Chase Clymer: From strategic design to Shopify-powered sales machines

Jay: Chase, thank you so much for coming on our show. I was trying to count, before you came on, do you know the actual number of times we had to reschedule this to make this happen?

Chase Clymer: It’s gotta be around a Baker’s dozen. This was the hardest interview I’ve ever tried to land in my life.

Jay: Come on. Well, I figure making you reschedule it 12 times, but you made me reschedule too, so it went both ways.

Chase: Yes, it was, but it’s fine. What is it? We’ve known each other five years now. So I feel like we know each other well enough to just deal with that kind of stuff.

Jay: No one’s offended. I don’t even have to email you, I can just drag it on the calendar and move it to another time and you’re cool with that. That’s how you know when you have a good enough relationship with someone, you don’t have to email them, you can just drag it and let the Google calendar notifications speak for itself, right?

Chase: Exactly. You’re a busy guy, man. Running Bold is something else.

Jay: Yes. Well, you know what, and I guess it’s e-commerce in general. We’re all, it’s the holiday season, and making time for these interviews is really important to me and I definitely wanted to make sure that this did happen, because I know you have a lot to say and I know our listeners are going to get a lot of this. So before we dive into that, start with who you are and what you do.

Chase: My name is Chase Clymer. I am the co-founder of an agency called Electric Eye. Our clients refer to us as Shopify experts. We like to think we’re like a gross strategy team. Long story short, we’re making beautiful websites and helping people sell more stuff on Shopify. I’m also the host of Honest e-Commerce, a weekly podcast where we interview a lot of store founders and kind of tell their stories. Jay was just on the podcast the other day. So you can go out there and find our episode about subscriptions that we dove in there and then a whole bunch of other stuff we talked about. But that’s kind of what I’m up to, building awesome Shopify websites with my team, interviewing cool people on the podcast.

Jay: How did you get here? Now to the what’s your story question, what brought you to this in life?

Chase: Being in a band that didn’t make it, that’s like the short answer.

Jay: Seriously?

Chase: Yes.

Jay: So your band failed so you started an e-commerce agency?

Chase: Kind of, yes. So I was in a band for a long time, dropped out of college and it played for five or six years toward the United States bunch. The whole time I was doing that, that obviously didn’t pay the bills, the whole time I was doing that I was freelancing, kind of cutting my teeth learning a lot of the strategies, and just kind of figuring out what I liked and didn’t like about the digital marketing world. So when we kind of decided to hang up what we were doing with the band, I had a nice little rolodex of clients that I was working with and I was kind of just like a professional freelancer at that point. Funny enough, my business partner, Sean, him and I met because we did the album art of my band together.

So we did the two album arts and got a like working relationship there and then when he left his e-Commerce company around six or seven years ago, he and I partnered up on a bunch of projects together in the e-commerce space, a lot of them being Shopify, and we kind of struck a nice little niche there and before we knew it, we had about six or seven retainer clients together before we even had an agency, and so we kind of like accidentally fell into the kind of now we have an agency because clients are like, who do we make these checks out to? And taxes are a thing. So kind of overnight, kind of figured that out and then we really doubled down on it probably within three or four months after that and it’s been awesome ever since.

Jay: And so what year was this?

Chase: So funny enough it’s like five years ago to the day is when we signed our papers to officially be…

Jay: Incorporate?

Chase: Yes.

Jay: Congratulations.

Chase: Yes. So, we made it past one year, which is when most people fail.

Jay: Yes, you definitely came in at an interesting time and you were set up also for what has happened in the last couple of years with everyone realizing that digital commerce is core to their strategy. It’s not just a side thing you do for fun.

Chase: You know what; it’s funny that you say that because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. We didn’t know that e-commerce was going to take off like this. We didn’t know Shopify was going to take off like it did, it kind of comes from a place of just like being smart and also trying to work smarter, not harder. We’re like Shopify makes things a lot easier let’s just focus on that and with proving the return on an investment, it’s way easier in e-commerce because the numbers are just right there. It wasn’t anything smart that we did and we just got lucky that now there’s been this just explosion of investment in the e-commerce and everyone’s trying out direct to consumer and obviously with the pandemic the numbers of the retail spend online have just shot through the roof.

Jay: The fact that, I don’t know if you’ve been following what’s happening with Macy’s and oh, it’s another large brand that there’s talk that they want to potentially split out the e-commerce portion and the brick and mortar because, don’t quote me on the numbers, but it’s like, Macy’s is something roughly like a $21 billion company. But if they had the exact same revenue if they were only e-commerce, they’d be valued at like 45 billion or something. Those aren’t the right exact right numbers, but that’s the premise and people are valuing e-commerce brands so much more than brick and mortar so that discussion amongst the board is do we split this out so that we have triple the value, essentially doing nothing different, not changing what they’re doing with Macy’s digital strategy and their brick and mortar strategy, but just separating it so that people can invest separately into the digital portion of Macy’s creates value. It’s a shell game, it seems like, but it’s real because people value digital commerce so much more. What are your thoughts on that?

Chase: It’s money magic man. I think it’s very interesting.

Jay: But it’s real.

Chase: Yes, the evaluations in e-commerce are wild, and even in SAS it’s even wilder and I know that you know a lot about that, with you guys kind of now going all in on SAS. But yes, that is very funny to me, especially when it’s not changing anything and just basically creating value out of thin air. That seems like a great way to get investigated by the SEC.

Jay: In some ways it makes sense, but also in some ways, it seems thin air, but people don’t want part of the investment to be in legacy retail, so I get it. But that was a bit of an aside back to you and Electric Eye, if you had to say, just for listeners, what are you better in the world than anyone else, at your agency?

Chase: We are the best at helping a small team with all the nerdy sides of running an e-commerce brand scale from 1 million to 10 million.

Jay: Okay. That’s your sweet spot.

Chase: Yes.

Jay: And what does that mean? So are you doing design development is it optimization and marketing strategies or is it a combination?

Chase: It’s a combination. So what we do for most of our clients that kind of fit that bill is they got a small team, people are wearing too many hats and we come in and we take the kind of the technical stuff off their plates. So first being is usually the design and dev of the website. We’re going to make sure that the user experience of the website is optimized to convert whatever traffic you’re currently getting. We put a lot of effort in. So all of our kind of strategy comes from this brand scaling framework that we’ve developed over the last couple years, which is basically e-commerce is math. There are three numbers that matter and we can argue about this all day, but it’s conversion rate, average order value, and sessions, those are the only numbers that matter. Those are our true Norths at the agency and that’s where all of our conversations with our clients kind of tie back to. So when we’re helping a small brand, not a small brand, a million dollars is nothing to shake stick at. But when you get to that point, you’re a different business than you are when you’re in that start-up phase trying to find product market fit. But a lot of the commonalities of those types of brands is they have an older theme. Typically off the shelf, they’ve tried a hundred apps, half of them being Bold apps and when you install apps into the store, the unfortunate truth is when you press uninstall, it doesn’t remove that code. So you have inherently some extra code in there. There’s nothing wrong with off the shelf theme, let me just say that now, but when you start to get into optimization and your goal is performance, you’re talking about a whole different ballpark.

So when you get off-the-shelf theme, there are a lot of extra features in there and that isn’t performant. Whereas if you have a tailor built theme for your brand, it’s going to be as fast as humanly possible. It’s hard to get a theme to perform as well as like an off-the-shelf theme to perform as well as a custom theme, it’s just pretty hard to do, and it’s probably more work than it is to get the same result. So anyways, back to the question is what are we doing? We’re building awesome websites, within that website a lot of strategy behind conversion rate optimization, making sure it’s easy to get from the homepage down to the product, get things in the cart and then make sure it’s super, super fast, and then we put a lot of strategy into AOV as well, which is something that I think a lot of people overlook.

So we’re trying to figure out ways to raise the average order value, get more things into the cart. That comes down to upsells, cross-sells, and bundles. Those are fun conversations to have. We help our clients figure that out, make sure that the way you position those offers is like on brand. It feels like it should be there. It’s part of the journey. And so once the website’s in the best shape ever, we’re usually then helping out with marketing and advertising, which comes down to email and SMS, Facebook ads, Google, et cetera.

Jay: So much stuff here I want to unpack. Well, first I want to say if anyone installs Bold apps and they uninstall them, perfectly fine. We’ll always happily uninstall any liquid if anyone ever asks, there isn’t a way to automate that and that’s always been a pet peeve of ours.

Chase: That’s a developer’s nightmare, isn’t it?

Jay: Yes, and we’ve always requested that…

Chase: They need a web hook, right? It’s as simple as just giving you guys a web hook, right?

Jay: Yes, once an app is uninstalled and it’s not just Bold apps, this is across the board. But once an app is uninstalled from a store, it loses all API access to that shop. So it can’t physically do anything. But if someone emailed, and any decent developer should do this for you, if you email them and say, Hey, didn’t work out, I uninstalled your app would you mind removing any code? They should. It takes two minutes. It’s easy to do, but some code can slow down themes. Some code is just sitting there doing nothing, but some of them might actually be making calls or running loops and checking for products that have something in the cart or something to show an offer. So it could actually be slowing it down if they’re not removed. But anyways, that was one thing. But speaking of speed, why does it matter so much?

Chase: So this isn’t an opinion, this is a fact; there are so many studies out there on it, just Google it. But page speed is directly correlated to conversion rate. The faster your website is, the higher your conversion rate will be and where that matters; here’s a really just straightforward answer to why this matters, Instagram ads and getting people to go to your site from that. Oftentimes if you have one and you’ve got, a winning ad and is a thumb stopper as they say, and I want to buy this T-Shirt, that’s a cool logo and then I click on the ad, if I’m not instantly on that webpage and you give me time to think about the decision I’m about to make, I’m probably going to abandon. So that’s like where that performance matters. So if it’s not like instantly loaded, you’re probably going to lose a lot more people. So what happens sometimes is people have websites that are a little bit slow. So I click on that thing and it takes like a second, literally a second to load, doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but in reality of it, that’s a lot of time for me to reconsider my decision, and then I will possibly just click back out and go back to the content of my Instagram feed and kind of abandon that sale.

Jay: Yes, and I’m so glad you mentioned Instagram. I’m just going to pull up Ed Finbarr, he’s the CEO of Shogun and it was Absolute 14 and they had some really interesting data around this. So what Shogun does is they have a Shogun front end, specifically, it’s a PW, a progressive web app solution that basically allows a headless Shopify store. So you can run it on their CMS, their platform and it’s like lightning fast, you still manage products and everything in Shopify, but the front end is on Shogun and they said for some of their brands, if the traffic was coming from Google, they saw a slight increase in conversion, a couple percent. If it was coming from social media, specifically from Instagram, they would see sometimes 25 to 30% higher conversion and the thing that I think a lot of people think is they think, well, if someone’s Googling for my product and I can say this for myself too, if I’m looking for a product, like right now I’m looking for one of those pizza ovens.

If I go to Google, I search it and I go on the site. If that site takes a second or three seconds to load, I’m probably still going to buy it because I’m searching for it, I’m spear fishing for that product. But if I’m on Instagram and I’m scrolling, and if I, like you said, there’s that thumb stopper and if I click on it and if it doesn’t load as fast as the next Instagram post, your competition is the next Instagram post, your competition isn’t another store and that’s what I think brands maybe don’t realize why it’s so important, page load speed is they’re not competing with another store, they’re competing with muscle memory in that thumb essentially.

Chase: The funniest thing, like when I kind of got into just digital and like optimization and stuff like that, someone that positioned, you need to think of your customer as drunk and in a hurry. So it has to be like that type of, it has to be a really simple and easy and fast experience.

Jay: Yes, at a red light with their cell phone trying to order something on the way home, if that’s legal, I don’t know. There were a couple of other things I wanted to dive into there too. You mentioned the three pillars. Actually, I’ve heard you refer to this before; you call this your brand scaling framework, right?

Chase: Yes.

Jay: So that’s conversion, average order value, and sessions.

Chase: Yes, you know what? I missed the whole reason of why those numbers matter. If you multiply them together, it gives you your sales. It’s a math formula. So you can go and see your baseline. Just go right now into the backend of your Shopify stores, get your conversion rate for the last 30 days, your average order value for the last 30 days and the amount of sessions you had in your last 30 days, multiply them together, it’s going to be really close to how much money you made last month. So there’s your baseline and then you can start manipulating these numbers and the magic number is if you increase each of those three KPIs by 26%, you’re going to double your business because that’s how exponential growth works.

Jay: Yes, that’s crazy. Here’s another fun fact about exponential growth. If you improve it just 1% and you do that for thirty-seven days, you’ll have double it as well, too. So of those three, conversion, average order value and sessions, I feel like conversion is talked about a lot. Sessions is talked a lot, but average order value I don’t find coming up as much as it should.

Chase: It does not get as much love, but it’s like such an awesome lever and I think I enjoy it because it’s definitely a more strategic angle because unfortunately is every single brand is different. Because it’s your customers that you’re serving, it is the price point of your product, it is your product assortment and how those products interact with each other to how you can kind of build out those offers. It’s very hard to find an off-the-shelf solution at times to solve for the offer that you need to put in front of your customer.

Jay: It’s probably also the easiest one to increase if you think…

Chase: Well, so here’s the thought exercise, pretend you’re a coffee shop and your product or your coffees and someone’s standing in front of you and they go, I want that one. You as an owner are going to immediately know what else to suggest. So you just had to get that stuff out of your head and then just speak with like a strategist or like a developer and be like, this is like what needs to happen and then you kind of start to work it out from there.

Jay: And there’s all this data around too, that it’s five to 25 times less expensive to sell to an existing customer or someone who’s already buying than acquire a new one. Once you have that customer that adds something to the cart or makes some type of buying behavior if you’re not suggesting they sell more in some way, whether that’s bundles or you talked about upselling or cross-selling, I’d love to dive into that a little bit. Obviously we have products at Bold to do this. I’m not saying this at all to promote those, but the concept in general, I think is really overlooked. There’s actually something I wanted to ask you about, maybe it was further down on my list of questions for Chase. I think a lot about membership and subscription. I know we talked about this a little bit on yours, but what are your thoughts around optimizing from an optimization standpoint? So you’ve got a customer who’s add something to the cart, what are some of the first things you do or you would suggest to a brand quick wins for increasing AOV?

Chase: Okay. Quick wins for increasing AOV. First and foremost, go look at your data. Everyone’s going to say that, but seriously, people are probably already buying certain products together all the time and so that’s like a quick way to find out like, if you’re stuck on I don’t know what to offer, you can just go and see what products that people are currently always buying together. That’s a quick way to start to build out cross-sells within your journey and there are solutions like Bold upsell, we’ve used that on projects before, that’s a simple way to start to think about it there. One that we do on almost every project that we do for our clients is we do an in-cart upsell and that’s usually, again, it kind of goes back to like what the customer’s kind of product type is.

But for example, for our skincare brand, their most popular product was what we put there and it is still their most popular product by like a lot more now. That one works really well, we had a brand that was a little more gifting and they just did an upsell for gift wrap $5 and it works that was the number one thing and all these are just in-cart upsells. So those were really fun. With one of our clients, a jewelry brand, we did an upsell sequence where like you get the earrings and they’ll try to sell you the necklace and then they’ll try to sell you the bracelet and it works every which way. So those were really fun.

Jay: You’re doing this as a static upsell in like the cart drawer that slides out or on the cart page?

Chase: Yes, so those have been some really fun, easy ones to, eh, easy is not the right term but is doable. Those have been fun. I think we should probably clarify real quickly, people in our industry use upsell and cross-sell interchangeably. I know the difference, but I’m probably going to say it wrong throughout this conversation. So I just wanted to kind of get ahead of that.

Jay: Do you want to define it?

Chase: I mean the real definition is an upsell is you’re buying a small and you sell me a large, but like a cross sell is you buy a small and then you also buy a large, so it’s like getting more products in the cart. But yes, oftentimes people just kind of default to saying it’s an upsell because it’s just, it’s more money.

Jay: You know, it’s funny. So Bold Upsell was the first app we ever launched in 2012 and we called it Upsell, but it actually didn’t do upsells, it just did cross-sells . So for the first five years of that app’s existence, it did cross-sells, you add something to the card and it recommends a product and it would add to the existing product. It now does both, it can do upsells or cross-sells. So you add something to the cart and it says for just $10 more, you can get the better version, you accept it and it replaces the original item, but nobody ever questioned it for five years. No one ever once said, actually these are cross-sells, not upsells. Chase: That’s hilarious.

Jay: Yes, it’s important to know the difference and you can combine them as well, too.

Chase: One of my favorite example to explore is Unbound Marino does so many awesome offers on their website. The one that I like to always bring up to fashion brands is a really subtle upsell on their blank t-shirt page. It’s like you can buy one black t-shirt or like right under the buy button, it’s like buy three and save and it sends you over to the bundle builder and I just think that’s so cool. That’s like a really cool way to do it. And they’ve got upsells throughout their funnel. So they’ve got it in the side cart. They’ve got it in checkout and they’ve got it post-purchase. They’re really giving you offers all over the place.

Jay: Yes, and the way they do it, I’m looking at it right now, that’s actually a really easy, anyone could do this. It’s just linking to the three-pack version, it’s just another product. It’s not even an app it’s just, they have a product that has the three styles, and then yes, like to me, that’s such a no-brainer.

Chase: I know. That’s the thing, this is something that’s so easy once you start to think about it and really strategize on it but people oftentimes overlook it, and it is such, like as far as return on ad spend goes, this is a metric that truly matters is that average order value. Because if you start to extrapolate your cost per acquisition, this number, the average order value truly matters. If you’re talking about like doing a really true performance growth model, and you really want to be nerdy with your numbers.

Jay: Just out of curiosity, have you ever used our app called The Brain?

Chase: I played around with it like four years ago. I remember playing with it when we had an office at this co-working space.

Jay: It’s probably one of our least known apps, but it’s such an interesting tool. We built it, it actually started as a hack days project. It was a bunch of our staff just thought like, what if we could use AI to find recommended products that should go together and then how it’s used can be wherever, it can be through bundles, it could be through maybe it’s a loyalty program you have, and you want to send emails out to say, Hey, you have 10,000 points. Here are some products you could buy but instead of just like any products, it was products based off of what you’ve previously purchased so that customers are more likely to convert or bundles. It’s free and I’ve actually never talked about this app on this podcast at all it and we try not to talk about Bold products and only doing this because it comes up, but anyone can install it and it finds products that are commonly bought together. You can do what you want with it. You can create upsells or you can just use it as data.

One of the things I found really interesting when we created this is it gives you reports on the highest converting products that are most often bought together and then there are like action buttons you can do, it can say create bundle, create an upsell or just you could use that in your email marketing if you wanted, whatever, it’s just data. But one of the things that was really interesting is very often it was actually the same product. So I remember this one brand, they sold barbecue supplies and it was like a flipper and this one store, there was an option that you could let The Brain automatically create upsells based off of data and the upsell that was the highest converting one was another flipper, which you wouldn’t always think as a merchant, you try to think, oh, what else are they going to want? They’re going to want the scraper. They’re going to want the steak sauce or the barbecue sauce or something.

We always think there’s like a matching product. Sometimes it’s another product, the exact same one and it makes sense, because one Flipper’s dirty, you want to have an extra one and it just reminded me when I was looking at the t-shirt example, instead of recommending other products, just buying more of the same one is often the best way to increase because you’ve got someone who’s already buying it. They’ve already mentally decided to buy that product, offer them another one. Probably that works for a lot of brands and thats just something they wouldn’t think of.

Chase: Yes, and so it’s either offer them another one or offer them a larger size. You see that a lot with supplements from the one pound bag to like the five pound bag or whatever as an upsell.

Jay: Yes. Such an interesting takeaway. I hadn’t thought about that for a while, but okay. I want to talk; okay, so there is conversion, AOV and sessions. So we talked a little bit about AOV, sessions, traffic. What are you seeing, I think a lot about acquisition and healthy acquisition, maybe unhealthy acquisition, some that are sustainable, some that are not sustainable of the brands you’re working with, or maybe the brands that you’re watching growing really fast. What are you seeing as some of the main ways that are improving the sessions metric?

Chase: Absolutely. Well, what I want to get out ahead of first though, is with oftentimes brands always run two sessions when they’re like talking about scaling, they run straight to paid acquisition, straight to Facebook ads. And I think that is blighting money on fire at times, if your other KPIs aren’t in the best place that it could be because your traffic is only going to increase as far as your budget goes. So it’s a little bit you’re leaving a lot of money on the table if like your experience is bad or you don’t have like these offers in place to try to raise the AOV. So that’s something I wanted to highlight to anyone listening and it’s a conversation we have all the time with people that come through the door. It’s just like, when people say, I want to do Facebook ads, and just some Socratic questioning, why, why, why, they’re just like we want to make more money. Like cool, I know another way you can make a lot more money, but it’s going to be a different order. They’re usually open to hear that conversation.

Jay: What are some ways that you’re seeing other brands drive traffic?

Chase: So what is going really well these days, I think, is this concept of like influencer seating. So getting your product into kind of like a micro or macro influencers’ hands, you have to be very cognizant of who you’re sending these products to and who is actually in their audience, but that’s a really easy way to grow any business. Be it a service business, a consultancy, or like a product business, like an e-commerce store. Here’s the perfect, I’m getting in front of Jay’s audience right now. This is how influencer marketing works is borrow other people’s audiences to spread your reach. So a lot of brands are doing kind of that influencer thing and I think that works really well, especially with how expensive paid ads are getting. So if you use it in tandem with retargeting, then it’s really, really sweet.

So say you send out a hundred free products to a bunch of people whom you believe their audience will resonate with your product and then you get all this traffic coming in. I wouldn’t say it was a bad investment if you didn’t get any sales from that but now you have a bunch of new eyes that have just been to your brand. Then you retarget them through Facebook and Instagram and try to get them onto your email and SMS list, then it really starts to do the business and you get the flywheel going.

Jay: Yes. Well, I’m going to recommend a previous episode too. Sorry to this, but do you know Cody Whitick?

Chase: I do not.

Jay: Okay. He has Kinship.

Chase: Oh, so I know a Taylor from Kinship.

Jay: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So Cody is one of the, he’s not one of the founders. Anyways, I had him on the podcast, it’s a really, really good listen and it’s all about product seating and there are right and wrong ways to do it and we got into that quite a bit. It’s definitely worth listening to, but it’s really interesting. I just want to pull up some of the data around what big brands, here it is. So 47% of people under the age of 34 have purchased something that a celebrity has spoken about or endorsed on Instagram. 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice. 60% of teens follow advice from influencers over celebrities. Influencer marketing campaigns last year earned $6.50 for every $1 spent, 17% of companies are currently spending over half their marketing budget on influencers. 92% of marketers are using influencer marketing and the largest brands this year are planning to spend more on influencer marketing than traditional media. So whether that’s commercials, Google ad, other methods.

But I would say too, that I do see a lot of people throwing money away there as well too. There’s a right and a wrong way to do it. Product seating is I think a really good strategy and if anyone doesn’t know what that is, definitely listen to that episode with Cody Whitick. But do you want to explain the concept in a nutshell?

Chase: Yes, it’s basically you’re acting in good faith and you’re sending out your products without asking for anything in return. Historically influencer marketing got kind of tangled up with affiliate marketing and people were approaching it the same way and that kind of isn’t the right way to do it. And I do agree with, like Kinships model is the way to do it and it’s not something that we do at the agency, but especially for brands that are about to launch or they’re like trying to get to that next level and they can’t seem to break the mold on paid or just get it done in a profitable way. I think that’s an interesting avenue to explore.

Jay: Yes, for sure. What is the process? What does it look like when a brand comes to you and wants like, well, first of all, what spawns that? Is it when they’re having struggles in one of those areas and they come to you and they say, look…?

Chase: It’s often, there’s a reason why they’re reaching out and it’s usually like, there’s usually a very, not urgent, but like there’s an immediate need and maybe it is an issue with their existing website or it is, they don’t trust their current strategy or they just don’t have a strategy and that’s a perfectly reasonable answer. A lot of brands have come through the door and they’re like we’ve never done paid ads and we think that it would work, we just don’t know how to do it and can we have a conversation and we’ll talk about that. Obviously, we’ll help them with the immediate need there, but we’re like also just explaining here are all these other opportunities and these are the things we’re good at, would you like help there as well? And like selling one product to someone that’s already bought a product, if we help them in one area, they usually like to work in other areas, but it comes down to the same things always is like the end goal is like they they’re trying to grow their business and they need help from kind of a strategic e-commerce perspective of it and we’ve been basically only working with Shopify brands for the last five years. So we have experienced every problem that you are going to bring up to us at least a dozen times.

Jay: Do you work with, if a brand has agency, do you act as just a consulting on conversion, AOV and session improvements or do you take them all or nothing?

Chase: No, we play very nice with others and I think that that is something that I would look for in other agencies that you’re working with as well. Obviously, we can do it all, but we’re fine with not doing it all and just kind of plugging in; at the end of the day, we’re a service business we’re trying to help these businesses grow. So where can we be most impactful and most helpful? And that’s kind of where we’ll plug in and we’ve made a lot of awesome partners through just being real. Here’s the thing e-commerce is still in its infancy and if you can’t be nice to all the other kids in the sandbox, you’re going to go out of business. We’ve met so many awesome agencies in this space and we have so many referral partners and people know exactly what we’re good at and what we’re not good at and I know that about them and just the referrals are going around like crazy.

Jay: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I want to ask, well, a couple of things; one, let’s talk a little bit about holidays right now. This episode should be out fairly soon. So it’ll still be the holiday season. What are you seeing brands do? I feel like this holiday is a little bit different. There are like supply chain challenges. Maybe we’ll get into that and talk about some strategies around that if people are having inventory, but in general, what are you recommending the brands do through the holidays? Like some best practices.

Chase: So we start holiday planning in September, I think. Basically, Q4 is like we call it our holiday success package and then we’re basically double downing on all of our efforts there. So we’ve been doing this for our clients for a while and we try to start the strategy sessions well before that, too. So just honestly we want everything answered before November. We want to know what the offers are going to be. What is the sales going to be? What things need to be created to kind of help those sales happen. So my advice to you would be, if this comes out in the next two weeks I hope you have all that stuff already in place because if you don’t figure it out now, you don’t want to be figuring out the week of, so there’s that.

As far as like what your offer should be for holiday, my opinion is to keep it simple. You’re going to be competing for brain space with a dozen other brands and if I can’t read your offer and just get it instantly within the text message or the email or the ad that I read, you’ve already lost the sale, because someone else’s offer is just going to make more sense and be easier to understand and I’m just going to go spend my money there. So make sure that your offer is pretty easy to understand and all of your marketing messages are the same. There is the kind of strategy of having a different sale every day and if that’s what you’re going to do fine, but tell me every sale that’s about to happen up front. Don’t change it and surprise me every day because then you’re going to get a bunch of customer service complaints. So that’s kind of my strategy behind what types of offers and sales you should do during the holidays.

Outside of that, I think that a lot of the listeners should also just recognize that last year’s sales and probably for a lot of the listeners, it was the best their business has ever done during the holiday and this year may not beat it because last year was lightning in a bottle. It was a very unique once in a lifetime kind of situation for everybody. So I would just accept that and don’t put more pressure on your team than should, you know what I mean? Look at the numbers and you can look at the KPIs and I would say a lot of brands won’t break what they did last year and they should be okay with that.

Jay: Mm-Hmm yes. Well, especially are any of the brands you’re working with having supply chain challenges?

Chase: Oh yes. So that was the end part of your question. So yes, there’s also the supply chain issues. Luckily a few of our clients are manufacturing everything estate sides and they’ve got all that figured out, but we do have a few that have kind of some issues with stuff hanging out in limbo off the coast of California. You know what’s funny is where a lot of the positioning has shifted is into focusing on gift cards and gifting and just being upfront about not having the inventory. So the gifting I think is going to be a pretty big deal this holiday season and gift cards and kind of like trying to get the money for the product you don’t have yet, I guess.

Jay: Yes. I just do you know, Kelly and Rianne?

Chase: I know Kelly extremely well, we’re really good friends. Jay: You’re e-commerce besties. So you obviously know the app they just launched?

Chase: I am an investor in their app.

Jay: Oh wow, there you go.

Chase: Yes, I believe them a lot.

Jay: Okay. Well, we’re going to up the value of their app right now by talking about it.

Chase: Yes, they’re coming in and trying to solve for gift cards. There is an incumbent in this space and they just saw some opportunity to put something new out there and I think it’s a really cool product.

Jay: Yes, I just had them on the podcast. It’ll be out by the time this airs. So if you’re listening to this, scroll back a couple of episodes, I think that’s going to be out actually tomorrow. Their solution I think is so timely and that was actually why I wanted to get them on really quick and rush it out because their solution has when a product’s out of stock, it automatically switches to buy a gift card. But the thing I think brands need to think about is maybe gift cards in and of themselves aren’t super sexy. I remember as a kid, you kind of don’t want a gift card sometimes.

Chase: It’s almost as bad as giving someone cash.

Jay: Yes, it’s one step worse because you’re restricting where they can spend it.

Chase: Yes, and it’s like, well, you know what, Cheesecake Factory is actually terrible. I’d rather get Chipotle.

Jay: Right. But if you do something cool where; you know a lot of gift cards don’t get used, it’s just a fact and so if you, as a brand are selling gift cards, a lot of them won’t get used. You can give more value to the people that actually do use them. So for example, if you buy a gift card for $80, but it’s a hundred dollars value, there’s a realistic chance, this is going to be different for every store, but if 20% of people don’t use a gift card, you can give that value to the people that actually are using it and your net even and it creates a compelling reason to use a gift card or maybe consider emailing out gift cards to customers that aren’t engaged and haven’t purchased for a while. Instead of emailing them a coupon code, a gift card is closer to cash, like you said, it’s more tangible. You can email all your customers here is a $15 gift card that they can go and shop with, it’s actual cash. So they feel like if they’re not spending it, they lose it versus a coupon code, if you don’t spend it, you don’t lose it, you just never get it but there’s that sense of loss with a gift card. And I think if people are strategic how they use it, I think gift cards can be a really, really powerful tool this season.

Chase: Oh, absolutely and you are so right. The consumer mindset is that it is cash. Also a really, really interesting thing about gift cards is you should, there’s a YouTube video about how Starbucks is like the fourth largest bank in the world and it’s all about how much money they have on their gift cards and like just how insane gift cards are in general and it’s a really cool little video to watch.

Jay: I probably buy 20 or 30 Starbucks gift cards every holiday, because it goes to all the kids’ teachers and the day cares and the dance teacher, the piano teacher, the hockey coach, everyone gets a Starbucks gift card in the holidays. It’s interesting.

Chase: Yes, and also just think of it this way, gift cards are basically a 0% interest loan.

Jay: Yes, essentially.

Chase: So it’s a great way to raise capital for your brand.

Jay: Yes, speak to an accountant [inaudible 36:25].

Chase: That’s not advice, that’s just a funny way to position it in your mind.

Jay: I don’t want to get us in trouble, but yes, no you’re absolutely right. Well Kelly had a really interesting, no, Rianne, it’s a crazy number. It was like 6.5 billion a year don’t get spent, gift cards get purchased that don’t get spent. I don’t know what that is as a percentage of totals, but that’s a huge number that is in retailer’s hands, kind of free money if it doesn’t get used.

Chase: Exactly, they’ll have to earmark it.

Jay: Yes, we’re getting close to our time here. I want to ask you a couple quick, just so everyone knows. I usually send questions to guests ahead of time, but I didn’t send Chase anything. I put him on the spot here for every single question and I’m going to put him on the spot for our lightning round.

Chase: All right. I’m going to fail.

Jay: No, I feel like you probably know all these off the top of your head.

Chase: I probably do.

Jay: I’m going to rattle off a couple questions here to end it off. Number one, what’s the biggest mistake you see merchants make?

Chase: Their navigation makes absolutely no sense.

Jay: So true. Do you have a pet peeve when you are shopping online?

Chase: Yes, because I’m so close to the internet. So if I’m shopping online, I’m going to go back to the navigation thing. It’s just like your top line navigation should be only things that are making you money. Everything else should be in the footer and so that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine and then a good way to think about it is just like break it down to money. These things have of categories attached to them and you can see how much money you make off of it. So why would you give something the same amount of real estate that makes you $0 versus the thing that’s responsible for 60% of your revenue?

Jay: So true. And when you think about most stores, it’s contact us, about us, resources and then there’s like one…

Chase: And blog, put all that crap in the footer. Nobody’s your homepage to go to your blog. They’re coming to your blog from like a social link or Google or email.

Jay: Yes. So good. So what was your pet peeve?

Chase: Oh yes, it just goes back to navigation not making sense. It should be all shopping focused. If I go to a website and the navigation isn’t shopping focus that frustrates me, especially for younger brands. Amazon, Walmart, Target, it is training people in UX patterns of how to shop on the internet with filtering and sorting and helping me get to what I want to see faster and I see a lot of brands not investing the time into building out that functionality on their site and it’s definitely leaving money on the table.

Jay: Yes, or thinking they need to reinvent it for some reason.

Chase: Oh yes, that’s a great way to light money on fire.

Jay: I get brands want to be unique and have their own look and feel, but certain functionality does not need to be reinvented.

Chase: A website should be intuitive, it shouldn’t be hard to buy.

Jay: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Chase: I get to talk to really awesome people like you and I mean, just, I interview brands a lot and I get to meet a lot of really cool brands too and that’s really fun. I am lucky to have such a great team here at the agency that knocks things out of the park for our clients that I basically am just like the front guy. I’m doing content and partnerships and business development, which is something I never knew that I would enjoy doing but it’s awesome.

Jay: Yes, the face of the company

Chase: That’s me, Sean likes to be in the shadows.

Jay: Someone has to do it. What’s your favorite online store or the last place you bought something if you don’t have a favorite one? But you must have a favorite one. Chase: On Brown Marino is really cool if you are looking for like upsells and cross-sells. Where’s the last thing, I bought a lot of stuff recently from different brands. Fairity I like a lot, American Giant is pretty cool. Here’s the thing, any Facebook marketers out there, if you work for a clothing brand that hits me with an ad, I’ll probably buy something because I just like to reverse engineer how they’re doing stuff. It’s fun for me to do that and I get to support a small business.

Jay: I do the exact same thing. I get to subscribe to so many things too because we are always checking out subscription flows and cancellation flows and different things. So like I have a subscription to everything.

Chase: It’s funny though, if I am not like if I see something going on and it’s like, not good, I’m like, Hey I’m a consultant in this field, this is broken, go tell someone to fix it. I’ll just tell them.

Jay: I’ve done, you don’t know who I am, I am an expert in this area and this is…

Chase: Yes, it never turns into a client it’s a really bad way to start a relationship. But you know, I’d rather it get fixed than it kind of exists out there in a bad way.

Jay: You should be one of those cheesy people that sends the video of yourself, shopping on their website and saying, I found this wrong.

Chase: Do you want to hear a really funny story? Do you know Shebo and the guys over at reversion?

Jay: Yes.

Chase: Guess how I met them. I screenshotted an Instagram ad that I got from them and I said, this is bad and then we got on the phone and that’s how we met.

Jay: Okay. Well it works. I stand corrected.

Chase: He didn’t become a client, we became partners, but that was, yes, it was really funny.

Jay: What is the number one thing you think stores could be doing to grow sales but they’re not?

Chase: I mean, obviously investing in upsell, cross-sells and bundles as a strategy and implementing it in a great UX on your website is a great thing to do. Finding content that resonates with your audience and then being able to distribute that content through all of your different channels. That’s something that a lot of brands I think have a problem with when they kind of get into that scaling phase of things is they like don’t have these systems to create content. So kind of building out the systems to create content before you get to this scaling phase is something you should do because when you get that scaling phase, you’re going to need way more content than you currently have and if you don’t have a system in place to produce it you’re going to be stuck and have to solve for that. Jay: And the lines are getting blurred between commerce and content. If you’re not a content company, you probably aren’t going to win in the commerce space and vice versa. The best media content companies are getting into the commerce game as well too. It’s not like you’re one or the other, you have to have a good content strategy.

Chase: Absolutely, and it’s pretty, that’s up there with like a difficult thing to crack.

Jay: Yes, absolutely. Last one; most of our listeners are business owners like yourself and they’re going through a similar journey. I’m sure you’ve had some good advice or quotes over the years or things that have resonated with you as you’ve built your business. So it doesn’t have to be related to eCommerce, but more business. Is there anything that has meant a lot to you or that you would share?

Chase: Something that always sticks out to me, a mentor told me this over coffee a few years ago is the money never comes as fast or as much as you think.

Jay: That’s true. So don’t get disappointed, right?

Chase: Yes, I think it resonates with like just level your expectations and be patient. Do you know what I mean? That those are probably the two takeaways from that.

Jay: It’s a flywheel. It’s like the first sale is a grind and the second one and the third one and it’s not until you hit significant critical scale that like you get sales just coming and I think there’s that mindset that like, I think it’s actually become harder, like Shopify is fantastic, great tool, but I think in some ways it’s actually made it harder to be successful because it’s so easy to launch a store where 10 years ago, you just having a decent looking store with decent navigation that looked good, kind of set you apart. But now it’s so easy to have that with Shopify and that’s a great thing. That’s fantastic, don’t get me wrong but standing out is even harder.

Chase: Yes, I think it’s going full circle now to where it’s like, you have to be creative. You have to really have a great customer relationship, not just experience, but you need to interview your customers, know what they want, solve their problems, great content that they want. It always goes back to a more creative approach, which is where I kind of like just being a consultant and being an agency space, in general, is like the more creative side of things. Running your Facebook ads for you, we’ll do that, that’s fine. But the creativity that comes along with consulting is what makes us happy.

Jay: Well, Chase, where can people find you to all the thousands of clients you’re going to have knocking at your door right now?

Chase: So if you enjoy what I had to say here you can go over to electricguy.io, schedule an intro call with a strategist so we can chat through these numbers. See if we’re a good fit, see if we can’t help you out. Or if you just like my ramblings on e-commerce, you can check out the Honest e-Commerce podcast available where all the podcasts are, honestecommerce.co.

Jay: Awesome and I’ll put all those links in our show notes as well. Chase, thank you so much for coming on.

Chase: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.