EP #299] [ENG] - Top strategies to maximise your D2C store conversions - Ben Sharf

EP #299] [ENG] - Top strategies to maximise your D2C store conversions - Ben Sharf Speaker 2: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 3: Hello guys, welcome to another episode of the e-commerce lab by e-commerce, the place of air related to Amazon FBA product level and e-commerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of e-commerce, and today we bring another special guest. His name is Ben Sharf. He's a co-founder of Platter. Which is one of those top solutions out there when it comes to help you figuring out how to make your Shopify store profitable. So profitability is always a key topic here because revenue at the end of the day means nothing if you're not putting some money into your pocket. And that's why today I want to talk with Ben all the different things that you have to effectively master when it comes to scaling your brand on Shopify to make sure that those conversions stay high and profitability also is as high as possible. So Ben, pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing, my friend? Speaker 1: Doing well. Thanks for having me. Speaker 3: Thank you, man. Pleasure, pleasure. And as we were talking before going live, a lot of Amazon sellers, given the complexity of the marketplace and how expensive it's getting, Exploring avenues to, you know, diversify and usually Shopify is a very hot topic when it comes to that. And I will say it's usually the channel you should consider next. And that's where, you know, solutions such as Flutter are definitely the perfect fit. So I will say before we dive into that, maybe just give us a quick intro by yourself and then we can go deeper into the topic. Speaker 1: Yeah, quick background on myself. I grew up in New York. I was working at a company called GoPuff before starting Platter, if you're familiar. And we were basically building out an ecommerce business unit there to enable instant delivery from .com websites. So I spent all that time talking ecommerce brands, brand founders, etc. And ultimately what I realized through those conversations was that a lot of the same pain points and problems kept coming up over and over again. It was either that they worked with a development agency who built something that was super complicated and expensive because they get paid for their time. And so it was really challenging as the brand scaled or they're dealing with problems in the Shopify ecosystem because they had way too many apps on their storefront. And a lot of these apps are features, not products. And so what would happen is brands would grow is they would either have a super complicated storefront that was custom built or they had a storefront with way too many third party solutions involved in it. And so it always would implode every time they'd get to a certain level of scale. And ultimately they would need to look for a solution to find their way out of that hole, which is ultimately where Platter came into the picture. So Platter is basically a storefront solution to help build the more profitable storefronts. And the way that we do so is by building a lot of the most popular functionality into one product suite. To essentially allow you to build a high converting storefront cheaper and faster without compromising quality. So instead of having to build everything from scratch as a brand, you benefit from the economies of scale of all the functionality that we have in our product suite. So we can give you a solution cheaper and faster without compromising quality. Speaker 3: Awesome. I think, I mean, the first thing I usually see Shopify sellers in general is struggling with exactly what you guys are bringing to the table, which is how we maximize that conversion that at the end of the day transform into profitability because There is definitely a science when it comes to that from the perspective of which products to use, which pop-ups to use on the website, how to make the speed of the website create certain action throughout the journey of the consumer. So there's a lot of things that I would like to start unpacking and I guess to start a conversation around this is like maybe start with the basics because I think a lot of people when they try to do the jump from Amazon to Shopify They struggle a lot with the fact that, first of all, the conversion of website by nature is much lower. We're talking about if you have a website that conversion is 3 to 5 percent, like you're a unicorn, most people are around 1 percent mark, which is on Amazon, usually 15, 20 percent is normal. So I guess when you do that jump, And you have those big drops in conversion. Like what are some of those main elements that are basics that you don't have, like you're really going to struggle when it comes to Shopify? Speaker 1: I mean, I think a really good analogy as it relates to Amazon is one of the great parts about Amazon is they kind of force you to sit within the confines of their best practices around conversion, right? When you get to a Shopify website, you have like this open sandbox where you can do whatever you want. And I think oftentimes there's brands who do really well on Amazon who forget that the thing that makes them successful there is the simplicity of the shopping journey. And so when they get over to Shopify, all of a sudden it becomes really complicated and you like lose sight of what actually makes it easy for people to buy. Right? Like a very simple example I give you, uh, you know, if you're a brand founder listening to this, like count how many clicks it takes for someone to actually go from landing on your website to checking out on your website. Speaker 3: It's ugly. Speaker 1: It's like a very simple example of like, if you have a high intent shopper coming to your website, why not make the process as easy as possible to let them give you their money? So the thing we find is people overcomplicate things, right? Like having their hero products on the homepage without like a buy now button. So then you force them to go to the product page, then you get to the product page and then it's add to cart, but then they have a new load page for their cart and then you go to check out and it's another page and it's just like, You're adding so much friction in the process. You're like making it harder for someone to purchase. So I think the way that we think about it is how can we reduce friction at every touch point in that buyer journey? And then how can we introduce different elements throughout the buyer journey to increase the likelihood that someone's going to buy and then also increase the amount of stuff someone will buy when they do so, right? So a couple of different examples would be adding social proof around your website. The way that I would suggest thinking about it is for whatever product you have, Understand what are the questions or concerns that someone might have when they land on your website. Figure out how do you get ahead of those beforehand to answer those questions for someone. So for example, if you're selling a supplement product, you should probably be showing the nutrient label somewhere because someone's probably going to want to know what's in that product. Another great thing is social proof. If you come to a website that has no reviews, has no user-generated content, people are going to be like, this is a sketchy product. Why would I trust this? Because it doesn't look like anyone else trusts this. So those are like very low lift, high impact things to do, whether it's like adding testimonials, adding user generated content, adding nutrition labels is the example that I use. And then the other thing as well that we touched on is gamification is a really great way to drive incremental dollars and to increase your conversion rate because it's just a game of consumer psychology. Like people always want to feel like they can earn another thing. So using like incentive progress bars, where it's like, if you add 10 more dollars to your car, you'll get free shipping. If you add two more products, you'll get a free gift. Doing things like that, where you can really lean into impulse purchase behavior is a really good way to get people to buy more every time they come to your website. So really, like if I can synthesize that down into a couple words, it's like, get ahead of the questions that people are asking, make it really easy to buy and incentivize people to buy more. Speaker 3: I agree. I think something that usually happens with all the things that you mentioned is that all of them for sure are must-dos when it comes to improving the conversion profitability of a Shopify store. But what a lot of people struggle with is in which order I start testing all of this because there are mistakes you can end up doing. We just see that happening a lot. So the question is that they start testing so many things at the same time, and then it's very difficult for you to understand which kind of element of the ones you've been mentioning so far actually contribute into a potential performance that you want to achieve. So I guess when it comes to that, like how you mitigate that complexity and making sure you actually understand the actual contribution and impact of each of these elements on the KPIs you're looking to achieve. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think to your point in the beginning, like simplicity is a superpower. I think like the first question that people don't answer for themselves when launching a website is does someone actually understand what our product does and is it really easy for them to buy it? I think that it's a slippery slope to try to isolate very specific features and functionality too early in your buying journey because conversion rate is a very blended metric. There are so many things that can impact your conversion rate, like the quality of your product, the seasonality of the product, your pricing strategy, your ad strategy. There's just so many different variables. So I think for us, There's a big part of it that's just around understanding best practices with conversion rate optimization, having built over 150 websites. So as an example, we don't really need to A-B test the fact that using a cart drawer is better than a checkout page because every page load that you add to the conversion funnel is going to result in an incrementally reduced conversion rate. Right. So that's not necessarily something that needs to be tested at the micro level for a brand. It's like that's the best practice that we know to be true. Another great example is like I've never seen a brand who's like we added social proof and we added reviews and all of a sudden our conversion rate plummeted. Like we just know it to be true that you need to make people feel comfortable and like answer those questions that you know they're going to have before they ask them to increase the likelihood of someone purchasing. So I think that The way that I view it is every threshold up the ladder that you go in terms of like revenue and complexity, there's definitely different things to start testing. But I mean, we work with brands that are doing over $50 million online that are leaving like very low hanging fruit opportunities on the table. You know, like I guess One example that just comes to mind, an eight-figure brand called NeuroGum. They sell like caffeine gum, if you're familiar. They're like one of the largest. Speaker 3: Yeah, I saw that. Speaker 1: I think they're one of the best-selling Amazon products, actually. Speaker 3: I know, I know. Yeah, they were big, yeah, very big. Speaker 1: Yeah, so like they're a customer of ours and like as a great example, we have an app called Platter Plus, which is basically all the checkout and post-checkout functionality on your storefront. So checkout extensions and post-purchase upsells, they were driving a ton of traffic to their storefront, but never used any sort of upsell strategy at their checkout and the post-purchase. And they installed our app and they've done almost six figures in incremental revenue just off of the features in the app. But it's like they were just leaving money on the table. It just depends on like where you're at in your journey, like what product catalog you have and like assessing what you're doing and what you're not and figuring out like what are the lowest lift ways to improve the impact and the amount of revenue that's being spent by every customer. Speaker 3: Yeah, so something I'd like to add to this is you mentioned depending on the type of product. So I guess a question I have I'm sure people might be asking themselves is that will you say that depending on the type of product the time of gamification that you do and strategies will change or the standard is the same regardless of the nature of the product? Speaker 1: No, it definitely changes and it's based on a couple different things. I think one is the average price point of your SKUs. So like a brand selling $2,000 necklaces versus a brand selling like $30 supplements. We're going to have very different recommendations because the impulse purchase behavior is going to be vastly different. And then the other piece to that as well is the catalog size. So if you're a one SKU brand versus a 50 SKU brand, like there's just different things that you can do. And then beyond that, depending on the category that you're in, there's also different mechanisms that you can use. So an example for you, we have a gamified bundle builder as one of the features in our product. And one of my favorite examples is like a skincare brand that we work with. It's a multi-step bundle builder. So it's like step one, add your cleanser. Step two, add your lotion. Step three, add this, add that. And it works very well based on the catalog that you have to try to drive further incentives. But if you're selling a $2,000 necklace, you shouldn't be focused on trying to upsell someone an impulse purchase because Spending $2,000 as is is going to require like a lot more education and thought. So I think the way that we we would guide a brand as they think about this is if you have a larger catalog and a more impulse purchase behavior type products, you can lean a lot more into gamification and cross sell upsell strategies. And then depending on that as well, you have the opportunity to use like incentive bars to drive further action. So I would say for us, we love working with brands that are mid-price point, large catalogs, because then you can start to do everything like bundle builders, upsells on the PDPs, upsells in the cart drawer, the checkout extensions, the post-purchase upsells. So it's kind of like The consumer doesn't realize it, but you're basically trying to get them to purchase more at every step in that journey. And so when you just look at math, if you get enough people coming to the website and you have some level of conversion on certain features, like you're going to see an increase in revenue. Speaker 3: Love it. Now, when it comes to timelines associated with this, I guess it's also going to heavily depend on the amount of data and traffic you get to your website because, of course, the more traffic, the faster you're going to be able to get enough insights to cross certain KPIs. But when it comes to testing all these different strategies in terms of retargeting and the gains within the website and all of that, How long usually you allow yourself to test them? Are we talking this a matter of days, a matter of weeks? Because you need to make sure that the decision is essentially the substance of data is good enough for you to make the right move, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that something we notice is that a lot of brands are way too small to be testing at a high frequency. Speaker 3: Okay. Right. Speaker 1: Like you need to be doing a lot of traffic. Speaker 3: It becomes a roulette. It becomes gambling. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. It's just like, it's kind of a waste of time in my opinion, because it's not statistically significant. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: I think in the early days, like you need to use a little bit of intuition and understand like, okay, I looked at these 15 websites and I know they all do well. Like what are the things that they're all doing? Like what holds true across these? When you get into the A-B testing on like down to the button color and the button location and all that, you need to be doing so much revenue or have so many monthly visitors that you actually have statistical significance to be able to like understand as to why or how. So I think what we found is a lot of the value that we can provide to a lot of these brands is like, here are the basic things that we know hold true. Right, like as an example, we actually, and I could send you the link to this because I think people would find this valuable. We released 112 page guide on how to optimize your Shopify checkout last week. And it's Shopify endorsed. And we have like 15 other tech partners who all added contributions to it. Like there's so much data and knowledge in that guide that like, I gotta make sure to put it down in the description. Speaker 3: Then if you send me the link, I'll put it down. Yeah. Speaker 1: I'll send that to you. There's so much like information in that where it's like, it doesn't matter what size brand you are. There's just like best practices and like certain frameworks that you should adhere to because so many brands have done it. And like, we all, we know that like, Scaling an ecommerce brand to do a lot of revenue, that is not a novel thing. Like a lot of people have done it before, right? Like I'm always in the camp of like expedite your learning curve by looking at other people who've succeeded and just figure out how you can reverse engineer what they've already done. Of course, there's nuance in terms of like, is your product unique? Because like, why should I buy yours instead of the 50 other options? But in terms of understanding what functionality to use or how to do it, I think what we find is the biggest knowledge gap happens because a lot of the brands that we talk to, they're not ecom nerds, they're brand builders. And there's nothing wrong with that. We always joke, I don't know how to build a brand, but I can tell you what functionality you should use to increase the average order value on your website. So I think brand founders need to have the wherewithal to find people who are significantly better than them at very specific things. And what I've seen in the past from like my successful brand founder friends, they're master delegators, right? They have someone who's really good at Amazon. They have someone who's really good at e-commerce, Shopify. They have someone who's really good at paid ads. Someone who's really good at copywriting and creative and like the list goes on and on. And so I think like just being honest with yourself about what you're good at and what you're not and just finding experts to kind of fill in those holes. Like I feel like that's actually the playbook to finding success and scaling a brand. Speaker 3: I see. I see. Yeah, I think that the issue I see a lot, and this comes back to connecting the dots with the Amazon kind of mindset, is that we are used to seeing results fast and we are very impulsive, right? So when it comes to then trying to transition this thought process into Shopify, it's sometimes challenging because, as you mentioned, you need to make sure that there's a thought process behind all of this in terms of timelines and in terms of making sure This is the right thing for your brand. Otherwise, you end up running in circles and end up achieving the results that you want. Now, another thing that I would like to bring to the table is how all these strategies in terms of the gamification, retargeting, checkout and all of that, we say my Change depending potentially of the seasonality and events that you find throughout a normal year. So I'm talking we say this change throughout Christmas, throughout Valentine's Day, throughout Halloween, because I guess maybe the behavior of consumers may also shift throughout the seasonality events. So is that something that you also recommend to essentially pay attention to? Speaker 1: It's a very good question. I think the answer is yes. For us, it's like when you get into the Black Friday, Cyber Monday holiday season, it's chaotic. I think a couple of things. I think the first one is that we definitely don't tell brands, wait till the week before the holiday and then all of a sudden panic and start changing stuff. You need to start thinking well in advance before these happen. Before these holidays happen, so you're prepared and not just like hitting the panic button right before, because we see brands do that. And it blows my mind. Like, why are you changing your website one day before Black Friday or Cyber Monday? With that being said, again, it depends on your category. It depends on when your busy season is. But I think one thing to note is that what you don't want to do is train like first time shoppers to assume that they're going to get a discount every time they come to your website. Right. So having an understanding of like it's and what I'm saying is not advice to any one brand. It's more like here are the questions you need to be asking yourself as you analyze because no two brands are the same. But it's like if Cyber Monday, Black Friday, you know that you get a lot of first time shoppers that are never going to come back. Like, maybe you minimize the discounts because you know that they're going to buy for the holidays and they're not going to be back anyway, so why not try to maximize the amount of money you get from them? Or if you find that a lot of people around Cyber Monday, Black Friday are actually consumers who are discovering your brand for the first time and then they become loyal customers, maybe you should increase the discounts. So like, get them more excited about trying your product for the first time. But again, it's the takeaway is not like, here's the exact playbook you should follow. It's more like, here are the questions you need to be asking yourself, depending on the seasonality, the price point, the catalog, the SKU count, like all those things. So what we always find, at least with us at Platter, is a lot of brands lean on us as like their thought partner when it comes to ecommerce on Shopify. It's like we don't expect you to have all the answers. We just hope that you can ask the right questions to like work with us to get to the answers you're looking for. Speaker 3: Yeah. So I guess to start coming to a closure, another thing that I get asked a lot is how we make sure effectively we can combine everything that we do within Shopify with the efforts that we also do outside of Shopify. And what I mean by that is for a brand, it's very important to keep the consistency of the experience that our customer goes through in terms of the branding, also even things as simple as the colors, the tonality of how you transmit certain messages. So I guess when we're trying all these things, how do you make sure also that you don't reach a point that maybe because you're doing too many games and too many things on your website, it reaches a point that could break the brand identity, if you see what I mean, right? How do you keep that fine line there? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's really like we have a very extensive discovery process when we work with brands. And I think it's really about getting a really good understanding of the brand before you actually build anything. You know, we have certain brands that don't like to do discounts, certain brands that don't want to do gamification. Cause that's just not who they are. So I think again, it's all about like asking the right questions, uh, getting the right inputs to ensure that you adhere to the brand guidelines. But like ultimately part of that process is understanding your brand, both in terms of like the aesthetic of it and like the values that you uphold to make sure that the online shopping experience is consistent with how you're being represented across other channels. Speaker 3: Awesome. That's great, Ben. So I think, you know, we have a very insightful conversation. So I appreciate, you know, all the value you brought today. So I guess to conclude, is there any last kind of advice or recommendation you would like to give to anybody jumping right now into Shopify and building, you know, the store and make it profitable? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think something that we always do for brands is we offer a free storefront audit. So if you want to go to platter.com, you can submit a request to get a storefront audit. We're always in the camp of just like adding value to people up front, because it usually comes to what comes around goes around. So I think like, always happy to jam on this topic and be a thought partner to anyone that's listening. And then the other thing as well as we just We released our app Platter Plus in the Shopify App Store last week publicly for the first time, which is all the functionality around checkout and post-checkout. So I'll send you a link as well to that so people can get access. Speaker 3: Yeah, put it down. So thank you, Ben. Been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Hopefully, see you soon at upcoming events, yeah? So it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 3: Bye-bye. Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That will make it easier for others to find out about the show and benefit from it. Want more? Visit our website at www.ecomcy.com where you can get your first consultation for free or find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at Ecomcy.