Search Interviews:

Jeremy Weisz 4:50

And a lot of people think and you thought this at one point that just putting more traffic on the will solve the problem.

Tanner Larsson 4:57

Oh, totally. But I mean if we take no Example A little further, what happens when you have a leak and you pour more water into it at higher force, you create basically erosion and a bigger blowout happens, and you lose more money, you lose more water. The other crazy thing like an online for some reason in businesses, people treat it differently. But if I said, Hey, Jeremy, there are there’s two swimming pools, right? One is full of water, the other one’s empty, they’re 10 feet apart, you have to use this bucket that I give you to empty one pool and fill up the other without dropping any water. And the bucket I hand you is a five gallon Home Depot bucket, but I punched a bunch of holes in it. I told you, you can’t lose any water. So are you in the real world? Would you grab that bucket? Dump it in and run over and try to fill it? No, you go, where’s the duct tape, you try to figure out how to patch it first because you realize you can’t lose that water. But in the business world, we just piss money away. Like, ah, we’ll just spend more. And we’ll eventually we’ll we’ll make more. And it’s crazy.

Jeremy Weisz 5:56

We’ll get into some things of what you look at when you see a site and maybe we’ll pull up G Fuel. But I want to point out, you teach this stuff but you’re a practitioner of this stuff. And if you don’t know Tanner’s background, he started off as a window cleaner built like an actual, you know, I don’t know brick and mortar business, whatever you want to call it. And then yeah, and then eBay PowerSeller little seller to digital products to physical products to Amazon taking his products to he’s like, I can’t want I don’t want Amazon business because I like you are about owning the customer. And you know, Amazon, you don’t own the customer

Tanner Larsson 6:32

now, right? So that’s a revenue stream, but not as a business.

Jeremy Weisz 6:35

Do you have people come to you a lot, they’re maybe a high volume seller on Amazon, they’re like, I know, this is a huge problem. I am very dependent on one channel, and what do you tell those people? And how do you help them move to whatever Shopify or one of

Tanner Larsson 6:50

the absolute so little caveat, even though Amazon completely screwed me over, like stole from me, I still like them. Like, they still make me a lot of money. And they still make my clients a lot of money. It’s one of those things like you took it in the back, but you still kind of you still you still like it a little bit. Right? So nothing against Amazon, other than I don’t agree with some of their business practices. But from what you’re saying, Yes, we get high volume sellers all the time. And having been one, I know the feeling even before I knew things were bad, you just know that there’s, for whatever reason, you could get a notice they shut your listing down, or it’s like you’re balanced on eggshells all the time. So we have very high volume sellers coming to us all the time, sometimes low volume, but a lot of the bigger ones are like, I know, I’m like I got a house. I couldn’t

Jeremy Weisz 7:31

sleep at night. I mean, I don’t know if I could sleep at night if everything was dependent on that one.

Tanner Larsson 7:36

And so they come to us, and they’re like, Okay, we understand we’ve got we figured out the product, we know how do we know what the imagery and the copy and how to sell it? on Amazon? We how do we take it to the other side where we actually own our customer and they start realizing it? Like, yeah, I don’t really control anything in my business. I don’t I and it’s nice, because Amazon converts so highly, but it’s detrimental to the actual business. And from a saleable asset perspective, your, if you want to get a better multiple, you got to have both sides, you got to own the customer and have the Amazon channel. So they come to us. And a lot of times they’re like, Hey, how do we what do we do? And the big thing is, hey, you need a store, whether it’s Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, whatever platform suits your needs, typically, we recommend Shopify because it’s simpler. And you know, then they gotta build it up. The problem is with Amazon, they don’t know how to market. They know how to use Amazon, they know how to use Amazon’s algorithm search as well as their internal paperclip, but they don’t, they struggle typically with driving traffic. And they also don’t know how to make a store convert, because Amazon takes care of that for them. The average Amazon page converts between nine and 12%. That is not the real world. Right? That is not e-commerce that is not so they get

Jeremy Weisz 8:49

high trust, you’re inside the Amazon ecosystem, you have the prime, you know, credit cards

Tanner Larsson 8:53

on file, and you click one button and then you bought 250 gazillion bazillion credit cards on file. Right? Nobody has that. So they struggle in that aspect. And then the problem is a lot of them give up. Because they’re like, it just doesn’t work. We’re just it’s too easy.

Jeremy Weisz 9:08

I mean, it’s it’s kind of golden handcuffs in a way right? It

Tanner Larsson 9:11

  1. It is so and that’s you know, a lot of it comes down to people spend so much effort and time on traffic, and they don’t spend nearly enough time on the actual website and what happens on site. And the reason for that is number one, traffic sexy. Number two, up until recently it has been possible to almost outspend the bad performing site because traffic was cheap enough and there was enough slop in your row as or whatever that you’re able to still turn a profit with a really crappy website.

Jeremy Weisz 9:41

So the order I mean it’s kind of the chicken in the egg a little bit so you Tom Okay, you got to put a Shopify site up. You don’t want to drive tons of traffic so you know if it’s converting so what’s kind of the next step?

Tanner Larsson 9:53

So the first step truthfully is build a site set up your data layer. Good. This is something that not even big nine Your brands, we actually are working with a big nine figure brand that just got Brad Pitt as their ambassador. So like big brand, no data. No Google Analytics, no Google Tag Manager to bazillion dollar, two and a half billion dollar company a year. But no, no data. Okay? They’re they’re navigating blind, they don’t know what their website is doing. They don’t know. And this is how most stores operate from small to big, so that getting your data layer set up is a big aspect of so you can actually make smart decisions, learn how to test off that. And then once that data layer is set up, then you invest the money. And you waste some of that because marketing is testing, right. So you’re going to invest money in testing, but you don’t do it until you have your data set up so that you can see how everything trickles down through the site. And then just go back and start plugging those leaks. That’s how you intelligently do it. The problem is it’s always the ready fire aim approach. And I’m guilty of that, too. Like I just wanted to get it to market and go fast and whatever. But especially in today’s economy in today’s marketplace, the way advertising works now, your your advertising is six to seven times or more expensive than it was five months ago. You can’t afford to do it that way anymore.

Jeremy Weisz 11:08

Let’s say they decide okay, dinner, Shopify sounds great. Okay, what plug, you know, they need to plug the holes in the bucket somehow I imagine people start with plugins, are there certain plugins you recommend out of the gate? The funny

Tanner Larsson 11:22

thing is, is that apps are actually one of the bigger leaking points in a in a store, certainly, because I got a dig on app developers for a second because they’re coders, they’re developers, they’re not optimization people. So they build something to sell. So it adds all these things to it. You know, it plugs in, but no idea what it happened. What happens downstream. A good example of that is a order bump app. Now on Shopify, you can’t do traditional order bumps in the checkout, like we would do on a funnel with a checkbox. So you would put them in your cart, or whatever else. Now, in theory, it makes sense. Okay, if I get into the car, and I pop up, I bought some sunglasses in the cart, it says, Do you want a cleaning kit, in theory that makes sense. And on Shopify, your app will show a green arrow saying look, your ARV went up. But downstream in the data, you’ll actually find out in every single time we’ve tested, it’s proven this, that you actually gain less customers and make total and less total revenue than you would if you’ve never had the app on because they abandon it. Exactly, it causes distraction. And it’s not just it’s also people do the wrong kind of upsell, or the right wrong kind of bump. It’s like I’m buying a pair of high heels. And then you try to order bump me a black cocktail dress and get me to check a box to know what woman in the world is going to buy a cocktail dress off of a checkbox without getting to see the size, and there’s the length and all that stuff. So it’s all kinds of things like that. But typically, the gain you get from an in cart bump is way less than how much you lose from not only revenue conversion, but also acquiring less customers that you can then sell in the future. So that’s a little exam.

Jeremy Weisz 12:55

No, I love that. Are there any like okay, all considered, you definitely need to have this type of Yes, login.

Tanner Larsson 13:02

Absolutely. So one of the first ones is search. So I’m a direct response guy, I have, I always, for my whole life considered search a necessary evil, something that you kind of had to have in certain cases. But if at all possible, we would eliminate it. The problem is that search traffic is actually your most valuable traffic on a store, it’s worth three to four times any other traffic or visitor on your site. And in most cases, your search traffic will be worth about a third of your sales just there. And it’s only only comprise five to 8% of your of your traffic. So it’s a big deal. So search, you can have a search functionality. But the problem is that functionality needs deeper functionality like predictive text, image based search those kinds of things. And that’s an app or apps that you can install that plug into your store and make that easy. Another piece of that yeah, and

Jeremy Weisz 13:54

by the way on WordPress, I don’t people use WooCommerce. But like I use swiftype I think it’s a free even on a it’s on WordPress is it’s an amazing one. So yeah, keep

Tanner Larsson 14:04

going to one on the Shopify store that is good as called product filter and search. That’s, that’s a popular one. It’s not too expensive. There’s several other ones, but that’s probably the most reasonable one. And it actually does another thing, which is my next point is on the category pages. Okay, so the store owners think category pages are a way for them to just kind of throw stuff together to organize it in a way it’s not. category pages are actually a filtering system to allow the buyer the browser the shopper to get into what they want to find faster. And most stores set up their category pages wrong. And one of the ways that you need to have your category page set up is to allow for filtering of the category page with checkboxes on the left hand side and it’s and I’m saying left hand side. It’s not optional. I don’t care what your site design or your graphic designer or your artsy fartsy sense wants to tell you. stats tell us the left side is prototypical. It’s where it wins. It’s what it needs to be not horizontal vertical on the left. And if you the easy way to do this, go to Best Buy, go to Amazon look at how their filters are and how native and intuitive they are for you to use. That’s what you want to duplicate. And the reason for that is again, let’s go back to the shoe example. Let’s say I’m on a shoe store, whatever it is, and I click on shoes, and for, which happens a lot, you click on shoes, and then it shows me everything I see is women’s shoes. And maybe this store sells mostly women, but they do sell men’s, but I only care about the men’s pair. And like there’s no way for me to filter. So I have to scroll through 20 pages of women’s shoes, try to find 30 pairs of when men shoes, right, that simple filtering option. If it was there would be a massive and tangible visible benefit in conversion, if you made it easy for your male shoppers to filter down to what they want.

Jeremy Weisz 15:53

You know, I want to, you know, just to kind of hit home a point here like going from Amazon to building you know, owning your customer or even just owning your customer with conversion. You had one lady who I don’t know the full story, but she was not even attracting that many new customers. But she was I don’t know, she was deploying email. And she was rocking and rolling. Without new customers. You know I’m talking about

Tanner Larsson 16:18

yes. Yeah. So this is a this is a she’s got a great business. So she owns a plus size store. And she’s doing it does a couple million dollars. This was before did a couple million dollars a year. And she came into our program. And she’s like, she’s Raven, like, Yeah, we were actually we were talking about one store in particular, and saying how their rich repeat customer rate was too low because it was like nine or 10%. And she chimes in the chat. She’s like, Yeah, my store has a 90 or 87% Customer repeat customer rate average for the entire year. And I’m like, well, that’s amazing. But can I tell you the bad news? And she’s like, there is no bad news I have I make a lot of money from this. And I said, okay, so she pulls, she comes on board and we start talking to her. And the reality of that is, yes, repeat customer rate is great. It’s even more important now. But if you have a massive repeat customer rate in the 80 to 90% range, or more, what that’s telling me is you’re not acquiring enough new traffic. Because if you are acquiring new customers, it dilutes your repeat customer ratio. And we told her was basically in her row as was insane. And all this stuff, which all makes sense. If it’s all repeat customers, we’re like, you’re about 3 million now, you could have been at 20 million or more this year, if we had just lowered that number by increasing your acquisition.

Jeremy Weisz 17:37

Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah, it’s kind of like if someone has a high end offer, and everyone’s saying yes, you’re probably charging too little. Something like that. Um, walk me through, you know, your book, right? Yeah, e-commerce evolved. You mentioned when before we hit record, that the store now in today’s environment, the store can convert as well as a funnel sometimes and optimizing the store. So talk a little bit about that and what’s changed.

Tanner Larsson 18:02

So again, as I’ve said, I am a direct response guy, I was cut my teeth in direct response. That’s how I built my window cleaning business and I translated online so I am a I’m a formal sales letter copywriter funnel upsell, like, I love that stuff. It’s in my blood. Okay. And I that’s how I got early success with e-commerce. When stores sucked, I was able to leverage funnels and then a lot of direct response principles and did really well. When I wrote the first version of this book in 2016. Technology was at the point still, where funnels 99% of time would outperform a store. And we and what we would do is we would leverage the funnels to drive to build

Jeremy Weisz 18:39

a business, right? You’d build like a landing page, and then send them to the store like well,

Tanner Larsson 18:42

sometimes depending on the business. But yes, the problem with funnels even today is that funnels are great for acquisition, not necessarily in all cases, but they are there. They’re purpose driven for acquisition, they are terrible, for repeat, and lifetime customer value, repeat purchases, think about it. I go through organic buys funnel to buy their green juice, love juice product, great, great stuff I cool. Once I bought it through the funnel, and I’ve gone through that ridiculous upsell sequence. I never want to do that. Again, I learned the product, I just want to be able to reorder or buy their next stuff or their or their red juice or their yellow juice or whatever they call gold juice. Right? Right and that but that’s every customer so stores when you have a funnel should be built to back clean up right and do all your the rest of it. However, what we’ve been able to do over the past, basically five years, six years, we’ve been able to take all that direct response stuff that we’ve always been able to do on funnels, and implement it in a way backed by data that now stores we can get them to convert as well, if not better in some cases than a funnel, which is beneficial to the e-commerce Industry specifically, because there’s a lot of brands and products out there that are not conducive to a funnel, like an apparel store. You are as a user that has lots of skews maybe you can build one funnel out for one product but It doesn’t it’s not conducive when you have a lot of high skews, right? So we need to make those stores convert as well as possible, as high as possible with the same kind of direct response principles and data backed science that actually allows that to happen. And that’s what the new book is about. So when I wrote the first version, like I said, it was 2016. It was cutting edge for 2016. Right now, about half of it would be still doable, but there’s better stuff. So the beginning of this year, we rewrote the book completely. Deleted three chapters added four more rewrote every single word like, and I mean, Mike, if you look at this book, it’s a kitchen sink book. Most people most most guys books are like this. It’s like, where are we at? Something like that. It’s like, hey, look how awesome I am. I’m like, no, never buy anything. But my book and you have a business at BGS live the last time in 2019. I had a guy come up to me, this is a little side note story. Just want to share. So a guy came up to me. And he said, Hey, just want to say thank you. And I’m like, Great, thank you. Appreciate it. Nice, nice to meet you. And he’s like, he’s like, You don’t know. But I bought your book. And he’s like, I was a chemist, I was out of work. I was living in my little warehouse space, and not doing all that well. And he’s like, I got your book. And when to start a business, I didn’t have much money. I bought some concentrated CBD, I diluted it down because I knew how to do that and diluted it down into some pet products. And I turned basically $100 and about $50,000. And he’s like, I just kept doing that. And I used your book. And he’s like, it’s the only marketing information I’ve ever bought. And nobody buys this course or looked at anything else. I followed your book. And today we’re the number four pet CBD brand in America. And so my books not a fluff piece. I don’t care if you like me or anything else by the book, say you hate me cross out my face on the back, but just use what’s in it? Because it is that good.

Jeremy Weisz 21:48

I love it. And then I’m gonna have you we’re gonna go to G Fuel on a second. Tanner. And but I wanted to ask iKON direct response. What who are some of the people that you’ve followed throughout the years that you were either mentors, distant mentors, mentors in direct response world?

Tanner Larsson 22:05

So I mean, I, I’m a dinosaur. So like, I go back to 2001 in the internet space, which kind of makes people like wait, there was internet back then kind of thing. But my one of my first mentors is actually Corey Rudl, who ran the Internet Marketing Center and then unfortunately, died of a car crash. But yeah, so he was basically one of my first mentors. I was big into all of Dan Kennedy stuff from ever I think everybody who’s into direct response, love Gary Halbert love a lot of bond stuff as well. And then, you know, actually the the old school Jim Edwards, back in the old days, I find a lot of Jim Edwards stuff, Jim on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah, Jim’s a great guy. I love I love his old stuff. Like, I’ve just, I guess I’m kind of nostalgic in that way. But I just always loved his older stuff. Um, but yeah, so those are a lot of the guys that I that I followed a lot. And, you know, there’s another guy named David something who owned a old school forum. Um, Alan says, of course, but like that was just Warrior Forum stuff. But he on this copywriting website forum where everybody would go and you post your you could post your copy in a thread and all these other copywriters would basically tell you how dumb you are and how much it sucked. And I basically learned how to write copy doing that, you know,

Jeremy Weisz 23:19

and it wasn’t David Deutsch, Rosa. No, no. Okay.

Tanner Larsson 23:24

That was a different one. Okay. Let me come to you in a minute. But I mean, I bring it up,

Jeremy Weisz 23:27

because I think it’s important. And I was watching an interview you did with Brett Thompson, who’s your copywriter, and I encourage people to check out, you know, the Build Grow Scale YouTube channel, they have some amazing resources on there. And they were just geeking out, I mean, in a good way. Because, you know, really, I believe the fundamentals of a lot of any marketing is direct response, whether it’s via email, whether you’re saying it, whether it’s on the page. And so it’s, it’s really important.

Tanner Larsson 23:57

Absolutely. It’s, it’s made it my career from 2001 to now 100% would not have happened in any level without direct response and learning, copy, learning and just the basic direct response principles like everything I’ve done in my life. Everything I have is I owe it to direct response.

Jeremy Weisz 24:16

Yeah. And so I’m inspired inside I actually interviewed I think almost all of the Gary Halbert protegees on my podcast just because I wanted to learn from I mean, Gary Halbert, unfortunately, rest in peace is not alive anymore but his protegees are in cooling you said bond so I want to go through G Fuel and have you break down a few things and talk about what where should we look and what what do you think when you see this so let’s

Tanner Larsson 24:44

start with what you just closed. Yeah, that’s that’s a perfect so two things there. Number one, how effective is it when you naturally closed it with and you probably would have done that with if I wasn’t here. Anyway, total but the other thing is is an I have this this site. So let me guys give you some background this store is a very, very successful store. But by all rights, it should not be. This store is bleeding money six ways from Sunday’s we’ve critiqued it and tore it apart multiple different times. They’ve never made any changes, of course, they’re making money. So you know, they probably don’t care, but they could be making massive amounts more from what they’re doing. Now. One thing as I was saying about this pop up, so the page loads, and before I can even see what this site is, because a lot of times you go to a site off an ad or whatever else or store, you don’t really know what they sell. Okay, you land there, and then this pop up comes up that says, hey, get 25% off, give us your email, and I might Okay, first of all, what do you sell? I haven’t even had a chance to consider your offer. Why are you giving me 25% off? Or is your shit bad? Or is it overpriced? And I’m gonna need a discount like this. These are the things that like subconsciously, totally all do in our head. So now that it cheapens it Noah. furs are great, but they need to be used strategically in the right way. And in today’s environment, they’re even more important because traffic so expensive, you need to leverage and capture as much of it as possible. That’s not doing it. Right. Okay, so the next thing is, yeah, you’ve had you guys have had a chance to kind of look at this. But when you land on the site, and you see it, you see Spider Man, you see a box and you’re like, what is it?

Jeremy Weisz 26:24

Yeah, I picture they’re selling like mugs. I mean, if I didn’t know like mugs, or Yeah, cups or something, it’s not

Tanner Larsson 26:31

clear that the purpose of your homepage is not to sell. The purpose of your homepage is to reinforce trust, provide very clear, immediate in knowledge that, hey, I’m on the right place, I’m in the place that I want to be and it’s where you know, and then also help them get off the homepage as quickly as possible into a browsing or shopping environment. You’re just a visitor on the homepage. However, what we say is the official drink of eSports. Okay, now the other thing is they call it the drink. It took me about the first time I went through about 15 minutes before I realized it’s actually not a drink, I was thinking like an energy can like a bang. It’s a powder. Hmm. And you get a shaker. So it’s almost like it’s a fitness drink. But it’s for guys who like to sit in front of the computer, right? So that’s not clear either. But then we also have this crazy navigation that there’s no hierarchy of focus, you don’t know where to look on the page, right? And then if you look at the top on the under the GPO logo it says search but the search isn’t prominent. Now when you go to Amazon How is search it’s a big search bar in the top of the screen why because search traffic is valuable having a hidden search like this I guarantee you their search rate is a fraction of what it should be. It should be

Jeremy Weisz 27:45

it’s not intuitive I wouldn’t know to even a bar

Tanner Larsson 27:49

disappear Yeah. And you don’t have to do it but when you search the search the way it searches is actually not nice either. It’s not awesome

Jeremy Weisz 27:57

yeah I’m not even sure what the search because I’m not sure what this is yes

Tanner Larsson 28:00

what do I want here now then you have navigation is home okay, well everybody knows to click the logo they don’t need a home button. But then we have sale shop now Holiday Gift Guide new arrivals build your own box rewards learn more our company where do I go now shop now you people that oh that course you to go to shop? Testing shows user testing data, everything that shop now or shop? Or is one of the worst things you can ever do because you’re basically asking for the kiss before you’ve got their name. It’s a commitment level that they’re not willing to make. They don’t want to shop they’re browsing they’re viewing and also shop now doesn’t tell me what you have. I still don’t know. Now go ahead and go ahead and into now now shop now energy formula ready to drink hydrate? Oh, they actually have a ready to drink now that’s new. Um, so go ahead and click on energy. click on shop now, or Yeah, go ahead, do that. Just click shop now and see if it actually still loads. Yeah. All right. So we go to collections G Fuel. So this will be a perfect example. Okay. Now just scroll for a second. Anyone feel overwhelmed?

Jeremy Weisz 29:08

They have a lot of a lot of flavors here.

Tanner Larsson 29:13

thing is that they do a lot. They do a lot of collaborations with like, pro gamers and stuff and make a flavor unique to this thing. Okay, which is actually a brilliant move. Yeah, captivates or captures other audiences. But I was a fan. Let’s say Jeremy, you are a big gamer. And I follow you and then you have a collaboration with this company.

Jeremy Weisz 29:32

Dr. J’s region. Raspberry.

Tanner Larsson 29:36

Raz right. How do I find Dr. J’s rage and RAS?

Jeremy Weisz 29:40

Yeah, I have to search through everything. Yeah, right. And if you

Tanner Larsson 29:43

go back to the top there’s there’s there’s no filtering the filter is hidden behind the thing and on mobile, it’s way worse experience. But you click this now, okay, I can sort by flavor. Okay, tubs, boxes packs. I don’t know what those are and special. By But I can’t, I can’t sort by powder. I can’t sort by ready to drink. I can’t sort by anything that I actually know how to use intuitively.

Jeremy Weisz 30:06

Yeah. I didn’t mean to click that. No, you’re

Tanner Larsson 30:10

fine. Yeah, I click through this all the time, and I still get confused. Now go ahead and click on any product you want.

Jeremy Weisz 30:18

And once you will try the sour blue.

Tanner Larsson 30:21

Just went next to a PewDiePie. That’s what that’s an influencer. PewDiePie is like a famous YouTuber I believe. So anyway, okay, now we’re here on the product page. Above the fold, we all heard before above the fold is gold, right? This above the fold is useless. Right? Like, where do I Okay, where’s my quantities? Where’s my product information? You keep scrolling down? That’s new. They used to not even have the shake scoop stuff. So that down at the bottom is where I actually learned about the servings per tub sugar free all those kinds of things. Yeah. And then after go all the way down. People don’t want to scroll. The average scroll depth on it on a site these days is one and a half scrolls on it on mobile. This where would

Jeremy Weisz 31:04

you put this supplement facts? Would you put it in should actually be

Tanner Larsson 31:09

in that? Yeah. And and below it should be in both location. Got it. But above the fold right here, I should have quick stats, like I should know that it’s sugar free. That’s a huge thing. Right? I should also know that that’s 4040 grand or 40 servings per tub last a month. Like how long does 40 servings last? Me?

Jeremy Weisz 31:27

Yeah, I didn’t even see that sugar free is huge. Yeah,

Tanner Larsson 31:31

yeah. And you know, all these things. Every one of those things could be up above the above the fold in a bullet form. And then they could have more details below. They have all those little blue icon things that don’t tell you what they are. When what does that what does that mean? Those actually mean something to them. But it doesn’t tell you see. Then if we go out, go ahead and add to cart if you can ever find a button, because that’s another problem added to cart. Okay, hang on, don’t do anything. What is prototypical, I’m expecting to go to the cart or have something slide in it shows me it’s been added to my cart. So now I either can This is not a good way to do it. Now click Go to cart. And see if they changed. I haven’t looked at it in a while. Okay, so now I’m in the cart. This cart is awful. But first of all, we don’t check out from the cart, we proceed to checkout from the cart. Again, it sounds simple testing shows that people expect to check out they expect to actually have done the payment. So if you see the checkout as a piece, the total above actually seeing the product makes no sense. And then it’s in two places. It’s like they duplicated the cart multiple times. On mobile, the experience is awful again, I believe actually, if you click quantity one and plus plus plus it up one, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, her car doesn’t even change. Okay, so now this is a huge thing. Now this technology to auto update a cart is only about 15 years old. So it’s not like they’ve had a chance to catch up, right. But what happens when this happened, this occurs. And we’ve seen this on big brands, including brands like Scientific American, who’s one of our clients. So we fixed this when we first started working with them, you have a massive cause abandonment on the next screen. Because psychologically, people are like me, they can’t do math in their head. Great. So they go, Oh, 35 bucks, I changed the quantity, the price doesn’t change. So my head still says 35 bucks. I go to checkout, and all of a sudden, it’s 70 bucks or 73 bucks or whatever.

Jeremy Weisz 33:33

And now by the way, I don’t want to make you late for your next call.

Tanner Larsson 33:36

Okay, so we’re okay. Okay. Let’s Let’s kick so it will take I can keep digging in on this.

Jeremy Weisz 33:42

Yeah. Can you just say you just say on crayon going? Yeah. All right.

Tanner Larsson 33:45

So then so anyway, that’s a big thing. And then that whole pop up, which also pops up on mobile is terrible. So then click Checkout empty up to me, those buttons shouldn’t be there. That’s all basic tech that should be built in. Now their checkout? Oh, they actually this is a big step for them. They actually added their logo to their checkout. Um, it’s only been a couple years that that hasn’t been there. This You mean at the top? Yeah. Which is super simple now, but what’s missing here is any kind of trust where your service information the phone number, if I have a problem, email, why are you asking for my email? Why are you asking for my phone number? There is the ability to add micro text to these fields. And we have tested this your form failure rate and form error rate, which means they give you a bogus email address or a bogus phone number is huge on Shopify. Now, except for on the critical forms, like shipping name, that kind of thing. phone number and email are the most spoofed Well, phone number and email are the two important ones to a marketer. Right so phone number allows SMS email allows cart abandonment, so we have to give them a reason to do that. So email parentheses required for shipping notification, phone question or parentheses required for shipping updates or tracking or whatever, give me a reason. And if you’re not using the phone number cuz you’re not doing SMS if you aren’t sure you’re dumb, because it’s huge, like a third of a third of your recovery revenue comes from phone, turn the phone field off. It’s not, it’s an optional field, every additional form fields you have in any type of thing, whether it’s email, conversion of applications, whatever additional form fields create a drop off basically, the extra form fields. Reduce completion rate, right. So the less form fields, the better.

Jeremy Weisz 35:26

So you put something on the right hand side, some kind of customer service, social proof reviews, something he

Tanner Larsson 35:31

built an app that was designed to do this for people that would actually build all this, because Shopify doesn’t make it possible. So we figured out a way to do it. And then Shopify said, Hey, we want people to only be able to do that if they give us $2,000 A month and upgrade to Shopify Plus, so they closed our backdoor and made our app no longer function. So now the only way to do this is to upgrade to plus. And then another thing that they don’t, that’s not awesome about it is they don’t they unlock the checkout, but they don’t actually help you do anything to the checkout. So most plus stores don’t have the ability to customize this, because they don’t know how to edit the code. But so that’s I’d say, that’s a pretty basic one on G Fuel, but just those things that you do have an opinion on this. That should be suppressed,

Jeremy Weisz 36:12

okay? Cuz I was gonna say, when I see this, I’m like, oh, there’s probably a discount code there. And it’s

Tanner Larsson 36:17

exactly what people do they, it causes a distraction points, like, oh, maybe I should go Google coupon, G Fuel coupon and find something and then they get distracted, they see a cat, they watch a cat video, and they’re done. We suppress it behind a button or a line of text with a link that says, you know, click here, if you have if you have a coupon code, yeah, or redeem coupon code,

Jeremy Weisz 36:37

this is more obvious than the search function on the on the front, right. So it’s way

Tanner Larsson 36:42

less important, you know, now, you’re limited in shot in Shopify, on most plans to how dialed in, you can make this checkout. But everything I mentioned is 100%. doable. The other thing that’s problematic that they’re doing really, really poorly is this Express Checkout. Now Shopify just made a change that doesn’t allow us to suppress this used to be we could suppress it here and only have it show up on the payment information page where it actually was relevant. The problem here is, first of all, when they click on this, if they click on Pay Pal, or G pay or whatever, it takes them away from your checkout, and does it before they put their email address in. So you can’t do abandoned cart recovery. But the other thing that’s worse about this is, Amazon pay Google Pay Facebook pay, that’s even worse. Amazon pay and Google Pay typically. Now in some instances, it’s different. But across the board, it’s about one to 2% of your purchase rate, well use Amazon pay or Google Pay, that is not worth an option. Because those same people will just use their credit card they know. So just get rid of all these cars press on Yeah, turn them off shot pay is one that’s growing, it’s basically the same thing as Shopify payments, only they’re calling it shot pay now. Some audiences, there’s a vast a big chunk of their audience uses shot pay, so it’s beneficial Pay Pal is a good one, because up to 30% of your revenue, or your buyers want and prefer PayPal. But the other ones, Facebook pay has never been more than about point 5%. So half of 1% for any of our stores we’ve tested it on. So reducing clutter, reducing things to distract them and get them focused on what they’re doing. That’s the whole thing. It’s direct response, streamline the process, remove distractions, remove objections, and put stuff in so there are no objections, remove information in place at the right time in the process and streamline remove the road bumps from that on site buyers journey that

Jeremy Weisz 38:37

increased social proof all the I think when you people should watch, you know, you talked about Aida, you know, and all those direct response principles, and you can incorporate them in all these pages.

Tanner Larsson 38:50

And every page when I was talking about leaks, and they’re leaky bucket, every page that your visitor buyer or shopper lands on your website is leaking, not one single page is not leaking. And it’s you know, some pages leak more than others. And the other thing is that when you start patching those leaks, this is just a little tip. When you start patching leaks in your business, start from the money and work backwards. So check out first then cart, then product page, then category, page and homepage. The reason for that is if you start at the back, everything gets impacted by that as it comes through. But if you start at the front and you optimize, say your homepage, but your product page cart and checkout is still broken. None of the optimization from the homepage carries through. It all gets lost.

Jeremy Weisz 39:33

Love it. Yeah, like 8020 or site lowest hanging fruit priority first. I love that. Yeah, cuz I mean the easiest thing someone’s go to their homepage and start tweaking it when they had someone abandon. Go for go for that first. Yeah, I love it. Um, first of all, thank you, thank you for your time. This could go another two hours and it’d be amazing and I know you got to get to your next thing. So I just want to point people towards go to build, grow scale comm check out more. You know, if you’ve learned anything which I have, you can check out his book, you can check out the BGS Live, which you can go to build gross scale live.com go directly there. And other places we should point people towards Tanner. That’d be good.

Tanner Larsson 40:19

Honestly, I mean, like you mentioned our YouTube channel, there’s so much free stuff on there. That’s really good. You can check out our podcast, too. It’s optimized e-commerce. But go to the bill, gross scale website, links to everything are there, you don’t have to go searching for it. That’s the easy portal to find everything but I spend some time there are a blog is actually really good. Our blog is written by our actual optimization experts. The people who work in the business, we call it part of our continuing education program. They all have to write articles. It’s teaching their expertise because it helps make them better. And that’s what’s published on our site. It’s not a blog writer, or you know, something like that is actually the experts who do this family.

Jeremy Weisz 40:56

Yeah, here’s the one with you and Brett, that I watch right here why speed copper is important. There’s a lot of great resources free resources for people to dig into. So can I I want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you so much. And everyone check out more learn more buildgrowscale.com and inspiredinsider.com and thanks so much. Thank you.