We Audited 50 Shopify Stores: 7 Mistakes Losing Shopify Sales

So I'm going to go through seven of the conversion mistakes that are losing you sales right now, slow page speed, too many pop-ups, complicated delivery and returns information, that kind of stuff drives me mad. We've looked at 50 Shopify stores, we've audited them, I'm not going to share which 50 we looked at. A bad example is saying this is a premium cotton hoodie, that good example, a heavyweight everyday hoodie designed to stay comfortable after fish 50 washes. If the product is say that hoodie, say it's $400, you need to justify that. Why is it worth $400? There is an uncomfortable truth that needs to be said. Shopify brands of all sizes think they have a traffic problem, but actually they have a conversion problem and they think more traffic will solve it. So they pursue things like optimise advertising, SEO, email, all the things that agencies like mine do, but that won't help it. If anything, it will make it worse. And we're going to uncover that today and talk about it in a little bit more detail. So let's dive straight in. So you spend thousands on your advertising, you optimize your ads, you add cool apps, you create cool content, but you're not always answering the questions that customers have. And as you probably saw in the title, we've looked at 50 Shopify stores, we've audited them. I'm not going to share which 50 we looked at, but we looked at 25 that we know are very successful and 25 we know could be successful, but we know they're struggling. And so we don't want to share the information of who the stores are, but I am going to share lots of lots of learnings today. The four questions that we believe customers are asking and the things customers are wondering about based on the data of the stores we've got access to and also applying that same logic to the ones we don't have access to. We think the four questions are, is this product right for me? Why should I buy it? What makes this different and what is the returns policy? So I'm going to go through seven of the conversion mistakes that are losing you sales right now. And this again applies to any Shopify brand. You would be amazed at some of the big brands we've worked with over the years and some of the very simple mistakes that they make just by not checking very simple and plain information. So what most brands do is you get them 99% of the way there, the customer, that last 1% you lose them. And that last 1% is the kind of lightest item. I'm thinking of buying it, but it doesn't answer my question or it doesn't give me enough to actually go over the line with my purchase. So we're going to go through these seven things. Number one, product pages describe the product, but don't cover the customers buying decisions. On almost every single one of these 50 sites, we found some really big hero products with loads of reviews. And again, you can see the data on some of these things. But it just was not covering or didn't cover what we believed to begin back to those four questions. Is it right? Shall I buy it? What makes it different? What's the returns policy? Those simple things were not being covered. So here's a bad example. And we've changed the product. So no one can work out this is this is pretty vanilla products now. A bad example is saying this is a premium cotton hoodie. Talking about premium is relative. That's your description. That's not what a customer would call it cotton. Not if one really knows much about cotton. And it's quite an extensive exercise to educate them about cotton and that as a material. There are other ways of doing that. And it's a hoodie. They already know it's a hoodie because they can see that in the image or it's what they've typed into the search box on your website on SEO, PPC, or they've seen it on a social ad. They know it's a hoodie. So here's an alternative. The page covered this a heavyweight every day hoodie. So it's heavyweight. It's going to last you a long time every day. You can wear it all the time, hoodie. Designed to stay comfortable. That's the cotton bit cotton super comfortable. So it's designed to stay comfortable after 50 washes. That's one of the biggest FAQs when it comes to clothing. You sell anything to do with clothing. Have you spoken about what the product would be like at five washes, 10 washes, 50 washes, 100 washes? I bought an amazing jumper when I was out in the US at Sub Summit and we went shopping for an afternoon. Oh, it's amazing jumper. And one of the first things I got told me in the store is he said we've washed all every product in this shop three times. And then we haven't like, you know, made it super soft for the shop. They actually are just this soft. And I said, I said, sorry, I'll work in marketing. Why are you telling me that? That's not the first thing you hear when you walk into a shop. And he said, when everybody asks, I thought it's such a good point. Everybody asks. So he was like, for you to buy a product today, I need you to know that like this is super high premium. We've washed it three times. Everything you feel is how soft it's going to feel at 50 washes, 100 washes. So again, that good example a heavyweight everyday hoodie designed to stay comfortable after 50 washes. Second point then reasons people don't buy it on a website is trust. If you don't trust this brand and that comes down to so many things, I'm going to list a few. If you don't trust this brand, there is no way you're going to buy this product from this brand. Is there absolutely no way? Are you a new brand? Well, you need to tell people why they should trust you. We're a new company and here's why you should get on board. This is why you can trust us to deliver a good product, deliver it on time, deal with your problems. Product, is the product worth the price? If you can't sell enough and you lower the price and it's suddenly worth $10 and you charge $10 for it, my definition is a terrible hoodie. It might not be, but it's by definition a terrible hoodie. Getting the pricing right is so important and whatever, someone's that price is dictated to you if you're in a marketing team or you're reselling other brands and I get that, they tell you you have to sell it at this price. Well, you need to justify that. Why is this thing so cheap? Is it actually rubbish? No, we just, we're just really good at making them. With the latest technology, making these things, which is why they're so cheap, but they should last 50 to 100 washes. Now you've got me. This is good. Now you've got my interest. Go on Amazon. Is there a better option to buy from Amazon than buy from you right now? That is very much the thing to do. I call it the Amazon test. Go and do the Amazon test. Customers buying it already, which is reviews or picking something saying there's only 106 left in stock, 900 sold. If you're a new brand, that is really encouraging and under lots of laws and lots of countries, you're not allowed to lie. So you can put figures like that on your site. I don't think enough brands do that. And I think if you said this is a limited run of a thousand products, only 42 left. Well, hang on a minute. Am I going to miss out? If I don't buy this product, there's a customer. So I think there's some really good opportunities there. Again, if you're a new small business or you're an enormous company and people know the brand, put some information there about the founder. If the founders involved in design or development or running the business or the whole ethos of the company is because of the founder. We'll put that in there. And not enough businesses. Again, these are legal requirement in most countries. You've got to put some sort of return guarantee. Someone's not happy. They've got to be able to send it back. And if you don't put any guarantees on there, no one's going to trust you. And I often say that to brands, it's certainly here in the UK, it's called right to cancel. You've got to give a customer the right to cancel and send their product back. So just remind them of the law next to the buy button or whether that adds a car bump. Just say you get 30 day, no questions money back guarantee. It's just the law. And you have to do it anyway. You might as well make it obvious to try and get some more sales in. Number three, this one is humongous. And there's two reasons this happens. The problem is poor photography. It could be high res. But it's just a bad picture. The lighting could be rubbish. Something we're reviewing in the studio at the moment. I've got some new lights on the way. And I'm super excited to have my new lights because yeah, if you can't see my face enough and it's bad enough, it's going to be brighter. I'm very sorry. That's my British sarcasm. But poor photography is such an important point. It could be the angle of the photo. It could just be that you're showing the product really, really well, but without a human. How big is this bed? I can measure two meters. But how big is it when there's a tall and a short person or a family laying on this bed? How big is this rucksack when a guy is wearing it? Like, you know, I'm a guy. I want to buy this rucksack show me what it's going to look like on me. How comfortable is it? And if the photography's just a guy trying to look a little bit too cool, then it might look like the backpack is actually uncomfortable. So you've got to look at those things going like, you know, this backpack is designed to be worn on a 12 hour hike or this backpack is designed to fly around the world and clock up at least 5 million miles on planes before you have any issues with it. Now you're talking to the customer's actual use case. And also, who doesn't want to be flying 5,000 or 5 million miles a year? Not so good for the environment, but it's fun to travel. So you've got to understand your audience and what do you want to put in front of them there. The other thing with photography is you take really good pictures and then you just don't display them properly on the website. And if you don't display them properly on the website, you can have high res images looking low res. You could have really cool high res images loading super slow. And that's one of the points we'll come on till later about speed and usability on site. So have a look at how your images actually show and ask yourself the question, you know, complete wipe your mind. You are a fresh new human. You've just come to this website for the very first time, your own site. What is it telling me? What's it not telling me? What's it asking me to do and all that sort of stuff? With images as well, just a couple of other bits. High res, but displayed in low res, as I said, is a massive issue. And I've mostly seen that on collection pages. So definitely check out your collection pages to make sure it's loading properly. You can use a thing like lazy load, where it loads the page and doesn't quit for SEO and then the images are all kind of populating After page load further down the page, user doesn't even know about it. Brilliant. Zoom functionality, so if it's an expensive item or even a cheap item, if you've got a high res image and no one can zoom, high res image is irrelevant because I can't zoom. Might as well be a small image. Point being is let people zoom on stuff, but make sure that functionality on mobile and desktop, the zoom functionality is so user friendly. We use Microsoft Clarity a lot to watch customers buy on our client's websites and we see things all the time where they're just getting confused by that little white X in the top right to shut the kind of zoom in, pop out or model that comes up. They try and click that little X at the top to close it. But if you've got a white background on image, you can't see the white X. It can be as simple as that. We fixed that on a client's site and I forget the number but it was nearly 50% increase in sales from PPC. No change to PPC ads. It was so simple that the client didn't believe us. So we re-added it in an A/B test to test again, how much it had a difference. And it came in again at nearly 50%. And two smaller mobile. Can you actually see this product on mobile? You could even display a different image in the code to mobile users than the guys on desktop. You could also have it where the image shows the size it needs to until someone clicks on it or clicks the zoom button. If you have a button on your site for that, when they click that, now load the high res image. But have a little loading bar. People don't mind waiting, as long as it's clear what they're waiting for and the process that's going through at that moment. Number four, I'm going to speed through the next couple, but certainly this one. No differentiation. So you need to differentiate because people are going to go on Amazon. They're going to go on eBay. They're going to look at other websites. If they interact with an advert on Instagram meta, they're now going to see ads for that product from other retailers. So I clicked on some trainers the other day on Instagram and now I'm getting bombarded by a trainer adverts on Instagram. And if they come in from Google, Google shopping, all of their ads are side by side. Google SEO, all the listings are side by side. So if your site's not perfect and it has to be perfect, not from any single point of view, it's going to be perfect in terms of answering all of their objections so that they buy, they're going to go to the other site if yours isn't perfect. Number five, website friction. This is where we spend most of our time in CRO. It could be things like I've written a few here, and a couple other just sprung to mind. Slow page speed, too many pop-ups, complicated delivery and returns information. That kind of stuff drives me mad. I always say to my clients, if I think it's too complicated, describe your delivery to me in one sentence. And they add about 20 commas to the sentence. Lots of ifs and buts and maybes and possibilities and oh, if this and if that, it needs to just be this item is free two-day delivery with upgrade options. Simple, really simple. And someone goes two days, can we wait that long? That's fine. If it just says fast standard delivery, it's like, I don't know what standard means, and I don't know what fast means. Fasting the Amazon world is literally next day, sometimes same day depending on where you're based. So you've got to understand that. The way to look at website friction, this point five, be a buyer and see what annoys you. And I'm going to mention the next one as well. Look at it on mobile, which is point number six. I'm going to lead this thing so these two are so interlinked. Make it work on mobile first if you get more mobile traffic than desktop. I'm so sick and tired of, I've spent 10 years now since mobile phones and smartphones have been out telling clients, this looks great, but you know, look at it on my phone. It looks rubbish. And when you're working on a phone as well, I don't know about you, but I've got I don't know if websites are just terribly made across the board that most sites are rubbish, or if I just have massive thumbs, and I'm not showing off, it's so frustrating. And maybe I just get really warm and they get swollen or something. Some of my wedding ring won't come off because my fingers are swollen. I'm trying to click some of the buttons and you have to like, I sometimes even squeeze my finger to make a little like callus on the end, try and get that corner to close that advert on a game on play in or or shut that email pop up because I was just looking at a really cool product and now I'm just being annoyed. And look at it on mobile before you do anything else. Go in cognitos, use your own website as a buyer. Go back to point five to understand that friction. What annoys you? What would you get frustrated with when you're buying stuff? And when you're buying things on other sites as well, write down what you like and don't like and go and see how you can apply that to your brand or the brand you work for. But this point about mobile, if you have over 51% on mobile, 15% or more, then you need to test it on mobile first. Don't ever review anything on a laptop first. Start on mobile. See what it does on mobile. And then go, oh, now show me the desktop view because if it doesn't work on mobile, we're not catering to the majority of the audience. This is a waste of time. And any suppliers you work with, developers and you work, you're doing start with that. A lot of things now like even on Shopify when you're going to customize area, change it to mobile mode and whack it in the middle and use that yourself to see how it works. Once you're happy with it, get a preview link and actually open it in cognito on your phone and start doing and start doing that because I think the biggest danger is we do stuff on desktop looks beautiful than the majority of people that come on mobile have a big issue. And some sites hide things on mobile that they're not hidden on desktop. They'll actually hide pieces of content. Not good, not good at all. If that content's going to help a customer convert, make it available on mobile. If it's not going to help a customer convert, just delete it from both. And I say both. There's also tablet in the middle. I'm the only person in the world that uses their iPad to buy stuff, but that's fine. And that's statistical. It is like 90 to 95% is desktop and mobile combined. Last point then. And again, this one, this one fascinates me. If you do not have an AB testing tool on your website, you are definitely breaking things and you don't even realize too many brands go, well, we've got to change that. Roll it out. If you have to have to have to change something at least test two versions of the thing that you have to have to change. So say one of the senior directors in your company says you've got to change the delivery information or a brand say you're selling our brand, but we've got a new logo and we've got some new copy for our products. Can you update it all to this? Or it's like, okay, it's black Friday. When you change with the copy to black Friday, use an AB tool either just to keep your current version and test a new one. Or when you make that change, make it twice and have here's the default version, the obvious stuff to change. And here's a slightly different way of looking at it. If you do four or five tests on the chart and you see no uplift, you have no good outputs. Fine, at least you've tried. If you have a test that has a bad output, you can avoid that happening. That is a good thing. And sorry, I'm so passionate about this. But if you have a good thing, A, you can roll that out and you've just created some uplift, which is the whole point that today's show is conversion mistakes. You can undo those mistakes, avoid those mistakes and do some good stuff. It's going to uplift conversion. Secondly, you've learned something about your customers. So if you find that putting your review widget more prominent, that's a classic one we do on almost every site. And it's, the results are insane sometimes. Sometimes it makes no difference. Sometimes it's just annoying customers. If customers know the brand already, you probably don't really want to be kind of chucking reviews down their throw. Unless it's a specific review or the contents relevant to the part of the journey you're in. A review that says it says it's going to be five days delivery and it always says that. But I always get it between one and two days. That's a good review to feature in the checkout or when the pop-out happens or the mode or when someone adds the car. Write that review at the bottom and link to it on whatever review platform you're using. But you've got to test everything, everything, everything. Never assume things I would test new page copy. I mentioned earlier as well. Photography. If you're going to change the way photography loads works, looks, test that. We always have these debates on PPC ads and also on collection pages about whether you should show the product in a lifestyle setting, the product on or near or next to someone or the product on a white background. Whichever one works best, the more functional the product, the less people are going to look at it, the more you probably want to go down the route of white background, the more things like how big is this backpack on somebody's back. Well, you should maybe have every single problem, just the backpacks on the side of a mountain have it on someone's back. So you can see how big it is. And then look at the way you structure and sort your collections by default. So with those backpacks, you probably want to have like a small one medium, large one. And the bit first filter maybe is like put in your height. So instead of size, we're now splitting the backpacks down by height. So if you are over six foot five, you want to go for the extra large straps or backpack size or whatever, or you could do it by liters. The problem with doing it by liters or ounces of fluid that can fit in the backpack is no one knows what that means, which is why the image is so important. And it's just it's one of those nuances that drive me mad where it's like, I think liters is probably the the good one here is like when they say it's a 30 liter backpack. I don't know, but the point me I don't even know how much 30 liters is, but use metrics that your customers a Google and B understands. So rather than using feet and inches, I'd highly recommend even in the United States use centimeters. This backpack is 40 centimeters high. It is 30 centimeters wide and it is 30 centimeters deep. You're like great. The height is the same as the depth of can go and it's expandable. Go back to my first point about the hoodie, heavyweight, multi wash, et cetera, et cetera. If you're going to change your, if you're going to launch a product launch it twice, not we don't launch it twice launch it once but have two versions of the launch on the site and see whether a big banner at the top of every single page really helps with this new product launch whether you should dominate the home page or actually you should be a bit more subtle about it and focus on the email users. One thing I find mad about product launches is how many people buy them because they're an existing customer and so they exist things that they care more about the new thing versus new new customers that come in. Therefore, they don't know that it's new. They're just looking for their first product. Again, test it. Is it a bit of a nuance with your business, in that sense? And if you're going to update the main navigation, the amount of times if our clients go, we've just updated the nav. And we're like, well, have you done conversion drops? SEO falls down a bit. And that SEO ranking that's driving a big percentage of sales right now, you've just removed it from the nav. So you've just told Google it's not an important page. And Google is going to start dropping it down the ranking. So check out the SEO agency if you're doing nav updates. And again, you can A/B test. When you A/B test, Google, SEO, and chat to your petitions only really be served old version. Don't show them the new version, because if you don't keep it and you go back to the old version, they've indexed the old version for a long time. Now they've indexed the new version, and then a few weeks later or a month later, they go back to the old version, and you're kind of messing them around. There's better things for them to spend their time doing. Reading pages, they've not read yet. Reading things that have adapted. Reading your new customer reviews. Good place to spend time. You've already got this, now check this version, now go back to the original. That waste their time, so don't do that. Without testing, I love this, I'll write this. You're probably killing your site conversion, and you don't even realize, and that's all from me. Check out our sponsor offers in the description below. Go and join our newsletter on the website, hit subscribe, and whatever channel you are at the moment. Check us out on social. 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