10 Mistakes KILLING Your Shopify Sales ☠️ - w/ Kurt Elster - Unofficial Shopify Podcast

Kurt Elster: Today on the unofficial Shopify podcast, we're doing a listicle. Yes. We're gonna run through the top mistakes Shopify store owners make. Totally opinionated, but from the angle of two Shopify partners with geez, combined what? What are we at here for e-commerce experience? 40. 40 years, maybe. I can't be that old.

Jay

Jay Myers: I started in 1998. When did you Yeah, it's gotta be up

Kurt Elster: 1998.

Jay Myers: that was when I first, my first store, so Shopify 2009.

Kurt Elster: You've been at it longer than mine. Longer than me. I've been on Shopify partners since 2011 or 2012. And, uh, in 1998, my first foray into e-commerce would've been retail arbitrage, selling Furbies on eBay.

Jay Myers: I, well, same as well. Mine was archery supplies on eBay,

Kurt Elster: Okay. I love that. Yeah. In the nineties it was like eBay was the

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: Man. Yeah. When you're 19, you're like, I, I'm gonna live forever.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Kurt Elster: So, uh, Jay, Mr. Myers, what, uh, give me 30 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, drop shippers, employee pricing, wholesaling, um, that's become really popular. Just a suite of different things that help stores.

Kurt Elster: 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 unlike me on the receiving end of. Lot of support or work requests that come across your desk, uh, that you get pulled into and so to see, we could quickly see, alright, here are some, some things that separate successful stores and, uh, stores that are, uh, less successful.

And so our our top 10 mistakes, what are our top 10 mistakes that, uh, e-com store owners make? And I don't think we have these in any particular order.

Jay Myers: No, 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 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.

Um, some of them maybe I think a lot of people might not have thought of before. Um, 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 wanna 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'll 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 a hundred thousand dollars 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. All right.

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 the store. You do everything and then you get to the cashier and she or he is grumpy. Or it's not like you, like 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 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: A hundred percent. Yeah.

Kurt Elster: what, uh, bring us to our next mistake.

Jay Myers: Well, I listed this one, um, and this is on the topic of subscriptions. I wrote Mistake. Okay, well it'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 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.

So what customers.

Kurt Elster: I offer a consumable, good for sure, I should offer a 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. I will.

Kurt Elster: cans. How big is this cat?

Jay Myers: she's got a thyroid issue, so, so, so she just eats and, no, I don't care. She's, uh, she's like 20 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 as, as an example

I always say, um, subscription is, a billing. Decision. It's not a relationship decision. 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 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 a member, he would, he's got Viking stuff everywhere. If he had another baby, it would be a, he 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 that includes all the other benefits 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.

'cause 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?

Jay Myers: Nope.

Kurt Elster: Subscribe and save, uh, a trademark of Amazon. I don't think you could say subscribe and save.

Jay Myers: A lot of stores do. It's interesting. I

Kurt Elster: yeah, for sure.

Jay Myers: Well I haven't heard of them coming after any, but that's interesting. They might.

Kurt Elster: We too. We operate, um, harney.com, which sells tea. And if you're selling caffeine 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 Saver, 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, 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. It's like, all right, if you're do, if you subscribe for six months, it moves up to 20%.

Jay Myers: But there's more benefits than just the the product. I often ask our subscription brands who use our subscription software, I say , what are you, what do your customers get when they subscribe? And if they say, well, they get my product every month at five or 10% off.

Kurt Elster: That's not enough.

Jay Myers: no, they're doomed, I can tell you , 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 churning eight 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 at 5%

Kurt Elster: yeah, ours says like, never run out. You'll never run out.

Jay Myers: No,

Kurt Elster: 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 a first like basic principle. If you're a member, you should get. 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 tea related products, access to products that non-members don't.

Or if they come up with a new flavor, email the subscribers first so they get it, um, 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 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 infuser, I don't even know whatever it is, but I. 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 ha 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. Brands. So like if it's tea, let's say your angle is mindfulness. Maybe it's tea for skinny tea, or it could be something else, but let's just say it's like focus and mindfulness, tea.

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 tee, I get 10% off at. My mindfulness, this mindfulness notebook company or this mindfulness app, I get 10% off calm or something else.

And they will always be willing to give a benefit to your subscribers. 'cause that's like a new acquisition channel for them.

Kurt Elster: That's very clever,

I already messaged my, uh, Mr. Harney of Harney tees. I already messaged people 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.

Jay Myers: The way you think.

Kurt Elster: 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, you know, we need additional benefits to really separate it out. Okay. Sold on that idea. Our, 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 return. And it just, yeah, it like it. It'll be either three items, always starting with home or like 20 items. But the most important thing is shopping, and that'll just be buried under shop and it'll be like a nested nightmare dropdown

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Kurt Elster: 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 a 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. I don't wanna have to go like three levels deep on it, and there's 20 items in each thing. That doesn't help anybody. 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. 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, shorts, dress pants, jeans is something to break it into further categories. But we're just, we wanna 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. 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 like 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 lead 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 dunno where, where you, you posted that one time and I still

Kurt Elster: I mean, that sounds like something I'd say,

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Kurt Elster: you know what, I'll take credit for

Jay Myers: take full credit. That is a quote. Like, you should own that quote because, um, 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, there's an argument. It could be in the main menu. 'cause 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.

So those,

Kurt Elster: 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 wanna know what other people are buying. I mean, that's just human nature, right? We wanna know. So have a training. And both of those are so easy to do in Shopify. 'cause I think every collection you can sort by.

Popular. So

Kurt Elster: you sort by bestselling and like if you wanna do a new collection, you sort by new, you didn't even have to make a new collection for it. You could like

Jay Myers: No,

Kurt Elster: in a quarry string.

Jay Myers: totally. Yeah. And like don't make the customer go in and sort the collection themself. Just make one that defaults. You can make a collection of your whole store, every single product. Default it to bestselling. Then add that to your main nav, and then there's your, there's your trending or hottest bestselling, whatever you wanna call it.

Yeah. That, that's, um, I, I bet you 90% of stores I go to the main menu is not ideal. That's a good, it's

Kurt Elster: For sure. Yeah. It's such when we do, uh, conversion rate optimization work, I think like there, you know, there'll be like, well, here's the 50 things. But the one that I think really makes the difference is you fix the main menu because it's more, it's like the main menu's going to get people to the right thing as fast as possible.

That makes a big difference. But also when I land on the site, you, the first time I pop open that menu, it's when they're set up correctly, I get an instant overview of, oh, this is what they sell.

Jay Myers: Yep. I read an interesting stat. 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 30% less.

Engagement in their menu when they collapse it to the, the hamburger

Kurt Elster: The hamburger, the

Jay Myers: Yeah. And like I always do that because it looks better and it look, but then, you know, you, 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 mis mistake is 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 often when I land on the 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

Kurt Elster: And the date with, will you marry me?

Jay Myers: bed, or get 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. Uh, it had like five different

Kurt Elster: Crippling diarrhea.

Jay Myers: It could have been right.

But what

Kurt Elster: what I picked.

Jay Myers: so I, I clicked one, uh, 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 backend. 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 can 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 popups.

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: You land on the site and it's like, Hey, get five bucks off. Just give us your email address. You're gonna buy.

Jay Myers: Exactly. Exactly. It's,

Kurt Elster: even know what I'm here for yet. I do. I'd like that segmentation though. You know, you're let's, you're using something like Klaviyo, you can write that into a customer profile property and so now we can have much more relevant emails to the person and we, we do a lot of work in aftermarket automotive.

And that one's tough. 'cause you know, you can have a website that sells for parts for 20 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.

Jay Myers: Totally. Totally. And when you.

Kurt Elster: it's like, I'm gonna get a, I'm gonna get an onboarding. Like ideally I'm gonna get a welcome series tweaked for, from that gut health brand tweaked to my crippling diarrhea.

You are going to get it for, you know, like weight loss or healthy eating or

Jay Myers: Hey, what are you saying?

Kurt Elster: you know, I was just, I was going with what's the likely the most common request they get. Um, so

Jay Myers: Yeah. Yeah. So, so, 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? Kurt. 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 gimme 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 up 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, oh, 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 and 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 1% 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, I don't wanna go too far back, but I do wanna 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

Kurt Elster: The pointy rock analogy. All right, let's hear

Jay Myers: Okay. Didn't Harley talk about this on your episode, or was I It was a different one. May.

Kurt Elster: I, there's so I forget more things in a day.

Jay Myers: Okay. Okay, so the pointy, maybe it's not called pointy rock analogy, I call it that, but here's the concept. Um, or Riverstone, Riverstone analogy, I think he might have referred to it as. But the concept is Shopify once. Pointy rocks. And so like typically when you, uh, do an employee, um, review, like a monthly review or non 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 AR or vr, something like for product images or something. They have this really, really unique talent and so they focus on that. So. 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 4% of people unsubscribe and then they stop.

They stop sending emails. Like they, they go, oh, we're, we're emailing too much. Okay, let's only email once a month. Oh, once a, I'm like, what? 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, what

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. 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 blowout, the 20. It's like 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 than trying to not offend the

Kurt Elster: Well, it's, it's tough 'cause like often we apply our rules of society to marketing, right? If I'm at a dinner party and I got 20% of the guests to leave, I. really messed up that dinner party, but in an email campaign, you know, if I got like I lost 20% but then made X much back in in revenue, whoa. That was a successful campaign.

Jay Myers: So good, right? Yeah. And so I think with our, our e-commerce stores that 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 buy, 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. 1%. 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 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 does 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 their revenue. Um. I love this principle that, have you heard of, uh, probably, um, if you increase something 1% each day, so say your sales or something, your efficiencies.

Just say you're trying to increase something 1%. Just get 1% better. How much better do you think you are by the end of the year?

Kurt Elster: How much.

Jay Myers: 37 times. So 3700% better. And it's like, if you can get. 1%. Like, you know, say you do pushups and you just do 1% more pushup each day. I, it's a hard to do percent on a pushups, 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, like,

Kurt Elster: I, I love it. We're not gonna do better than that. So we're gonna move on to

Jay Myers: I, I wanna say,

Kurt Elster: five. All right. Let's hear it.

Jay Myers: last thing on this 1%. Okay. This one, uh, I think all I'll say on this is every single store has, uh, the, you know, the concept of a thousand true fans.

Kurt Elster: Yes.

Jay Myers: find your thousand true fans and you have a successful business. Um, everyone has a thousand True Fans. No, everyone has true fans.

Might, maybe it's 50, maybe it's 20. But 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, 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 wanna do is you wanna 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 wanna 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

Kurt Elster: Double down on what works double down on the people buying, not the people who aren't buying.

Jay Myers: Correct, correct. We get too, we get too worried

Kurt Elster: a good

Jay Myers: that leave. Yeah. Good mind. So I just wanted to make sure that was in there too.

Kurt Elster: No, that was good. We needed to, it's good to spell it out. I needed the, needed it spelled out for me. Uh, all right. The other, one of my, I. 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 in the brand, and we, you know, we wrote our, our story page and we've got these, you know, um, like we've got our, 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. 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 socks, action shots so badly on every Shopify store, and I want, uh, 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. 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 pull quote from a customer review.

I want a more narrative description. I want those bullet points, but then I want. Longer description and you know, if there's technical details, I want those too, where like we have 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 idea of like, well, this is how you would style it.

And this is, um, and like this is a, a sense of the size of the bag

Jay Myers: so good selling the

Kurt Elster: and, 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, treating that sales page, like a landing page where now we have like a much more narrative format and we have a.

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 we have like a little looped, muted, animated video showing how that feature works. And it's like, 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: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think you can get creative too with, 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 then 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, then the, then a screenshot of like what people are saying on social.

So like, since the, since they're in.

Kurt Elster: 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, 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 five B 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. Like 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 wanna 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. 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, a earphone company, uh, called Master and Dynamic.

They are amazing. Just click on any of their products. Go on a, like their headphones or something. As you scroll down, it's like big imagery. There's videos, there's comparison tables. Like what does this, how does this compare to the competition? There's,

Kurt Elster: nice.

Jay Myers: yeah, so, so good. Um, Timbuktu also does this really well.

Uh, they're a bag company outta 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 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, 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

Kurt Elster: No, for sure. Uh, yeah, and Timbuk twos is really good. That one. Timbuktu I relate to a lot just 'cause 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.

Okay, what do we have next on our list?

Jay Myers: Where do we wanna go here? We got a few

Kurt Elster: Oh, 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 dunno if you put this in here, you said AKA, so become a soulless e-comm zombie.

Jay Myers: Yes, I added that

Kurt Elster: That's funny. But it, it's, it, it, 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 ha 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 Chance GPT and they're like, I own this business. My name is this.

Write me an about page. And then they copy paste it. 'cause 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 wanna see who I'm buying from.

I want the person, not the brand. Ideally I have video, but I get it's intimidating.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Kurt Elster: Um, but yeah, like having. A 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, 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 wanna 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 buy the customers, they're making the purchase decision, buying the product, but they're also buying into the story and the brand because a little bit they wanna 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 I. Um, I always like any drop shipping site, you go to, like I say, drop shipping.

There's no offense to anyone that drop ships, but there's a lot of sites that,

Kurt Elster: you said drop shipping with stank on it. It was quite derisive. It was clear where Jay stands on drop

Jay Myers: I'm, I don't have an issue with drop shipping, but when they're like completely, uh, there's no, it's like you land on site and all it is is just dropship products connected to Uber low or some dropship catalog and

Kurt Elster: And there's usually a lot of countdown timers, some lightning bolt emojis. I don't know why they're always there.

Jay Myers: yes. Everything, the sale ends in 10 minutes.

When you edit to cart, there's only one left in stock. And, um,

Kurt Elster: man. And that stuff like, I mean, flat out that it's illegal to do stuff like

Jay Myers: yeah, it is now.

Kurt Elster: urgency, fake scarcity, but

Jay Myers: Well, and I'm actually a.

Kurt Elster: 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? Am I, should it be any concern here?

Are they authentic? Like there's all these checklists, like I need to see social proof. I know like you, 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 wanna 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 Shopify 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. Like that's, that's the bar we're trying to pass here. Um, I work, we don't have a ton of time left.

Jay Myers: Can we get through the next three real quick?

Kurt Elster: Well, there's

Jay Myers: Let's,

Kurt Elster: the one I wanna know, this is, this is you. I did not write this. It says stuck on the paid add nipple.

And then the first bullet point to yourself is get off the nipple triple excavation point.

Jay Myers: See, you know, I, it is not AI generated because I.

Kurt Elster: Yeah, I did

Jay Myers: think chat GPT would write, get off the nipple. So, so this is obviously the term, 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

Kurt Elster: Kinda wean them.

Jay Myers: You gotta wean 'em 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 get sales, but it builds a very unhealthy I.

Business where especially if something goes wrong, and like last couple years we've seen with, um, Temu and other players coming in and buying up so much ad that it's driven up ad cost even more now with like AI buying ads and affecting the algorithm, like it's gonna get even more expensive. And so I.

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. Yeah. Yeah. I

Kurt Elster: 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'll 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. Um, gut health's, there's a lot of blogs in gut health 'cause 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 and 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: these, these AI search people are like, oh, SEO's dead. But where do you think these AI search tools are getting their information? It is. If you rank, you know, in the top three, it is very easy to have whatever crazy thing you said get included in the AI answer. If you declare, like if you're making recommendations of your own products at 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, well, you know, suddenly the AI is gonna say you're the best robot vacuum. And so that's why it's easy to dismiss SEO in blogs, and I a hundred percent 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. A hundred percent.

Kurt Elster: So, all right, we got Jay off the paid ad nipple and. I, there's two more in here quickly. There's one, it says they screw up referrals and there's no notes in here. So I'm wondering how

Jay Myers: I left this one vague on.

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 Subs Summit a couple years ago. Um, and I called it the subscription death curve, but I. Bottom line, I 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 could happen at a thousand customers, 10,000, but at some point they, I. If 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 would 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 other 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 for 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 with a friend, get 10% off. Like I don't, I never share it. 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 may pretending from the founder and they say, Jay, thank you so much for subscribing. We are giving you three unique coupon codes.

We can only give you three, but we're get, but they are for. Two months or three months, completely free of a, 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 it to think, okay, who, who do I know needs? Oh, I.

Kurt Elster: has crippling

Jay Myers: Who else has, Curt has crippling diarrhea. I'm gonna,

Kurt Elster: then, okay, then now I'm in. All

Jay Myers: I'm gonna, and what I did is I pre-qualified the perfect customer for customer for them as well too, right? So it's interesting.

Kurt Elster: us with crippling diarrhea, I really derailed this.

Jay Myers: um, do you remember Clubhouse during the

Kurt Elster: Oh yeah, yeah. That was brief.

Jay Myers: 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 gonna use this?

'cause 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, and 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 more, 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: All right. We gotta, we gotta wrap it up.

Jay Myers: we gotta wrap it up.

Kurt Elster: was not taking advantage of international markets. A majority of the stores I work on do not take advantage of international, like in a proper way, and it because it's intimidating. Today it is easier than ever and it is because of Shopify's tooling.

You know, Shopify markets really makes this quite easy if you want to attempt to sell internationally, um, you know, 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. Alright, we managed to get through

Jay Myers: We did it.

Kurt Elster: 10 mistakes. I am so thrilled to have this episode and to have recorded with you, Jay.

Jay Myers: Oh, me too.

Kurt Elster: 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, and leaning into their top 1% of customers.

They're, 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, 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.