w/ Jay Myers, Bold
Are you making one of these Shopify mistakes? If so, you’re losing sales. In this episode, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast host Kurt Elster teams up with Bold Commerce co-founder Jay Myers to reveal the top 10 mistakes that Shopify merchants make—some of which even big brands get wrong. From neglected checkouts to bloated main menus, they share simple, actionable fixes that can boost conversions and keep customers coming back.
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Kurt Elster
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Jay Myers
When did you yeah it's gotta be up there.
Kurt Elster
Nineteen ninety eight. Well that was when I furt my first store.
Jay Myers
So Shopify two thousand nine.
Kurt Elster
I Are you been at it longer than mine? Longer than me. I've been on Shopify Partners since twenty eleven or twenty twelve. And yeah In nineteen ninety-eight, my first foray into e-commerce would have been retail arbitrage, selling Furbies on eBay.
Jay Myers
I well, same as well. Mine was archery supplies on eBay.
Kurt Elster
So Okay. Yeah. I love that, yeah, in the nineties it was like eBay was the gateway.
Jay Myers
eBay should have been like what Amazon was. Like it was man, some days I was like 19 years old making a couple thousand bucks a day. It was crazy. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, when you're 19, you're like, I I'm gonna live forever.
Jay Myers
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Jay, Mr. Myers, thirty seconds. What does bold do these days?
Jay Myers
Oh man, well we are Doing what we've always done, we uh we we've got a suite of apps that we we help Shopify merchants make more money. And so like I I was a Shopify store owner since 2009. um started building the apps for for my stores and then eventually they that became bold and so we've got everything from from memberships and subscriptions tools upselling Customer pricing tool, which lately has been really popular, you know, stores that want to give um VIP pricing and different prices to different customer segments, maybe like clubs, dropshippers, employee pricing, wholesaling. Um, that's become really popular. Just a suite of different things that help stores.
Kurt Elster
No, absolutely. And so you are you have such experience and a view into you know the the various operations of stores. And really you're probably on like me on the receiving end of a lot of support or work requests that come across your desk. uh that you get pulled into. And so it is e we can quickly see, all right, here's some some things that separate successful stores and uh stores that are uh less successful. And so our Our top ten mistakes. What are our top ten mistakes that uh e com store owners make? And I don't think we have these in any particular order.
Jay Myers
No, no particular order, but I I think you know it's we we chatted about a month ago. We said we're doing a podcast together. What should it be on? And we both kind of said, like, let's let's make a list of like the things that you just absolutely should not get wrong. And some of them I think are more obvious than others. Some of them maybe I think a lot of people might not have thought of before. But these are all simple things that I think Every single merchant should be able to get right. Like it doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to fix these things. These are some they're like conceptually simple things, but yet some of the biggest brands in the world make these mistakes. So yeah, how do you want to kick this off? Should we just like like top to bottom kind of thing?
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And in fact, I will open with you said some of the biggest brands in the world make this mistake. I will go with the number one simplest mistake I see. is people who forget to style the checkout. You'll be on a store that costs somebody like $100,000 to build with a big fancy agency, and then you get to the checkout, it's just like plain text logo, right? It it's just a very common mistake that I think is is easy to mistake, or a very common mistake that is easy to make. And it takes, you know, 60 seconds to fix. Just go and check out settings and Upload your logo at the very least.
Jay Myers
And bare minimum, I'll just say on checkout, like I I always say the checkout is the handshake. And it's like imagine you have a great shopping experience in a store, you do everything, and then and then you get to the cashier and she or he is grumpy or it's not in the cute you bumble with your card or it's not enjoyable. Like it ruins the whole experience. And Um, so it's it's so important for not just converting that sale, but then turning that customer into a long-term repeat customer. And it can be as simple as Streamlining some fields, adding some quotes or testimonials from some other people on the checkout for conversion. Like it it can it doesn't have to take long. Um but if anyone ever said to you, Don't style your product page, just use the default product page. It's good. Like everyone would say you're crazy. I have to have a better product page. But yet so many people just Use the default checkout.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, the checkout just gets ignored and unloved. And you're right. That's the moment where they're entering the payment details is when trust becomes unusually important.
Jay Myers
100%.
Kurt Elster
Bring us to our next mistake.
Jay Myers
Well, I listed this one, um, and this is on the topic of subscriptions, and it I wrote mistake. Okay, what's I guess number two. They think customers actually want their subscriptions. And I think what I mean by this is subscriptions have become um I would say a a a f way people buy. Like it used to be a strategic advantage. If you had subscriptions, like whatever, say you sell cat food. Like seven or eight years ago, if you had subscriptions and your competitors didn't, you were better than them. You had a you had an advantage that your competitors didn't. But now every single person that sells cat food has a subscription. Like if you don't, you're missing out on a table stakes offering. It's no longer a differentiator. It's just the way people buy. Like it's a shipping and billing decision more than anything else.
Kurt Elster
So if I offer a consumable good, for sure I should offer subscription.
Jay Myers
Correct. I mean it's like not offering different forms of payment or different forms of shipping. It's just a way Like I will not buy, I have a cat, so this is actually a good example. I will not buy cat food over and over. I will, that is a waste of my time. I personally will only buy is a predictable thing. My cat eats three cans a day.
Kurt Elster
I will three cans. How big is this cat?
Jay Myers
Well, she's got a thyroid issue, so so she just No, I don't care. She's uh she's like twenty years old and she's on the thyroid meds, but she eats like a horse but doesn't gain any weight. So, anyways, so but it's predictable. And so that's as an example, like that that's nothing to do. I always say um Subscription is it's a billing and a decision uh a billing decision. It's not a relationship decision. So like you can have a subscription with your electrical company. You might not have a relationship with them, but you have a subscription. And people often mistake the two. A membership is a relational concept. And like you might have a member you might consider yourself uh whatever state you're from. I'm closest to the Minnesota Vikings. My my father-in-law loves the Vikings. He is a Vikings member. He would he's got Viking stuff everywhere. If he had another baby, it would be a put a Vikings onesie on that baby. But he doesn't pay a Vikings subscription, but he would he's a Vikings member, right? And so then what you actually have to do when you sell subscriptions is sell the membership and s and that includes like all the other benefits uh that come with it. Maybe it's exclusive. Pricing like we just talked about. Maybe it's access to you as a founder. Maybe it's once a month you do a a Zoom call because you sell coffee and it's like have coffee with your members or whatever.
Kurt Elster
So is it is it not enough to do subscribe and save? Which subscribe to uh a trademark of Amazon. I don't think you could say subscribe and save.
Jay Myers
A lot of stores do. That's interesting.
Kurt Elster
Oh yeah, yeah. For sure.
Jay Myers
Yeah Well, I haven't heard of them coming after any, but that's interesting. They might.
Kurt Elster
We too we operate um harny. com, which sells tea. And if you're selling yeah, caffeine is i is addictive. And so if you're selling a consumable good that also contains caffeine, oh my gosh, offer subscriptions. And this is top of mind because we were just trying to optimize the form. And uh we we went with subscribe and savor. And then we made that like that, you know, our landing page, our menu link, like we tried to make it a branded experience, and then we give them rewards where it's like, hey, you get You know, if you keep the subscription, you get additional savings. Like it starts at, oh hey, we'll give you 10% off. I don't know what the numbers are exactly. But it's like, all right if you're do if you subscribe for six months, it moves up to twenty percent.
Jay Myers
But there's more benefits than just the the product. Like I often ask our subscription brands who use our subscription software, I say like, what do you what do you customers get when they subscribe? And if they say, well they get my product every month at five or ten percent off.
Kurt Elster
It's not enough.
Jay Myers
No, they're doomed. I can tell you like their subscribers will hit subscription fatigue. They'll probably average three to five months average subscription length. And then eventually the customers will churn and they'll get to a point where They're turning 8 to 10%, and it could happen at a thousand customers, 10,000 customers, but then they can't onboard as more and their subscriptions flatline. I can promise you any brand that just says, well they get the convenience of my subscription and a five percent says like never run out.
Kurt Elster
You'll never run out You'll be a wash in tea bags. What um so like for this this tea example, what would we offer them in addition to savings and never running out of tea?
Jay Myers
I would offer exclusive pricing on other products on the store. That's like a first like basic principle. Like if you're a member, you should get you you gotta also start calling them members. Don't call them subscribers. So as a member, they should get exclusive pricing on on every product, like 10% off any all their one-time orders on other T-related products. Access to products that non-members don't, or if they come out with a new flavor, email the subscribers first so they get it before anyone else. They should get an exclusive offer every month. So we always say like Um actually, this is an interesting stat. 92% of subscribers want more opportunities for one-time add-ons. So That means like they want when they get the email come, yeah, your subscription's going out in three days. Here's an offer for 25% off our flavor of the month or our tea. Infuse or I don't even know whatever it is, but they they feel that because they're a subscriber, they should get those offers. They should log into their customer portal and see an offer there that other customers don't. They should get access to events. Like if you go to an event, a tea conference, and you have and you rent out a tea house, only subscribers, members can go. Um partner benefits is a big one that costs nothing. Uh so find aligned companies or brands. So like if it's T, let's say your angle is mindfulness. Maybe it's T for skinny T or it could be something else. But let's just say it's like focus and mindfulness T Well, what other companies lean into that? Well, there's all these like um different like uh notebook companies that have subscriptions or different Anything else in that space include a benefit in your subscription. So while I'm subscribed to this T, I get 10% off at my mindfulness this mindfulness notebook company or this mindfulness app. I get ten percent off com or something else. And they will always be willing to give a benefit to your subscribers because that's like a new acquisition channel for them.
Kurt Elster
That's very clever. I already said I already messaged my uh Mr. Harney of Harney Tees. I already messaged him like, hey, we gotta call these subscribers members and then give them exclusive benefits. Because it like it it's such a good unlock that really it transforms The way you think. Yeah, the subscription's no longer transactional. Even when it had the savings, it was still just like this is a transaction. You were gonna make this transaction either one at a time, and now we're gonna add the convenience to it. But you're right, there's no Yeah, we need additional benefits to really separate it out. Okay, sold on that idea. Let the our s our next mistake is my personal pet peeve is people who have really not taken advantage of a good main menu. They screw up their main menu. And the dead giveaway is I land on the site and it goes like Home, shop, blog, contact, about or Yeah, it like it it'll be either three items, always starting with home, or like twenty items, but the most important thing is shopping. And that'll just be buried under shop. And it'll be like a nested nightmare drop-down. If I want a good main menu, then my main menu should be exclusively products, collections, and landing pages. And unless you're sophisticated, if you're sophisticated enough to do a landing page, you probably already have your main menu figured out. But that's that's what I want. That main menu's job should really be to give me an overview of the store. It needs to go very broad. And then, you know, depending on how big the catalog is, I really don't want this main menu to be super nested. Like once I You know, I don't want to have to go like three levels deep on it and there's twenty items in each thing. That doesn't help anybody. No. Just get them to, you know, help them segment themselves. Like I'm I am looking for men's tops. That should be what I click on. And then once I'm in that collection page, I can either like maybe you sell 12 items. Great. We don't have to your work is done. Yeah. Or, you know, you sell you have a hundred pairs of pants for men. Okay, then we have to add a little bit of filtering, either a sidebar filter or an interstitial collection page that has like, you know, you know, shorts, dress pants, jeans, is something to break it into further categories. But we're just we want to go broad to narrow in a series of steps. One to three steps.
Jay Myers
You know, you actually taught me something about this one time. What I don't even know that you know that you taught me this, but I I think it was on a podcast, one of your episodes, or you might have posted it on social. I can't remember. But one time you said something and I refer to this. All the time. See here, you're the wise old e-commerce guy here, but you said everything in your main menu should lead to money. And I remember that to this day and I always go back to that. And every time that's like the litmus test, does it lead to money? And you could Make a very loose argument that about us pages leads to money, but no, it doesn't. Like it needs to directly lead to money. So like I would just say to everyone listening Look at your main menu. Does it lead to money? Everything else should be in the footer or somewhere else. But do you remember saying that? I don't know where where you you posted that one time and I still remember to say that.
Kurt Elster
Sounds like something I'd say. Yeah. I'll take credit for it.
Jay Myers
Take full credit. That is a quote. Like you should own that quote because claim it and don't because it it it's such a great way to think about it. Um if it leads to money, it could there's an argument it could be in the main menu. Because I I would also say, like I agree with everything you said and then maybe a couple I would add is I like when I go to a site and there's a a trending like what's trending or what's hot Um and I like when there's a what's on sale.
Kurt Elster
So like sale. Yeah, for sure.
Jay Myers
Yeah, like and those are I like to quickly find what's on sale and I like I don't I want to know what other people are buying. I mean that's just human nature, right? We want to know. So have a turning in. Both of those are so easy to do in Shopify because I think every collection you can sort by popular.
Kurt Elster
So yeah, sort by best selling and like if you want to do a new collection, you sort by new. You didn't even have to make a new collection for it. You could like stick it in a query string.
Jay Myers
Totally, yeah. And like don't make the customer go in and sort the collection themselves. just make one that defaults you can make a collection of your whole store every single product default it to best selling and then add that to your main nav and then there's your There's your trending or hottest best selling, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. That that's um and I I bet you 90% of stores I go to, the main menu is not ideal.
Kurt Elster
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Jay Myers
Yep. I read an interesting stuff. We'll go on to the next one right away, but um 30 per I think it was 30% of people on mobile Don't properly know how to navigate with like the hamburger like ellipsis style menus up in the corner. And almost by default, most themes do that. But they get no it was they get thirty percent less engagement in their menu when they collapse it to the the hamburger menu.
Kurt Elster
The hamburger? The three.
Jay Myers
Yeah. And like I always do that because it looks better and it look but then, you know, you're if you want your site to convert better, consider having it open by default with fewer items so it doesn't look bad. But Uh if especially if you sell to an older demographic, like I always think, would my 70-year-old mom know how to open the hamburger menu and navigate three sub things in it? No, probably not, right? So um something to consider and to test for sure.
Kurt Elster
So this leads us into our next mistake. And it's about jobs to be done. Tell me about that.
Jay Myers
Okay, I put this in here because I said the mist mistake is the merchants don't know what the job to be done is of their site. And what I mean by this is Everyone thinks their site is to sell and really often it should be about telling the story of your brand, um, collecting information, segmenting the customer. Um positioning yourself against like where are you in the market against your competitors? Are you the bargain? Are you the most expensive? But r often when I land on a site, it's too geared towards selling. It's like jumping, it's like uh you're going on a date and right away trying to end the date with get you married in the bed or get or whatever, right? Like So the job to be done of that first date is to under know the person for them for you to understand them, for them to understand you, to get their number, to get their information, all that. So what I mean by that, like in a practical sense is I was on a site the other day that did this I thought really, really well. And I landed on the site and instantly a full page pop-up took over. And instead of it being a standard email collection, it said You've won. No, unlock your your mystery discount. Um, tell us what you're here for. And it was like uh it was like a health site, so it said like gut health, stomach. Um mental focus. It had like five different things.
Kurt Elster
That's right.
Jay Myers
Could have been right.
Kurt Elster
That's what I picked.
Jay Myers
Right. So I I clicked one. Well that that I'm not saying which one I clicked. It's private. But I clicked one and then entered my email, got my discount. But what did they just do there? They in the back end segmented me, they learned a little bit about me, they learned that I'm here for gut health, not for something else. And they added me to a list about that. They uh they now understand me better. And before they've even sold anything, they've learned that they can they can personalize the website, they could personalize the menu, they can personalize, they can tailor anything, they can tailor their email marketing. And I just thought that was so refreshing versus like the standard email pop-ups. And there's a lot of ways this can be done, but what this brand understands. Is that right when I land on the site, you've got an opportunity to get to know that customer and for them to get to know you, to tell the story. And I just think too many brands jump to the to the sale with with and miss miss that opportunity.
Kurt Elster
Yeah you land on the site and it's like, hey get five bucks off. Just give us your email address. You gonna buy?
Jay Myers
Exactly. Exactly.
Kurt Elster
I don't even know what I'm here for yet. I do I'd like that segmentation though. You know, you're let's say you're using something like Clavio, you can write that into a customer profile property. And so now we can have much more relevant emails to the person. And we d we do a lot of work in aftermarket automotive. And that one's tough because you know you can have a website that sells for parts for twenty vehicles. But the person shopping only owns one of those. So now, you know, 95% of your catalog is irrelevant to that person. That's the advantage of segmentation. Like when you view it as We use the segmentation to not show the irrelevant stuff to the customer in both our marketing and on site. That's the magic. Like that's when you increase the relevance now our funnel works better because it's not just noise anymore. Totally. Totally. In this case, it's like I'm gonna get it like ideally I'm gonna get a welcome series tweaked from that gut health brand tweak to my crippling diarrhea. You're gonna get it for, you know, like weight loss or healthy eating or whatever. Hey, what do you say? Yeah, I was just I was going with what's the likely the most common request they get.
Jay Myers
Uh and jobs to be done for those who listening who maybe have never heard that terminology before. Google Jobs to be done. It's a a concept by Clayton Christensen. And the concept is, have you heard this concept? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So it's it's pretty common, but just just so uh anyways, that everything in life Does a job and it's not often what we think it is. So for example, if I buy a coffee at Starbucks, well It's not just to quench my thirst and maybe give me energy. It's like if I'm going on a drive, the job to be done of that coffee is actually to keep me company or like something to do. I need to fidget with the lid as I drive or it's something to hold and warm while at my desk. Or um so the thing is like It's not always the exact thing that we think it's doing. And so the job of your website is not just to sell. The job of your website is to build a relationship, tell your story. Gather information about your customer, get to know them better. So you can so as soon as you understand, like, okay, that's the job of my website. It's not just to sell. It becomes really effective. So, anyways, Google jobs to be done. There's like a 15-minute video where he talks about that and it's it will help understand that concept. And I think it'll be eye-opening for a lot of people about how they think about their website.
Kurt Elster
You know, the we had in our our list, our next one, I believe this is you. It says not focusing on the top one percent of customers. So I interpret this as the 80-20 rule, right? 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of our operations, of our actions. And that's just like a general rule for life. And you could try to optimize for it. Tell me about it.
Jay Myers
Yeah, I I do think this that's so interesting that you say that like this Okay, I don't I don't want to go too far back, but I do want to take a step back because I do think it is a great general rule for life. And actually Shopify has this um concept that I love with their employees. They call it the pointy rock analogy. You've probably heard it. I think the pointy rock analogy. All right, let's hear it. Okay. Didn't Harley talk about this on your episode or is I it was a different one? Shopify wants um pointy rocks. And so like t typically when you uh do an employee um review, like a monthly review or an hour review, like most companies what they do is they say, okay, well let's talk about your strengths and your weaknesses and let's let's focus on your weaknesses and let's see if we can improve them. What Shopify does is they say Let's talk about your strengths. Let's forget about your weaknesses. And how do we double down on your strengths? And the concept is they want pointy rocks versus river stones. River stones are like in the water and they're rounded and they're kind of boring and they're just average. But a pointy rock, like you might have someone who's like super, super good at one thing, maybe horrible at everything else, but they're the best at like AI or A A V A R VR something like for product images or something. They have this really, really unique talent. And so they focus on that. So yes, in life, focusing on the narrow, what you're really good at, I think is a really winning strategy. Now, how that relates to e-commerce is Too many brands focus on things like the 80% of the customers that don't want your products, that don't open your email. Like I've actually talked to brands that Some they get they send an email out to everyone and they get a bit of a high unsubscribe rate, like maybe four percent of people unsubscribe, and then they stop they stop sending emails. Like they They go, Oh, we're s we're emailing too much. Okay, let's only email once a month. Oh, once a well, I'm like, well, and I just say, like, you know what? They weren't those weren't your customers anyway. Like you should be emailing more, blow them out, and cater to your your core customers, right? Sorry, where are you just?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, you could keep a low unsubscribe rate, a low spam rate. and a low everything else rate, click through and purchase rate by just sending really safe generic emails. Yeah. It's like you you do you gotta turn the screws a little bit. You have to have something to get their attention And when you do that, fundamentally, you will lose the people who were not your customers to begin with.
Jay Myers
Totally. They exactly. And I've some people call it the blow out the 20. It's like the so a a percentage of your email subscribers are gonna unsubscribe anyway. Better to email every week and just let them unsubscribe and at least you're giving like Good content to the people that actually want your emails, then trying to not offend the others.
Kurt Elster
we apply our rules of society to marketing, right? Right. If I'm at a dinner party and I got twenty percent of the guests to leave I really messed up that dinner party. But in an email campaign, if I got like I lost 20%, but then made X much back in in revenue, that was a successful campaign.
Jay Myers
So good. Right, yeah. And so I think with our s our e-commerce stores, the any store that if you analyze it The top 20% usually makes roughly 80% of your revenue. And actually there's a data point that the top 1% for a lot of stores can generate up to 40%. So you've got these like super, super fans that they don't just repeat by. They're they're buying like 10, 12, 20 times.
Kurt Elster
This goes to the top, man. This is the premise of the title of your podcast.
Jay Myers
1%.
Kurt Elster
Why is it called 1%?
Jay Myers
I think 1% is this magical number that can apply to so many things. And so the reason I originally named it that was because There's this interesting data point that the like the top 1% of stores on Shopify make about 97% of its GMV, the gross merchant volume of the whole platform. Like it's a crazy, crazy number. And so then you think, well, how what are they doing differently? Like how does what is that 1% doing differently? There's the concept of this that we just talked about. The top 1% of your customers make close to 50% of the revenue. I love this principle that have you heard of uh probably um if you increase something 1% each day, do you think you are by the end of the year?
Kurt Elster
How much?
Jay Myers
37 times. So 3,700% better. And it's like if you can get 1% like you know, say you do push-ups and you just do one percent more push up each day. I guess a hard to do with a percent on a push-ups, but anything that you do 1% better each day is 37 times better after a year. So 1% kind of to me is this magical number. And I named it the Shopify 1% podcast because it was like, how do you be in the top 1%? How do you do the things the top 1% do? And how do you be 1% better each day? And so it's this. magical number to me.
Kurt Elster
I I love it. We're not gonna do better than that, so we're gonna move on to number five.
Jay Myers
One last thing on this one percent. Okay. This one, uh I think all I'll say on this is Every single store has uh the you know the concept of the thousand true fans?
Kurt Elster
Yes.
Jay Myers
It's find your thousand true fans and you have a successful business. Everyone listening right now, I guarantee, has true fans. You can find them by going in your run a report, find customers that have ordered more than once. who've mentioned you on social media, who shared a post about their product on an unboxing video or something, but I guarantee you have true fans. Find them. Maybe it's 10, maybe it's 50, but find who your true fans are. And then find out why they're your true fans to call them up, talk to them about why they buy your product. Because what you want to do is you want to find more people like them, understand who they are. Versus if you have 20,000 customers, but you only have like 800 true fans, focus on them, build for them, talk their language. Write your copy for them, everything you do, and you want to find more of them because that's your that's your channel for growth versus um oh these people stopped buying. I'm gonna survey and find out why and try to improve it. Forget about them. Like focus on the top level.
Kurt Elster
Double down on what works. Double down on the people buying. Exactly. The people who aren't buying.
Jay Myers
Correct.
Kurt Elster
Okay. It's a good reminder. All right, the other one of my the other pet peeves, one of the the missed opportunities I see are anemic product pages. Like these product pages that feel like an afterthought. You know, we in we invested in in everything else and the brand. And we, you know, we wrote our our story page. We've got our catalog, our product in there in our marketing. But then the product page itself will be Really weak. It'll be like our product photos. They'll have some good product photos, but they're just on white and they're very sterile. And then just like a short description with some bullet points. It's not enough. Like go to any successful Amazon listing. They'll have the product photo, but then the they'll also have video, and the product photo will have action shots. Oh my gosh, I want action shots, action shots so badly on every Shopify store. And then they'll annotate the product photos. Where like the product photo will have like little tool tips in there that call out features of the product. All right, so just doing that, our product media becomes significantly better and more convincing. Because we know it's it's about half of people when they land on a product page, the first thing they do is start looking through the product photos. So once I've got their attention with that They probably have questions. We need to tell them more. And so in my product description, man, I want reviews. I want a like a subtitle, a little subheading, maybe a poll quote from a customer review. I want a more narrative description. I want those bullet points, but then I want a longer description. And you know, if there's technical details. I want those too. Where like we have a a client who sells a lot of purses online. And for her, it'll she'll list inner and outer dimensions. And then like we'll try to give people a sense of what will fit in the bag and we'll show a person carrying the bag, which that really helps, you know, give you a idea of like, well, this is how you would style it and this is And like this is a a sense of the size of the bag.
Jay Myers
So good. Selling the benefits.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Or like you get really fancy, you know, and this depends like how many products you sell and what your resources are. in content, but having like, you know, uh l treating that sales page like a landing page where now we have like a much more narrative format and we have called out feature sections where we're like, hey, this is, you know, like this bag has these magnetic pockets and they're the coolest thing ever. And then we have like a little looped muted animated video showing how that feature works. And it's like it it's easy to ignore and just skip that part. But for the person who's browsing the site and is like looking for an excuse to buy, you just have to help help show it to them, help convince them. Cause the purchase decision happens on that product page. And when it's like just a really anemic Really lame product page. It's soggy. It's not doing a lot. It's just like we check the boxes for the bare minimum. Don't be surprised when the add-to-cart rate is low and people don't buy.
Jay Myers
I think you can get creative too. You mentioned like the number one place people go is they open up the product images. Um and like a lot of people sometimes don't scroll. There's that whole above the fold, like a certain percentage don't go down. Um, we on one store we put uh Instagram comments, we took screenshots of people posting uh their their product on Instagram and it's saying like, oh my gosh, I love this. This is the best ever. And then all the comments and then we took a screenshot and kind of worked that in between some of the product photos. So like the first five things were product photo than the then a sc screenshot of like what people are saying on social.
Kurt Elster
So like since they're good. Since they're user generated content and social proof.
Jay Myers
Right. Within the product photos. So Even if they don't scroll to the bottom, which a percentage of people won't, they still see that in there, right? So you can work some of that stuff in there more than just product photos.
Kurt Elster
That's really good.
Jay Myers
I I put I don't know if you saw on the on our list there, but I put 5B on this one, which I I think you're so bang on, and I just wanted to add that I think maybe a way people could think about this is if your product page was a landing page, would it work? Like Would you build a landing page that way? And then most people will kind of sheepishly tail between the legs. Oh no, that would be a really crappy landing page. Like, no, no, it's not. Then my product page is like an order-taking page. That's it. But like if you were paying money. to for ads, you would build out a long form landing page with video with testimonials with like ping pong style things. And uh by ping-pong style, like going back and forth with peach uh different features of the product, um, really explaining like um explainer videos, like just a long form landing page. Now If you're running so like if you're running paid ads, you you want to have a landing page that converts. I guess where I'm going with this is like That would be an ideal product page. One of the mistakes people make is they think, oh, I should send my ad traffic to my product pages, but their product pages aren't any remotely remotely close to what a landing page is or should be. And so maybe a good way to think about how should I make my product pages look is they should just look like a landing page. Like that's um and I I a couple ones that I think do this really well. If you're like, well, what does that look like? Um There's a uh earphone company uh called Master and Dynamic. They are amazing. Just click on any of their products, go on uh like their headphones or something as you scroll down. It's like big imagery. There's videos. There's comparison tables. Like what is this? How does this compare to the competition?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, this one's nice.
Jay Myers
Yeah, so, so good. Um, Timbuktu also does this really well. Uh they're a bag company out of San Francisco. If you click on any of their backpacks, like As you scroll down, there's a video of someone opening it, someone doing like a time-lapse thing of like putting products in the bag, and then another video. And it's just like you keep scrolling and scrolling, and um, that's what I mean. by like a long form landing page style um product page. And those are pretty easy to create in Shopify. You just create ch sections and different product templates and they have like I know Timbuktu. We actually worked with them for a long time. They They um they just have like a different template for their backpacks and then for their suitcases, and then they it a lot of that stuff is like It's actually cookie cutter. Like every backpack has the same section for showing what goes in a backpack and stuff like that. So it's not as hard to do as you might think. Like you don't have to create these whole pages every single time. Some of it can be templated, but Anyways, check those ones out.
Kurt Elster
No, for sure.
Jay Myers
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Uh yeah, and Timbuktu's is really good. That one I really Timbuktu I relate to a lot. Just because we built um Tactical Baby Gear uses a sim like they sell bags and it's a really similar format. In fact I just I sent Timbuktu to them and was like, hey, here's uh here's some inspiration. Um that's a good looking site. Are your upsells stuck in the Stone Age? Your store runs on data, so why aren't your upsells? Outdated upsell apps make you guess, test, and tweak manually. That's costing you money Zippify one-click upsell changes everything. Its AI engine automates upsells, analyzing every cart in real time to offer the highest converting product. No guesswork, no setup, just results Over 10,000 Shopify stores trust OCU, and it's already generated nearly a billion dollars in extra revenue. So flip the switch and let AI handle your upsells. Try Zippify one click upsell free for thirty days at zipify. com slash curt. That's zipify. com slash K-U-R-T. Don't leave money on the table. Start AI powered upselling today. Okay. What do we have next on our list? Where do we want to go here? We got a few more. Well, I think you know what works with this that leads right into this one is uh lack of supporting brand content. Which I think I don't know if you put this in here, you said aka so become a soulless e-com zombie. Yes, I added that. I see these sites a lot. They're definitely, I get it. It's like it'll be someone who is earlier in the journey and they don't just have like you end up with a backlog of content when you do this long enough. Or they're not confident in the content. And so instead, they go to ChatGPT and they're like, I own this business. My name is this. Write me an about page. And then they copy-paste it because it's like grammatically correct. The problem is. That means that now everyone can do that, right? And so it is table stakes is no longer just like we had an about page. Now I need to see you. I need to know who the founder is. I want your story. I want to see who I'm buying from. I want the person, not the brand. Ideally, I have video, but I get it's intimidating. feeling like a a proper brand where it feels like this is a business. And that could take the form of there's an address in the footer, you know, so we know this is a physical place. And there's a phone number I could call. In addition to there's a story and there's like reasoning behind this and there's we they do brand collabs. All that stuff is cumulative And at some point it it trips a trigger in our brain and go, this is this is a real business. This is a real brand. I don't know where that line is, and it's probably different for everybody. But like that's the thing you want to work toward. I don't just want like copy-pasted AI slop. We we have to go a little bit past that and suddenly This goes from like transactional to I'm buying the customers, they're making the purchase decisions, buying the product, but they're also buying into the story and the brand because a little bit they want to support you.
Jay Myers
Totally. And I think this is gonna get more and more important as AI is getting used more and more too, right? To it's it's so tempting to to use it for everything, but then you you you lose your soul. So yeah. And I think you know You know, like, I don't know, a few years ago, um, I always like any dropshipping site you go to, like I say dropshipping, this is no offense to anyone that dropships.
Kurt Elster
But there's a lot of sites that You said dropshipping with stank on it. It was quite derisive.
Jay Myers
It was clear where J stands on. Yeah, I I don't have an issue with dropshipping, but when they're like completely uh there's no bra it's like you land on site and all it is is just dropship products connected to Uberlow or some dropship catalog and it's there's usually a lot of countdown timers.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it's just some lightning bolt emojis. I don't know why they're always there.
Jay Myers
Yes. Everything the sale ends in ten minutes when you add it to cart, there's only one left in stock and um Oh man.
Kurt Elster
And that's stuff like I mean flat out that it's illegal to do stuff like that. Yeah, it is fake urgency, fake scarcity, but these sites clearly do it anyway.
Jay Myers
And I'm afraid to buy from sites like that now because my my I don't actually ask this question in my head, but subconsciously when I land on the site, my brain is going to like like any customer, is this legit? Are they real? Should be any concerned here? Are they authentic? Like there's all these checklists like I need to see social proof. I know like your the brain needs to answer all these questions within a couple seconds of landing on a site. And like there's certain drop shipping sites I land on that instantly I know this is not somewhere I want to be ordering. This might take six weeks to get here. It's gonna come from overseas and it's not even maybe gonna come I feel like that's happening now with AI generated content on sites. Like people's radar is gonna go off and be like, uh doesn't feel right. And so like the authenticity has to come through. Instantly too. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. During the pandemic, we all became e-commerce shoppers. Like online shopping just went up significantly during that time. And in doing so, everyone's more experienced. And so it it's more than just like I threw together a shop by store and I could run ads to it. Right now, just people will expect more out of it to pass that litmus test of is this legitimate or not? And then on top of it, like as we see more and more AI content, we are more suspicious of things that feel inauthentic. And so like that's that's the bar we're trying to pass here. The one I want to know, this is you. I did not write this. It says stuck on the paid add nipple. And then the first bullet point yourself is get off the nipple triple exclamation point.
Jay Myers
See, you know I it's not AI generated because I don't think ChatGPT would write get off the nipple. So this is obviously the term Yeah, you know, like when a when a child is on the nipple too long, it's it's easy and the milk is good, but at some point you gotta get off the nipple. You gotta wean them off and Paid ads, I mean here's the bottom line. Do you like do you think paid ads are gonna get any cheaper? No, they're only gonna go up. Do you think that do you think it's healthy to build a business on paid ads? No. But the like the problem is it's it's so tempting. It's it does it works. You you'll get sales, but it builds a Very unhealthy business where especially if something goes wrong and like last couple years we've seen with um Timu and other players coming in and buying up so much ad that it's driven up ad costs even more. Now with like AI buying ads and affecting the algorithm, like it's gonna get even more expensive. And so now is the time to get off the nipple and master your owned audience. And owned audience is your email list, your SMS list, your influencers, your uh word of mouth, um anything that you own that like no one SEO is a big one.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, yeah, I remember I would say the other one that we often We often often get left out because we're so focused on digital is in-person events. In-person events can really be quite incredible and make an impression on people where you will stay top of mind way longer than with any of the online sources.
Jay Myers
Yep. Yep. And I I wrote I yeah, blogs is such a big one. I I feel like blogs has been left behind. And there is such a huge opportunity. Like go on any site and find a product they're selling. Like let's just use that gut health. There's a lot of blogs in gut health because there's health blogs, but maybe this isn't the best example. But All it's so easy now to create content. And for this one, I'm not overly against using AI to create blogs, but create content on the products you sell and have a blog. Like just having a blog right now, I think um I don't know why it's been kind of a little bit disregarded blogs. And I think there's an opportunity. to create content in rank like just organically for stuff quite easily. And so maybe now's the time for people to re-look at having a blog that if they haven't to reconsider.
Kurt Elster
And these these AI search people are like, oh SEO is dead. But Where do you think these AI search tools are getting their information? It is if you rank in the top three, it is very easy to have whatever crazy thing you said get included in the AI answer. And so if you declare like if you're making recommendations of your own products in some blog article or maybe, you know, someone else posted and someone asks, like, hey, what's the best robot vacuum? And you happen to be in that listicle, oh You know, suddenly the AI is going to say you're the best robot vacuum. And so that's why it's easy to dismiss SEO in blogs, and I 100% would not do it. In the face of AI, they're getting the info from somewhere and you want it to be you.
Jay Myers
Yep. 100%.
Kurt Elster
So all right, we got Jay off the pay dad nipple and there's one it says they screw up referrals and there's no notes in here.
Jay Myers
So I'm wondering how I left this one vague.
Kurt Elster
How does one screw up referrals?
Jay Myers
Okay, here's the thing. Kind of maybe ties in a little bit into the um getting off the paid nipple a little bit, but um I'm gonna give a link to this talk I did at Sub Summit a couple years ago. Um and I called it the subscription death curve. But bottom line, I'll kind of try to sum this up in a minute or two is almost every brand, whether even one-time or subscription, they they they flatline. They get to a point where their growth just like they're losing as many customers a month as they're gaining. And it like I said it can happen at a thousand customers, ten thousand, but at some point they They hit this death curve where they're flat. And you can't acquire more customers to get out of it. You just will hit that curve a little bit higher. You can't reduce your churn enough. It'll just hit that death curve a little bit further out. The only way to have long-term sustainable growth Is through a referral system where customers recommend on average one or more of their customers. So this is it's called a viral coefficient. And as long as you have A viral coefficient of one or greater. So it can be 1. 001. And what that means is on average, a customer refers one other customer. So some customers might refer five, some might refer zero, but on average a customer refers one or more. If you have that, you don't need to spend a penny on paid advertising. Zero. Nothing. It you'll you'll grow exponentially like that hockey stick growth curve forever. Now, the problem is is most people run these like share 10, get 10, give 5% off. And it's just noise. Nobody even shares those. Like I've I buy stuff all the time online. I get the link, share it with a friend, get 10% off. Like I I never shared. I'm not gonna go to Facebook and like, hey, does anybody want 10% off Timbuktu? Probably not. But imagine, let's use this gut health example that we were talking about earlier. Imagine I buy something from them or I subscribe, and then I get an email. From them, maybe pretending from the founder, and they say, Jay, thank you so much for subscribing. We're giving you three unique coupon codes. We can only give you three. But we're getting but they are for two months or three months completely free of us of a subscription. We know we're trying to change gut health for the world. And uh these codes will give someone in your life that you care about three months free of this gut health product. So now what do I do? I I I right away start to think, okay, who who do I know needs has crippling diarrhea? Who else has Kurt has crippling diarrhea?
Kurt Elster
I'm gonna Okay, then now I'm in.
Jay Myers
And what I did is I pre-qualified the perfect customer for customer for them as well too, right? So it's interesting. I really derailed things. You remember Clubhouse? During the pandemic. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like that was brief. It it was but it had the most, the fastest growth ever. But then eventually, like Twitter launched spaces and there was other things that came out that affected it. But What was interesting about it is you couldn't even sign up for it. There was no sign and you you you could only join if someone referred you. But it was the fastest growing social media platform like at that time in history, but you couldn't even sign up for it. It was bizarre, right? You'd think like, well how does a imagine TikTok you couldn't sign up for. You just you had to get referred by a friend. And so, but what was powerful about that is each person that joined got five referral links. And so I remember going to someone and saying, hey, like are you actually going to use this? Because I only got five. And so all they need for viral growth. is a one referral rate, but they shared five. So like you make it feel exclusive, you make it feel limited, you make it extremely valuable. And if you give referral opportunities like that to your customer You will if you can hit that viral coefficient of people referring at least one customer, you will be the most successful e-commerce company in the world. Um, so that's I think So many people just implement bland, refer, give someone 10% off, and it doesn't move the needle at all. You have to give extremely valuable, limited offers that they can give to a select group of people. So That's what I mean by that. And I'll make sure we put the link in the show notes. There's like a 45-minute talk on this. It's uh something I feel very passionate about, but I just summed up in two minutes. So
Kurt Elster
We gotta wrap it up. The final mistake was not taking advantage of international markets. A majority of the stores I work on do not take advantage of international market, like in a proper way. And it's because it's intimidating. Today it is easier than ever. And it is because of Shopify's tooling. Shopify markets really makes this quite easy if you want to attempt to sell internationally. Um, and it's not something I would just do flippantly, but for sure there is opportunity there. Like if you feeling like you have exhausted your home market, Well, there are other markets, right? Other and in this we assume you're English speaking. There are other English speaking markets. Um, so it's certainly something I would I would explore and not ignore. All right, we managed to get through the top ten mistakes. I am so thrilled to have this episode and to have recorded with you, Jay. Um me too. Yeah. This is a good one. Okay. What uh What's the bottom line? What's our our our big takeaway for folks?
Jay Myers
I think uh almost everything we talked about today was on uh giving more attention to your existing customers, um increasing LTV. We talked a little bit about acquisition, but I think if you if you summed up as a whole Um most brands kind of don't focus enough on retention and in and leaning into their top 1% of customers, they're top thousand, you know, they're true fans. Um, focus more on the customers you have. I there's a great quote by Seth Godin that says, uh, don't find people for your products, find products for your people. And I think more brands could do that by they have the people, but the traffic is there. They're just not optimizing it and leaning into the customers they already have. So I think that maybe could sum it up as a big takeaway.
Kurt Elster
Man, that's perfect. I'm not gonna do better than that. Jay, this is great. Thanks for thanks for doing this with me.
Jay Myers
My pleasure, man. So fun.
Kurt Elster
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