The Hidden Costs of Poor User Experience in Ecommerce

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Welcome back to Customers who Click the Ecommerce Podcast for DC Brands. In each episode we will look to answer one important question. What is the one thing brands should be doing right now to get customers clicking? Each guest will take us through actionable insights and real life examples from brands excelling in the art of customer attraction. So whether you're looking to enhance your conversion rates, boost average order values, or extend customer lifetime value, this is the podcast for you. Visit customers who Click.com for all our past episodes and to connect with us now, dive into the world of D2C E commerce with us and unravel the secrets to keeping those customers clicking. Today's guest is the brilliant Khalid Saleh, CEO and co founder of figpi, a conversion optimization platform. Khalid's a fantastic speaker. He's written a book about CRO and the content he puts out on LinkedIn in particular is fantastic. Which is exactly why we're connected and why I've invited him onto the podcast in the first place. So, Khalid, tell us why CRO?

Thank you for having me. Well, I'll give you two stories. Why CRO, why I got into it in the first place. Another story. So back,005 I was a software architect, had nothing to do with marketing. I was lead architect for motorola.com eventually after like 2005, Motorola decided, oh, this web thing is going to stick around. So we really need to build a website. Hired the consulting agency I was working for, brought us on starting in September and they said by end of December we need to launch an E commerce website. Sure. How many engineers do you need? 120 engineers. Sure, we'll give you that. What kind of servers, what kind of software? I mean, it was a dream. Whatever feature we mentioned, go ahead and implement it. Absolutely amazing. And it's funny because at that time I started kind of like reading online. I was getting bored with development and whatnot. I started reading about SEO and I'm like, oh. I'm like, I don't think those guys at Motorola really know anything about SEO. So me being just excited and I'm like, oh, I'm thinking, I'm in the leadership role. I'm running this project. I go and talk to their VP of E Commerce. Like he entertained me for a few minutes and then just switched the topic because he thought I did not know what I'm talking about. Move forward, fast forward until end of December. We're ready to go live. Finally we go live. And it turned out that I didn't know what I was talking about. We had 16 servers. And those are Sun Microsystem servers. I mean, absolutely state of the art. The latest and greatest servers. Those within a couple of hours went down because of how much traffic the site got. Did not really anticipate anything like that. So it turns out, yeah, I didn't really know whole lot about SEO. Now that was kind of end of December, beginning of January, and Motorol had spent about close to $50 million between software costs, development costs, servers and all that, lots of money. And we start looking. I'm like, hey, let's see what kind of sales we've had. Less than 10 orders. Needless to say, I always joke about that, that I say some people, actually many people lost their job as a result of this. Some people like me, we finished the project, moved on. I'm like, this is such an interesting problem to solve. And I'll give you another story. Our friends at New Balance, big brand correct is like, hey, very impressive. I forget the exact year, whether it was 2000. It was between 2009 to 2010, one of those two years. They decided just before Black Friday, you know what, we need to update our website. Because, I mean, the New Balance, everybody wants to buy the shoes. They hire an agency, they build this website, and they release it just beginning of November before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And I still recall visiting that website. And I mean, you're selling shoes. It's not exactly the most complicated thing to sell. I mean, yes, there are usability issues that you need to worry about. But I look at the website, I'm like, am I looking at Google? I just don't understand. There's this shoe, a search box in the middle, and I'm just puzzled. And it turns out that I'm not the only one who was puzzled because their sales took a nosedive by, I think, end of January, they rolled back the websites and imagine just frustration. So you spend so much money, you build out a new website, you release it 30 days later, like, oh, let's go back to the old version. And their VP of E Commerce was also ousted. And that is the reason we focus on Ciaro and why I love ciaro.

Some brands just say, well, we're done. We, we, we've redesigned, we've relaunched, we're going to run with this.

And we, I mean, it's funny because every time we talk to a customer and they're like, oh, we're doing a website redesign, I always tell them, love it, it's a great idea. However, no one wants to hear, hear this. However, I tell Them two data points. One, Microsoft finally decided to do a study on all the different redesigns that they've done and they have many properties and turns out that in 80% of the cases, the redesigns that look really nice cause a drop in conversion rates. It looks nice. People absolutely hate it. So that's one. So yeah, I always tell them mentally prepare. I understand it's a beautiful website, I understand you think it's going to help your increase your conversion rate. But put a line in the sand and say to yourself, I am willing to accept a 10%, a 15%, whatever percentage you can choose. I can accept a 10%, 15% drop in conversion rates. Anything beyond that, gonna go back and roll back the side design. Now lots of people say no, we're gonna deal with that when it comes out. I'm like, no, because when this problem happens, you're under so much pressure. It's better to have that discussion where you're comfortable, you're working through this and just set that line in the sand and just run with it when you're.

Not in panic mode. Let's agree what we're gonna do when we do guide to pack fighters like.

Oh, there is, you know, pothole in the road. How are we going to deal with it before we get there as opposed to, yeah, there's a pothole. Oh, there's, we're getting closer. Oh, oh God, we're in the middle of the pothole. Oh my God. What do we do?

Yeah, I think there was a brand in the uk. I think it was being Q. I might be wrong with that. Think it was B and Q. They redesigned their website and I think it was say something like 25 million pound project. And that didn't go too well and you just hit, I mean so from my point of view, I mean I know obviously it's, we're talking about a billion pound brand, right? But I'm looking at, I'm like, how do you spend 25 million just redesigning and rebuilding an E commerce website? What can be so special about it that requires that amount of investment? Maybe they do have loads of crazy stuff going on the background. One thing that I do like about their website is although it's not perfect, it works on your location, right? So it will tell you whether you can pick up in store or whether something is available for delivery. But I believe it's based on the stock near you. So it does mean that if the stores near you don't have stock, you can't get it delivered even if other Stores do, which is a bit frustrating, but they are really good with that stock element.

The most expensive website ever is something we have in the US healthcare.org which is how we get our healthcare. You guys don't have to deal with that. We deal with it twice a year. That's how we get our health insurance. It costs 1.4 billion. That's billion with a B to build. I mean, I just, I cannot even fathom a website costing that much. You know what I'm saying? Even if I try and you give me that money, I just cannot. And for the first three months after it was released, it was crashing left and right. People could not figure out how to submit their applications. I still remember it's like almost a 20 step process. So I'm like, okay, I just asked for a million information. So I'm going through it. Step seven is like, oh, we need this information about your son and this information about your daughter. And I'm like, I don't have it. So I'm like, save the application, go find the information. This is horrendous. I come back and start from step one. I'm like, no. And let's reinvent the wheel and just frustrate a whole bunch of people. Yeah.

What's weird is it's for such an expensive build. It's also something where arguably they could have built it and thought, well, we don't have to make this incredible because people have to do it. So we can actually afford to build something that's a bit meh. It just does the job. People have to fill this in. So to spend 1.4 billion on something that also doesn't work.

Yeah. And it's four or five screens by the way. It was like, okay, that's it.

Don't get me started on track and trace. And all that happened in the UK that was, I think the app alone was 50 million and it was literally about scanning a QR code. And that was pretty much it. I don't know what else really went into it. But anyway, so you've talked about website redesigns and how that goes badly. So what is the one thing that E commerce brands should be doing to keep customers working?

Sort of interesting. So since we finished the year and we have almost 3,000 companies using our software at this point, which is then mentioned it to you. Figpi. It's a. It's an AB testing platform, conversion optimization platform. One thing that I get to do is to look at a whole bunch of experiments, Just anonymized experiments. Oh, how Many experiments did this brand launch and what kind of revenue impact did they have? So it was just really fascinating because we always like to attributes, okay, the, what we call the testing velocity. How many A B tests are you launching and the impact in revenue that you saw, what's the percentage increase in revenue that you saw? And when you look at almost 3,000 brands, on average, we are doing about 20 experiments. So you can just do the math. It's just really crazy number of experiments that we looked at. And you can see that the more brands launch what we call good or high quality experiments, the more they launch of those, the bigger the impacts they will see. Because those experiments stack up. Correct. The first month you've done one experiment, okay, that's fine. Second month you did two of them, three of them. By the time you got to November and December, we also kept one brand. And by the time they were in November and December, they had launched 50 experiments throughout the year. In November and December, they had nine experiments that are winning and those are clicking and increasing their conversion rates. And it was incredible because the experimentation program in December did about half a million dollars of additional revenue for them. And in the whole month they've done about $2 million. So about 25% of their revenue came because of experiments that they were launching. It's money in the bank, very powerful. So there are two benefits to that. Correct. One, everybody likes money. It's like, oh, look at this, we redesigned this and people are really liking it. The other thing, kind of the other side is you are saying, oh, there's a problem on my website. People are struggling with this page. Let me fix it while I can fix this problem in 1, 2, 3, 4 different ways. Let's test it out ultimately then that's, I think, the beauty of AB testing, that's the beauty of experimentation or conversion optimization. You're trying to find the best solution for people so you're making them happy for your visitors. And the best solution, that also will make your bank account happy. So it's a win situation.

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose going back to what you talked about earlier, if it goes wrong, if it's a nightmare, you switch it off, you pause the test, you rethink things and you're good. There's no panic because you've spent a huge amount of money redesigning a page to find out it doesn't work. So the thing I really like about high impact testing is it's great to see a 20% increase in revenue from that page, whatever. But also it's a signal, right? It tells you. Let's say, for example, you've run a test with Social Proof. You've added some reviews to your website or UGC. 20% improvement in conversion rate. Now you can say, this is what people respond to. Let's do more of it. How can we make this.

I'll mention a story to you about Social Proof because we had one brand came in, start using Big Buy and they're like, hey, what should we test? And they have a team and some talking to their VP of marketing. And Tris, I'm like, tris C need Social proof. She's like, yeah, this is obvious. Let's go ahead and make the change. I'm like, well, you can do Social proof in so many different ways. Number of customers who place an order with you, they had, I think almost 5,000 or 6,000 reviews. 4.9. Impressive. I'm like, you can use that. They had influencers who had mentioned them. They had a whole bunch of GQ magazine and this magazine. I'm like, each of those would work. And she's like, oh, let's just pick one. And I'm talking to her and she's with her design team. So just, guys, let's pick one. We need to find something of a bigger impact if we're going to run an A B test. We go back and forth. Eventually I convince them, like, Chris, come on, this is the first month you're using the software. Run it as an experiment. We run it as an experiment and it's fascinating. What do you think between those. Kind of like, okay, so number of people who place on order the number of star reviews that they've got, the influencer mentions or magazine mentions. Which one do you think actually helped them the most? I, by the way, I picked the wrong answer because initially I'm like, oh, this is going to work for sure.

It's. I would want a little bit more information like what's the product and what they selling? And want to go down the research route with that. As you would have thought, a combination maybe of the number of people who have ordered. And that 4.9 star range is funny, right? That should be a pretty.

And I would have to tell you, it was the number of people who ordered that was a 17% lift in conversions. The star. Yeah, star reviews was about 4, 4 and a half percent improvement in conversion rates. Influencers and magazines reduced conversion rates, which was funny because that's what I'm like, all influence. That's what I bet. I'm like, all Influencers will be really good. And I had said that the number of people who place an order, that's not going to help you. Because of all the different things that we've used, that was the one metric you can fake. You can just say, oh, 5,000 people, 20,000 people. No, no, no way to validate that.

Yeah. But then arguably I, I'd say there's an argument that the influencer class.

That's exactly it.

Because it's paid for, it's scripted, whereas the newspaper, the PR coverage, I would have thought that'd be a good thing. Well, I would thought it'd be a bit of a, maybe a no impact thing, but not a negative. But the number of people ordering is really interesting because I've seen it used in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes it is joined the 500,000 happy customers, something like that one brand. It's a meal kit in the uk, a bit like hellofresh and Blue Apron. So now all the UK people know what I'm talking about because I've named the competitors. They did something like, we've provided this many meals, right. So they didn't just do how many customers, it was, how many meals have been provided. And of course, if you're looking at a million customers and each of those customers would have had at least four meals, I think, yeah, probably more. You're talking about multi, like millions and millions of meals. And that had a negative impact because actually it was too big enough. People looked at him like, how can you possibly have served 563 million meals? Right? And it was like mind blowing, backfired.

I'll give you an example, talking about this. So everybody says, oh, we have the most amazing customer support. Okay, well your competitors probably can say the same. I forget which brand it is, but I was just fascinated because they showed, hey, last year we had 12,000 people who placed an order with us and of those only 107 actually had a problem with the product. That was very powerful. Correct. Because instead of saying, oh, we have amazing product, we have this, we have that, it's 107 out of 12,000. And you're like, wow, that's an impressive number. Correct. So again, they're using the numbers, but they're kind of framing the whole argument or the whole presentation in a different way, where people are like, I'm impressed.

That actually reminds me of where that's the optimistic reaction where it was like a printer paper and on the printer paper on the packet it said 99% jam free. Yeah, right. And you Think, okay, that's a good number. They probably didn't want to write 99.9999% or something like that. And you think 99, that's a good number. But actually, when you think about it, that's one piece of paper in every hundred is going to jam the printer. And then suddenly it sounds like, yeah, this sounds like it might be a bit of hassle. And people overthink quite a lot. I did one experiment with a brand where we did it very localized. So it was, this is how many people in your postcode, like zip code are using, using this service. And this is actually a direct mail piece. It wasn't a website piece. So we tested that and that worked really well. So people really responded when we put a map on this postcard, we showed them the location of their car that they could book a car rental service. And we said, this many people in your neighborhood are using this. Yeah, that worked really well because it was that. That kind of community sense. A B testing cra. Really important. What would you say is how brand. I know you can go on forever about this, but what would be the tips to apply it to a business? How would you advise brands get started?

There are so many different ways, but I'll tell you my most favorite way and kind of the least amount of effort. So my mom just, who's a bit older, she's in her 70s, just moved into the house with us. She's going to be staying with us for, you know, a few months. So like, mom, just don't live alone. Just come here. Now, traditionally my mom would go to the mall, just buy a whole bunch of things, bring it home. And I'm like, why you're Chicago too cold? There's something called the Internet that she knows. I mean, she's always on WhatsApp on Facebook, and she's like, oh, I can place an order. And it's funny because you and I get used to and then deal with certain challenges on a website. We don't think about them. We're just. We just figured it. Figure it out for her. I mean, you cannot imagine the number of times she ordered the wrong thing or ordered twice of an item or got things shipped to the wrong place. And I'm like, okay, so what I tell our team, I'm like, the grandma desk. And they're like, what is that? I'm like, okay, let's go find somebody who's older. Not to offend anybody, but really you need to design your website for the people who have the Least knowledge of how to use a mobile device or a computer. Because if you can fix all the problems that they face, then you probably fix the problem for everybody else. People always tell me like, oh, how do you do that? I'm like, oh, simple. So I like to do this every Tuesday morning. I'm consistent about this. I usually wake up very early, but 6am we have Panera, which really serves an okay breakfast. But it's always the retirees who are just hang out there. I would go there, I'm sitting there sometimes with my laptop, sometimes with my phone, sometimes like I borrow an Android phone and I would find a gentleman or a lady and I'm like, hey, do you mind if I can just buy you breakfast and chat with you for a little bit? They're always very open because anyways somebody's going to talk to them. I'm like, here's this website, do you mind, like, have you ever used it? If they've used it, like they shop for the same item, they'll be like, oh yeah, good. If not, I'll just tell them, I think that you want to buy maybe a printer from this website and this printer needs to be a color printer. Just show me how would you go about that. And I just watch them now on an iPhone, I'm always recording them like this. They're talking to me and they're kind of scrolling. It's a gold mine. Now the minute you find those problems, it always starts with problems. Oh, people are struggling here, people are struggling there. People are not able to use our product page. Oh, they're getting confused in the cart. They you fix, you look at those problems and you say, okay, well these are all valid problems. Let's pick one of them and let's just sit in a room and say, okay, well we can fix it in this way or that way. We can come up probably with two, three different ways to fix it. And that's when you say, okay, well let's just sit out. Let's see which one actually helps people accomplish the task and increases or and would increase our conversion rates. And that's really how I usually recommend. I'm like, let's not go really fancy. Go really. I'm like, okay, let's just start with something simple. Figure out problems and then come up with different solutions and test them out and see which one people like.

Yeah, start, start with one thing. Identify one area that's a problem and try and fix it. And I think the great thing that I've seen from user testing is Sometimes people come across those problems and they'll say how this isn't working, how I expected it to, or whatever. But every now and again, you get someone who actually explains what they think is supposed to happen. And I'm talking about, like, unmoderated Nan's, where you just use the testing or something. You're not there to kind of ask questions. But they would just say, it'd be really helpful if it could do this, or, why doesn't this work? Or this thing? Why isn't this button working? And you realize that they're clicking on underlined text, which, because it's underlined, it might look clickable. So, yeah, I think, yeah, great advice. Find an area that needs fixing.

And just yesterday, my niece is visiting, and she's like, oh, I want to eat wing stuff. I'm like, really? Just wings. Like, no, for dinner. She's like, I want wings. I'm like, okay, I'll order wings for you. So I've never bought from them. And I'm like, okay, I'll just go ahead and pull up their sites. On my mobile phone, I select, and they have a whole bunch of flavors. There's one that's selected by default, and I'm like, trying to select a different flavor, and we don't let me. And I'm like, there's 10 other flavors. Surely there's a reason why I list all those flavors and they all have radio buttons next to them. I'm pressing. Nothing happens. And I'm getting frustrated. So I'm sitting next to my wife. I'm like, I just understand. Why would they show me all these other flavors and they have radio buttons next to them? How come I can't select another one? I mean, it's just radio button. You should. And she picks up the phone, and it's funny because she looks at it. She.

She.

She clicks on the option that's already selected, that removes the selection, and now she's able to select another flavor. So I'm like, what? I actually have to unselect. I've never seen anything like that. I'm like, okay, this is not the default behavior for radio buttons. So somebody actually had programmed it this way, went out of their way to add this. That was getting me frustrated. And I'm like, I spend all the time online buying the same websites, and I'm getting frustrated. I mean, imagine somebody else who's not familiar, like, with the sites, like, what's going on here?

Yeah, I mean, I know I find that I can overanalyze sites and I get into little things. I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. Why would they design it like that? But I'm viewing it from a bit of a CRO marketing point of view. Whereas actually it's not a problem. It's just something that I don't like because I think it's a bit weird. And I think that kind of shows why, like, best practice is never really a thing. Like, just like with your social proof example as well. You can't just rely on some best practice and what other people are doing yet you have to test things. Have you got a resource that you'd recommend to everyone to read, listen to?

Yeah, yeah, I mentioned. I always like to mention this book because. So I've been running the thick pie now for a few years. And when you run your own business, it's a chance that you're in a bubble. You're trying to make it. You're trying to figure out how to get new customers and all that. And then you read one book, at least for me. I was like, wow, that was really insightful. So I always recommend it on every podcast because I think maybe somebody else will benefit from it. And it's the Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. Absolutely love that because he argues that's we don't have to make too many right decisions. We have to make less stupid decisions running a business. And I think, by the way, this applies to everything. Marketing, business, life. It's like less stupid decisions and you'll be fine. So I always recommend listening to that book, by the way. It's on audio and it's so, so, so small. Like it has, I think, about 50 chapters. Each chapter is about three pages. And yeah, and he just helps you, like. And it's like, hey, at the end of the chapter, here's some questions around this topic that you need to ask about your business, about your marketing program. And I find myself sometimes using the wisdom that I gained from that book, even running projects and running experiments and whatnot. But I'll have to. I'll plug in Shameful plug over here or our podcast. So we do two podcasts, CRO Live Hour for some reason. By the way, it's the most popular podcast in Spain. I'm like, really? On C. I didn't know that there's an audience over there. But we've been doing it now for a couple of years where we basically take questions from people who are interested about an experimentation, a B testing and heat map social session recording. And we just answer those so it's really driven by whatever questions we get this week. Let's go ahead and answer it. And then I mentioned to you our podcast, Boot Trapped, because I run Thick Buy and my wife and my partner runs invesp. So we're sort of trapped in this and trying to make the company succeed where we just talk about our journey, running two companies.

Yeah, that. That sounds really cool. I'm gonna have to check that one out. Cause that's the sort of podcast, to me that sounds really interesting. Like, just what is going on? I guess, what are the problems? What the solutions, figuring things out, like just what's going on. So, yeah, I'll make sure there's. There's links in the show notes to both of those. So, yeah. Carly, thanks so much for joining me. If anyone does want to reach out, find out more about what you guys do.

So I do hangouts in the land of LinkedIn. I'm usually there reading, commenting posting, and you can find me just by searching for my name, the guy with the black hat. You'll recognize me right away. Otherwise you can visit our website, FI F I G P I I com and can get in touch with me there as well.

I did notice that since you came.

On, it is the most, the. The best marketing thing that I've done. I wish I discovered it back in 2006 now. Also, like, people remember you even in conferences, they're like, hey, you got the guy with the hat. I'm like, no, the guy with the black hats.

Thanks for listening. That's all we have time for today. If you have any questions or would like to add to today's conversation, join me here on the podcast, sponsor the show, or work with me. Simply email willustomers who click.com, visit our website, customers who click.com or connect with me Will Lawrenson on LinkedIn. But until next time, keep those customers clicking.