Why People Buy: A Practical Guide to Consumer Behavior in Ecommerce

18:51Matt Bertulli:important here i love that you mentioned the algorithm thing algorithmic ad platforms or even just like content social media whatever they have taken a uh what used to be a relatively simple buying journey right and they've really made it so like customer discover brands in fragments now like they it's like an ad a creator uh a direct mail piece an amazon listing they saw it in a store like there is so many ways to discover a brand and it's so fragmented that the algorithms are actually your best friend in this fragmented world they find the moment and serve the message to the person at the moment so like they're taking away some of that old school like guesswork that we used to have to do uh simply because they have way more data right so like they can pick off the customer and the journey at the moment that you want them to all of this like buying journey stuff, we're still skipping over the who is your customer, right?

19:49Matt Bertulli:And how do you figure that out? So like, we've talked about reasons that people buy, we've talked about the journey, but how do you think about like, figuring out the very first thing? Who do I, how do I develop a thesis on who my customer is?

20:05Sean Frank:You can be customer led or product led in that decision flow, right? There's a friend of the show. He launched a sports drink, okay? And it was just going after athletes or whatever. I think he's a golfer. He wanted to make a sports drink for golfers. They raised money or whatever. It turns out that the number one buyer of their product was nursing women because it really, really helped with breast milk development. It was shared in all the forums. It was all over the Facebook groups. They were selling out everywhere they could go because it was really good for breast milk development. Now, that is a product-led customer discovery.

20:51Sean Frank:He had customers pulling his product in and that's the product market fit he ended up leaning into. But when he went to go invent the thing, he was like, my customer is athletes. I'm a golfer. That's who we're making stuff for. So both ways are valid. There are success stories on both sides where you have an ideal customer, you go out there and you make it. And the flip side is you let the world tell you who your product is or who your customer is. When you're launching a brand, I think you have to be customer led. You have to tell us who your customer is. You have to make ads, right? But you have to be loosely tied to that because if you're going after the athlete and the CACs are$1 ,000, but you open up female targeting and it drops to a hundred bucks, well, you don't have a sports company.

21:42Sean Frank:I'm telling you right now, like you will go out of business trying to make that work, right? And going back to my agency days, I would see this all the time is, you know, we had five fashion brands and they'd all show up and they say, my core customer is, they live in Silver Lake, they make$200 ,000 a year, they would never eat at McDonald's and they only shop with Lululemon and Irwan and whatever else, right? And I'm like, okay, well, you just described less than 1 % of the population. So you're gonna have a very small business competing with the wealthiest people on earth or let's try to open the aperture and find a new bucket of customers, right?

22:18Sean Frank:So anyway, when you're launching something, be super focused, have a customer in mind, and put it out there, but then be willing to look at the data and pivot, right? And when you have a brand trying to find a new angle, ask your customer, this is when the surveys actually really matter. You send it out like, hey, who are you and why did you buy this thing? And you'll see who you think your customer is, but then you might find a thread of somebody new, right? And then that's where you can open up a new angle to your business.

22:46Matt Bertulli:Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about super fancy launch videos this is why i'm loving what rich panel is doing they have ai and support smashed together made it practical made it useful made it valuable to brands today not on some future promise and instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting they flipped the whole script their ai builds your support team for you and everything it needs i've watched it it works it's freaking amazing rich panel even guarantees 50 percent of your support volume will be automated by ai within 30 days or your money back i call that a no-brainer offer the pricing is also kind of wild about 20 cents per conversation instead of most other vendors being like a dollar to three dollars which is a little nuts if you are interested go to richpanel.com slash demo not for some generic demo but to actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team when we launched pila this i'm dating this is going way way back like eight, nine years ago, eight years ago.

23:49When I launched it, what we did at the beginning

23:53Matt Bertulli:was we actually came up with five different customers and different reasons that each person would buy because we didn't really know. Like we don't actually know what's gonna work. We don't know what the pricing should be, like the message, all that stuff, right? So we came up with five and we were dead wrong on the one. So and of the five, none of them worked, but out of one of them came this like little pocket of people called Zero Wasters. And these are like YouTube creators and Instagrammers at the time who were trying to live their life on absolutely no waste. They used to like do videos, guys, where they would have like a mason jar and that would be like a year of their personal waste in like a little mason jar.

24:32Matt Bertulli:So this customer turned out to be a massive fan of a compostable phone case, right? Now, we went into it thinking like, oh, people who care about sustainability are going to be our customer. Well, it turns out it was actually this like like a little tiny niche that was really where all of the noise came from and all the initial traction came from. So I think on that, what you're hitting on, Sean, is like, you probably, if you're launching a new brand, you probably are wrong on who you think your initial customer is. And then you really want to think about over time, like, is that customer, how deep is that customer, right?

25:05Matt Bertulli:You done this earlier. And am I going to have to evolve or expand out from this, like sort of toehold customer that I have acquired. Yeah.

25:15Sean Frank:Look inside of Ridge, our biggest, deepest customer pool is gift givers. Right. But the problem is it's very hard to have that as always on this year. There's birthdays all year, but like it's very hard to target people who are, who are interested in giving a birthday gift and really rely on that. But for the holidays, it is half my revenue for the entire year comes from people who are gift givers. Right. And when we launched the brand, we were trying to sell cool wallets to cool guys right and and just like how that's changed to be

25:42Matt Bertulli:like this very big deep pocket of customers okay sean so on the customer thing uh metas partnership ads are all the rage we've had multiple people on the pod talk about like this is how you're winning on meta right now with with ads um when it comes to influencers partnerships like ugc when you're early on as a brand you don't really know who your customer is yet or you're still trying to figure it out. How wide and how deep do you go with influencers, partnerships, creators, all of those things?

26:15Sean Frank:Influencer marketing is the overarching bucket here, probably, right? Because the three things we talked about, influencer partnerships and user-generated content are just different tools for different parts of the ecosystem. So let's take each one for what they are, right? When I hear the word influencer, I think pay for post. I am paying a big celebrity or a big account to post about us and hopefully drive meaningful sales, right? Now, they might give us ad rights to that content, and then I might run it as a partnership ad, right? And then that kind of bridges the gap there where, you know, I have Hailey Bieber.

26:53Sean Frank:She does a post about us. And then I take her ad account, and I run from the Hailey Bieber account, and now it's a partnership ad, right? And then, so that's one end and then that's the middle. And then the other end is user-generated content. This is TikTok shop affiliates, mass posting videos. I get right to that content and then I run it on my ad account or their ad account. I'm running those partnership ads. And each one of those are different tools in the tool belt for different things. So look, I brought up Haley Bieber earlier. Ridge should probably not work with Haley Bieber. it would be$300 ,000 for a post.

27:31Sean Frank:Her audience probably isn't buying that many rich wallets, right? Even though gift giver is a big part of it, it's just, it's just, that's very hard to activate, right? One Haley viewer post will actually see money from that, right? So when we go out there to do our influencer posts, we're working with people like JerryRigEverything or Marques Brownlee, like tech focused, you know, building credibility, really trying to sell to a smaller, more core audience who will respond well to those value props, right? Now with Marquez, it's a partnership because he'll post about us, he'll be in his YouTube videos, and then we'll also run him in ad content.

28:05Sean Frank:So he's kind of bridging the gap there, right? We're taking his words, we'll bring it to our platform and we're amplifying that. And then on the user-oriented content side, we're working with hundreds, if maybe thousands of people, right? They are shooting tons of content. We're taking it down, we're adding it up. And there we're really seeing just what works, right? we don't really know who these people are we don't know who they're really speaking to we're feeding into the algo and one of them will just hit and we'll get a million dollars in spend and that's our best performing app so different tools for different parts of the ecosystem it also sounds like you're using all these tools to attack trust in the brand right so like all of these like you

28:45Matt Bertulli:know uh influencers partnerships ugc like all ugc like there's paid for ugc then there's a legitimate customer, UGC, all of that is sort of like as a brand, you need to, you're constantly trying to deposit into the trust bank, right? So like that when somebody is ready to buy, it's like, oh, yes, Ridge Wallet. Like I saw Marquez post about it. I've seen like 50 people on my feed talk about gifting it to their boyfriend. That must be some element of this, right? It's like, it's not just awareness, but it's also like, I've got to have the brand trusted. Black Friday and Cyber Monday you're coming.

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30:08Sean Frank:I would say influencer partnerships deliver the ability to borrow trust from people. So like in your life, think about who's the most trusted celebrity voice you would go to for information on stuff, right? And maybe you're very well read and it's Malcolm Gladwell, or maybe you're a chef and it's Gordon Ramsay, right? Well, all of those people have podcasts or have agents and you can borrow that trust for money and have them stand behind your product. And we saw Heclicloud do that in spades, right? Squarespace does that with the Malcolm Gladwells of the world. So you can really borrow that trust and you can be associated with that person.

30:47Sean Frank:With the user-generated content piece, it just helps you unlock new surface areas of angles. For instance, Ridge probably would never think to sponsor a Spanish language creator. I'm not opposed to it. I just would never think about it. But with user-generated content, you're getting such a wide aperture of people, experiences, videos coming in that some of them will be Spanish language and some of those will actually work in ads. And now we have a new angle we never thought about. We have a new pocket of people to go out there and serve. So, you know, some of it's attacking trust. Some of it's actually just expanding your surface area.

31:23Matt Bertulli:Let's move to the fourth thing, which is ultimately, how do you sell to the customer? So you've got attention, you figured out awareness, you figured out, you know, who the customer is, how to reach them, like all that stuff. Okay. You still got to like, how do I sell? And to me, I want to start this off by saying a bunch of things that don't matter when you're figuring out how to sell. So here's what doesn't matter. Inversion rate doesn't matter. Heat maps don't matter. Card abandonment doesn't matter. Checkout process, segmentation. All this stuff doesn't freaking matter when it comes to learning how to properly sell to the customer, right?

32:02Matt Bertulli:What you have to figure out is offer. ultimately if you don't nail the offer for whatever you're selling none of that matters

32:11Sean Frank:do you agree or disagree sean don't just abandon looking at conversion rate because i think it's a helpful yeah i think it's a helpful data point tell us you know if your offer is working but let's talk about you know um checkout flows heat maps card abandonment the best industries have so much demand that they can be bad at all of these things. The reason why consumer is so hard is it's purely discretionary. If my cart is a little too confusing, people are going to bail and buy a competitor, but go try to buy a ticket to a sporting event, a ticket to a flight. The industries that are, there's so much demand.

32:55Sean Frank:They don't give a fuck. They're like, They're like, no, we're going to make you click nine buttons. Or you know what? We crashed. Who cares? Log back in and do it again, right? Because those industries, just like they are better. They have more demand. They are gated to some degree, right? So you want to be in an industry or have a product that there's so much demand for that even if your website sucks, people are still going to buy it, right? And we've seen examples of this, people with very ugly websites, like hard to check out. You know, I always bring up James Persis as an example. They still charge for shipping.

33:30Sean Frank:No matter how much money you spend,$1 ,500 order, they're going to charge you$15 for shipping. And it's because, look, their customer wants the stuff, they'll pay whatever. So when you get down to commodity goods, competitive goods, that's where you have to get really good at conversion rate, really good at card abandonment, really good at segmentation, right? And the lesson to take away from this is try to elevate yourself to an industry where you have wind at your back. It's a growing category. There's tons of awareness. You don't have to work that hard to get sales. And it could just be totally abandoning the business you're in right now because it's too difficult.

34:05Sean Frank:But let's say you're selling dog beds in 2026, very competitive category. Everyone has a dog bed. Well, then you have to get good at conversion rates, heat maps, card abandonment. And more importantly, the most important thing Matt talked about is the offer. Why is your offer better? Why is your offer going to win? i'm so happy you hit on the like the category you're in and the demand it automatically has

34:26Matt Bertulli:you know what makes me think of this like if you told my daughter that she needed to hire a carrier pigeon to buy a taylor swift concert ticket she would do it right like that's how much demand there is to go see a taylor swift show is like she could just make everybody send it in by like snail mail like you send a donkey and she would still pack the stadium yeah the rest of us you

34:47Sean Frank:got to think a little harder you could tell your daughter hey we have to walk to the concert and it's in it's in vancouver and it's going to take us two weeks she's like all right well let's go

34:58Matt Bertulli:i'll get my shoes on let's go yeah so but i guess like for the rest of us then all of that stuff is true like offer i think also too like when people hear offer uh if you're not in the industry i think the immediate thought goes to discount right and that that is not what makes a good offer like Like offer has a lot of elements to it. There's, there is price, like there's the product, the price, there's a guarantee. So like Ridge, you're famous for what's your guarantee? It's like lifetime guarantee on the product, which is a stupid guarantee from a business perspective, but great for the customer.

35:30Matt Bertulli:Um, there's like delivery and proof of promise. So like, you know, do you have a lot of trust and reviews and all that stuff? Like there's that part of our offer urgency and scarcity. You already hit on those earlier. Like there's only three left or you have 12 hours before this deal expires. Like that's part of the offer. So I just think for people that are thinking about like, how do I sell something? I would spend a lot more time on the offer and how to position it relative to the rest of the category than I would almost everything else in the purchase journey. Like offer can make up for a checkout, in my opinion.

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36:59Matt Bertulli:Okay, so on this offer topic, Sean, Ridge has been around a long time. You guys have probably tried a lot of stuff. GIF with purchase. I know you guys do a big sweepstakes thing. what are some of the offers that have worked best for you? And then are there any that have just completely flamed out that you thought would be a banger and just did not work at all?

37:20Sean Frank:Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought up that discounts aren't offers. Like discounts are a part of offers, but when people hear offer, they're like, oh, you want me to go on promo? No, like honing your offer over time is like, what promises are you making to the customer? And like, what problem are you solving? why do they need to buy this right away, right? So we've explained the offer. We have a lifetime guarantee right now. And let's talk about our rings program because I think it's the best offer we've ever rolled out is that it's never lost forever fit. So what that means is if your ring stops fitting, we will ship you a new one.

37:54Sean Frank:If you lose your ring, we will ship you a new one, right? And there's up to two times coverage. So you buy a ring, you get up to two additional replacements. And why was that such an amazing, We call them no-brainer offers. An offer, when you hear it, you're like, yeah, why would I ever buy from anybody else?

38:10Matt Bertulli:Yeah, you feel stupid for not taking it.

38:12Sean Frank:Yeah. And it's because what we found out in our research is the biggest problem with men's wedding bands is they lose them. It's like, you know, you can't track them. Like, it's a small little piece of metal you put around your finger. and 25 % of men told us that they've lost it in the past 10 years. So it's like, okay, well, we got to solve that problem for these guys. And it's just a no-brainer offer and it's got that business to 50 million a year. I vacuumed up my wedding ring.

38:44Matt Bertulli:So I know it's not technically lost. It's just somewhere in my house's central vac system. I don't know where. Like if I could somehow get a, like a magnet or something in there, I could get my wedding ring back, but it's gone. So this resonates. Dude, that's a great, way to phrase it. What a killer offer. That's frick awesome. So what did you call that? Never lost forever fit? Is that the word you used? Is that what you used to the customer too?

39:10Sean Frank:For sure. It's a never lost forever fit guarantee. And, you know, if you ask anybody before we launched rings, no one thought we'd have any business winning that category. It is omega competitive, right? It's like, there's no, there's nothing proprietary going on. It's little pieces of metal that have existed forever. And you can buy them from any jewelry store. You can buy them on Amazon. You can buy them from Tiffany's. This is literally commodity goods level stuff. So how we approached it, like, okay, what are problems that are still left to solve? And so we launched this and yeah, currently we're doing like 10 % of all men's engagement rings in america so it's like we have a huge a huge penetration in the market right now um

39:59Matt Bertulli:yeah so it's been great for us so okay so on this then so wallets rings you have hit on category expansion a number of times that kind of brings me to like the fifth part that i want to talk about which is this sort of like brand loyalty you know when do you when do you expand categories or when do you try to figure out how to sell people more so like maybe we can break this up into when do you try to sell somebody more of something? And then when do you start to add new products to your brand and expand categories? Like, are there ways that you can help people think about this?

40:35Sean Frank:Yeah, well, going back to like choosing the right product category, I could beg someone to get a second wallet and like I could be on my knees offering it for free. And still, if it was literally free, maybe 50 % of people would take me up on it. And that's how you can tell you're in a bad product. Is that like, it's like, you know, if you're starving, like you'll pay any price for that first slice of pizza. But when you're about to throw up because you just ate a bunch of pizza, no one could offer you anything to eat the next slice, right? And that's kind of like the wallet line on that is one.

41:10Sean Frank:Nobody needs more than one, right? So, you know, we got into product expansion just to solve that one problem. I've talked about it ad nauseum on this podcast, on Titans episodes, my operators, listeners here at Connor talk about it. We talk about it everywhere, right? So you want to be in product categories where there's a natural need and want for more. And Mike at Trevi is doing a great job here, right? They're consumable. It's electrolytes. That's why the meta has shifted so much on.com, on e-commerce, Twitter, on e-commerce fuel. This is the new meta. It has to be consumable, right? Or quasi-consumable, like fashion and clothes or whatever.

41:52Sean Frank:Durables is just like, you know, not it anymore. And that's just because you can sell them more. And there's brands that have great brand loyalty. And I think the fashion companies are doing this, like Buck Mason, right? And so, you know, how many t-shirts do you really need? Like probably four a year. If you buy four t-shirts a year for like six years, you're gonna have a ton of t-shirts. You know what I mean? So like they have to solve... their LTV problems via brand loyalty, expansion out into shorts and pants and jackets and whatever else, right? Where if you're Trevi, you just keep shipping people electrolyte packets all day long, right?

42:33Sean Frank:It's an easier life to have if you're just doing that. So when you get into category, I think category dictates this and that's what you should think about.

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43:19Matt Bertulli:and would you say ridge is like a brand loyalty play right so like you've built the brand you started wall now you're expanding categories and there's like there's brand equity that you are tapping into i know katie from kate lane she's done this across a ton of categories like portland leather goods like they just do everything in leather is that kind of how you view ridge is like look we have brand equity we have loyalty let's pick good categories that we can expand into with the brand that we have for sure and it's porting over trust you talked about trust

43:47Sean Frank:earlier, right? You're borrowing trust from influencers, social proof's a real thing. And what we've seen is just like, we could enter into categories and charge more than legacy competitors. And, you know, we just had a meeting with Best Buy and that's what blew them away. It's like, look, you're on shelf next to the anchors of the world, the apples of the world, right? And you're charging more for your products than them. So they're like, yeah, it's amazing. We don't know how you're doing it, but keep doing it. And that is the trust aspect.

44:15Matt Bertulli:there's also like you hit on this um the gifting element of ridge which i think is another way to so i would call this like for people listening there's buying modes right that you can also lean into so as a brand ridge has a strong gifting element to it right like that is a buying mode that you have but trevi is like a replenishment buying mode then there are things like some brands are great at discovery um i actually would put buck mason here like i think they do a really good job of like curating and designing new things you just go in and you discover new stuff there's brands that are really great education there's brands that are great entertainment um assisted buying deal hunting like we had the what's his face the utopia deals guy on from amazon he's literally sold at least one thing to everyone in america because like he just focuses on the best deal so i think for brands there's just lots of buying modes that you can play with but i will say this i think it's very hard to force loyalty so like i think way back when we talked about like loyalty programs with brands and why they don't work and i think that a big reason for that is like you just can't force loyalty you can't put something in and just expect people to like tap into it.

45:34Matt Bertulli:It's just not how loyalty works.

45:36Sean Frank:For sure. Loyalty is just affinity over time, right? Like proximity over time. You know, am I loyal to the milk I buy or is it just like, that's the one that the store had one time and I guess I'm going to keep buying it. And after five years, I guess I'm loyal to that milk. You know what I mean? I think this is like really a big part of Shark Ninja's success is that Shark Ninja had a horrible reputation, but they stayed in business and they stayed around business for 15 years and now they're trusted it's like that's just all it took they were at target they were at walmart they were making knockoffs but 15 years later i guess they're the trusted brand in um you know home goods so good for them oh dude they've

46:15Matt Bertulli:crushed i also okay it's like on the shark ninja thing this sort of makes me think of like the second part of this sort of like when to sell them more which is just straight up retention uh there's a lot of software and a lot of companies out there that are going to tell you that they're going to help with retention. But the reality is that the solution to retention is often a better product or a more coherent next product, as opposed to like the best time to send out an SMS or the how quickly should you drop the email flow? Dude, it's mostly product like that product. And then like the experience of the first one, the first purchase, like not just the experience of using the product, but the buying experience from like the first ad to when they got it, that will dictate more loyalty than tactically, when do I send the damn SMS?

47:04Sean Frank:Well, dude, I mean, I could give you every tip on earth about how to have an amazing subscription company. I could tell you about, you know, get them to sign up like subscription only, and then don't email them again. Like don't send them reminders. I could give you every little tactical tip to help churn. But if the product tastes bad, people aren't going to buy it. It's like, that's what it comes down to. It doesn't, dude, it could, it could help you jump higher. It could help, it could make you taller. If it tastes bad, you're going to have a churn problem. So it ends up being product for all this.

47:37Matt Bertulli:Yes.

47:37Sean Frank:It's always product. Consumer behavior in a nutshell. If you're listening to this, the one thing to take away from my perspective is when you're going to create your brand, you are going to have an idea in your head about who your customer is, but you have to put your product out there in the world and let the customers tell you who they are. I've seen tons of brands launch and they're like, my customer is this super successful, whatever X, Y, and Z, this avatar they have in their mind of who they are, who they want to be. And then a totally different customer shows up. And if you keep leaning into the wrong customer, tax just go up.

48:14Sean Frank:So put your product out there and then whoever loves it, that's your customer. Lean into those people. Matt, what's your takeaway from this episode?

48:22Matt Bertulli:Okay, I'm going to piggyback off of what you just said. And I think that if you are, even if you are very experienced in consumer and you've been in this space a long time, you want to learn as much as possible about why people do what they do. Okay. So what Sean is hitting on is brilliant. You can't make assumptions around who you think the customer is. You have to listen to the market, look at your data. My recommendation is that everybody goes and reads Cialdini's Influence. I think that book is by far the fastest way to get up to speed on the basics of what influences people's purchasing behavior.

49:04Matt Bertulli:You could probably just read that book and you will be a better marketer. I don't care how good you are. If you haven't read it yet, go read that book.

49:11Sean Frank:All right, guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. Matt just told you to read a book. You got homework. I want to hear. I'm not going to read the book. So you read it. You tell me about it in the comments below. Tell me what I missed. Thank you guys for being here. I appreciate you. Talk to you later. Goodbye.