Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi and welcome back to a second episode of E Commerce Ascend. I'm actually outside right now filming this because I thought that this looks much more better for the podcast and I hope you can wonder and look at my background in order to stay focused on what I'm about to say. So to keep things simple, you should really watch the first episode about the actual background and actual most important things that you have to focus and you have to learn in order to make sure that your E commerce brand and your DTC fashion brand actually grows. And there I didn't only talk about E commerce, I talked about other things and other metrics that you can probably use as well for just normal D2C fashion brand that is selling offline and is selling other places.
[00:00:42] So today we actually have something very, very exciting. I'm actually going to show you how to double your conversion rate in next 30 days using very simple tricks and how I did it in my $10 million revenue in the year E Commerce in order to do it as fast as very fast and actually very easily because it doesn't require too much technical work, it just requires some really, really focused decision making and really focused things just to start getting more conversion rate. So I'm actually able to tell you this because I have exited a hundred million dollar startup which was basically fashion D2C brand and we mainly focused on E commerce. We barely had any sales anything outside of E commerce and offline in retail. So I really know what I'm talking about and I made many mistakes, I tested many things. So I'm able to save you time and save you money. So let's get on with it. So the first thing is let's check what is the conversion rate. In 2019-2021 the conversion rate was around 2% in Covid impact. It actually dragged it down because the number of visitors that the website had to around 0.5.
[00:01:55] Then in 2024-2024 there was a recession not just in conversion rate but E commerce in general. I think it went down to around 0.3% as a standard for E commerce in general. And of course we're talking about millions and probably billions of traffic per day. And so it's not something to have as a benchmark. It's just an average number for the industry because some E commerce, you know, they don't know what they're talking about about they don't know what they're doing and they have conversion rate of 0.05 and a lot of traffic and they're dragging the whole industry down.
[00:02:28] Then we have the 2025 and now actually 1% is okay. And anything above that is great. And I think the thing to strive to is actually 4, 5% and it's highly achievable and not that hard to get if you know what I'm doing. What you're doing in E commerce in general and in your landing pages, in your offer and in everything we'll talk about and how we structure our offering just overall. And so let's get on with it. So yeah, so for example, let's look at. You have a Facebook budget of $10,000 and you have a conversion rate of say 0.01. No, 0.1%. Okay, so $10,000. 0.1%.
[00:03:17] By doing very napkin quick math, we can see that if you have $10,000, you get one, let's say CPM of 2,000 people or 1,000 people actually coming to your website for $5, which is acceptable for most of the niches. And I mean, it's bad. Facebook also adds benchmark, but it's something to start with. So let's say $5 per thousand people.
[00:03:45] So we actually divide $10,000 by $5. We get 2,000 CPMs and we times that by a thousand and we get 2 million people coming to your website with $10,000. Is that relevant?
[00:04:02] I think it's a little too high. And let's check the CPM right now in Facebook. CPM on Facebook, on Instagram ads. Because most of us are doing actually Instagram. Yeah, 4 to $10 for the view. So that's 2 million impressions.
[00:04:19] Let's look at what CTR is on Instagram as well.
[00:04:23] CTR 0.5 to 1%.
[00:04:26] Okay, so we have 2 million people and we times that by 0.01. We have 20,000 hits on the website. So we have traffic of 20,000. By spending $10,000 on ads with CPM of $5 and CTR of 1%.
[00:04:44] So what do we have? We have 0.01% conversion rate. Right. So that means that you are getting around from 20,000 hits on a website.
[00:04:55] You're only getting around 20 sales and that's $10,000. So you see your actually conversion rate is super low. In order to make this worth it, your each product has to cost at least a hundred dollars. So you can make around $20,000 with 50% costing the ads. Let's say 30% actually going on the product itself for the cost of it with the shipping, with everything. 10% goes on hiring people. 5% operations and then 5% is profit. So you have around 2.5k as a profit for you. And that's not bad, right? That's not too bad. I think my math is correct, maybe somewhere similar, but either way, if you're looking at the funnel and how it works, I mean, you have to have a product which costs more than $100. That's the only way to actually make it this work. And in most cases that's not the case. And in most cases, the average cost and average value of the product which you're selling are much lower. They should be around, let's say actually around $50. I think the average price I saw last time in the U.S. yep. And so I think it's not really a good thing to have 0.01 conversion rate. Right, because you're struggling. If we raise it by 10, if you take it to 1% already, there is a multiplicative effect. You are getting much more sales, you're getting much more return on your investment in the ads. You're also getting much better customers, probably because the customers who are coming from a bad copy, bad ad, probably not your target audience. And you'll have problems with that. And just in general, you'll feel much more leg way to have better product quality, to have better ads, to spend more money on where it matters for you to live a happy life as a founder, as an operator of an e commerce store. So in general, if you're trying to get your return on investment higher, if you're trying to raise your revenue, your profit, anything, try to work on your conversion rate. So I think I demonstrated that with my napkin maths. So the 0.1% and 1%, right, that's 10x difference in revenue. So even if you're doing ads, if you're doing everything just by focusing on that, your already can 10x your revenue straight away. And usually that means 10x in your profit or even more. Because when you have 0.1 per conversion rate, you're not really able to get much profit because all money goes onto ads. So how do we do that? Oh, 0.35 conversion rate still worked on seller traffic. So it was quite low. But it wasn't that low. It wasn't that low. So what I actually did is I differentiated between Marketplace and single product optimization.
[00:07:43] That means that I actually didn't go only onto my own E Commerce. I also promoted my product on Marketplace. And because marketplaces already have a good conversion rate optimization, I didn't have to worry about my low 0.35 conversion rate in SEO and what I did I actually worked on working on my product, getting more money out of it, increasing profit there, talking to operators in the operations so I can actually improve my profitability there and my ROI there. And so in general I just worked on that and that way I actually sideways my bad conversion rate because I didn't have to worry about it until I worked on my e commerce whilst my marketplaces like Amazon and ebay sold my stuff. So the five pillars of conversion rate optimization is actually first Product page optimization. Product page is one of the most important things on your website. Especially if you have less than five products selling or even if you have three products or one product selling. There is nothing more important than product page. I mean the whole E commerce doesn't really need to exist. There is no product page and on the other hand no e commerce need to exist if there is a product page cart and basically just after the card checkout, right? So what you have to do is to focus on product page as much as possible because that's where most likely where your all ad budget is going. And if you're not going, if you're not spending money and you add budget on driving traffic to your product page and driving traffic instead to your homepage, that's a huge mistake, you should not do that. And that's just disaster because you're already losing lots of customers by the click because they have to go from the homepage to the product page, then to the cart, then to the checkout. And it's a bad conversion rate because every time a person clicks there is 25%, that 25% of the traffic just leaves. So yeah, it's just bad. So product page is extremely important what you could do straight away, open it on your computer, open it on your phone, open on iPad or any tablet and see how it looks. Check your direct competitor, see what they're doing. If for example they're doing 10x your revenue, most likely something to do with conversion rate as well. So check them and see how it changes and how it basically matters. What's different between the two.
[00:09:59] And I think in general just think about what is your product page, what is your conversion rate, what is your goal for customer to do? For your goal is to sell the product. You go for the customer to either add to the cart or check out from the product page straight away. So make sure that you're doing that, make sure that you are driving traffic and have the whole thing mapped out so that the only thing that the customer can do is actually click on the button to buy or click the button to add to cart and then there's an easy way to buy because most of the e commerces that I've seen actually don't do that and that's the reason why they actually fail and they have this low conversion rate. So product page is extremely important and of course in there you need to look. Also apart from how it looks, how the buttons are on two, three things. First thing is customer journey map. So the customer journey map is basically why the customer is buying. There should be the pain points of the customer, the solutions to the pain points, the experience that the customer experiences right now, the destination where you're trying him to get to basically tell him that won't be any problems getting to that point. And in general just basically explaining your product as easy and as relevant to the customer as possible. The second thing that you need to do is to look at keywords. What is your title, what is your description of the product? Is it actually offering the solution to the client or is it something that you're trying to push to the wrong audience? Again think about that because offer in the product page is extremely important. Yes, it's a little bit more product wise and marketing wise than conversion rate, but I think that it's undervalued how much offer and how much the look of the product actually drives the conversion rate up or down. Considering the audience that you're driving from the ads to the page, the next thing is to look at price.
[00:11:52] So price again is very undervalued as a mechanism to increasing conversion rate. So what you can do is actually look at your price and look if it's 30 doll or is it 29.99 or is it 28.90 or is it 2939 you need to check. And I think that this biggest problem that most people actually do, they start their e commerce, start their product and they put the price down. Right? They say okay, this is going to cost $31. Why we multiply this just by five and that's how we got there. And plus around number nice, right? But that's completely wrong. You should test your offer every single time you open a new campaign or you're doing something new. In general, you're driving new ads, new customer audience, anything. You should always check your price, check if it's relevant, check if it's actually making sense to your customer, if this is something your customer wants, if it's something your customer needs, if it's something that you can do to improve your customer journey. Because otherwise you can actually be in the position where you think you're helping your customer by giving him a good price, but in reality he can pay twice the amount of the price. And you're just losing out on money in the revenue, in a profit, in everything because you undervalued your product. At the same time, you can overvalue your product. Maybe your customer only can pay $15 and then you have to lower the quality of the product. You have to really drive through the CGM of the customer, why he should buy and just in general change your strategy. Because otherwise why would the customer buy a $15 product if he $12 to spend on this in the current month, year or overall in the marketplace, it only costs $12. And he doesn't see a difference between your product and your competitors. So the next thing that you can also look at is size chart, of course, and what it actually looks like. Because in fashion, especially if you have for example a T shirt and it's oversized, that doesn't tell anything to a customer. First of all, compare it to competitors or to brands that you know your customer is buying and how you know, talk to your customer, of course, but have a size chart for the product, for the T shirt, what size corresponds to what size.
[00:14:10] I would suggest also having a specific person, if you didn't have that already, measure the technical places. For example, how long is this part? How long is this part? How long is the collar, the hand, everything because and put that in centimeters or inches or whatever your customer understands. And basically tell your client how to measure themselves if they want to get into the right fit. And of course there are other things that you can do. That's the last thing for product page, I think, at least for now, is to focus on social proof and answering all the pain points again. But the pain points are a little bit different. What I mean by that is most of the customers, again because maybe you don't have a size chart, they don't understand what is the sizing for the product. So they're worried about returning or shipping or how it's going to feel. You saw all that by saying that there is a free returns, there is a free shipping after a certain value, there is, I don't know, very good feel.
[00:15:11] And on top of that, put social proof, don't just tell show. I really love how rich does it. They have this section at the bottom where they take for example a product and they put all reviews there. I think they Found out that for example, if you're buying football team wallet, it's impossible to get more than two reviews for example, for this exact football team wallet. But what you can do is put for all wallets, all reviews, and then put a picture of what review is actually for. And in most cases even I haven't realized after maybe third time visiting their website that the reviews worked like that. I thought it was the same product, but in reality they're just showing for every product. So it just makes sense that for example I buy a gold plated wallet from Ridge and I see all the reviews for all the wallets.
[00:15:59] So in the end of the day testimonials and social proof is extremely important and you have to make sure that you're actually doing that in order to drive your customers to buy.
[00:16:09] And art to cart psychology, of course that's super simple. We can go fast. Button color is extremely important.
[00:16:18] I know that there's a 10x potential in putting blue color, red color, yellow color, green color based on the psychology, the actual feeling of the product and industry. Because for example, in fashion yellow and blue and orange work much better than for example black color, right? At least in my experience. Because I know my Theresa has the black button and that supporter as well. And maybe they did their experiments. That's of course do AB tests if you don't have to. If you can do a B test, right. But otherwise I would just suggest to go with industry standard, Google your competitors, see what they're doing, Google psychological studies in your actual niche, see what colors people like and go from there. The next thing for the car add to cart psychology is urgency only free left, limited time and things like that. Most people who I speak to say it's scammy, but what they don't realize, you cannot make it scammy by being truthful. I always put on all my items the actual number of items left for each size. And of course I don't display it if there are more than 10. But for example, if there are nine sizes left, I start displaying that next to the choice of the sizes. That means urgency. That means that people are actually looking. Also what you can do and I love doing in my brand is showing how many customers on this exact product page. Because when you see 100 people in the product page, you start to be nervous that people are actually browsing this page and they're about to buy. Of course, if you don't know how to do that, you can always just write an average of how much traffic is per day. Divided by 24 and see what the number is and just put it there. But limited time and only three left is just examples of really great urgency that can drive conversion rate. The next thing is wishlist. That's the intent before purchasing. And I think if your E commerce doesn't have a wishlist, especially in fashion, you're doing something wrong because 33% of sales actually come from wishlisting before and people don't understand that add to cart and wishlist is basically the same thing because not many people understand wishlist, they forget about it. But add to cart is easy and most people use cart as a wishlist anyways. They put 20 items into it and they basically shop something from it once in a while. So make sure you have some possibility of doing that, saving your card, saving your wishlist, because that's a no brain game changer for fashion e commerce.
[00:18:46] And the one more thing is actually to understand the optimization between mobile and desktop. Because if you're looking at mobile, for example, and you see that people are not behaving the correct way, they're not buying, check if there's something broken and most likely there is.
[00:19:01] Mobile is the most important thing on a website because right now around 90% of traffic comes from mobile. And of course the conversion rate is a little lower there than for, for example on computer, on PC. But it doesn't matter, doesn't mean that you shouldn't focus on it because it just means that maybe your website is badly optimized or that people are choosing to browsing by mobile and then looking at computer.
[00:19:25] The third thing is free email sequence. So cart abandonment is extremely important. And of course getting sequences for emails, getting sequences for everything else is even more important.
[00:19:39] So for example, you have a customer, especially if he logged in, if he didn't capture that email, store it in a cookie. There are already tools that can do all that for you, all the hard work, but basically capture the email and do the email sequence. For cart, abundant cart is already extremely, extremely, extremely important. But when you have intent and then you capture that intent with the cart or with wishlist and then you convert them, it's insanely important by communicating with them. I don't care what you do email, if you do abandoned card, Facebook ads, if you do sms, anything, just work with your cards and wishlist and intent of purchase, next thing is exit intent pop up of course to capture emails, to give additional discount, anything. Just make sure you have some way of capturing email. Because sometimes when the screen goes black and there's Something in the front. Even when I wanted to exit, I still look at it. Even though I have been in the market for 10 years, I don't know how long. 10 years I think and more now I still look at it because it's something visual, something very direct, very specific. So I have to look at it. Is my primitive brain working? So make sure you have that Payment methods, Stripe, Shopify payments, anything. Just give as much options to your customers as you can. Because for example I really prefer link with the stripe now to pay at least because there is already my card. I know how to cancel easily. I know how to refund everything because I have used it. So it's useful for some people. Shopify payments for example is much useful and much easier. So have just as many options as you can because there is a real conversion difference between both.
[00:21:18] And one more thing, there is, yeah, save for later psychology.
[00:21:26] So for example there is, let's say a problem with your website or a problem with the card your pet trying to pick. There is a, I don't know, banking outage or you don't have enough money right now or you have to consult your wife, friend, anyone, make sure you have some way to save this thing to remind the person, wish list, card, anything. Because most cases I would love if someone would call me up and say yo, you forgot to buy this. You remember you asked us to remind you? Yeah, I would like that because I don't need to do the busy work of actually thinking about this.
[00:21:59] So that's also an interesting thing to do. Next thing is checkout optimization. Single page versus multi step checkout testing is extremely important. Some customers in some industries prefer single page. In some areas multi page is much more important and actually more conversive because single page allows you to do it fast but also it overwhelms people. If you have great bounce rate on a checkout, maybe changing to multi page. If you have low conversion rate from for example starting the checkout to ending, maybe change to single page. Just a B test, change, test and choose the best performing one. Single page versus multi page. You might think it's not important. It is check that then guest checkout versus account creation. Have the both options. Sometimes I know that I will never come to the website and if there is no guest checkout I won't buy and I'll choose to go on Amazon for example or if for example I know that I will buy this more than two times or there is an offer or there are news or there are guides or anything like that. Of course I'll create an account. Why not? Maybe they're offering some, I don't know, support or some way to help you create an outfit with this clothing. Yeah, of course I'll create an account. Why not? You know, it's a great thing.
[00:23:19] Then we have payment security badges and trust signals. Yeah. Again, the consumer confidence rating is on all times low in 2025. So making sure that you have the SSL certificate, you have cloud payment certificate, you have some proof on the card in checkout and you're a real website.
[00:23:40] It's super important because otherwise you're actually missing out on a lot of customers who would never buy if they don't see this. And it's super easy to get, it's super easy to install, it doesn't cost you much or if anything, but in general it enables you to attract and convert the customer who really cares about this, who has been scammed and doesn't want to be scammed ever again.
[00:24:03] And front prevention versus conversion balance. So again, what I had in my fashion business is customers making hundred thousand dollar purchases without the card because I allowed no card purchases into the system and that's basically fraud. Also I, I didn't realize that I paid my affiliates based on an order and not the purchase price because that's the difference between people buying and returning. And I still pay affiliate or buying, not returning and I pay the affiliates. Right. So fraud is extremely important, but conversion rate is even more important. So you have to balance all those and see if there are any things you can do to basically have that and fraud prevention and conversion rate optimization.
[00:24:53] Then we have post purchase convention. So thank you page upsell. You might think that customer has put in their credit card details, have put in their email, they create an account, maybe didn't use guest checkout. Make sure you have upsell because yes, of course you have to have it in the product page, into the cart, but also on the thank you page. Why not? We saw 20% increase in average order price and average order amount in units by having a thank you page with the upsell. Make sure to do that because otherwise you're missing out on a customer who just didn't know that you can buy a battery to that card or a battery to that photo camera, to anything. So make sure to do that. Then you have an email sequence for repeat purchases. I go into way more in my consulting. I really believe in emails, SMS and direct communication with WhatsApp and everything like that. And calls. So if you're not doing that, you should. And of course, if you're not doing that, try to implement it slowly. Try to implement it step by step so you don't overwhelm yourself because it's a very big thing.
[00:25:59] And then yeah, so there are other things that you can do. For example, can implement some way for your customers to need to buy something new. I really love how printers do them do that with their refills for ink.
[00:26:15] I really love how some of the fashion brands, for example, do that with T shirts which you can subscribe to and you get free T shirts every month. It's just some way for your customers to come back to purchase more and to keep repeating being your customer. Because in most cases customers just forget about your brand. The minute they wear the T shirt and pack it and they get this dofamine of buying things, that's it, they forget about you.
[00:26:41] So yeah, there are only advanced tactics from actually growing past $5 million I think because before that it's super easy to get to $5 million if you have product market fit. So above that, if you're above 5 million, you can stay and listen. If you're below that, I would suggest to not overwhelm yourself and just start with something small. So for me the advanced things would be to merchandise. So for example, you have a catalog with your T shirts.
[00:27:10] Make sure you have the most profitable and the most popular item in the front.
[00:27:15] Maybe even put two listings. For example, you see in Zara they have the video, they have the double listing, they have the full page listing for the most important products. It's for the products that they do the ad campaign for and also the most profitable ones. So merchandising is extremely important. Do that also anchor products. For example, when you scroll down a certain point, a product just keeps on being there. Also incredibly important to increase POV and conversion rate into adding to cart converting. Buying this specific product then sisal rotation is extremely important. Again, if you are in the winter and you have coats, make sure they're everywhere in the product page in the catalog, everywhere there first. At the same time, if it's summer, don't show coats, show T shirts, dresses, sandals, flip flops, anything like that. So fashion is extremely determined by seasons and you know that. And if you don't do optimize for seasons, you're screwed straight away. So make sure you do that.
[00:28:15] Then you have to do is actually to do a B testing for your website.
[00:28:21] And the 80:20 rule sells that you should test and optimize what actually converts. So for this page for your most important items, catalog where most traffic is and pages with the most traffic overall. Do that, check them and make sure you actually understand. Because if you don't have 10,000 users in your A B test, it's not statistically significant. So you don't have to test it, you can wing it and it won't really matter. So make sure you actually do that on the most important pages. Do it for one week. And also the biggest mistake that I actually made in my testing is testing the wrong thing. For example, testing the button color where it's not something that is important and doesn't actually lead anywhere, like converts, it's not great. But testing, for example pricing, offer, that's extremely important, something you should do. Definitely. In international considerations, I would say that it's yes, it's important to understand what countries you are selling to, but I think that's also about $5 million. Way, way more. Because even in US you can go up to 10, 100 million no problem if you're doing everything correctly. And of course it sounds nice to be an international brand, but really capturing your audience, focusing on the pain points, staying lean and getting the groundwork to scale is more important. But of course after that you can go into international expansion like I did with my brand. But apart from that, just focus on what works and don't go into crazy adventures before really nailing the basics down. If you haven't done everything above what I just said, do that before going international.
[00:29:58] So I would suggest four week plan actually. So first week we have foundation, so audit everything, audit conversion, rate, build analytics, build everything. The second week is testing, so set up your A B test with I think Ripple, the app called, I will make sure to put it in the description. Basically an app that most Shopify platforms should use for A B tests. If you don't have Shopify, build your own or use Google's one for a B tests, set it up, set everything up. Then optimize mobile experience also on week two and implement cart abandonment sequences with emails. The third week is checkout flow, payment methods and TrueSight implementation. TrueSight is basically you can for example post hoc look at how exactly the person is going through the website, what he's doing, where is he clicking and you get real great AI insights there. So do that. And then for week four do measurements and iterations, so analyze results and then play next rounds of tests, for example, which you have. Then document what worked and what didn't for what audience, for specific audience and make sure you focus on that so of course I can go into call case studies and I can tell you all about that. But to be honest, I think that you should implement this.
[00:31:13] And in the next episode in my podcast, I'll actually go through the case studies for the brands that I'd worked with that achieved insane results with these exact methods. Because I've been working with shoes, accessories, clothing for women, clothing for men, full brands with everything, all categories, only dresses, only T shirts, only polo shirts, everything. And there are many things that are very interesting you can implement in your fashion D2C brand, so make sure to stay for that. And if you like this podcast, make sure to write to me and schedule a call, maybe get an audit from me for free about your website, your strategy, your ad campaigns and everything, as I have worked with many brands and have scaled mine to more than $100 million. So I think I can help you with everything you probably can think of. So have a good day and keep in touch and come back next week. Thank you.
