2006 – Discover the Future of E-commerce: Trends and Tips for Shopify Entrepreneurs with Clayton Bates

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1:05With us right now, it's Clayton Bates. Clayton, you are a Shopify expert and you are the founder of Inspire Small Business. You are found on the web at InspireSmallBusiness.com. Clayton, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me. Yes, and I should point out that we are recording. Thank you so much. You are in Australia and we're recording this in the middle of the night for you. So thanks so much for this conversation. Would you mind, Clayton, maybe just sharing a bit about the work you do and who you serve? Yeah, no dramas. Yeah, we help. We build and rebuild Shopify websites to convert more visitors into paying customers.

1:48We've been doing that six years now. We've worked with 600 people and over$100 million has went through the websites we've built. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, indeed. Why is it that there's a need to potentially rebuild a Shopify website? So it depends what stage of your business you're at. But most likely, people make certain mistakes. Like they might build their website themselves. They might get it to like$100 ,000 a year. but there's lots of little things that they're missing that can improve the conversion rate, average order value and stuff. And then anyone making like millions of dollars a year, normally there's little 1 % of things.

2:31If you improve them, you'll increase that, the conversion, average order value, stuff like that. No website's perfect. So there's always room to improve. Yeah, and indeed. So maybe you could share, I'd love to hear maybe some very common things that you see among e-com websites. We'll speak a little bit more broadly that are just like, so you see it often and you're like, please don't do this. Like, and it's just, it, unfortunately for whatever reason, a lot of newer business owners may fall into this trap and anything immediately come to mind? Yeah, there's normally five things that people mess up or they can improve.

3:18So the first one would be the homepage. You really want to flow that page. You really want to think about what you're putting on the homepage. So that's really important. The second one is the product page. You want to have all the information about the product, build trust, benefits if you can, and have it in a way that's easy to read and consume, especially on mobile. The third one is site navigation. So normally the more products you have, the more important site navigation is. about 33 30 people excuse me are going to use your navigation so you really need to know that one little ninja hack is to bring is to build out a main menu one way for desktop and a completely different way for mobile because people are experiencing your website different ways the fourth one is the checkout so you want to have your logo there your colors you want to look very branded in the checkout a lot of people on shopify they actually forget to change those settings because they're in a different section to where the colors are.

4:17So if someone has a big rebrand, they often forget to change that stuff in the checkout. And then the fifth one is just mobile friendly. These days, 50 to 90 % of your traffic is probably going to come on a mobile. So you really want to optimize for mobile. Yeah, no doubt. So I would imagine, Just think about like the typical person that starts an e-com business. Like it's easy to make these mistakes and likely comes from a certain degree of enthusiasm. Maybe they've just watched a handful of YouTube videos. Do you mind maybe talking about, I'd say, the general psychology of an e-com business owner and also, you know, just typical life cycle?

5:05Um, you know, and I think part of it comes down to, I don't know that there is necessarily a huge, uh, wall, like there, there it's, it's, there are a huge barrier to start an e-com business today. Could you maybe talk about that part of a little bit? Yeah, it's pretty easy to start a website. There's lots of free tutorials and stuff on the internet and stuff like that. but I think what there's two things that I say a lot of the time I think people build their website on a desktop and they're thinking desktop and they don't focus as much on mobile so that's like a really big mistake that I say and then the other thing is like people are so much in their business that normally the website if it's making sales it's normally the last thing for most people to think about like they're focused on shipping orders like rush rush uh build a social media um sort of thing so just like one example is that a lot of people don't put effort into their about page and one to five people out of a hundred will go to your about page if they read your whole about page they're super highly likely to convert into a customer so spending one or two hours on your about page could mean thousands of extra dollars a year but because they're so caught up in other things i think it gets a bit lost it gets overwhelming a bit daunting um so like our service takes that daunting task off someone and basically we we build everything give them training videos so they don't they can update little things themselves or they can hire us forever um so that's normally the difference the other thing as well we've worked on 600 websites Now, I've interacted with thousands of businesses, so we sort of have a pretty good idea of like what works in every single niche.

6:59Good to know. So when someone when you work with someone, what does that typically look like? Obviously, you know, again, when you're bringing in an expert, I mean, there's going to be some investment. And could you maybe share just a bit about what that engagement looks like and what you would what you generally hope to have your client experience in terms of like a before and after? Yeah, so mostly when we do a rebuild, the first thing that's the most important thing to us is that we send them a free video audit of their website. So we actually go through and give them tips and suggestions. so whether they work with us or not um the interaction with us is positive and good because i always believe you what if you put good things into the world good things come back to you so i'm always very big on that uh then we'll jump on a call uh find out all their issues go through a lot of different things see what they like on other websites stuff like that um then we'll test some stuff out um when they're happy with it we'll launch the website and go from there and we'll track a lot of things.

8:04So let's say if their conversion rate is like half a percent, we'll go back, we'll document all their conversion rate, average order value. In a week or two, we're really monitoring everything and then trying to improve things to make it the best it can be, if that makes sense. So that's sort of what we do. Yeah. Thinking ahead of where we are in e-com, This is what you do. This is all you do. I mean, you know, again, clearly have some great authority in this space to folks that might be a little bit on the outside. Let's say that they're in the B2B world. They don't necessarily do econ themselves, but, you know, but they want to stay aware of what's going on.

8:45What would you say would be some of the major trends that not only have been recent, but you would say, yeah, pay very, very close attention to this, this and this over the next six to 12 months? What comes to mind there? Well, I guess the big thing at the moment is AI. Yeah. So like just for example, the content you can write for your website is unbelievable with AI and stuff like that. if you're an expert in your field so let's just say you sell socks and you're you're an absolute expert in socks if you use your expertise and enter the right things into the into ai it's going to come back with really really good content like i always think the more you give the ai and especially if you're an expert the better the material comes back so you're actually just making everything better on your website.

9:39It can't really code very well yet. They can do basic code, but we're even looking into that, like trying to integrate coding into website using Aeon and stuff like that. But yeah, I'm always looking for trends and seeing, like having an open mind to other things, if that makes sense. Yeah. Who, from a personality standpoint, or, you know, what are some thinking that if you were to hear this and let's say a founder or a new founder that not so much about the practice or the exercise of what they're doing or the tactical, what they're doing, but what do you think is helpful from a belief or a behavioral standpoint?

10:27Like if we think about the traits that make a successful e-com leader today. What's your opinion on that? You have to be consistent and you have to have a good mindset. I reckon it doesn't matter what business you do, one of the most important things is mindset. If you have a good mindset, then it's nearly impossible to fail. So if you're consistent and have a good mindset, that's really important. But the one thing I have noticed is like a lot more people, especially since the pandemic, a lot more people, they want to feel a connection with the business. So if you're the face of the business and people like you and stuff like that, you have a competitive advantage over like going to Amazon or Walmart or whatever.

11:17So yeah, people want a connection. So if you're consistently rocking up, posting on social media, building a brand that loves you. I think that's really important as well. Yeah. And how important is it? You were talking about the about page. I, you know, even when I'm doing business in any comment, I mean, unless it's maybe like Amazon or something like that, I usually want to check out the who. Like, I want to know, am I going to get scammed? Are there real people here? Like, you know, also to like I'm interested. I might not be completely normal. I'm not, you know, but but I'm a little bit interested in the story.

12:00I'm interested in the in the people involved in this product. I mean, if nothing else, I want to know what other humans have to say about this product that I might be making a purchase on. Yeah, 100 percent. I think that like people underestimate stuff like that. That's why I've been going on a lot of podcasts and stuff lately because when I get on sales calls, people are like, oh, you said this on the podcast. I watched your video, your about video. I watched your video reviews, all the stuff like that. I always think if there's 20 reasons why someone buys something off you, one of them might be they watch your about video on your about page.

12:38The next one might be you have 145 star reviews. The next one, you've won 40 awards or be finalists. Like one's a Shopify expert. So if you keep stacking these things on top of each other, it really makes a big difference, especially service based businesses as well. Yeah. So it's all these little things, all these one percenters all add up. So making a good about page is definitely one of those things. Yeah. Yep. I love it. All right. So I know that you've got some resources to our friend that's been listening to this conversation right now. Do you mind maybe just sharing a little bit about, hey, listen, if you've enjoyed this conversation, here's some things you might want to take a look at or things that we make available to the e-com community.

13:24What should our friend do? So the first thing, if you have a website and you want a free audit, we do a completely free video review of your website, giving tips and suggestions. So that's really good. the other thing as well the five things i said before they are important and i always think the the three really main things to a website is the traffic that's going to it so if you've got good traffic that's going to help the second one is the flow and how the the website works and then the third one is the images a lot of people underestimate images on a website so for example i can build the same fashion website selling women's clothing.

14:07But there's a big difference between someone who did a selfie and then someone who had a photo shoot and stuff like that. So I definitely think images are underrated for a lot of businesses. Yeah. Your website, inspiresmallbusiness.com, what would you recommend folks click on? Just, yeah, free video review. Yeah, just grab that. that's i've done 2 000 of them now so people really love those videos um so yeah grab that if you want a brand new website just click uh new website and and we'll have a chat jumping up for something no dramas at all yeah i like it okay yeah in fact um so again it's inspire smallbusiness.com um it's right on the front page um you'll see under services it says free video review.

14:57Just click on that, fill out the form and bam. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. It's great conversation. Clayton Bates, again, founder of Inspire Small Business. Thank you so much for being a guest. All right. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate your time and thanks for listening, everyone. Cheers.

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