Tanner Larsson 0:07
Welcome to the optimized e commerce podcast. I’m Tanner Larsson. This is Matthew Stafford, my business partner. We are the owners of Build Grow Scale as well as the host of this podcast. So what we’re going to cover today with you is why you should never copy what Amazon is doing, thinking that it’s going to work for you and your ecom business, which is something that a lot of people do. And then we’re also going to give you some crazy, crazy results from one of our average order value split tests, where the store owner, one of our partner brands, was copying Amazon’s frequently bought together Cross-Sell Program, or Cross-Sell Strategy, I should say. And what the results of the split tests were and it will kind of drive home our point so you can kind of guess where the test is gonna go. But we’ll dive into that in a second. So Matt talked to us about Amazon.
Matthew Stafford 0:55
Well, Amazon is its own animal, so we know that for every $1 that is spent on the internet, about 53 cents of that is with Amazon. So the amount of online shoppers that they consume as far as like the, the whole market is just, it’s insane. It’s crazy. And we also know that they’ve created—obviously, they’ve made it very easy for people to buy from them. I think they actually even were the very first ones with the one-click order and one-click buying.
They literally — Amazon — People don’t go to Amazon to shop around and look for products that they want to buy in the future. They literally go there when they’re ready to buy and they find their product and they buy right then. They have also trained consumers to expect their product right away. So they’re shipping has changed the face of physical product sales anywhere in the globe. It is just the fact that they can get it shipped to you. Sometimes same day now, if not within 24 to 48 hours. It is fairly standard.
Tanner Larsson 2:14
Totally. And you know, everything Matt just said, All things that you, the regular store owner — even if you’re a big store, you could be a Banana Republic or an R.E.I. or something like that you still can’t compete with with that ecosystem. Amazon — if you want to look at it in one way. Amazon is a cult of shoppers. They’re trained to consume Amazon style. They have their credit card on file. Most people have three to four to five credit cards on file at Amazon. I know I do. Matt does, because
Matthew Stafford 2:47
Two or three addresses.
Tanner Larsson 2:48
Yep. And because you ship to other people, you go there, you buy, you use one-click. If you have a Kindle or use their app — I probably buy two to three books a week with one-click on my Kindle. Why? Because I’m conditioned to do it. Amazon Prime is the biggest continuity program in the world. Huge. No one else has that.
Matthew Stafford 3:10
55 million subscribers, something like that.
Tanner Larsson 3:12
Yeah All paying 200 plus a year. Yeah. Then you get on Amazon Prime. What do you do? You watch a movie? Oh, I just bought Star Wars The Force Awakens. 10 bucks it was on sale. Cool. Got to have it. Push the button and now I have it. Stores don’t have that. Brands do not have that outside of Amazon. So what works in Amazon’s ecosystem on their store, people think “Oh, look, they’re doing it. I should do it too.” Now. It doesn’t work that way. Now also, it’s not just Amazon. We work with you know, thousands and thousands of different stores. We come in contact with thousands of different stores a year. Okay. Between our events and our workshops and everything else we do in our mentorship program and our partner program, just an ungodly amount of stores that we come into contact with on every platform conceivable. One of the biggest things that we see as a problem is this copycat and need-to stuff, right?
Matthew Stafford 4:08
Yeah, absolutely.
Tanner Larsson 4:10
We’ll talk about that for a second. Like, what are you seeing?
Matthew Stafford 4:15
Well, a lot of times, people will get on a trend. They’ll see, depending on what niche they’re in. One thing that I see a lot is “Add to Bag” like all these clothing stores and different things like that? It sounds very simple, but we know from all the testing that we do that clarity always beats trying to be, I don’t know, tricky, or like, you know, gosh, I can’t even think of the right word. Just being really nice with your words or whatever. Clear— exactly what it is — always works better. And if we talk about our typical and prototypical people who are so used to “Add to Cart” they know what your cart is and all that stuff. So even just being tricky or trying to be new and innovative or whatever that new word, a lot of people will not know what that means. Is that a wish list is that a whatever, it’s not a cart, and everyone uses a cart. So now that one thing could create confusion and there we know that people don’t buy from sites, if they have unanswered questions or they’re confused, they’ll just leave they’ll go somewhere else.
Tanner Larsson 5:32
Yep. And you know, what he’s talking about is those little things we have probably seen on two dozen sites in the past few months. Before, it was never seen once in a while. And what is it? It’s “Copycat Me Too Marketing”. Oh, this bit GymShark is doing it so I should do it. Well, you know what, GymShark is a big company. They’re awesome, but they probably haven’t tested it. They just had their designer who said hey, this is cool. Let’s Throw it up there. And then, because a big brand does it, I’m not saying GymShark did this. It’s an example of the brand people try to copy. But that’s what happens. And we see it all the time. Oh, why are you doing this? We need to test that. Well, I saw it on Banana Republic. So if they’re doing it, you know, it must be good.
Matthew Stafford 6:17
We even get that with our partner stores, they’ll see it on stuff and we do run tests on it and we’ve never ever beaten “Add To Cart”. It’s just people understand exactly what it means.
Tanner Larsson 6:31
And that is one example but like Matt said about our partner stores. We’re constantly — when they come to us, like everything that’s on their site is obviously to some level been working for them before they became a partner of ours. But we challenge everything, every single thing on their site. We’re going to collect data on and then we’re going to start testing our way through it to figure out what’s different and this is where the copycat stuff comes in guys. We hear it all the time. Why are you doing that? And it’s always — Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? Oh, I saw it over here or this person’s doing it or whatever. And it’s usually someone that they hold as a higher-level competitor, someone who is a guru or someone who they think knows more than they do. So they like what they are doing. It must be good. And then what happens? If you think about it, just because someone is doing something, doesn’t mean it’s working. And the reality is that they actually may be more clueless than you are. And we see that a lot.
Matthew Stafford 7:33
Yeah, it’s a, I mean, understandably, like, if you’re not in this world doing this over and over and over, if you see this big band doing it, like we get why you would think that initially, but we work for a lot of those big brands, and it’s crazy the stuff that we see when we first start. Just the reconditioning and stuff that we teach them so we’re not saying this because we’re better or anything like that. We’re literally saying this because we’ve seen it over and over.
Tanner Larsson 8:04
We’ve actually been guilty of it in our past too before we started testing. Before we started testing. We had to change our thought process to challenge our own ideas. Matt and I had said the exact same words to each other like, “Well, hey, they’re doing it. Maybe we should try that.” Yeah. And then we have to be like, what are we Why
Matthew Stafford 8:22
We did it before we had all the data. We didn’t know if it was working or not. Yep. Now we know.
Tanner Larsson 8:27
Yeah. So speaking of that, I’m going to share one of the test results that we did from a split test that we actually kind of put together for you. So I’m gonna share my screen. All right, can you guys all see that? Yep, I can see this. Yeah. Okay. So guys, if you’re listening to this on iTunes, I’ll explain it all and you don’t have to go to YouTube to see it. But if you want to see the visuals that I’m showing here, hop over to our YouTube channel and check that out. You don’t have to do that by any means. Just to make it clear for everybody. So what the test was, we have an amplified partner store of ours that’s in the crafts niche. And they serve the older demographic that likes to knit and sew and do all kinds of crafts like that. And they’re pretty much the market leader in that space. And so they have lots of products. And they’re a good brand. They were doing a lot of things. They actually had an app on their Shopify store called Frequently Bought Together. And that is an app that mimics Amazon’s Frequently Bought Together upsell thing which I’m showing you a screenshot up here. In this case, the person is looking at a first-aid kit and Amazon says, “Hey, the first-aid kit, the lifestraw, and the emergency mylar blankets bought together for 54 bucks is what people usually buy.” It’s kind of like a cross sell bundling option that Amazon’s done. We’ve all seen it, right? Now, it’s interesting to note about March 25th, Amazon took that off their store. They’re no longer doing it on their product pages. So they’re running the test as well. Or they’ve collected enough data to realize that they don’t need it. So anyway, there’s a big app out there. And we have tons of stores using this app or variations of this app, because there are lots of different types of it out there. But the concept is on the product page. You offer this to try to increase your average order value by getting people to buy more related products all at once. And this app was 100% built because it mimics what Amazon was doing. And there are a lot of other people who want to do that same thing. So we ran this test on our partner store and there’s plenty of awesome products that are nice, complimentary upsells and cross sells to whatever the product was. So the product matched and everything else was perfectly dialed in on this frequently bought together cross sell function. All right, so we ran the test with the cross sell function, and not the cross functional, we took it off, and we ran it with it. Alright, so let’s go ahead and jump over to the results. And what you can see here is I put Google Analytics screenshot up here. But what we found was variation B, which was the variation without the cross sell app on there actually outperformed having the cross sell on there. So yes, there was a lift in AOV — Average Order Value by having that app, but it was actually hurting other metrics that were more important. So when we took it off, here’s what happened. We had a 5% increase in average order value over what it was before. A 17% increase in conversions and a 23% increase in revenue per user. So, revenue per user went from $1.96 to $2.41. Okay, so that’s a big lift when you think about every person on there. How long was that app on? They’re trying to increase their AOV. But it was actually hurting other metrics. And this is one of the things that — Matt, you can kind of talk to that, like, we’ve gotten really good at not taking the face value of something, right?
Matthew Stafford 12:18
Yeah, for sure. A lot of times people feel like they’re only looking at one metric. Thinking, “Oh, if we can raise conversion rate, that’s a win or if we can raise average order value, that’s a win.” But they’re not looking at the other areas because they’re just not collecting enough data points to see if that’s actually hurting them somewhere else. Clearly, you would make the assumption that “Oh, those things Frequently Bought Together is going to raise their average order value. Yeah, but it also confuses the user, because now they have two or three more items that they have to go look at to see if they want and we know from all of our tests the more times that they’re clicking around the site, that’s a lot more exit points. And not even that they don’t want to buy it. But like, their kid comes to the door or their dog starts barking or their boss walks up to their desk. Right now, that’s probably not happening too much. But you know, those types of things, people just are busy and get interrupted and they leave.
Tanner Larsson 13:21
So here’s a perfect example of where something that was designed to mimic what Amazon was doing, because everybody believes it was working for Amazon and it very well could have been working for Amazon within their ecosystem. But when translated to another store, in a regular vertical with a great brand presence and all the good stuff going for it, it actually was hurting it. Okay, and they didn’t know it. They thought until we showed them the data they thought, “Man, we have our AOV gone up a little bit.” And as soon as we took it off, we showed them the results. Now they make more money by actually trusting the data and not the “Copycat Me Too Marketing.” And you know, it happens a lot. So, anyway, guys, the whole point of this is not to tell you that, you know, this app is bad or whatever. And the other thing is still testing. Because there is going to be a case where that app works on a store. More than it hurts, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. There are always outliers. And we do the same thing, just because we say, “Hey, guys, it didn’t work this time.” Doesn’t mean we won’t ever try it again. We’re constantly running tests, because every market, every target audience, every site, every store, we consider it — we call them contextual, excuse me. They’re all different.
Matthew Stafford 14:38
Yeah. So we have like when something wins, we test it across all of our partner stores, or as many of them as we can make it apply to it. And it doesn’t always win. So for us, we’re using multiple tests all the time to see that out. And we know for a fact that one win here doesn’t necessarily mean it’s across the board.
Tanner Larsson 14:59
And even our best practices always work. It always pops up at least one time, but it doesn’t work. Yeah, because that’s just the nature of the beast. But the thing here is that you guys need to be working off of data — off of sound decision making, not based off of guesses, hunches, or “Ooh, look what they’re doing. I should copy that.” In future episodes, guys, we’re going to get into a lot more specific optimization. Some data hacks and some ways you can dial in each page on your site and then bringing on experts and stuff like that. So if you got something out of this episode, make sure you click the subscribe button below. If you’re on iTunes, subscribe there. Also, hop over to our YouTube channel, subscribe there and you can see the video of it. And if you need to direct links to do that go to build grow scale.com forward slash podcast. You can see the show notes you can subscribe to on Stitcher iTunes Google Play however you want to listen to the podcast it’s there for you at BuildGrowScale.com/podcast.
Matthew Stafford 15:57
Yep And guys if you liked this, please like leave us a review or even just share this with your friends. Obviously, the more people we can help during this pandemic, the better. You know, everybody everybody needs. Everybody needs a couple different perspectives.
Tanner Larsson 16:14
Totally. So that’s it guys. Excited to see in the next episode, and we will show you some cool stuff next time. See ya.
