On this 45th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Chase Clymer, co-founder of Electric Eye and host of Honest E-commerce where he and his team create Shopify-powered sales machines from strategic design and development to customer-centric marketing funnels.
Tune in to this episode with Andrew and Chase as they talk about bundling, product-market fit, and scaling Shopify brands.
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How to Scale Your Shopify Brand through Effective Web Design - Electric Eye
SPEAKERS
Andrew Maff and Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
Chase Clymer is the Co-founder of Electric Eye, where he and his team create Shopify-powered sales machines through strategic design, development, and marketing decisions. He is also the host of Honest Ecommerce, a weekly podcast where we provide online store owners with honest, actionable advice to increase sales and grow their business.
Transcript:
00:03
No agency, no freelancer, no consultant will help you find product market fit, it will never be worth it. That is a founder's struggle and journey. You need to do that hard work yourself. You need to get off the ground and get that first 100k on your own. Hey everyone, this is Nezar Akeel from Max Pro. Hi, I'm Linda and I'm Paul and we're Love and Pebble. Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA.
00:26
You're listening to, and you're listening
00:27
and you're listening, and you are listening to The E-Comm Show. Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts. They share their secrets about how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello, everyone.
00:56
Welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff. And today I'm joined by the Amazing Chase Clymer who is the co-founder of Electric Eye and also a podcast host himself of Honest Ecommerce Chase, how're you doing? Right for a good show?
01:10
I'm ready. Let's do it.
01:11
Let's do this. So I love always having other podcast hosts on the show because it's the banter is always so much fun. So but why don't we let you kind of enjoy yourself? Tell us a little bit about yourself, obviously Electric Eye, your podcast and we'll kind of kick it off from there. Okay.
01:26
Absolutely. My name is Chase Clymer. I'm a terrible golfer. I'm a nerd. I like playing Magic the Gathering. And I'm also the host of honesty, and commerce, which is probably the only way that any listener might have heard of me. It's a fantastic show, we interview mostly interview brand founders that kind of have some cool going on, tell their story, and kind of just like how the heck they did it. We also do a lot of bonus episodes where interview subject matter experts or vendors in the E-commerce ecosystem, those are always fun. And then my real job is I'm one of the co-founders of electric guy. We're basically a design and optimization agency for E-commerce stores we take, we just build beautiful Shopify themes that are super performance optimized for sales, or optimize existing stores. You know, a lot of people like to call it CRO. And those are the two things we're really good at over there.
02:15
Beautiful, obviously, really appreciate having a show. You run a podcast very similar to ours because we do the exact same thing. Typically, we're interviewing other merchants or other brands, seeing what's going on with them. And every now and then we like to have other people like yourself on the show, which is fantastic. What are some of the craziest stuff you've had on your show? What's like you got it? You got a few good episodes. We were like, oh, man, that was a good one. Well,
02:38
what is it Today is Wednesday. Yesterday, we released episode eight with smile direct club. So that one was pretty. No There might have been that is probably up there as one of our biggest guests. I believe. I'm trying to think I mean, there are some cool people that I've interviewed that I just like because I'm a nerd I liked. But yeah, that one that one's pretty noticeable. I got a few in the can see, here's the thing. I'm like, really ahead of the game when it comes to these recordings. So I have six months in the can which is 30 episodes almost. Yeah. And I don't know if some of these are out yet. So I can't pull it up. I don't want to like spill the beans.
03:18
Last year. Yeah, you get way ahead. Usually, we're only about a month or two ahead. You got your six months out.
03:23
I with the recordings now with the editing. But I did that on purpose. Just because q2, q3, and q4 are just insane for E-commerce. So like that's like a lot of good stuff done for our clients. And I'm used to doing a lot of outreach to get guests and now I've evolved and now I'm on all these awesome PR lists and people come to me so it's a lot easier.
03:43
And that's why you're here. Right? Shameless plug. So So, what made you start? Well, what came first, the podcast or Electric Eye?
03:52
The agency? Absolutely. We started the agency I want to say 2016 Maybe it was honestly just like we needed a name because taxes straight up. It was really my partner Sean and then we kind of started to take stuff seriously. Two years later, maybe we kind of read traction we read Profit First we started to learn about ELS and actually running a real business. We made our first key hire Andrew and Andrew was like hey Chase, you're like talking but I noticed you don't have the focus to actually write blogs and I was like you are correct. So there's this new thing called podcasting. We thought we'd give it a try and it was a very very very good idea. Nice so
04:37
Electric Eye obviously you're catering kind of to it's primarily Shopify or solely Shopify.
04:43
Um Oh, our shot like Electric Eye like sorts of services go we only work with Shopify stores. Like the only reason, we'll touch other stores is if like we're migrating them off another platform if Shopify is going to solve kind of their use case. So but yeah, it could be like our design team is like strictly Shopify, all of our E-commerce or development team is all Shopify, all of our E-commerce design is like strictly like ecommerce UX. You know, we definitely try to stay just in our lane. Yeah.
05:14
And solely website design, you're not venturing into like paid advertising or social media or anything along those lines.
05:22
In the past we had, so we kind of did an ad 20 look at ourselves this last year, saw that a lot of our business was coming from the optimization stuff, and this website builds. And, you know, then we had a talk with our team, I called some competitors, I used air quotes for those listening, and got a really smart guy on our team a job at a competitor, and we sunset all of our marketing offerings and went all in on optimizations, and you know, building beautiful teams.
05:55
Well, it's really nice. So you actually reached out to your competitors and help people find jobs that obviously if you were more or less, I don't wanna say downsizing, but kind of pivoting a little bit. Yeah, you were able to
06:04
DM them on and I said, Hey, I know you. I didn't say I know, you know who I am. But I was like, I know you'll respond is kind of what I knew. And I was like, you have to hire this guy. He's fantastic. Like, and I just explained to him exactly what we're doing. And I was like, give him an interview, please. Yeah. And so I was very happy. There you go.
06:20
So what makes you know, electric, I like the place to go to for Shopify design development,
06:27
we respond to our clients, that's like, the number we get from our clients is that like, we, we have a really good response time. And we actually care, like getting a hold of your, you know, whoever your point of contact at the agency seems to be the biggest pain point with a lot of your spending 1000s of dollars a month with some of these relationships, like, you know, someone should get back to you are like internal, we tried to respond within, like a business day, like, that's what we say up front, but like, we're trying to respond within like an hour to just you even if it's just like, hey, we saw your thing. Like, that's enough to be said, yeah.
07:07
That's very interesting that that is the case. And that, like, no one's being responsive. What, uh, so,
07:14
I mean, it also helps that we're really good at what we do. Well,
07:17
obviously, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. You'd be solely due on the podcast. So obviously, you know, that's a relatively crowded space, right? Like website design development. God knows how many agencies are out there. I have one. So there's one right here, to be solely focused on the design development side? How many websites and complete overhauls have you guys pretty much done since I think you said 2016?
07:43
Oh, man, 2016. I hundreds of sites we've touched. But like I remember, when Mike joined our team. He's our lead developer. He joined the team two or three years ago, right before the pandemic. And he was like, just looking back. And it was 66 GitHub repos that he had integrated with by the end of the year, because he started on January one. And he was like, That is insane to me. And I always think back of that, so that that may be an answer. So that was just one year. But like, that isn't cool website builds, right? Some of that's like the fix and stuff and all sorts of weird things. But you know, we're definitely that makes it sound like a little bit of a larger or like more of a churn and burn agency, which isn't necessarily true these days. It's definitely more of a long-term partnership, we're working with bigger brands and like kind of focusing on their conversion rate and their average order value and like how do we make these things better?
08:40
To say what's, what are the ongoing changes that you guys are consistently making? Like obviously, doing a complete website overhaul and all that stuff? Makes a lot of sense. But then after that's been completed, are you leveraging some kind of like heat map process? And just tracking that and adjusting stuff? What is the ongoing changes look like?
08:59
Yeah, absolutely. So not everybody that comes that reaches out to an agency or consultant, like everyone that reaches out to you. They're just like, we're doing things we want to do a better that's, if you just keep, like peeling it back. That's the exact request you get from everybody that wants to work with an agency, it's like you're an expert, you should easily be able to help us. But not everyone has the budget, or is that a place where they really need to do a whole website build? Sometimes that is the case. It's like, this is a, you know if we were going to talk about conversion rate optimization, step one, build a better mousetrap. This is a bad place to start. But sometimes, you know, they have an OK mousetrap and what's going to happen there and then yes, you hit the nail on the head heatmaps analytics, customer interviews, we're getting into the data. We're using our brains, we're being smart. Like there's the whole thing of we're experts. You know, that's the heuristic elements of CRO just like this is against best practices. I don't even have to test this. I just know that this is wrong. But then it's like, there is this weird thing where it's like, you know, it is it's a working relationship and there is kind of Money, transacting here, and sometimes you're recommending things that are above their budget allocation. So if it's just like our we're the experts, and you need to build a better bundling solution, that's custom because that's what is going to help do the goals we both want. And to them, it just sounds like we want more money to do this thing. You know, we don't like to approach it that way. We'd like to do it a sneaky way. Which is not sneaky. It's like, well, we're going to find your customers failing to use the out-of-the-box bundling solution, or, you know, reviews that said, it was hard to order this bundle, or people like you hot jar recording where someone is fumbling with the interface, or a customer interview where they're just like I didn't, I almost didn't buy because, or actually even get people abandoning cars. So we'll leave things like I didn't buy because this doesn't this isn't user-friendly, right? So you go, you come at them with this qualitative and quantitative data of their customers, showing and highlighting problems with the website, and then we go cool, let's fix this and you hypothesize on like how to solve that problem. That's fun stuff.
11:01
So so you're letting
11:03
the customers do the selling for you, which is smart. And that makes the most sense. Yeah. So what are a lot of our engagements like, it's strategy driven? And it's, then we're, we're coming up with all these ideas. And together with a customer, we're prioritizing that priority list of what do we think is going to pull the lever that we want to work on right now, or what's the most important, and then, you know, while we're doing that stuff, there's always just crap going on that needs to get updated there, add a new product, they need to work on his product page or something broke, or there's a new update to some, the app and the ecosystem that needs to be, you know, messed with. So definitely kind of just an extension to the other team from like a strategic optimization and development kind of the point of view. Do you
11:42
get pushback from any sellers? Regarding doing interviews for customers? Or have you typically implemented some kind of survey aspect to the post-purchase or anything along those lines? Actually,
11:55
you ask, when's the last time someone did customer interviews? And then they go never, and you go, Okay, well, we have to do that. And then you have to educate them why? If there's a pushback, it's just it's people are working, you have just to tell them, the goals with it, and why, yeah, it's the end of the day, it's to make your website better, to make people buy stuff more.
12:17
What do you find is one of the like, main things that are constantly just wrong with some of these sites.
12:24
I mean, it's like there, there is always something wrong, because they're too close to the website. Like, they don't interact with it on their phone, they're always on the desktop, they're always in the back. And they're not actually using the website as if they were a customer using it for the first time, actually, when people reach out to us through our contact form at electric guy.io. You. Like, I immediately go to their website, and I like to start recording my screen because it's my first interaction with it. And it's those first things you'll notice, like goofy stuff, and I like trying to talk out loud and like, catch things that are weird to me from my first interaction, because the second time, you're already used to whatever it was, and maybe not even registered. And by the 100th time as a store owner, or marketing manager or whatever, you're so used to how the website works, it's always worked that way you think that it's, it makes sense. But to like the new customer, it doesn't it makes no sense in their complaints. And that's why your conversion rates are low.
13:21
That makes less sense. How, what's your stance on like, an overabundance of features, like I know, some sites, I use, I always use like fanatics as an example, when you go to their site. And it's like they have the banner of this is on sale, but only for a short time. And there's a countdown and then there's a pop-up here, and then you have a bundle option, then you have a subscription option, then you have like six different ways you can pay, like at what point do you sit down and tell the seller like you're offering too much options?
13:50
I mean, here's the thing. It's like, all of that. And everything I just said, all of it. It needs to be split tested, right? Like that's the real answer at the end of the day. But you are saying a truth, Andrew, which is like, you present too many options, it gets confusing, and you're going to give your customers analysis paralysis. So you do want it to be streamlined. You never want to put friction in the buying journey. And you want to just kind of like make sense and have them do what you want them to do. And a lot of the merchants like you know, comparing fanatics to a $3 million a year boutique beauty brand is apples to oranges, they are completely different stages of growth, completely different stages of traffic, first of all. So it's a little hard to kind of understand what is going to be the best for the customer now, like the abundance of features is going to throw me down the rabbit, the rabbit hole tangent of like there's an app for that, which is what the Shopify ecosystem teaches us, right? But everyone will install and uninstall all these apps to try to find something to solve the problem they want, and then they don't find it, and then they finally hire someone to build the thing they want, right But all those dozen apps you just installed. All of them and stuff installed code into your theme JavaScript in your theme, your load time is now way lower, it's got 12 More things, it's loading that it isn't using. And you've created a spaghetti mess of code that a developer has to wade through to fix stuff, right? And that's just one time. Like, if you're talking about a theme that you've had for two years, there's so much capital of you can there that a developer, you know, a team doesn't want to, like, it's more work to fix that than it is to start over at times. And that's the truth. You know, it's, it's if you've been in this game a long time, too. It's like, sometimes you have to be the first person to tell someone that what they have is terrible, and they need to start over. They're not going to hire you. But you just made it easier for the next person to tell them the exact same thing. Yeah.
15:42
And they should thank us for it. That's two comments. This is horrible. Please don't make me work with this. I just lost my train of thought. I knew I had somebody want to ask you. Oh, you'd mentioned obviously, you use the boutique, as an example from fanatics. What, is the ideal client that you guys work with? At electrica?
16:03
Yeah, um, unfortunately, we don't really work with startups per se anymore. Now, when I say startups, I'm talking about like, zero to $1 million a year, like you are still trying to find product market fit. And I, this is a, like a take that I'll take to my grave, here's my stance, no agency, no freelancer, no consultant will help you find product market fit, it will never be worth it. That is a founders struggle and journey, you need to do that hard work yourself, you need to get kind of from you to need to get off the ground, you need to get that first 100k on your own like you can't outsource creating a business because someone will just do it for themselves and cut you out. Like why would? Why would they do that just think about it a little bit larger like that? It's a dumb consideration like you have to go do that work. Um, now where we come in is we are looking at the data, right? We're like, we need customers, we need sales, we need the stuff to make informed decisions. And we kind of just drew a line in the sand at like a million dollars a year. So that's kind of where things start with us. But you know, a couple million up to like 10 to 15. Like at that point, people are starting to bring a lot of what we do in-house. And we still work with some larger brands don't get me wrong, but just kind of where things are in the market. Our job is usually not outsourced anymore. When brands start to get into that, you know, eight figures and beyond? Yeah,
17:29
that makes a lot of sense. And you're not sticking to any specific category, right? It's just you're kind of looking in that million to 10 million range? Well, I guess I can get a little
17:38
more finite on the verticals like we're extremely good at fashion, apparel, and accessories. And like beauty. I already spoke on earlier jewelry, like, the more kind of lifestyle lean more towards luxury with a healthy margin product versus like, you know, not the best fit for like, say, a fast fashion or like a commoditized. You know, Bodega of the internet, marketplace is not a good fit. That's kind of a very long answer to your
18:09
question. Do you? Do you find that sellers with larger product lines are typically the ones that require more optimizations? Because of all the difficulties around navigation and all that fun stuff? Or are you seeing equal issues with someone who's got like a handful of products?
18:24
You know, what, if it's like a larger product line, but it's like, they're manufacturing it or sourcing or building of themselves? Like, not really, because you just kind of you approach it the same way, you want to approach everything with like an 8020 rule. So like, what's the thing that's really gonna move the needle here, it's like, alright, well, these are the three flagship products, we're gonna focus on these for the first time, cuz that's where all the wins are going to be. You know, they just kind of have different paths to success. Like, if you've got to really like, say, you got a single product store, like you're like, okay, like, the funnel is real simple here. And we can get a little more granular on the customer profiles. Whereas, you know, if you've got a lot of different offerings that are solving for different people, you're like, alright, well, which one's gonna be most impactful? Yeah.
19:07
Where do you see sites going? As time goes on? Let me caveat that, so I've got a theory. Stay with me. So I've done this for years where I was a big fan of underneath the Buy Now button, typically on your product page, adding some kind of like available on Amazon available on Walmart, etc, typically, for in the same general area of where you're at, right? Like someone who's kind of doing like the one to 5 million may be solely on Amazon. And now we're kind of venturing off. Well, that does bring up other questions. So you said your ideal audience tends to be in like the one to 10 million areas is that solely on their Shopify site, are you including if they're doing on Amazon or Walmart or anywhere else?
19:46
That's a great question. I guess I would include it kind of, you know, because that helps to prove there's product market fit and there's, you know, the opportunity for them to invest some of that profit and scaling stuff. We are Again, we only are touching the Shopify store and the direct consumer experience there. So all of our advice is more about that owned experience. But going back to your question about like adding that Amazon kind of CTA under the call to action, I know a lot about that, that I literally cannot speak about.
20:19
So because Amazon actually about, like a month, maybe two months ago, they released the Buy with prime button now where it's essentially a JavaScript code that you add to the site, and it links over to that listing. And I'm kind of starting to realize, like, you know, you think about the CHEWIES of the world, or the Wayfarers, where they're starting to break out categories of products, and basically building marketplaces that cater to certain types of product lines. And I'm curious if your thought is similar to mine because I have a feeling that as time goes on, we're going to see a bunch of different marketplaces or similar types of other websites where people can go shopping for multiple types of products and the websites are almost going to become like a showcase of the brand. And then it's going to list like, yeah, you can buy on the site, obviously, you want to put all the bells and whistles on the site to try to get them to convert because you want to keep the customer. But are we going to start giving them the option to go shop wherever they're most comfortable if they have a prime account? Or if they like Walmart, eBay, or however, whatever they choose to go to do? What's your theory on how sites will migrate as time goes on?
21:24
I think that's just kind of an evolution of what a popular strategy is for mature brands, which is the Omni channel strategy. I just think that's a kind of like a, potentially a net next step and next evolution of what that might become. And I get just a very easy response is like, just sell your customers the products where they are, you know what I mean? If your customer is on Amazon, and you're not on Amazon, you're leaving money on the table. But I will say that as a branded product and lifestyle brands and stuff that we work with I you know, I think that you have to try really hard to stand out with, say a t-shirt brand on Amazon because you're competing, it gets into the barrier of entry, there's super low, and you're winning loyalty based upon your story and branding, which is hard to deliver that experience on a very controlled site, you know, product page like Amazon or etc. Whereas you can really invest in that kind of telling that story on an experience we have full control like a Shopify store. Yeah. Thanks, lesson.
22:31
I appreciate that. Chase, thank you so much for being on the show. I don't want to take up too much more of your time.
22:35
Andrew had a blast. Like I said in the pre-recording I love being on this side of the mic and just rambling and not having to think
22:42
changing it up a little bit. So then you know this next step where I say hey, do you mind letting everyone know where they can find out more about you more about an electric guy and of course honestly, commerce?
22:52
Absolutely. If you enjoy listening to my opinion on ecommerce, I share it weekly. But mostly I'm interviewing people and I do a pretty good job at it. I think we just crossed 100,000 downloads last week. Go check out honest ecommerce, you can find it anywhere podcasts are we're also on YouTube, and we film them. And then if you think that you might be a good fit for the agency, or just wanna pick my brain about what's going on there. You can find us at electric i.io
23:18
Beautiful Chase, thanks so much for being on the show everyone who tuned in, obviously, thank you as well please do the usual rate review, subscribe to all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you want, or YouTube or head over to Ecommshow.com. But as usual, thank you all again and we'll see you next time. Have a good one.
23:34
Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by blue tusker, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to BlueTuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.
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