Latest / Leaders on Shopify with John Readman / Showing your search bar on mobile can lift conversion by 30-50%

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Showing your search bar on mobile can lift conversion by 30-50% · Leaders on Shopify with John Readman

• Adam Pearce - Blend: Thank you, John. Look, really good to be here. So, yeah. So started Blend Commerce about a decade ago with my brother in law Peter, which we can we can talk about if you want to as well. so we're a conversion optimization agency only for Shopify brands. And ultimately, what we do as a business is we say every company wants to do three things get customers to buy now, buy more, buy again. And we help businesses that sell on Shopify do those three things. And that's it. That's what we do. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. And why do you, what do you do differently from other Shopify agencies out there or other people who claim to be CRO experts? Adam Pearce - Blend: I think the thing is, people will need different types of agencies at different times. And it it's probably worth me sort of explaining this is that when we started out as an agency sort of 10, 11-ish years ago, we were a design dev agency. So what it meant is that we were doing either small fixes, maintenance style work on sites, or We were completely redesigning a store or bidding store from scratch. That's what I would class as the sort of pure play dev design. About six, seven years ago, we switched to being CRO, which meant that we focused specifically on that piece of improvement. Now we're at a per point now, I think, you know, sort of in the year that we're in, is that there is a blurred line between what is a design dev agency and a CRO agency, and some design dev agencies offer over the top. The main difference I see, and obviously because it's my industry that I work in. Is that CRO can take a couple of different routes? It can be the flavor where it is, we're doing CRO where our team will look at a site and look at what you're doing and say best practices, you should do XYZ. You've got some that are taking a pure 100% statistical significance, data driven approach to everything there is. And then there are some that saying let's take the best of both worlds, but importantly, implement things on sites that have a very strict priority around them. And that's probably where blend sits in that we're taking best of those both worlds, we're using the data approach, but of not ignoring best practices, but importantly saying, in terms of doing these things on your site, this is the order they come in, and here is the reason why. So those are I think the three flavors of CRO and and we fall into that last category. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and you you you did it in the opening you only specialize on on Shopify and but how did that how did you end up just specializing was that deliberate was that like a deliberate bet or did it sort of just happen over overnight by accident? What was the what was the thinking there? Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, I mean, look, the aside from bumping into my wife when I was 16, the only other time in my life I've been the right place at the right moment is with my my brother-in-law, Peter. So he decided about 12 years ago that he was going to stop being quanti surveyor and become a developer. And he meets this Canadian guy online who's like, there's this really small company called Shopify. And he's like, Spotify. He's No, no, no, no, Shopify, which obviously everyone still does today. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: and he basically this guy was Jonathan Kennedy, who started a platform called Storetasca. Now, Store Tasker, for those of you that that don't know it was effectively upwork for Shopify when Shopify is very, very small. And because of that, sh the the momentum of Shopify, the growth, the leads they would give us, the support they would give us in the early days, that just meant that we were just, you know, like at one point we said, look, you know, our blood was kind of running green because we We just loved everything about the way they did things. We dabbled with big commerce. we thought about, you know, woo. And look, there is still a massive market for WordPress. You know, I think about fifty five, fifty-six percent of all global websites are still on WordPress. So there's they're not saying that's not there, but we kind of said, Look, you know, in an industry where it's growing all the time, there's loads of agencies coming about, which of course there are. We kind of wanted to be a bit brave and go, nope. It's only Shopify, it's only CRO, and that's what we do. And we actually used to do email marketing up until about two years ago. And saying goodbye to that as an email marketer myself was was tricky and scary. but it's it's purely because we were right place, right time, and we we've decided to just not bother looking anywhere else. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, so you've probably seen more shop-aside stores under the bonnet than most people. Roughly how many stores do think you've worked on? Adam Pearce - Blend: I was thinking this the day. I think it's probably about 450, I believe. So that's that's my body count if if anybody wants to know from a Shopify John - Leaders on Shopify: Thank you. Adam Pearce - Blend: perspective. I mean, you know, look, it's it's interesting, you know, with with Shopify and that I think the type of business that is on Shopify has very much evolved. And John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: I think what's interesting for me is look, you know, we predominantly work with American-based businesses. Like 95% of our clients are American. There is still a disparity in terms of how Shopify is used this side of the pond versus that side. So it it's interesting to sort of observe sort of how it's evolved, but equally as well, the the length that people can push it to to get what they want. John - Leaders on Shopify: We can get into who's best UK versus US at some point. Years ago, I launched Search Laboratory into America when I was running the commercial arm of Search Laboratory. And I literally stood on this stage at SES Chicago and told the American audience that they were rubbish at PPC. And I went into, and then I got the maths to prove it. And half the audience loved it. The other half got up and walked out. Adam Pearce - Blend: I love it. John - Leaders on Shopify: And then I stood on my booth handing out Yorkshire tea going come and join the British Revolution But no so Shopify is changing all the time right and I was at dotdev a couple of weeks ago and They're all in on AI they're going here. They're going there. They're trying to really move things forward But I suppose from what you've seen What do you think is sort of like the two or three big changes in the last couple of years? That's that's changed what you're doing Adam Pearce - Blend: I think the the the biggest changes really is the expectation of speed. and I think this is from more from a perspective of being able to get work done and implementations done, because from from a CRO point of view, the the biggest thing that people obviously want is to get sh tests shipped, i.e. the the tests actually happening on the site or changes happening on the site as well. And I think Overall, the value of development in most people's eyes has obviously diminished. On the other hand, though, the value of strategic thinking of being able to thread it all together has certainly increased. And that's why I think, you know, look, and I've said it already, AI in a podcast is being very, very popular. But what we're seeing already is that the inquiries that come through is people saying, We've actually tried to do this ourselves. with a little bit of Claude Hell and a little bit of Chat GBT, it's not really kind of what we had in mind. Can you have a look for us? So we've that's that the trend recently is we, you know, the development aspect, a lot can of course be done with Chat GPT or with Claude in terms of development, but the John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: complexities that are there are not possible. So I think it's people are and I think brands do this now. They are a lot more clued up in terms of what it can do and what it can't do, and we'll then try and cherry pick, which of course, for an agency owner, you hate because you're like, here's our package, this is what we do, and buy it. Yeah, exactly. John - Leaders on Shopify: Take that one. Yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: Whereas now we we, you know, we can't really do that because everyone's having to have something that's slightly different, which has then meant that the what we're providing is also having to change. So it's state of flux. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, we could, we could have a whole separate podcast on the future state of agencies. So yeah, that what is an agency going to look like in two or three years time, but we'll, part that for, for when you come back on next time, Adam. So Adam Pearce - Blend: Excellent. John - Leaders on Shopify: the over the last few years, there's been a lot of yo-yoing between right, headless versus standard Shopify themes. What's your view? When's headless right? When's it not right? Adam Pearce - Blend: The issue I have with Headless is that I feel that a few big brands rushed into it because it was going to be the next big thing and it was going to offer this multi platform, you know, no need to actually have, you know, Shopify, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you had so many people in the past couple of years now then backing out of that and then back in. Yeah. Yes. John - Leaders on Shopify: Well, you've got people making racks from headless, and that's a bit of a trend. Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, absolutely. And and I think, you know, that's that's probably the issue that I think, you know, concern me. I think the other thing as well is is that the cost of headless two, you know, still from what I've seen, and we don't do headless builds, is still not come down to a level where it it feels like it could potentially be a benefit. the I think the overarching thing for me though is And this is the true, I think, of all you know discussions about websites and particularly e-commerce sites is that there's there's a couple of things at play here. What do the customers actually need, and what do the visitors need? What are they telling you that they need through the way that they use the site currently, and in terms of the quantitative data that you're going to get from them in terms of talking to them? And thirdly, from an internal process point of view, what is it also that you need now? I think if you can very clearly say with all of those points, okay, headless is the only option, for me, then that feels right. But I don't think there are going to be many situations whereby those core things that you're asking about customers and internal operations. And the reason I say those things because ultimately we're talking about revenue and cost, maximizing revenue, minimizing cost, are then going to lead you to that decision. So I would must I must admit, you know, John, I'm not the most informed on it. But I think, you know, at the same time, that's gonna be my take generally looking at sarchitecture. John - Leaders on Shopify: Well, think looking at that sort of total cost of ownership, I everybody got up. I completely agree with you. Everybody got a bit excited. this is like the big thing. And people jumped on this speed. it's going to be the fastest thing in that. And actually, if you look at the total cost of ownership over a period of time, but also Shopify hugely invested in improving their own platform and they've got what? 5,000 developers, right? They're going to make this thing better. Every day. So you're already in the good, a good place, a good spot. So, and I suppose that's probably one reason why so much we're seeing now so many big brands, move over. we've seen people. So I get Magento, right? Or Adobe commerce or whatever. You must see loads of people moving over Salesforce, big commerce cloud and like household name brands now. So in the past shop, if I was often label does, well, it's the mom and pop shop, it's the startup. And then everybody would always sort of load, well, look what Jim shark did this, that and the other. But why do you think now the bigger brands are really starting to embrace and move over to Shopify? Adam Pearce - Blend: I think this there's two things, you know, one is when they're obviously seeing other, you know, the big names like the Gymsharks and the Kylie's and that kind of thing, there's the of course I think there's gonna be a sense of okay, is this the direction to go in? I think that piques the interest. I think the second thing is is that in an environment where it has become a lot more expensive for acquisition, they're looking at costs overall. And then when they look, you know, particularly at Magento sites and having to, you know, and again, my experience with Magento when I was managing one year ago was, you know, even if you need to change a banner, you have to go and call the developer up and then pay them X amount of pounds or dollars to do it. So that I think, you know, the the that lure of then Shopify that comes with it. but I think the overarching thing really here, and I think this is what the other platforms haven't been able to crack, is the availability of the app. And because the the App Store, I think, really is the biggest, I suppose, sort of, you know, gem of Shopify in the sense that you can tap into so many pieces of quite now significant and complex pieces of software that are packaged up as an app that again aren't possible with the other platforms. Now, you know, I think, and they yeah, absolutely. John - Leaders on Shopify: And they just work as well. They're working out of the box. There's no low time to integrate. There's no SI cost and all of that. Yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: Exactly. You know, and I think look, Shopline, you know, came in. they tried to sort of offer something that was similar in terms of app availability, but of course, they were so far behind that there was going to be a lot of catch-up space. We had to say we're we're comparable in terms of that availability. Big decided obviously not to go down that route. And again, you know, yes, there were, you know, the there's that infrastructure there, but you still then gonna need a developer to do significant work for you who's familiar with the platform. It it was that sort of, you know, the the meshing of those ideas, they're still trying to bolt onto. And you know, obviously Shopperfall was that line, you know, built for e commerce, but it it kind of is, you know, and you could you there's no real sort of getting away from that. 100% I'm not saying Shopfall dynamic flaws. Absolutely. Yeah, there are days when, you know, I scream blue murder about Shubaifau. They they do my nutting. you John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: know, for for many different reasons, like I'm sure, you know, many merchants do. You know, and and you you've obviously you've had Gymshark, you know, who some of the biggest poster boys for Shopify, but again, you know, they've had their issues with it. So it's it ain't perfect, but I think, you know, in terms of looking at this, the difficulty I think, John, your mine and your world is that when we look at, you know, a website when we look at e-commerce, we see that as the world of the business. For most businesses, for the the end merchant, the website itself is just one small part of it. You know, they have got retail, they've got omni channel, they've got operation like all this other stuff. And I think John - Leaders on Shopify: They've got fleets of balance and they've got a warehouse and they've got yeah, the website is just part of part of it. Yeah Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah. Yeah. And we become obsessional about it in our world, don't we? But for them it's like it it works, it is what it needs to do, you know, and there are a few that maybe kind of will want to pick holes in it, but for me, yeah, it's still a safe bet. John - Leaders on Shopify: And so with that in mind then, what do you think is the sort of one of the biggest myths you hear about Shopify from brands that maybe haven't moved across or reluctant to move across? Because I think there is still some big brands are like, are Shopify is not for grownups? Adam Pearce - Blend: Hmm. I think that the main thing is really, you know, look, which has obviously been resolved now about sort of the variance situation. That was always the one thing that, you know, sort of put people off. And and people saying, look, well, you know, once you get over sort of 40,000 SKUs, it's not possible, it's tricky. I think, you know, the whole ERP situation was something that, you know, kind of came up quite a lot. but then, you know, look, that the PIM situation has been massively improved on Shubber Five the past few years, particularly with Shubha Five Plus. So I think it it's still kind of more misinformation. And equally as well, it is it is more the operational side of saying, well, actually, all of the other services that then bolt onto the website is usually the main part of concern for the bigger businesses, I think, when they're thinking about coming across. Because you know, if if you've spent and invested, you know, a heck of a lot of cash in terms of integrating your Magento site with either your warehousing system, you know, stock control, finance of you know, the real nitty gritty part of the business, the thought of then backing out of that, I would agree, you know, probably would turn your stomach. But, you know, again, I I'm not here to be the post war of Shopify, but all of that can be done very straightforward now. John - Leaders on Shopify: And it's easier maybe than, and I think what a lot of people are thinking about, and I talk to different people thinking about this all the time, is because in their mind the memory is how hard it was with Magento. They've got this like PTSD of what happened. And actually they can't necessarily get past that. So they keep suffering the pain of being on the legacy platform because of all the backend plumbing. And I go as I suppose, and I don't want to give Jim too much of a big shout out at Patchworks, but some of the stuff they've done within the Shopify ecosystem around Adam Pearce - Blend: Absolutely, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: the plumbing, there's even like apps in the middle now that can connect you to all your other like technology systems. So this sort of ecosystem of connectors to make all your infrastructure work, people are actually building businesses on now to support your business. So that sort of brings us nicely onto the sort of app world and it is a bit of a minefield and there's something I never thought I would say as a part of a USP of a business, but it's the same as what sort of what you were saying before about actually where we've got, you had a play with Claude, now let some people who really know what they're doing do it. There's tons of apps appearing all the time in the app store and a lot of them are sort of copycat apps that have been spun up with a bit of Claude code and this, and the other. We've just changed some of our marketing messaging to go in the first line, real human onboarding, real human account management, because people actually want to talk to practitioners and experts who know what they're doing. But I suppose you'll have some favorite apps and go-to apps. What in your mind, if you're a serious scale up brand, what apps would you... be in your tech stack, but I suppose what are maybe some of the more obscure apps that do a great job that people might not have heard of? Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, sure. So I'll I'll give kind of a flavor from different areas. number one, rebuy. Rebuy Engine is a fantastic app in that it can do a lot of items around your upsells, your cross sales, personalization, tapping into AI, on site search. There is a heck of a lot there. So that's a good option, I think, for a lot of businesses first and foremost. Secondly, then what I would say is that from the point of view of thinking about okay, how do you work out what your site needs? One thing that people still don't download is Microsoft Clarity, which is free. I said free. and Microsoft Clarity, for anyone that hasn't heard of it, is a heat mapping tool. What this is going to show you is effectively how your visitors and customers are using the site. Now The beauty of clarity is that you can also, and if you are hacking away on Claude or Chat GPT, you can integrate that into Claude and Chat GPT to help you get some interpretation of each of those things that are happening on your site. So that's another one that I would say is is very, very important. And I would say that the third one that everyone should go and have a look at is an app or or a plat platform and app called IntelliGems. This is an A-B testing platform. Now, lots of A B testing platforms out there. Why do I like IntelliGems? It's actually the only A B testing platform out there that will give you an expected pound, dollar, yen, wherever you are, estimation of the impact of that test. So, what you can do is you might be running a test on your PDP, and you might run that test, you know, for a couple weeks, get statistical significance, and then what it will say is if you implemented variant A or variant B. This would lift your this would lift your average monthly orders by 200 orders, 300 orders it might be, at a value of X amount of thousand. Because I think the problem with you know, sort of CRO sometimes is it can feel a little bit like the whole SEO black box idea. We need to give it time. It's gonna take three, six months. All those great one-liners that you you can throw in a set. John - Leaders on Shopify: We need some statistical significance and enough data. We haven't got enough data yet. Adam Pearce - Blend: Exactly. John - Leaders on Shopify: We don't know yet. Yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: The old the old buy me some more time while we try and figure this shit out line. but I think like ultimately the the with John - Leaders on Shopify: You've never done that. Adam Pearce - Blend: no no of course not. But I think no look it's the the thing with it is that it gives you if you are being serious about CRO experimentation, whatever you want to call it, you've got the empirical data, which is okay, how much revenue is actually coming through the site right now. And then what you've also got is if you use that kind of tool to extrapolate what is gonna be, what do we expect to happen over the course of the next few months? And then you can cross-reference that in terms of the realities of what happened and try follow it through. Because you know, there's there's there's nothing worse, I think. And wherever you are doing testing or wherever you're doing CRO is if you are trying to make changes to something and then never track back with them. never actually have that accountability with what you said or what you thought was gonna do. And and it happens a lot, you know, in e commerce. You know, we all we've all done this before. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, we'll put those links to those three apps that Adam mentioned Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, perfect. John - Leaders on Shopify: in the show notes and then people can go have a play with them. So we all know, right, conversion, e-commerce conversion rates are in single digits, right? Unless somebody's amazing and or they work with you and they're obviously in double digits. But it's like most Shopify stores are leaking money. When you first start looking at stuff, where's the first place you go and where is it leaking from? Adam Pearce - Blend: So I would say the in terms of thinking about the past three months, there's been a few areas that are still massively problematic. and I'll start off with on-site search. Now, the reason I say on-site search is a lot of the time, still brands that are doing, you know, over two million quid a year or over sort of, you know, three million dollars a year, they are still Using a very basic search function and only using it on desktop. Now, a couple of the big tests that we've done that have worked very, very well has actually been around making sure number one, that a search is very responsive. Secondly, also that when you are using search, that that data is being collected and collated. And thirdly, is that that search is also happening on mobile. Now, We we always look for on mobile, and if you're not doing this, exposing search on mobile. If you think about, you know, your typical mobile store, you'll go to the homepage or the PDP and you will see a magnifying glass in the top right corner. From a pixel perspective, you will got big fat thumbs like me, tiny little magnifying glass, again, access to that. A is difficult, but B is not visually easy to do. Exposing the search bar, we've seen it increase conversion rate between 30 and 50 percent. It is absolutely phenomenal what it can do. Equally as well, what you tend to find, and those of you who believe in the mantra of LTV, God bless you, is that if you are thinking about LTV, if you have a customer that uses on-site search versus the customer that doesn't, you tend to see as well 35 to 40 percent higher LTV. For those customers that do on-site search. The reason that we kind of can see that happens is that when they're using search and if you're using up sales and cross sales, you're taking them eight or irrelevant products very, very quickly. And then secondly, you are showing then comparative products that can go with it or products that that bolt with that product together. Because of that, then they become more invested at the start of their journey with you. And then historically then will continue to buy more from you. So On site search definitely is one that should be looking at. the second one I think that is super, super important as well is also around using video content on the PDP. Now, this isn't necessarily a new thing, but I think brands have been a little bit scared, particularly when they are bigger brands, to take video content from their Instagram or social reels and put that into their main PDP. We found that putting that video content in the second or the third video works very, very well. So, sort of, you know, a a real UGC or someone using the product, when you have that particular situation, that always again will be very good. Interestingly, from an AOV perspective, conversion it has an impact, but AOV has got the biggest, biggest boost. typically when you've got a product that is enabling you to get multiples. Or particularly when you have a cus you have a particular product that is subscription based, that again will lead you to then getting more subscriptions off the back of it. So that is another one that I think you look, people are very happy to put an Instagram feed or a TikTok feed, you know, lower down the PDP, but actually bringing that video content into that main product gallery is one thing that is is very important. and I think you know, the the the final one that I'll probably talk about now as well. Is also thinking about when it comes to your PDP itself, is how actually are you displaying content? And I think the biggest issue that I have with a lot of PDPs is still, still, still, still, still that we are getting blocks and blocks and blocks of content. Just use please, please, please use accordion menus, use drop downs. Now, some of the SEO folk out there are gonna say, no, you shouldn't be doing that. It's bad for SEO. Okay. My rationale here really is this is that when you are using those as a way to direct people to information, you are signposting and hand holding. Now we we have a a Chris company or a chip company from the states. What we were seeing with them is their on-site search, they were getting name of product. Plus ingredient, plus ingredients. So, you know, it was like, you know, plain chips. what are the ingredients? And what we worked out is, is that on the PDP, big swathes of text, and what was happening is people won't find that information. So you put that into an accordion menu, ingredients, manufacturing, all that kind of stuff. That then just basically okay, right. Yep, visually, that's information I need, go to it, then go and convert. So I know I've gone a bit of a rant there, John, but yeah, those are my three things. Everyone's still doing. John - Leaders on Shopify: And also if it's all coded right, SEO pick it up anyway. think those days of like hidden text and hidden things, all that's moved on now. And Shopify does a really good job of making that readable to the spiders anyway. So one thing we talked a bit about before the show was everybody's still obsessed with customer acquisition, new customers, new customer acquisition. And we want to pay more, pay more, spend more. I've got, need more budget and think we've all got addicted and some of this is agencies fault. We've, and certainly in my background before performance agencies is it was spend a pound to make 10 pounds. You'll keep spending pounds Adam Pearce - Blend: Mm. John - Leaders on Shopify: and just chucking money. And the winner there is Google meta, et cetera. So yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: So, but just to sort of give some examples, how much of the growth conversation should actually be about retention and lifetime value. Adam Pearce - Blend: mean far more than it is. And look, the it I'll I'll talk you through kind of my sales process basically of me selling CRO. What I am basically talking about is that when we're looking at CRO, I'm saying to them, imagine that you literally keep your traffic as it is today. I'm not talking about more, I'm not talking about less, I'm keeping it as it is today. And this is the impact of you making some directed Pointed structured changes to your site can happen. When we do that, between 10 and 45% increase in revenue over six months. That's what we get as a result of doing CRO. And the problem is, is that we and we're having this issue right now, is that we are banging the drum about revenue per session being the metric that you should use to assess performance of an e-commerce site. Now, the issue that I have is that many e-commerce directors and Some founders are either remunerated based on conversion rate or are obsessed with this idea of conversion rate because people have told them that that is the metric they should look at. I've had situations before where we've gone to a client, and this was about three weeks ago, we told them that their revenue per session had increased by 78% in three months. We were over the moon. But The majority of that had come from the fact that their subscription rate had increased subscribers and that AOV had also increased. Conversion rate had only gone up by eight percent. And the first thing that was said to me, but what about conversion rate? John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, Brilliant. Adam Pearce - Blend: It John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, it is... I could spend all day talking about, we're gonna get a bit more into data measurement, people Adam Pearce - Blend: Mm. John - Leaders on Shopify: are sometimes measuring the wrong thing, right? And I see it in... We see this all the time. Everybody's obsessed with ROAS. So we're looking at ROAS, right? And then, yeah, but my ROAS is good. but we're losing money over here or we're not hitting out. And I'm like, that's because you're probably spending money advertising products that you're not making a profit on. You need to Adam Pearce - Blend: Mm. John - Leaders on Shopify: get the data organized to actually work out with all my advertising costs and my fully loaded costs, deliveries, returns, everything, what products and advertising am I actually making a profit on? I'm making sure you can do that. And because it's hard, finance are looking at what's left in the till. And then you've got They're marketing guys looking at ROAS and what's in the app platforms. They're looking at different numbers and then they're having this sort of awkward conversation and mistrust that happens all the time. So yeah, and it's the same in CRO. I think it's better than maybe it was four or five years ago where nobody even owned a number, right? Cause it's like, who's in charge? Cause the other thing we talked about, who's in charge of conversion? well it's Econ, it's marketing, it's the developer. No, somebody in the business needs to be responsible for improving in your, I agree with you, revenue possession. Right. And who owns that? well, Econ, marketing or where, and again, this, how, how businesses are sometimes structured is counterintuitive to getting best performance. I think sometimes people don't even look internally on that. So, but we could, we could rant about this all day. So, If we're sort of... How much, I'm just trying to think of the sort of decision-making you see following on from that conversation about you went in, lots of good news, some stuff we're doing, but what about this? How much of what you see in the sort of decision-making with the clients is do you think is on gut feel versus actual real practitioner knowledge or data driven sort of decisions? Adam Pearce - Blend: I think the the the biggest barrier really to us in being able to to move quickly and get results is still brand and obsession over aesthetics. And it it doesn't matter how much you know the business say, look, you know, look, the brand guidelines are there, but they can be bent, they can be this, they can the other. There is always gonna be a founder or someone in brand or marketing would say, hang on, I'm not sure about that PDP in that way because, because, because. And I said a number of times on on different podcasts that have been on this you kind of have to be, that's why the data approach takes precedent here, because it allows you to be a little bit of a peacekeeper when you come into that situation and go, okay, guys, we see it from both points of view. However, this is what your customers are doing on the site. We've seen when we've done this same thing with a similar site to you, this is what happened. You can't really We got out of that one and say, well, no, no, no, because our business isn't either. Because ultimately you are still getting that kind of gut feel. I think the biggest thing though really is it it I find that the reliance upon the brand and the aesthetics piece that starts to diminish once they then start to see throughput from the work that we're doing as a business. So we, you know, as we build up that trust, the fact that the stuff that we said we were going to do has an impact. Then actually we've got some clients now who don't even review our work. They literally just say, Yeah, go and make that just go make the changes, which is you know, an earned position to be in. but I think you know, still when you have that initial conversation a lot of the time about CRO, they are sometimes thinking about a redesign and sometimes thinking about CRO. For me, those are two completely different things. You know, the redesign for a lot of the time. is tend to be driven from an aesthetic perspective that they don't like the look of that site anymore. Whereas in my view, redesign should be about architecturally, is that site fit for purpose still? Is the theme still up to date? And thirdly, is it fast or is it slow? Those are the real decisions. What it looks like front end stuff, couldn't care less. John - Leaders on Shopify: that actually is really interesting because it reminds me of a conversation years ago at Search Labs. We were doing the SEO for ASOS when ASOS was sort of in their up and coming thing. And there was this whole debate about And they'd lost a few positions in SEO and they weren't number one on dresses anymore. And it was like, it was the end of the world, right? We need to get our rightful place back for dresses, maxi dresses, like the biggest words in women's fashion about it. So, well, not apparently, the numbers would back that up. Adam Pearce - Blend: It is, yeah, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: And we got into this whole debate with the technical SEO and then we had the UX guys coming in and our SEO... advice at the time was we need a paragraph of text at the top with some contextual links that's going to improve the SEO but it needs to be at the top above the images of the the beautiful models in dresses and there was this whole no because people want to look at women in dresses before they buy the dress and we're like yeah but so we did this whole modeling adam of like well what's more important net overall sales right so if we get all traffic Even if conversion rate drops a little bit, we might sell more dresses. All right. So anyway, I managed to convince them to do the test and we ran the test and we rolled it out and we did. And unlike the LLM discoverability now, SEO took a little bit longer to take. But anyway, within weeks, they were back in a higher position. They were getting more traffic from SEO. The amazing thing was the actual conversion rate went up as well. Right. So not only did traffic go up, conversion rate went up because humans read stuff too. And actually the person who landed on the generic page for dresses who read the paragraph about we stock lots of different dresses, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, shift dresses, maxi dresses, bodycon dresses, da, da, da, with hyperlinks to those individual pages. Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, clicking through. John - Leaders on Shopify: They found where they wanted to get to click quicker because people read as well. And then... What we saw, interestingly enough, really quickly, quiz, boohoo, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Everybody started copying it and was like, right, ASOS are doing it. We need to see that. So, but yeah, it's, it's often, you're right. It's, there's so many, I don't like that button being green. You must get sick of the, that's the way what people think CRO is, is, just change the color of the button, right? And Adam Pearce - Blend: yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: it's, it's a gut feel thing. And it's like, we've got to, yeah, the best practices, but ultimately. What is the data going to tell us to help us run a better business to get that revenue processions up? so you're not only the founder of blend, you're also co-founder of the econ collab club. All right. So for those Adam Pearce - Blend: I am, yeah. So yeah, I mean John - Leaders on Shopify: who don't know what that is, where have you been, but what is it? When does it meet? Why should people get involved in that? And I suppose, why do you do it? Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, no, thanks, John. I mean, look, and thank you obviously for coming down to and like you said, if people don't know what it's about, so e com Collab Club was started about four years ago with me and my business partner because we are pretty crap and networking. And at the time, there was nothing really in the e-com space where you could go and meet people that wasn't either a glass of warm white wine or a chicken in white wine sauce. So we said, look, we'll hire out a cinema, we'll do it eight o'clock in the morning, we'll invite some of our e-com friends. And we'll basically do some panels and a bit of chat. First one we ever did 30 people. fast forward today, we do it once a month. We have between 150 and 180 people each time. We have brands, we have agencies, we have tech providers attending. and look, ultimately, it's about getting together, talking about a particular topic. We have panels where brands and agencies and tech talk, we have speed networking, and it's very light-hearted, it is very sweary, and it is very early. So If you like all those things, if you like e com, if you like swearing, if you like being in London in the morning, this is the very niche event for you. John - Leaders on Shopify: Perfect. You couldn't have sold any better. That sounds great. Adam Pearce - Blend: Ha ha. John - Leaders on Shopify: I was actually after .dev in Toronto a while ago, I met some apps from, where are they? Eastern Europe somewhere. And they were like, we're coming over for Econ Collaborate. We are coming to London specifically for it. And obviously I've known about it for a long time. was like, wow, people are like traveling from other countries now. Adam Pearce - Blend: It's it's crazy. I mean we we had two guys actually flying from New York for it, which it made me feel sick. Slow, I'm like, you do know it's only a three hour event. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Adam Pearce - Blend: they're like, Yeah, we've heard such good things. Like, Okay, enjoy. but no, lucky it's it's lovely. John - Leaders on Shopify: It's to become bigger than Blend. You're going to be bigger than Shop Talk. Adam Pearce - Blend: about that, but it's certainly fun. And and look, you know, you know, John, you've been there. It's it's a nice environment. it's a a non sales environment. And look, I think, you know, we we can sometimes, you know, in our work lives take ourselves a bit too seriously. And this is a bit of a, you know, a start reminder that look, actually you don't need to, yes, you can still learn and take value from things, but you don't have to do it all with a stiff upper lip and a stiff colour. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think it's great. And there is a genuine sense of community. there is one thing lovely about I think, and there was a bit of this in Magento back in the day, but there is a genuine feeling of community and collaboration, but it's almost competitive collaboration. Right. And there's enough business out there for everybody. And yeah, it's, it's just everybody seems to want to help each other. And what I do see nicely is that Shopify sort of encouraged that and support that as well within the ecosystem. So, yeah, Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, definitely. John - Leaders on Shopify: so if there's somebody who's listening to this or watching this and they're thinking like, right, there's one thing I need to do tomorrow after listening to Adam, what's that one thing they need to go away and do to improve the conversion on their site? Adam Pearce - Blend: I would say go and work out where you are, where your site is in terms of performance. there are lots of different tools out there. You can do that very simply. There's actually one on the Blend website that we've built called the benchmarking tool. And what this basically does is it tells you where you are from a buy now, buy more, and buy again perspective. So your conversion, the average order value, repeat customer rate, and that will actually indicate to you which of those three levers you need to pull the most. So working out first of all. Whichever one it is, focus on the area first and then make the changes to your site based on what you need. John - Leaders on Shopify: So we'll put that link into your tool there as well. And as well as that, where can people find you? Where can people find Blend if they wanna get in touch with you after this? Adam Pearce - Blend: Yeah, absolutely. So blend is just blendcommerce.com. you can find me on LinkedIn. So Adam Pearce, P E A R C E. I post a whole range of stuff that it verges from very kind of technical CRO stuff to posting random pictures with my phone and then relaying it back to e commerce, which is sometimes tenuous, sometimes not. but yeah, find me there. And obviously, of course, look, if you're in London or gonna be in London, do Google Ecom Cloud Club. And hopefully there'll be an Econ Cloud Club coming up for when you're back down in town. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and well, thank you for coming on. It's been great. And yeah, we'll we'll we'll get you on again. And I really appreciate you the Adam Pearce - Blend: Super. Thank you, John. John - Leaders on Shopify: time and talking everything CRO I thought that was a super episode. Thank you very much. Adam Pearce - Blend: Pleasure. Thanks so much.