From $2K to $200K/Month: The Post-Purchase Upsell System with Nizar Abdul-Halim ($100M+ in Ad Spend)
51m 43s
In this episode, Nizar Abdul Halim shares his expertise on leveraging post-purchase funnels to transform e-commerce profitability. With nearly a decade in e-commerce and over $100 million in ad spend, he discovered that optimizing what happens after checkout—rather than focusing solely on front-end acquisition—can flip unit economics. For brands running break-even or loss-making ads, especially in supplements, post-purchase funnels can recoup costs immediately by increasing AOV and first-order profit, making them cash-flow positive day one. Nizar emphasizes that while most brands set up basic funnels, they neglect continuous testing, leaving significant money on the table—often just $2K monthly versus $100K+ with proper optimization.
He outlines a systematic approach: testing in five buckets (products, pricing, copy, page design, and segmentation), starting with the most expensive upsell to anchor prices, and focusing on profit per visit rather than revenue per visit. For one-time customer brands, aggressive, urgency-based offers work, while retention-focused brands need softer messaging and tailored funnels. Premium brands can use free gifts instead of discounts to maintain value. Segmentation, such as VIP tags or purchase history, further boosts performance. Nizar concludes that post-purchase is an underutilized, high-margin channel, and even a quick win—like analyzing top co-purchased products via Shopify's AI—can unlock immediate revenue gains.
Welcome back to e-commerce growth insider, the show where we actually break down
what's working to scale e-commerce brands proftably. Today's guest is Nizar Abdul Halim,
a guy who spent an e-commerce for almost a decade, has built multiple seven-figure e-commerce
brands and spent over $100 million on paid ads for his brands and clients. But what he's
obsessed with now is in paid ads. It's what happens right after the customer clicks to buy.
Because if you break even or even losing money on the first order, Nizar shows you how post-purchase
funnels can flip your entire unit economics by increasing AOV and first order profit without
even touching your front end conversion rate. In this episode we go deep on his exact system,
the three layers of liquidation, why upsells are a logical yes and not an emotional one,
why he starts with the most expensive offer first and how he tests in five buckets to scale revenue
per visit and more importantly profit per visit. If you run a Shopify brand and you want to unlock
a real margin without increasing the outspent, this one is a must. Let's dive in. Hines are excited
to have you on. Likewise, thank you for hitting me up, man. I know it's been a long time in the
making and my, uh, obviously been moving around a lot, but hopefully now we can, you know, hop on
this and give some people some value. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, you've built multiple seven
figure, seven figure brands before you spend more than 25 million on ads. I think probably way more
by now, um, and you're obsessed with, with what happens after they check out. What was the moment
where you realized that post-purchase was the growth lever for brands? Yeah, I mean, to give you
some context, I mean, obviously, like you said, I've been an e-com for almost a decade now, um,
ran up my own stores, ran an ad agency. We spent over a hundred million on ads over the last
couple of years. I mean, up until like a couple months ago, we were even spending close to two
and a half million a month. So I mean, that alone is pretty decent, I would say volume-wise, but
the idea of post-purchase isn't new. It isn't something that we just found out about, like ever
since I was running my own stores, it was kind of like a default thing everyone did. Like you just
set up a post-purchase file. Now, the actual attention to detail that went into building a post-purchase
file, that's the thing that changed because like before, um, we would just set it up, like put random
offers, like anything just to get like a little bit more, even five dollars more and call it a day.
But the reality is, is like, when I started to work with a lot of these bigger brands, like brands
that are spending 50, 60, 70, 100-K a day on Facebook, we started to realize that, yes, we're
willing to lose money on acquisition or break even, especially if you're a supplement brand.
Almost everybody I know who's doing over a million dollars a month on a supplement brand is
running break even or at a loss on the front end and then they recoup all of it on the back end.
Whether the back end be the subscriptions because that's where they're getting the majority of the
revenue or email marketing for the non-subscribers, etc. What we found is when we came in and built
post-purchase files and actually, you know, gave this channel the attention it deserved when it came
to like proper split testing, genuinely taking this seriously. We were able to not only offset the,
like, break even or lost on the front end, like we were, there was points where we were actually
profitable. So it changed the entire dynamic of the business because, you know, initially,
someone's spending $35, $40 or let's say $60 to acquire $50 subscription. They're losing $10
plus cogs on the first order. They have an LTV of three to four months. That's how they're making
their money. Now we can make them back $10 from the funnels and now all of a sudden they went
from losing to making money, which means on, you know, if we're, if they're doing, you know,
$50, $60, $100 a day, that could be easily like $15,000 or whatever $10,000 orders a day or whatever
the number it is, right? So in that case, you know, they can not only recoup it, but now they're
cash flow positive day one or if they're at a loss, they can get to break even. Or in general,
like this isn't work for subscriptions pretty much everybody. But the reality is is that we kind of
saw that on one of the brands we were running. So we did it on another one and it worked,
did it on another one and it worked. And then we were like, okay, let's see if you will pay for
this. So then I started posting about it on Twitter. I had one guy. His name is Frank Gabriel. He's
one of the first people that reached out to me. We set it up for him. He was one of our first
ever case studies as well. We crushed it for him. He told all this friends. They were all doing like
eight, nine figures. They all came in and very slowly, very quickly, sorry, the business grew and
it became basically way bigger than what we do now. What we used to do with ads. And now like I said,
we got like, you know, 80 plus brands are doing post purchase for most of them are in like the
one to five million. We have some people doing 10 million, 15 million, 20 million dollars a month.
And post purchases like a huge lever for them now more than ever because CPMs keep going up.
So they have to figure out ways to come combat like the higher CPAs that they're getting on Facebook.
I'm not just Facebook, any platform, but I mean, Facebook's the biggest spending one. So yeah,
I mean, long story short, we there was a problem. I figured out this was a solution. We spent
a year and a half testing across hundreds of stores until we came the best at it. And now, I mean,
even the software after sell, they send us, you know, eight and nine figure brands all the time.
So, you know, they sent us like partnerships like true classic. Some of the other ones you see on my
page like huge, huge, huge, like multi nine figure brands. And yeah, I mean, it's kind of just kind of
when I went from there. Yeah, I mean, that's amazing. And I know so many brands that would kill for like
to be profitable on the first order or at least to break even because yeah, as you as you mentioned,
especially in the supplement industry and especially if you want to scale, scale fast, like you,
like pretty much every brand loses a lot of money on the custom requisition. And then if they,
like if they're lucky, they make it back after maybe 30 days for some, it's even 60 or 90 days.
And obviously, that is, that puts a lot of risk on the business leads to a lot of cash flow
issues like they can't scale up the outspend as fast as they would like to because they always need
to wait those 60 days, 90 days until the customer comes back. And if you then can like pluck something
in that makes sure that the customer is profitable right away, that's like life changing for them.
Yeah, I mean, that's also a big thing as well. Like email marketing is very important. Don't
any wrong. But the problem with email marketing is that it pays you back in like 60 days or 30 days
versus when you do this, you get paid back now and in 30 and 60 days from emails. So it doesn't
hinder emails. If anything, it does better because when you email your existing customers or
customers that didn't convert the first time, they're coming in even warmer. They're going to
convert higher on those funnels. So what we've seen is the LTV, the lifetime LTV of a customer
goes up by like 50 to 100% when you have these funnels set up properly, where day one you're making
15, 20% more AOV, but then day 60 when they come back from an email and they've already tried your
product and liked it. If you have the proper funnel for that, now their AOV is going to be double
whatever you would have been. So that's also a big key part that people don't really think about
because everybody's focused on front end. They just need to scale front end as much as possible.
No one's really thinking about the back end. They have all the other stuff that gives them
a little bit of money here and there, but like nothing is going to be post purchase on the front end
on day one as soon as somebody purchases to bump the AOV and increase the profit per order
than post purchase levels. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What was the moment where like did you have a
moment where it was like holy shit. This is where I have to go all in on this. This is what really
Christmas money or was it like slowly through like testing it on like a bunch of different brands.
Yeah, I mean, I would say the popularity is very low still. I don't think anybody really is doing
it. There's only one guy who ripped my entire website and is trying to do it. I'm doing, but you know,
he can convince people, but he can't get them the same results. Other than that, like there was
low competition, obviously, but the biggest thing was once I cracked it and I realized how quick
it could be ROI positive, like from an ad agency perspective, like maybe if you're lucky,
you onboard a client in the first monthly crush it for them, you scale up, spend everything's great,
but that's not usually how it goes. You know, it's usually a couple months or at least like a
month or two of proper testing to crack a winning ad in scale. Now, some people do it faster,
they have better teams. Some people do it longer. That's like, you know, we can argue about that all day,
but the reality is that that's what happens. So, you know, before it was very much like a, you know,
two to six months ROI play with the client where they're going to work with us, we're going to scale
them up. And we do, but again, it takes time. With this, it was a service that I'm providing where,
you know, within with our systems within 24 hours, they're ROI positive. So from a client kind of
relationship standpoint, it's like way better for me than what I was doing. So that's kind of like
the biggest, like, aha moment where I was like, fuck, I need to just let, let go, everything's
do this. So that's what initially did it. And then the second thing is like, we worked our offer
quite a bit and we ended up with a performance only offer. And that's been absolutely crushing as
well. So it is more lucrative, but at the same time, it requires a different type of focus than
what we were doing with the ads. So with the ads, like, it was a lot of like research and creatives
and stuff like that. With this, it's more like human psychology and trying to understand, like,
why somebody's buying and how can we kind of position this other product in a logical way for
them to take it and then testing different prices, different copies. So it's like kind of the same
thing, although that you feel the effects of it right away, like if I launch a funnel and it does
well, tomorrow, we're making more money, not, you know, in six months or three months, like tomorrow,
we'll go from $5 to $20.
Yeah, the feedback loop is crazy fast and I assume based on that you can improve and
learn, improve the final just way faster.
Yeah, 100%.
And you mentioned that it's still pretty untapped market.
And I think a lot of brands and a lot of founders still don't have it on their radar and
don't spend enough time and effort to improve the post-purchase funnel.
What do you think, what do founders misunderstand about post-purchase?
I don't necessarily think they misunderstand.
I think they just are way too focused and rightfully so on the front end.
Because without the front end, the back end doesn't even exist.
So we have to kind of put that out first and make sure everybody knows.
I'm not saying that post-purchase funds are more important than your ads.
Obviously without ads, you will have no money to make in the post-purchase.
However, you know, it's an neglected part because like it only generates 10 to 15% more revenue.
But when you think about the fact that that 10 to 15% is at your gross margin, that's when it becomes interesting.
And that's what people don't really think about.
Now the other thing as well is that they are already investing in ads.
They're investing in CRO, they're investing in creatives, they're doing Google, they're doing emails.
Nobody's really doing this, like there was no provider.
There was the apps like AfterCell, OCU, etc.
They come in, they set it up for you one time and then they leave.
But again, if they're not doing continuous testing, you're just ending up back at Square One,
which is basically, you know, you have a half decent funnel and that's about it.
And that's not necessarily what we're doing.
What we're doing is like CRO on the back end.
So we're constantly testing stuff every single week, but testing pricing, products, angles, copy, funnel segments.
Like pretty much everything, every single week.
And I think with a lot of the founders out there, they just didn't really think of it as like a channel that can generate much money.
Like I've audited so many accounts, like we've worked now, like I said, with like 40, 50 plus brands are doing over a million a month.
All of those people when they came to us would do a million dollars a month on the front end and make like 2K from their Prosperch's Fundals.
Because they were set up by either like an email marketing agency six months ago when they onboarded them.
Or like OCU or after sell just kind of turned on like they just turned on like the AI funnel or whatever that is.
And they're making 2K a month.
I come in build a funnel all of a sudden they're making a hundred K 200 200 K a month from this right away.
And then like holy shit, like why don't we not do this before.
So definitely every time I do onboard someone would do this for them, they realize like holy like I've been sleeping on this for so long.
Yeah, you mentioned before like the the goal is for you or one of the goals is to to liquidate the custom requisition cost at that checkout.
In general, like for you, what are the like the success criteria that look that you look for when you set up like a new post purchase funnel.
So it all depends on the business model on the front end.
Not everybody is running a break even. So like for example, we work with other people that don't sell supplements and not don't have subscriptions like people that sell like home decor items or clothing or stuff that's not on subscription.
Like they have to be profitable day one.
So people like that were more so focused on what are the actual goals of is this have some of them have so many skews, but they only sell two.
So the rest are all like dead stock that need to get rid of. Okay, cool. How can we use post purchase to liquidate all of the dead stock at you know decent margins.
So we don't have to run ads to it later on a clearance section and lose money for a month just to get rid of it. Right.
So because it also what people will think about is that it also costs brand owners money to just have inventory part like if they're using 3PLs, they're paying storage fees.
If they're not, they're just losing money on the money they invested into that stock if they're not selling it. So that's like one way.
And another way for example would be if somebody wants to kind of introduce another product line because they have one product line that they're really good at selling.
But the second product line doesn't get much sales except for returning customers. We can try to use the funnels to potentially get people to buy that second product before having to go through the whole.
You know 30 60 days and then go through email etc so we can bypass that so then the email could sell them the third thing for example.
So it really just depends on each brand and what the goal that they have is but I would say for the most part.
If any brand made it to like one or two three million a month they most likely have some sort of retention figured out and they know how to get people back.
So if that's the case then it's more so liquidating CPA or just increasing profit on the front end so they can spend more on ads.
Yeah, yeah that makes sense.
I just wanted to say something.
Yeah because we have a few brands that where we have like one clear hero product that like on the outside we just want to advertise that one product and everything else just it doesn't make sense on the front end.
But the brand obviously still wants to sell that and they always like try to push us to put it more on the ads but from a customer acquisition standpoint it just doesn't make sense to push those products.
So with those kind of products I always tell them like that is something that you need to sell on the back end either through email marketing through the post purchase funnel because like for the customer acquisition it doesn't work.
But it's still like an amazing product that the customers wants to buy like want to buy.
Again it really depends on what their goals are and like what their needs are like sometimes we have a client say I need to get rid of like the 15,000 units of this product.
How can we get rid of it?
And that's where we come up with like you know similar to how people do like flash sales on the front end like we'll do like a flash sale on the back end and say you know
mother's day flash sale choose any of these and get 60% off and then we usually do like a three pack or six pack just to get rid of as much stock when still have margin.
So there's a lot of ways to go around it but like it really depends on what the problem the brand has whether it's like they don't have enough margin or if they have too much stock or if they have very low returning customer rates because they have very low returning customer rates we need to make as much profit as possible from every single order.
Because otherwise we know we're never getting these people back like I work with a lot of people that are like dropshippers they have like one or two products or maybe just one product.
And that's it like they just know someone's going to come by this and never buy again and they're just constantly under the fear that as soon as the CPA goes up a little bit they are in the negative they start losing thousands of dollars every day versus making thousands of dollars every day.
You can easily bypass that with a post versus fall. So what exactly is the difference in strategy that you approach when it comes to like a store that sells that has primarily one time customers versus a store that has has like a lot of returning customers.
Yeah, so I mean the biggest strategy is going to be around messaging and segmentation so like if we're upselling for a brand that only sells once.
The messaging and everything around the offer that we make whether it's the same product again or different product is all more so urgency based in the sense of like this offer will never be here again.
You know this is a limited time offer et cetera and mainly the offer itself how it's positioned is way more aggressive because we know that they're not going to come back so like we're just kind of trying to make as much as we can right now because we know they're never going to come back.
Versus somebody has returning will usually be a little bit softer with the messaging and what we'll do is we'll build a different funnel for the returning customers.
So then the returning customers will see different offers than the new customers which means we can now play into their purchase behavior.
So if they bought like one product and they came back and bought it again clearly they like it let's upsell them like a three months apply six months apply or like you know again five pack ten pack whatever whatever the case may be whatever the unit that you use depending on the brand that you're working on but the idea is is like how can we put as much product in their hand right now because even though your cohort analysis may show that a customer like 20% of your customers at month 12 or still coming back cool.
But that's not guaranteed so why why not try to get as much of it as possible every single interaction you get and then if they say for 12 months even better you just made four times more money.
So that's the difference mainly if like somebody I guess has like a one time brand or you know something that comes back it's just mainly the messaging and how we position the offers.
Like we can almost kind of do more of like what we call a Hail Mary strategy on the brands that only have one time purchase like all like we could pretty much sell them anything because we know they're not coming back versus if there is returning customers then we really have to think about like this person is probably going to come back to this brand like we can't use that type of messaging or that type of offer because it's going to devalue the brand in their eyes the next time they come back.
Yeah so some more aggressive more direct response style on the on the one time customers and a little bit more like softer and relationship building on the on the retention brands right yeah 100.
Got it and like I assume it's very difficult because it depends a lot on the brand but going into like a little bit more into the specifics like for a brand that's doing 10 million a year in revenue like what would you say should post purchase.
Contribute to there to that revenue or to the results yeah there's a couple of like things that play into that just because if they're on shop five for example and they're using after sell after sell doesn't support support shop by markets so if somebody checks out any other currency then you're.
default store currency. They won't go through the funnels. Hopefully, Shopify will remove
that restriction soon, and then they'll be able to do it. But right now, it's just out
of their hands. They can't do it. The other thing is Apple Pay and Clarna and any of these
other third-party payment processors, they're also not supported by after saw, or any app
for that matter, OCU or any other one, even like specific payment processors like Molly,
I think in another lens or ideal, like all those other ones, they don't work either. So,
they're very much limited to Shopify Payments and Shop Pay and PayPal. Those are the main
ones that will go through the funnels. Now, in an ideal world, assuming you have a brand
doing 10 million a year in the US, all your store, your orders are in USD. You don't have
any Apple Pay orders. Everyone is seeing the funnels. You should be able to get 10 to 15
percent of your revenue, no problem. Like, it should probably be more than that, but like
10 to 15 percent of your revenue, no problem. You should be able to get that. So, easily
could be one to one and a half million a year. Probably even more, like I said, and that's
all at the gross margin. Most people are running at like 70 percent plus margins. So, it's
easily like a million dollars a year in profit. Yeah. Because the brands have already paid
for the customer acquisition and everything and everything goes to the bottom line. Yeah,
whether the brand, whether they show this offer or not, they already paid for the ads
already got the sale. Now, they're just tacking on more profit. So, yeah, literally just
go straight to the bottom line. Yeah. So much free money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy
because people don't actually genuinely think about how big this is. Like, a lot of people
think, oh, there's going to be actually like 10k a month, 20k a month, which, to be fair,
if you're running like worldwide and multiple currencies and multiple payment methods,
like, yeah, you're only going to get whatever you can get out of it. I would still challenge
that because a lot of people's RPVs, which is revenue per visit on the funnels, that's
like the main metric people use. Most people's RPV is way too low anyways. Like some of them
have RPVs as low as like 50 cents when they're AOVs like 60 dollars, which for context,
you want to aim for 10 to 15% of your AOV. So, six to what is that? Nine dollars essentially.
So if you're at 50 cents, like you've got, you've got a 10X from where you are right now.
So I think that's also another thing that a lot of people don't really think about. Yeah.
You talk before about like three different layers of liquidation. Like one is the pre-purchase,
one is the in-card and check out, and one is the post-purchase. From your experience, what is
like the job of each of those layers? Well, the ones that are in-card are more so like, we don't
really play around with them too much just because they affect conversion rates. So like, with
our service specifically, what I do with post-purchase, I remove all the risk both monetarily because
it's performance-based, and just kind of external risk because we don't actually touch their
front end, which means like, if their ads were converting at 10%, they're going to still convert
at 10%, because nothing we do could ever break what's happening on their end already. So I
think that's like a big thing to think about. But like, if I was to just think about it more
so from a strategic perspective, and also don't quote me about that because we might start
doing cart stuff soon just because a lot of our clients are asking us for it, but we do
tell them that this could affect front end conversion. So we have to be careful. But I think
with cart upsells, if I had to guess and also based off some of the testing we did, they
almost get considered more than post-purchase ones do. And this has to do with the psychological
theory of like the peak of the customer journey is when somebody buys, as soon as they buy,
a clock of like, whatever they buy, like the regret afterwards, basically, like that starts
right after, which means like, basically from that point forward, they're already starting
thinking, "Oh, I probably shouldn't have bought this." Or, "Oh, that was expensive." Or,
even like, "Oh, I can't wait for this to come." So at that point, it's like anything
else you add on is there's still not that high. But the thing is in the beginning, when
they land on, especially if it's a new customer cold traffic, they land on your page, you're
still building trust. They add to cart. They get to the cart. The upsells in the cart should
usually be there to fulfill whatever offer you have. That's usually the strategy everybody's
doing. That's why they have those progress bars and stuff. So those upsells, people really
look at the price more than anything to see if they will fulfill that goal. Now after
they get past that point, on the post-purchase side, there's no goal anymore. It's whatever
you put in front of them and how you position it. So whether that be a limited time offer
or for that month or for that week or for that specific segment, you're the hundreds
customer. Some people do that strategy and it does pretty well. And then the last thing
is the thank you page. I think that's what you're asking. The thank you page is basically
after they buy. Usually what we find with the thank you page offers, people that take
the post-purchase offers don't necessarily take the thank you page. The thank you page
ones we use are for the people that don't see the funnels because if they don't see
the funnels, whatever currency or whatever, we can still upsell them on the thank you
page. Now there's more friction obviously because they have to go through the whole
checkout process again versus the upsells within the funnels or one click upsells. So because
of that, we see a drop in conversion. We see a drop in like the RPV on the thank you
page. But again, like don't be mistaken by the fact just because it's a drop doesn't
mean they don't make a lot of money. Like, you know, we have a brand doing 15 million
a month right now where we make over a million dollars a month in the funnels and then the
thank you page as well makes like 200k a month. So still decent amount of volume from there.
But again, before us, they were probably making like, I can't even remember the number,
but it would be like five or 10k from their thank you page. It may be like 40k a month from
their funnels. So again, it was like they had the smart funnel set up. It just runs whatever
RPV they get. They're like, whatever, it's free money. But they about I think eight or nine months ago.
Yeah, almost a year now they came to us and we started working on this and you know, we took
their RPV from like $2 to $3 to $4 to $5 to $6 and now we're trying to crack $7. So that's basically
using the combination of thank you page and post purchase. We're not we're not touching like the
the cart ones. Check out ones as well. Like, that's another thing that that you could do. We also aren't
playing around that too much just because it's on the front end. And again, it could hurt conversion
rate. But what we've seen is you can kind of carry over the same offer you had in the cart
to the funnel to the check out. So if it's like, you know, you're $50 away from free shipping,
putting that same thing in the checkout right under the shipping where it shows the shipping is
$5. Then it says there's a progress bar and it's like, add this and then the shipping will be free.
Then they'll do it and then it'll be free. That also works pretty well. So yeah, those are kind of
like the main way we would use each one of those ones like the cart, the upsells, the funnel,
the checkout and the thank you page. And what would you tell founders that are like, I think a lot of
founders that I've talked to, they're always afraid of adding like too many like upsells,
cross-cells because they think they are like too too salesy or putting like too much pressure on
their customers and they don't want to like hurt the relationship that they have with them.
Yeah, I mean, I've heard that before and we tested this now obviously on massive brands so
we know that that's not the case. It's more so of a limiting belief. There's a right way and a
wrong way to do upsells. I will say that. There's like people that will devalue their brand with
their upsells and not because of discounts because people think that the discount devalues a brand
that's not the case. It's a like discounts with no context of reason like, oh, here's another one
for 80% off. No reason whatsoever. Versus, you know, because it's Father's Day or, you know,
Father's Day weekend exclusive by another one for 70% off today only. Right? The framing is very
different. Or for example, like if they bought a product now with aftersell, there's a lot of
personalization you can do like you put their name, you can put their, you know, you put their name,
you can put like the product they bought, et cetera, like it'd be dynamic. So you can basically say,
you know, you know, Andre, today your customer number 100 that bought this product and because you
did, you're eligible to get another one at 80% off just for you, this offer expires in two minutes
or whatever. And then underneath, you can explain that, you know, we are a brand that likes to give
back to our customers and, you know, et cetera, like to, as a token of appreciation, we want to
offer you this. Don't confuse this with what you see on the sore. You'll never see this publicly
anywhere. This is purely just for you. You cannot share it with anybody to take it or leave it kind
of thing. That makes a the customer feel like more special and B doesn't hurt the brand's image
where they feel like they got, you know, scam because they spent $80 on a hoodie that you're
not offering for five versus if there's a reason why it's offered for five, you're like sick. This
is amazing. I like this brand like if you went to Jim Shark to buy a workout shirt and they offered
you five more for the price of one, just like that. You're gonna like sick.
Good deal. Take it, but you might think in the back of your head after like, well, how could they
afford to do that? And I just paid $50. You know what I mean? So it doesn't, versus if you position
it as like, you know, you unlocked, you know, you have to make it eligible. Like, why did they unlock it?
Then it becomes more logical for them that like, I should seize this opportunity. And then we've seen this also happen on the on the retention side when they send emails and then
we get those huge spikes in post purchase revenue for those days because they send out an email,
people come back and buy. We have returning customer funnels that absolutely
demolish all of the, like they get so much stock sold through that every time, that they
start to realize that people, when they come back, they spend more as well. So they spent
more initially and they spend more as well. So if anything, it actually compliments it
if it's done properly. Now, if it's done poorly, I could definitely see how a customer
can be, you know, can feel like they were scammed because they bought the first product
for 400 and now they're being offered it for 25 bucks.
Yeah. Yeah. The messaging and the reason behind the offer is super important. I mean,
it's the same on the on the ads, like you can have very aggressive like front end offers.
And if you communicate it properly, you can do it without developing the brand. But if
you just like always have like an 80% off sale running, then people will just assume
that's the way it is and that's the brand. Yeah, makes a huge difference. Yeah. What is
your approach when it comes to like more, more premium brands or brands that don't want
to do like those, those aggressive discounts, which is say like post purchase finals also
work for for those brands? 100%. They're not going to, I will say this very clearly.
They will not perform as well as others that do offer more discounts. That's just the
reality of it. You can't upsell someone the same product they bought for the same price.
It just that you don't have a good enough reason to do so. Like as in like the customer
doesn't have a good enough reason to say yes. So you have to sweeten the deal somehow.
What we've done with premium brands is we may not offer it discounted, but you might
include a free gift if they take that offer. So if they buy, if you bought like this DJI
thing, we're going to give you like this things like whatever 200 bucks, 300 bucks, we're
going to give you a tripod for free if you buy the battery pack. For example, in that
case, now the tripod doesn't seem like something cheap because like, and the discount becomes
the value of the tripod, which is probably like 150 bucks. So now they get a 150 dollar
saving if they take this battery pack with this product. So it's not going to convert
as well as if I just offered the battery pack at 40% off, but it can still perform and
still generate a lot of money. So it still works. It just like requires a little bit more
finesse. So just to like make it actually work properly. Yeah. And how do you find the
perfect balance between just like maximizing revenue per visitor, but also making sure
that the profit per per visitor is high because obviously you're already like the brand
already paid for the customer acquisition and for the ads, but they obviously still have
to pay for the product itself. So if you give out a give out like 10 products 80% off,
the brand might not make as much profit from it. Yeah. So I mean, this is actually very
interesting because we, the way that we structure our offers our profits splits for the
most part, we do some rev shares as well, but mainly profits splits. So like with our
team specifically, like we're incentivized to maximize the profit because we get paid
a cut out of it, right? So when we test stuff, we're mainly focusing on how can we increase
profit per visit more than we are on revenue per visit. Usually they go hand in hand, but
the biggest player is conversion rate because like a lot of people tend to try to increase
conversion rates as much as possible. And what happens is they end up lowering their margins
so much where now their RPV might be $10, but their profit is like 42 cents or $1 versus
we might come in, drop the RPV to $7 or $5, but now the profit per visit is like $3.50.
So they essentially like 7x their profit per visit by lowering the RPV. So there's actually
you can actually track your RPV in after sell if you have your cogs set up on Shopify.
We also do it manually with our funnel trackers like we built our own, we could just kind
of figure out what the PPV is because we ask for our cogs and everything. But in reality,
the main metric you're focusing on is PPV because sometimes you might be giving up too
much margin to increase the conversion rate. And then the increase in conversion rate isn't
enough to justify it. And now you have an inflated RPV, but your profits are actually
lower. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you want to test a lot of prices like price
testing, offer testing, bundle testing, product testing, all of those to try to find the
perfect balance. And then you can use stuff like, you know, the actual copy, the angle,
the design of the pages to increase the conversion rate after that point because if you found
the sweet spot price, now you just want to keep increasing the actual conversion rate.
So it's good for your testing to always know what metric you're aiming for first. Yeah.
And when it comes to structuring the different offers that you're doing, I've heard multiple
different approaches like some people say that it's better to start with a pretty cheap
offer to get the person to say yes to commit to it. And then you like give the second offer
and the third offer and try to get them into into the yes loop of just taking everything.
And other other people say you should do the most expensive offer in the beginning and
even if only like 10% or 5% of people take it, you massively increase your AOV. And also
in comparison, the second and third offer will look way cheaper. So there were more likely
to take on those offers. But it's your approach. I'm the other people. So I'm the ones
you were talking about. So all of our strategies involve us up selling the most expensive products
first. So the idea is like in some cases, we'll change it. But in most cases, that's
how we run it because, you know, like you said, as soon as you upsell them the most expensive
item, everything also looks like a better deal. First of all, so it price anchors. The
second thing as well is that it's the closest thing to their current AOV. If anything
when you upsell them cheaper products leading up to higher AOVs, what happens is like they
start, they start to get more price sensitive every step they go because the last offer
they took was $5 or $10. Now it's $25. Now it's $50 versus if it was $50. And now it's
only $25. Now it's only $10. It's a very big difference, right? And we see that. And
that's one of the biggest differentiators between our funnels and other people's funnels
or just like people that set up their own funnels in general, are conversion rate and
RPV down the funnel. So from upsell, one upsell, two upsell, three goes up versus most people's
funnels go down. So like they might have the first upsell, like 30% conversion rate,
$4, RPV. Then their second one's like 10% and RPV's like $2. And then the other one's
like 10% to RPV's like $2 versus ours. The first one would be like four, second would
be like eight, third would be like 14 because that's where that's like we're stacking on
top of it. Like I would rather the people that say no to the higher priced item, I will
downsell them the cheaper one. But I want the people that say yes to the higher priced
item to go through to the next because those are the customers that are worth the most
because they will, if they say yes to the most expensive one, the other ones look way
cheaper to them, they're just going to take them all. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say you work
with the supplement brand that does, that has a, let's say $80 average or the value.
Like roughly, roughly where would you price the different upsells in the beginning, like
when you're just starting out, and if you have like no data from, from prior tests?
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends like $80, is it just one box or is it like a buy to
get one kind of offer or like what's the, is it just one box for $80? Yeah. I'll say
average card size like one and a half, one and a half boxes off like a basic protein.
So for example, like there's a couple of different type people we work with. So there's like
the supplement guys who run like kitchen bundles, like setups, like buy one, get one, buy
it to get one. And then they usually are on subscription, then 60% 70% subscribe, the
other 40 or 30 down. And then basically the people that subscribe, the upsell them different
products to people that don't subscribe, we upsell them volume, like more. So I guess
$80 if they're buying, let's say two bottles. So we would probably upsell them if they only
have one skew, one product, we probably sell them two more, then sell them one more. If
they say yes, then sell them another one. And then if they say no to the two, we'd probably
sell them one. That would do one. Finally, we try another funnel, we'll try probably
be like a three, six, 12 months of buy setup. So we might say here, buy like a 12 month
supply. And if they say no, we might say cool, 12 months is a lot, buy a six month supply,
then we might test six and three. Then if they say yes to the 12 month, we might upsell them
then an extra six month for a friend or whatever, like a, like a loved one who has a similar
issue that you're trying to fix, etc. We use a lot of copy there, like emotional copy
around, like help them kick start their journey because you know, they may not even know
they have the problem that they have, stuff like that to kind of build into it. But usually
we recommend they have other skews to be able to upsell. But the pricing of the upsell,
they have an $80 AOV, like I'll probably start testing around $60. $60 for the, for the
first one and then cheaper ones, cheaper ones, like I'd probably go 60, 40 and then 20 if
I could, if the margin allows me, or I'd probably go, you know, and then downsell will probably
also be 40. And then from there, I'll just split test. So I might do 60, 55, 57, 52, 49 and
then just see where can I get the most amount of conversion rate boost with the highest price
possible. Got it. And I assume for the, also like for subscription brand that sells, for
example, the supplement on subscription, you just try to put, to move as much cash forward
as possible and sell them like the 12 from our 12
month, six month, three month upfront, and rather than getting them on a subscription right
away, right?
Well, if they already were offered a subscription and they said, no, it kind of doesn't make
sense to upsell them again on a subscription.
So that's that that's at least what we've seen so far.
So it's like, if somebody didn't subscribe, why would they subscribe now?
So the idea is instead, if they subscribed, you can either with this is something that's
very new that we're playing around with right now is upgrade your subscription.
So someone subscribed to the monthly where like cool, you know, if you want, you can upgrade
to a quarterly and we'll give you an extra $10 off.
And then they would then there's a button now with integration with aftersell and I think
recharge.
I mean, they I shouldn't probably be saying this because like some of it's like still
beta mode, but they are going to launch it soon, I think.
So we're testing it on a couple stores, but basically you can upgrade subscription so they
go from a monthly to a quarterly.
So that same like month when they renew, they were new for three months instead of one.
So now the expected cash went from the $30 to maybe the, I don't know, $65 because now
they're going to the quarterly instead of the monthly.
So that one also works very well for non-subscribers.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense to put them on another subscription instead.
I would just focus on quantity and focus on like you said six month, 12 month, three month,
two month, even like it doesn't just have to be three, six, 12, like you could literally
be two months, it could be one month.
You could literally do three.
And if they say no, you could test two.
And then if that doesn't work, you can test one, then you can go two and one.
So again, a lot of it comes down to testing and I think just in general, people don't do
that on the post purchase because like they don't care to.
It's just too much work considering they could do that same amount of work on the front end
and make more money technically, but it's only more money revenue, not more money profit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I assume the quarterly, like changing the subscription to a quarterly basis will have
a massive impact on the LTV because obviously you get the quarterly one right away and then
also if it renews out there after three months, you get another like really big payment.
And you also just move a lot of cash forward.
And cash today is always way more worth than potential cash in like three months.
So yeah, I think that's a great offer.
Yeah.
When it comes to the testing, like what is, what do you focus on the most?
Is it just like different products, different offers?
Or if you, like if you would only be able to test one thing, what would it be?
So I'm not really a fan of testing one thing.
I like to test a lot of stuff.
We have our own strategy that we developed over the last like year and a half now.
And so far, it served us very well across over a hundred brands.
So essentially, we test in five different buckets.
Initially we start with products and within products, you can test obviously different quantities,
different order, so like product A, product B, product C versus product B, product C versus
product C, product A. So you got to mean like the order of where that product is and then
the type of product.
So that's the first type of testing that we do.
The second testing comes down to pricing and offers.
So once we crack those products, like those are the product orders that work well.
So you'd be surprised.
Sometimes if you just upsell the AirPods before the DJI one, it does bad.
But if you upsell this versus this, all of a sudden it works.
So we always want to test all the different variations that are possible.
Then when we find the ones that perform the best, the next part is doing price testing
and offer testing.
So testing different prices, again, different offers.
Usually we're running split tests.
Sometimes we have ABCD tests.
So like we have four different versions that we're testing at the same time.
So that's also pretty cool that you could do on after sell.
And then basically from that point once you crack the price or the offer, you can go into
the angles and the copy.
So that's where like, you know, going back to their winning ads, seeing what the winning
angle is with the main desire awareness sophistication, like the more of the ad stuff that we focused
on back in the day, we're now using that for our post purchase funnels as well.
So we take their ads, we pull the transcripts, we put them into like a cloud that we built
that is filled in with all the information from Eugene Schwartz and all the best copy
writers for direct response.
And we try to pull from those, okay, what's the main desire awareness sophistication
of this customer?
Why are they buying this product?
How can we position this second product using the copy that we have as the highest priority
item they should get next logically?
Because what I found is that upsells are logical, they're not like emotional, people don't
take the upsells because of emotion, they take it because of it being a logical yes, at
least that's what our testing is found.
I mean, there's probably other people that I've found the other, like this is a fun part
about econ.
There's always one person doing one thing and saying it's the best and then someone else
doing complete opposite and it's also the best.
So the reality is always all the best until you test it.
Essentially, that's step three, step four is the actual landing page UI, like how the
page actually looks.
This is a secret that I will keep to myself, but we have ways to build funnels and no
one knows how to do it other than us.
So we can build funnels that look like full on landing pages, whether that's like a, you
know, TSL, like a text sales letter, whether that's a advertorial, a listicle, three reasons
why whatever whatever the case may be, we can build whatever funnel we want in the in
the post purchase.
And that will also help with conversion rate, although it's not as important as the first
two or three that I talked about.
And the last one is segmentation.
So you kind of repeat this process after you segment because let's say the brand is selling
two products.
You have one funnel right now, you're doing all this testing, cool.
Now you got this funnel dialed in, cool.
Now you can split the traffic into two funnels and repeat the whole process again.
Products pricing offer because now they're buying something like now you control what
they bought first.
So if they bought this product, we want this, this works best.
They bought this product, this is this work best and you can keep testing that.
Then when you finish that, you can go into the next layer, which is how can I segment
this further by either how much they spent or how many they bought like, you know what
I mean, or if they're returning versus new, so a lot of people think that this, this thing
that we do is like, uh, we set it up and forget about it.
Like, oh, I'm going to come in and 10 X to your RVV and then you're just going to, you
know, fire me and then leave and you're just going to make 10 X more money.
You could make 10 X more money, but you could also make 20 X more money if you just keep
testing because like the more of these tests that you crack, the higher the RV gets, the
higher it will be gets like, I have accounts that we've been working with, like I said,
for a year now or more, like I have a specific one that I'm going to do a case study on pretty
soon that we onboard them at $1.30 RPV within the first month, we were at 10, which is obviously
a big jump, but then over the course of the year, now we're at 20.
So, you know, over over the course of the year, they've 20 X to our PV or I guess 18 X to
our PV, but or maybe the math is not adding up, but you get the point versus, you know,
if they had just let it off there, they would have only 10 X. And only 10 X is still a lot
of money, but 20 X is a lot more than 10. And it all came down to just continuously testing
and again, just continuously splitting and testing more, splitting and testing more, creating
more what we call like, like custom customer journeys, like every customer, if they bought
one, they're going to go through this path, if they buy two, they're going to go through
this path of this product or if they buy three, but one of them is this product thing
to do out of the path. So it's starting to look at the order patterns of like, what are
the most common orders? How are they coming in? And how can we then use the winning funnel
that we've built to further increase the RPV of that specific path of customers? If they
bought like a water and a Coke Zero, how can we maximize how much they make versus
they're about two waters, how much can they make? So you start creating all these customer
journeys. It starts to look more like a mess unless you're the one who built them because
there's going to be like 15, 20 funnels live, but that's the level that some of these
bigger brands are operating at to be making, you know, millions of dollars a month in profit
from this. Yeah, that makes so much sense. Like to be honest, I never even thought that
you could segment the post purchase survey to post purchase funnel to that degree. I mean,
it makes sense that based on like what the person bought and what kind of products they're
looking for, they want to buy different products afterwards. And also, depending whether
it's a first-time customer or returning customer that you want to give them different
offers. But I think like most founders don't even know that that's possible. Yeah, I mean,
no one, no one, again, it's not their fault because like it's not the biggest thing in
the world. You know, we're still talking making an extra million a month if you're doing
like 10 million. So I mean, it's still a million, but this guy's making 10 million. So like
he has more stuff to deal with. But I would say, yeah, like you could, you could segment
so much like you could do returning customer funnel where the minimum they spend is $60
and they are part of this segment that has this tag. So like we have a client who had like
a VIP list. So this is like people that are paying for a VIP kind of membership. Those
people when we upsold, we had returning customer with this tag and then the funnel that we had,
everything was discounted more than the normal. And it was also written on the page that this is a VIP
customer upsell only. Don't share this with your friends. Don't show this to anybody. This is
offers only for you to take. And that also obviously converts hell a lot better than the normal
[BLANK_AUDIO]
and customer one that's not VIP.
So even that, when you really start to think about it,
it's like how can we get people to buy more
and be happy buying more?
You have to make it personalized,
you have to make it logical,
and most importantly, it has to benefit
the customer experience.
It can't negatively impact it.
- Yeah, if I fall in there listening to this,
once like one quick win this week,
like what would you recommend to him?
- Yeah, I'll give him a more detailed one.
Go to your Shopify sidekick AI thing that they now did,
and ask it, what are the,
what like based off of my hero skew,
what is the top product that is sold with it,
and then put that product as your upsell one in your funnel?
And you will, that will be like the easiest way
to get more revenue from funnels.
Again, that's like the first easiest thing to do,
but I mean, that's data driven based off your store right now
that you could probably do in like 10 minutes.
- Yeah, so much free money.
- Yeah, of course, there's a lot of free money.
- Where can people follow you and learn more?
- Yeah, I mean, I've got YouTube,
Nizarb Duhalim, my name.
I've got Twitter, e-com, Nizarb,
and I've got Instagram, Nizarb Duhalim,
underscore, although I am trying to get at Nizarb,
so we'll see, but yeah, that's pretty much it right now.
It's where you'll find me.
I'm posting a lot of stuff.
Definitely should be posting more than I am right now
on YouTube, but I will be.
And I post a lot of Twitter, a lot of game there,
and then also we're gonna be posting soon on Instagram.
- Awesome.
Thank you very much.
So much, so much value in here.
And yeah.
- Yeah, thanks for having me, bro.
Appreciate it.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Post-purchase funnels can make brands profitable on the first order by increasing AOV and profit per visit without affecting front-end conversion rates.
Nizar shifted from paid ads to post-purchase optimization after seeing rapid ROI (within 24 hours) and consistent success across brands, spending over $100 million on ads previously.
Most brands neglect post-purchase, generating only ~$2K monthly from funnels, but can scale to $100K-$200K+ with proper testing and strategy.
The three layers (cart, checkout, post-purchase/thank-you page) serve different roles; post-purchase upsells are one-click and lower friction, while thank-you pages handle those who miss funnels.
Upsells should be logical, not emotional, with messaging and framing (e.g., exclusive offers with reasons) to avoid devaluing the brand.
Premium brands can use free gifts or value-based incentives instead of deep discounts to maintain brand perception.
Testing focuses on five buckets
Start with the most expensive upsell first to anchor prices and increase funnel conversion rates downstream.
Key metrics are profit per visit (PPV) over revenue per visit (RPV), as deep discounts can inflate RPV but hurt margins.
1
A quick win is using Shopify's AI to identify top co-purchased products and testing them as the first upsell.
Summary:
In this episode, Nizar Abdul Halim shares his expertise on leveraging post-purchase funnels to transform e-commerce profitability. With nearly a decade in e-commerce and over $100 million in ad spend, he discovered that optimizing what happens after checkout—rather than focusing solely on front-end acquisition—can flip unit economics. For brands running break-even or loss-making ads, especially in supplements, post-purchase funnels can recoup costs immediately by increasing AOV and first-order profit, making them cash-flow positive day one. Nizar emphasizes that while most brands set up basic funnels, they neglect continuous testing, leaving significant money on the table—often just $2K monthly versus $100K+ with proper optimization.
He outlines a systematic approach: testing in five buckets (products, pricing, copy, page design, and segmentation), starting with the most expensive upsell to anchor prices, and focusing on profit per visit rather than revenue per visit. For one-time customer brands, aggressive, urgency-based offers work, while retention-focused brands need softer messaging and tailored funnels. Premium brands can use free gifts instead of discounts to maintain value. Segmentation, such as VIP tags or purchase history, further boosts performance. Nizar concludes that post-purchase is an underutilized, high-margin channel, and even a quick win—like analyzing top co-purchased products via Shopify's AI—can unlock immediate revenue gains.
FAQs
A post-purchase funnel is a series of upsell offers presented to customers immediately after they complete a purchase, aiming to increase average order value and first-order profit without affecting front-end conversion rates.
They can flip unit economics by generating additional profit on the first order, allowing brands to recoup acquisition costs immediately and become cash-flow positive day one, rather than waiting for repeat purchases.
For a brand doing $10 million a year in revenue, post-purchase funnels should contribute 10-15% of revenue, potentially $1-1.5 million annually, all at gross margin, which directly boosts bottom-line profit.
Starting with the most expensive offer creates a price anchor, making subsequent cheaper offers seem like better deals, and higher-value customers who accept are more likely to take all offers, increasing revenue per visit.
They still work by using free gifts or value-based offers instead of discounts, such as bundling a free accessory with a purchase, which maintains brand value while still increasing order value.
The five buckets are: 1) Products and order variations, 2) Pricing and offers, 3) Angles and copy, 4) Landing page UI/design, and 5) Segmentation by customer type, spend, or product purchased.
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