their their code base.
Kurt Elster
And it's obfuscated code, like intentionally hidden code that breaks the page speed score, makes you feel good, but doesn't actually improve anything.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, you're still you're still ugly. You're just I don't know, you got a good tender picture is basically how that thing works out. So if that's in there, that's a big red flag that we call out. A lot of that is whenever we're in a position where we are the client is like in a position where they want to know, is it worth redesigning or can I use this theme still and optimize this theme? And so a lot of this underlying stuff is to determine like whether that's a good idea or not. And so if you know they've got this code that's obfuscating stuff. They've got a lot of customizations that were done by maybe like a junior dev that really didn't know what they were doing. There's a lot of just gunk in there. Like we're probably gonna lean towards should probably redesign this thing.
Kurt Elster
They got the upwork special?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It but if it's pretty clean, it seems well maintained, it's a modern it's a more modern theme, uh things are making sense, uh then we're gonna be like, Yeah, this is actually probably a pretty good base to kind of start optimizing from. So that's what we're really looking for in the code audit. There's a little bit more nerdy stuff in there, especially around performance. We're looking at page speed and performance within that as well.
Kurt Elster
And then once we're at, all right, so it either if it doesn't pass that check, then immediately we're like, all right, start over You know, online go to online store two point zero, get a clean theme, and build what you want and consider this one a learning experience, a trial phase to figure out what works for you. And now that you know that and put your vision is sharpened. And now we could we could build you what you really want. So we pass, let's just, you know, that theme code audit is really like passfail. From there, I'm guessing UIUX audit is next. This is the more subjective, squishy one. How do we approach that?
Chase Clymer
It you're right. It is subjecting and squishy. And so Andrew on our team was really just like, all right, we're gonna make this thing so our opinion is out of it until we're writing the summary. So it's very suggest, it's very just binary questions, right? So I can give you some examples. Um we're mainly looking at the buying journey. So that's going to be homepage. Collection, product page, checkout, you know, the things that truly matter. Um, but we've got some specific uh things we're looking for, right? So here's an example, right? It's like, is the navigation structure clear and intuitive? Which is awesome when we're doing this for someone we've just met because it should be our first time on the website. So, you know, we take a look. Does this navigation make sense to me as a first-time customer? Do I know how to get to things, how to buy the products, how to understand it? Uh while that's a little bit subjective. It's pretty close to being like, yeah, this makes sense or no, this is just off the wall. Um navigation is uh how much time do you guys spend on navigation when you're rebuilding websites?
Kurt Elster
A lot because merchants don't. And that's the thing that really uh has outsized gains. It's like, can you come up with better copy? Can you come up with a better navigation? Because that navigation is more than just getting around the website, right? It's how quickly can you get me to the thing that is most relevant to me? And often the navigation becomes a quick way to figure out what that site is about.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, so so that's just that's one thing we're looking at is kind of is that navigation. And then on the homepage, you know, first thing we're looking at the hero section and be like, does this give me the an idea of what this company is, or is this a picture without any text that doesn't really make any sense? Uh you know, does does it actually include uh their unique like Tagline about the business. Like we make socks for people without feet, right? That'd be a crazy thing, but it very specific, and now you know what this business does. Um, but sometimes it's it's kind of up to your imagination if you don't know what the product is or how you got there, you're like, they could be selling Socks, shoes, hats. I don't know. This is just a picture of a guy. Um so sometimes you start to point out these things. And a lot of it within UX is like merchants are so close to it and it's
Kurt Elster
They just need to It's obvious to them. They spend more site more time on the site than anyone else.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. So they're we're looking at things like that and then we start getting more into the collection pages. And this is where navigation goes hand in hand with filtering and searching. We're like how good and how easy is it for me to click around and and get to the black t-shirt and an Excel that I that's all I want. You know, does that not exist? Like, mm-hmm that's that's call-out, you should probably look at that. And a lot of this UX audit stuff is best practices. Um, and a lot of the suggestions from it are I mean, sure, you could argue you should split test them, but sometimes it's just like this is just wrong, you should do this. But there are some call-outs in here. It's like, all right, you should start split testing some of these things. Um, you know, and then we dive into some other areas of it, like how is their search? Are they using autocomplete or is it smart search or is it like old school? Is it weird? Um, do they have any cool stuff in the cart? Are they You know, giving upsells or cross sells? Like does the site have bundling? Like, do they have subscription? Does this make sense for subscription? Is that And then there's a few things that are kind of leaning towards accessibility, but we'd never say we're an accessibility uh consultant by any means, but it's like, are the fonts legible?
Kurt Elster
You find with a lot of legacy brands they're getting like super small and just like Yeah, the tiny I got some light gray text on a dark white background. Okay. And it's it's size 11. You really squint at it.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, so so there's a there's a lot of interesting stuff there. Um but the UX audit is um usually feeds a lot of ideas into If we're going to improve an existing store because their code isn't trash, uh, it gives us a lot of stuff for kind of our to-do list. It's like, all right, well, this stuff is all obvious. And here's a lot of cool stuff that we should maybe split test.
Kurt Elster
I like this plan. Alright, I see how this works. I like this. The now when you run you review the list of apps, and this we do a lot of because apps are such They could be a pain center, both in they add recurring cost, um, they can add fragility to a store, I find, you know, in the game of e-commerce whack-a-mole, you know, squishing bugs. There's often apps are the culprit. So in your app audit, What are you looking for?
Chase Clymer
A few things. One is like, do they have apps in areas where they don't need them? Sometimes it's again, it goes back to Merchants don't know what they don't know, and you can be like, hey, you've got five apps that are doing the same thing here, but it looks like you're only paying for this one. Sometimes it's just reminding them to to delete apps. And then also reminding them that like, hey, these five apps put code in here. We need to delete that code. Sometimes it's like exploring uh what functionality they wanted to build into their theme that's a little bit more robust where an app does make a lot more sense. An example of that would be kind of upsells and depending on where we want to put that in the journey. I think hard coding an upsell is pretty easy in the cart, but if you have got a more uh robust catalog and you need it to be a dynamic upsell. That's when a uh a an app makes a lot more sense. So you can kind of tailor the upsell to whatever the heck's in the cart. We do have kind of like an internal blacklist of apps that were like, this thing sucks or is bad for these reasons, and you should consider moving to to these apps instead. Um has nothing to do with who we're partnered with or not. And the only people that we partner sh partner with are apps that we like know work well. But a lot of it is getting through there and helping them streamline their app choices and delete as many as possible. And then confirm which ones we need to get that functionality that we need for their customers and you know get rid of Shogun basically.
Kurt Elster
Ouch. Poor Shogun. If you have to use a landing page builder, you know, I for me it I am guessing you have the same feeling as what do I need it for? I can in a good online store 2. 0 theme, I can treat it as a landing page builder.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, what we have been doing is building landing page templates for our clients in you know as part of the project. So we'll build a template that doesn't have a header and footer and it has all of the sections from their theme within there. And you can usually do whatever you like what you need with that. And then if you have that, then you can do really fun stuff with like intelligiums and like heat mapping software and you can build it all within your Shopify. kind of ecosystem. You don't need any secondary CMSs. Uh you don't have any w oddities with your tracking softwares because it's all still within your Shopify store. So everything should work a lot more seamlessly as far as like your data collection goes. People could argue that it wouldn't be as fast as, you know, some of the Andillary landing page builders out there that you'd put on a subdomain. And it's really kind of up to your business. I think you can get exactly what you need like doing landing pages on Shopify with 2. 0.
Kurt Elster
I I would agree. And I think it has it there's SEO benefit to that versus creating it on uh a subdomain. And, you know, plus all the you're right, about analytics and tracking getting weird.
Chase Clymer
Cross domain analytics is
Kurt Elster
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Chase Clymer
I would say the most common area of improvement like with the app audit, they it it's wild how much knowledge you and I have just from like being in this ecosystem forever. We can quickly scan a list. Those things are good, those things are bad. I've never heard of that And just that alone is like super helpful to to potential clients or clients. Um so just helping them Confirm or make better choices within their apps is something that we've got a lot of really good feedback around. Um another thing is and we've got some case studies on our website about just this kind of diagnostic. They like to either uh be confirmed in their decision that they were already gonna be made, make, or like us help them from making a bad decision. So an example of that was a client was going to uh invest quite a bit in redesigning their store before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, uh on a really short timeline, which kind of sounded like a, you know, that's already kind of sketchy. Uh but we took a look at things for them and we're like, you actually shouldn't do any of that. This is perfectly fine. Uh just do what you want to this. You know, make sure you've got your heat mapping software installed, make sure that you've got all your analytics kind of set up so you can see what's going on during that high traffic traffic season, and then you can make you know a better choice in Q1 of redesigning then or even further optimizing this because it was like A really well maintained code base. They thought it was like slow and bad, and I was like, no, this is pretty legit. Like, who told you this?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, that's the other thing is you have to know whose advice to listen to. And that's tough. You know, I think there's that's it's probably just a gut check. It's like what resonates with you, what makes sense. So what are some effective like let's assume I I have a store and it and it's solid. You know, I've got a one and a half percent conversion rate, I've got a hundred and fifty dollar AOV, we get a thousand visitors a day. That would be a really solid business to have. And you know, at that point you have a very solid foundation. What in a store with a solid foundation like that What are either a a typical key area or like some effective low effort changes for someone who's just like they just want to scratch that ish that itch on give me a fresh new look?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, um, well, there's a lot of things, right? And I'm just gonna make some assumptions here. Uh it's a mature store. They've, you know They they've got uh some different products and whatnot, but there's probably some things they're not doing. I would say like how deliberate th Is there kind of upsell and cross sell like all their AOV motivators is how we kind of talk about it internally? Like how is all that stuff look? Right. And some Clients just let their customers buy what they want to buy and they don't make any suggestions, which is weird. Uh so like free easy money is a post-purchase upsell. It's just like they already bought. Like try to sell them something else. Um, but you can put all those kind of AOV motivators throughout the customer journey. So um Unbound Moreno does a fantastic job of this, by the way. Wish they were a client, they're not, but they do a great job of this upsell stuff. They have an upsell on their products page, uh, on their t-shirt. Uh you wanna it like right under the I think the add to cart button it says like buy three and save and it sends you to the three t-shirt bundle. So just right there they've got like a pretty pretty cool upsell. And then in the cart they've got upsells, in the checkout they've got upsells, post-purchase they've got upsells. And I've yet to audit a store that has consideration of those types of AOV motivators like that intentional throughout their journey. Bundling is huge. Bundling's hard. Bundling is unique for a lot of customers. Um, so it's so it's just unique to products. Like you you can do like some cool bundle builders for t-shirts, right? But you couldn't like do that for some super high uh like couches you're not buying four couches so like figuring out how you're building those bundling things it is a pretty fun endeavor. We talked about a lot about landing pages. A lot of clients still don't have landing pages. And so that's like an easy win. You work with their marketing team about their best offer and you help them build a landing page out on 2. 0. You know, they might not be doing any split testing yet. Um, and that goes hand in hand with having like heat mapping software installed and like seeing where people are actually clicking and interacting, what they're doing, and user recordings for sure. Um, so we were we're really big fans of like IntelliGems or like Shoplift uh for doing the split testing stuff on a store. Um and then like Hotjar or like Heatmap. com is a really interesting new player in the space. Uh for heat map uh heat maps and customer recordings. Um, but all that stuff is more getting into like some real fun CRO things.
Kurt Elster
In ter all right, so you brought up CRO. In terms of measuring effectiveness of these changes, are we doing you know A then B tests? How are which, you know, that those have their own issues. Uh are we are we not worrying too too much about it? How do we go about those?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. So when you do when you do the audit, right, that's a lot of heuristic insights from her it's just that's expert insight. I have been building e-commerce stores for eight years. This is right and that's wrong is a statement I'm allowed to make. Um sometimes I can even go as to far as to say as like we can split test that, but that's just gonna waste two weeks when we could do a test that'd be a little bit more interesting to learn from. So a lot of that stuff, I hate saying low-hanging fruit, but a lot of it you can just do. Josh Frank, who I know you know and who taught me a lot about CRO, is just like make bigger tests, like don't test the small stuff. Uh yes.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I I talked to you too. It was like rather than do the tiny test that has, you know, all this noise in there, make it like You know, you don't want to test button color, you want to test an entire page layout.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
And then you get much faster, more statistically significant results.
Chase Clymer
CRO is a funny kind of service offering and in just industry in general because a lot of people have opinions on it and doing it the right way scientifically takes forever. So you gotta kind of make some choices into like where you wanna see results, and you can measure that by the money in the bank. Um, what's actually coming in from these sales. But Back to CRO, when you are approaching things that need to be tested, yeah, we want to run split tests. Uh IntelliGems or Shoplift will give you some great split testing capabilities now that Google Optimizes is sunset. I think, you know, BWO is a little expensive for most merchants. Um and that also requires a little bit higher of a educational lift on how to use that product uh versus something that's just a Shopify plugin that allows you to clone templates and Make the choices within the customizer and know exactly what you want to do there. Um and you can get some cool statistically significant results from bigger tests, not button colors, like we already talked on. Uh I think that's Definitely something a lot of merchants should lean into. But caveat there is you gotta kind of have the traffic to support it. I don't think a sub-million dollar merchant is really gonna get crazy results from split testing. Like they're gonna need to go further back in the funnel to start testing things. Like they're not gonna get as many conversions to get them what they need. So they're gonna have to do like add to carts or pay for the thing.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, the amount. The amount of purchases required to do statistically significant useful split testing is just outrageous. Yeah. Um Outside of like the best time I ever had split testing, we worked with a store that had it it retail chains with 500 plus locations across the country. When you get something like that, uh, it becomes very it becomes easy and quick to do your split tests versus, but even then you still need two weeks for it to be significant. Um and you may not hit it. So it I love split testing, but it is not it's not always practical, I think is the the th the takeaway there. So One thing I think was interesting, customer feedback has not been mentioned yet. How I love customer feedback. It's so useful. How how crucial is it for you? How do you you get it?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, uh we also love it. It's only been mentioned because I don't have like notes and I'm just flying by the seat of my pants. Uh so Hotchar has a cool customer feedback survey just like built right in. Uh again, Josh uh gave us some cool insights here. Here's some secrets, people. On your collection page, you have this thing pop up and ask how you got here. And always open-ended questions. No, no multiple choice. You don't want to feed them answers. You want their their answers in their own voice. Um on like product pages when people are abandoning, ask them like what information uh is missing from the page. Uh post-purchase surveys, ask them you know what brought them there or there's some other cool questions you can ask about why they bought or or things like that. Also, you can send out emails. And I would probably, you know, gate this to your top buyers or people that bought in the last week or something, incentivize them, be like, hey, we want some feedback about X, Y, and Z. Um, you know, we'll give you a ten dollar gift card or something. Uh you can get a lot of really cool information there. Also you can take it a step further. You can do like user testing, which is different than customer feedback or cus or like user recordings. But this is like uh hiring I don't know if you we call them professionals, but they're like internet browsers with a job.
Kurt Elster
Uh but they'll like Yeah, they're people who are always online and you can pay them to browse your site.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, they'll tell you what's wrong for money, which is not that expensive. Uh, you know, you're talking less than a hundred bucks to get one of these things done. Um, you can learn a lot from that as well. Uh just Things that are broken, low-hanging fruit. I mean, uh obviously you can get people to tell you what's wrong with your website in words, but user recordings, you can see how people are interacting with your website and what isn't working by what frustrates them.
Kurt Elster
Uh one of my favorite things to do, I like I'll watch them at one and a half X speed, 30 watch 30 minutes of these things, just looking at only the rage click stuff on mobile. And by like fifteen minutes, I am screaming as I'm watching people just wildly misuse the site. But when you see the same seemingly stupid issue three times in a row, five times in a row, then suddenly you go, ah. They're not the stupid ones. I am, right? I have to fix this and make it work the way that picture should be a button, I guess. It's like, oh, I guess you click on that, it's supposed to do something. Because everybody seems to think it does And they're mad that it doesn't.
Chase Clymer
For anyone that hasn't installed user recordings, like which you can do through hotchar or any heat mapping software usually has like a user recordings. uh uh feature people are gonna interact with your website in the most ridiculous way that you never would think is possible and that's just how the internet works.
Kurt Elster
I'll sh yeah, I'll show I'll share some of these screen recordings with people and they'll go, are they messing with you? I'm like, no, they don't know. They have no idea.
Chase Clymer
It'll really fill up kind of your like testing uh kind of like wherever you're keeping track of ideas for testing or some of it's kind of obvious. It's like we don't need to test that. That's obviously broken. Um but yeah, you'll get a lot of ideas from running through that.
Kurt Elster
For sure. So okay, looking forward, any upcoming trends, any commerce or Shopify features that we should be prepared for?
Chase Clymer
I think trends like performance and page speed is super top of mind for people uh these days. And obviously you and I were chatting uh outside of this about some solutions in the ecosystem and how they affect page speed. I think that's going to be interesting to monitor uh and see, you know, how that affects things. Like, because if you look at Nike. com, it's got a one-on-performance, but I think they're doing okay, right? Uh, but other people like are asking to be in the nineties when it comes to this performance thing. And I think um, you know, light speed is maybe not the best judge there because it's like a generality of the internet, like a portfolio website with static content versus a robust e-commerce CMS. Like those are two different things that you're measuring speed on. So take take it with a grain of salt. But I think performance is going to be something a lot of people are looking into uh in twenty twenty four. I think um Landing pages are still gonna be super popular. I think a lot of people are gonna look into doing those with 2. 0.
Kurt Elster
Um I think that's there's still that low-hanging fruit there. Like number one, if you're not on online store two point oh yet, why? You're disadvantaging yourself. Move to two point oh, it's ready. Uh and then after that one Sounds like heuristics, screen recordings, etc. Uh, if you're doing any kind of marketing campaigns, landing pages. is such a an easy win, right? A little bit of effort, but they make a they have an outsized impact. What else?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, so uh here here let me break down Our electric eye strategy in is basically like build a better mousetrap and then optimize your mousetrap. So if so we're gonna test it to see what your mousetrap looks like first, which is your website. Uh if it doesn't suck, we'll just move into optimization. But Sometimes there are some obvious like red flags. It's like you should probably invest in doing this the right way. Because then we know nothing is broken, so then we can optimize it from there. Um So e-commerce is three magic numbers. You've got your sessions, your conversion rate, and your average order value. Um Both of our agencies don't do really much that impacts sessions. We don't do, you know, advertising or marketing really. We'll give people ideas, but we're not that's not our bread and butter. So we just ignore sessions. That's up to your advertising and marketing team. But average order value and conversion rate, that is 100% in our wheelhouse. So for average order value, that comes around to Getting more stuff in the cart, more revenue per visitor, right? So that's where you want to do these upsells and cross-sells throughout the customer journey. Like, what is the offer that's gonna resonate that resonates with my not only my product, but my customer. And gets them to buy more stuff and where in the journey that is. Bundling is like a kind of a f interesting consideration of which solution is going to work best for this customer. I would argue Lifetime value is akin to AOV in a sense where you can start talking about subscription and membership. Uh are things that we can impact to help improve the site around AOV, I guess. Um, and then so outside of AOV, then it's conversion rate, right? So that's performance, that's you know, the UX of the website. And then the gets a little more sticky into kind of like copy and offer and split testing uh you know to try to eke more percentages out when it comes to CRO. And I I would put landing pages on CRO too.
Kurt Elster
For sure. What's a what's a common myth you want to dispel? What's the one that drives you crazy?
Chase Clymer
Oh, uh that you need a beautiful website to make money.
Kurt Elster
For sure.
Chase Clymer
Ugly converts, man. I my favorite thing ever is when a c client like comes to us for an audit or something, and I'm like, that was interesting. Four million dollars this month. And I'm like, well, if they're doing this, this is gonna be a home run. Like, that's it's so exciting to like see like all these bad choices, but they're still just printing money because a good product outweighs all of the stuff you read on Twitter. It just a good product will sell itself.
Kurt Elster
I'd agree with that because I've seen it. So As we wrap up, where could people learn more about you?
Chase Clymer
You can hear me interview brands on our podcast uh once a week. It's called Honest ECommerce. Um the main feed I'm interviewing brand founders. asking them how they did it, how they came up with the idea, how they found their customers, how they scaled it, what worked for them. Um I also interview kind of bonus episodes with subject matter experts. I just had Kurt on. You can go find that episode. We talked about migrations. It was really fun. Um if you are curious about our agency and what we do, it's electriqueye. io. Um I can give away a few of these diagnostics, uh, so be quick about reaching out. Uh but Sean, my business partner Who Kurt knows will tell me no pretty quickly. Uh so get in line quickly, I guess. Uh but yeah, that's that's what we're up to.
Kurt Elster
You know, at the start of the shit you said, yeah. I s have you talked about this saying we sell the Shopify Diagnostic. I'm sure a whole bunch of other people are miraculously gonna be selling Shopify Diagnostic soon. And I'm one of them. It's such a great idea. I mean do it. Uh I'm gonna start working on my own.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I I it's Now, this is gonna be a lot of inside baseball, but we should leave this this next five minutes in. But from like a service offering and service business perspective, giving people a taste of what your s good and your smarts are is just such a good idea. Um i it it really will kind of get them hooked on working with you if you can give them some really awesome advice at the beginning.
Kurt Elster
It a hundred percent. It's that um Well, it's the a demonstration of of expertise and authority. It's like, okay, don't tell me, show me. And that's that's what you're able to do when you can work in these these smaller, low effort, low-risk engagements.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, and it's you know it's the we do sell the diagnostic. It's on our site. I think it says $2,500 next to it. So normally we are selling this thing, but every once in a while I'm allowed to give it away for free. It keeps our team sharp. It you know, strategically free is a very uh interesting concept.
Kurt Elster
Strategically free. I like that phrase.
Chase Clymer
Uh yeah. I if anyone listening to this also has an agency and they're not listening to the Two Bobs podcast, it is a fantastic world of wealth for agency owners.
Speaker 3
Yeah, two bobs is a good one. That uh I like that one a lot. So, uh Chase Climber, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. Absolutely, Kurt. Uh thanks a lot for having me.