The 5 Deadly Mistakes Killing Your Ecom Conversions (And How to Fix Them!) With Matt Stafford

Matt is a seasoned entrepreneur and powerhouse in the ecommerce world. Over the last 30 years, he’s launched and scaled businesses across industries, from concrete and brick-and-mortar ventures to thriving ecommerce brands. As the Managing partner at Build Grow Scale, Matt has personally helped hundreds of store owners reach and surpass the million-dollar mark, with many hitting $10M+. A sought-after speaker, Matt has graced stages across North America, sharing his expertise on ecommerce optimization and growth strategies with audiences from around the globe.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

Transition from retail arbitrage to private label brands in e-commerce.
Importance of delegation and hiring the right people for business growth.
Learning from failures and embracing setbacks as opportunities for growth.
Strategy of acquiring existing Facebook groups to access established audiences.
Challenges faced in scaling e-commerce businesses, including inventory management.
The role of TikTok and other marketing channels in driving sales.
Prioritizing resources effectively for sustainable growth.
Emphasis on focusing on high-return products and optimizing cash flow.
Importance of building a cohesive brand identity in a competitive market.
Strategies for expanding into direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales and retail channels.

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley chats with Matthew Stafford, managing partner at Build Grow Scale, about achieving e-commerce success through effective systems and strategies. Matthew shares insights on conversion rate optimization, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer feedback and optimizing checkout processes. Key takeaways include adopting a long-term business mindset, prioritizing exceptional customer service, and eliminating ambiguity in customer communications. Matthew also highlights the value of showcasing responsiveness to customer feedback and leveraging AI for data analysis. This episode offers actionable tips for scaling e-commerce businesses to eight figures and beyond.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Regular Reviews: Schedule regular reviews of customer feedback and website performance.
Data-Driven Decisions: Use data to inform decisions and prioritize improvements.
Stay Agile: Be willing to adapt and make changes based on new insights and feedback.

Resources mentioned in this episode:
Here are the mentions with timestamps arranged by topic:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

Episode Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Transcript Area

Josh Hadley 00:00:00 Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Aaron Cordovez and Michael Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I am speaking with Matthew Stafford, and he is going to be talking about how e-commerce success isn’t just about luck, it’s about systems. It’s learning what customers actually want and implementing proven strategies to boost conversions, setting up your business for long term success and scalable growth. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a coach or consultant who can help take your business to the next level, my team and I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for that coach or consultant, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com. That’s ecom with two M’s and let’s turn your dreams into reality.

Josh Hadley 00:00:49 But today I am super excited to introduce you all to Matthew Stafford. Matt is a seasoned entrepreneur and a powerhouse in the e-commerce world. Over the last 30 years, he’s launched in scale businesses across industries from concrete in brick and mortar ventures to thriving e-commerce brands. As the managing partner at Build Grow Scale, Matt has personally helped hundreds of store owners reach and surpass the million dollar mark. And with many of them hitting over $10 million in revenue, he is a sought after speaker and Matt has graced stages across North America, sharing his expertise on e-commerce optimization and growth strategies with audiences from around the globe. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Matt.

Matthew Stafford 00:01:25 Thanks for having me.

Josh Hadley 00:01:26 Matt, I am super excited to have you on the show, because our history actually goes way back when, before, you know, we had before we hit eight figures in our business on Amazon. I was once upon a time trying to crack the Shopify nut a long, long time ago. We’re talking circa 2018, 2019.

Josh Hadley 00:01:43 I attended one of the build, grow scale workshops that you had put on, and that’s the first time that you and I had met. And so it’s fun to see how things have come full circle 6 or 7 years down the road. And I know for both of us, a lot has changed.

Matthew Stafford 00:01:55 Yeah, we had quite a conversation before we started recording and asking to catch up.

Josh Hadley 00:01:59 So Matt, today I’m excited to have you on though, because you are an ecommerce wizard and a mastermind when it comes to conversion rate optimization. You live and breathe e-commerce, Shopify sales funnel optimization tactics, and you’ve shared some of them with me briefly before we hit the record button. And all I can say to the audience is like, make sure you get out of pen and paper right now, because what Matt’s going to be sharing are some like, golden nuggets that you can apply into your business immediately and begin to to experience some ROI. So, Matt, no one that we’re talking with experienced seven figure e-commerce business owners right now.

Josh Hadley 00:02:34 Where do you feel like we should start with all the different optimization tactics and your experience that we could dive into? What do you think is the message that people need to hear right off the bat?

Matthew Stafford 00:02:43 I think, well, what I’ll do is I’ll pull back the curtains on a couple of the things that have worked for us better than anything else that we’ve ever done, and it’s now become a staple of our business for anybody that we go to work with or that we partner with, and one of the things that I shared with you before we got started was, everybody’s making sales, like, we know that that’s your audience. And so how do we help improve the number of their sales? It’s always been my opinion that traffic is not the problem. And the reason why I say that is because average ecommerce converts around 2%, maybe a little bit better. But that means for every 100 people that come to your store, 98 people left. But they were interested. They raised their hand, clicked on an ad, and came there, and then they left.

Matthew Stafford 00:03:25 So typically it’s either because they don’t trust you or they have unanswered questions. And a lot of times our website is what raises those questions and they don’t have a way to get them answered. in the online environment, if we could talk to every one of our customers, we would sell a lot higher than 2%. And so, I’ve used that mentality is how do we get the conversation with that customer going so that we understand from their perspective? Because there is a paradigm shift that has to happen. We have to go from being the store owner that wants to make as many sales as possible to looking at our website from the consumer’s point of view. How do I find the solution to the problem that I’m looking for or looking? The solution that I’m looking for, for my problem. And so the very first thing that we do, and this is a writer down there, because I will tell you that it’s responsible for probably six of the ten biggest wins we’ve had over the last 4 or 5 years, which means multiple millions of revenue for our particular client.

Matthew Stafford 00:04:20 And what it is, is we have a question pop up on the thank you page like it’s a little survey we do as Lucky Orange, but it can be done with multiple other tools. And we asked the question, what was the one thing that almost made you not by and by putting that up, the person who just gave you money, who just said that we trust you and we’re excited to get this thing. We’ll now tell you what wasn’t clear, what friction points they had or what they wish was different. And we take that data and we go back and we make the site better. And over and over and over it produces gold. We leave that run all the time, and it’s like this perpetual well that just continues to tell us what’s not clear. What have we done that’s like added complexity. And as we remove that and we take care of that, we get win after win after win.

Josh Hadley 00:05:06 So man I love that. Very simple and very straightforward. Not like not super like mind shift changing.

Josh Hadley 00:05:13 But it is at the same time right. Because it’s the simple things that it’s like you’ve overengineered your sales funnel, right. And you’ve put in maybe barriers that you didn’t initially think were barriers and you’ve made it more confusing. There is some friction and so that forms there to fill it out. So I guess my first question, though, Matt, is like typically a Shopify store owner is all about the upsells, right? Hey, I don’t want to go to I don’t want people to hit checkout and then go to a just a thank you page. I want people to hit checkout. And it’s like, here’s upsell one, here’s upsell to like, you know, one click add to cart checkout process. So how are you how are you balancing both of those words like I want the valuable information and feedback from the customers. Yeah. I also want to try to increase their average order value from post-purchase upsells.

Matthew Stafford 00:05:54 Yeah I would say absolutely. Keep the post purchase upsells in there and on the thank you page.

Matthew Stafford 00:05:58 Still ask a question because, they’ll give you feedback on the upsells. Oh, there’s too many or there was, or they weren’t appropriate or they weren’t congruent or whatever they are. You want their feedback on any part of the funnel that you think isn’t good. And the truth of the matter is, we don’t realize, just like if we drive to the office, you know, not everybody works remote. And, you know, but if you drive to the office or you go to the grocery store or whatever, a place that you go consistently or regularly, you can have your lunch on your on your lap while you’re driving, not remember what street lights you went through if they were green, red, whatever. If you pass cars, that same, thing happens on our website with our brain where once you do something again and again and again, it kind of just puts it into this subconscious area where you’re just going through the motions. That happens on our website because we’re on them all the time, and we think that what we’re doing is super clear because we understand that having that customer give us feedback right after they went through the process, they point out the things to us that we’re not aware of.

Josh Hadley 00:06:58 Love it. So what you’re saying is like, hey, you’re still going to have all your posts purchased, one click up sales and things like that. You’re talking about the final, final thank you page after all the order bumps, etc. that’s the page. And then what you’re saying is this is an additional plugin or whatever lucky orange you said is what you’re using. And it’s just it’s an actual like pop up, right?

Matthew Stafford 00:07:16 It’s just a little square that comes up and it says, what’s the one thing that almost made you not buy? And it leaves it open so they can put whatever they want in there. And I’d say we probably, on average, get between 10 and 20% of people will fill it out. and those are, those are the ones that we want.

Josh Hadley 00:07:31 Yeah. Love it. And then go take action on that. Right.

Matthew Stafford 00:07:33 Yeah. The other thing is, in my attempt to provide value, I’ve always I’ve always been, it needs to be sustainable. And so this is something that you can set up once and then you literally continue to get benefit from it for as long as as long as you’re looking at the results that people are giving you.

Matthew Stafford 00:07:51 It’s not one of those things that requires a lot of work, and you got to send out a bunch of emails. You got to do a bunch of stuff. It’s literally let people fill it out, and those replies get added to a Excel spreadsheet. And now what we’re doing is we’re taking all those replies and actually interacting with them with AI, and coming up with insights that we’re not typically thinking of just because it can aggregate hundreds and thousands of responses that we’ve got over the past several years and come up with, it’s really, actually very fun. What we’re doing.

Josh Hadley 00:08:20 Are that is that’s super exciting. I love that my my mind is going a million miles an hour already thinking of the possibilities, especially with the AI behind it all. Man, I love this. I know you’ve got more ninja optimization hacks to share with us, so let’s dive into the next one.

Matthew Stafford 00:08:33 Okay. yeah. The next one that I would say is, again, something that anybody that has a website can use and in the attempt to give them the most value, I can tell you, we’ve never done this on a website where it didn’t produce a lift and what it is is on your checkout.

Matthew Stafford 00:08:50 You ask for their email, their address, the phone number, all of that information that you need in order to ship down their product. What people don’t do is in those form fields, we track every error because we’re trying to optimize. That’s the closest, place to the money. So if we can if we can get rid of the errors on the checkout, that translates into directly more money. And so what we did is in tracking those errors, we realized that the email on the phone is where all the errors were. People weren’t getting the address wrong. And now with Google’s like auto suggest it fills it in and people can that’s actually helped conversions a lot too. We used to do that through a like a plugin, with Google before, before it became a standard practice. And that was always kind of one of our secret sauce to get the checkout to work out better. But now what we do is we change the text in that form field. And the attempt was to reduce that number of errors.

Matthew Stafford 00:09:41 And it came from a book that I was reading called Persuasion by Robert Peel. And in it he talks about this experiment they did where people could cut in line and, about eight out of ten people would tell them no if they just asked to clap, if they gave them a reason, like, my kids are going to be late for school or I’m running behind. now eight out of ten people would let them cut in front of them. It didn’t matter what the reason was. Eight out of ten people would let them. And so the the principle was people don’t mind giving you permission or giving you information if you give them a reason why. And so I thought like, wow, if we’re getting all these errors here, why don’t we tell them why we why we’re asking for their email? Most people are like, I don’t want to be spammed. We have this like unconscious thing of like we have more than one email. So we kind of put our our junk email in those because we don’t want them to start marketing to us like crazy.

Matthew Stafford 00:10:33 And so what we did is we put email required for order confirmation. And the email order confirmation is open to 85% of the time on average. So that’s the most open email that you’ll ever send. And also, who doesn’t want to make sure that their order is correct? And so now by telling them that they give you their best email. And like I shared with you before the recording, I would like to say, hey, I kind of knew this was going to happen 2 or 3 steps down the way, I didn’t. What we noticed is our abandoned recovery. We’re not, and we believe because now we’re marketing to their very best email. We capture more of them. So once we.

Josh Hadley 00:11:12 I just think like it’s just like a it’s one of those, Jedi mind hack tricks, right? Where you’re already doing this, right? You’re already collecting the email. It’s not that we’re saying, hey, make sure you collect email addresses and cell phone numbers from people. What you’re saying is like to increase the number of people that give that information to you without.

Matthew Stafford 00:11:31 The quality of it. Yes, the quality of the information.

Josh Hadley 00:11:34 Because all of us have the spam email, right, that we give out to everybody. Oh, I enter the sweepstakes, get a free hat. Okay, well, here’s my email. Right. And then you give them your spam email. But you’re right. Like, so many people are like, oh, I do want to make sure I get the text when this thing’s been delivered or order confirmation. So anyways, tell me more because it’s you’ve seen big wins from abandoned cart to person conversions, right?

Matthew Stafford 00:11:55 Yeah. So an SMS became really big. we realized, wow, we get a lot of revenue. It’s like the number one source of revenue is SMS recovery compared to all the rest of the things that we do in. In many cases, it’s as much as our email marketing altogether. And so we’re like, well, we can improve that too. And so under the phone we put required a phone required for shipping notification.

Matthew Stafford 00:12:17 Everybody wants to know when their stuff shut. It doesn’t matter if it’s even shipping the same day. You want to know when it’s shipping. And so, subconsciously you give your best, you give them, you know, the correct one. And what we did is we were tracking these and we were getting we got about a 279% increase. So, that doesn’t mean we got three times to the revenue. What it means is, people were giving us improper emails and improper phone, or it wasn’t a complete phone number, which didn’t stop the order, but we reduced those form field errors to 179%. So in that we’ve got as much as like I was sharing with you, we’ve got as much as a 17% lift on the checkout from just changing those two things. And one of the sites that we were tracking it, they do about 60 million a year in digital products. And so for them that 17% lift was huge. It was huge.

Josh Hadley 00:13:08 Yeah. Oh I can already see like and your email list, right gets better and better because you’re not falling into a spam trap.

Josh Hadley 00:13:15 Right. And so your email like deliverability rate is also going to increase across the board. So I mean I see so many benefits there. And honestly like that Jedi Ninja mind hack, it just works even for myself as I’m thinking through it like it’s true. Whenever I’m on some other website and I’m checking out or whatever. If they ask for my phone number, I’m like, oh, I don’t want to get who knows what they’re going to be sending me. But if they just say, like, hey, for shipping confirmation. Oh yeah, great. I would love to just follow my order on my phone, get those notifications, and guess what? Like, I know in the back of my mind I will probably receive some marketing text later on, but like, I’m fine with that rather than like, it’s just weird. Like it’s a weird mind hack that, like, nothing’s actually changing. But the psychology of it is, I think, the magic. So I love that hack.

Matthew Stafford 00:14:00 Yeah, so many of us have put our phone number or have put our email in there, and then the garbage marketer violated that by sending us four texts in the next 30 minutes.

Matthew Stafford 00:14:11 Here’s this, here’s that here, you know, whatever. And so everybody’s dealt with that. And they 100% are going to assume the worst when you’re asking for it. Nobody tells you why they’re asking for it. So as soon as you show up, different than the 99 other checkouts that they’ve been through in the last three months, you become different. And they look at you different. They treat you different, they respond different. You can start a relationship.

Josh Hadley 00:14:34 Yeah, I love that. Well, Matt. Super juicy tactics. Any other hacks that you might have for us? Conversion rate optimization.

Matthew Stafford 00:14:41 Oh man, there’s so many. where do we go next? I guess what I would tell you, because I’m trying to not come into like specific use cases. If we use, ones that everybody can apply, then I think, the audience gets the most value from that. So I can tell you another principle that we’ve noticed or lived by for years is it’s called the hierarchy of focus. And what I mean by that is every page has a specific purpose, and we want them to know what the next most important action to take is on the page.

Matthew Stafford 00:15:13 Because if you think about it, everybody always wants to test the button color. Oh, we need to split test button colors and figure out which one is going to get the most clicks. But we’ve done all that. And like we’ve been, you know, we have owners that ask us to do that all the time. And what I can tell you from literally hundreds of millions of clicks and, and hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, the button color doesn’t matter. What matters is that the button stands out from everything else on the page. So if your theme and your store is black and yellow, don’t have a black button, or don’t have a yellow button because it blends in with a whole bunch of other stuff on the page. That would be a perfect place for a blue button or green button. I try not to use red. We’ve used red and it hasn’t, hasn’t like tanked it or anything, but usually red signifies an error. And so psychologically we’re always trying to, you know, it really is a game of nuances.

Matthew Stafford 00:16:01 And so we try not to use red because red is typically what’s shown as an error on a website. And so I would say the color doesn’t matter what we’ve got. The biggest lifts from is when the color stands out from everything else. And then the second part of that would be the text that you put on it. And the concept behind that was people don’t want to click on something if they don’t know where it’s going to take them. And so if you’re or if they’re not ready to go there, so when you see a perfect example is like when you see on the home page, people have like click add or buy now buttons on a whole bunch of products. And I always ask the owner of the site, does the person have enough information in that thumbnail to make a buying decision, because your average order is around 100 bucks. And do they have enough information with that quick add or buy now button? to make a $100 buying decision? Like no, like. So they’re going to be afraid to click on that button.

Matthew Stafford 00:16:52 It’s there’s going to be resistance because you’re telling them they’re buying it now and they’re not ready to buy or they’re going to add it to their cart. They’re not ready to add to the cart. Why not see more or more options or, you know, different learn more different things like that, that give them the, the, the freedom to go ahead and click on it and know where they’re going to go instead of overcommit to something that they have not enough information to know yet.

Josh Hadley 00:17:15 Love that. Very basic principles. But again it’s just like that confusion is what leads people to abandon cart abandon just the website in its entirety, right? Matt, what are some of those other myths I love that you touched on? Like most people think about like, oh, it’s all about the button color. I love that you dispelled that myth. What are some other common myths that you hear that people in the e-commerce space like, oh, this is how this is what you need to test. Maybe dispel some of those myths and like, you’ve got decades of experience testing and running like millions of data points on all these different sites to know what works and what doesn’t work.

Josh Hadley 00:17:48 So maybe they and maybe some of these are going to be more niche and that’s okay. But like just to get the juices flowing in our audience’s mind, why don’t you just go share like maybe some of those case studies, even the niche opportunities, and dispel some of those myths about conversion rate optimization?

Matthew Stafford 00:18:01 All right. I’ll share one with you that won’t make me popular. and let me ask you, I’ll start off with this question. what is the FAQ?

Josh Hadley 00:18:11 Frequently asked questions.

Matthew Stafford 00:18:13 Right. So if you actually want to serve your customer, if people are frequently asking a question, what does that mean?

Josh Hadley 00:18:20 It means that I haven’t provided that information in the description above it or I’m missing. Yeah, I’m missing information about that, whether it be in the images or video or the description of the product. Right?

Matthew Stafford 00:18:30 Right. So the majority of store owners think the FAQ is where we throw everything that people don’t understand, and that is their way of doing business. And what I call that is you’re taking a business problem and making it your customer’s problem.

Matthew Stafford 00:18:45 You’re now saying, hey, I’m too lazy to, understand how to answer your question on the website when you would actually want it, because, the other thing that we believe makes a huge difference in how well your site converts is, answering the questions that are in their mind at the particular place that they are in your website. And it comes from Dean Jackson, where he says, enter the conversation that your customer’s having in their mind. Well, the conversation of adding something to the cart happens on the product page. So what are some things that are going through your customer’s mind that they need to have answered before they want to add their product to the cart? Is it American owned or American made? Is it going to ship in 24 hours or 48 hours? you know, saying fast shipping. okay. According to what? Like so all of these things are you’re bringing your. Because now they don’t know what fast shipping means. Does that mean one day, two days? Three days? I just introduced a question because I wasn’t clear in 24 hours or ships.

Matthew Stafford 00:19:45 typically we’ve had some. They go, oh, we always usually ship within 48 hours. So we put ships typically in 48 hours that increased conversions. It was crazy how many people, think like, oh, I can’t be that specific. But the more specific that you get, the higher the convergence go. Because what we say is that that makes a Homer Simpson simple. They don’t have to guess. They don’t have to, like, try to figure out what you mean. If you say exactly what it’s going to be and people will give you the grace for that. So in that FAQ, take those frequently asked questions if they’re actually frequently asked questions, and not just ways for you to try to get people to make a commitment and go back to your website and answer those questions in this clear, concise manner as you can, without making the site confusing.

Josh Hadley 00:20:26 Love that. Do you worry about how long the description is or is not for a product? Then if you’re not having a separate FAQ section?

Matthew Stafford 00:20:34 Yeah.

Matthew Stafford 00:20:35 So you’re I think progressive disclosure and tabs, give you the ability to give a lot more information and not force the customer to go through all of it to find out what is relevant to them. It could be behind a tab with different things. Yeah. By doing that.

Josh Hadley 00:20:48 Yeah. What does that mean? Like give me a practical example. What do you mean by these progressive tabs.

Matthew Stafford 00:20:52 Okay. One could be for shipping. one could be your return policy. one could be, details of what the products made out of. And then the other one could be highlight where they can just kind of skim through and browse. Now, instead of them having to read all of that stuff to find what they’re looking for, they can if if this is a very analytical person, they’re going to know all the details. And we’ve worked with a lot of supplement companies. People are very the number one most clicked on thumbnail of every single supplement company that we work with is always the ingredients. People want to know what they’re putting in their body.

Matthew Stafford 00:21:21 And so it’s crazy how many of these companies have literally taken a picture of their bottle, and it’s like the lighting is not good and it’s too small. You can’t zoom in and it’s like, no, people need to know, like exactly what you’re putting in your body. And so making that like there’s, like, ingredient generators that you can make the images where that stuff and kind of going off on a tangent because we’ve seen that make massive difference in, people supplement sales just by generating the ingredients in a perfect to see thumbnail.

Josh Hadley 00:21:55 Interesting. Okay. I think you hit on a vein there that I think I want to dive down deeper here with you, because this applies very applicable to whether you’re an Amazon seller or on your own DTC website. The images, you know, tell a thousand, you know, speak a thousand words right in a video, maybe speaks a million words, if you will. So what have you seen? What are some image hacks that you have implemented into your different website stacks that have proven to be successful and are repeatable across different industries or niches.

Josh Hadley 00:22:27 and more.

Matthew Stafford 00:22:27 Yeah. So one that works every single time is, comparison charts. It’s unbelievable the amount of lift that we’ve got from them. And I’ll give a little damaging admission, just because we’ve grown a long way since the beginning. But we used to test stuff on a product page, and when it would, we would run the test in at one. Then we would look for the next thing to test. And what we realized is, if that thing won in the place that we put it, not everybody goes through the page the same way. Maybe we could put that winning element in another place on the page, and it would still win even more. And so when we found wins, we started seeing how many other places we could add that to the page before we moved on to the next test. And many times, 2 or 3 times we would get more and more lift by adding the winning element to different places on the page. So that’s another thing that everyone could do that you wouldn’t really think like, oh, I tested that one.

Matthew Stafford 00:23:21 Cool. Now what’s the next thing? And really, when you find the winner, just replicate it.

Josh Hadley 00:23:26 Love it. So comparison charts. This is just comparing your product to what the next best competitor or some other.

Matthew Stafford 00:23:33 Yeah, yeah. And what we’ve also noticed is it doesn’t work as well. If every single thing that you have on yours is green and the things that they have on there is are red, so people don’t trust it. And so you want to have damaging emissions that are okay, that typically aren’t going to hurt it, but they actually trust that more like you could you could be like, frequently out of stock. So, you know, you can come up with something, but you need it. You want it to be red, so that they their, trust symbol doesn’t go off, you know? And they don’t know why they don’t. Because nobody does things perfect. And this brings up another, really, really valid point that I think people need to know is the the highest converting reviews on your website are two star and below.

Matthew Stafford 00:24:17 And everyone would be like, what? That’s not true. 100%. The thing is, they won’t convert. Well, if you don’t take care of the problem. Nobody expects you to be perfect, but they expect you to take care of it. So any of your low star reviews that you went in and handled, I would push those to the site, because you will be shocked at how many people that’s the most clicked on is two star and below. And if they see that you handled it. typically we see higher than double digit like conversion percentages on people that click on a two star review where it’s been handled. And most sites don’t convert at 10% and above. So that means that’s a conversion element that you want in as many places on your site as you can get it.

Josh Hadley 00:24:54 I love that because I think like the I’ve got in my mind that you have a response, right? And maybe it was a failure of your product or shipping or whatever it is. You acknowledge it, say, this is how we’re rectifying this situation.

Josh Hadley 00:25:06 And by the way, we’ve now implemented this in our business to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Right. And it’s like, okay for that customer. They don’t really care about that. But what they do care about is or what you care about are the next 100,000 people that come to that site, and they read the issue that this customer had. Yeah, you rectified it, blah, blah, blah. But most importantly, you said you’ve updated either the product or the process so that that issue won’t occur again. Like, oh okay. Well good. Well this is a reputable company. If there is an issue it seems like they’re going to resolve it I think is what people want to see. Right.

Matthew Stafford 00:25:35 Yeah. They don’t expect you to be perfect, but they do expect you to take care of things when when they arise. If all you have is five star reviews, they instantly don’t trust you because nobody’s perfect and they can’t relate to that. And so if you just push your high star reviews and none of none of the low stuff, you’re actually hurting yourself.

Josh Hadley 00:25:52 Love that. That is fantastic. I think that that like, adds another flavor of like, what is your customer service for each of your customers and how are you replying on a public facing perception? I think it’s so important. So Matt, I love that we talked about comparison charts. What else? What else do you see on those pages? Or maybe images that are working really well for your brands that you work with?

Matthew Stafford 00:26:15 Yeah, I have one more that we can share and then maybe we’ll go down to those questions that you asked me to make sure that we don’t run out of time. Yes. I would say a picture of your product in relation to something that they know the size of. So, like in relation to someone’s hand in relation to a notebook or a lifestyle image, we find that that helps a lot. You’d be shocked how many people don’t have that. And so they get the supplement or whatever. And it’s like a third of the bottles, a third of the size of what it looks like in the image.

Matthew Stafford 00:26:44 And even if it’s exactly what you said it is, the person still feels cheated. So you did exactly what you were supposed to do as the business owner, but the person just doesn’t feel good about it because in their mind, they just saw this close up image of this thing. And so we’ve found that you definitely have better customer service. And repeat. Customer rate happens when all of the processes are very crystal clear. And one is like them having a mental image of what they’re getting. So images, I believe the images and the copy are two of the quickest wins that you can get an e-commerce site that and removing stuff because most of the time, early on in your business, you did the customer support and everybody that had a problem, you went and then put that information on the website and you didn’t know how to do it, how to make it congruent. And so what now you’re doing is you’re forcing every single person to go through a process that was built off of the people that don’t understand stuff, no matter what.

Matthew Stafford 00:27:37 Like, I mean, when you do customer service in your own brand, you go, wow, I cannot believe people are writing in questions like this. But in the beginning you think, oh, that’s not clear. I need to go put that out there, and eventually your site just becomes this convoluted mess of, you know, customer service questions or questions and answers when really it doesn’t need to be. You want to serve the 20% of people that create 80% of your result.

Josh Hadley 00:27:58 Yeah, I love that. I think sometimes there’s a lot to be said with the, you know, addition by subtraction. Right? And it’s a.

Matthew Stafford 00:28:05 Mental model we use all the time. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:28:07 Love that. Well Matt, as we begin to wrap things up here, I’ll ask you the three final questions that I ask every guest. But before we get to that point, is there anything else that you haven’t touched on that you feel like our audience of seven figure sellers need to know, as they begin to dive into the world of Shopify and just trying to, you know, get more than 2% for their conversion rate on their website.

Matthew Stafford 00:28:28 Yeah. And it’s probably it’s probably something that they’ve heard, you know, a hundred times before and you forget how critical it is, is customer service. the, the one consistent thing that never changes across all of the successful brands that we do. You know, they all have different owners, they have different flavors to their business, different personalities. the one thing that all of them that are very successful do is they have a really good customer service. in fact, I’m going to share in one of the questions you asked me. a close friend of mine, now that I’ve literally watched him go from less than $10,000 a month in revenue to now, he’ll do 50 million this year. And his entire business is built around customer service. He’s about 20% higher than his competitor, the nearest competitor, and just dominating his niche because his customer service is so good. Like they will take care of you even if you don’t buy from them. And that’s just their mentality. And so over time, having that be the ethos of why their business is there, it’s made them untouchable.

Matthew Stafford 00:29:31 It really is. It’s super incredible to watch.

Josh Hadley 00:29:35 I think that’s such a good principle just in its entirety. And it’s, you know, it allows for future growth of the brand as well because you’re going to have repeat purchases, you’re going to have people that will go tell their friends. So it all starts and ends there. yeah.

Matthew Stafford 00:29:47 It reminds me of a principle that I heard from a guy at a mastermind I was going to, and he said to people in e-commerce, I always talk about, oh, I’m building this to sell. I’m building this to sell, or I’m going to get 100 million. And he said, he goes, I challenge you to change that mindset of building to sell. He goes, why don’t you build the business that you would buy in five years? And if you do that, then the decisions that you make are for ten years from now, not for five years. And your business is a lot more saliva. So many people think like, oh, I’m going to sell this in five years.

Matthew Stafford 00:30:17 And they don’t realize that what? They’re unconsciously making five year decisions, not ten year decisions. And so when the person comes along to buy it in five years, the business is really worth way less because it’s been built to get to that point, not to get beyond it. And so they’re going to have to do the next heavy lift. And so I would say, in watching what this all has done, he’s really built a business that would be valuable in the future by saying, like, yeah, maybe you didn’t buy your products from us, but we’re still going to take care of you because eventually you’ll buy another one because we took care of you. And the other guy just answered an email. We have a salesman. he’ll buy from us next time. And now, four years later, those people are, you know, sometimes 2 or 3 times. And it’s a very it’s a very high average order value. So it matters.

Josh Hadley 00:30:59 Yeah. I think I love that principle too. And here’s a really important mindset shift to how many people try to, when they’re about to sell their house.

Josh Hadley 00:31:08 They then do all the renovations. They make the house look better. Right. And it’s. And you get done with the renovations. You’re like, actually, this house ain’t half that bad. You’re right. I could stay here for a little bit longer. So the same principle applies to your business, right? It’s like, what is the what are the renovations that you feel like need to be done right? Rather than having that in your mind like, well, this will be a future like whoever acquires us, this is their issue. Like they’re going to want to have this like some, some easy optimizations they can make. But I think that it’s quite the opposite. They want to buy something that’s like, you’ve already done all the renovations. And I think you as the business owner, it allows you to make better businesses or better business decisions as a whole because you’re growing for the long term. Right? And if the opportunity presents itself to sell, that’s great no matter when that comes along the way.

Josh Hadley 00:31:50 But if you first go with the mindset of like, I may hold this until the rest of my life, till I die, so what does that mean? If this is the house I’m living in, I’m going to try to make it the best I can. I’m going to renovate the things that bother me, and I’m going to try to make it the best version of itself possible. So likewise, the principle is that in business you never know what the future holds, but the best thing to do is act as though you’re going to be in that situation for the rest of your life, and so make it the best situation. You’ll make ten times the better business decisions when you do that.

Matthew Stafford 00:32:17 Yeah, and your business is a lot more valuable for the people that are coming along to acquire it. Because like I said, it’s built for the future. It’s not built for where it’s at. Right then.

Josh Hadley 00:32:24 Yeah, it’s a weird like a mindset shift, but it’s like it’s valuable on both ends of the spectrum there.

Josh Hadley 00:32:29 So love that. Now, Matt, as we love as we leave the audience, I love to leave them with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three that I noted for today. Let me know if I’m missing something. Number one, it all starts with customer service and you shared your very first hack. In my opinion, Matt is nothing more than customer service, which is hey, when the customer gets to that thank you confirmation page, you have a pop up that says, what was the one thing that made you not almost not buy, right? That is nothing more than just customer service, which is like, okay, whatever it was that like, what are the common patterns that I’m seeing here? Oh, it’s like there, wasn’t it? They didn’t understand the size of the product well enough. Okay. That’s the change that we make, right? Which is goes back to customer service. So that’s action item number one. Enhance your customer service and just listen to the feedback of your customers.

Josh Hadley 00:33:14 Action item number two is actually showcase and demonstrate that you’re listening to the customers by a having those 1 or 2 star reviews featured on your website and actually showing that you’ve responded to those people, that you’ve handled their situations and then type up. What do you want? Future customers, the next future 100,000 visitors to that website to see about that experience? That’s how you write that review. And in fact, maybe that becomes the review that sits at the top, because that’s what people are going to resonate the most and be like, oh, okay, great. I see the other 500 reviews that are five stars. I don’t care about those, but this shows me that this brand cares. They’re going to correct anything. If a problem arises, they show up.

Matthew Stafford 00:33:50 Yeah. If you talk about what you’ve done wrong, they automatically trust that you’re going to take care of them, because you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t have the morals and ethics to be able to handle it.

Josh Hadley 00:34:00 Yeah, I love that third and final action item here.

Josh Hadley 00:34:04 And I think this applies across all conversion rate optimizations, Matt. Which is like if there is any ambiguity in something, it’s going to decrease performance and conversion rates. And my favorite hack that you shared, the Jedi mindset shift here is this right? When you have when you ask for their email and their phone number on that order information page in that field, you need to tell them, hey, give me your email so I can send you the order confirmation. Hey, I need your, your SMS or your cell phone number so that I can provide you with shipping updates. Yep. That’s it. And you’re going to see that, like across the board, you’re going to have much accurate customer information. But then likewise, if you do that on throughout your pages on your website this button leads to this. See more add to cart by now when you do that, when you just like remove the ambiguity, it increases conversions across the board. Is that sufficient? Anything else you feel like I missed here?

Matthew Stafford 00:34:55 No, I would say that you’re spot on.

Matthew Stafford 00:34:57 I totally agree with it.

Josh Hadley 00:34:58 Love it. All right. Now the final three questions. Number one, what has been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Matthew Stafford 00:35:06 I would say I’ve read a lot of books. letting Go is probably one of the most influential books. I have another very smart mentor that, brought something up to me. I used to say, I’m really smart, and I’m a hard worker. And he goes, man, I used to say that, too. He goes, but I start. I change that question to what if I’m not very smart? And he goes, what does that do? And I said, oh, that allows me to opens me up for more possibility. Like, oh, I could look at other things, because the moment that we think we know the answer or we’re smart, I know the answer. We’re not looking for a better solution. And so letting go of these different, stories that we’ve told ourselves through the years of I’m smart and I’m a hard worker, but what if I wasn’t smart? And what if I didn’t have to work so hard to get everything? And so by doing that, it’s made business a lot more fun?

Josh Hadley 00:35:53 I love that that’s a great recommendation.

Josh Hadley 00:35:55 All right. What’s your favorite AI tool or ChatGPT prompt that you’ve been using?

Matthew Stafford 00:36:01 asking. So we’re doing some really cool stuff with that right now. We’re actually downloading, like, all of our reviews, all of the sales data, the ga4, and then, interacting with that and saying, hey, what are the things that you see that we can’t see? Or, hey, my site converts at 1.5%. My average order value is $100. I want my site to convert at 2% and be $120 average order value in the next 90 days. What do I have to do to get there? And, you don’t get great answers right off the bat if you ask very generic questions, but the more that you play with that and start going through it, I really believe that we’re 6 to 9 months away from, in some cases, doubling the conversion on some of our client stores, by the wins that it’s giving us because it doesn’t think linearly. It’s essentially, you have a library of all the information available to you, and you can only read one book at a time if you’re if it’s based off of you.

Matthew Stafford 00:36:52 But by feeding all of this into this hive mind, you literally get access to all the information at once. And it’s just it’s really mind blowing what’s, what’s starting to turn out for us.

Josh Hadley 00:37:02 I love that I love that use case of like just diving deep and giving it a very practical like hey at 90 days how do I increase my AOV. How do I increase my conversion rate. Love that. Like and just it’s going to produce ideas and sometimes you may need to refine them. But it’s the ideas that are, you know, are valuable that then you can go and refine and apply to your own business. Love it.

Matthew Stafford 00:37:20 Yeah, yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:37:21 All right. Third and final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Matthew Stafford 00:37:28 I think that I think it’s probably my most successful student of all time. What he’s done, it still blows my mind. And I’m excited to be on the journey with him. when he came to me three years ago, he was doing less than ten grand a month.

Matthew Stafford 00:37:41 I think he had, like, 4 or $5000 a month in sales. And this year he’ll hit 50 million. He’s on pace for 50 million. So in three years he went from 0 to 1 in 13 months. The next 12 months he went to 14 million. Last year he did 36.8. This year he’s on pace for 50. he has a newsletter. where he basically talks about all the different things that he’s went through personally, professionally. his view on how he looks at businesses, it’s just really, really fascinating to. Look. He’s a young guy. Not very. He’s an early 30s. and, Yeah, I think that I would say I respect him the most. He’s very coachable and he’s really, really wicked smart.

Josh Hadley 00:38:18 What’s his name? Matt.

Matthew Stafford 00:38:20 His name is Vassell. Sal and I gave you. I’ll give you the, link for his, newsletter. Everybody can go sign up. It’s free. he’s not trying to sell anything. It’s not. He doesn’t monetize it that way.

Josh Hadley 00:38:34 Awesome. I love it. So yes, we’ll include that in the show notes. It’s going to be newsletter dot vessel job jabari.com. Okay so take a look at that Matt. If people want to learn more about you they want to work with you. they want you to take a peek under the hood of their website and have you share more conversion rate optimization strategies. what’s the best way people can reach out to you. What services do you offer?

Matthew Stafford 00:38:57 Yeah. So they can come to build, grow, scale. Com or they can send me an email at Matt at build grow scale. Com and I would be happy to jump on a conversation. Take a look at their site, see if we can provide some value.

Josh Hadley 00:39:09 Awesome. Matt definitely knows this stuff. If we haven’t piqued your interest enough today with all the Jedi mindset shift tactics here with conversion rate optimization. Matt, thanks again for your time. I think we’re going to have to do a part two, because you also have hired a CEO in your business that actually has an Amazon background, has built, scaled, exited some Amazon brands.

Josh Hadley 00:39:29 And I think that will be a worthwhile conversation to say, like, how do you make that jump from Amazon to dominating in the e-commerce space, just like you mentioned your best student? That’s all I want to become like vassal. So how would do more Amazon sellers get to 50 million on DDC? And I think that would be a great part too. If we can twist your arm and get you and your CEO both on here again.

Matthew Stafford 00:39:47 Yeah, let’s do it. We’ll get the calendar invite.

Josh Hadley 00:39:50 Awesome. All right, Matt. Well, thanks again for your time today.

Matthew Stafford 00:39:53 Yeah. Thanks, Josh.

The 5 Deadly Mistakes Killing Your Ecom Conversions (And How to Fix Them!) With Matt Stafford

The 5 Deadly Mistakes Killing Your Ecom Conversions (And How to Fix Them!) With Matt Stafford

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