Brian and Cory will walk through the 10 things they see Amazon.com doing really well that you can emulate in your own eCommerce store.
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Machine Transcript – 10 Things You Can Learn From Amazon.com
Brian Krogsgard 00:07
Hello, and welcome to Commerce Journey. My name is Brian Krogsgard. I’m here with Cory Miller. Hey, Cory.
Cory Miller 00:14
Hey, always get rockin on The Music Man.
Brian Krogsgard 00:18
Me too, it’s easy to get distracted by good music, you know, but don’t get too distracted. Because today we have a great topic for you 10 things to learn from Amazon, you know? What better example is there for how to do eCommerce? Well, then amazon.com the most popular eCommerce website in the entire world all of us have shopped there at some point or another, I’m certain. We’re going to learn a lot from Amazon today. And Cory and I are here to walk through this process with you. 10 tips and things. You know, a lot of us are just what are we Cory, we’re just we just go through the motions when we shop on Amazon. But as store owners, we can think about what is Amazon doing to influence my decision making so that they can make more money by us shopping at their store. And you know what we want you to make more money to, the best way to do that is to go to commerce training.com slash go dash webinar and take advantage of our awesome deal with GoDaddy Pro, our exclusive partner for all things on Commerce Journey, using that link at Commerce Journey.com slash go dash webinar that’s going to allow you to get three months of all of their eCommerce features, you can get your website fully up and running with a domain, eCommerce hosting awesome extensions, everything you need to get going with your eCommerce store as $1 insane deal they hooked up hooked us up with an inquiry.
Cory Miller 01:46
Yeah, got a couple of people friends that have already purchased that. And then their trial period. And I like the fact that you have three months to kind of get your store going. I mean, that’s a perfect time period, I think. And it gives you a deadline. If you’re like me, I need a deadline.
Brian Krogsgard 02:01
That’s right. There’s no better way to bootstrap your store than using commerce tourney comm slash code dash webinar. All right, we’re so excited today to talk about things that we can learn from Amazon. And Cory, what is just your first thought when you think about shopping on Amazon?
Cory Miller 02:19
Oh, man, the ease of use? Yeah, I can go on my phone and order stuff. My kids, you know, I gotta be careful. They know how to find my Amazon app on my phone and look up stuff. And they love to daydream. Have you ever gotten
Brian Krogsgard 02:35
fully realized and expect? Totally a ghost purchase from your kids?
Cory Miller 02:41
Asking counts. So we’ve got an echo show, I think is what it’s called. And it’s worth the video. And my wife uses it for recipes and things like that. But then my son knows how to do it. And we got some ice cream cones, you know, their whole, you know, from the beginning, they have just made it so easy to use from their shipping, like policies and pricing and stuff. All the way to baking it dead simple to order something like a bike from my phone. That’s pretty crazy. I mean, I’ve got Amazon shipping deliveries coming today. I don’t know about you?
Brian Krogsgard 03:16
Yeah, I probably do. It’s, you know, it’s pretty common. I love to shop at independent stores, and whenever I have the opportunity, but there are a lot of things where Amazon is the place I know I can go for a certain type of product, especially like a more generic product. So for instance, if we’re just, you know, we’re picking up a big batch of nighttime diapers, well, rather than go into the store to get that right now I’d rather just have Amazon, send it to me, and we’re gonna get into some of the reasons why they make that appealing. But before we do that, the first thing that Amazon does that I think of more than anything else is they’re constantly testing and tweaking and improving the overall experience on their site. And that is our tip number one, to never be afraid to tweak what you’re doing to see what will work better. Now, Cory, we were talking a little bit before like, Well, does your average store especially your newer store? Do they really have the traffic or the budget or all that stuff to take advantage of, you know, like multivariate testing, you know, an A B testing and all these different things that you can do in a really sophisticated way if you’re getting millions and millions of page views. Well, no, right. But what can they do? What kind of tweaking and testing can we do with our smaller stores?
Cory Miller 04:42
Yeah, we want to give the caveat like Amazon is the largest eCommerce in the World Bank for a good reason. right but it didn’t happen overnight. And most of our all of our audience at Commerce Journey and our tribal Commerce Journey is not dresscode Another side of the spectrum from that. But there’s things we can learn. And we want to caveat that so we, you know, we started this conversation saying tweaking and testing. And what I love about Amazon that I’ve learned and I use prolifically to all the projects I’m involved in, is data. You know, like, every point, it’s the beauty of the web and doing eCommerce is you can track things you can track movements of how people flow through your, your site, you can track to a very granular level that can get kind of scary, we’re going to give some of those caveats today too. But in every project, I want to get as many data points as I can to learn. I mean, what I love about Amazon is they’re always experimenting. And that’s what we try to do and all of our projects will this work today? Well, this topic resonate today, we get signups for the email on that topic, can we, you know, score an SEO piece of content for the site, and track it through Google Analytics and search console and all that kind of stuff. So I mean, I, the mantra for me, for online work, anything I’m doing specifically eCommerce is always be tweaking and testing.
Brian Krogsgard 06:04
Yeah, and you know, what, we can learn from some of the decisions that they make to have some understanding that, you know, this, or this is probably a best practice that they have figured out based on their testing. So we can steal from their sophisticated testing based on interacting with hundreds of millions of customers, or however many they have, we can take some of that and just assume like, hey, Amazon is doing this, this is a best practice, I can do this, or it’s vastly different than how I’m currently doing it, or is a great example, is a good check for us to say like, maybe I should reconsider the way I, you know, showcase my variations of products, or the way where I put my photography, that kind of thing. So that’s a good way for us to take advantage of what Amazon is doing. And, you know, put it on our own store.
Cory Miller 06:57
here’s a here’s a great test for everybody. You know, if you’re not on Amazon right now, and just close your eyes and go, what color is the buy button? What color is the Buy Now button? And you probably even know there’s probably two types sometimes, right? So what’s what’s the buy? Now? What’s the one click Buy Now button, which by the way, Amazon’s gonna patent on the one click that they thankfully, let everyone use. But I bet you know, it’s yellow, and maybe a gradient of orange, you know? So that’s interesting. When you look at the parents go back. Yeah, go back and look, just look at the page, we’re going to do that. And later on, we’re going to do a walk through
Brian Krogsgard 07:37
Just a teaser with some of these, but we want to walk through on a text and video version first, so that you know what to look for when we’re on the page. But yeah, it is interesting, their Add To Cart versus their buy. Now buttons are essentially shades of yellow and orange. So they’re very complimentary. And that is certainly based on that testing. Alright, so tip number two, something Amazon does incredibly well, is to provide a blend of upsells cross sells and bundles. So they do this thing extremely well. And this is, you know, algorithmically driven for them. But we can, we can fake it. Because we know, we tend to know someone’s buying something on our store what else they may buy. So they do, they do frequently bought together. And then what’s really cool about what they do with their bundles, is they say, add both to your cart or add both to your shopping list. And I think that is really clever, because not only did they show you the other product that is like you know, a upsell or the the bundle product. They also give you the link to just go ahead and bam put both of them in your cart at one time. I do that all the time on Amazon, especially if it’s like some cord. Sometimes it even catches me like if I’m buying electronic and unlike it says oh, this is frequently bundled with this other core like HDMI cord or something. I’m like, dang, I bet I need that HDMI cord, because so many people have bought it. And I just click the button, whether I need it or not. They are getting me to increase my overall purchase price for that shopping trip by giving me that easy bundle.
Cory Miller 09:16
So this this whole maximizing sales with cross sells upsells and bundles, I think is all under the category of maximizing also your customer value. So it’s so expensive, and so time consuming to get a customer. And so I’ve made a lot of money doing this, by the way, bundling packages. So in my previous business, we had software products, and we would come out you know, at one point I think we had like 200 skews and probably even more than Mali. We made a ton of money on bundles. And all that was was a new product type. With the same products the same infrastructure support system we use the same development time it took to fix updates and people will upgrade they’ll go up the chain No, if you give them a good reason to, and I mean, you know, the convenience factors, which you mentioned, which is like a buy mic or something or a TV, and it has a little bundle thing that has the chords. But when you’re thinking about this for your eCommerce store, how can you get a customer? How can you maximize their value, not just to take advantage of them, but like, how to continue to extract more value from the customer by giving them something good in return. And one great way to do that is, when you bundle things, give a discount for it. So like, if you buy all these three together today, like somebody may just be looking for, you know, like the TV, right? I’m trying to think of another parallel, but TV, and you also give, you know, a DVR, something like that will still exist, or, you know, and instead of them had a wildcard, on top of it. Yeah, make a percentage on it. And that’s just a great way to do that. And we’ve seen a lot of ways, particularly like with WooCommerce, where you can do that in cart. So like, they go to that next page. And they say, but if you get this, you can say X amount today, I see that a lot on software sites, too. And subscription, SAS services where, hey, if you upgrade to, you know, lifetime or something like that, you’ll get X amount off. I love that. Because when you’ve got them to that point, that’s a great way to make a deal, because they’ve already taken a step in that direction of buying.
Brian Krogsgard 11:20
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, like you said, within WooCommerce, you can also do this in Shopify, there’s built in upsells, cross sells, and product specific discounts that you can set up, that will all help you in this goal, which is our number two tip for maximizing your sale per trip for that customer. All right, number three is probably the thing you think about most, especially in determining Are you going to buy on Amazon or somewhere else. And this is using Amazon Prime, or whatever you want to call it encouraging customer loyalty on your site. Amazon Prime, everyone knows what that is. Theirs is actually a club membership. You know, Sam’s Club is similar Costco is similar. This is obviously a model that’s been perfected in big box retail, and Amazon’s the online version of big box retail to the fullest, right? They do so many things to help you with this. Now, of course, we have this both with posts or other projects. And you had this with I themes where you essentially have a club membership to if you get the club membership, then you have access to other things. So you on post ads or the project. This is all digital products, but someone has to be a Club member, which is our baseline product, to then be able to purchase a job posting, and it kind of self curates and like I you know, brings that customer and qualifies them and makes them more likely to post on our job board than say some other job board because they’re already a post member, Amazon Prime, they have various benefits that they’re going to encourage loyalty with. One is as everyone knows, you know, free and faster shipping. Another one is, they may give you like a credit based on certain purchases. So they call this like a slow shipping option. This is one I thought would be cool to bring up because you know, we’re all pushing, Hey, you got to get faster shipping, or else they’ll just go somewhere else that offers it, you have to do it for free. Well, one of the ways to make your free shipping a little better, if it’s not an emergency for someone to get their product like they are a month in advance of when they need it, you could offer them a little credit to select slow shipping, and then you still make extra money on the difference. So that’s one of the really cool things that I think Amazon does, what they do, and I read on my Kindle a ton, they actually will offer, you know, if you put out your guaranteed shipping date by an extra three or four days, they’ll give you like, $1 off your next book or something. I think that is so cool. And we can mirror something like that on our stores by saying hey, if you choose, you know, super fast shipping is free. If you choose normal shipping is still free. And here’s a 10% coupon on your next visit. What you do Cory with that, you’re giving them a great reason to come shop with you again. Right. And that’s got to be worth every penny of that 10%
Cory Miller 14:10
Oh, absolutely. In case you get a person to come back and repeatedly buy from you, you enter this loyalty category. It’s a huge win for your business. You know, I think Amazon if I could say this has left some on the table with prone. You know, we’re talking about memberships, like post has is a membership. It’s a club, you know, it’s a group of people that identify similar, like, similar professionally in WordPress developers, entrepreneurs. And I think prom could go a little bit ways to say like, it’s just not this just huge discount, but it’s like I’m proud. You know, they can make this into a tribe kind of thing. Like I’m Prime I get all these discounts plus all this and, you know, and gather people more together because I think the powerful part of business, any business This is when you can create a tribe for people, your customer community, make them feel like they belong to what you’re doing. Then you’ve got this little t on lockdown. But what I love, there’s so much we need to spend a little bit time on this whole loyalty thing because there’s so much with Amazon we can talk about. One is they get you to stay on their site. Like if you think about it, so I am ordering these little Lego journals. I’ve loved this for some reason. And thankfully, they’re not as expensive as some other journal types. I’ve got one coming today. But as a Prime member, the loyalty is I also watched one of their original series last night. I mean, you know, they’re given me multiple reasons. And just under the category, you’re asking yourself, you can’t, you know, offer online stream like they can necessarily, but like, can you give people another reason to come back, and that’s the value. So everything they do in amazon prime video, by the way, their naming sucks, I think but like, every chance you can to give people another reason to come back is so huge that you get that loyalty from like, your content, your blog posts, you do all the supplemental stuff around your products, you can give people a reason to come back and be loyal to you. And I will say this, if you teach people something, if you inform educate them, it’s another way to earn that type of loyalty.
Brian Krogsgard 16:20
For sure. And loyalty, it doesn’t have to just be by someone buying into it through you know, actual value, like Cory said or hinted towards, you can do this with the way you tell your story. There’s a company that I always think of with this, and they’re great eCommerce store called Saddleback leather. And this is a company that makes like really high quality, like leather, backpacks, and briefcases and stuff like that. But they’re really good at telling their story. For instance, they’ll do YouTube videos talking about like, Hey, here’s a breakdown of how our bags are made, versus how the competition’s bags are made. Here’s the things that we do to go the next level for you to make our products awesome. And by the way, you know, I’m the founder, and this is like, this is me talking, this is my baby. And what you’re doing with that is you’re creating a connection with your shopper, to say like, hey, you’re buying from a real person. So now we’re taking we’re taking something from Amazon, the importance of loyalty, but we’re adding something to it that Amazon can never do. Amazon, if you think about who they are, you just think of Amazon or you think of Jeff Bezos, and you don’t need to make Jeff Bezos richer, he’s rich enough, right? But what you can do is you can you it’s hard to connect to individual brands as much on Amazon, but you have the power of your store of the individual brand. And that’s a whole angle for loyalty. That doesn’t cost you anything aside from like, the content creation or the you know, the initial story development for who you are. And you can create an identity for yourself, that’s gonna bring natural inherent loyalty, without even like charging for it with the club or like any of those types of other incentives.
Cory Miller 18:03
Yeah, you’re right, you hit on Sunday, which is the, you know, if you want to earn loyalty, one way is to be human and do things that the big box people can’t do, which is what you kind of shared right there. And I and I really liked that, because we leaned into that. And I themes too, we’re like, okay, we, we can’t maybe beat somebody on price or something like that. But what we can do is be the most real human, genuine human show up. You know, a lot of that is just your, how you communicate with your customers to we’re going to get into that next too. But I just want to mention a couple things that also instill loyalty for customers. And that is, you know, I’ve got an Amazon card. I don’t know about you, Brian, but like, I’ve got an Amazon card, and I use it for cashback, but every time I use it, even if it’s not on Amazon, by the way, I still think about Amazon, it’s brand awareness, but I get rewarded. So like when I’m in the checkout, I can use some of my cashback points to buy things. And just give an example but you can’t do your own credit card. Right, but but just like you said with the $1 credit, if you pick the slower, cheaper option delivery option, that’s a great way to do that.
Brian Krogsgard 19:11
I think what the area where we can take advantage of that as eCommerce store owners is with repeat purchases. So we’ve talked about coffee and like having every webinar and every everything we’ve done but you know what, I go to buy coffee beans, I will often go to buy from the same place because they have that age old trick where it’s a little card, and it’s like you got 10 stamps, and then you get a free one. Well, that’s no more than a 10% off coupon, which is not that significant, but it feels really good when you accomplish the free one. And I promise I will I will go buy 10 bags of coffee from somewhere, even if it’s a little more expensive because I want the satisfaction of that last one being free. And we can totally do that with our eCommerce store whether we do it when they hit a certain dollar threshold or if they make X number of purchases in a year. Whatever it is, and this is especially important if your store is the type where someone can buy from on a repeat basis, like if it’s not a lifetime product, if it’s a consumable product or anything like that, you can offer these loyalty rewards that people will take advantage of, and it will affect your bottom line in positive way.
Cory Miller 20:20
Yeah. Last thing real quick under the loyalty is like the smiles program. So we’ve done this with Vida Bars too, by the way, in, but the smiles program is awesome, because it’s all automated, but like you can buy things through your smiles link. And I just got an email last week saying, I think it was $200 was donated to my net tells me a lot, right? There was a few hundred dollars is was donated to my nonprofit of choice. That’s pretty awesome. Now, you don’t have to have it all automated. And so the thing caveat, we said like, if you get to a certain point, or if we get this many sales or something this week, well don’t make a donation to this. We’ve done that before. Or you go good.
Brian Krogsgard 21:02
Yeah, you can have a period like, we’ve been talking about getting ready for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you could say hey, 3% of everything we sell towards Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we’re donating to charity water or like what you know, if your local store, do a local charity, like connect to your audience, that stuff is gonna inspire loyalty, think of the ways that you can create incentives for loyalty with your shoppers, because getting those return shoppers is huge. Amazon knows that. That’s why they have prime and all the stuff built around that. Alright, let’s talk about something Amazon. You know what, they make great attempts at this. And in some ways, it’s too good. But I actually think it’s the, it’s the dumbest, like smart interface that they have. So this is around personalization, and customization. So what we mean by this, this is not like personalize your product, which is something you can totally do. Amazon can’t do that very well, like put your initials on product, you know, monogram things. That’s the type of thing other marketplaces like not eBay and Etsy, Etsy, like these individual fulfilment people, they’re better at that than Amazon, this type of personalization is the shopping experience. So this is more important with the more skews that you have, if you have 100 plus skews, you really need to be trying to personalize the experience based on previous browsing activity and previous shopping activity of your visitor. So this is something depending on the platform you use, it’s probably based on extensions, or apps that you add, rather than out of the box. So we look for the appropriate extensions to try to have this kind of smart recommendations engine and the back end. And some of these platforms are starting to build this into their core features. But this is something that certainly Amazon is able to do better from an algorithmic perspective. But we can be we can do other things right, Cory, like we, Amazon tries to be verbal. And honestly, I think they are so clever that they’re dumb sometimes, for instance, I recently bought a computer mouse. And it’s like, okay, I bought a computer mouse, I’m done. But Amazon’s like, you must be really interested in computer mice. And it’s like, look at all these 20 other types of mice. So like they’re being yours using their AI, but it’s actually not that clever, we can be dumber, and still provide something for them. And we can do it by asking questions. This is much easier to do from implementation standpoint. So you could say, All right, here is our here’s our outdoor store. Hey, what are you interested in? Or what do you like to do? Do you like hiking? Or do you like climbing? Or are you a swimmer? You know, different questions. Are you looking for, you know, men’s clothing or women’s clothing? Ask them those questions, save the results as cookies, this is stuff that’s much more, you know, doable. And anyone with high skew store can take advantage of this type of thing. And then you can cater the experience based on what they answer with. And it could be as simple as having categories for your products, and then showing them the category archives for that. That is the poor man’s personalization, but it can be just as effective because you’re showing them what they want to see. Not what’s you know, less appropriate for that individual shopper.
Cory Miller 24:30
So one way we did this, in my previous businesses, we knew we had two customer types. We had the do it yourselfer that wanted to buy our tools and go build their own website, from dentists in the UK to you know, landscape architects in the United States or Canada or whatever. And then we had another customer tab which was the builders, what we called the builders and they were the ones that would buy our tools to build for other people build websites for other people. Well, very simply, here’s a you can personalize it. Just Like you said, you’d have two buttons on a, you know, do it yourselfer? Yeah, you could have another button that says, I’m a, and we had this on one of our sites, you don’t have to have like machine learning and all this kind of stuff for the servers that Amazon does. But, you know, you click to that, and then you have catered offerings. Now there’s a software service called write message that does this, that kind of helps with this too. But you could also use OptinMonster for it as well. But help people just you know who your customers are likely, right? And what are the past they’re on to solve their problems and personalize a journey for them. The simplest, easiest way you can do is when you get emails is collect their first names. And then in your emails, or on your site, as you can do with some software is say, Hi, Brian, you know, hey, Brian, we got this new sale, we got this new content, we got this new, you know, all these things, but just by calling people by their first name is a great way to personalize your marketing message, your website copy and things like that. And when you do that,
Brian Krogsgard 26:07
I feel like you’re talking to me directly.
Cory Miller 26:10
Exactly in and there’s also options like chatbots. So chatbots can do that. where, you know, maybe there’s a you’ve done your past with a chatbot and you’ve got I’m a freelancer, I’m a do it yourself for any go through. They say By the way, what’s your name, Jeff. Okay, cool. Hey, Jeff. Now you’ve just you know, and you, you know, you’ll see it a lot in the chatbot people, they also get their email. So now you’ve, you’ve attached Jeff with his email. And in that conversation, you can insert those kind of merge tags and things like that to make it personable. The best thing and I should have asked you this before Brian, I saw was I went to a site one time, first time I’d ever been to the site and happened to be and this is getting in the borderlines. scary part too. But I saw my picture on the page. And I was like, What the heck, and they had used Facebook somehow, in a way to like, I recognize my picture on the page. Now, you don’t want to get into the creepy category. But like, you know, when you see your name, when you see your picture and likeness…
Brian Krogsgard 27:08
I think once you’ve registered for an account, that’s a really great thing to do. If the person has not registered an account, though, if they’ve not connected, their name, their email address, that type type of thing, it’s not as good. I have a website, we have a web savvy audience for post status. So we actually do that based on their email address. Because in our world, everybody has these gravatars or avatar or like, someone might log in with Twitter, those types of things. In those scenarios, I’m all for it. But I’d be careful with that. Just being like super, you know, super creepy, like hunting for them on Facebook and pulling it in. Like that’s a little scary. But there’s so much that you can do with personalization that we can take advantage of. All right…
Cory Miller 27:50
So there’s a quick tip for everybody who’s going to gravatar.com Make sure your information is hooked up all the emails – you use online.
Brian Krogsgard 28:01
Especially also that you’re sending from for your store, because most email providers are going to pick up the gravatar and they’ll show your picture in email rather than you know, whatever other generic icon and that’s going to make your email stand out better. So there’s a little hot tip that’s a completely Aside from this, but that’s gonna make you stand out a little more.
Cory Miller 28:24
And I know of one email address I have this connected so I need to do that soon as we get off this webinar, it’s good stuff.
Brian Krogsgard 28:31
Hey, the next one tip number five, this is the most coveted thing in eCommerce I think. But you know what, it’s important that they’re done write reviews, we always harp on the importance of getting reviews. Okay, well, why do we want to get reviews One is we want the you know the the feedback from the customer. But another really important thing is it offers a form of social proof to future shoppers because you have a variety of five star reviews, testimonials, things like that. I don’t know about you, Cory. When I’m shopping for a product again, this is important in high skew stores. I want to see what other people saying how many stars does it have? If there’s low star ratings, why have they fixed it? Amazon nails reviews, we’re going to show you, you know, a product and a bit and we want you to just take as much as you can from this and now this is really tough, especially for new stores because getting the reviews is the hard part. Yeah, if you have products that have reviews, and especially if they’re positive reviews, you need to take advantage of those because it will be outstanding social proof for the rest of your website. So yeah, Amazon, you know they have the five stars right underneath the product name and the you know the who you’re buying it from. And this is so important. You guys have this right They’re on the veto bars. If you have this many reviews, just like Cory shows here, hey, we have 22 reviews, look at these five star reviews. And bam, click that and look what they see, they see positive reinforcement for this product, this is absolutely, absolutely gonna impact my desire to purchase from the veto bars. Because look at that, you can’t have anything better to promote your product than other people who’ve bought it.
Cory Miller 30:29
And by the way, there’s so many reasons other than social proof what this is really cool, like when you go to a site, and you see all these five stars, or whatever, like every book on Amazon, I always, if it doesn’t have like a four and a half star rating with a good number, meaning like 50 plus reviews, I go down and I start looking if I’m on the fence for the reviews. But there’s another way that reviews can be a huge plus for your store, which is the way your customers talk about your product, particularly glowing, is a way that like, for instance, these words of chefs kiss, that’s great. But like right here, the Holy Grail, we could do, we could take this, do a screenshot and say like 22 five star reviews, my holy grill, and then you go, for curly hair.
Brian Krogsgard 31:15
Or these bars have completely changed my hair like that is awesome. Like that is the type of review that you want. Now, this requires a good product. This requires a collection of reviews, this requires presentation of reviews. So this is not something you do when your store is brand new. But as you get those orders coming in, as you start to nail it with your product, what do we know you can nail it, then the power of these reviews is awesome. And Amazon does this great. I’m proud to see our resident showcase product with the Vida bars that Cory works on is already doing a great job showcasing these.
Cory Miller 31:52
So you know, you might be thinking, Okay, so how do I do? How do I get reviews you need to ask? Don’t just don’t just assume people will do reviews. You need to ask for this. So take whatever your product you’re selling, and say, Okay, how much time needs to elapse for someone to consume it or try to consume it before I ask for review. So it might be like a software product for what we did. We did about 14 days, we want them to kind of get started, make sure they have support emails for questions and things and all that but like, give them like two weeks. Now for these bars, it might be two weeks to like two weeks have an automated email that goes out from your shop to your existing customers saying how was it? And if it’s good here, can you leave a comment? Now you’re gonna get polarized stuff, right? But you can learn from the five stars and the one stars when you get one stars your level that think this sucks, it’s going to be tear, oh, the world is ending, right? Everybody’s going to get your one star every once in a while. But those are learning opportunities. Just like the five stars, you can utilize the one stars to go, how can I rush in and fix something about the product? Or are my sales pages clear enough? You know? Or did my shipping fail or something like that and respond to those one star just like you do the five stars?
Brian Krogsgard 33:10
Yeah, you know, your store might actually have the ability to reply to review. And anytime, especially with one star, two star low reviews, you need to have public visible responses as best you can to those because you want the other people. One of the things I do when I’m shopping on a place with a lot of reviews like Amazon, I’m definitely looking to see what are the top things people say about it. And I want to see what are the biggest complaints Is there a pattern in the one star reviews of like, you know what the hinge on this tripod just broke. And if you see that type of thing over and over again, especially in my experience with those types of tech products or whatever, it’s like the same thing was with the problem every single time, you know, the keyboard, the spacebar sticks, or you know, whatever it is so super important to look at those reviews. And then to be responsive to those reviews. And sometimes to date them as well. Ask the customer to edit their review, there’s lots of things you can do to try to make sure that your reviews are stay on point and stay fresh. All right. Let’s dig into something that Amazon does great. We can do this really well too. And some of its really easy. So this is always a nice one. We want to provide great customer service. Amazon, the biggest thing that they do that I think is they have easy no questions asked returns, which means they put the onus on the seller because if you as a buyer want to return the product, they say boom, okay, return it. Free Shipping, here you go send it in, you’re done refund and then we’ll figure it out with the seller. Now us as our own sellers, we need to have the same exact response. Because we need to cater as best we can to our customers but there’s no point in doing that this is a little bit controversial. Maybe there’s no point in having that great, like no questions asked type of return policy, unless you tell the people that haven’t bought yet Hey, by the way, we have this no questions asked return policy, that’s fantastic. You want to show on your website, you know, a lot of times they’re like this little circular badge, you know, like with the, with the stuff on the outside of it, it’s like 30 day guarantee, money back guarantee. and that type of thing is powerful. Kind of, what do you call that Cory, like authenticity on the product page, like to just give someone just a little bit more courage to go through the checkout process.
Cory Miller 35:38
You want to take away all the obstacles to someone buying? And one is what if I don’t like it? What do I do? And what enough fit? What if it doesn’t fit? Yeah, I think it’s confidence is what it is like confidence that I can buy this, that the trust maybe is another one trust that, you know, if this doesn’t work, they’re going to take it back. They’re going to exchange it, they’re going to make it fast. And so, you know, oftentimes that refund guarantee, by the way, I don’t say on most of mine, I don’t say no questions asked, I say one question asked, and that is, how can we improve? How could we have better improve the experience for you. And so we say that because we want them to, I want that embedded is that we’re going to give you your money back. But we also want to take your feedback.
Brian Krogsgard 36:28
There’s a famed investor, startup guru named Paul Graham, and he says do things that don’t scale. The things that don’t scale is when a CEO replies to a refund request and said, I’m so sorry, that this didn’t work out, how can we make it better your money, your money is back on the way, I know Anna B divorce has done this to where we’ll just eat the cost of the bar, because the relationship is more important than that particular making that $5 or $10, or whatever it is back from the customer. You know, one of the advantages of a marketplace over what we have as individual sellers is the you know, the marketplace can just be that interface for the customer service and say, Hey, we got you, and they offer the refund, they are the middleman on that. And the seller just has to deal with it. So we want to step up and say, well, we’re you’re buying direct from us, we stand behind our product, here’s our our money back guarantee, and we want your feedback we care about this, just you want to highlight that you care, you want to highlight that it’s safe for someone to purchase from you.
Cory Miller 37:36
In tying in with that. And some of the things we talked about is i and i themes. And still today I sign my emails not even if I don’t necessarily write them, or even if people realize that I’m not necessarily sending them either. I want my name as a human on there. And I want often in the first couple of years of themes, I would reply back to customers and then say CEO or founder on my title. And people go wow, that’s nice to have the attention of the person even if I was like it was three people but you know, three of us getting a personal reply from people and doing things that don’t scale meaning replies fastest possible on customer service type issues and saying I’m handing, Hey, my name is Cory. I’m the CEO, I’m handling this personally for you goes a long way trust, as we talked about earlier, is earned purchase by purchase. But people by the way, you might think, don’t you remember I ate the cost on that shampoo bar, you know, a couple of weeks ago, it’s it’s a for customers, it can be fickle. It’s it’s a purchase by purchase event by event thing.
Brian Krogsgard 38:37
That’s good. All right, number seven, this is different names for different types of stores. But most of the time, it’s called a wish list. So the ability to save a product for later purchase or to be able to link it off to someone else that they could purchase for you. A lot of times a wish list could also be used for gift registry. For instance, if you’re like a really boutique type of store, maybe you’re a local store with your own gift registry and people are buying from you for having a baby or getting married or something like that. That’s a great thing to do. You can also just do you know, generic wish list, y’all have this on the V bars, you said we are seeing your wish list, I think on Amazon right now, where you’re just saving stuff for later. Again, very important for high skew stores. Because you want people to remember, hey, I was interested in this product, here’s that product. Here’s that list that I have where all that stuff was because they may not pull the trigger the first time but they will come back and pull the trigger the next time or it could be as simple as like hey, it’s a my kids fifth birthday. And here’s a list of all the things they want. Just make it easier on the family. And if you if you run a toy store or something, you know, whatever it is like you can do that, especially these niche stores where that kind of wish list concept makes a ton of sense. You can do it straightforward. There’s extensions for WooCommerce and Stop by to make this happen. And it’s just it’s just a thing that you got to do. Right, Cory.
Cory Miller 40:06
Exactly. And so one of the examples I had was, Well, the reason why I was showing you my wish list is because over the years, people know that I’m a prolific reader. I read all the time, and I’m not talking about fiction, I’m talking about nonfiction, business, marketing, leadership, all those. And I share actively my wish list now how much money over the years has Amazon made from me specifically, from my wish list? Probably quite a few sales.
Brian Krogsgard 40:31
So you’re using, like a recommendation engine.
Cory Miller 40:34
Exactly. And again, we go back to like empowering our tribe or community by like being able to sell it. Now the other thing I want to mention why I pulled up Yeti here is because one I love their mugs. I’ve been drinking out of this Yeti mic using today, when he gets some Commerce Journey mugs by the way. But is that I put things in my wish list and also a company called Tom bin. And I get emails specifically from that, like, I know they use the data. So like, if you’ve got an eCommerce store, and you’re using your wish list data, right, you can see how many people have wishlist, certain things. That’s social proof. Think about it. The reason why I was looking at you know, audio recorders just to show you like, I don’t know anything about audio recorders, but I’m gonna go through there and look at the highest thing, highest rated ones, like Brian Clark, Gerard has, you know, put a review in there, I want to buy the one that he has suggested. Because he’s not selling the audio-video stuff. But you said they didn’t say this is the number one wishlist item in our in our inventory. Yeti. The reason why I should share this is Yeti has really leveraged the wish list and things like that, for me in their emails saying the one that you have in your wish list is hot right now. And they do a fantastic job
Brian Krogsgard 41:48
…on the item in your wish list or who knows what Yes. And this is going to depend on how your store called you know how it stores this information, how you could use it in your automated emails, like there’s going to be some nuance and depending on your platform, depending on your email provider, all that. But it’s important for you to have this feature, but especially again, for high skew stores. Because it’s just makes it a little bit easier for your customers to shop at your store.
Cory Miller 42:17
And hey, Brian, you’ve got some knowledge about back to the GoDaddy Pro offer with WooCommerce. You know, specifically like WooCommerce, wishlist extensions and things like that, yeah, can give you that kind of ability to do that kind of stuff, right?
Brian Krogsgard 42:32
Yeah, they have there some power in those in that built in extension, and we’ll have to see about whether it’s got the wish lists in our special deal. But even if it’s not in our special deal, it’s a pretty minimal add on for a store that’s making money. And it’s a nice little feature to add to your WooCommerce store. Alright, our number eight item is SEO. Cory, I want you to drive on this because you’re our SEO master around here.
Cory Miller 43:04
Okay, so let’s just type in a book. So I’m going to type in leadership challenge, okay. I didn’t even look this up beforehand, so I could get caught. But what I love Here it is. Yeah. So this is a book that I read in college and fantastic, incredible book, they do better than anybody else. Like this is the actual site. This is one of the few authors that do this. But what they do better than anybody else is Seo. I mean, any book you’re probably looking for in books, the ones I’ve seen this, most often, they have done a really, really good job with SEO Now make sure whatever platform you’re using, your you’re looking at, and then now this save to your own. I don’t know why this popped up. But anyway, there’s the smiles, things that pops up says hey, buy this book and give back to your charity. But they do SEO better than almost any eCommerce I’ve ever seen. Now see more on books, because I’ll just type in a book, Brian will mention a book a good type it in and out in one or two, number one or two on the spot is SEO, please don’t neglect SEO. Because people are searching for whatever your product is solving for them the answers to their questions. Make sure you’re doing your due diligence with SEO and thinking through like masks, customizable face masks right now, you know that that’s a high, a pretty big. And we’re gonna have a webinar on this in a couple weeks about products. You can personalize through some of these cool vendors like printful and do this. But if you do your SEO, right, you can get a leg up and they do it better than anybody.
Brian Krogsgard 44:39
Yeah. And it’s just one of those things to pay attention to be cognizant of your product descriptions, your images and their alt texts, like all those things are gonna play into it. And you know, we’ll have some very specific SEO stuff but yeah, you can’t shop for something without seeing Amazon results in Google because That the way they structure their stuff and the way they recommend people list their products, or they’re going to enhance that SEO compatibility. All right…
Cory Miller 45:08
And for the main keyword that you’re trying to, here’s the real quick little punchline, the main keyword you’re trying to score for your product should be on the sales page of the product. Don’t stuff keywords everywhere, it particularly on the page. And don’t make every page on your site, that keyword but the product specific page, for my good friend, partner, Rebecca gear will tell you SEO expert is make that so like, for instance, Backup Buddy was the one when you go to Backup Buddy, on the sales page, that is the word the keyword phrase that you want to go after should be on the sales page for the product that you’re selling. Related to that not every single page, but new ones for that. So that’s the quick thing I’ll share about the SEO on eCommerce.
Brian Krogsgard 45:53
Nice. All right, number nine is email, the power of email. This is there’s so much that you can do here. What you need to know is you can do a lot of you can mimic a lot of the stuff that Amazon does with email with your email, especially if you use an automated email email platform like Jilt, you can go to CommerceJourney.com/Jilt to check that out. That’s now a GoDaddy product, by the way, they just acquired the company behind Jilt. And you can set up automated emails for a variety of reasons for transactional emails. So like customizing the way your receipts look so that those receipts Look, just write and have just the pitch that you want in them. Another thing that Amazon does really well is they kind of cater category email so they know a category of product that you’re interested in, and they send you emails recommended specifically for you. And there’s a lot of stuff that you can mirror from Amazon’s email strategy in your own course, what are some thoughts that you had in terms of the way Amazon does email that we could learn from.
Cory Miller 46:58
But two things is one is the first and foremost is good communication. So if you’re shipping something from your eCommerce store, or you have a digital product, is using the emails right after purchase, and until the purchase is delivered, to give them updates, pay, don’t let don’t make people guess and ask and come in, potentially complain and get mad. Get in front of that anticipate all the questions they might have. So like Amazon does the best with this, they send me emails and even text updates to tell me when something’s been delivered. And I can track my products make that easy in your email. So they can go straight to their email box and check on the status and go click over and see on your site. The second goes back to one of the previous points we’re talking about is upsells and cross sells and bundles. So we would do sometimes you’d buy products software product from us a previous business and maybe five, six days later, have an email that comes in said by the way did you know you can upgrade for the price difference, the bigger package? So there’s a communication with the customer aspect. And then there’s an awesome marketing opportunity with your emails. Now I still think Amazon could do way better. I’m thinking they’ve got all this software or you know, processing power. Brian, I’m like their emails sometimes still stuck.
Brian Krogsgard 48:16
Yeah, you know, one of the things I do like about their emails, and maybe it’s because it’s where their origination is, I like their emails they do around books. And I think there’s a way we can mimic this because they send me a like a books of the month. It’s almost like an announcement email for you know what to read this month. And they do it based on the fact that they know that I read books on their website, the way we can do this is you can do category based announcements, right? So you can send a customer segment, anyone who’s purchased from category y, send them an email saying, Hey, here’s new stuff in this category. If you’re the type of store that’s kind of consistently adding new skews, then you can put those skews in a nice automated email and say, Hey, send to anyone that’s purchased from this category. And here’s a list of the products in that category. And here’s the latest releases that we have. And that is an automation campaign that you can do in a service like Jilt, that just automatically goes to people on your email list. And that is just a powerful type of email. You’re constantly reminding them. Hey, you love hiking boots, here’s all our latest stuff and hiking and that is going to be really impactful.
Cory Miller 49:27
Matt, by the way, most stuff you’re talking about like a service like Jilt is automated. Do it once. Absolutely. Then you’re off to the races. Yeah. All right. So our last one last but not least, is our website walkthrough. And do you want to do you want to take over?
Brian Krogsgard 49:42
You drive because our I’m worried about my screen share on my end, but if you just click on any product, it doesn’t matter. Let’s see a Korea’s homepage so we’re going to see the personalization. What matters for Cory so they’ve got all this stuff get go down to some physical product if you don’t mind. Here we go, the one coming today we’ll use some Legos. All right, so there’s a few things that they do so well on Amazon. And I think that I want to start just with the fact that they have this general product layout. They are smart with the way they set this up. It’s all based on testing, they are doing a couple things here, they got your images on the left, and it tells you Hey, roll over this image to zoom in. So you can see the details. If you have really detail oriented images, then that’s really powerful. So you can see exactly what is this going to look like, you can see the super cool Lego ruler, which I really like this product Cory.
Cory Miller 50:38
By the way, let me tell you a nuance. Here’s why this product, this picture right here is helpful. This is different than the other journals, I ordered this specifically. And in the second photo, they’re showing me what that little ruler looks like the other journals I’ve got done include that.
Brian Krogsgard 50:54
Oh there you go. All right, the next thing that they do really well is they’re showing you all of the major things that you want to do. Okay, on the right hand side, at any point, you can add this to your cart, you can do the Buy Now button, you can add it to your list, you can add it to your registry. And they’re also saying, hey, this qualifies for prime, you know, free one day shipping, they’re giving you all the benefits of shopping on Amazon right here on the right hand side. Now, they Amazon does this look kind of baseline description in a bullet point format, which I think is really cool, I think that something a lot of us could learn from is to make it as easy as possible to see the baseline description. But where Amazon’s product pages really start to shine is as you go down, you know, people scroll down a page, and they dig more and more, you can see the frequently bought together like we talked about before, they’re offering you your bundle. Now we scroll down some more, we’re going to continue to see what Amazon’s great at, which is here’s other stuff in this category. And then hey, what questions do you have? Now, not all eCommerce stores can answer this, do this as well. But you can actually do like an FAQ tab on most eCommerce platforms. And you’re essentially preventing them from contacting your support. You’re preventing them from leaving because they have unanswered questions, because you’re just putting the questions on there that you know you get over time.
Cory Miller 52:17
And you know what you’re doing back to our point number eight, I believe it is your SEO SEO?
Cory Miller 52:22
Yeah. So like, answered the questions people ask. Google knows best user intent. And if you’re doing really good FAQs on page, by the way, you haven’t much more opportunity to rank in the search engine. And you’re doing right by your users, which is the priority for Google.
Brian Krogsgard 52:40
That’s right. The next thing we learned through this is you basically can’t have a product page be too long. Like, yeah, we’re detail the more pictures, the more descriptive texts that you use on the product, it’s going to benefit your SEO, and it’s going to give that certain type of customer, you know, if I’m buying some stuff, I’m like, I know what I want, I go I press Add to cart, and bam, well, it didn’t hurt me that it’s a long product page for that. But if I’m really exploring, I’m digging in, I want this long product page, I want to get down to this section where it’s like, here’s every little detail, maybe I’m looking for something very specific like is this product made out of graphite or aluminum or whatever else. Or maybe I know then this example is like a sin number. Maybe I know the number or something I want to look that up. Amazon works really hard to provide all the potential information. What we learned from their product pages is there’s not too much information to put on these product page. A lot of times when I see products for individual, like store owners like a an independent store, there’s just not enough on the page. Like I don’t even know what I’m buying. I don’t know enough of the details. And Amazon does never, they never fail for that. Like they always have tons of stuff. And now we get down to their outstanding reviews. And this is where the marketplace has a big advantage. But like you saw on the beat bars earlier, we can do this too, we can show those reviews right there on the page. Because if you’ve got great reviews, you want to show them off. And you see here is a verified one star purchase. And there’s not a response on that. So this store on or this, yeah, the person selling this item they need to keep on track of that. But you know, for every one of those, there’s however many of these five stars, certainly it wasn’t enough to get Cory off the page. What was it…
Cory Miller 54:26
Nah. And look, look here again. Okay, so look how many times you see measurement pieces. So that was a problem, right? Because Wow, what are they buying? Look? It’s this ruler, like I mentioned to you like how many times you see ruler just in the headline. So back to this picture. Look what they did. second picture. Now that might be Lego, not necessarily Amazon, but like they showed me a picture of the ruler. And then they unpack it and look at this creative stuff down here. They did all this stuff. One thing I’m wanting to mention too, and you’ve kind of you’ve mentioned this to Brian, but like I had no idea they had highlighters now I’m not gonna buy a highlighter, but like this is curious to me like, I haven’t bought a pencil set yet. But in by the way, Cory I’m a grown up a 44 year old adult dad, by the way, and I’m buying this for myself, not for my kids. But a look, I didn’t know all these things existed. So I can go over here and look like this stationary pin gel set. And but the thing I like too is the related the related products. Like some people might not know this obscure thing. And if you’re offering it, it doesn’t cost anything extra for you to showcase that kind of stuff. And here’s another, you have the sounds louder. Yeah. And, you know, if you’ve got a lot of skews like that, that’s, that’s fantastic. And then again, like there was the questions up here. So like, you know, this is probably huge if I’m Lego, huge question like, should you superglue or glue your Legos together? This kind of thing is a cardinal sin for Lego people. But like, you know, somebody asked that that’s a question that could get Amazon over Lego or a piece of traffic for.
Brian Krogsgard 56:09
Yeah, and core, this particular product doesn’t have one thing that I do want to show off before we leave because this is something in WooCommerce. And Shopify, you can do really well, which is to be up here we go. Go if you go to, I want to look at the variations that you just showed at the top of that. So there you go. Yeah. All right. So these buttons to make variations, really simple to say, Hey, I don’t just want the mouse, I want the mouse in the keyboard, I want the mouse in the palm rest. They’re pretty clever. And you can do this too, where you actually kind of game a variation on your product into a bundle. And I fall into this all the time where I end up buying a little more than I anticipated, because I use these variations. So your variations don’t have to just be like color, you know, like, what do you want the charcoal or the gray, you can also do variation that’s essentially going to add a bundle to it to where you’re getting, you know, the mouse plus the keyboard, or you’re getting the boots plus the hat or like whatever, like really common upsell, you can almost gain those into your variations. And I think that’s something Amazon does really, really well, that I personally enjoy about shopping on Amazon because sometimes I don’t even know that’s the variation I wanted and then they show it to me right there on the product page. Cory there’s a lot of stuff on Amazon that we could walk into, like adding to cart viewing the cart, you know, the checkout experience. I think the checkout experience all that’s probably just a whole nother webinar. But yeah, I think if you don’t know what an Amazon product page looks like, if there’s something really different between the way your product pages look and the way Amazon’s look and operate. Consider why like it does, it’s not necessarily that it’s a bad thing that yours is different. Consider why it’s different. Consider it, is it possible that I’m missing something and that I’m missing conversions Most importantly, because I don’t have things set up in just a certain way. And you know what, we want to talk to you about this stuff, too. Join us on Facebook Commerce Journey.com slash Facebook, you’ll go right to our Facebook group where we can have a discussion about setting up our store, mirroring some of the functionality that we see on Amazon and other stuff. Thanks for being here with us on this webinar, go to commercejourney.com/go or commercejourney.com/go-webinar to take advantage of the outstanding deal from GoDaddy where you can get started with your store for $1 for three months. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time.