Optimized Ecommerce EP 020 – Stop Copying Your Ecom Competitors
“Sometimes, your competitors can have very different business models in terms of where they are financially. Some could be in rapid growth with enough funding to lose money during tests. Your average store owner may not be in that position, especially when growth needs to get going. There is a risk of sacrificing meaningful things
Show Notes
Welcome to Episode #020 of Optimized Ecommerce — Stop Copying Your Ecom Competitors. I am your host, Tanner Larsson, CEO of BGS.
BGS means Build Grow Scale! It is a community that we founded where eCommerce entrepreneurs and physical product sellers come to learn how to take their businesses to the next level.
Today, I will be talking with Erik Kwoka. He is one of our expat and full-time Revenue Optimizations Experts. Erik is also one of our most prolific writers on the BGS blog and some of our other content platforms.
Here’s just a taste of what we talked about today:
Get to know a little more about Erik Kwoka and what he does at BGS
Erik’s forte is pointing out the potential problem areas on a client’s site. He also develops content for Ecom Insider members.
Being in charge of store audit, Erik looks at hundreds of stores in every conceivable niche and industry. On top of that, he is the most dedicated to continuing education in the Revenue Optimization Space.
Erik is just a beast at site auditing and because he is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge, we find ourselves asking for his advice on the current best practices and what is working.
Why is there a need to talk about competitor stores and their designs?
When your average store owner is at a loss on what to do next, they may start looking at other sites which, sometimes, can be beneficial in a certain way.
But usually, your average store owner simply snags features that look like the cool new thing. Some of our amplified partners even approach us with news of what their competitors are doing and asking for those features to be applied to their stores.
Just because a bigger site is doing something new does not necessarily mean that they have any testing to back up why they are doing something new.
The biggest elephant in the room: Amazon
Amazon has business models that average stores absolutely cannot be replicated. They are simply massive. So much money flows through them that they can make money off of selling things that they have not even paid for yet.
It becomes very complicated from a business sense — something that an average store cannot do.
Amazon can essentially lose money on every sale and still make it back. Overall, Amazon’s profits are extremely low. So, copying them may not always be the best strategy.
We also discussed a few other fun topics, including:
- You would think that copying what big store owners do works. After all, these huge stores are successful. Of course, whatever they do works.WRONG.We dive deeper as to why your average store owner must avoid copying their competitors and some examples of features that get copied from big stores that end up performing poorly.
- There is always the right time to do something. After talking at length about why average store owners should not copy their competitors, we move on to discuss the correct way to do competitor research.An entire section about competitor research is written in my book, Ecommerce Evolved.When the time is right to look at your competitors and the things they do on their site, what are some of the things to be gained?
- Remember that all sites are contextual. Each one is different — even if they share the same market or niche.
And a lot more! But you’ll have to watch or listen to the episode to hear about those!
How To Stay Connected With Erik Kwoka
Want to stay connected with Erik? Please check out his social profiles below.
- Website: https://buildgrowscale.com/author/eric/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thekwoka/
Resources
Also, Tanner mentioned his book, Ecommerce Evolved, on the show. You can find that on:
Tanner Larsson 0:07
Hey, welcome back to the Optimized Ecommerce Podcast. I’m Tanner Larsson, the CEO of Build Grow Scale and your host for this podcast. Today we’re going to talk about something kind of interesting. We’re going to talk about why so many stores and entrepreneurs … copy their competitors, and they copy Amazon and they’re doing it for the purpose of trying to make more money, get get a lift, say, oh, they’re doing it, I should do it, hoping that things are going to, you know, change for them. But today, we’re going to talk about why they do it, and why that’s a phenomenally bad idea to do that. Okay. And to help me do that I have one of our BGS team members on the call, Eric Kwoka who’s one of our expat and full time, revenue optimization experts, also one of our most prolific writers on the BGS blog and some of our other content platforms. So Eric, glad to have you with us.
Eric Kwoka 0:58
Glad to be here.
Tanner Larsson 1:00
So Eric, to kind of kick this thing off, why don’t you kind of give our viewers and readers a little bit of background on who you are, what you do at BGS, kind of where you came from. And then we’ll dive into the meat of this.
Eric Kwoka 1:14
Well, as Tanner said, I am Eric. I work with the store audit team primarily. So when clients hire us to look over their sites and point out potential problem areas, that is like my main forte, as well as developing other content for our EI members. I’m currently living in Singapore, so it’s dead of night right now, but we’ll get through this. Before BGS, I was actually in the Marine Corps for 5 years, and then I was living in Korea when I got hired by BGS to start working here, 18 months ago.
Tanner Larsson 1:46
Yeah, we we are getting there. Yeah, so what time is it actually because it’s only 11am for me, so you it’s what?
Eric Kwoka 3:23
So 1am.
Tanner Larsson 1:54
1am. Okay, so we still got the same number in there. Well, crazy. So appreciate you for being on this late with us, and excited to kind of dive into this. Now one thing Eric hasn’t mentioned, so I’ll kind of brag on him a little bit is yes, he does basically run the store audit team for us, and is in charge of doing that. So meaning he looks at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stores, even more so than some of the optimization experts who work just on one store for one of our partner stores. Eric works on those but also sees hundreds of other stores in every conceivable niche and industry and everything else. On top of that he is probably the most dedicated to continuing education in the revenue optimization space. The guy is just a beast at that and we find ourselves coming to him a lot is like, Hey, what’s the current best practice on this? Or what are people doing here? And how is this working and usually Eric’s that walking encyclopedia of knowledge. So this would be a really good episode. He’s also very, very analytical and he’s very detail-oriented in terms of like, if he sees something he has to he has to know why it’s happening. And he won’t accept your answer on why it’s happening until he’s also gone and done all the other research that can support whether you’re full of s*** or not. And he does that with me too. So I’ve learned to accept that and it usually comes out the better. So in this case, we’re going to talk about the whole concept of copying your competitor or copying Amazon. So first of all let’s start with the first question. Why do we even need to talk about competitors stores and their designs? Why do we even need to talk about this?
Eric Kwoka 3:27
Well, oftentimes when store owners get into a bit of a slump as to what they need to do next, because there’s always something to improve, but it can be hard to tell what, they just start looking at other sites which can, in a certain way, be beneficial. A lot of times they just start trying to just snag things that look like the cool new thing. Like even some of the amplified partners like they’ll come and be like our competitors doing this. Put this on our store. We have to be like woah, hold up, like, what problem is this supposed to solve? And where’s the evidence that we have that problem. And we don’t always win that battle. But at least we test it and sometimes have to go back and be like, we don’t know what your competitor’s doing, but it’s not working for you.
Tanner Larsson 4:16
So with that said, very interesting point, because naturally, we see something on like a big competitor, or like the market leader in our space, or whatever. And it’s natural to say, oh, they’re trying something or they change this layout around, they added this widget, or whatever else. And it’s naturally go, oh, well, I should probably do that too. Because our gut or common sense thought process, which isn’t all that intelligent, is to think, well, they’re the market leader. They’re the bigger store, they’re more successful. So if they’re doing it, it must be working. But that’s often not the case.
Eric Kwoka 4:54
Yes, it can be all over the place because sometimes competitors can be a very different business model in terms of where they are financially because some could be in a rapid growth where they have enough funding where they can be losing money in certain ways. But to just get growth going, while your store may not be in that position, to where you could be sacrificing stuff that’s actually more meaningful to you while they can just be losing it, or they could even not be doing good testing at all. Or when they get to the results of the testing, they may pick the wrong one, because their own statistical analysis isn’t very good.
Tanner Larsson 5:32
Correct, or their data reporting could be wrong. Or what’s even more common, we found like, as you mentioned, our amplify partner program when prospective clients come in to to work with us, we find most of them don’t do any testing at all. And everything they’re throwing on their sites is more because they like the look of it or they think that it will work or they saw someone else. So just because it’s a bigger site or whatever doesn’t necessarily mean that they have any testing whatsoever to back up, why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Eric Kwoka 6:00
Yes, and bringing up Amazon because it’s always the big elephant in the room. They even have entire business models that can totally not be replicated by your average store. Because they’re just so big and have so much money flowing through them that they can actually, like, make money off of selling things that they haven’t paid for yet. And it becomes very complicated from a business sense. But that’s something that you can’t do. But Amazon can essentially lose money on every sale, and then still make it back. But overall, Amazon’s profits are extremely low. So copying them may not always be the best strategy.
Tanner Larsson 6:37
Good point. So a good example of that would be the, the frequently bought together widget that Amazon used for a long time where it would like offer you the three products below the product thing. And then of course, some Shopify app developer created an app that would do the same thing. And, you know, talk about how we experienced that in the app world.
Eric Kwoka 6:58
So this was actually talked about back in episode 7, you talked with Matt about this with a case study about this specifically, but go really summary. We’ve tested that on stores they were like Amazon’s doing it, we need to do this and we fired up those apps, set them up properly, tested them. And then it really did not work. It hurt the conversions more than it helped. Because users can get distracted by these other things that now they have to make a decision about, you know, 3 items when they thought they were just coming to make 1.
Tanner Larsson 7:31
So the point that we’re talking about here is that just because someone else more successful or you would deem more successful as doing something doesn’t necessarily mean it works. And all sites are contextual. What we say is they’re contextual, meaning that every site is different, even if you’re in the same market or the same niche serving the same customer. You could have a fitness brand selling a male supplement and someone else could have a fitness brand selling a similar male supplement. The buyer demographics are going to operate completely different on both stores because they are different ecosystems. So what works for one may not work for you. So Eric, let’s take this a little bit further. So we talked about why we need to talk about these designs. But why shouldn’t owners just copy their competitors? We touched a little bit on that. But let’s go a little deeper in that.
Eric Kwoka 8:18
So overall, the types of users that can be going to different stores can be entirely different and have very different familiarity with the product space, as well as familiarity with the brand. Some stores heavily focused on just selling to the same customers over and over again, which is a great strategy, but it can allow them to use designs that benefit that type of user, while the new users that goes to the site could be fairly confused. And we even have one amp partner that sells a very specific kind of item to where they can get away with having just add to carts everywhere that they show an item. Even on like the homepage they can just have ADD TO carts because this specific type of item and their specific user base can just come and just make the decision right off of that picture. While that’s not something that most stores can do, so that if they were to copy that, it would probably just tank their conversions all over the place because users would just be too distracted by all the add to carts when they don’t really want to add to cart.
Tanner Larsson 9:19
Totally. So a little side note, guys, for those of you who are new to the new to the podcast or not as familiar with Build Grow Scale. When Eric is talking about AMP partners or I say amplify, what we’re talking about is our BGS Amplified Partnership Program, which is where we actually become the optimization back end of the stores that we partner with so a brand would come to us and if we found out that it would be a win win for both of us, we could actually come in and take our entire team, plug them into that store, and handle all the day to day optimization, testing, tweaking and all of that and we do that as a basically a done for you and done with you partnership with the brand where they can focus on growing their store and doing all that marketing and that stuff, we handle all the data and optimization. So when he says amp partner, that’s what he’s talking about. And currently, we have about 30 plus stores that are in our amp program. They’re all doing, you know, multiple millions of dollars per month on average. So we get a lot of testing, a lot of data. We collect all that, and then we can really see across a number of industries, what’s working and what’s not. So, Eric’s got a really good foundation for where his information comes from. Plus, he also then goes out and externally researches and validates what we’re finding from our amp partners. All right. So all right back to it. Can you give us a few examples of you know, common design choices that are not so hot that get chosen a lot?
Eric Kwoka 10:45
So, kind of piggybacking off of the frequently bought together, Amazon’s replaced that instead with a long, but entire screen of cross sells like other items, you’re looking at one item, you just see a whole screen of other items that you could buy and while Amazon does it much more aggressively than most stores do. It’s extremely common to see stores putting a full width cross sell, just directly underneath like the image gallery and the short description, before that user has gotten into possibly a longer form description, more details and the reviews. And this can just wildly throw off users expectations. Because when they get to this, they start to think, Oh, I guess this product is like, done like that’s all there is to see about it. And they haven’t been able to get the appropriate information to decide, oh, this product isn’t for me, but one of these others might be? Well, if you let them go through the entire site, or the entire page and see all the description and the reviews, they can more thoroughly make that decision.
Tanner Larsson 11:43
Before seeing the cross sell suggestions, right?
Eric Kwoka 11:46
Yes. And because the point is that the cross sells are for the users that this one’s just not working for them, like it’s missing something and then you direct them somewhere else that might be the thing that they really want. And Amazon’s really interesting with this because they’re very prolific, they have a whole pate, like entire viewport worth of like your entire screen gets full of these cross sells. But they’re all ads. And that’s something Amazon can do as a marketplace that a normal store can’t. So they’ll make money off of users just browsing between items and never buying anything. While you as a store owner, you need them to buy something at the end of the day. So you don’t want to distract them with other options before they’ve actually considered the one that they’re looking at. And you’ll see that if you go to Amazon branded products like their Echo, there is none of that’s there. They put way down at the bottom of the page. If you scroll super far down, you’ll see a little row at the bottom of some other items. Because they know it doesn’t work for actually getting the product sold. But when they can make money off of the ads, it works for them overall, but when it’s their products they want to sell they don’t do that but a lot of stores see Amazon doing that. Copy it or they see other stores doing that because it seems like almost every big store does this and usability studies constantly show users get like mixed up when they start to see this information. They’re like, Oh, the page is over. Or they just get distracted by something else. And they never actually learned what the product they were looking at is.
Tanner Larsson 13:14
Gotcha. That’s great. So what what else is out there that people do a lot that performs poorly?
Eric Kwoka 13:21
So another one that stores often do is put social sharing icons like all over the homepage or on the products like you read a short description and then there’s all the Facebook, Instagram links to share the stuff off. This seems to be like the hot thing because social media marketing’s like the the cool thing. But it just doesn’t really work. It kind of just takes up space. It reminds people that they could be doing something else. And they make click it, I doubt anybody clicks these. I’ve never seen any data showing that people actually click those things. It’s just a distraction. But even if they do, they could just end up at Instagram and then not post whatever it was, and just start scrolling Instagram and they never come back to your site. And stores just pack these things in everywhere, when the best place to put these is just in the thank you page after somebody bought something, then they might want to share that they bought it or follow you to get more information later. But when they’re just looking at the products, it’s not helpful. It’s not doing any of the work to sell the product.
Tanner Larsson 14:24
Totally. Now, it’s always been crazy to me especially when you think about it from like, the media side. I’m advertising on Facebook, I get a click, I pay for that click to send you to my website, only to show you on my website, a Facebook icon that they can click to take you right back to where I just paid for you to come from. And it’s like why would I do that? But it’s it’s what happens a lot and that’s why those social icons are so dangerous.
Eric Kwoka 14:51
In the past Amazon was able to get away with the scheme like that where they’d actually have other stores advertising on the Amazon product pages. But Amazon basically new that everybody that left would just maybe research the product better there and then they’d come back to Amazon to buy.
Tanner Larsson 15:05
You guys gotta remember that 50 cents of every dollar spent online is spent with Amazon. So they can do all kinds of stuff that nobody else can do because their ecosystem is so powerful. So until you can claim those kind of numbers; probably shouldn’t predicate your store’s design and elements based on something that Amazon does. And same thing with some of the bigger stores, a lot of the bigger stores, Eric touched on this are funded. This is very common in in venture funded stores and we’ve worked with a few of them. They don’t care about profit. They are totally fine losing money on every sale. And their only intention is to get a massive customer base, lots of sales, lots of product out there, branding, so to speak, so that they can have these volume numbers and the size appeal when they They want to package these stores up and then resell them. So it’s it’s very, very counterintuitive to see a big store and and, you know, realize that they’re not profitable because you don’t think of that. You think they’re a big store, they must be making lots of money, but it’s not always the case. Okay, so tangent done back on track, Eric. The next thing I want to know is what we really want you to talk about and share is what, it frustrates the hell out of me by the way, but why do so many stores and why can some stores get away with such c***** designs and still do well?
Eric Kwoka 16:35
So a lot of this comes from being longer lasting stores like Amazon has been around since as long as anybody can remember buying something online. So they have a lot of faith with users. And this can also be seen with major luxury brands, like even Louis Vuitton and things like that. They’ve been around a long time have built up a certain amount of trust and reputation to where users are highly motivated to fight through any friction that they have. Like, if you like, chances are nobody’s created an Amazon account recently. But if you actually have to go through that process, it is awful. It’s like 16 steps, and you don’t know where you are as you’re going through it. But everybody’s motivated to do it, because they know Amazon’s good, they’re going to have that account forever. But if you were to make that step on your store, they’d get to the first step and just, they’d leave. Nobody wants to stick around and make an account with a store that they don’t necessarily know that they’re gonna be shopping with later. And then luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, like I was researching email marketing of signing up for all kinds of newsletters. And Louis Vuitton is like the most boring possible newsletter, they just send out like basically just one picture and here’s the new thing. But they can do that. And those probably make a lot of money because of the type of customers that they’re dealing with. While a smaller store needs to do a bit more to be like oh, like by the way our brands like organic, vegan, all those different things while they can just be up, like you’ll buy it, we don’t need to do the selling. And while they could probably do even better if they properly designed, they’re selling, it’s just not on their radar because it’s making money now. So it must be doing well.
Tanner Larsson 18:15
Yeah, and the thing that a lot of competitors don’t take into consideration, like the people we’re talking to on this podcast is, that’s a whole lot of, you could call it brand equity or whatever else you want to call that comes into play, that supersedes and like, picks up the slack, so to speak for a c****** designed store. And we all do it like think about some of those places, you buy things online, that you – You are an e commerce entrepreneur, if you’re watching this podcast, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. So you know, e commerce, you understand store flow and one good user experience, and things like that to to at least a basic extent. But there are still places that you will shop online that have a frustrating user experience or are annoying you like, man, I wish it wouldn’t do that, but you’re still keep going back to them. That’s an example of that. Because you for whatever reason, they have your loyalty or they have something that you desperately need or whatever. And that convenience factor of just go and comfort level, you’ll deal with the crap that they put you through in order just to get the product or buy the experience. Just because you do that, though, on those stores doesn’t mean someone’s going to do it on your store. Especially not if your store doesn’t have that stored brand equity, or, you know, long term customer base and faith in who you are.
Eric Kwoka 19:31
Yeah, it’s like going back to your your favorite, leaky bucket example, like metaphor. Some stores just come in, they have a huge bucket with so much water in it, users are just, they’re gonna make it through, no matter how many holes you poke, like they’re, they’re gonna figure out a way to do it because they want to get through that experience. Even if it’s an awful experience, they’ll just keep trying because they need to do it.
Tanner Larsson 19:56
Correct. But with most consumer products, that’s not necessarily the case. So, again, copying that or you know, thinking, well, if they do it, I can do it is not the best way to approach it. All right, Eric. So we’ve been talking a lot about why it’s dumb, why you shouldn’t copy competitors, why you shouldn’t look at competitors. But obviously there is a time for that. I mean, h*** there’s an entire section in Ecommerce Evolved, my book, where we talk about competitor research. So obviously, there is a time when you should look at your competitors and look at your competitors site. What are some of those things that you can gain by looking at a competitor store?
Eric Kwoka 20:35
So one of the more obvious and simple ones is just like when you’re just starting out your brand, like you don’t have a lot of information on your own customers. And it can be smart to look at competitors to see how the customers talk about that competitor, and see how you can use that information to benefit your own site. But a major thing going on as you’re developing your site, you have your own customers. You need to be doing the research on your customers to see what their problems are and what they care about. You should be looking at whether it be customer service transcripts, or just the reviews. Maybe if a blog has talked about you see what people are talking about as the pain points, the benefits, and then see where in your current flow that those aren’t being properly addressed. And then once you’ve kind of identified these problems and opportunities, you can look at other sites to find inspiration for what may be a good way to solve that problem. Because it can be hard to come up with all the ideas for how to solve any problem on your own. But you can see, I’m having an issue with users not understanding how the product works or like what it’s supposed to be, go to a competitor’s site and see how they explain what the product is like if they’re very similar products. They, maybe they also have the same problem that users don’t understand it. But if they have something that looks like it solves that problem, that could be a good starting point to move forward into testing. Because you should always be testing everything.
Tanner Larsson 22:03
And that’s the biggest thing he’s saying right there. So even looking at another site through a competitor research or analysis perspective, don’t take whatever you find on their site. Or even if you find the same thing across 3 of your competitors, don’t take it as the gospel. Because without testing it, it’s not going to be beneficial. Like because you’re basically again, you’re just throwing s*** at a wall hoping something sticks. And you know, you what you may find out is that making that change. And if you’re not tracking it and testing it, making that change actually hurts you. But if you’re not testing or tracking it you’re not going to know, hey, is this the reason my Add To Cart dropped? Or is this the reason my Add To Cart went up, but my average order value went down. There’s a whole lot of other metrics that can be affected by any one change. So it’s super important, like Eric was saying, to test, any change you make, even if you believe it’s beneficial, and you see it across one or more of your competitors,
Eric Kwoka 23:02
I’m sure store owners have seen blog posts and other kinds of things that tell like, Oh, we did this one simple change, and we got a 20% increase in sales. But think of how just as easily, it could have gone the other way. Like if they didn’t test it, it could have made that change in the opposite direction. And suddenly they’ve lost 20%. And they have no idea what happened.
Tanner Larsson 23:23
And to be fair, or actually more more unfair, I guess, to that kind of post. Those are exciting to read. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, because we found a lot of the time that just because one metric goes up doesn’t mean other metrics don’t go down. Right. So one of the best examples that we use, and we actually developed our own app to try to solve this was the in cart upsells or AOV boosting apps that were developed to help you on the front end trying to boost your average order value. And all these apps when they are installed and they start working, what happens? Average order value does go up, we see an arrow on the Shopify average order value or on your ecommerce platform or whatever we see that working. The problem is most people don’t have the Google Analytics set up correctly, they’re not tracking their other metrics correctly. They don’t know if anything else is affected. And what we’ve proven over and over and over again, is that most of the apps out there that raise AOV also hurt conversion rate proceeded check out all the other metrics. So we’ve actually done the math, most of them lose more money for you, than they gain an average order value increase. So you really got to make sure that whatever you’re testing, you’re not just looking at that one metric and taking it at face value and saying, cool, this helped my store because it’s very easy to get one metric to go up and then have a quarter percent loss in conversion rate. And over the course of a week or a month, that quarter percent loss and conversion rates gonna more than likely outweigh any gain you had from the other lift.
Eric Kwoka 24:58
Yes, and especially don’t just look at the apps owned dashboard on their sales, because they’re gonna just say, Oh, you sold all this through our app, but they’re not going to give you any information on the sales that could have been; that they prevented.
Tanner Larsson 25:13
Very true. What was lost. And the other thing is a lot of those app dashboards, we found when we start really during the tracking, they don’t line up with the true Google Analytics tracking. And part of that is a lot of them are very generous in what they attribute to their own metrics to make their own data to make their own stats look better. So anyway, this is that this isn’t an app discussion right now. But we kind of got on a tangent, but it’s it’s good information nonetheless. So anything else you want to talk about, about what they can gain by looking at a competitor’s store?
Eric Kwoka 25:42
Not too much. It’s mostly that specific issue of once you’ve identified a problem on your store, look for inspiration in how other stores may have been attempting to solve that problem.
Tanner Larsson 25:54
Well, I think that’s actually a pretty good place to stop talking about the whole customer copycat type system. But I actually want to ask you one more question before we wrap up. And that is, with all of your, this may be actually incredibly difficult for you to answer because of who you are. But I’m going to ask it anyway, with all of your your background with all of the stores that you see in the site audits, and let’s actually just narrow it down to that. So it’s not quite so broad. You look at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of site audits, meaning or we do a complete analysis, deep dive audit of all these different stores, top to bottom mobile desktop, everything. If you had to pick one thing, the one common thread that you see that you would want to say, hey, out of all this, what is one thing that I and you could just pick the top one or whatever, that you see that the store owner should be aware of or mistake that most people are making, what would that be?
Eric Kwoka 26:49
It’ll be hard to narrow down to a single tiny thing but –
Tanner Larsson 26:53
It could be a big thing, whatever whatever you want.
Eric Kwoka 26:57
Guiding information or just that it’d be beneficial for stores to focus on how their store guides users to what their perfect product is. And that can be done through all kinds of different ways, whether it be the navigation filters and wizards or any kind of other things. Users want an easy experience where they know that product is for them. And if you’re just throwing a bunch of stuff out in front of them, it makes it very difficult for them to identify what’s what’s actually the thing that’s going to solve their problem or benefit them.
Tanner Larsson 27:33
Makes sense and looking at it. So to clarify or dig a little deeper in that the store owner does not have the same perception or thought process as the browser or the shopper. Being at the store owner has products I want to sell these, this visitor coming in, they’re looking for whatever takes their fancy or floats their boat, not everything you’ve got and more than likely, if you’ve got you know, more than a few products only One or two of them may tickle their fancy. So the idea that we’re talking about here is don’t do a c***** job of giving them the tools that they need in an easy to use way that they can find what they want, without having to wade through a bunch of c***.
Eric Kwoka 28:14
Yes, because the store owners, they know their products, they know how to get through their site to find like, you are at a women’s fashion site, the store owner knows exactly how to get to green corduroy pants, but a new user, no idea, they have to learn that from the ground up. And if you make it difficult, then they’re never going to find what they actually came to buy.
Tanner Larsson 28:35
True. And an example of that would be as simple as your category page. They go to women’s pants, they click on women’s, you know women’s pants, and they go to the category page that shows all women’s pants, but they only want a pair of green corduroys. But if let’s say there’s 200 pairs of pants, and there’s one pair of green corduroys out of all the other stuff, and you have no way for them to filter or self select, to eliminate the stuff that they’re not interested in. There’s no green color filter, there’s no corduroy material filter, or anything like that. Now you’re forcing people to go through and look at all the products that they are not interested in, just to try to hopefully find the one that they are interested in, which they don’t actually know exists on your store, because there’s no way for them to quickly locate that.
Eric Kwoka 29:25
Yeah, and after a few items, they’re probably just gonna go back to Google or just back to scrolling through Instagram, because they’re just gonna be fed up with, you’re making it difficult for them to buy.
Tanner Larsson 29:37
Attention spans are not what they used to be, they’re getting shorter. Think about it, especially on a mobile experience, which 80 plus percent of shopping occurs on mobile now. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in a certain – the user experience is s***** on a store. You get over it real quick and would just rather go back to looking at your Instagram stories, because at least that is user friendly. So you give up on the store very quickly, much more quickly than you would potentially on a desktop. Well, Eric, I appreciate that that was actually really, really good stuff. And I think it will prompt a lot of questions. Guys, if you enjoyed this episode, obviously leave us a review or whatever. And if you’re on YouTube, put a comment below. But also, if any of the stuff that Eric and I talked about today, you know, prompted some questions, or you have ideas or things that you’d like us to talk about or clarify further, go ahead and drop those below or add them to your review or whatever. And we read those. And then that’ll give us you know, ammunition for future episodes that we’re happy to talk about and really take this further. Eric is that wealth of knowledge that we definitely want to exploit on the podcast. So if you’ve got ideas or you want to hear from him on stuff, drop it in a comment below. Also, if you are not currently subscribed to this, we do this show on both podcast platforms, so like iTunes, Stitcher, or anywhere you get your podcasts. And then we also have a YouTube version. So sometimes we share things via video and other things like that, that you’re going to want to be able to watch. So it’s a good idea to subscribe to both our YouTube channel and wherever you listen to your podcasts, if you need links to any of that stuff, just go to https://buildgrowscale.com/podcast/ you can get all the links to the different platforms as well as see every single show, show notes, transcripts, all of that for the podcast on the https://buildgrowscale.com/podcast/ link. And with that, guys I appreciate you listening to us. We will see you again on the next one. See ya.
Ecommerce Store Audit
Want us to do an Audit on your e-commerce store and show you how you can make some quick changes that will dramatically increase sales and profits without increasing your traffic?
Tanner Larsson
Ecommerce Store Audit
Want us to do an Audit on your e-commerce store and show you how you can make some quick changes that will dramatically increase sales and profits without increasing your traffic?