In this webinar, Cory talks with Clifton Griffin of CheckoutWC.com about optimized eCommerce checkout flows and WooCommerce shopping cart checkout pages. Are yours easy for your customers to use? How can you make the WooCommerce checkout experience — and overall customer experience — better for your site’s visitors and drive more sales?
Find out in the video.
Use the coupon code ‘commercejourney’
to get 15% off at checkoutwc.com
What are the Best Practices and Designs for eCommerce Checkout Pages and Flow?
Cory and Clif discussed the best answers available for some common questions store owners have. Whether you use WooCommerce, Shopify, or another eCommerce platform, these are critical questions:
- What are the best eCommerce checkout page designs?
- How important is a one-page checkout eCommerce experience?
- What are the best practices for checkout flow on your eCommerce site?
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About Clifton Griffin
Clifton Griffin is a Web Developer with 14 years of experience developing plugins for WordPress. For the last 3 years, his focus has been on CheckoutWC. Their mission is to create high converting, delightful checkout experiences for WooCommerce.
You can find Clif on his personal Twitter and work account. 🐦
Machine Generated Transcript
Cory Miller: [00:00:00] Everybody welcome back to another Commerce Journey webinar sponsored by our good friends at GoDaddy Pro. I’ve got my friend Clif Griffin of checkoutWC.Com not wp, wc.com. And we’re going to be talking about checkouts and smoothing the process and sales and conversions and everything. Liz had some extensive experience with eCommerce particular with WooCommerce too and has built a product on it. We’re going to be talking about all the things, expertise, experiences he’s learned and why he built the product that we’ll talk about at some point, you know, in our webinar today, but this is so critical because sitespeed. You know, conversions make the difference for eCommerce.
[00:00:45] So pleasure. Thanks for coming to the Commerce Journey webinars series. And could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and what led you to create Checkout WC and all that?
[00:00:56] Clifton Griffin: [00:00:56] Sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I’ve been doing eCommerce for about 11 years total. Pretty much all in the WordPress space. I did dabble in OS commerce for a little while, which was not very fun. Literally you just had to hack the core files to accenting, so pretty rough, but I got my start with the eCommerce plugin Shopp which was coming to the kind of,
[00:01:16] Cory Miller: [00:01:16] Oh man! Shopp with two ‘p’s
[00:01:19]Clifton Griffin: [00:01:19] Shopp with two ‘p’s. And I had a full-time employer at the time that was doing some cool stuff in the retail space.
[00:01:25] So for 40 hours a week plus, I just got to dive into the eCommerce world. I became a little obsessed with trying to optimize conversions and just create great user experiences and really. Tech started to tackle the checkout page through that job and really starts to think about how it should work in particular.
[00:01:47] So, yeah, that’s my background. I’ve been doing WordPress since 2007 though. So plugin development in particular. So, you know, had a bit of a time there
[00:01:59] except you’d use a coal work, which is the development side. I can never do that. Never pretend to be a dev. Hi, I was telling you when we were talking about this webinar, that.
[00:02:10]You know, we focus so much in the product world on building our product, getting it ready. Then we start thinking, this is my natural flow then, Oh, this is going to be the magic thing that changes people’s lives. And then we get it on. You know, we start to do all the technical nuts and bolts. Okay.
[00:02:26] Set up Stripe or PayPal or whatever payment processor eCommerce set up all those kinds of things. And then for me, it’s oftentimes, you know, okay, what’s the messaging for it, for the sales page. And I admit it to you. The last thing I often think about and forget who my detriment is, the checkout, the process, like we do all the front side, but we go, why aren’t we getting cells?
[00:02:49] And we start looking at messaging and all that stuff, but we don’t think about. What is the experience someone comes through from Linden on our site to check out to the back. And this is your product in particular, in your expertise. I love because you’ve hinged on this one part that I think most of us forget about, which is what’s the actual checkout at I themes for instance, for 10 years, like once a year, I’d go and I would assign it to somebody else.
[00:03:17] I’ll say, Hey, Go through our checkout experience and they’d oftentimes go through it and they’d have a bunch of notes for me and was like, okay, that’s good enough. But it’s crazy to think about that. So you’ve got to this one with all your experience in eCommerce, you got to this checkout experience.
[00:03:34] Tell me some thoughts that you obviously have some beliefs about what the checkout experience should be for everyone. Can you share some of those with us?
[00:03:45] Sure. Yeah. You know, it’s funny when I was thinking about when you were talking there is you know, were you really describing as a funnel, right?
[00:03:50]So everybody is landing on your landing page. So you’re seeing your flashy sales marketing copy. They’re seeing pictures of your product, they’re hearing about your story. And then hopefully they add it to the cart and then hopefully they go from the cart to checkout or directly to checkout and then on how that’s configured.
[00:04:07] And so the force multiplier that we’re trying to be is you’ve already figured out your sales copy. You’ve already figured out your product. It’s appealing to people. You’re getting it in front of people. So how can we get more of those customers that add the product to the cart, to actually finish their purchase and an analogy I saw one time or not even an analogy, just a fact.
[00:04:30] Is that it’s much cheaper to double your conversion rate on your checkout page than it is to double the number of people that get to the checkout page. You know, if you think about the top of the funnel, you know, 10,000 people are coming in, maybe, you know, 2% or something like that, actually finish a purchase.
[00:04:49] Okay. What, if you could get that 2% to 4%? Well, that’s double the profit now on the same number of customers coming in, but getting it in front of 10,000 new people is going to be really tough. You know, as far as the checkout page in particular you know, back in 2000, probably 13, something like that when Shopify had just come out on the market, I said, man, this is.
[00:05:12] A much more delightful user experience for me while I’m purchasing, but also for the customers we’re trying to serve. Because you know, the history of eCommerce and WordPress is a little muddy. It wasn’t, you know, we’re pressed for a long time. It’s just a blogging platform. And we all agreed. That’s great blogs.
[00:05:31] And then we started come up with like, well, what if the post object is a kind of extendable thing? So we had custom post types and along the way, then we start to get these eCommerce solutions, but they were really geared towards trying to solve, how do we add products to our store? How do we take payment?
[00:05:50] Things like that, not on creating great user experiences. And I think that’s because. In those early days WordPress was primarily something developers used. It wasn’t something that someone that had a retail store could just sit down, configure themselves and have a great looking site. Nowadays, we have all the solutions for creating gorgeous sites.
[00:06:17]I’m amazed at some of the sites I see from our clients. And they’re not building custom themes like we were, you know, they’re not in the weeds of CSS, they are buying great WordPress themes. They’re using element or, you know, they’re using all these tools that we didn’t have. And I think because our eCommerce platforms for WordPress in particular, started before.
[00:06:39]All of that stuff was available. They’ve kind of lagged behind and they’ve accumulated some technical debt. So I really saw an opportunity first with shop and then with eCommerce eCommerce was acquired by automatic and really picked up a lot of steam and has become probably the largest eCommerce platform in the world.
[00:06:58] If I remember correctly I believe you’re right. That while it’s very functional, it’s not leading people to the right actions. You know, it’s not designed to make them trust the store. It’s not designed to be easy. It’s not designed to reduce friction and so at a high level, and you know, like I said, we.
[00:07:21] We got a lot of our ideas from Shopify. Well, what is Shopify doing there? First putting you in a single domain of knowledge at a time, you know, so every Shopify store first asked for your shipping address. Why is that? Well, because if you show somebody 25 form fields, when all you really need to show them a shipping rate is five.
[00:07:41] Max five then just show them that five. And then the next screen asks for them to pick how they want it to be delivered. Then the third screen collects payment. That’s also where they can optionally define a billing address. And that also is, you know, it’s billing that’s related to payment and a huge reason for credit card declines is mismatched billing address and credit card information.
[00:08:05]People forget, Oh, you know, when I signed that up for that credit card, it was at my old house or, you know, it’s using my work information whatever it is. So we, if you keep them in a single domain of a knowledge at a time, It reduces what they have to think about and you start to create something that’s intuitive that they can they know what the next field is.
[00:08:28]They don’t have to like study the labels. Particularly the WooCommerce default, you’ve seen a lot up front immediately. Especially if you check the box for shipping address, now you’re looking at two completely different address fields that going down the page, you have to scroll.
[00:08:42]So really trying to get rid of that and give people confidence as they go through that they are answering the right questions the right way which also leads to fewer incorrect orders, which can be a big. Problems because sometimes you get an order and you’re like, this is not fulfillable this address is wrong or they put in their name and the address field, but you know, the software didn’t catch it.
[00:09:04]So that’s kind of conceptually what we’re trying to do. And then we tried to layer on top of that as many optimization automations, as we can think of you know, the easiest example is for us customers in particular if you, if we know your zip code, we also know your state and city. So we order our fields so that people choose their country.
[00:09:24] Then they put in their zip code and then we try to fill in their city and state for them. Which is just another thing that reduces friction. It’s a little bit delightful.
[00:09:32]Cory Miller: [00:09:32] I wanna pause for a second cause I want us to spend some time on that. I want to scroll back a little bit.
[00:09:37] Clifton Griffin: [00:09:37] There’s not a lot of caffeine today.
[00:09:39]Cory Miller: [00:09:39] No. I want you to talk about this because you created a product because you’re passionate about, and you spent time working with clients and trying to help people build stores. But if I scroll back to when you mentioned about Shopify and WooCommerce there’s two roles to me, there’s the storekeeper manager on the back, you know, trying to get the store ready to go.
[00:09:58] And I know this firsthand because thevidabars.com, we just celebrated our year anniversary. Last night, I was helping ship 450 orders and I’m like, Oh my gosh, this is a lot of work, but there’s the store owner, just managing the store. And that’s a mess. Like that’s just hard work shop with them. Makes it.
[00:10:17]Super easy. But there’s also the user experience, which you’ve got. You’re helping both those roles with. Your product, but also what we’re talking about here, there’s the I’m tweaking the knobs on the back end as the store manager, so that the user, and we’re getting to friction here. So the user can glide through and get, you know, that experience.
[00:10:34] And I love that. As you recall, we built an eCommerce plugin back in the day and I . And for this. If just shopkeeper roll for a second or stop manager role w you would activate WooCommerce and most, any, like you’re saying in the early days of WordPress. Oh my gosh. Any eCommerce I was like, Nope, cause it was just like 500 things you had to do. And you know, it had to have a PhD. It felt like in eCommerce and computer science to navigate it. And I love what you’re saying with Shopify. They led the way in there, innovated in the user experience from the. The shop manager side, but they’ve also nailed the user experience on the other side.
[00:11:13] So it doesn’t surprise me that you would be inspired by Shopify because it’s really fantastic software meant to do this . Now, so with those comments, now I want to talk about friction because at the end of the day, there’s shopkeeper shop manager, friction that you want to make it easier for them to.
[00:11:31] You know, Ana last night was cussing. That’s not our software that we’re using that has not been named so far today because they were limiting API requests, just trying to get all these labels printed with partnership. And I was like, she wasn’t really cussing she was just grumbling and I was like, it’s justified. I get it. The frustration is real. But friction or the user to me, I love what you talk about in your product in particular, because it’s helping people. It’s that. Reduce friction to get to the experience they’re trying to, there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
They’re trying to get two and 500 form fields that don’t match. You’re trying to, I’m the same as you, if I have to start entering my address and stuff and I have to go really? And now, I have to scroll down and find Oklahoma. Nope, it’s not Ohio. It’s Oklahoma. And you’re doing intuitive things to reduce friction. Talk to me more about reducing friction and before, I’m sorry, one more thing you said, because I’m running these things down.
[00:12:24] If anybody watching this, if you heard what Chris said earlier, you could double traffic. And how much would that take to get 10,000 or just doubling your traffic? That’s a Herculean effort because that’s a lever you can still pull. Right. But what you said that I’m going to go back and evaluate everything I do is if I just double my conversion rate on checkout, Holy cow.
[00:12:46] I’ve in a sense, almost doubled my business because that’s a smaller level. It’s still tough. It’s still tough to do that. But now Clif, now, can I turn you loose on friction or if you want to make comment on anything I’ve just said
[00:12:59]Clifton Griffin: [00:12:59] No. Friction is great. Well, friction is bad for instance, not great. But it’s a great topic. You know, I think friction can happen in a multitude of ways. No, I think one of the first, most obvious and probably least focused on introduced friction and a process is just the size, the speed of your site. It’s amazing how many people will spend hundreds, thousands of dollars developing doing a R and D with products, you know, finding someone to manufacture them, figuring out how to ship them.
[00:13:27]Hiring copywriters and then they will pick a host that’s extremely slow and people have short attention spans. And you know, w we’ve all heard the stat that Amazon loses, like millions of dollars, the second that their sites down We’re not losing millions of dollars, but we’re losing $2.
[00:13:46]We’re losing search presence because Google is going to score our site as being suboptimal for user experience. So they’re going to use that as a ranking signal. Is this a quality site? Is it not? So I would say that’s the first thing that most people don’t give any attention to, but absolutely should.
[00:14:03] It’s the speed of their site? You know, friction looks a lot like a lot of different things to to your product pages have enough information about the product to assure someone that they are making a good purchasing decision. You know, that’s more on the marketing side, but if someone is clicking around on your site and they never click the add to cart button, it could be that the sites do slow.
[00:14:23] It also could be that you haven’t. Made the case. You haven’t matched your marketing copy to the person you’re trying to reach. They aren’t convinced that this is something designed for me. You know, as you go through the funnel there’s lots of different ways the friction can crop up, you know, an obvious one is that too many steps that can be too many fields on a checkout page, but it can also be having a cart page.
[00:14:45]That isn’t needed you know, something that’s a default and move commerce that I think is really suboptimal is that when you add something to the cart, it takes you back to the product page and puts a banner at the top that says, you know, product a added to the cart, click here to view your cart.
[00:15:04] That’s not taking them any closer to finishing their transaction. You know, maybe for some stores that would make sense if their customers generally buy, you know, like multiple quantities of items. But for most stores they’re selling one product and the sooner they can get someone through the steps, the better for them.
[00:15:22] It’s amazing how many stores you are on where. You add something to the car and there’s not even a visual indication, that’s obvious that you did it. So you know what I recommend customers do. And by customers, I mean the merchants that, you know, work with us use a plugin or a theme that has a sidebar cards so that when you click add to cart, That product page fades out and incomes to the car sliding in just enticing you to take the next step and even better than that, if it makes sense for your store and who you’re trying to reach just don’t have a car page go straight to the checkout page.
[00:16:00]That’s going to make sense for a lot of a lot of different sites that maybe focus on one particular product where there aren’t accessories and things to consider.
[00:16:09] Cory Miller: [00:16:09] Hey, you know, you were kind of alluding to, even though you’re the developer, when you let developers just run wild on things, they’ll make them so functional. So functional. Like it works! The software actually works. But you know, the epic book, I can’t remember the author’s name, but don’t make me think is if you have to hunt for those types of things, you’re causing friction. On the Vida bars, for instance, I noticed when you added the cart, you had to go hunt for it.
[00:16:40] Maybe a lot of people now know there’s a little shopping bag somewhere on most sites that do eCommerce, but I was like, why even leave that to chance? I love how you said, hang up the cart page altogether, go straight to checkout. And they can always go back to navigation, find your shop and add more carts and stuff. But again, don’t make me think, get it to where shut up, take my money, you know, and deliver it to me as fast as possible kind of thing. And. It’s amazing. How many sites how many, I’m sorry, software. This is the software kind of do this where I know functionally it’s there, but just to your thing of the point of going, w Shopify asked for your shipping address, first that’s smart.
[00:17:23] That’s intuitive, you know, like that’s you’re making decisions for the customer. And one thing I think was such a shame was, take out the kitchen sink or hide it. Give them what they need and hide the rest where or make it just a tab click where you can see it. That’s from the shop keeper side.
[00:17:41] But I think the same principle is like, why overwhelm the user? Did you actually want to do the opposite of that? So I’ve got site speed. Absolutely. You know that. And I think if I’ll just say, I’ll say it for myself and you can say yes or no, don’t cheap out on hosting. You can, you’ve got an eCommerce site that you’re depending on for revenue don’t cheap out on hosting.
[00:18:01]So site speed and that’s, there’s some really good players in the space that offers really good site speed but it’s not going to be $9 a month. I’m a farrier users. I love that too. Again, don’t make me think and also eliminate my worries and fears. I think that’s under your assurance thing, too many fields.
[00:18:19] So many people bogged down and we got into, you know, for instance, lowering friction means get them straight to what they’re trying to actually do with the least amount of steps possible. Okay. I pause you there, but you’d go into play.
[00:18:32] Clifton Griffin: [00:18:32] Yeah. So, on the, you know, I think the cart page in particular is kind of vestigle. It’s like a relic of a different era in a lot of ways. I think, you know, there’s two main purposes. One allows people to see what am I ordering before they commit and adjust quantities, remove things. And that’s very important. But I think that one of the main reasons or the, one of the main things it was used for was to collect information such as country and zip code or city so that we can estimate taxes and shipping on the checkout page.
[00:19:05] And that’s because estimating those things. On the checkout page is kind of complicated. You know, there was a time when Ajax was not commonly utilized, it was kind of a complicated new technology. We didn’t know for sure that all of our customers browsers would support it or that the site would respond quickly enough to create a good user experience.
[00:19:25] So we’re not in that time period anymore. We’re in 2021. As of filming this and these technologies all work great. And so. You know, on checkout WC, we actually make the cart fully editable right in on the checkout page. So if you do want to adjust the quantities and say, Hey, you know what, I want to get another one of these for my wife.
[00:19:46] Just click the plus icon next to the product. Now you have two of them. If you want to remove something that you’ve changed your mind on, you don’t have to leave the checkout page. You can stay right there. So it’s. You know, we want to remove as many steps as possible. So even if the conventional flow is landing page, product page, add to cart, checkout landing page could be your product page.
[00:20:11] The checkout page could be your cart page, so you can reduce four steps to two pretty quickly. If it works for your customers and your site and the way that you’re selling products you know, another thing I I think a lot of people miss, because it’s not easy to do conventionally, especially if you’re just using a kind of stock commerce site is to remove all the distractions that might tempt some on a way.
[00:20:36] And that includes advertising for your products. So we recommend when you’re on the checkout page, there should be no header links that. You know, show them other categories of products or promotions or, you know, account links, any of that kind of stuff, because none of that stuff is supportive of getting someone to a transaction, getting them to that thank you page. You know, On the one hand you could say, well, but I want people to know that we also sell gloves or whatever, you know, they have a coat in their cart. They’re at the checkout page. I want them to add gloves. So I want that category link for gloves up there, but what if they get insecure about their purchase?
[00:21:18] And they say, you know what? I don’t know. Maybe I do need gloves, but I don’t know my size. You know what? I’m going to wait to finish this until I can go check my gloves at home. Make sure they’re, you know, medium. Like I think I am. Now you’ve just lost a sale because nine times out of 10, they may never come back. You know? So it’s all about keeping people, laser focused on what’s most advantages to you and helping them through the experience.
[00:21:45] Cory Miller: [00:21:45] Too often as entrepreneurs, I think we get insecure and go, Oh gosh, you know, I was just talking actually to my coach about this before we started the webinar and being like, you know, I want people to say yes.
[00:21:57] So I think oftentimes we go. Throw in the gloves, you know, or, and I was about to say on the gloves and since that’s good email marketing on the backend, you know, by the way you bought whatever, this is a boat boots, you know, we also offer gloves and here’s a discount to go get your clothes and come back.
[00:22:15] You know, they’ve likely already in our scenario, some of these scenarios created an account and I can zip through that chop up checkup process to add it. But it also occurs to me. What you’re talking about is really knowing. Your ultimate goal. And when we throw in all these other things, like to your point, we’re saying we’re distracting them.
[00:22:35] We have to go back to what’s the ultimate goal, getting to them too, for us getting them to the other side of checkout. And then I would say for everyone should be delivering impeccable, delivering on what you promised impeccably. You mentioned like delightful earlier. I think it’s like then that’s a whole other webinar to talk about on the delighting people with your product or service.
[00:22:56] But if your goal is to make money, you want to get them through checkout. So everything else becomes superfluous. Like don’t distract him. I love this. I actually Clif, I was working on one of my sites, a membership site, and I was like, you know, with WordPress, now you can hide certain things, you can hide header footer and all that stuff.
[00:23:14] You can add your I’m looking at Berg and different things. And I was like, Hey, I’m going to try this, but I’ve been one of those people that have always been afraid to do that, you know, but like on paper right now, It’s the way to go. Cause you’re trying to it’s just about the one goal, not the five goals.
[00:23:29] If you have five goals, you’re going to get a dart board or crickets chirping, because nobody’s going to, they’re going to be confused. You have to lead people through the process. I think that’s what you’re talking about. When you say I got the distractions aren’t leading, it’s confusing people.
[00:23:46] Clifton Griffin: [00:23:46] I’ve seen this also on pricing pages you know, for software products where. When you’re looking at the pricing table, all those other, you don’t notice it, but all those links to like features and account, all that stuff has gone because you’re on the pricing page. And they’re just trying to get you to go one step further, which is to click on a, get started button.
[00:24:04]These are like subtle things that I think influence user behavior more than we realize. And the idea is that you’re trying to. Anticipate those and get rid of as many blockers to success as possible. I just lost my train of thought. Sorry,
[00:24:19] Cory Miller: [00:24:19] No, no. I think this is good stuff too. And you know, when you were talking about doubling your conversion rate and doubling traffic, there’s an element here that we need to make sure we’re doing, which is, monitoring the metrics. Having Google analytics installed, having goals set up at a minimum, which by the way, I didn’t do other people I did for me at other places, but, you know, metrics matter.
[00:24:44] And so having, so you can go back and look at the stats, try something. So, you know, if you’re. If you’ve got links, sub links, or, you know, whatever on your checkout experience now if you’ve got good data and, you know, historical data, you can go, you know what, for this amount of time, I’ll test what Clif and Cory have been talking about and we’ll take everything off, you know, and then see what happens.
[00:25:08] Does it cause a bump, test it for enough of a sample size. Maybe it’s two weeks, maybe it’s a month, but enough sample size to go. Okay. Did that have a measurable, good and positive impact and then go from there, you know, and if it doesn’t or some, you know, just having that data, I love having data in front of me that I can make good decisions and then test my next hunches and assumptions.
[00:25:33] Clifton Griffin: [00:25:33] Yeah. Yeah. And you know, for early merchants, people that are just trying to figure this out in the early phases, don’t do AB testing, just try stuff, you know, You can read a lot of stuff that pushes people to these kinds of enterprise techniques that you know, are very they’re not useful for someone that has a store that gets a thousand page views a month.
[00:25:53] You know, you’re not going to be able to reach statistical significance. Right. So follow your gut, make a change, see it, you know, if it doesn’t go down and you see it going up. You know, I assume you probably made the right decision and keep leaning into that versus trying to solve it with math, which is essentially what AB testing is.
[00:26:12]And you just have to have the tooling to set all that stuff up. And I think it’s a distraction. There’s low hanging fruit pick that first.
[00:26:19] Cory Miller: [00:26:19] Yeah, that’s good. I think we can nitpick and this is where I get where I overthink it, but I kind of look at it as just get data flow through. And, but put this, bake this stuff in like Google analytics from the beginning.
[00:26:34] So you at least have some data, get the data flow in, use your best hunches and knowledge of what you think is going to convert. And then you can start doing, when you get some data flow in, you can do some measurable testing, at least not fly blind or, but I’m with you is ultimately I try to get my best guess.
[00:26:53]My best experiment forward to see what that audience is going to do with that. And if I’ve done my empathetic work on it, if I’ve put myself in their shoes, what is the problem they’re truly trying to solve? What is the aspiration they have on the other side? And this goes to your, this goes to all of your points, particular like assurances, you know, I have this quote, I’m probably going to butcher.
[00:27:15] It is people don’t buy a three-eights, whatever that is drill. They buy a hole that size, they want the expect, the result, the outcome. They’re not, they think by checking out wc.com. Okay. It’s going to help me speed along and get get to the result faster. You know, it helped me do something and I think you do that, like you were saying what data flow for sure.
[00:27:40] Clifton Griffin: [00:27:40] Yeah, the other way of, I’ve heard it said a couple different ways. It’s don’t sell horses. So horseback riding, you know, you know, sell the sizzle, not the steak. You know, I think it’s really easy to kind of get a myopic about some of this stuff when you’re on the merchant side and to forget what it’s like to be a customer on your site, what do they really want?
[00:28:01]You know, my wife has a local babysitting service here in town. And when we were writing her marketing, you know, we focus on that. What do people want? They don’t literally want babysitters. They want a date night with their spouse, you know, they want to be able to relax and have a night off.
[00:28:18] So, if you can focus on that kind of stuff and your product has that kind of stuff, even if it’s not, you know, sexy it could be you know, Ink cartridge refills. What is the thing that the person really wants? They don’t want the piece of plastic, you know, they want whatever they’re printing. So if you can find the way to like exploit that you’ll really help people.
[00:28:38] And you know, it’s a lot of this stuff sounds kind of, when you start talking about marketing psychology and things like that, it can feel a little cynical. Like we’re trying to trick people in a stuff, but I always flip it around on the other side. I want to be convinced, you know, when I go to best buy and I’m kind of browsing around. I’m a technophile. I want to be convinced that this product is going to change my life. You know. It’s more valuable to me and more desirable to me if I think it’s the best keyboard I’ve ever looked at, you know, I said keyboards, cause I bought one today at Best Buy.
But you know, it’s like, if I, you know, we want to have that like, That optimism and that hope and so it’s like trying to match your copy to what people actually want. And then, like you said, fulfilling it on the other side, giving them that great experience. If you can put all those pieces together it gets you that first sale, it gets you the followup sale. It could see the referrals things like that.
[00:29:36] You know, I think one thing I wanted to mention is we tried to go beyond just Like UI, like user user interfaces, user experience to make our process delightful for our stores, customers, and we, and sometimes, you know, so there’s, we have these examples, like convert kit did not have a logo for like their first two years.
[00:30:01] They’re still killing it, you know, and sometimes we put a little bit too much weight on while it needs to be a perfect logo, perfect theme, perfect photo. And that stuff is less important than what the actual product is and positioning it right for your customer. But I do think that at some point in that process it matters whether experience is good enough or delightful.
[00:30:24] And I think of it like this There are times when I have purchased, you know, a room in a hotel site on scene, that’s usually how we purchase the rooms and you walk into the lobby of the hotel and you’re like, ah, man, what did I buy? You know, this place is not like the pictures, you know, or this place does not seem.
[00:30:44] The same quality is maybe the price per night of that hotel. Or you walked into the room and it smells a little bit like musty or smells like cigarettes or something. These things are quality signals. And so I think when somebody lands on your checkout page and they start typing and Google address out of complete drops down, they’re like, Oh, thank God.
[00:31:05] I don’t have to type my whole address. And I think that’s an indication of quality. It’s an indication that that this is not a fly by night operation and that’s one of the things we have to fight against when we’re first starting out. Is that no one, we don’t have brand recognition. We don’t have 1,005 star reviews and testimonials and all these things that kind of complete the picture of people like me, but, and they’re not going to just run with my money.
[00:31:34] Yeah. So it’s, you know, at a base level where you are trying to just remove friction and get people through the process. But I think if we can delight them along the way give them surprises of like, Oh, that worked really nice. Oh, that felt good. People are going to be kind of magnetically drawn through the process.
[00:31:51] We’re going to say, you know what? This company has it together. I feel good about giving them my money. So I don’t know where that fits into marketing psychology, but I definitely have been through that as a customer where I was like a little unsure and it’s just like, the more I get in, it’s like, you know, this is good.
[00:32:07] Cory Miller: [00:32:07] Yeah. You were mentioning how you go. I like to be convinced, you know? Yeah. And. There’s so many different types of buyers to my thought, when I would talk about some of our developers would have problems with marketing. And I said, well, do you believe what you’re building will help people like change their lives in some way, even as small, you know, as just safe five minutes on their day or pounding the table or whatever.
[00:32:35] And if the answer is yes, then I think, do you have an obligation to share. How that can connect to what their journey they’re on, that they’re trying to solve or do or get or achieve, you know? And so that’s the other perspective where then you’re just trying to talk to those people specifically kind of almost whisper in the air. This is for you. Like we built this specifically for you. In fact, the sales page, I’m working on, I’m on mental health startup. We’re doing essentially websites for therapists, which kind of scroll back in my career by the way. But it’s more like a system and we’re going to do the website for them and maintain it and all that kind of stuff.
[00:33:13] And the marketing is all baked in and it’s true. We’re trying to say like, you don’t have to be a tech. Becky. We want you to be a therapist. We don’t want you to do the rest. And we’re trying to get into that beat and then realize like the alignment of, if you get, this is all a hassle to you, then that’s why we created this just for you.
[00:33:33] Now, if you go, I want to spend eight hours. I want to learn web sun, more power to great hobby. Cool. Go. You know, you can Google all day and learn this stuff. Like that’s how I started, but if you just want to do therapy and you just want to grow your practice. This is for you. We’re trying to get that to come out in the marketing and messaging.
[00:33:52] Like you’re saying all these other tips too, is just then reduce the phrase to get them straight there to get them started on that, because that’s what they’re wanting. They’re saying answer boom. Yes. I want it, you know?
[00:34:05] Clifton Griffin: [00:34:05] Yeah. It’s you know, you don’t have to be a techie to figure this stuff out. And I think immersing yourself in marketing psychology is a great start because you’re going to start to have intuitive Understanding of what your customer sees. And you’re also going to understand the levers that you’re trying to pull. You know, I think most of us when we start marketing we tend to focus on the wrong things because we don’t actually understand why we buy things. You know, a book I love to recommend is influenced by Robert Cialdini.
[00:34:33]It will make you question everything. About why you do the things you do and help you understand why anyone buys anything. You know, and that’s where it’s like wanting to be convinced is one of those principles, like when we ask tell me more about that special at a restaurant, we’re really saying sell it to me.
[00:34:54] It sounded good, or it looks good on the menu board. But I want to, like, I need to be pushed over the bubble a little bit. You know, I want to believe that it’s actually worth that extra $10 or whatever it is.
[00:35:05] Cory Miller: [00:35:05] What an Epic book that I will say be careful on how you use it, make sure your mom’s could and helping people because what a powerful book. He nails it, I keep. I see, you know, just bringing up that book makes me remember. I keep going and remember the simple, direct, correct. And obvious that what is the obvious thing people are trying to do? You know, when they get there they’re hunting for something or searching for something. And that book can be used in malicious ways. If you’re, if you have malicious motives, but if you’re doing well, it’s a part of this alignment, your product, you’re confident what you built helps solve problem, or get someone to where they’re going faster, better. Then. That book is so good to help people realize what really makes us all tick.
[00:35:54] And if we review what we do to buy, and I’ve been really dwelling in this lately, Clif is like value. What’s the exchange. What causes me to go. Hold on, stop talking to Clif, I’m buying your product. You know what I mean? Like that’s, when you really nailed that the messaging what’s baked in, like when you got to your particular product is because of all of this frustration you’ve heard from yourself and clients and all this stuff, and you’re like, okay, I’m done with it.
[00:36:19] I want to show people. There’s an easier, better way to do this particular aspect to eCommerce
[00:36:24]Clifton Griffin: [00:36:24] Yeah, because I was doing it manually. You know, I was literally building custom checkout templates and I didn’t want to do anymore. I was getting bored. I was like, I want to do this once so that I can just drop this on every client site from here on, you know, and know that they have a checkout flow that works, you know, where I don’t have to like make all these decisions over and over again.
[00:36:48]You know, like you said, a Chelsea Annie’s book is great. Probably if you want to learn how to market your products and sell better for good. Yeah. It’s also great. If you want to start a cult it just teaches you how our brains work and how people exploit us. Yeah, I think it also arms you a little bit more of like, when you’re being manipulated to know
[00:37:08] Cory Miller: [00:37:08] this is a total sidebar. Yeah, the reciprocity, somebody yeah. Comes up to you and tries to give you something. And I just sat there. I never do it because my instinct is to grab it. But I just sit there. I’m like, just to look at it because I hate that so much. Okay. I interrupted you. Please continue.
[00:37:26] Clifton Griffin: [00:37:26] That’s the it’s the free food samples at Sam’s Club and Costco. It’s the Hey, you know, come hear our presentation about this timeshare and we’ll give you, you know, this umbrella, whatever it is they got ya, you feel bad. They spent all this time, but that’s not how we want to use these things, obviously we want to use them in a less manipulative way. You know, one of the most powerful ideas that I’ve applied or just absorbed in my consciousness is from Seth Godin I can’t remember his last book. And it may not even be his last book at this point, but he said that the essential thing that we’re trying to do when we’re evaluating whether to buy something is an identity based question.
[00:38:04] What we’re really asking is do people like me buy things like this? Also, do people like me do things like this? Do we go to this type of resort for vacation? Do we, you know, is this the type of welcome mat that people that I see is. You know who I am or where I want to be by. It’s really easy to understand and close.
[00:38:25] Why are we buy the clothes we want to be, well, we want to fit in and look nice, but I think we’re also building an identity out of that. So if you can match those two things up, you know, if people look at your product and they say, you know what. Cool guys like me are cool gals like me by things like this, you’re going to sell them like hotcakes.
[00:38:47]And I think that’s really what product market fit is. It’s the customer, the potential customer. Matches the offering and they say, this is me and this is, this makes sense in my life. If it doesn’t, then they’ve got to go the extra mile on their side to convince themselves that it’s a good deal for them.
[00:39:06]Once you’ve, if you can shore up that distance and they don’t have to like, do a mental calculation of like, does this make sense to me? And they just feel it. You don’t have to do any more work. They’re just going to buy it.
[00:39:20] Cory Miller: [00:39:20] It’s identity so powerful to what you’re getting at when that quote with Seth Godin is amazing. And it works in messaging and the content you’re producing in the community you build, like, I think there’s transactional businesses. Okay. Transaction. They got what they needed and they’re moving forward. And then there’s transformational. Like. It is an experience and my company wants to be a part of your life in some way.
[00:39:45]Which is I think, where you build raving fans and people that love you and will sometimes over look. Some of the mistakes and missteps she might make along the way. So, and then the second is belonging, you know? Right. And like identity is people like this, you know, by things like that.
[00:40:06] And then you show it’s a part identity first, then belonging, even. Beggar that just reinforces that identity piece and is incredibly powerful. What we tried to do, I felt like my previous company, you know, there’s all these competitive compensation and money coming into the space. And I was like, well, the one thing we can always do is take care of our people and take care of them.
[00:40:30] And you’re hitting on these two incredibly powerful parts of just being human. That you can lean in, in the right way and build a great company.
[00:40:40] Clifton Griffin: [00:40:40] Yeah. Yeah. It’s kinda, you know, I think you know, we’ve kind of gotten far away from checkout pages, but you know, what we’re trying to do on our side is help people. Put those signals in, you know, that this is something for them, that it is trustworthy. That it’s safe. You know, a lot of these like trust patterns as we have. People, aren’t literally reading the text around the circular badge and, you know, making evaluations on the factual nuts of it. The badge just says almost implicitly there’s a refund policy or, the site’s secured, that’s all it’s doing. And it’s just trying to remove one more obstacle in a person’s brain that might keep them from finishing their purchase. You know, if they’re a little unsure that they’re going to have recourse, if they don’t like the product or a little unsure that the site’s not secure.
[00:41:32] When they see these things, it just tells their brain. Now you don’t have to worry about that. Just stay focused on
[00:41:37] Cory Miller: [00:41:37] Yeah. Affirmation. You’re right. In fact, I put a trust badge on the site I was telling you about that I pick out the navigation and stuff like that. This is almost like an expectation now subconscious or conscious that, Hey, all, that’s there. And it’s just that cool reminder. That signal is you’re putting that. I love how you say that. Yeah. All right, Clif. So we’ve had a great conversation. We’ve talked about a ton of things, basically this experience, trying to get people straight through and this critical piece, which is the cart checkout type experience a year and have some great tips and all that. Anything else that we missed you want to mention?
[00:42:13]Clifton Griffin: [00:42:13] You know, I I think I would just tell people that you know, this is what we focus on for the checkout page in particular. We do have plans to branch out and have this. We want to basically create these kinds of. Modules that you can just activate and not worry about.
[00:42:29] So, we have plans to help out with the cart page as well, or the cart slide in so that when, if you have a lot of eCommerce sites you can just roll this stuff out and you can know it’s going to convert really well. You know, things like that. So, you know, I would encourage people to check out our site and also we have a coupon code. I can give you for anybody that’s listening today.
[00:42:51] Cory Miller: [00:42:51] So I asked Clif if he would mind offering a coupon to our viewers, audience at Commerce Journey. And you want to share that?
[00:43:00] Clifton Griffin: [00:43:00] Sure. Yeah, it’s just commercejourney. It’s the discount code. It’ll get you 15% off, which is a discount that will follow you forever.
[00:43:09] And the websites just checkoutwc.com WC like WooCommerce.
[00:43:16] Cory Miller: [00:43:16] Is it commercejourney, one word?
[00:43:18] Clifton Griffin: [00:43:18] Commercejourney. One word. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.
[00:43:20] Cory Miller: [00:43:20] 15% off. And I’ll put this. Okay. So checkoutwc.com. Use commercejourney, one word to g et 15% off your purchase. I put that in the chat here today. Well, Clif, thanks so much. Stellar insights and the one takeaway I’ll tell you, I’m going to go back and really simmer on and then try to take action immediately on is if I could just double my conversion rate.
[00:43:49] What’s my conversion rate. If I could just double that. If I could just make some incremental progress, I’m going to make money today. And I think that was, you’ve shared a ton of tips and things that are so valuable, but that one alone I’m like, Whoa it’s simple, direct and obvious. If you just get lucky conversion, right.
[00:44:06] Start working on that for your checkout page, you’re gonna make an impact in your business. So I appreciate that very much. Clif tell us where we can find you again and or we can find more about you and then of course, checkoutwc.com.
[00:44:20] Clifton Griffin: Yeah. Just ClifGriffin on Twitter, C L I F G R I F I N. And that’s pretty much the only place I hang out online. So. I’m on there way too much.
[00:44:33] Cory Miller: [00:44:33] Thanks Clif for being here today and sharing. And thanks again to our sponsor GoDaddy Pro at Commerce Journey. We’re very thankful for all that they do to support our work here. Clif, have a great day, and it’s great catching up with you and thank you for all the things you’ve shared with us.
[00:44:47] Clifton Griffin: [00:44:47] Well, thanks so much Cory, for having me.
[00:44:49]Cory Miller: [00:44:49] All right. See you everybody.