Do you wish your Shopify store was performing better than it
is? Would you like to increase your
conversion rate and also get more traffic to your store?
Well, whatever size business you are, I'm going to reveal 5
things today that I find in a lot of Shopify stores that are
not as they should be. And when we fix them, we see
revenue increase pretty quickly. These are the Confessions of a
Shopify store owner, not me, but the brands that I work with.
And if you haven't tuned in before, my name's Nick and I've
been hosting the show since June 2020.
So we literally were sending this out on the 2nd of June.
So I am just about to hit six years running the podcast, which
is super awesome. And what a journey we have been
on as well. Anyway, let's dive in today.
So number one is shop pay. I love shop pay.
You can type in your e-mail address and you can purchase.
You can monitor all of your delivery notifications and
everything else that's happening through all your purchases from
Amazon and eBay and loads and loads of other places all
through the Shop Pay app. Why is that a bad thing, Nick?
Well, lots of stores have a buy with Shop Pay or a check out
with Apple Pay. Check out with Google, I think
it's called Google Pay. I'm not a Google user, so sorry.
But you have all these quick express checkout options on a
product page. Now, the way to test if you've
configured this properly or whether you're making the
mistake that lots of Shopify brands are that I talked to, is
to add lots of items to cart, different items.
So go on three or four different product pages, add those items
to the cart. Now go on a different item,
something that you haven't just visited.
Go on a different item and instead of adding to cart, click
that Buy with Shop pay button or buy with Apple Pay and see how
many items are in your checkout. So you click that button and
what often happens in the store, and this is where it is one of
the easiest and fastest things you can do to increase sales is
when you click that button, it goes to a single item checkout.
It ignores all the other things you've added to checkout.
Now pause this podcast and go and check if that is working
correctly on your store or not. Assuming you pause the podcast.
Welcome back. If you didn't pause the podcast,
then please pull the podcast and go and try that thing because
you'd be amazed. It's probably about 20 to 30% of
Shopify stores we look at have that running.
And the other problem with it as well that I probably should have
said a minute ago, which hopefully you've now fixed it if
it was a problem, is shop pay often is the bright pink purple
button and the add to cart is often like an outline button.
You want to make add to cart really big visible and in nice
big bright colour. The reason being is
psychologically customers then are looking at the add to cart
button or add to basket button and it is drawing their
attention. So it's keeping their focus on
the right question. And I talk about it's a lot.
What's what question is your web page asking?
And it's asking the right question now, which is do you
want to add to basket yet? And let's, let's start that
journey. Let's, let's make our our first
little commitment towards a sale.
The second one, we're going to get a bit more nerdy.
Now we're going to talk about SEO specifically, but it does
affect other channels. But SEO is by far the biggest
channel I see brands missing out on loads and loads of traffic
and revenue from this. So the context of this second
point is there is only so much server capacity that Google will
grant to you to go and crawl your site to decide what to
index for SEO purposes. Normally Google will run out of
energy in server capacity or crawl budget we call it.
It will run out of energy basically and it will stop
crawling the sites before it has actually even finished.
And if it stops crawling the site before it's finished, it's
not going to index stuff. And no, you know, no website at
that stage is going to have every single thing they want to
be indexed, indexed on Google. And what I mean by that is if
you're not indexed on Google, your pages are not going to
appear. And this thing I'm just going
to, I'm going to try and explain as simply as possible without
any visuals is one of the biggest things that exhausts
that crawl budget. So Google will miss important
collections and products. Those are the main two things
you want Google to be crawling on your sites.
And indexing is collections and products.
Crawling is where Google looks at it.
Indexing is it's now in Google's index and it can appear on
Google. If it's not in their index, it
cannot appear on Google. So it has to find it.
What it is, is if you go to a collection on your site on your
Shopify store and then click on a product.
Now look at the URL of that product.
If the URL has forward slash collections slash the name of
the collection that you found it through or any collection.
So it's got. So on the product page it has
slash collections slash name of collection slash products slash
the name of the product you're on.
You have this issue and the issue is Google will find every
single one of your products on the URL that's just your website
dot whatever you're on dot com. For example products name of
product. Google will find every single
product without that collection part of the URL in the URL.
If that collection part's in there, that collection part will
appear as one URL and you'll have a second URL which is just
forward slash products slash name of products.
And if that product's in five collections, you'll have 5
collection URLs and one product one.
Which means Google's crawling the same page 6 times and it
should only crawl it once. Not only that, Google will
probably mark you down on SEO for having duplicate content.
It's called Google will say there's only one page that you
should only really have one page with this content on it.
And this is the page that we should have is what we should
say to Google. And that is just the forward
slash products, forward slash name of products.
Depending on your store set up, this might be a bit more
complicated than the last one, which will just be in removing
shop pay as an option on the PDP pages.
I should have said that actually, sorry, it's Monday
morning when I'm recording this and I've had a very long weekend
and but you will need to do a little bit of dev work.
You can possibly ask Shopify sidekick, the AI for some help
on this. But you want to make it so that
when you click on a product through a collection, you only
get the forward slash products, forward slash name of product.
You only want that URL to exist on your site.
You do not whatever want to have forward slash collections,
forward slash name of product, sorry, name of collection in a
product URL. That's the output.
So you manage to bet at Google. You might talk to a developer or
find somebody that can help with that to get that sorted.
Number one thing we check on every Shopify store when we
first start working with people #3 I love this.
I've basically said remind the customer of their rights.
And this is so effective because in most countries, I've, I've
read lots of surveys on this, in most countries, most customers,
we're talking about 80 to 90% don't know even the basic
customer rights in that country's like law.
They don't even know the basic customer rights, let alone some
of the more nuanced advanced ones.
You as a seller should be fully aware of the selling laws in
your country. And one of them, certainly in
the UK and in lots of other countries, is a customer's right
to return. Now, I'm not suggesting for a
second you're not letting people return.
And well, the other thing as well is if you return an item,
you should be due a refund. There are nuances and we'll come
back to this on the next point in a minute talking about
returns specifically, but generally speaking, most
countries have a like 30 day money back guarantee.
And that's just the item wasn't what I expected.
I don't like it, It doesn't work, it doesn't do what I need
it to. It's not fit for purpose.
I want to send it back and there's loads of clauses around
this like has to be in full original branded packaging, it
has to be in full working order, can't show any signs of damage,
can't show any signs of use, all that sort of stuff.
But next to the add to cart or buy button on your site, again,
previous point, best have an add to cart buttons.
People buy multiple items. But next the add to cart button,
Why don't you put some italic text underneath the classic 2
that we tend to use. There's no quibble guarantees
and 30 day money back guarantee. It's so simple, but it just
reassures someone at the point of like, which is basically
saying someone, there's no risk with this at all.
You can send it back if you're not happy and we'll give you a
refund. And those are just your rights
as a customer. But there's a 30 day money back
guarantee. Go on, add it to cart.
Add it to cart. See if it fits, see if it works,
see if it's as good and fills as high premium quality as we are
making out, or whatever your USPS for that product are.
And that you would not believe that 2030% increase in revenue
just by adding that to the site is so quick and easy.
And it really is part of our secret sauce, right #4 Let's
open Pandora's box. I can hear some of you screaming
already before I've even said the words charging for returns.
I don't think brands should charge customers to return
items. I know, controversial.
Some items are heavy, they're expensive, they cost a lot
especially in the USA. Lot of shipping costs and stuff
like that. But hear me out.
Similar to the previous point and similar to other podcasts
I've been through before and other things I've shared and
then things guests have shared. If you are confident in your
product and you've described it well, you've got great
photography and it's a good product.
If you're confident enough in your product would then no one's
going to return it at all, are they?
So why would you even say to people they have to pay to
return the item so that you're not saying free returns?
Again, the money back guarantee minus the delivery cost and you
have to package it up yourself and the, you know, the packaging
we send can't really be reused. You got to package up yourself,
then you got to take it to your local post office or
distribution centre, drop it off there and you've got to pay for
it, especially if it's on a heavy item.
Someone will be offering free returns and free delivery.
And I know it's a heavy item, but that's where you need to get
your margins right. So many e-commerce businesses I
work with, they hemorrhage money.
They waste so much money on such silly little things.
This is a good place to invest money.
Instead of spending money on warehouse staff, they're just
sitting around most of the day or even doing warehousing there.
There are so many other better three PO options now where
warehousing can be cheaper. There are companies wasting tons
of money on display ads and they're not.
They're not actually contributing any revenue to the
business at all. We'll stop doing that and start
spending that money on paid for returns.
Like returns are free to the customer now and and again it
you see an uplift in revenue from doing that.
Plus, if someone's thinking I'm going to have to pay to return
this item, they're already pessimistic about the item
before the items even arrived. And that is a big, big problem.
Again, the question you're asking now is do you want to
return it or not? Don't even talk about returns.
Just say they're free, free returns.
I saw a case study of I believe it was New Look here in the UK
and I can't remember the stats, but I remember being at the
conference and they said it took them a few years to get the
accounts department to sign off free returns and when they did,
returns actually decreased slightly.
They didn't increase, they decreased slightly.
And yes, they now had to pay for those returns, but the
increasing conversion outweighed the additional cost in return in
paying for customer returns. The additional revenue without
investing any more money and profit outweighed the cost of
those returns several fold. It was one of the best financial
decisions they ever made was to offer free returns.
So especially you guys in the USI know it's mad in the US, the
delivery and other sect because you guys are such a big country
to move things via planes, trains, etcetera.
I know it's easier for us on our little island over here in the
UK drinking our tea. But consider free returns.
You could always test it for 30 days.
You can even run it as a campaign.
You know, we're offering free returns 30 days only on our big
large bulk on all items. And we got some really big large
bulky items. If more people buy and no
returns, keep it, just keep it #5 this is the other thing that
I think is a quick fix and it's a process change internally.
It is. In fact, I've got my laptop
here. I'm going to Google it.
How much it costs for Shogun on Shopify is an amazing app.
We're not endorsed by them at all, $39.00 a month and you can
run a theme or template test, an AB test on Shogun.
How awesome is that $39.00? But if you can't afford $39.00 a
month, you should not be listening to this podcast.
You do not have a business yet. And obviously I'm saying that
very sarcastically, but the point here is so many brands are
just doing stuff. They're like, oh, we got a new
design, we're just going to roll it out.
And what you're doing, Shopify, you can just test the themes and
like, but we know it's better. We know revenue is going to go
up and then they start these big kind of macro reports every
month saying like total revenues up 20% or it's up 8% since we
rolled out that new, that new theme, the new theme cost, this
is going to pay for itself in nine weeks.
Happy days. What if two of your five
channels dropped, one went up astronomically, and two stayed
the same? Wouldn't you want to know that?
Because now you're not just rolling out a brand update, a
theme update. You're working smarter, not
harder. You roll up the initial update
as an AB test, and then you monitor the analytics to see
what individual channels do, see what happens to add to carts,
see what happens to revenue per user, see what happens to your
actual conversion rate. There's so many nuances
underneath that big macro. How much did revenue go up that
you might be missing sales that would be so easy to actually
undo something you've done in the new theme or change
something again to at least get back to kind of square one on
that thing, which now means your 9% become 1415% from this.
My point really being is test everything as you roll it out.
And secondly, these things are not linear.
The more data you get and the more you look at that data and
the data is not difficult or complicated or time consuming to
analyze, the more you then go, right, we've got this budget to
redesign the site. Well, actually, let's just make,
let's use that budget to make 5 rounds of tweaks rather than one
big update because the site then will convert better maybe two of
the five things we have a decrease in conversion.
Well, good job. We didn't do that in the theme
update. So Shogun's the cheapest 1 I can
find. There's Shoplift, there's
Intelligems, there's loads of core AB testing tools that we
use across Shopify. But for $39.00 a month on
Shogun, it's the cheapest I've found so far that does
everything I need it to and gives half decent analytics.
Most of the buttons that you do have to click upgrade my package
to use a lot of them. But we're using that for two of
our clients at the moment, which is absolutely, absolutely
brilliant. But if you've enjoyed this and
you want help, my agency does PPC SEO.
If you're turning over over a million a year in revenue,
either dollars or pounds, we'd love to have a conversation.
Any less than that, feel free to reach out.
I'm happy to give you guys some advice on e-mail as well, but
thanks for tuning in. If you want to check out our
agency, it's Spec dot Digital, Spec dot digital.
Hope you can join us again on Friday for another brand episode
or it might be, I don't know what's coming up this week.
I haven't checked the schedule, but every Friday I have a guest
with me anyway. But TuneIn on Friday, if you can
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See you next time, yeah?