While having a strong sales process is essential, it’s only half of the equation. To truly unlock potential growth, businesses must focus on the post-purchase flow as well.
On this 94th episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew chats with Ruth Evan Haim, Cofounder of ReConvert, on how to optimize your post-purchase flow, when to make your upsells and cross-sells, and tips to make effective product recommendations to customers.
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Andrew Maff and Ruth Even Haim
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Ruth Even Haim
Meet Ruth Even Haim, co-founder of ReConvert, the number-one upselling app on Shopify that helped merchants generate thousands of extra revenue in sales.
After a stint as a merchant herself, Ruth realized there was a huge need for merchants to optimize their thank-you pages - a functionality that Shopify didn't offer.
So, together with her brother Eric, they created ReConvert - an app that now helps over 40,000 Shopify merchants make extra sales, for no extra effort.
Learn more about ReConvert here as well as their Upsell & Cross Sell Shopify app here and their YouTube channel.
Transcript:
00:03
The thing that people were very interested in was the upselling part of the post-purchase upselling because there were a lot of problems with the existing solutions.
00:13
Hey Everyone, this is Nezaar Akeel of Max Pro, Hi I'm Linda and I'm Paul, and we're Love and Pebbles.
00:20
Hi this is Lopa Van Der Merch from
00:22
RASA and you're listening to and you're listening
00:24
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, where they share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello, everyone,
00:54
and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm show. As usual, I'm your host, Andrew Maff. And today I'm joined by the amazing Ruth Even Haim of Reconvert. co-founder over reconvert. Ruth, how're you doing? Right for the good show here.
01:05
I'm great. Yeah, I'm ready. Ready for a great show. Thanks for having me.
01:09
Yeah, not a problem, obviously, really appreciate you being on the show with us today. I am super excited for this one, mainly because we're at least at the time of this recording. And probably by the time this goes out, it's a little bit now kind of like a little on the Q4 Prep side ish. And so we're going to talk upselling, cross-selling CRO all that kind of stuff, which is perfect for Q4. But I always like to pretend that no one knows who you are. And that you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit of insight into who you are your background a little bit more about reconvert. And we can take it from there.
01:42
Yeah, I'd be happy to. So my name is Ruth. I used to be a Shopify merchant for a very short period of time, I had my own dropshipping store that was very niche, selling specific products to some very specific, groups of people. And we actually managed to get it to be a little profitable like the font itself, which at the time, I thought was not that impressive. But now I kind of think it is a little more impressive now that I know how difficult it is to get anything profitable. And eventually, as a Shopify merchant, I had a lot of ideas for different apps or different solutions that I couldn't find on the App Store. At the same time, my brother Eric, who is also my co-founder was actually a Shopify Plus merchant. He had his own store that he managed to really go to like a business. And we decided to build our own apps like we started talking about it. And we realized that this is something we want to do. Neither of us is a developer. So we were not sure in the beginning how to get to do that, how to get around that. But we managed to do it and we built reconvert. We built a few different apps actually, we can read was not the first one. But it is our baby. It's the one that we like invested the most in and believed in the most. And it's the biggest one to date. Yeah, that's my background. Very focus. Yeah.
03:20
And reconvert, one of the top if not the top, like upsell cross-sell app in the Shopify store right now. Correct?
03:27
Yeah, yeah. We started off as a thank you, page builder, like that was the branding in the beginning. And then we realized pretty quickly that the thing that people were very interested in was upselling. Part, of the post-purchase upselling, was because there were a lot of problems with the existing solutions back then in Shopify. Now, I do think the ecosystem changed, though a lot of solutions for post-purchase upselling. But really convert is still one of the top ones. And I think this is because we had enough, like, timing the platform, I guess, like background and a platform to really know what people care about where the pain points are, and how to solve them.
04:13
Nice. So I know it's a little obvious why someone should focus on upselling and cross-selling that kind of stuff. But what you see is mostly the common problem when they're coming to you. They're, you know, they're downloading the app, they're getting started the whole process. Is it typical for someone to have just no upsell cross-sells in place at all? Or is it more like, Hey, we've got some in place, but it's just not doing what we needed to do?
04:42
So I do think that most stores have some form of upselling and cross-selling. I think some store owners see it as something a little annoying and spammy because no one likes pop-ups. And people kind of look at it from these eyes of I don't lie When people shove products at me, so I'm not going to do it to my customers. But if you do it right, then it's really a win-win situation because your customers are getting a product that they want for a better price. But I would say this is the minority, most people do have some sort of upselling and cross-selling in the store. But they are blind to the post-purchase section. So you know, when when we think about upselling, cross-selling, we think about the product page, the checkout page, and the checkout. And these are all very important. But when you upsell post-purchase, you don't have to be as careful because if I'm upselling on the account, not to mention a check out, I am going to want to be very, very careful not to take my customer out of the purchase flow. Because if I confuse them, if I annoy them anything like that, I'm losing the sale, I'm healthy, and my own conversion rate was purchased. That's not an issue they already bought, now, you only have something to gain out of it. And I think a lot of the time, it's difficult to be profitable when your customers come in, buy something and live. And the whole idea of optimizing the post-purchase flow. The thank you pages and other pages that are post-purchase, are to make sure that customers don't do that, that they come in buy something and then maybe stick around them by something else.
06:25
Yeah, yeah, I completely agree, I find that no one kind of realizes the customer journey, they always think it's everyone's pictures, the funnel, right, you've your top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel, and then it's over and the funnel is done. But it's really a little bit more cyclical because you want them even after a checkout even for us from a marketing perspective, the marketing doesn't end once they make a purchase. Now we're just starting the whole process over and doing what we can to get them back. So it is very interesting that a lot of people tend to skip out on post-purchase upselling. Now, before I touch on that, though, you did mention, you get some people that I've heard the same thing that will say like, I don't want to have you know, a ton of pop-ups and all this stuff for the pre-purchase aspect. What is your suggestion on like, where that sweet spot is? Like, what's too much? What's too little? Like? What if you had your own store? Still? How would you have it set up?
07:16
So I do have to say that when we talk about the purchase, I can only talk about my opinion, we're working on some pre-purchase features, but we don't have any yet. So I don't have data like I do have some data about post-purchase, but not about pre-purchase. Instinctively, I would say one offer on the product page, one on the cart, and one at checkout. And that doesn't necessarily mean a pop-up for each it can be one pop-up one-page offer, maybe a checkbox offer on the product page, and things like that. And then a checkout obviously on Shopify, it's only if your Shopify Plus merchant, but if you can add an upsell on The Checkout, that's also amazing. And I think that is not too overwhelming for the customer. And you're not at risk of offending them too much. I do like my own purchasing experience. When I go like on a product page, I would maybe add the product to call out and then scroll down to look at the recommendations. And then it's in my control. Like I don't have to do that I don't have a popup. That's annoying me but I have some options down there. But once the customer enters, let's say the cult, I think that's a signal that they're like, Okay, I'm ready to complete my purchase. So our goal is to not take them off of that too much. So maybe either one pop-up or one very simple on-page upsell. That is not going to confuse them too much.
08:52
So now the post-purchase side. Yeah, obviously you've got the data you're loaded for this one. So someone checks out, what is your suggestion on what should be put in place and what's too much, and what's too little?
09:06
So when we talk about post-purchase, I think the out-to-like sections to discuss one is just post purchase a full page upsell One Click Upsell, that is the complete page and one is the thank you page. And I would treat them differently. So for full page upsell, I would show two different upsells with increasing discounts, so either you can let's say I'm upselling this pen, so I could offer this pen for a 10% discount and if you decline it, I can offer it again in the next page, this time for a 20% discount and maybe you accept or if you did accept that I would offer a different product on the next page. And this is a really good way to not show all your cards at like on the first See the upsell, you actually like to have the opportunity to increase that a little bit and improve the offer. And then once this is done, and we get to the thank you page, I do think the thank you page is basically a very interesting page that on Shopify is a little bit wasted. There's so much you can do there, you really don't have to be careful, you can treat it as whatever you want. I've seen people do this. So when we talk about conversions, the best converting thing that we have in reconvert is a popup. It's a pop-up giving a general discount, and it's time-sensitive, there's a timer that follows you around and lets you know when the offer expires. And this is the best converting element. It's both the urgency and the fact that it's a pop-up that works really well. But you don't only have to upsell, that's the beauty of the thank you page, you could do a video where you talk to your customers if you have a complex product that you want to explain if you want to explain something about shipping, or if you just want to say thank you, you can add a post-purchase survey to learn about it about them a little bit, you can add some product recommendations that are scalable, so that even after they finished their purchase, they're like, oh, there's some more interesting products here. Let me have a look. It's a very Amazon-like experience like you can never finish purchasing it back to the thank you page. And it's a cycle you'll never leave. Yeah. Yeah, these are just a few suggestions. We do have for people who install reconvert, we have a template that is called Conversion Monster. And it basically has all of the best practices that we've seen throughout the years stores using and getting the best results from so
11:51
for the post-purchase side. So they've obviously gone through there on the thank you page, they're seeing all the different pop-ups or different upsell opportunities that you're putting in place. Is it the option where they can add to the cart and then have to kind of start the process over again? Or is it one of those, like, add this to your order kind of things? How does that work?
12:12
So on the full-page post-purchase flow, you don't want to eventually get to the thank you page so they can see the details of the order. You don't want to take them away. It's a one-click upsell, they just click and it's added to the cart to the order and paid and everything. On the thank you page right now on Shopify, it's not really possible to do that, unfortunately, I, I have a feeling they walking on it. And it's going to be available sometime soon. And then we'll be able to add it. But for now, they do have to go back to checkout. And it depends on which widget so we have a product upsell widget which is the second most converting one after the pop-up. If it's a specific product, you accept the offer with the discount, and we direct the customer to the checkout, all they have to do is re-enter the payment details the rest we already have from the previous model. So we like we try to make it as easy as it as we can for the customers so they don't have to go for you know, the entire thing.
13:18
Gotcha. I love the idea of you know, in some cases, not having kind of that post-purchase upsell and having like the video as an explainer like there are so many other ways for that to be utilized for even products that don't have typical repeat purchases, or if you're just selling like one or two things, and that's what you have to work with. But when you have a larger product line, how do you decipher what you're offering after they've made that purchase?
13:48
That's a great question. It has a few answers. Honestly. Again, I can only speak from the solutions we've created with free convert, I'm sure there are other solutions as well. But what we did is, first of all, we have what we call funnels. And the funnels are basically a mechanism that allows you to create, to post-purchase offers and a thank you page. And you can customize it in whatever way you want with whatever triggers you want. So it can be according to the product that they purchased, which is the use case you talked about. And it can be according to their gender where the form, how many orders they've made for your store, there's really a lot of options there. So that's one way to do that. And that is the most customizable way because you can literally show them something completely different in each case. But the problem is if you do have a very large catalog, as you said, then it's going to be a little difficult to manage and to create a trigger for each collection or type of product or anything like that. So we do have other solutions which are either by using a Shopify smarter commendations mechanism, which basically, you know, your show dynamic recommendations, and Shopify, I'm pretty sure the algorithm works according to what collection this product is in. It's, it's something that we just use. So I'm not 100%. Sure, but that's the feeling that I have. And we actually recently launched something that allows you to use Shopify related products system, which is relatively new, you can basically manually as a merchant decide if this product is related to this. And then in reconvert, when they get to the post-purchase offers, we can look at that and offer the related products that you defined as the merchant on Shopify.
15:45
Got it? Yeah, interesting. How are you able to leverage that same functionality to kind of focus on retention, like making sure that they continuously come back? Like what's that kind of approach look like?
15:58
So first of all, I think that, if they are on the thank you page, they just finished a purchase, and you get them to buy again, immediately, then that's one form of retention, you got them to purchase. Yeah. The second order, less than an hour after the first one, that's awesome. But you can also use the post-purchase flows to collect more information about them. So you have the email or SMS, they just purchase from you. But now, you can send them promotional emails. But you can also send them a birthday email, let's say, you ask them for their birthday on the thank you page, and they give you their birthday. And then on the day of you or the week of you can send them a special deal just for them for their birthday, celebrate with them. And that is so much more personal than just a general holiday or something like that. And you can actually become like deepen your relationship with them and get them to come back again. One more thing that I think people are, I don't know, not as aware of maybe now, people know about it a little more. But the thank you page on Shopify is also the order status page. So if a merchant a person just purchased, and they live, and then Shopify, after a week, sends them the automatic email, to update about shipping, they put a link back to the thank you page in this email. So the customer, what we have seen is that for each thank you page, customers visit about somewhere between one and a half to three times per order. So you do have you can have used for this page, even like two, three weeks after the order. And then it's another opportunity for them to not just land on a blank page, but land on a page that's optimized for conversions.
17:58
Interesting. Okay. The birthday thing was very interesting as well, how was that triggered? So those emails after you know, let's say post-purchase, you asked their birthday, they give you the birthday, then on their birthday, it sends an email? Is that functionality? Also something within reconvert? Or is there kind of an integration like, how does that actually work?
18:19
So there is an integration, we actually don't send it out ourselves. We have integrations with a few SMS apps and SMS marketing apps, but I would say the biggest integration is with Klaviyo. So you can basically send the birthday information to Klaviyo and then use that to communicate in emails or SMS, with your customers. Yeah.
18:44
Beautiful. So all that data that you have coming in, you can actually use that data, send it back into clay, VO, and adjust based on everything that they did within there. Exactly. Awesome. So that obviously brings in a lot of different data and analytics and different segmentations. Like there's, I mean, at that point, that really opens up a lot, because you can obviously create different lists around people that have done a post-purchase or different products they created or their birthdays or anything along those lines, like how are you seeing people leverage all the different data and analytics that's coming out of reconvert?
19:19
So So yeah, I think maybe I need to clarify for Klaviyo we only have the birthday integration, we don't send any more information. We do have Shopify flow integration, which I think is now only four plus advanced merchants. I think they open it up to like one plan below plus. And we've seen them using it to really send this data to wherever they want to send it. And then you can really like to do whatever you want with it. You can send out a very specific product recommendation email if you want depending on what the message the customer was into Studying. Yeah, you can do a lot with it, I have seen most people use the birthday integrations to create automatic birthday flows and get people back. It doesn't have to be one day, by the way, it's like a birthday month, where you get a discount for the entire month or something like that, that you can utilize. We also have a widget that I was kind of surprised picked up as much as it did. And it's a social sharing widget, it allows customers to basically share the order with their friends. And if you choose to, you also give them a discount. So they can share, like, Hey, I just purchased from this store, get 10% off your order. And this actually works really well, like we knew people would share the product. But we didn't know that some stalls would get a lot of the post-purchase conversions from this widget from friends who click on the link and actually buy with the discount. And I think it really goes to show how strong actual social proof is, like real people talking about something real that they just bought, rather than you as a brand doing it.
21:19
Yeah, that's interesting that I can see how I could see how that would actually do really well. Because basically, if you're, if you're promoted with like, Hey, here's a 10% off for one of your friends. You just made a purchase, chances are you're like, Okay, I've spent enough right now, I don't want to do that. But you feel like you're wasting that 10% off. So just hitting a button and sending it to a friend or colleague or something does make a lot of sense. That's very interesting. Yeah. Right, when we started, before we started recording here, you mentioned that for listeners today, you have something super fun for them, correct?
21:56
Yes. So we have created pretty recently a clo ebook, it's basically an ebook with over 20. I don't remember the exact number right now but over 20 tips on how to improve your SEO. We are very passionate about conversion rate optimization. It's like what we do, we do it post-purchase. But we've learned a lot from that on how to do it pre-purchase as well. And I think that's one of the things that can really help merchants who are getting traffic right now into the store, but are unable to turn that into sales, to figure out where the drop is happening and how to improve that. So I would love it if people want to check it out and see that you can also let us know how they feel about it. And if it helped, you can find it at reconvert.io/cfo. Yeah,
22:52
great. We'll put that in the show notes for it. Thank you, Ruth, obviously, really appreciate you having on the show. I'd love to give the opportunity here. Let everyone know where they can find out more about you. And of course more about reconverting.
23:04
Sure. So you can find us in the website and only reconvert.io in the app store. If you just look for reconvert on the Shopify app store. You can find me on LinkedIn and places like that, but honestly, I'm not. I'm not very active. But we do have a YouTube channel where we have one of our employees building a store from scratch and kind of documenting that. So if you're interested, you can vote on YouTube. Yeah,
23:33
that's it. Beautiful. Ruth, thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously, everyone that tuned in thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review subscribe on whichever podcast platform you prefer YouTube or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes and don't forget August 30. We are doing our 100th episode live. We will have more information out about that soon but put it in your calendar. Otherwise, Ruth thank you so much for joining us, everyone.
24:02
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