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Part 1: Principles

​ hy This Could Be The Most

W
Important Ecommerce Guide
You Ever Read
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is
doing the right things.”
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management

large mining corporation in the early 1900s sent engineers to a rural area.
The mining engineers from their mineral discovery work believed the soils
to be littered with gold. The mining company set up shop to tap the riches
beneath. 6 months later and 100 metres into the Earth, no gold was mined. The
company could not fund further exploration in the region with opportunities
elsewhere so they departed.

1
A couple came along that year to buy the property. They heard what happened with
the mining company so they got out their rusty shovel and sifting pan then explored
the grounds where the company dug. One foot in, the couple found a three-pound
nugget of gold. Then another. And another.

98% of people who visit your store, give up on buying from you. Some people get
seconds away from submitting their payment information then stop. Each person
has a reason for pressing back on the browser, closing the tab, or putting down
their phone that causes them to not spend money. You need to find out why then
create change. That is the essence of Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization.

Good entrepreneurs work their butts off doing a lot right to get sales, but they miss
20% of tasks that lead to 80% of results. Unbeknownst to you, you could be one-foot
from sales you dreamed about.

The Goliath Product That Broke

An Online Store
A store owner had a beautiful garden statue handcrafted by indigenous people of
the land who used ancient stonework. Nothing like it was available anywhere.

The statue’s product page had great photos, video, a clear call-to-action, and an
interesting product description. It cost $200, a few dollars more than ugly
mass-produced statues from competitors. In other words, it was built to get sales. A
lot of people were seeing it yet none bought. Zilch.

A friend was visiting the store owner one day as they talked about decorating the
friend’s garden. The store owner grabbed a phone, showed the friend the statue,
and she fell in love with it.

She went to buy the statue right away. She added the product to her cart then went
to checkout. She typed her address details to order.

“Is it possible for me to pick this up from somewhere?” asked the friend. “Why?” said
the owner.

The friend showed the checkout page on her phone. The owner’s eyes grew wider
with lips pulling apart. The shipping cost for the $200 product was accidentally over
$1000.

2
 How To Maximise Your Store’s
Conversion Potential
During an interview at the Institute
of Advanced Study in Princeton, a
reporter asked him what he thought
was man’s greatest invention. Einstein
paused but a moment and replied,
‘Compound interest.’
Bank Performance Annual in 1978

How many times do you need to fold a standard piece of paper to make it reach the
moon? One thousand times? One million? Scientists calculate forty-two times.
People are poor at comprehending compounded numbers.

Compounding is the reason this could be the most important ecommerce guide you
ever read. It is a complete step-by-step guide to get more visitors buying and buying
more, from your Shopify store. I created it to boost your Shopify ecommerce
conversion rate because I’ve seen profit growth that has brought tears to the eyes
of store owners.

Your store’s ability to efficiently turn a visitor into a sale is the difference between a
wildly successful store and one that bleeds profit on advertising because enough
people don’t buy enough.

The number of store visitors who turn into customers is your conversion rate. The
most common conversion rate is 1-2%. The metric is often flawed because stores
have bad analytics that track spam bots, include employee page-views, and factor in
other behaviours like blog posts. If you write a blog post for the store that gets read
a lot, its “conversion rate” will melt from the high pageviews on the blog. (I will show
you later how to correct this.)

No one knows the exact conversion rate your store can reach. One conversion hole
patched up can turn 30% more visitors into buyers. Some businesses even double
sales from one alteration.

3
Rather than obsessing over your rate, your goal is to make an element more effective
for whatever purpose it was created for.

The best default CRO goal in Shopify is to increase revenue per visitor since most
ecommerce elements exist to sell products. Measuring revenue per visitor rewards
changes that result in more people buying and people buying more.

However, there are micro-purposes. FAQ pages exist for customer support so you’d
optimise such a page by reducing the number of inbound enquiries for support. The
performance of a store’s search function can be measured by the number of pages
viewed and search queries performed so you’d optimise it by getting people what
they want faster.

Drastic changes are not always possible, nor are they necessary. As you improve
bit-by-bit working through this guide, small improvements add up, until soon
enough, twice the people purchase from you. The more profit you get per visitor,
the bigger your advantage over competitors. Throughout this guide are changes
rooted in real results to achieve incredible sales.

It’s easy to under-estimate small wins. One 20% increase in product views, 15%
boost in add-to-carts, and 15% jump from order completion is not a boost of 50%.
Sales increase by 63% because more people reach the next step to order. A store
doing $50k in sales a month with these three improvements grew to $81.5k a
month.

What do you do with the profit from $31.5k? An increase in conversions lets you
instantly pocket more money. You could out-bid competitors in paid channels to
drive more traffic, invest in product development that sets your business apart from
others, or hire people who can do what you don’t want to spend time on. Profit is
created out of thin air that spirals into growth. That’s the power of compound. A
conversion rate improvement creates waves for years.

You achieve small wins by ticking off six critical areas of conversion optimization
that make up the rest of this book. This is the formula the Digital Darts team uses to
boost a client’s sales:

4
 Shopify Conversion Rate
Optimization Outline

Principles

Why this could be the most important ecommerce guide

you ever read. Unlock the principles to turn casual visitors
into raving fans while saving you time and money from
wasted tests.

Positioning

Position right and the rest of marketing flows to create a

greasy chute that nabs sale after sale. I’m horrified at how
no other conversion guide or book discusses this lifeline
of ecommerce success.

5
 Design

A beautiful store is not one that gets you sales. Amazon is

ugly yet functionally brilliant. The crux of good
ecommerce design is revenue. Discover the design
principles any store can use to jack-up sales.

Technical

If your visitors cannot buy, you’ll never make a dollar.

Learn the tactics without being a coder to speed up your
store, spot mobile device issues within one-minute on
thousands of phones, hunt down broken links, and
bandage other problems that screech sales to a stop.

Product

Your offer matters. Elevate your product game with

proven ways to make your products irresistible and
master the art of creating high-converting product pages.

6
 Pricing

Price strategies are the quickest, most-guaranteed

method to affect profit overnight. Mathematically
maximise profit with simple price strategies.

Checkout

At last, fix the problems your store has with cart

abandonment, get customers to buy more, and help your
fans build the business for you.

Insider Secrets To Save Time

And Money By Optimising For
Conversions
I discourage passive scepticism,
which is the armchair variety where
people sit back and criticise without
ever subjecting their theories or
themselves to real field testing.

7
 Tim Ferriss, “The Human Guinea Pig” and author of The 4 Hour
Workweek

A/B Split-Testing Or Multivariate

Testing
The scientific approach to research and conversion improvement is to compare one
variation against the original, which is the control. This methodology is known as an
“A/B split-test” where 50% of people see version A while 50% see version B. The
outcome for an A/B split-test in ecommerce typically discovers the version that
results in the most revenue. The best performer becomes the control in a
King-of-the-Hill-style battle.

An alternate form of split-testing is multivariate testing. Three or more variables are

mixed in all combinations. Mathematics then calculates what combination of
variables are most effective. Multi-variate testing is faster than if each variable was
A/B tested, but it takes longer to achieve a reliable outcome.

Based on the time to do most tests and their statistical significance, I think you want
to be doing 5,000 transactions per month for multivariate testing. Most Shopify
businesses based on their transaction volume are suited to an A/B split-test.
Furthermore, large changes like website redesigns, product page layouts, or
different landing pages are easiest to do as an A/B split-test.

The Best Testing Tool In Shopify

Use Convert.com to test in Shopify. It is a popular tool in the conversion industry, is
quick to implement in Shopify, and has a growing repository of knowledge to
conduct various tests. Convert also has unique advantages for Shopify Plus
merchants like theme testing, debugging transactions for tests run on the checkout,
and granular tracking based on language, location and demographic data.

Testing tools can damage conversions from the time it takes for a page to load and
the time to paint the first pixel. Moreover, based on how all tools work, flickering
can occur where content appears then quickly disappears as it gets modified.
Depending on what is tested, the page speed can vary which alone hurts the
reliability of a test. Convert has SmartInsert technology to avoid flickering.

Here are additional tips I have to best work with your testing tool in Shopify:

8
 ✅ Design changes often need a designer. The visual editors of testing tools are
harder to work in then you think.

✅ Always track revenue. Include the post-purchase page in Shopify.

✅ Fully integrate the tool into Shopify. For Convert, follow their documentation.
They also have a Shopify integration knowledge base that I’ve helped clean
up. For Visual Website Optimizer, implement the tracking code in Shopify.

✅ Fully integrate the tool into Google Analytics. This lets you segment any piece
of collected data based on the test variations. While one variation may not
increase revenue, the time on site or adds to cart may change. Data in
analytics from a variation can lead you to test a hypothesis.

✅ Fasten the creation of variations by leveraging theme features. Duplicate the

theme in Shopify then change the non-published theme. Preview the theme,
copy the source code of changes, then paste the code into your testing tool.

✅ If you append ?view=list to any collection URL, your store will use the
collection.list.liquid template. If you use ?view=grid at the end, the
store will call the collection.grid.liquid template. The method can be
used on any liquid file. Different product page designs can be tested with this
method.

✅ The coolest trick is how you can test major design changes. Read my guide I
wrote for the Shopify blog on how to test for revenue, themes, and nearly
anything.

Another useful testing tool is Microsoft Clarity. Integrate Convert with Microsoft
Clarity to replay sessions and see heatmaps. As you go through the data, the tool
may provide further test hypotheses for future iterations.

If you build landing pages through a third-party tool, many have their own
split-testing feature. I recommend Zipify Pages to quickly make landing pages, which
comes with its own testing tool.

How To Quickly Test

If you double the number of
experiments you do per year you’re

9
 going to double your inventiveness.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder

“Will this theme convert better for my store?” Marketers love to say, “test it.”

“How does this new ad compare to my old ad?” The ad buyer says to “test it.”

“Should we position the order button here or there?” You know the answer: “test it.”

However, the saying to test everything is unrealistic. It can also be a cop-out for
miss-understanding conversion principles. You will take years to test every
conversion tip in this guide. If your store gets 1,000 transactions per month, 1 test
with a single variation may take the whole month to get a conclusive result.

Markets, technology, and expectations of shoppers change every year. You want the
best chance of results now, not in 5 years time. You cannot test everything.

The need to test can be skipped by asking yourself whether a change can negatively
impact sales. You require experience in conversion rate optimization to make this
judgement since many leaders and managers have destroyed conversions by
making changes that are “guaranteed to be better”. You don’t need to test fixing
broken functionality for a particular device or browser as that will help shoppers.
Every shopper wants a store to load faster so speed up the store then test
something else.

In a test, I recommend you reach at least 200-300 transactions per variation with a
statistical significance of 95% for the most time-efficient accuracy. Statistical
significance means there is a 5% chance the improvement is not due to the actual
variation. A 95% statistical significance is the scientific standard for most research.

If you’re doing less than several hundred transactions per month, make educated
changes then invest money into driving traffic. All conversion rate experts make
educated assumptions to save time.

PIE Framework For Testing

Big improvements with a large potential gets you more profit and makes testing fun
since conclusive results happen faster. If you make tiny trickles of growth, the
changes take months to test, which discourages you from further tests.

There’s a methodical way to decide what one element to test among hundreds of

10
ideas. The PIE framework categorises each idea based on:

1. Potential. How much improvement can be done? Potential is the hardest

variable to measure since it is subjective. You can cross-reference what is
advised in the book and other trusted sources, against what you’re doing to
judge an idea’s potential.

2. Importance. What is the severity of the idea? Content that is high traffic, high
visibility, or close to the checkout is of high importance. You can form a
hypothesis of impact from experience and research. A conversion expert is
valuable to hire because the person can identify what is likely to impact sales
then craft an effective improvement.

3. Ease. How much effort is required to implement the idea? Low effort tasks
lead to quick implementation.

Group your ideas into a single Google sheet. Categorise them in the PIE framework
then add an example for inspiration. Let this sheet form your optimization library to
save time and money.

I’ve made you a Conversion Optimization Library sheet to give you a

methodical way to decide what element to test using the PIE
framework. It also gives you a place to log your ideas as you
progress through the book.

Begin using the sheet, by making a copy. From within the document,
go to “File” > “Make a Copy”.

Reading Shopify Conversion Rate

Optimization
Now that you know the power of conversion optimization, principles to optimise,
11
and the core tools to get you there, here’s what to do to get the most out of the
guide.

Read the guide from beginning-to-end because the lessons build on each other.
While you can apply the collection of conversion-jolting ideas, case studies, and
hacks in any order, you want to implement what will generate the biggest profit.

The checkout is likely to have the highest importance since you are closest to the
transaction. Proceed to positioning where you unlock your biggest jump potential.
Get your positioning right and the rest flows to create a greasy customer chute that
gets visitors to the finish line.

You are to test because you will change things that for whatever reason, decrease
sales. Be satisfied you found a way to not do something and you did not
permanently make the change.

Testing leads to failure, and failure

leads to understanding.
Elbert Leander “Burt” Rutan, aerospace engineer

Let’s begin your optimization by learning how to make a visitor buy from you
instead of a competitor or online giant:

12
Part 2: Positioning

​ hy Someone Should Buy From

W
You In An Ocean Of Choices
“There is more similarity in a precious painting
by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than
you ever thought possible.”
Alfred Taubman, owner of the A&W chain, comparing marketing
challenges faced following the purchase of a 241-year-old auction
company

hy would someone buy from you? Visitors to your website buy your
product, or a similar version, from another business all the time.

13
Perhaps visitors buy from local businesses because they give an in-store experience,
the ability to touch the product, and the option to talk with staff. Maybe a
competitor has a feature in their product that makes it better than what you sell.
Then there’s Amazon who will always offer a wider range at a cheaper price
delivered faster.

Ecommerce today is competitive. The battle for a customer’s credit card will only
harden as new competitors emerge.

The solution to competition is positioning. Someone will buy from you because your
business and product stands out in their mind as the solution.

Position is determined by perception. Position-focused CRO works for any store

because perception is malleable. Positioning is your saviour to the great ecommerce
sin of being another “me too”. It is how you set yourself apart from the competition
to solve problems unique to your business.

A store’s position can be anything. You can serve the tastiest ice-creams to
leprechauns. However, an effective position solves a meaningful problem. Your
conversion rate will increase with great positioning—ignore it to make all other
conversion work hard. Let’s mould your store into a profit-generating machine with
the right position.

Strategy That Sets Your Business

Apart From Competition
The Law Of Category
You cannot compete head on with the monster of Amazon. Their size carries with
them an unbeatable economies of scale, which drives down price and provides
shoppers a wide range of products.

Positioning gets attention to make you remembered. When someone thinks about
the niche problem you solve, they go to you.

The size of your category matters to the point it aligns with your business goal.
First-time pugapoo owners in Texas could turn to you for dog equipment, but if you
want to build a 10-million dollar empire, you’ll need to expand. You want enough
size to meet your profit goal.

14
Here are ideas and questions to position yourself into a unique category:

● What type of people buy your product? Survey to find why someone buys,
where they use the product, and who they would recommend the product to.
If hobbyists get the product for the weekend, the website hero banner and
text should show these people in that situation.

● Drill down to one benefit. A toothbrush for the general population is taken. A
toothbrush made for sensitive teeth stands out.

● Mindmap your niche in the centre then branch out with product categories.
Spend time alternating between brainstorming and looking at competitor
product categories for ideas. Find a niche within a niche. Our client Galen
Leather sells handmade leather goods for writers.

● Browse competitor reviews. What do customers love about a product that

gets little attention? What do customers hate? How are customers using the
product?

● Overlap two traits of value. Go crazy writing down a combination of product

traits and problems. You can’t be critical of your ideas until you get at least 20
since creativity flows from volume. Magic Spoon recreated childhood cereals
that are keto-friendly.

● Use your imagination to enter prompts within ChatGPT. I entered, “Give me a

business idea tagline for a men’s skincare brand that no one else has done.
Everyone has black products or a complex list of ingredients. Make it brief
and to the point so I’m impressed by it.” The response I got was, “Simplicity is
Strength: Men’s Skincare Redefined”. Build on the idea by yourself or with the
AI. The idea of simplicity and strength had me think of a skincare brand that
can scientifically prove it is good for male hormones.

Avoid Dilution From Extension

Products will forever tempt you to dilute your message to a broader audience.
Speak to everyone and you will speak to no one. The purchase rate of products
begin to vaporise when you disobey the law of category.

People think focus means saying

15
 yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.
But that’s not what it means at all. It
means saying no to the hundred other
good ideas that there are. You have to
pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of
the things we haven’t done as the things
I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to
1,000 things.
Steve Jobs

If you must deviate, launch a new brand and store for products that do not serve
your biggest buyers. Shopify makes it easy to get a new store up in minutes.

Focus On Your Biggest Buyers

Serve The 20% Of Top Customers
20% of customers will contribute to 80% of profits. Identify your biggest buyers then
arrange everything to attract more of them. Make it your mission to figure out how
to acquire them and keep them.

Every market is made of bad and good customers. A bad customer may ask loads of
questions from customer support about a product that costs less than $20. If the
person eventually buys the product, they return it.

Great customers are identified by the recency and frequency of their orders. A great
customer is likely to have recently bought, and buys many times. Your biggest
buyers are also nice to talk to since they appreciate the brand.

When you know your great customers, you understand how to acquire them and
how to get them to buy. Since they make up a small percentage of your addressable
audience, your conversion rate may not increase, but your customer lifetime value
will skyrocket.

To dive deeper into your biggest buyers, there is qualitative and quantitative data to

16
collect then analyse. An example of qualitative information about your biggest
buyers is surveying someone through Klaviyo once they make their third purchase.
If you can meet with them face-to-face, you will gather insights that are otherwise
impossible to collect.

Quantitative data can be gathered and analysed through Google Analytics, Shopify,
Klaviyo, or Triple Whale. I like to export data from Klaviyo then begin working with it.
Your goal is to look at recency and frequency then understand so much about these
people.

Leverage Profitable Traffic Sources

Get more of the traffic that converts well for the business. Sources that lead to
visitors—rather than profit—is a common mistake store owners make in a lousy
conversion rate. Your conversion rate is doomed before anything else happens.

You can use Google Analytics to see the most profitable traffic sources. The data
you gather from an out-of-the-box Google Analytics setup is often inaccurate and
incomplete. Once good data flows in, good choices can flow out.

To see the touchpoints of people who order a lot in Google Analytics, there are
several features you need to set up so the data becomes useful. Give your business
the best chance of accurately tracking lifetime value in Google Analytics with the
“User ID” feature, Google UTM codes on external links that point to your store,
cross-domain tracking to eliminate self-referrals, and referral exclusions for
attribution accuracy. Follow my step-by-step guide to get Google Analytics done
right for your Shopify store.

A good first way to leverage profitable traffic sources in Google Analytics is by doing
a lifetime analysis. Open “Reports”. From the template library, create the “User
lifetime” report.

17
Looking at this Shopify client example from the default report, customers who first
buy from email are 10 times more valuable than those who first buy from Facebook.
The business can focus more on how to collect emails and invest more into email
marketing.

Sell To Your Foxes

Too many companies are afraid to read a scathing comment of an offended visitor
or turn away market segments because their products are for everyone. You may
feel uneasy about an ad speaking to a niche group when you know everyone can
benefit. Quiet mediocrity is the formula to be the little guy with a soft voice.

You will minimise those unlikely to buy from you when you speak passionately to
your best buyers. The late copywriter Gary Halbert called this “selling to the foxes”:

There are hundreds of companies in direct response who give up millions of dollars
in sales every year just so they won’t offend a small percentage of scumbags who
will never buy from them anyway… Stop worrying so much about offending people
and start worrying more about selling them… I didn’t worry about offending the
‘dogs’. Instead, I concentrated on selling the ‘foxes’.

Cards Against Humanity excel at selling to the foxes. One holiday they updated their
website with the message: “To help you experience the ultimate savings on Cards
Against Humanity this Black Friday, we’ve removed the game from our store,
making it impossible to purchase.” Another year the company had a campaign to
sell bull s*** that had staff the whole day on Twitter explaining what people could
18
literally buy:

30,000 people in one day literally brought crap. Cards Against Humanity’s foxes are
people with a dark humour. Sure the company annoyed a lot of people. I’m sure
their owners don’t care. Healthy ignorance stems from knowing your audience
rather than stupidity.

Your foxes have problems, ideals, emotions. If they believe Kim Kardashian has
done nothing for human life, your store can say that on social media. Does your
product have a defect? Maybe your product should not be used in a type of
situation? Write about it then when you say something the product does well, it is
believed. Tell deep stories, publish videos, and single out a situation that matches
the lives of your passionate fans. You turn away the dogs and appeal to your foxes.

Tactics That Command People

To Buy From You Over Others
Add Value Propositions
A value proposition is a simple message that promises value to the visitor’s
purchase. They can alleviate risk, build trust, save the customer money, or
guarantee a solution to your customer’s problem.

Imagine you were interested in buying a bike to ride along the beach. You arrive on
one of my client’s websites:

19
Do you feel safe? Do you feel Beachbikes is the right store to buy from? Do you feel
confident that if you were to buy a bike from here, it would be fantastic?

Value propositions pull you apart from the pack. They are best placed in the header
of the homepage and beneath order buttons on product pages to quickly tell most
visitors why they should stick around. You’ll have unique value propositions like
“Take Your Bike for a Test Ride” in addition to general ones. Here are some to get
you going:

Do not use vague variations that carry poor influence:

Test the presentation of value propositions because they have been found to
distract. FSAstore.com boosted revenue per visitor 53% when they removed their
five core messages from below the navigation for a simpler appearance.

Survey Customers To Attract More

Empathy gets you started at what you think should be done; ignorance caps your
store’s conversion rate. Disregard what your intuition tells you to do. Listen to the
exact reason why someone purchased in their words with a survey.

20
I recommend Hotjar to survey visitors and customers. Qualaroo is another good
tool with top resources for ecommerce surveys.

You’ll want to trigger the survey to appear on the thank you page. Buyers have gone
through the sales funnel. They have wrestled their objections. They have
experienced the low of a problem and the high of a solution promised by your
product.

Here are my most potent questions to ask buyers that will fuel conversion ideas to
boost skyrocket sales:

1. Where did you first learn about us?

2. What got you most excited about buying from us?

3. What almost stopped you from buying from us?

4. What are you unsure about with your purchase?

5. What convinced you to buy from us?

6. What other options were you considering before buying from us?

7. What could we have done to make your purchase choice easier?

8. How would you describe us to your friends or family?

At first glance some questions seem like they are best suited to non-buyers. The
problem with asking a non-buyer what they are unsure about or where they first
learned about the business, is they don’t have money in the game. They may have
spent 10-seconds on the website, forming a weaker opinion. You will get garbage
responses. That’s fine. It only takes one response for an epiphany.

Integrate what you learn into the business otherwise the data is useless. Log
insights into your Conversion Optimization Library sheet. When you understand the
people who bought, you nudge along people who previously wouldn’t have bought.

Survey To Find Out Why Your Visitors

Didn’t Buy
I tweaked the guarantee of one store to instantly boost sales 50%. It worked so well
because the product was inherently risky. The heart of your Shopify store’s

21
conversion problem is unlikely to be a simple design change. The biggest growth
may come from qualitative testing.

Trigger a survey with rules that match your most profitable segments and another
with rules that match your least profitable groups, to learn about visitors who do
not buy. The disparity in answers may surprise you.

Any business can always improve with surveys. Look at this survey Google gave me
in analytics when writing this guide:

The information Google would gather from this survey to understand what users
are trying to achieve on a report would be golden in usability design.

Ask one question for the best response rate. Good questions you can ask include:

1. It seems you didn’t complete your purchase, can you share why not?

2. What would convince you to buy from us?

3. What other information would you find helpful on this page?

4. What if anything is stopping you from completing your purchase?

Test Google’s approach of asking what someone is trying to do. When you’re
convinced this strategy works, survey visitors based on other behavioural data. You
may want to know why one product does not sell, why someone who viewed 10
pages left, or what caused someone to abandon cart. It depends on what you want
to discover. Bathe in the new information gathered then test what you learned
about your store.

A survey to nearly any segment is possible. For example, you can create a unique
shortened URL for a magazine promotion. You can then have an overlay with a

22
discount that only triggers for people redirected from the URL. The popup can
include the magazine’s name. This way the scent remains from the advertisement to
improve conversions. Refer to WebEngage’s guide for extra ideas to use overlays for
CRO.

Should You Offer Live Chat?

Passivity is the enemy of change. You need feedback. Live chat is one way to provide
instant customer support without the delays of an email or feedback form.
Forrester research found, “44% of online consumers say that having questions
answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the
most important features a Web site can offer.”

A live chat widget on your store is not guaranteed to increase conversions, but it is
an avenue to explore if you get many support questions, feel dazed at why people
do not buy, or have never done it before. How you implement live chat also matters.

Total Gym Fitness increased sales by 39% with live chat while other stores have seen
a decrease. Several things Total Gym Fitness did well was train staff to ask different
questions based on how high or low the person was into the research funnel,
deliver a chat box sized to mobile, and provide short answers when typing to a
mobile user.

The problems your visitors try to solve will differ from each other so don’t take a
one-size-fits-all approach. You need to regularly train and meet with your live
23
support agents. Record every question your visitors ask, or objections your visitors
raise, about your product or store. These are optimization opportunities to include
in your testing log.

Run The Premature Test

Get a person who doesn’t know about your store to visit it on their phone. Give
them three seconds to view your store then pull their focus away. Ask, “What person
would buy from this store?” Repeat the test with someone on a desktop computer.

The premature test tells you the immediate positioning communicated through the
design of your store. If your tests reveal contradictory points or uncertainty, look at
the top 200 pixels on the home page. What can you do to speak to the person most
likely to buy from you?

One major mistake I see are messages like, “Welcome to So-and-So.” Use the visual
real estate in a clearer way. Your visitors will be unknowingly thankful.

Brand names like “Chamberlain Coffee” and “Guitar Center” are clear with what they
sell. When brand names are unclear, taglines beside a logo are effective at selling to
your foxes. Smith and Noble use to do a good job with a tagline next to their logo
that quickly describes who the store is for.

Use Simple Customer-Focused

Language
Company-focused information gets me mad. You don’t give your visitors “Consumer
Information” or “Customer Care“!

What is Sunbeam’s “promotions” page supposed to be? Promotions is a bad

marketing translation of “specials” or “sales” in normal people's language.

24
When reading corporate speak, I picture a board of bobble-head directors puking
their vile. It is common among large companies that distribute their product to
retailers while also selling to individuals.

The right jargon can be used so your best buyers understand why they should buy
your product. When your words mimic the lives of your visitors, you captivate an
audience. Hobbyists love jargon. If you sell to passionate golfers, write about the
golf club that puts an end to army golf, makes you a burglar, and equips you to
break par.

Write to one person using “you” language—do not say “people”, “you guys”, or
“customers”. Be guided by “what’s in it for me” instead of “what we do” in everything.
Keep your product descriptions, core content, navigation, and stories focused on
your biggest buyers.

Create An Amazing About Page

People want to know who they buy from and if they can be trusted. The about page
lets you address these concerns while helping you differentiate the business from
others. It is a commonly overlooked area to increase your conversions.

What makes a good ecommerce “about” page?

✅ Tell your story. Use dialog, names, times, and other specific details to bring
the story to life.

✅ Give a personal anecdote related to the reason the visitor is interested in

your products.

25
 ✅ Share your passion as though you were talking face-to-face to the person
reading.

✅ Use video.
✅ Reveal team members.
✅ Provide contact information.
Another idea that can work well on your ecommerce “about” page is connecting
your message with a greater cause. A fitness store can show photos of fun fitness
classes it ran for a school.

Here are examples of good about pages:

● Yellow Leaf Hammocks

● Tessemae

● Schott NYC

● Sandy Feet Australia

Be Clear With Brick And Mortar

If you have a physical location where customers can buy your product, it’s a good
idea to test the message. While it’s nearly guaranteed to boost offline conversions, it
can also boost online sales by establishing trust.

Have a page for your offline location. Test how you attract customers to the offline
store whether through a link in the header or footer of the online store. Anchor text
ideas are: “See our showroom”, “Visit us in store”, and “Our physical locations”.

John Lewis provides a “Our shops” link in the header that takes you to a list of their
brick and mortar locations.

Do not reference your online store (mystore.com) as differing from your offline
26
store (My Store). Your company is one body.

For help setting up brick and mortar locations, there's the Bold Store Locator Map
app. Make it clear where users must go when things are accessible in only one
place. For example, let customers know that certain products or video instructions
to get the most out of their purchase, can only be accessed from the online store.

Make Customers Buy Before They

Visit The Store With Endorsements
Your customers admire certain people. Get a person your audience respects to
endorse your product and you will have people ready to buy before they visit the
store. An endorsement can also drive branded traffic. Every store can use
endorsements, though it works best when you develop your own product.

Endorsement strategies include sending your product to the person, offering equity
in the business, or working closely with a charity that appeals to the person of
influence. Superficial endorsements are the lowest-level execution of this strategy
even though it can still work.

Under Armour signed NFL athlete Tom Brady for equity in the apparel company.
Brady wears Under Armour clothing and speaks well of the brand given any
opportunity. SK Energy partnered with 50 Cent and the World Food Programme to
provide one meal for every energy drink sold. The Honest Company works closely
with Jessica Alba who reveals a side you rarely see that is authentic and aligned with
the target audience of concerned parents.

Capture video, photography, and as many quotes as possible from the person.
Show the celebrity using your product for the ultimate proof of support. ROC
headphones rapidly built its brand with Cristiano Ronaldo that combined a PR
campaign and endorsement.

Your celebrity’s behaviour is a double-edged sword. What they do imposes onto

your brand. Kellogg’s ran from Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps one week after a
picture of him smoking a bong became public. Nike, Honey Stinger, and other major
brands departed from Lance Armstrong following his doping scandal. Total Flex
home gym equipment caught Jean-Claude Van Damme on a British reality show
revealing his disdain to promote the product he disliked.

A superstar is unnecessary; sometimes ineffective. What matters is your audience’s

respect for the person and awareness of their love for the product.

27
 Suggested Resources
● 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout

● Drew Sanocki on Customer Value Optimization

● How To Acquire Better Customers To Increase LTV

● The Finest Google Analytics Setup in Shopify for Splendid Data

● 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly

● Gary Halbert on selling to the foxes

● How to find a manufacturer or supplier for your product idea

In the next lesson of the conversion optimization guide, you will learn how to design
a store that gets you sales without being a designer:

28
​Part 3: Design

​ hopify Theme Design To

S
Convert Customers
“Wearing a veneer of perfection never did me
any good.”
Liz Phair, singer-songwriter and guitarist in an Elle interview on
women being women

eauty is the shallow veneer of good web design. Pixel-pushers know little
about conversion rate optimization; designing for appearance and
functionality with words that “we’ll achieve your business goals”.

Facebook, Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, and eBay—all online

monsters—are aesthetically ugly. Functionally, they are brilliant. These companies
test and tweak little elements every week like the addition of an icon on a form,

29
change of navigation text, or introduction of a new element to see the effect on
business goals.

Store design does not need to be art. The crux of good ecommerce design is
revenue. All else is irrelevant.

The given design ideas and methodology show why certain designs work and how
you can apply the concepts to pluck low-hanging fruit from your store. Default to
principles. Apply the principles to your situation. It is tempting to be hand-held into
a high ecommerce conversion rate by copying another store, but this can hurt
performance when you don’t understand the principles. What boosted sales for one
store may not work for yours.

Design Principles For Higher

Conversions
Axis Of Interaction
Joel Marsh beautifully labelled a theory to optimally control eye movement on any
page with imaginary lines, edges, and blocks in design. Our eyes follow chunks of
images, text and other elements until interrupted to reduce intake of information.
He calls it the “axis of interaction”:

The implications of axes in design are monumental. Everything on your page either
30
builds an axis or destroys an axis. Groups of centred elements are bad usability
unless you want interruption.

Centred logos are cute but destroy navigation.

A button to delete something valuable, like removing an item from cart, should
typically be placed outside an axis. Notice below how the volatile button of “Move to
Trash Can” in the Google Analytics property view is nowhere near an axis line. The
feature is available for the user seeking it yet invisible to others. That is purposeful
design.

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Want an element clicked? Have it follow the axis of interaction. Form submit buttons
that you want engagement with are best placed along the axis of the previous
behaviour. An “Add To Cart” button in a product form should align with the content
above it.

Common points of optimization for stores are form elements, navigation, and
images. Cart and product pages have the most opportunity for Shopify owners.

Full-screen responsive designs are extremely hard to get right because they screw
over axes. Where are the eyes supposed to go in this example? There is no control
of the eyes.

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The design could be compensated by moving key elements or giving worded
directions of what the person is to do next. However, these bandage bad design
that should be intuitive.

Whether you should go for a left-to-right axis or a top-down axis of interaction is up

to you. Test each with heatmaps and session recordings in a tool like Microsoft
Clarity to see the axes users have with a page. A product form can have the “add to
cart” button horizontally after the product quantity selector. This may alter the
interaction of each form element to affect the average order value and frequency a
product is added to the cart. What billion-dollar companies do in their product
design hints at what’s better for revenue.

The axis of interaction principle gives you an understanding of interaction data, lets
you predict flaws in design, and helps you form a hypothesis to test a design with
intent to optimise.

Colour Contrast
I’m sick of trying to read 50 shades of grey. Stop using grey fonts on a white
background. The moment I see a Shopify design agency make this mistake, I know
their designers care about appearance over sales. Grey text looks modern but
webpages exist to be read.

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Low contrast is disastrous for users with poor vision, low-quality monitors, and glare
on screens. What is hard to use does not get used.

Load up a product page on your store then stand back two metres. Pretend you’ve
never seen your store before. Can you tell where the navigation, product images,
production description, and call-to-actions reside? What links can be clicked?

There is no best colour for you. Pick colours that match your brand or have a subtle
psychological influence. Give fonts and backgrounds enough contrast for
accessibility by using a tool like WebAIM. Keep your call-to-action colours distinct
and consistent.

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Colour contrast matters more than what shade of teal looks best. Be a contrast
rebellion. Call-to-actions need to be clear and look like they can be clicked. Links
must look like links, not white blobs.

Consider colour as a whole because one element can affect the whole. Colour can
form an axis of interaction. A “coming soon” collection in the main navigation is not
the key piece to draw attention with red. Grab your users by their eyes as you use
colour to control focus.

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Simplification Versus Complexity
What food additive sounds most dangerous: Hnegripitrom or Magnalroxate?

Researchers found people rated the fictional Hnegripitrom as more dangerous. The
researchers conclude, “…dangerous food additives were rated as more harmful
when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to
pronounce.”

We have a distaste for what’s hard to say. People are less likely to order a dish at a
restaurant if they cannot pronounce its name.

The effect of simplicity carries over to product purchases. A 2007 study on the
“Preference Fluency in Choice” found that our product preference depends on how
easy or difficult the legibility of options appear. The researchers discovered that
twice as many people wanted to buy a product when its description was in an
easy-to-read font. When the option was difficult, people deferred their decision.

The mind has vast cognitive biases towards noise reduction that minimise the
amount of work required to interact with the world. Break fluency and you will
make people think more than they need to, which leads to indecision then no
purchase.

If something does not have a clear purpose, elimination may boost revenue.
Ecommerce perfection is the state when whatever you add or take away worsens

36
the results.

Look at the design of websites your visitors regularly use. These influence what is
expected from your store. Also follow this conversion guide to give people what
they expect from a store to create a fluent shopping experience. An intuitive
experience is an enjoyable experience.

Design Elements That Leak Sales

Carousels
A carousel is the group of sliding images seen on the front page of most online
stores. Carousels are the most over-rated, over-used, and poorly designed element
in ecommerce. Most carousels suck because:

1. They are poorly designed.

2. The eye follows movement. Auto-play carousels are a usability disaster. A

static hero image avoids the error.

3. It’s the designer’s way of jamming multiple messages into a group. You
complicate what should be simple.

4. A lot of people do not engage with carousels because of banner blindness.

Most marketers have no idea how often their carousels are clicked on.
ND.edu had a 1.07% total engagement with 89% of those people clicking the
first frame.

If you use carousels:

1. Really ask yourself if you need it. Take the “Should I use a carousel?” test.

2. Still not convinced? Carousels can present key information in a confined

critical space above-the-fold when used right. Keep the carousel static until
the user engages. Test engagement, revenue, and timing. Auto-forwarding
carousels aid banner blindness.

3. Give the user simple controls with easy buttons to tap. Do not expect people
to click tiny circles like Taylor Stitch.

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 4. Provide an information scent on each frame. Tell the user what to expect with
clear link text and descriptions when the image is clicked.

5. Show the number of frames. This can be integrated with controls. Everything
about John Deere’s carousel is brilliant.

The Hamburger Menu

What do these icons mean?
38
Systems designer Wayne Pau says the answers in order are:

1. Motorola hardware menu button

2. MS Word bullet bullet icon

3. Android holo composition icon

4. Android context action bar overflow

There are many more versions. You’ve seen the hamburger icon in digital locations.
Most ecommerce stores use it as a menu icon for mobile users.

Amy Schade makes a good point that the hamburger menu has a high-interaction
cost. Users cannot see what the menu contains, have to press it with their finger,
and possibly scroll to locate what they want. Designers make the mistake of
jamming the entire desktop menu into the hamburger and fail to consider how else
to present core information to a mobile user.

39
Booking.com shared they found no difference with the use of “menu” near their
hamburger. Peep Laja for a scented candles seller found the hamburger menu with
a border and “menu” text beat out the plain hamburger to increase revenue 6%.

40
Reconsider the icon design because of its confusion and influence on the
user-experience of 50% of your visitors. The first lesson of the hamburger menu is
to taste-test. Well, split-test. The second is to attack assumptions that affect a lot of
your users. You may surprise yourself at what you find.

Calls To Actions
Buttons greatly impact sales because of their high engagement. Every customer
adds a product to their cart making the action a valuable touchpoint to test.

Visit your home page then proceed to buy a product. Write down every element you
click. These are good test options for a store with thousands of transactions per
month. Another idea is to repeat this process to buy in blur mode:

1. Go to Thomas Spark’s Bookmarklets.

2. Drag the “Blur” to your browser toolbar to bookmark it.

3. Go to a store’s home page then click the “Blur” bookmarklet. Bam, the page
goes blurry.

4. Can you click all the buttons to reach the checkout page? If so, the buttons
passed the blur test.

The text and design to use on buttons that maximise your profit can be different
41
from other stores. Here are call-to-action points to consider in tests:

● Make clear how to shop online. The primary call-to-action must be clearest.
Phone case store Lifeproof changed their “Store” link in the top navigation to
read “Shop Now”. 13% more people clicked through to the store and the
company equated a 16% boost in projected revenue.

● The “Add to Cart” text on your product page. Black and Decker changed the
primary call-to-action button of “Buy Now” to “Shop Now”. 17% more visitors
proceeded to vendor pages for a yearly projected revenue boost of six
figures. “Add to Cart” is a time-tested winner.

● Button design. Weird could work because it makes the button stand out.
Design variables to consider are icons on the button, button shape, colour,
and size.

● Vagueness is bad. “Continue”, “Next Step” and “Submit” are common

mistakes. The “Checkout” text on your cart page can be “Proceed to
Checkout” or “I’m Ready for Payment”.

● Christian Holst found users expect fields to auto-update and there to be one
button at checkout. People do not know the role of buttons like “Update Cart”
or other weird alternatives like the refresh arrows on Pure Fix cycles in their
checkout process.

Collections: How To Design Them

My analysis of client websites show user interaction with Shopify collections make
up 25% of the online shopping experience. The data shows collections are viewed as
a middleman to achieve a goal and often have a lower engagement time compared
42
to the rest of the website.

This means a good page design for your collections is likely to let people synthesise
the best option for them in the quickest time. Here are factors to test on collection
pages:

● The title and description. These clarify what the person is looking at and
helps SEO. The content has a high impact on collections when it is
above-the-fold. Helix Sleep uses value propositions in the description on the
collection hero image.

● Internal promotion banners above product listings. Keep it relevant

because users assume the banner to be category-relevant.

● Filters. A good filter system helps people sort through the attributes that
matter to them. If you have a low SKU store, you can avoid filters or even
collection pages altogether.

● Product card layout. The display of results in either a list-view or grid-view.

43
 Most Shopify stores have a grid-view. Wheelchair store spinlife.com found
list-view increased sales 16.1%. I hypothesise a grid-view is best suited to
collections that have similar attributes where visual differentiation matters
like clothing and list-view is favoured for products that look similar and so
require text for differentiation. The only way to discover what is right for your
visitors is through a test.

● Information in the product card. Images are a must. Other elements to

consider are product titles, descriptions, ratings, price markdowns, stock
status, and call-to-actions like “wish lists” and “see it”. Let shoppers compare
products at a glance.

● The default image size. Maybe your images are not large enough to help
people see what they want. Mall.cz got a 9.46% boost in sales from enlarged
product images and moving the short description to viewable only on a
mouse-over event.

● A product preview. The Quick View app lets people see a bigger image and
quickly access more information about the product.

● Pagination. You can use none, numbers, or wording. Infinite scroll didn’t
work for Etsy. Larger stores can also test the ideal number of products to
display per page.

Design Tactics That Boost

Conversions
Use Trust Badges
A trust badge is an image that increases a visitor’s confidence to buy from you. The
best badges for your store convey facts or benefits that matter the most to your
biggest buyers.

I don’t trust a lot of studies out there that discover “79% of people abandon
checkout because they don’t trust you” because they are funded by companies that
issue trust seals. There are many more effective ways you can use badges to
increase sales. Here are trust badge ideas to test:

● Logos of your payment gateway like PayPal. A lot of Shopify stores use

44
 accepted credit cards in the footer.

● Logos of your delivery companies.

● Value propositions. Refer to the chapter on positioning. My client Oh Clocks

reinforces free shipping, returns, payment options, and customer support
through trust badges.

● Shopify designed their own secure logos for vendors that you can grab.

● The Shop Promise badge. Display delivery dates predicted by Shopify that are
backed by a limited guarantee for your customers. Help customers check out
with confidence and increase conversion by up to 25%.

● Buy on Google has a Google Guarantee. The Google Guarantee covers up to

$2,500 per order. Visitors get assurance that one of the largest companies in
the world can handle delivery and return issues instead of trusting an
unknown merchant. In Google Shopping, there’s also the trusted store badge.

● If you’re an American company, you can use the BBB dynamic seal.

● Lesser known trust badges are logos of charities you donate a percent of
profits to, institutions in which you are a member, review widgets, and press.

There are many badge options. Before you chase your designer to plug every trust
badge you can find onto your product pages, footer, and checkout, do it with a test.
One study that looked at trust seals in computing tracked eye movements of 60
people and found 38% didn’t see the VeriSign and TRUSTe logos. Furthermore, the
participants had “significant misconceptions of their meaning”.

If you use security images when security is not a concern for shoppers, you may
make people concerned about security to complicate their decision. Your goal is to
pick the badges that overcome objections or set your business apart to get the sale.
Hexclad does this perfectly on the product page to counter the top objections
someone may have buying their cooking pans.

45
You can also explore where the trust badges are situated. I've seen logos reduce
conversions because they are situated too close to order buttons. The best
placement of a trust badge either fortifies a statement or addresses a visitor's
concern when it is expected to arise.

Leverage Brands
Make known the brands that trust you. It is a favourite strategy in the software
space underutilised in ecommerce. What well-known businesses or individuals have
purchased from you?

Include a section of logos and messaging on your home page or product page
sharing who uses the product. By leveraging another business’ trust in you, you’re
subtly suggesting to your customer, “You can also trust us.”

Always respect the privacy of people and businesses by requesting their permission
to share their use of your product. Get permission to use any logos. Do not confuse
people that bought your product that they endorse your store. Be an ethical,
law-abiding store owner.

A similar strategy is to list the brands you stock. School Specialty do this at the
bottom of their home page.

46
“Model” The Big Boys
I rarely recommend you copy a competitor’s design because most stores have no
idea what they’re doing. The objection to this is, “I want a unique design”. If you
model a store because they follow a lot of the principles in this conversion guide,
who cares if your store is not unique. Design is about revenue and your visitors
couldn’t care about a unique experience. Only egos care.

The big boys of eBay and Amazon understand conversion optimization. They run
copious amounts of split-tests every day so model design ideas off them.

When you complete this guide, you can identify why a store might use a word,
image, or design. You become Neo in The Matrix who is possessed with a
perception to filter ideas for your tests.

Spot Design Problems With A Usability

Test
Eliminate usability issues in your store to make purchases a friction-free experience.
A website that works and is easy-to-use, gets used.

A user test helps you realise issues you overlook. Gather test subjects to screen
share their computer on a video call or you can look over the person’s shoulder. Ask
them to find one particular product then buy it while talking out loud. Record their
47
screen and audio. Services like UserTesting.com can do it for you.

One test subject is better than none. Elaborate usability studies are a waste of
money. Jakob Nielsen with Tom Landauer for the Nielsen Norman Group found,
“The best results (for usability tests) come from testing no more than 5 users and
running as many small tests as you can afford.”

In terms of frequency, run user tests every six months to spot issues that creep into
website updates. A design trend may have snuck into your theme that is ineffective.
Follow this simple user-testing plan for accurate scientific data that patches your
blind spots.

Suggested Resources
● Color theory and conversion over at Unbounce.

● 5 dangerous UX myths debunked by UX content strategist Jerry Cao.

● Want To Win Fights With Your Web Designer? Use These CRO Tactics.

● Flex Shopify theme by Out of the Sandbox. My favourite publicly

available theme I recommend to new stores. It ticks a lot of design
check-boxes.

● Christian Holst at The Baymard Institute does a great job with

ecommerce usability testing.

Good job completing the lesson! The following part reveals how to find technical
issues and make other technical improvements to boost sales without being an
advanced coder:

48
​Part 4: Technical

​ he Foundation Of Ecommerce
T
Profit
“The first rule of any technology used in a
business is that automation applied to an
efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.
The second is that automation applied to an
inefficient operation will magnify the
inefficiency.”
Bill Gates

omeone will not convert if the website does not let them take the required
actions to convert on their device. It takes more effort than a test booking
from your browser to snipe technical bottlenecks so the purchase experience
49
is a breeze.

Technical conversion optimization looks at the usability of your store in a variety of

situations then covers ways you can use technologies to turn a visitor into a sale.
Adjustments can cause a surge in sales when the issue affects a lot of users. Fixes
for an unpopular device or browser accumulate to cause an uptick in sales, while
also reducing customer support tickets that are hard to solve.

Technical Choices That Boost

Conversion Rates
Page Speed
Store speed correlates with revenue per user. Many tests prove the correlation time
and time again across all types of business.

Walmart found: “For every 1 second of improvement they experienced up to a 2%

increase in conversions” and “For every 100 ms of improvement, they grew
incremental revenue by up to 1%”.

Excellent servers are critical to a lightning fast store. Shopify was the first hosted
ecommerce software to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN has servers
placed around the world so visitors pull and push data to the nearest server. The
server speed is taken care of for you.

One area non-technical store owners and marketers can optimise is images. Use the
right image format and compress quality. Screaming Frog is one way to identify
large image files. GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed insights tool provide charts to
see slow images as well as other reasons a page lags in performance.

Also analyse the time it takes for a user to be able to interact with the website,
which is known as first input delay (FID). A faster FID gives the impression of a faster
loading page. The FID metric can be gathered from Google’s PageSpeed Insights
tool.

Work on your slowest pages that get the most views. Google Analytics 4 does not
have a native report for website speed so you can set up your own customizations
to identify slow pages.

The majority of speed optimization has to do with your theme. A good developer
50
can refactor CSS, reduce apps, replace images with CSS, concatenate files, and
minify files. See my guide on common SEO mistakes for ways to speed up your
Shopify store.

Website Architecture
If your visitors were told to find one product, would most find it within 20 seconds?
How about you actually find out with a HIT on Mechanical Turk.

Links on your website connect the user experience. The old rule of “the user should
be able to find anything within three clicks of the home page” is a load of rubbish.
You can have everything accessible in three clicks and still befuddle people at where
to find information. Depth is unrelated to clarity.

Place links to key pages like contact, returns, and postage in the footer. Consider
testing the collections displayed in the header rather than lumping them together
under “Shop”. Test a link to your standout product at the top.

The most important part in ecommerce architecture is the categorization of

products. You don’t want a product to slot into multiple collections that are meant
to differentiate products. Do you know the difference between “Custom Options”
and “Custom Stone Options”?

What’s the difference between navigation links in one shop that are “By Category”
and “By Collection”?

51
A good categorization structure helps conversions, SEO, and possibly average order
value. You get it right when your visitors look at your collections then quickly know
where their product is most likely to be.

The process of good categorization depends on store size. A store with less than
200 products can list all product names in a spreadsheet then group similar ones
under a column. Large stores with diverse SKUs can model Amazon or eBay and get
ideas off competitors.

Well-organised collections can be brands like Ben Sherman, Timberland, and Under
Armour or be made of interests like basketball, netball, and tennis. Do not use
product attributes and minimise adjectives in a collection name like “Adidas
Basketball Black” as it leads to an overwhelming navigation bar.

Collection Order
The order of your product categories affect sales. Put your most important
collections first from left-to-right or top-to-bottom based on page views. Group
similar navigation elements to help visitors identify products.

Create a report that lets you see the views of collections. In Google Analytics, go to
“Reports” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens”. Change the dimension to “Page
path and screen class” then filter by “collections”.

52
Explore the verbiage for navigation links. Designer Marta Eleniak talked one
company out of calling their “Personal Vehicle Leasing” product “Just Drive”
(whatever that means). Enable people to easily find the products they want.

Breadcrumbs
A breadcrumb is the trail of links that tell someone where they are on the website.
See an example on RadarMount.

Imagine you did a Google search for “car mount camera” then came across
RadarMount’s product. You also want something made for your phone, but you see
the breadcrumb then click “Suction Mount Device Brackets” to find other options.

Breadcrumbs cut user anxiety, reduce bounce rate, and assist SEO. A breadcrumb
provides context for the user at no cost. Jakob Nielsen has recommended
breadcrumbs since 1995, “Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing.
Users pay attention to breadcrumbs only 30% of the time; when they do, it helps
and even when they don’t, it doesn’t cause any harm.”
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Descriptive URLs
A descriptive URL reassures a visitor they are on the right page. What could be at
this URL? Something about New Balance.

example.com/collections/new-balance/43545

You know exactly what is at this URL:

example.com/collections/new-balance/purple-packer-new-balance-shoes

A miss-match or lack of clarity can hurt conversion. You also improve SEO with clear
URLs that match the page. A hidden conversion benefit of a descriptive URL is you
help someone locate the page when they try to revisit it in their browser window:

Internal Search
One study found people who search convert 1.8 times better than non-searchers
and bring in a disproportionate amount of revenue. Zohar, CEO of Fast Simon that
provides search functionality to Shopify stores, tells me this stat is far below their
data for thousands of stores. He says people who search convert anywhere from
2-10x better than non-searchers.

I agree with Zohar’s data looking across the stats of my clients. One random client I
looked at with a SKU count of 1,500 has searchers convert at 6.42% compared to
2.32%—a 277% difference.

Internal search matters most on websites that have a large product range or
products with intricate details like shoes and jewellery. Search can bandage poor

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website architecture—overcoming bad navigation and filters—so the best action is
to stop the bleeding at the source.

How you implement search is as critical as having an internal search option. A study
by SLI Systems found 25% of shoppers refine their search query after their first
search and another study learned 73% abandon the site after 2 minutes if they
cannot find what they want.

Here are ideas to explore search that have worked for my clients:

● Conduct a search of the most popular queries from visitor data. See what
people encounter. Are the results accurate and helpful?

● Test autocomplete search functionality.

● Test product images beside autosuggestion results.

● Test verbiage within the search box such as, “What are you looking for?”
Inside the search box, the text “Search the store” does better than “Search”
because people are assured they will stay on your store rather than be taken
to Google. Compare search button designs like an image of magnifying glass
to “Search”.

● Avoid including articles inside your main internal search. Articles can have
their own search field in their template.

● Track internal search queries to see what people want and how you can
better serve what they search.

● Consider new collections or reworking existing collections if common

searches appear for products. Make your collections based on user
preference.

● Assist shoppers in refining their search results with filters on the results page.

● Provide default suggestions like bestsellers on the search results page when
no products match the query.

You can do all this with Fast Simon. It is my favourite search app on Shopify.

Filters
Nothing is more frustrating when you find great shoes or clothes, but the product
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page clarifies they are not made in your size. I’m 6’9″ and have been there many
times.

Options make decisions hard. We handle complicated situations with inaction.

Help shoppers find what they want with filters when your store has product options
that are complex or apply to groups of people. The collection filter app helps a lot of
Shopify stores with filter functionality and design.

Digital Darts’ client Blue Bungalow has a clear filter that opens when “Filter” is
clicked. Given the large number of options, the filters are not collapsed to let
shoppers see the categories of filters that best fit their needs.

A related part of the filtering system to consider is sorting. Let people sort by
bestsellers, price, alphabetical order, and possibly date.

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 Broken Content
404 For Internal Links And Images
A 404 means the page viewed is non-existent because it was deleted or moved to a
different address. You may improve the conversion rate when links and images
function as intended as it forms a good user experience.

Rather than click every link or view every image to verify 404 errors, use Screaming
Frog to scan your website. Once the tool completes its scan, click on the “Response
Codes” tab then sort by “Status Code” to identify 404 errors.

Click the “Inlinks” tab at the bottom to identify where you need to update a broken

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link or image.

404 From External Links

A link from another website that goes to a 404 page can cost you sales, especially if
it’s from a journalist or blogger who has pre-sold the reader.

To identify pages that do not exist:

1. Create a custom report in Google Analytics. Go to “Explore” then click “Blank”

to create a new exploration.

2. Edit the name of the report to be “404 Report”.

3. Change the date to the last 30 days.

4. Add “Page title”, “Page path + query string”, and “Page referrer” to
dimensions.

5. Click and drag each dimension in the same order to the rows.

6. Add a metric of “Views”.

7. Click and drag the “Views” metric to the values.

8. Change the “Show rows” value to a large number to display all the data.

9. Open up a new tab. Visit the store with a made-up URL handle to generate a
404 error. Record a unique part of the page’s title in the browser tab that
identifies the 404 page.

10. Back in Google Analytics, create a filter for “Page Title” that contains the title
you found.

Your report will look like:

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The report helped me identify a broken link in my YouTube video on Google Ads
conversion tracking in Shopify. The page referrer dimension is limited in information
so you may have to do manual digging to locate the exact location of the link.

If a third-party is linking to a non-existent page, the quick fix is to create a redirect.

The better option for SEO is to reach out to the website asking them to update what
link, on what page, to the correct version.

404 Page
When you find a non-existent page, how does your store help the sale? Type your
store’s address into a web browser with a non-existent address like
mystore.com/errortest to check. Allbirds are an example of what not to do:

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Control the message by telling the visitor what happened and what to do next. Here
are high-converting principles for your 404 page:

✅ Use the same design as the rest of the site.

✅ Follow your brand’s image and have the page sell to your foxes. Do you sell
clothing for dancers? Have a decked out cartoon figure busting a move. Give
some tongue and check.

✅ Provide a search option.

✅ Offer a phone number or other support to help the person locate what
they’re after.

✅ Fix the root problem. Check the 404 did not happen from a page that should
exist.

Here are some examples of good 404 pages. The best one being yours truly for
Digital Darts.

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Mysterious Mobile-Device
Performance Issues
There are thousands of mobile phone models and more mobile phones than people
on the planet. Mobile is likely to make up more than half of your store’s traffic. How
do you discover when someone on an iPhone 12 is unable to purchase then leaves
your store, when they don’t tell you the problem? No foolproof method exists.

The most comprehensive fast way to begin finding mysterious mobile-device

problems is in Google Analytics:

1. Click “Reports” > “Tech” > “Tech details”.

2. Edit the report.

3. Add a metric of “User conversion rate” to the custom report.

4. Change the primary dimension to “Device model” to see mobile devices with
the lowest conversion rate.

5. Expand the timeline of your report for a greater sample. Avoid going too far
back in time when major website updates occurred, since the functionality
across devices is likely to have changed.

6. Save the report.

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It’s ideal to have every page perfect for every mobile user, but you have a budget.
Focus on what is most likely to grow your bottom-line:

1. Look at the conversion rate differences across devices. Your best customers
may use a brand of mobile device that explains a conversion difference.
Chrome users in the example are 48% less likely to convert than Safari users.
Furthermore, Chrome users also have half the average engagement time. It’s
a worrying difference that needs investigation. I’d add a secondary dimension
of device category and other metrics to explore what is going on.

2. Pay attention to the combination of engagement rate and average

engagement time. Low values of both metrics on one device indicates a major
usability problem for those users.

Online usability tools like BrowserStack and Google’s mobile-friendly tool can purge
obvious problems. They claim to replicate mobile device usage, but I’ve repeatedly
come across strange problems these tools overlook.

Browser testing is easier than mobile device testing. You can install browsers on
your computer then thoroughly test the website.

Suggested Resources
● Shopify theme development documentation

● Image optimization tips on the Shopify blog

● Shopify SEO Guide to Perfect Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

● 16 Usability testing tools to improve UX

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 ● What design elements are compatible in browsers and devices

● OpenDeviceLab.com for cross-device testing

You are now past half-way through the Shopify conversion guide. Keep going
because some big growth hacks are ahead. You are about to learn how to craft
product pages that make visitors pull out their credit cards:

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Part 5: Product

​ ow To Craft Product Pages That

H
Make Visitors Demand Your
Products
“What we do has to make commercial sense,
but it’s never the starting point. We start with
the product and the user experience.”
Steve Jobs

pple spent over $100 billion on research and development across 5 years
since 2023. That is some expense on innovation. CEO Tim Cook invests in
how the product is sold because he knows the value of experience. Every
square foot of an Apple store is designed to make you spend.

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A high-converting product page that you can spend millions on driving paid traffic
to, doesn’t begin with a good landing page design. The process of conversion
optimization for a product page begins at the ideation stage of product
development. You don’t need to be innovating with millions to craft new
technology—you need to excel at giving to people what they want.

In the chapter you’ll learn how to craft a hot product. From that foundation, you
learn the ways to optimise a product page for profit. Every pixel of your product
pages should aim to influence people to buy. A high-converting product page has an
anatomy that can be dissected then analysed so you can replicate the experience it
gives to visitors.

Product Development
Develop And Sell More Of Your Own
Products
There’s a limit on how big a store can grow based on the needs it fulfils. Discover
the intentions of visitors that you are not serving, fill the gap, then your conversion
rate will increase.

You can begin by surveying visitors on your website by asking, “What did you come
to do on our website?” In a sheet, determine if you fulfil the intention. If you don’t,
add another column with ideas of how you could satisfy the need. Prioritise the
intentions by calculating the percentage of visitors and how much revenue you
could generate from each activity. You will boost the profit per visitor to the website.

A likely solution to satisfying unmet needs is making a new product. Retailers that
manufacture unique products who sell direct, are lavished with the highest possible
margins in ecommerce. If you only sell your products through your store, the place
of purchase is obvious. Your products are better inoculated against competition.

It can also be wise to develop and sell your own products for better conversions
because you can regulate product quality, possess agility to respond to market
evolution, and ultimately give a great product that people want.

Sell A Hot Product

There’s no better way to have a killer conversion rate than sell a product someone
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wants to desperately buy before they hit your store. Bad markets alone can be the
sole source of a stinking conversion rate.

How do you sell a hot product? The best selling products solve a problem for
someone who is searching right now for a solution with minimal competition. When
your product solves someone’s pain, urgency, or an irrational passion, marketing
becomes easy.

You can discover what people want by seeing what they buy. Some competitors
have a bestsellers collection. It’s common for websites to list their most important
products first.

However, you need to move beyond competitors by going directly to the most
trustworthy source: customers. The secret is to do smart research on valuable
customers:

● Read the two-to-four star reviews of your own products and competitors for
insights. The people who give two-to-four star reviews are dissatisfied. How
could a product satisfy them?

● Setup automated emails that go out to customers who have bought two or
more times. These are the people who matter the most. They will share ideas
you never dreamed of. Ask them questions to discover what is a hot product:
“What do you wish you could buy from us?”, “If you had the chance, what
would you have us make just for you?”, “If you ran the company, what would
you say to make people use our products?”, and “What have you brought
from a competitor that you couldn’t get from us?”

● Business owners and marketing managers should periodically answer

customer phone calls, respond to support tickets, and meet customers to see
who they are, what they struggle with, and what they want. You are never
above figuring out how to best serve your customers.

Use Your Products

Don’t be the company who is out-of-touch. Use your own products.

Know firsthand what’s good and bad about what you sell. Maybe your
manufacturing process needs improvement, you need to source the style of the
product from another brand, or you realise how awesome the product is and your
product photography does it injustice.

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The best copywriters when writing copy for an educational course, will sift through
every word of the course to spot every lesson. Each lesson is then crafted into a
captivating bullet point. A good copywriter can be made great by living the life of the
customer being sold to.

When you use a product, you gather a kinaesthetic experience that cannot be faked.
You know the product inside-out. You can bridge the gap between where the visitor
is at, to what you’re doing, with new product features, product adjustments,
bonuses, video, and copy that catapult sales.

Name A Product Well

The name of a product influences visitor interest, paid ad performance, and organic
rankings in search results. It can also evoke desirable feelings or instantly
communicate the problem it solves.

You can name a product well by knowing what criteria visitors care most about. An
informational naming structure of brand, model, and version works well for stores
with a large number of products similar to each other like appliances. If you were
buying 3D printer accessories, you would want to know what brand and model
printer the accessory is made for. Colour and size can be important descriptive
attributes to include in product names of clothing.

Website architecture can also influence product name. Ron Bennett uses “jacket” in
a lot of products listed under the “Jackets & Coats” collection for clarity and to help
SEO. A conversion-focused idea is to include “benefit language” in the product name
like “Nike Free Runner Shoes – Comfortable for Exercise”.

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You can also optimise product names from organic search data in Google Search
Console. Under the “Performance” section, click “Search results”. Click the “Pages”
tab, click a product URL, then view the search queries that lead to the most
impressions and clicks for that product. Frontload the most searched words into the
product name.

Product Assets
Photography
People identify images within 13 milliseconds. We notice product photos first on
product pages.

Have yours count. Photos can make an otherwise disinterested visitor curious and

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an interested visitor more likely to buy. Here’s how to make your product
photography convert into sales:

1. Make your photos high-quality. This includes getting professional

photography done. BlackMilk has great photos that focus on the listed item of
clothing.

2. Use a white-background for your primary shots. Upgraded Ape changed the
background in their product photos from a rug to white isolate and increased
their conversion rate 21%.

3. Have product photos taken from various angles. It eliminates questions in the
mind of the interested buyer. Capture important elements like the dials on
white goods, zippers on bags, and ingredients list on foods.

4. Use a zoom feature on images when details are important. Take this to the
next level if you have money to invest with 360 degree photography or
augmented reality to increase perceived ownership.

5. Give context in photos. Show how your customers use your product. Give
perspective on the size of the product. If Tattly didn’t show the size of their
temporary tattoos by displaying them on someone’s body, conversions would
drop.

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6. Provide photos of variations. If a product’s variation like colour matters to
people, the primary photo should update when the variation is selected.

7. Combine photography with graphic edits to reveal facts about your product
that standard photos cannot show. Bionic Gloves create a kinaesthetic sense
hard to replicate in words for how much grip their golf glove provides by
blending an octopus with their glove. The worst glove is one without grip.

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Video
Video nearly always increases conversions over no video. The reasons it works are
similar to good product photography. Video reveals product intricacies, allowing you
to sell to your biggest buyers with detail and visual stories. It’s the most time-tested,
low-cost way online retailers can get visitors to experience the product.

Matt Lawson from ao.com found, “Video gives us the opportunity to wow our
customers and this in turn delivers results. We have tested and proven that when
someone watches our video reviews they’re 120.5% more likely to buy, spend
157.2% longer on the site and spend 9.1% more per order.”

If you lack the budget for good video, test it first on your bestsellers. Follow these
tips for good video:

1. Make your video informational more than anything. Minimise graphic intros
and other wastes of time. Avoid a cheesy product pitch, but if your video is
awfully funny, it could work by creating loads of traffic. Zappos have done
great video by educating viewers for over a decade. They host the videos on
YouTube to get another benefit of free traffic from one of the world’s most
popular websites.

2. Consider your narrator. EyeBuyDirect.com found a male-narrated video had

9.28% conversion rates compared to a 2.78% conversion rate for the
female-narrated video.

3. Once you realise that video increases your conversions, get more people to
watch the video:

● A thumbnail sets a first impression, enticing your audience to hit play.

● Embed the video rather than only provide a link. Thinx used embed,
autoplay, and transparency well.

● Use a play button overlay. Test other overlay information.

● Provide a clear-to-action like “Click to Play”. Draw attention to the video

in product descriptions like, “See how fast this widget cuts food by
clicking here to watch the video”.

● View the video analytics to see where people drop off. Think about why
people are dropping off at this point then capture the lesson for future
video scripts so you achieve continuous improvement. Combine an
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 analysis of engagement time with revenue because someone may stop
watching a video after successfully getting the information they
wanted.

4. Use video throughout the store beyond products. Video makes testimonials
trustworthy, a company story believable, or a homepage emotional.

Product Descriptions
Most stores have poor product descriptions. They are either boring, incomplete,
ignore the real customer, or do all three.

PJ O’Connor Jewelry Designs provide custom jewellery. Their product page has a
great opportunity to show-and-tell the manufacturing process, share who the item
is for, or create a meaningful story behind the item. Instead, they provide 11 pitiful
words.

Rather than face the overwhelming task of rewriting every product description,
focus first on updating your high-traffic bestsellers to quickly get data at a low cost.
Follow these tips to write product descriptions that convert into sales:

1. Make it known who the product is for, where someone uses it, why someone
uses it, when it is used, and how someone uses it. Don’t be afraid to sell to
your foxes. Go into detail. Refunds and returns will plummet. The ideal

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 message and length of a product description is one that accurately reflects
that product and provides enough information that lets someone convince
themselves to buy.

2. Answer every possible question someone could have about the product.
Provide full specifications like sizing, dimensions, and product materials. You
discover more unusual things someone wants to know about a product with
surveys and chat. I like how Champs Sports provide a “question and answer”
section for products.

3. Include features the shopper wants to know. If you saw a hard drive that
promised “it will store all of your photos, work, and games”, you would not
believe it until you knew its size—the feature. Magic Spoon sells keto cereal.
The amount of carbohydrates in a serve, and ingredients, matter to their
audience so they focus on the facts.

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4. Transform features into benefits. You can turn features into benefits by
asking yourself, “so what?” Rewrite it then repeat the process to get to the
heart of why the feature matters. You can use descriptive language to paint a
picture of how the feature benefits the user. “With our built-in timer, you can
relax and enjoy your cooking without worrying about overcooking or burning
your food.”

5. Use personality to match your image. If you think your product is boring,
you’re either in the wrong market or need inspiration. Any product can be
made interesting when it meets the needs of a shopper. A lot of Etsy sellers
understand how to do product descriptions possibly because of their
personal link with what they make. Method Home gives some flare to simple
hand wash.

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6. Tell a story. It can be a personal use of the product, from a customer, or the
manufacturing process. Stories drill into specific moments with emotion,
sight, smell, and sound. One Etsy seller shares a quote from her mum about a
lip balm product.

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 7. Help readability with simple words, bullet points, and formatting. Share your
strong points beneath the product name so the “Add to Cart” button and core
information remains above-the-fold. More copy can be included lower on the
product page.

Product Description Extras

Do not limit product details to descriptions and specifications. Increase conversions
with extra bits of information that reinforce trust and build value.

There are three extra categories of information any brand can consider for product
pages:

1. Guarantees, warranty, and returns. Mention your guarantee in more places

than a link in the footer. Reinforce the zero-risk guarantee to the customer on
the product page. You do provide guarantees and returns, right? They are
guaranteed to boost conversions. The best guarantee is derived from
customers’ fears, pain, and perceived obstacles. What do they not want to

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 have happen if they pay you? What are they most afraid of? Reverse their
fears into a guarantee. To give a guarantee teeth, you need punishment for
what you’ll do if they don’t get the result. Without the “or what” portion of the
guarantee, it is diluted.

2. Delivery. Let someone know the delivery costs before the checkout. A link in
the footer of your store is insufficient. If the costs can only be calculated at
checkout, share a free shipping threshold.

3. Product use and care guidelines. This helps customers get the most out of
their purchase and increases the value of your offer. Clothing stores should
give care guidelines for each item. Bali Body sells body oils and advises
visitors “ways to use” their purchase. This makes readers see themselves
stepping out of their shower then applying the product lotion to their skin as
the “natural goodness” is absorbed.

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 Product Page Conversion
Boosters
Reviews
People use others through reviews to figure out if they’ll love the product. Reviews
create social proof that helps someone make a decision. The best reviews are from
customers who give their thoughts about the product while not being incentivized
to sell.

Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University found 95% of consumers read

reviews before an online purchase. The researchers say, “We found that as products
begin displaying reviews, conversion rates escalate rapidly. The purchase likelihood
for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than the purchase likelihood of a
product with no reviews. ”

While your products may not get a three-digit increase in sales from reviews,
another study from Reevoo says reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.
Reviews seem to have the biggest impact on conversions when there’s 0-10 reviews
with a plateau around 20 and another 18% uplift between 25-50 reviews.

No reviews versus not having the option to review, may hurt your conversions
because it says no one is buying—social proof works against you. However, giving
customers the option to review while there are less than 5 reviews is a sacrifice of
early conversions for years of higher conversions.

Aim to ask for reviews at cloud-nine moments when customers are likely to rave
about you. A good email flow is the best way to automatically collect reviews at the
right time. You can also ask for reviews with a product insert, when someone leaves
a positive social media comment, or when support solves a customer problem.

I suggest Judge.me, Okendo, or Shopify’s free Product Reviews app to collect reviews
in Shopify. Collect photos and videos from customers for extra believability. No
matter the option you use, require reviews to be approved first to moderate spam
and also respond to reviews by addressing product flaws or negative experiences.

Testimonials
A testimonial is a quoted endorsement. Testimonials from celebrities, person’s of
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trust, customer emails, user quotes, or social media comments slipped onto a page
can handle objections. You have to do quoted remarks right to make a testimonial
convert.

One testimonial from someone trusted by shoppers will help conversions more
than the same words from someone who is unknown. Carnivore Snax uses a quote
from Joe Rogan at the top of the homepage because he is one of the world’s most
respected podcasters.

Savvy shoppers are numb to vague remarks from customers. An excited testimonial
saying, “This is amazing. You need to buy this!” from an everyday person does
nothing to help conversions. Another way to bolster performance is with specifics. A
testimonial is more effective when it contains the problem, what the person tried,
how the product helped, and who person recommends the product for.

Sometimes your customers will email you great comments or rave about you in an
online public space. Leverage their comments for conversions. Ask for their
permission to use their comment. Coffee Joulies use testimonials from their

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Kickstarter project where comments were made before any review system was in
place on the store. The testimonials could be made more believable with names,
photos, and locations.

Customer Use Of The Product

Let customers show off what they bought. Pull in images from social media, or have
direct uploads from reviews, to boost social proof.

Our client Lack of Color on product pages have images of raving fans wearing their
hats. Lack of Color sorts through hundreds of photos per week on Instagram.

The Foursixty app can automate the collection and publishing of Instagram photos.
You can also push the content to email campaigns, and contact customers to get
the legal rights to feature their content.

Out Of Stock Reminder

When someone cannot buy a product because it is out of stock, the product’s
conversion rate will go to zero. When someone can only pre-order a product, I see

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the conversion rate cut in half from its normal potential.

Have a feature that lets visitors get a reminder email or SMS when the product is
back in stock. Build a list of shoppers waiting to buy.

Once the product is back in stock, contact the segment to get double-digit
conversion rates. Klaviyo has a feature to collect a person’s details once a product is
out of stock, then it can automatically notify people via email or SMS once a product
is available.

Social Buttons
Social media buttons clutter a product page. As you learned in the chapter on
design, simplification often outperforms more elements in design.

On product pages, you want shoppers to add the product to their cart. Social
buttons distract from the goal, rarely resulting in any shares. Finnish company

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Taloon.com removed their social sharing buttons from product pages then had
11.9% more clicks on their “Add to Cart” button.

Show Who Purchased

Another way ecommerce stores can leverage social proof is by displaying
notifications of new orders to visitors. We look to other people’s behaviour for
direction. Robert Cialdini in his book Influence writes, “We seem to assume that if a
lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t.”

Booking.com pioneered sale notifications. They inundate a visitor browsing a

particular listing with notification boxes in the bottom-left to build social proof.

eBay lists how many times an item has sold on a product page. They share this

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figure in multiple places because it works.

Shopify stores can use the Pop! app to show notifications of customers who
purchased. The app can also display reviews and a live visitor count as popups on
your Shopify store.

Create Urgency
Most shoppers are just looking in order to better understand what product they
really need. Their procrastination kills conversions. Put a fire under the feet of
visitors to make them buy by creating urgency.

There are a couple of ways you can use urgency on your ecommerce store to
increase conversions:

1. Add a timer to countdown sales or events.

2. Use time-sensitive coupons for cart abandonment. This is doable in Klaviyo.

3. Mention the hours and minutes the visitor has to order to get their purchase
by a particular day. Amazon does this best to create urgency. The ShipTimer
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 app lets you display dispatch time-windows in Shopify.

4. Show the amount of stock left. Test this because conversions may boost
conversions only when products are low in stock. Pia Pottery displays the
remaining stock to shoppers, which gives another subtle angle of their
pottery being handcrafted.

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 Suggested Resources
● The Ten Principles of Building Great Products by Avid Larizadeh at
Forbes

● Example product pages by Shopify

● DIY product photography tips on the Shopify blog

● Augmented reality in Shopify

This chapter covered how to optimise product pages on Shopify by developing

products people want, making product assets, and gathering product extras that
boost conversions. Experiment with different tactics to consistently enhance
conversion rates.

I am yet to discuss one gaping topic on product pages to sell products like hotcakes.
In the next chapter, you discover how to price your products right. Pricing is the
quickest and most dependable method to increase the profit of an online store.

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Part 6: Pricing

​ eyond Conversion Rate

B
Optimization Pricing—Lazy
Ways To More Profit
“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.”
David Ogilvy, “The Father of Advertising”

ow products are priced can make or break the business. Products priced
too low will make everything in the business futile. A company without
profit is a charity.

Pricing is hard to get perfect since there are many influences. There are competitor
prices, manufacturer guidelines, confusion of what metrics to measure, the
psychological implications of pricing high or low, and the research cycle of buyers
who seek a low price. The challenge of getting your price right is worth it because
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you can increase profit overnight by typing a few numbers on your keyboard then
clicking save.

Read the whole chapter first before applying it to your situation because the
individual tactics are connected. All the proven tactics are not meant to increase
conversion rate or even revenue—they aim to explode profits. A higher price can
mean more profit, even with less revenue or lower conversion rates, thanks to the
increased margin.

How To Set Price

Pricing Against Competitors
You can do everything right to make someone crave a product then have a savvy
online shopper buy from a competitor because they offer it cheaper. I have found
this regularly true for high-priced items ($300+) because people spend hours
searching options for the best deal. Manufacturers with a minimum advertised price
(MAP) stop destructive price wars of stores who undercut each other on price. A
high-priced item with a MAP is most likely best priced at the MAP. What should you
do?

One lost sale doesn’t matter. The challenge is determining whether to price higher
or lower than the market as a pricing strategy. Two questions can help you to
decide what to do:

1. What segment is underserved in your market? Can luxury, high-end, or

low-end customers get what they want? What about Fortune 500, corporate,
or small businesses?

2. What value can you provide to deliver the ultimate product and service? Alex
Hormozi in the Offer Creation Checklist, gives this tangible formula to
measure value in the eyes of the beholder:

Value = (Dream Outcome x Perceived Likelihood of Achievement) / (Time

Delay x Effort and Sacrifice)

If you increase the dream outcome or the perceived likelihood of achievement, you
increase value. If you decrease the time it takes to get the outcome or reduce the
required effort or sacrifice, you increase value. Hormozi in $100M Offers, expands
on the formula, helping you apply it to your business. I encourage you to grab the
book then do the exercise.
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No product or service can thrive on its own without considering the people who use
it. How you price relative to competitors influences what people buy. So, if you want
to set a price that truly resonates with your customers, start by looking for the
groups of people who may have been overlooked in the past. Understand what they
really want, and use that knowledge to inform your pricing strategy. By doing so,
you can build a more meaningful relationship with your customers to provide a
product with services that truly meets their needs.

Automatically Monitor Prices

You need to monitor competitor prices to see how your products compare to them.
If the product has a MAP, monitoring lets you report any violation to the
manufacturer to keep the competitor inline for the sake of your business. You have
several price monitoring strategies in your arsenal.

If you sell products that others can buy from Google Shopping ads, you can meet
them or beat them in price. In my book Google Shopping for Shopify, I reveal how
you can use an automated discount feature to deliver a price real-time in Shopify
that beats the lowest-price competitor. If you don’t want prices to drop below a
certain margin, you can set rules for that.

Google Merchant Center has a price monitoring feature for advertisers with their
price competitiveness report. The report lets you compare shopping ads against
other advertisers. Be aware that the method only monitors products advertised in
Google Shopping.

A comprehensive strategy to track any store you choose is scraping. Create a Google
Sheet with the ImportXML rule and XPath data to pull common schema markup like
the product name, currency, and price. The downside of this method is it is
time-consuming to set up. You also cannot scrape data within JSON+LD, which a lot
of stores use for schema markup.

The most complete solution in Shopify that updates pricing for you based on
competition is PriceMole. The software monitors the prices and stock levels of your
competition then lets you automate your response with pricing strategies of your
choice.

When To Increase Prices

A price increase is the quickest and most dependable method to increase the profit
of an online store. If you charge a higher price per product and maintain the
conversion rate, you get extra profit per customer that can go towards ads. Paid

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advertising scales when you can spend more per visitor.

A store on tight margins gets the most relief from a price hike. An increase of 10%
can bring in 50% more profit provided it does not damage conversions.

If you sell an exclusive product, a price higher than competitor substitutes puts your
product as the quality option. The higher costs can form a halo effect to help
customers see your store as high-quality—provided all messages are aligned. Bear
in the mind, other factors impact the halo effect. If your store looks like it was
designed in 2005, a higher price just makes you over-priced.

Consider at what stage of the customer lifecycle the product is frequently

purchased. A customer who spends $2000 on a laptop is more willing to spend
extra on speakers from you in that purchase than from a competitor. People are
less price sensitive for low-cost items, up-sells, and cross-sells. Make the golf club
you sell competitively priced, then have good margin on the golf glove available as a
cross-sell at checkout.

It’s normal to be concerned that a price increase will terrify visitors. Your worst case
scenario is you decrease profits for a period. Your best case is you increase profits
for the life of the product. Test a few of your bestsellers at the start of the month for
measurement accuracy to see the effect for yourself.

Furthermore, give yourself the edge on pricing relative to your competitors with
value propositions. Irresistible guarantees and return policies are ways to
distinguish yourself from competition rather than a raw battle on price. Refer to the
second chapter on positioning in this conversion book for further help.

When To Lower Prices

Most people in most markets do not want the cheapest option. People buy based
on value. Your goal should be to charge a premium price then figure out how to
shape the product and marketing to deliver on it, to delight customers.

If your strategy is to competitively price products, lower prices leans towards high
conversion rates and extra repeat purchases. Your goal is to improve the economies
of scale by lowering the cost of goods sold. This works better with fixed overhead
costs. You enter a volume game instead of optimising profit per order.

Zooming in on individual products, the best product candidates for lower prices are
high-ticket items that are indifferentiable from cheaper alternatives or ones that
start the customer lifetime cycle with your store.

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If you have a high-ticket item that is indifferentiable, a more sustainable alternative
than lowering price is to create a competitive advantage. You can provide more
convenience through speed or location, warranties, guarantees, support, or digital
bonuses.

The most reliable way to lower prices is on one product that most of your
customers buy first. The loss-leader gets more customers through to your profitable
products. Use a loss-leader once you have multiple products to sell and automated
strategies built out. Without a funnel in place, you’ll never make the money back.

How To Increase Customer

Lifetime Value And Average
Order Value
Subscriptions
Harvard Business School found an increase in retention of 5% can increase profits
by 25-95%. A subscription makes future sales simple. Turn that one hard-earned
sale into six.

Your store’s business model could be built around subscriptions. Not enough
ecommerce entrepreneurs consider this for a business model. Loot Crate delivers
boxes each month with a collection of nerdy items from cups, posters, and clothing.
Club Jerky sends out an assortment of jerky flavours every month.

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If you have a fast-moving consumable good, offer a subscription option on the
product page. This is the most commonly known subscription strategy. Loop
Subscriptions lets you set up subscription payments in Shopify, control delivery
frequency, reduce involuntary churn by setting up automated dunning rules, gamify
subscriptions, and integrate with Klaviyo. Chamberlain Coffee lets customers pick
either one bag of coffee or put it on subscription at the desired frequency.

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Use this best practices and tactics to optimise your subscription:

✅ When setting up a subscription, consider that people are unsure of getting a

consumable on a repeated basis without first experiencing the product.

✅ Use Shopify data to predict the expected date of the next order. Klaviyo uses
this data to calculate the date on a per customer basis.

✅ Follow up on all non-subscriptions orders through email, at the time you

expect the product to be fully consumed, with a subscription option.

✅ When pricing subscriptions, test how the cost is displayed to make it appear
cheaper. Rather than a monthly price, try a daily price. If the price is
substituting something, like a tea replacing the daily latte, you can compare
the daily saving to the daily cost.

✅ Generally, you want to avoid expressing savings as percentage because

people struggle to quantify what they mean.

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 ✅ Consumption frequency matters a lot. If the frequency is too high, people will
cancel as they get a backlog of products. If the frequency is too low, you miss
profit by not getting your subscribers their purchase soon enough.

✅ Incorporate elements into your packaging that promote a subscription.

✅ Help customers succeed with your products by giving them educational
content. When customers get the results they want, they are more likely to
buy again and refer others.

✅ Email customers about an upcoming order. Include in the email a link to

FAQs.

Bundling
Bundles boost the average order value. They can also help conversions by providing
choice to different consumer segments.

A Harvard Business School piece looked at consumer behaviour and profit when
Nintendo bundled games with their console system. “Pure bundling” where the
pieces were only available together resulted in worse revenue than if the products
were available separately, or in a bundle and separately. People who didn’t care
about the bundled games, or were more price-sensitive, grabbed the bundle.
High-end gamers (me!) liked to spend more on the console then pick their desired
games.

The most important ecommerce rule of bundles is to make the items

complementary. What constitutes a complementary product can be logical to you or
gathered from your data of what people purchase with the primary product. The
Product Bundles app provides the technology to bundle products in Shopify.

You can offer a bundle option to buy additional items at a discount on the product
page, or you can create a standalone product that includes other products.
Manscaped has a bundled product that incorporates a customizable subscription
plan. This is my only active ecommerce subscription, which speaks volumes to how
they’ve executed it. You can let customers customise their boxes with my
recommended subscription software Loop Subscriptions.

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Cross-Sell And Upsell
A McKinsey report says 35% of Amazon’s revenue in 2006 came from product
recommendations. The report also says 75 percent of what people watch on Netflix
comes from product recommendations. Personalised suggestions at the right time
drive up revenue.

South Record Shop has what I presume is a suggestion of similar music yet provides
no context. Half-hazard promotions are likely to be ineffective.

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A cross-sell in commerce suggests another product prior to purchase. An upsell
either adds revenue to the order with a higher priced option prior to purchase or an
offer after payment. The two selling strategies are defined interchangeably in the
world of ecommerce.

Cross-sells and upsells are generally revenue boosters rather than conversion
boosters. The type of selling aims to increase profit-margins by getting people to
spend more. However, an upsell and cross-sell can affect conversions because they
give people a targeted alternative, alter confidence in the product, or present a
custom offer that prompts urgency.

There are many ways you can use the two selling strategies on your store to
increase profit:

● When someone buys a product, offer more of the same product at checkout
for a reduced cost.

● If someone looks at a $1,000 television, mention a model up in the product

suggestions section. This of course presumes the higher priced item is more
profitable. The presence alone of a higher priced item may increase revenue
4%.

● Test “You may also like” and “Customers who bought X also bought” sections
on the product page and checkout. Make the products complimentary to
increase uptake of the offer. If someone buys shoes, recommend socks that
match.

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 ● Add-ons I’ve seen work include extra warranties, product support
subscriptions, and training. People love these reassurances “just in case”.

Test your offer because it must not undermine the primary offer through distraction
or decreasing the shopper’s confidence. An upsell that makes a promise to achieve
x can cause abandonment when the shopper expects to get x from their original
purchase. Aside from the offer itself, the timing and design of the offer can be
tested.

To do the strategies in Shopify, ReConvert lets customers add additional items to

their purchase after payment. The Cross Sell & Cart Upsell app is one way a Shopify
store can pick the products they choose to sell with the product viewed. Each app
more than pays for itself.

Downsell
The downsell lives by the motto “any sale is better than no sale”. The person doesn’t
want a $500 suit? You give a discount or sell them a $300 suit.

Drew Sanocki from DesignPublic.com and a competitor were the only Google Ads
advertisers for a $10,000 lamp nicknamed Lampola. Drew stopped the ad campaign
because it gained zero sales yet the competitor continued. Years later Drew met the
competitor CEO over coffee then asked him if he sold any of the lamps? “No”, he
replied. “Then why were you advertising it so much? I noticed your ads everywhere.”
“Because the visitors who clicked on the Lampola ad came to our site and
purchased the Crapola, and they bought a ton of them.”

The Crapola lamp had high margins and high volume. The CEO was sure to include
the lamp as a suggested product for Lampola.

Not all downsells are healthy for business. Any sale is not better than no sale. A
downsell is laden with risk in ecommerce because the purchase funnel and life cycle
of a customer is not linear. Everyday people abandon cart on purpose to get a
discount in an email. Downsells are hard to do without jeopardising profits as you
train visitors to eat at profits.

The goal is to aim for maximum lifetime value rather than any sale. If you decide to
downsell with coupons, review your analytics to see how long it takes on average for
a shopper to buy. Test the follow up of email coupons around this time period. Even
then, you have to consider future purchases. What’s your average customer lifetime
value?

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All things equal, you are more likely to cut profit from price cuts when you sell
exclusive products because your visitors have fewer perceived options.

The most reliable downsell is a cheaper product in a “similar items” listing on the
product page. It could have less features or be a model down. If it has higher
margins at a lower cost to the customer, that’s better for your bottom-line.

Price Principles For All

How To Price For Free Delivery
You hurt conversions and profit with an unoptimized delivery cost to the customer.
When the visitor is required to visit the checkout to see delivery charges, your
abandonment rate will always be higher than its potential. Unexpected charges are
the number one reason for cart abandonment.

Free is a power word in the English language that makes people do irrational things.
In a famous study cited by Dan Ariely, Lindt chocolate truffles were battled against
Hershey Kisses. 73% of people chose the Lindt chocolate when it was available for
15 cents compared to 27% of people who chose the Hershey Kiss for 1 cent. When
each chocolate was lowered by one cent, 69% of people picked the free Hershey
Kiss. We love a deal and even more love a steal.

Free delivery gets people to buy more when done right. When poorly executed, it
eats profits. How can you ensure free delivery builds your profits more than
charging for delivery?

The most popular method by retailers for free shipping is a minimum order value
(MOV). Free shipping is provided to customers once their order gets above a certain
total.

Provide an up-sell to push the visitor to free shipping when you have a MOV and the
order amount is short. Monster Upsells sends a clear message of how much more a
customer needs to spend in the order to qualify for free shipping. Golden Greens
Organic uses the app to show the shopper the dollar amount to reach free shipping.
A second threshold, that is higher than free shipping, is shown as the goal post to
get a free gift.

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A MOV works when a percentage of customers spend extra to meet the
requirement. Pick a MOV that is a percentage above your average order value and
average shipping cost while giving extra profit.

You likely think about average order value in the wrong way. Your AOV is revenue
divided by the number of orders. By definition, it is an average. Store owners look at
their AOV in an attempt to raise it by setting a free shipping threshold about it.
Whether the strategy works is a dice roll.

You can be more certain by grasping the statistical concept of “mode”. The mode is
the most frequent number in the sequence.

Let’s say you sell a protein supplement for $50 and t-shirt for $20. The free shipping
threshold is at $40. Your order history for the day looks like $20, $50, $50, $70, $20,
$20, $50, $20. Your AOV calculates to $300/8 = $37.5. Does anyone ever make an
order for $37.5? No, they don’t. But a free shipping threshold, or Facebook bid cap,
is often based on this information.

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The number you care about is your mode—here it is $20 as there are 4 orders of
that amount. You’ll likely get more profit setting the free shipping threshold, and
cost cap bid, 25% above that amount at $25 than $40.

The next step is to dig into all $20 orders to see what they consist of. Export your
orders for as long of a timeframe as possible that reflects your current inventory
strategy, sort from high to low, then eliminate the orders far outside your mode.

In our example, we know it’s one product with a new price. Reality will have orders
containing varied prices so look at orders above and below your mode. When you’ve
done that, you can strategize to increase the value of those orders.

Make free shipping obvious early with a value proposition in the header and
automatic at checkout to simplify the promise for people. Do not require any
coupons. One retailer cut the requirement of coupons for orders over $100 to
increase conversions by 50%.

With your new free shipping threshold, unleash it at the start of the day. Track it to
see the effect on average order value and conversion rate. Once you have acquired
enough data from different shipping offers, use our free online store and shipping
calculator tool to see what gets you the most profit.

The Left-Digit Effect

Psychologists found the first digit in a group of numbers exert more influence than
the digits that follow. A price of 79.99 is judged mostly by its “7”. It’s not accidental
the price of Dyson products in Target are jacked with nines.

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The left-digit effect has three implications for retail. Firstly, we interpret prices by
slashing off the remaining digits. The rule of retail is to end your prices in “7” and “9”
because repeated studies have found these prices to get more sales. An MIT and
University of Chicago study found a clothing item sold best at $39 compared to $44
and $34.

Secondly, reconsider the use of cents for items where quality is important. “[99-cent
endings] can give the image that an item is of low or questionable quality,” says
Robert Schindler, a professor of marketing at Rutgers University. A bargain-oriented
store should use cents everywhere.

Thirdly, whenever you discount, consider the change on the first digit. A cut from
$357 to $307 is far less appealing than if it were $297. It’s not just the $10 difference
that has an influence, but the left-digit effect. A price of $4.6, down from $4.7, is less
appealing than a price of $4.9, down from $5. The right price is not always the
lowest price.

Use Zeros Wisely

Prices can appear higher by adding zeros to the end like $19.00. The strategy is
good when you want prices to be seen high like for free gifts or the standard price
of individual items within bundles.

On the flipside, prices can appear lower by removing zeros from the end like $19.
Most products should be priced without decimals to lengthen the gap between the
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perceived low price and high value.

Make Prices Clear

Baymard Institute surveyed 4384 respondents in the US for the reasons they’ve
abandoned cart online in the past 3 months. The study found an unclear total price
paid by the customer as the number one reason for cart abandonment:

Display your price and every possible charge clearly on the product and cart pages.
Communicate all tax, delivery, and return charges. Wristwatch company MVMT
makes clear the pricing of the product, and all other charges, to lower cart
abandonment rates.

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A flat-fee, or free, delivery cost saves people from having to calculate the total
themselves or proceeding to the checkout to view the full price.

Pricing is a crucial aspect of any ecommerce business as it determines profit and

influences the conversion rate of your Shopify store. A well-optimised pricing
strategy can help you attract and retain customers, boost sales, and increase
revenue. However, finding the right balance between profitability and affordability
can be challenging, and it requires constant testing and tweaking. By implementing
the pricing strategies and psychological tactics outlined in the chapter, you can
profitably scale your Shopify store in a competitive market.

Suggested Resources
● Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by
William Poundstone.

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 ● Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

● I cannot recommend Loop Subscriptions enough to grow your recurring

revenue.

You’ve almost finished learning all the best ways to get more customers from
visitors. The last part is the final step of the purchase where you learn how to make
your checkout compel people to buy.

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Part 7: Checkout

​ ow To Make Your Checkout

H
Compel Visitors To Buy
“Like an airplane pilot landing in the dark, we
want runway lights on either side of us, guiding
us to the place where we can touch down our
wheels… Thinking is difficult and sometimes
unpleasant.”
Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational

mprove near the money. The conversion rate motto says to prioritise checkout
optimization because fears, doubts, and questions surface when it’s time to
pay. Any last drop of anxiety, deficiency in credibility, or doubt about the
product, divulges at checkout. Expect an element to have greater influence on profit

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the closer it is to when the customer is charged for their purchase.

Shopify handles a lot of what makes a good checkout page, yet there are
customizations possible to increase sales. You’re about to learn how to make your
checkout a smooth sequence of ease and reassurance.

This chapter on checkout optimization covers advice that is unique to pages from
the cart to payment confirmation. For example, a free delivery threshold reduces
cart abandonment, but the tactic is revealed earlier in the chapter on product page
optimizations so it is not shared here. Follow other chapters of the book to squeeze
more sales out of the checkout. Read every prior lesson on design—especially social
proof and usability testing—plus upsells, cross-sells, and down-sells to optimise the
checkout for shoppers.

Laws Of The Checkout

Cement Trust
Most trust should be established before the checkout. You have learned the
ecommerce trust-builders like live chat, trust icons, value propositions, and policies
like guarantees, shipping, and returns.

Repetition of trust messages can still boost sales. Turntable Lab decorates their cart
page with messages of security, free shipping, lifetime technical support, and a
customer phone number. The trust-builders are brilliant, but their mistake is the
visual prioritisation of what to click next.

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Pirate Fashions list the top three concerns and questions people have during
checkout on the cart page.

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If you are not on Shopify Plus, you have limited control over the checkout page
design. A little hack to build trust is to customise the logo used on the page with
extra trust messages. In the one image you can include other images to let people
know they can call you to get last-minute questions answered. The funny thing is,
most people will not call—the number provides confidence that customer support is
real and available.

A survey or live chat at checkout can reveal where your store most lacks trust. Refer
to the positioning chapter for the best post-purchase survey questions to ask.
Record questions then support’s answers in a Google sheet. Use the captured data
by addressing objections before they arise to increase the conversion rate.

Always Upsell
The cart page is another chance to increase the average order value by offering an
upsell. Prompt visitors to order something else to complement a product in their
cart or meet the minimum order value for free shipping.

I’ve seen a slipper company suggest a slipper bag and gift wrap. I also saw a shoe
company suggest shoe horns when I viewed my shopping cart that had a pair of
shoes in them.

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The PetLab Co. offered me paw balm and an ear spray at a heavily discounted price.
The items were framed as a bundle, available to be added to cart beneath the
dental kit subscription I added to cart.

Provide an explanation why it complements their purchase to increase conversions.

Carnivore Snax uses GrowLTV to offer a subscription on a one-time jerky order
while also suggesting other products people love to help reach the free shipping
threshold.

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On top of product upsells, provide a small service upsell that costs no more than $4.
The goal is to increase profit per order. The checkout page can offer “Priority
processing”, “Expedited delivery”, “Present wrapping”, or a “Shipping protection
plan”.

I tested a shipping protection plan for one client using Navidium Shipping
Protection. The service upsell has customers get their order sent again if their item
is lost or damaged in transit. After 1,000 orders, it had an 83% uptake rate on all
sales with no impact on conversion rate. Previously, the company would resend
orders when items became lost or damaged, but now the service is packaged as a
product for more profit.

Diversify Payment Options

What payment options should you provide for the store? There is no answer that
one payment method is best. The best payment methods are trusted by customers,
minimise the effort to buy, and even help fund the purchase.

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If it is available in your country, enable Shopify Payments offered to Shopify through
Stripe. Enable Google Pay, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and Shop Pay that saves people
from having to find their credit card. I also suggest enabling PayPal. A Nielsen study
found that merchants get a 28% higher conversion rate when PayPal is offered.

The payment method you select can also affect average order value so if you’re
testing payment options, consider that metric. When skin care brand Kiramoon
enabled PayPal at checkout, the average order value of customers that paid through
PayPal was 6.25% higher than other payment methods.

On top of the payment method, let customers pay the full amount of their order
later in instalments. PayPal, Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay are all payment providers
with a buy now, pay later solution. My favourite is Shopify’s Shop Pay that lets
customers pay in 4 interest-free payments or monthly instalments up to 12 months.
Shopify claims the flexible payment method can result in “up to 50% increase in
average order value” and “up to 28% fewer abandoned carts”.

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 Forms And Fields For Checkout
Optimization
The Three Hundred Million-Dollar
Button
One form made of two fields, two buttons, and one link stopped 45% of customers
purchasing from a major ecommerce site. When fixed, the store saw an extra $300
million in sales over the following 12 months.

The solution had such an impact because people had to register an account before
checkout. Visitors could not remember their email, had difficulty authenticating
their account, and experienced problems resetting their password. When all of this
went fine for visitors, emails were lost in the spam folder.

In place of the account registration form, the designers put a “Continue” button with
a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our
site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases
even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

Do not require people to register an account. Full stop. Enable the guest checkout
option in Shopify by going to “Settings” > “Checkout”. Disable the setting, “Require
the customer to log in to their account before checkout“.

Customise Opt-In Text

Having more interested people on your marketing lists is always better than less.
Capturing the emails or mobile numbers of engaged shoppers results in better
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conversions from quality traffic.

Improve the email opt-in offer at checkout. Shopify’s default email opt-in description
is “Email me with news and offers”. Keto-cereal company Magic Spoon is losing
email subscribers with a bland invitation to opt-in.

You can collect subscribers at the checkout and edit the opt-in description within
Shopify by following these steps:

1. Log into the Shopify admin.

2. Click “Settings” > “Checkout”.

3. Scroll down to “Marketing options” then enable the “Email” and “SMS”
options. (If you’re not doing SMS, it is an easy channel to add revenue. We can
launch your SMS for you.)

4. Click “Save”.

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 5. Click “Customize sign-up labels” in the “Marketing options” section to edit the
text. If your brand is fun and funky, make your message reflect that. Give
people a reason to subscribe.

Make Fields Optional Or Explain Them

Marketers crave information on their customers. The digital manifestation of this
desire are web forms that ask for more information than required. Users feel
invaded when asked to provide seemingly unnecessary information.

The Baymard Institute from their usability tests recommend an approach of “make
it optional or explain it”. Mark every field as either required or optional to create a
smooth checkout process. Tests show people intensely focus on one field at a time
and need to be told simply what is to be filled. The text of “Required” or “Optional”
next to each field is effective, as opposed to the vague red asterisk.

If a piece of data is not needed to process a person’s order, don’t even present the
field. The next best option is to make the field optional. Required fields are more
likely to impact abandonment than optional fields, because when someone wants
to avoid an optional field they go to the next step.

Change the required fields, like company information, address line 2, and phone for
your store by going to your Shopify admin then “Settings” > “Checkout and
accounts”. People are more willing to share personal information for expensive
purchases like a laptop where they want to be easily reached as opposed to an
impulse buy of a shirt.

Another field that can be removed on the cart page is order notes. The purpose of
the order notes field on the cart page is often unclear and can be disabled most of
the time.

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Another rule for field optimization proven effective in ecommerce is to explain why
the data is needed. People will wonder, “Why do you need my full name?” or “Why
are you asking for my phone number when you already have my email?” It is
obvious to you why you need their email, but not all people know their email is used
to send tracking information or an order summary. Explain that phone numbers are
required to process orders through customs in Australia.

Share the reason you request such information beneath the label rather than hiding
it behind a tool-tip. Shopify Plus users can customise the labels at checkout while
others can alter the placeholder text. The Baymard Institute found the best
justification for requesting a phone number is, “Only used to contact you in case of
problems with your order or delivery.”

Minimise Effort
Any time you minimise the effort for shoppers to checkout, you are likely to
increase revenue. Check off these best practices to make the checkout simple for
shoppers:

1. Use Shopify’s one-page checkout. Fewer fields and page loads reduce friction.

2. The “Tab” key can be used for effortless navigation between form input fields.

3. The numeric keyboard appears for number-only fields on mobile devices.

4. The width of input fields correspond to the expected data entered into it. For
example, a credit card security number field should be smaller than the credit
card number field.

5. Dedicated buttons for “@” and “.com” appear when entering an email field on
mobile devices.

6. Placeholders of input fields save thinking or reduce doubt.

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 7. When a user leaves the checkout, input fields save allowing the user to
continue checkout at a later time.

8. Clear error messages displayed for improperly completed input fields, with
guidance for correction.

9. The billing address can be set from the shipping address to avoid duplicate
entries. In Shopify, go to “Settings” > “Checkout” then check “Use the shipping
address as the billing address by default“.

10. A street address database prevents user errors in address entry and speeds
up the completion of forms. In Shopify, go to “Settings” > “Checkout” then
check “Use address autocompletion”.

Coupon Fields And Remorse

The coupon field disrupts the purchase when the visitor does not have a coupon.
People are enticed to leave the checkout, jump over to Google, and search the
brand plus “coupons”, “promo code” and “discount code”. If they fail to find one,
they either abandon checkout or proceed feeling disappointment that they’re
missing out.

One approach to handle this is to give the visitor a coupon on a page, FAQ or blog
post that is SEO-optimised for coupon searches. On the page, have an email capture
to claim the coupon. Request something from the person if you’re going to give
away profit. Display the coupon immediately to new subscribers through the page
to discourage checkout abandonment.

The second approach is to remove the form field altogether. Bionic Gloves, who sell
a variety of sport gloves, tested removing their coupon field and increased revenue
24.7%.

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 The Thank You Page
The customer sees the thank you page after his or her purchase. Every thank you
page should do the following:

1. Clearly confirm a successful purchase completion. Congratulate the user to

affirm their choice. In Shopify, you can personalise the congratulations with
relevant content based on the order.

2. Summarise order contents.

3. Provide delivery date and courier information.

4. Offer easy contact options through live chat, email, or phone.

5. Explain the package tracking process.

6. Include a clear ask that is valuable to the business.

The last point can be asking the customer to refer a friend, like the store on
Facebook, do a survey, or make another purchase. Most direct-to-consumer brands
would do best to provide an upsell and show a post-purchase survey. People who
missed earlier cross-sells and upsells may still buy these products. ReConvert lets
you customise the thank you page, offer upsells, and run surveys.

Analytics company RJ Metrics studied 176 ecommerce retailers and 18-million

customers to find, “The fastest growing ecommerce companies have a customer
lifetime value 79% higher than their peers.” The research went on to reveal the first
90 days is critical to get the customer purchasing again to build a high lifetime value.

All of the contents on the thank you page, can be replicated in the order
confirmation email to further boost conversions. If you offered a coupon code on
the thank you page, include it in the email. If an upsell was offered on the thank you
page, include it in the email. The worst mistake is not asking your new customer to
do something.

Where To Next?
Well done on reaching the end of the ultimate guide to boost your Shopify
conversion rate!

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What you finish reading means nothing if you fail to apply the lessons. Learning is
behavioural change. Every day you put off conversion optimization is another day
sales fall through your hands.

All I ask of you is to make one simple change right now that will have a large impact.
Create a free delivery threshold calculated from the average order value, fix broken
links, or change the price of your best-seller. If you’re uncertain of yourself or short
on time, get someone you trust to execute this conversion plan. We’d be happy to
help.

Once you get your first lift in revenue from conversion optimization, you will
become addicted to the process. Go on and seize your first victory.

​About the Author

Joshua Uebergang is owner and Head of Strategy at Digital Darts, a
certified Shopify Marketing Expert company. He helps Shopify stores
rapidly get more visitors and profit. At 6’9″, he plays basketball. If you
liked the guide and want help to increase your sales, see the Digital
Darts growth services for Shopify.

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