Hi everyone and welcome back to the e commerce impact podcast today. Clayton Bates is here to talk to us about all things Shopify. So welcome along Clayton. Thanks for having me  yeah. And excited to have someone from across the ditch.

Our second, I think, Australian guest. So that's fun. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your agency and what you've been working on. So my agencies inspire small business. We're one of the only authenticated Shopify experts in Australia. We've won and been finalists for over 30 business and design awards.

We have 105 star reviews and we only build Shopify websites. So far we've generated over 40 million in extra revenue for our clients from just rebuilding their websites. So. That's pretty cool. Amazing. 40 million. Love that. Always good to have a social proof stat like that. Awesome. 

So first and foremost, you've hitched your cart to Shopify as a platform. So you've kind of put your eggs in one basket there. In your view, what makes Shopify the go to platform for e commerce brands versus something like WooCommerce or Wix or, you know, a custom build? 

 I have basically two answers to this. The first one is that I'm the worst person to ask this question because I have a bias to Shopify. I love Shopify. I love Shopify. I love Shopify. It's the only platform I've ever used. 

But basically how I look at it when someone asked me that is, that is Shopify the cheapest? No. Is there some things that aren't great for Shopify? Yes. But if you sell e commerce products, nearly every solution you could ever imagine has been sold on Shopify or someone's made an app or code or something like that.

So if you want a reliable software you can sell products on, I believe Shopify is the best solution. Just for example, some other platforms, you can't even have after pay for a payment gateway. And obviously after pay gets used quite a lot. So. Lots of agencies use Shopify, so you can't really go wrong 

yeah, I think it's the way it's, everything is pre built and done for you already. If you're a, A small to medium, even scaling business. It means you can get stuck in with the strategy of growing your business versus getting caught in the weeds of trying to build things bespoke, you know, to bolt onto your website, to customize it, to make it do what you need it to do.

So yeah, I'm in agreement there as an agency owner. I guess I have a bias too. But when we work with clients that are on Shopify, it just makes our job a breeze and we can crack on with the work of growing them rather than getting caught up trying to solve frustrating problems. 

What are the common design mistakes that you see people make with their Shopify stores? There's normally made five main ones. So there's heaps and heaps of different things people make mistakes on, but the five main ones is people don't structure their homepage correctly. They don't build out that product page correctly.

Their site navigation has a lot of issues. Especially the higher amount of products you have, the more important site navigation is. The checkout, they forget to add their logo and the colors in there. That's really important. And then just mobile friendly, like 50 to 90 percent of traffic's coming from mobile.

So you have to make sure the website works really well on a mobile phone. They're the five main key ones. So when you say incorrectly structuring the homepage and product page, what are some, what's correct in your view and what's incorrect? So it depends on the brand and the niche  you should test different things, but I think a lot of people, they focus on the wrong things on the homepage.

So I like to build the homepage in three sections. So the first two or three sections section blocks are all about selling because most people going to your homepage, they already know what you're all about. So they followed you on social media, that Google because the same, they have a pretty good idea.

So I just want to make it super easy for them to buy something. Okay. The middle of the page is build trust connection. So you have reviews, a little bit of story, things like that may be featured in stuff like that. And then basically the bottom of the homepage, most people will never make it down there, but you want to have some products, maybe bundles, special Instagram feed.

If you have really nice images on Instagram. So that's sort of how I structure homepage and then by test different versions too. And then the product page basically two to three things here, all the information about the product. build trust with reviews. So Loox reviews is really good up that I recommend and then benefits as well.

So yeah, a lot of people don't really do stuff like that. And it definitely depends on the niche and industry, how you structure these things. So yeah, a lot of people make mistakes. And you mentioned Loox. Why is that your preferred review platform? There's so many out there. Reviews. io, Yotpo, to name just a few.

What's, what is it about UX that you're loving? My clients have made hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably millions of dollars from that app because basically it will automatically email the customer after X amount of days.

When they click through to leave a review, it will put cookies in their browser, so you know how much money they spent after they left the review. So a lot of people will leave a review, have a good experience, and go buy something again. 

So I have nothing bad to say about them boys.  And that's Luke's L O O X. Is that right? Yeah. Cool. Okay. So walk us through your audit process when you're looking to improve performance for an e com, for a Shopify store. So normally we send a free video review going through someone's website.

And we'll go through a lot of those five things that I talked about. But basically we go through their homepage. We go to their about page, their product page, the checkout. , one tip that I didn't talk about before is people underestimate their about page.

That's why I always do. the review because not that many people go there. 1 to 5 out of 100 people that go there, read your whole story, get a good feeling about you, it's actually super highly likely convert a customer if someone reads all of the about page, so, you know, putting a few hours into that page makes a big difference over a whole year.

So there, there's some of the things we do in that order. That's really interesting. And what sort of things are you putting on the about us page? Cause I'm always telling people to put, you know, the people behind the brand tell their story, but as it relates to the customer, rather than as it relates to their just life, what else do you say as suggesting people include on the about page, just a good feeling that represents your brand sort of thing.

So. For example, if your mom and wife sorry, husband and wife, and you have kids and it's all about products for kids, like put pictures of your family there, because a lot of people that have families are probably going to your website and buying stuff. So you just want to build that connection , maybe have 2 or 3 image with text.

Then you can probably have some categories at the bottom, Instagram feeds,  most of my clients have followings on Instagram, so we try to like, be Instagram sort of thing on the website. You know, really nice images . Yeah. Awesome. All right. And so Shopify plus versus Shopify, the big question, you know, I see bigger brands do seem to invest in Shopify plus.

What do you see as the advantages of Shopify plus versus Shopify? And at what point should people make the jump? So probably most likely nearly a very high percentage of people listening to this would not need to worry about Shopify plus. You, you're at least minimum have to be doing like about a million dollars a year for it to be worth it.

And we even have clients on like 5 million dollars a year that it's not worth it to be on Shopify plus. Some of the benefits are like, if you say you're JB Hi Fi, for example, they have multiple stores. They're on Shopify plus you can have like multiple locations. 

And. Most people, they don't really need the Shopify plus, like, I think it works out maybe 5 million a year is like where you have to think about Shopify plus if you don't have like 20 stores so, and there's really good support as well. Sorry. They have really good support and Shopify plus.

Yeah. So what are the benefits of Shopify plus for those 5 million, those brands that are kind of heading towards. The kind of eight figure mark. What, what are the benefits that do make it worth investing? So they get POS system for free. So normally that's, I think, 89.

So it's all these little things like the dedicated support, the multiple channels and stuff. There's also one really cool thing for big brands is like some people have multiple websites in multiple countries. So they might have like Australian website, New Zealand website, us, Canada, UK you can actually put all of that into one admin.

So you don't have to have five different stores. You can have it all together. So that would definitely be. Big benefit to Shopify plus. So changing tack a little bit, how do you approach or how does your team approach the design process for a brand new Shopify store? . So the first thing we do is we try to get examples of websites that client likes. We, we would never copy a website, but it gives us a good inspiration to what the client will like because at the end of the day, if someone sits down at their website and they don't like the look of it, it doesn't really matter how, how much it converts and stuff.

A lot of people are going to be upset about their website. Yep. So we try to get a good idea of what they like, then we'll do some research into the niche. A lot of niches now we've done lots of research in. So for example, if someone's selling women's clothing or something like that, we've built so many websites, we sort of get a really good idea of how that works, but we'll do research into that, see what's working for other people, and then sort of start building it out from there

so, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Like having that, That mood board I guess of like sites that you like is so important because it's sometimes there's the only way to visually convey What you actually like in terms of the fail is to show other sites that you already like. I agree with that. Yeah. Cool. Okay. And if you were migrating a site to a new design, like, so from, from whatever it was when it came to you to like the new set up, the new design, 

what's on your checklist for that? Like, what are the kinds of gotchas that people might forget about when they're migrating to a new design? So if you come from another. Platform, then you need to do link redirects because most likely your platform will have different links to the current website.

That's a big one. A lot of people forget. But yeah, most of the other stuff is just whatever they need, we add to their website and sort of things like that. So if they didn't have about paid before, we'll add that into the new website, 

like you should have frequently asked questions about all the policies. Even though a lot of people don't click those. It looks more professional to look, look the past sort of things.  But it makes your website look more professional.

And the more professional you look, the more I'll convert  more trust you'll build. Yeah. Well, you're, you seem like a guy who. From just even looking at you now is big on the social proof. You've got lots of awards yourself that you've won, you know, your intro upfront talked about like the amount of revenue you've generated for clients.

How important is social proof for e commerce sites? And like, what are some examples of social proof that you would use for a brand, to make this like convert better and signify more trust? So I think reviews is really important. With that being said, we have one website making millions of dollars a year that has no reviews on it.

 There's another thing that I didn't talk about the homepage. If you're being featured in really deep public, like on big websites and stuff, that could actually be the second block you have on your website.

You get better than featured in because. You know, those really big brands, like when people see that, it's sort of like, oh, whoa, they, they've been in these sort of things sort of thing. You probably won't. So you mean like magazines or, yeah, yeah. If you've had some PR Yeah. Or been on a podcast or shot TV show, that kind of thing.

Yeah. Sometimes we'll do that. So if it's like they've been on seven or Channel nine or something like that, will will lead with that at the top sometimes. I think one of the key things is making your website look professional.

That, that builds a lot of trust too. You don't want it to look scammy. Yeah. So what would be concretely things that make a site look scammy versus make it look trustworthy? And you're talking about like the look and feel of the design, design elements.

Yeah, so sometimes like a lot of people used to recommend using certain trust badges that the font will be different to your website. So little things you just want to be consistent throughout your whole website. And when there's no consistency, there's not very trustworthy. If the fonts are all different if you have like fun on the images as well.

So sometimes the font will be different on the images. It scales different. There's some cases where you can't get around it. You have to. I have a font already on the image when you upload it but I try to remove all the font from images and stuff like that. Just make it consistent throughout the whole website.

Okay, cool. And what about user experience and kind of UI design for e commerce?  Like what are, and what are the key things that you're looking out for there in terms of making sure the user experience works? So normally you have to be like 50 50 on both of them.

If you go hard, hard on one side or the other side, the website won't convert. So for example, there's some websites where the design is so amazing that you look at, like someone like me looks at the website, right? And I'm like, Oh my God, this is a beautiful website. But the issue is that website will not convert like a website I build will convert.

It looks absolutely amazing, but I can guarantee that the website I build will convert way better than that. So you have to have sort of a mix of like both. You have to think of both. You can't go hard on one or the other sort of thing. Right. So it can, it needs to look good, but it needs to kind of follow.

The standard where people expect to find stuff. Is that fair to say? So like if people expect an add to cart button, it needs to be there and it needs to be called add to cart. People expect to see the menu in a certain place. They expect to see the cart in the top right hand corner. They expect to check out to work in a certain way.

So if they're not seeing what they expect, they're lost. And so it might look pretty, but they don't know where to go. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yeah. A hundred percent. And then sometimes people have these beautiful things on their website where things are jumping around and going crazy and stuff.

Most of the time in my experience, that  doesn't convert so well, but it looks nice. So yeah. Right. Sure. So what are some of the most impactful kind of custom features you've implemented in Shopify stores? So there's, there's probably been lots of different things that we've done. It really depends.

On the client, what they want,  but yeah, I think probably lately, like we've been doing a lot of like subscriptions and bundles and upsells I'm actually surprised with subscription.

How many people are buying products on subscription lately? So yeah, it's pretty, I read a book recently called the automatic customer, it's a good read, and it talks about how, you know, Most big businesses such as Amazon have a subscription model and why it's such a great business model. So yeah, I think most clients, if you've got a product that repeats, you want to be getting people to automatically repeat rather than just repeat when they feel like it.

So yeah, there's just, I'm trying to remember, did Shopify bring out like a subscription? Yeah, they've got a new bundle and subscription thing. So yeah, that's what we're starting to test lately. So the winter to down to down 24, so they've started bringing out stuff like that. So we're testing stuff in development sites

so yeah, that would be really good. I think. How's it stacking up compared to like paid for apps that you've tried in the past? Normally my experience is when I, when it's free, it will never be as good as the paid ups. Nearly always a lot of the apps that Shopify brings out that are free. The way I look at it is that they're a very good stepping stone.

So if you want to test something out, so you want to test subscription or bundles or the, they've got an upsell one as well for product page. It's very good to test it out, see if it worked for free. And then if, if it works, then you go and use one of the better apps to do that sort of stuff. So.

Yeah, I really like it in that, in that sense, sort of thing. Cool. How do you ensure a Shopify store can with a growing business? Like what should a fast growing bit store bear in mind to future proof their tech and make sure they're able to handle the growth that, that could inevitably come if they get their marketing, right?

I think a lot of people that scale fast make a really big difference. Mistake with their website. So for example, if I hire someone to build a website and then they 10 accept business in like a year, a lot of people are in the mindset, like we pay someone a year ago to build the website, we need to keep the website.

But normally if you scale massively, it's almost like a better thing for you to upgrade your website every year, or instead of waiting two or three years to upgrade it. If you have like slow growth, then normally your website can last 23 years . But if you have massive, massive growth you should always be thinking about should we update our website?

Should we add more new features into the website? Because at scale little things make a massive difference . So, you know, there's all these little things that might be like best look at winter 2024, right? So if you built your website a year ago and you're like, Oh, we just did it a year ago and you're massively scaling, there's all these new features that you could be implementing into your website.

And a lot of people don't do that. So I think that's really important. Yeah. So when you say update, is that, Do you mean like updating the theme or changing the design? Or do you mean more just like moving with the times in terms of testing the new features and adding new apps and that kind of thing?

Combination of both. So sometimes. It makes sense to just update the, the theme template. And then sometimes as hard as it is for some, because I've had conversations like this with people, sometimes it's, it makes sense to completely rebuild your website again after a year, because like better things that come in place, all this sort of stuff.

If you're scaling massive, like if you're making, let's just say you're making 100, 000 a year, right? You build a website, Then it scales and you're doing like a million dollars a year, right? The money you spend on a new website couldn't could take your website from a million dollars a year to 3 million a year.

So it's sort of like, that's why it makes sense  but if you're slowly scaling, it normally doesn't make sense. Maybe upgrade the same template  it really depends case by case, but definitely always be thinking about that because you literally could be losing millions of dollars if you, if you don't think about that.

So millions of dollars because of lost conversions, do you mean, or lost average order value?  Yeah. Those types of things. Yeah. So for, for example, we actually worked with someone in the UK and they had their website built by someone else at scale to a million pounds a year. And then when we rebuilt it, it went from a million pounds a year to 3 million pounds a year.

Right. And then when we went, yeah, when we went back and tried to look at why it went to 3 million, it was probably a million pounds was just because of the website we built. So, you know, if they didn't do that, they could have lost a million pounds. 

So for like a similar, not much more traffic. The revenue was increased by like double just because the website, yeah, people spend more and convert more. Yeah. There's, there's, oh, sorry. I was just going to say, there's definitely one type of bracket where you really need to think about rebuilding your website.

Most likely if you're making 20, 000 to a hundred thousand a year, you should be contacting someone to. See about building a website because most likely at that bracket, you might have done the website yourself, or you might have just hired someone on the cheap at the start those types of websites. We normally can 3 to 10 X their revenue because there's like large amounts of little things that they're not doing right.

So yeah, yeah, it's crazy at that level. So you're talking speed, homepage, product page layout mobile optimized. Yeah, probably 50 to a hundred little things. If they did them right. You know, for example, we worked with a client, they're making 50, 000 a year. We rebuilt their website. I went to 300, 000 a year.

Then I went to a million dollars a year. Now they're a multimillion dollar company. Right. And it's like they had, they had all the ingredients at the start to have a successful business, except that website was broken links everywhere. It was like crazy town  we helped them. They got this 300 and then now they're like multi million.

So sometimes, you know, you got to think about things like that as well. So what were some of the things they were doing wrong and what, what were the kind of quick wins that you were able to implement for that brand? So they had very nice images. Yeah. So the thing I love is when people come with really nice images.

So we just like really display the images to make the feeling of like the other person to feel really good about their clothing and stuff like that. So that was our main goal is like people to want to envision themselves wearing it to feel good about the clothing and stuff like that. So we really displayed.

We basically have nearly no text on the website. It's basically all just image focus to give that person that really good feeling sort of thing. So. Yeah. So for example, when we first worked with their website from memory, it was about five years ago, I think they only had a homepage banner that went to all the products.

So we built out all the homepage, the navigation, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, that was pretty cool. I think we've worked with them for four or five years now. We've done everything on their website for that long. So, well, I hope that brought you a beer or two. 

So they're, they're awesome when you, when you have stories like that. Yeah, that's so cool. Love it. So that's why we do it, right? We want to help businesses grow at the end of the day. That's what makes it fun. Yeah.  What are your favourite apps? Maybe some of the little known ones that you love adding to a site and also some of the bigger ones that are just your go to. I'd love to hear. So, yeah, like I said before, Loose. I love that. Search and discovery by Shopify is a really cool free up because it has you know, filtering system on your collection page.

You can have like a product upsell. You can change the related products and stuff like that, which a lot of people want to change the related products. So yeah, I really love that app. So that's probably my favorite Shopify free app at the moment. I like lucky orange. So lucky orange actually records what people do on your website.

So you can actually press play and actually see what they see on their devices and stuff. A couple of years ago, I watched hundreds of hours of lucky orange footage. And it, that was like one of the things that changed my whole agency because I could actually see what people were actually doing without, there's lots of apps where it tells you all this many people clicked on this button

but I actually could see in real time, like how people were scrolling on their phones, how they're, how they're going on the desktop so if you really want to get a good idea of like what people are doing, that's a really good app as well. So, yeah, that sounds like a good shot. Yeah. Shopify apps actually changed the way I look at the internet as well, because.

In 2020, 2021, I was offered over a hundred thousand dollars to make a YouTube videos. So lots of different Shopify app companies actually messaged me offering me a thousand dollars to make 10 minute videos and stuff promoting the apps and what I actually realized is that there's probably a lot of people on the internet where companies are like, Hey, I'll give you 10, 000, 20, 000 and promote my product 

and so it's a little bit deceiving sometimes when you listen to some people. So I think you should always do your own research. The reason I didn't take that money is because I believe in, if I was in the street and some random person come up to me and I was never going to make a dollar off them or anything.

And they asked me, what's the best Shopify apps. I would be like, weeks reviews search and discovery lucky orange. So whatever I'd promote for free is like what I would actually give to my clients  I think it's a doubt. You have to have like good integrity and do the right thing.

And that's probably why my business is where it is now. So. Yeah, I know what you mean. I've heard some pretty dodgy stories of people with pretty big Twitter followings as well. Like shouting about particular apps or tools, et cetera. And they're doing it for money and they're not saying that they're being paid for that post, which is pretty sketchy in my view.

Yeah. Yeah, cool. So talk us through Shopify versus non Shopify themes. What's your approach here? I used to use third party things a lot back in the beginning. Right now. If someone wanted to use a third party like theme that wasn't free Shopify theme store, I would refuse to work with the person.

The only reason is because third party themes is a bit like the wild wild west sort of thing is like they can get away with doing heaps of different things  for every one good third party theme, there's probably 20 bad ones. So. Like even just getting the right, good one is like very hard.

The ones in the theme store, you have, they have very strict rules, like very, very strict rules to stay there. So I always like to think like they're always doing the right thing. You know, everything's not perfect, but that's why I like to go there. The thing is, right. If, if you use a third party theme, And this has happened to me before because I've built like a hundred sites on a third party theme when I first started.

If they completely change directions or something like that, you're in a weird situation being an agency. That's probably not going to happen when they're going through Shopify theme. So you, you've got unlimited updates, you've got support, there's all these different things. There's like a million things why I would pick like a Shopify theme for Shopify theme store.

So yeah, hopefully that sort of explains it.

Interesting. Yeah. So, and. When you're working with clients, you're, you're not building custom themes. You're always using Shopify themes for all of your clients. Or do you sometimes build custom themes for them? Depends on the situation sort of thing. So most of the websites we build is like a hybrid where we'll use a paid theme.

So we'll try to find a paid thing that is a good foundation to build the website. We'll get the website 60, 70 percent of the way there, and then write code for the rest. Because I think that there is no perfect Shopify theme. So even if you build your theme yourself, you're running to roadblocks.

We've never built a website we haven't done coding on. But for more high level, like really, really big websites, we'll probably use most of the time we'll use a free theme and custom build everything. So we'll, we'll use maybe 10 percent of the free theme and then 90 percent custom build everything.

But it makes sense at a certain level. Like if you're making like 5 million, 10 million plus a year, it sort of makes sense to custom build the whole website. But at a lower level, it makes sense to use a paid theme in my opinion. And it's actually cheaper too. So if you can get. The closer you can get to the website being done or using a paid theme, it ends up being cheaper normally anyway.

So it's better for everyone sort of things. So yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. What were your favorite features from the latest Shopify update? What they call winter additions, even though for us it's summer. Yeah. Basically what I was saying before, bundles, subscription they're going to improve the variance to, you can use API to do 2000 variants.

For products probably one of the biggest issues in the last five, six years of any business is that the, the variant level people, there's a lot of people that want to have more than three options and a hundred combinations. So there's lots of issues and stuff. Even just this week, we've had an issue where, where someone is like the variant limits, not enough sort of thing.

So that's happened a lot. So that's, I think that's probably one of the biggest issues. With Shopify is that if you want to have more than a hundred variants, you have to use a plugin or app or something like that. So yeah, hopefully they, they really focus on that. I think they are focused a lot on the products as well over the last few years.

 What what advice do you have for brands when selecting a Shopify agency? So there's thousands and thousands of agencies out there.  You probably want to work with someone that's been around for a while and has a lot of reviews.

You can get good results with for with cheap agency. Sometimes if they're only new and they're starting out, they'll do a really good job. But I think it really depends on the level where you're at. If you're making like millions of dollars, you can't cheap out on an agency. You have to really go try to get one of the best agencies because it can be millions of dollars that you'll lose.

But yeah, I'm just maybe some examples. Check out the reviews if they've got some video reviews. There is some really good agencies that that are new or haven't, haven't done much work, but yeah, it really depends on your situation. 

If I get a good feeling with the other person, I just go for it, so.  Well, thanks so much Clayton for coming along. Where can we follow you and keep in touch with you and find out more about your agency? Inspire thanks for having me by the way. My agency Inspire Small Business, so you can find me at www. inspiresmallbusiness. com. Same on Instagram, inspire small business.

And then on YouTube, Clayton Bates, Shopify expert trying to be more dedicated to making free training videos and stuff on YouTube this year. So I really believe in giving value out and expecting nothing in return. When you do that good things normally come your way. So, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Love it.

We'll put those in the show notes. Yeah. So, so thanks for coming.