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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent Peterson (00:00.782)
All right, welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce special episode, Ask the Expert. Today I have Chase Clymer. He is the expert climber of all things Shopify. Chase, go ahead and do a quick introduction. Tell us your role and what you do.
Chase (00:20.8)
Sure. I guess people I'm most known for in this industry hosting Honest Ecommerce. Go check that podcast out. I'm gonna have Brent on very soon as well. And I've also just been in this game for a very long time running an agency called Electric Eye. We do a lot of things, Shopify specifically, migrations to Shopify, optimization for stores, a lot of design dev stuff. So a lot of front -end nerdy stuff. So I...
I've been doing this over a decade. I can definitely say I'm an e -commerce expert. So hit me with it, Brent. What do you got?
Brent Peterson (00:53.582)
All right, before we jump into content, Chase, and this is your second time on the show, and so I'll make sure that I put the link back to your original episode that we did a couple years ago in the show notes. But before, and I believe you did answer the free joke project, so I should go back and look and see what you did last time. But I'm just going to tell you a joke, and all you have to do is say, should that joke be free, or do you think someday we should charge for it? So here we go.
What's the difference between a vegan and a computer programmer? One is disgusted by a rack of lamb and the other is disgusted by a lack of ram.
Chase (01:36.32)
Should that joke be free or someday hidden behind a paywall?
Brent Peterson (01:41.742)
Yes, correct.
You have to answer. Free or pay.
Chase (01:49.344)
I guess... Free.
Brent Peterson (01:56.366)
Alright, good. Hey, my little music box is working good too. Alright, so we're jumping right into content. This is supposed to be a quick session, so the only thing we're going to ask today is the most common mistakes that merchants make when setting up their Shopify store.
Chase (02:12.146)
Thank you.
Chase (02:16.224)
Absolutely. And this is when I get to go on my tirade about Shopify. All right. So Brent only gave me this right before the call. I made a few notes here. But a lot of this is off the top of my head. So I apologize for the stream of consciousness this answer is going to entail. But I've got three main topics, I guess, or points I want to make about the common mistakes merchants make on Shopify. First point being is over investing in customizations within their store when they're not ready to do it.
The next would be the choices that they make within the UX of their store, custom or not. They just make bad choices. And then the third being a lack of content or overall direction with how they're building content within their site. So going back to the first, if your store is doing under a million, you could even argue under 5 million. You don't need a custom theme. This is maybe controversial to some shops out there. But I think that over investing in design...
Brent Peterson (02:46.766)
you
Chase (03:11.552)
is more appealing to a brand's founder, especially one that's a design -oriented creative. And it doesn't really add much to your bottom line. I think that you can make amazing customized themes and designs, building stuff out of the box with using themes that are out there in the ecosystem. And I think that a lot of brands overspend in this department when they're too young.
Brent Peterson (03:37.518)
you
Chase (03:39.264)
If you're doing less than a million dollars a year, any extra dollar that you have, you should spend on marketing and getting more customers. Nobody cares how you're about page looks. Let me just be real. So that is a big mistake that I see is people over investing in custom design before they're ready. If you got the money and you've got a really dialed in ICP and you've got a really dialed in marketing funnel, yeah, then I think you can definitely eke out optimizations within your branding strategy within your overall site. But...
you're not a nine -figure brand, you are not... You're not spending your money wisely. So that's the one mistake I see. The second mistake I see is this comes a lot when brands either DIY their site or someone builds their site for them that maybe isn't a true Ecommerce expert. They don't understand a customer journey. They don't understand how this thing is supposed to be laid out. So there's a lot of bad choices made in the UX. I can...
call out some specific ones here. Navigation is always, always bad. It's like the first thing I can see, I'm like, who built this site? I could tell that they didn't know what they're doing. The way the navigation is set up for an eCommerce store. Additionally, sorting and filtering is often overlooked. And that's a huge thing that needs to be understood. And then it's 2024 now. And I still have to have conversations about mobile optimization with people. And they're just...
I get it. You're on your desktop computer looking at your website all day long. You don't realize how bad the mobile experience is. But that is a big mistake I see often. And then the last one here to end my rant is... When we talk about content, oftentimes when I'm having conversations with merchants about designing new stores, content comes up and I'll send them examples and they're like, that looks great. This looks great. That looks great. And I'm like, yeah, you want all these things have in common is they have great content. They have awesome imagery. They have great...
copy. They have good video. And then you send me all your stuff and it's stock photography or it's renderings or AI -generated stuff. There's nothing wrong with that as a starting point. But you have to understand if you're looking at a Rolex website or these top tier websites with amazing content, they look good because of the content. A website is just a wireframe. The content gets dropped in at the end of the day. So your website is only going to look as good as your content. Even going beyond that...
Chase (06:03.648)
People aren't investing in the written content on their website as much. They're not telling their story and they're about me. It's crazy how many brands I'm running across that don't have an About Me page or About Us or the story of the brand. People are interested in that stuff. After they believe that your product will solve their problem, they're like, Well, who am I buying from? Because people buy from people, not from businesses. Another place that people just aren't really investing in is coming up with a blogging strategy. Shopify has a free blog that is...
just as powerful as any other blog platform out there, especially now with OS 2 .0. You can do whatever you want within the blog. It's very powerful. But a lot of people just don't have a blogging or content strategy. I over answered your question, Brent. Hopefully, that's what you wanted.
Brent Peterson (06:47.246)
No, that's awesome. So I want to back into it. I think that I love the three points that you made. The first point about content and then the second point about the UX and the first point about the theme. If you were to take your content first and then you were to make sure you like the way it feels or I guess.
The first thing you do is you want to lay out your content. Then the next thing you do is you're going to choose this theme, right? You don't want to build a custom one. You want to try to find a theme that's going to work for your store. You could use that theme to kind of fill in that content. I guess the question that I have specifically around this is for the theme and for the UX, is a lot of that UX dictated by the theme you choose? And the second part of that question is,
When you're talking about mobile first, shouldn't any good theme you choose already be optimized for mobile?
Chase (07:51.488)
I got the first part of your question, which was, is a lot of the UX choices heavily dependent on the theme that you chose? The answer nowadays is no. These themes are very robust in what you can do within the customizer. And I can show clients 3 examples of end websites that were based upon the same starting theme. And you get wildly different results. So don't...
think that you're going to be boxed into a specific UX choice by your starting theme. Now it does have a... You can tell if you're looking really hard, but your customers aren't looking that hard. What they want to do is they want to see familiar patterns within the UX of the theme. What was your second question again?
Brent Peterson (08:39.726)
It was around mobile first, so any good theme should already be optimized for mobile. Is that correct?
Chase (08:47.296)
Yeah, and I would say that Shopify's theme ecosystem does an amazing job at being ruthlessly difficult to get into. It was actually closed for the longest time. They just opened it up when they launched Online 2 .0 as an offering within their new theme frameworks. But basically, most of those are good. There are better ones.
I can name some names right now. Anything by Maestro is great. Pixel Union, Out of the Sandbox, anything by Archetype Themes. Those four, you're not going to really find anything bad within those. But if you don't know what you're doing, you can definitely ruin it. So that's where maybe it makes more sense to hire an expert to help you that's really familiar with how to tailor these themes to an in -store versus DIYing it. What's your time worth to you?
Brent Peterson (09:37.934)
I want to jump back to the content and you talked about the blog and I know that Google wants you to have 40 pieces of content to support you being an expert in the field you're in. Maybe we'll close out the podcast on why that's important for a merchant to develop that good content and what is that content that they should be developing around their product page.
Chase (10:06.144)
Yeah. I mean, I can even take this from a perspective of conversion rate optimization and content plays into that because it basically... A customer will come to your site and look at your product because it may or may not solve the problem that they're experiencing. That's a really straightforward answer of how commerce works. It's like, does your product solve a problem for a consumer? Now, where content comes into play with this is the supporting evidence to help...
dispel any fear, uncertainties, or doubts that a customer has about your product solving that problem. So they might not be scared. They might have a fear that it's not American -made. Or they might doubt that it'll get there in a certain amount of time. Right? So all of these questions about the product may not even be about the exact product, but it might be about shipping or refunds or returns or guarantees. All of these questions can be answered by your content.
Then from that, you can also expand upon that by what you said, the expertise. So now it gets a little lost in the weeds. It's like, well, what is your product? And we can talk about a product strategy around building content. So just some examples off the top of my head with merchants that we work with. We work with a company that sells packages of beef, so meat. So they have a whole blogging strategy.
around recipes featuring their products. So that raises the expertise of how to use their product. And then they have just oodles and oodles of stuff supporting their FAQs and talking about their guarantees and how their product is raised and butchered and all of that stuff. So it answers all the questions that their customers could have and all that content at the end of the day. Another kind of direction you could go... And this one's a lot harder. It's apparel.
is super difficult to write about from a traditional blogging strategy. You can only say so much about a t -shirt. But you could get a little more deep with it. And you could talk about maybe top 12 products that are trending for fall. And maybe your t -shirt is featured within that list. So now you're helping with a gifting strategy. And now we're getting into some super SEO -centric stuff. I think SEO is super...
Chase (12:28.128)
crucial. I would never say I'm an expert in it. I understand what it comes down to is backlinks and content. But I do believe that if you do the work and you really put the work into building out an SEO strategy, it pays dividends for years when you stop working on it. Versus investing money into paid ads, it stops the second the budget runs out.
Brent Peterson (12:52.398)
That's awesome, Chase. You know, we wanted to try to do five to 10 minutes and now we're at we're almost to 15. So I think that let's let's see where this lands. And I love this format. I guessing that it's going to be hard to get five minute question or five minute question answered in any type of podcast format. But I really appreciate you being here today. I will make sure that we put all the contact information on the show notes.
Why don't you quickly tell us how to get a whole debut?
Chase (13:25.696)
Absolutely. First and foremost, if you like the sound of my voice, you and my mother have something in common and you can listen to me on Honest Ecommerce. HonestEcommerce .co is the main website. You can find it on any typical podcast thing. We're on iTunes, Spotify, all that jazz. If you think you have got a Shopify store and you need some help, reach out, go to electriceye .io...
schedule a contact call. It will literally be with me. I'll be the guy you talk to. And we can see if we can't help you out there. We do a lot of discovery work upfront with our clients to see where we can find some of these hidden profits for the businesses that we work with. Other than that, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. I'll make sure Brent has those things that he put in the show notes.
Brent Peterson (14:13.678)
That's awesome, thanks so much. And I like what you said during the conversation about people buy from people, not from businesses, and that people are gonna come to Electric Eye because of you and the solutions you give them, not because of some business thing, right?
Chase (14:33.984)
Yeah. It is for a service business. I could go on a whole podcast just about this and growth strategy and just content marketing for a service business. Yeah, it all comes down to being authentic. Having that expertise and sharing it. Business development is just out like planting seeds and then someday they'll grow into an actual tree and then you can harvest that tree. It's how business development works.
Brent Peterson (14:50.734)
you
Brent Peterson (14:59.054)
Alright, awesome. Thanks, Chase Climber, Honest Commerce, and Electric Eye, the climber of commerce. Thank you so much for being here today.
Chase (15:08.576)
Brent, thank you so much for having me.