B (2:12)

First of all, we can just toss a couple of numbers around, right? You know, it's an honor for me to step in and lead the zero team. What do I bring to the table? Well, I have been working in e Commerce for 25 years. There's always been a website there. I've always been working on a site in one way or another. And although, you know, certainly this team has grinded more in very specific way that I haven't. So a lot of, you know, my work is just, you know, learning what they're doing and what's working right now. You know, I can have an idea of something that worked five, six years ago because I was doing it, but you know, maybe hey, what's working right now. So that's where I'm fitting into this is, you know, obviously bringing in general high level knowledge and also kind of merging that with current stuff. Off the bat, I did immediately just start building some benchmarks. The first thing I want to do is like figure, hey, what's good, what's bad in Shopify? Right? Before I wasn't even, I wasn't even on Shopify sites before I came to pilot House. I was doing, you know, enterprise stuff. So I first wanted to just build some benchmarks. And so we, we do look at right away add to cart. Total conversion, direct conversion. And direct conversion you can find if you poke around on Shopify. And that's kind of like conversion after all the noise of different channels always if you add a bunch of unqualified traffic because you're really doing reach marketing, it's going to drive your conversion rate down. So the headline conversion is kind of really volatile. The direct is not. And so for some numbers, look, you know, you want to be doing like Certainly at least 5, but probably around 7 on Add to cart. Right. And you want to be doing little over 2 on.

A (3:40)

These are percents from clicks.

B (3:42)

Percent. That's right. From session. From session.

A (3:44)

From session.

B (3:44)

Okay, say for sure 5 but definitely like, you know, 7% on add to cart. These are medians for us. Yeah, a little over 2 on conversion and on direct. It's like what direct is showing in Shopify is maybe 1.25, around about that 1.25%. So the direct does come in, does come in structurally lower. It's just good to run those two. It's good to run those two against each other.

A (4:08)

So first of all, what's the difference about direct? Like direct just is what, what to what?

B (4:13)

Well, okay, in theory, when someone just types you into the browser, that's direct traffic. And so that would, you know, have a different conversion profile than someone who like clicked was doom scrolling and clicked on.

A (4:26)

You know, there's more intent in the former.

B (4:30)

Yeah. Although that's in theory. I mean, in reality there's so much weird attribution logic that that's going on there. I've definitely grinded this more on GA4, you know, back in the old days, figuring out, hey, what, what's, you know, when something is not set, you know, okay, well, it's getting pulled out of this and put into direct. Point being, of course, it's not simply everybody who's typing it into the browser, of course Shopify is going in and saying, hey, this, let's pull this out, let's pull this out, let's pull this out, let's pull this out. And what's left is direct. Point being is it's less volatile. It is less volatile. So if you want to trend something over time, you want to look at that direct as well. Because a lot of that noise from different. If you just change your channel mix overnight, your, your headline conversion is going to just change all over the place, but the direct one will be less volatile. Does that make sense?

A (5:18)

Yes, it does.

B (5:19)

So those are some benchmarks people can look at right away to be like, hey, are we even in the right ballpark? If your numbers are significantly lower than that, you know, you're not, you're not sailing with the same wind as, as some kind of really established brands.

A (5:32)

Now give me the leverage. What are these high leverage CRO moves that brands can make?

B (5:37)

A lot of the way that we design our service is to get brands from here to here quickly. Right? Because people come to pilot House, they sign up, they're going to spend, you know, 100,000 bucks a month on advertising or whatever. It's going to be right. You know, some people are spending a million bucks a month on advertising. So it's like, okay, well we better get that bottom of funnel. We better get some wins right off the bat. So here's some things that maybe you could even, maybe get done in time for Black Friday. The first thing we do is we make specific pages on the site really, really fast. We use an external tool called niche. And by the way, if anybody uses niche through us, they get 50% off on their, their niche fees. But anyway, point, it doesn't even need to be niche. Although we, we use them as a partner, we love them. So feel free to use that Partner. But the point is a page tool that will just load killer, killer fast. Because let's just say you've got 25 PDPs. I'm just picking a number, 25 PDPs and you know, probably four or five of those are like just. It's probably a Pareto distribution. You got five that are doing tons, right? Probably the majority of your traffic goes through of your majority of your revenue goes through those five pages. Because it's a choke point. To get something in the cart, you got to add it to your cart, right? So you got to go to that pdp. So we find that choke point, which is your top five PDPs and make them load really, really, really, really fast. Because we know and Google publishes these numbers, you can go find them. Like if the, if something's taking more than 3, 3 seconds to load, people are bouncing, right?

A (7:09)

Not going to make it.

B (7:09)

So. Yeah, and three, three seconds isn't this magic number if it's taken more than one second, a bunch of people are bouncing, right? And it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse. So by just using a tool to make that page load really fast. What Niche does, by the way, is pulls out a lot of the kind of stuff that's running for regular Shopify. It doesn't, it doesn't need that. It just pulls out a bunch of the crap that runs in the background. But it's Integr Shopify. It's in the same domain. So I should have Richard at Niche on, on the World Postponement Attention podcast. He can, he can describe all this better than me, of course. But anyway, it's on the same domain so you don't lose all your tracking. You can pull over an add to cart button. You can pull over a checkout start button to go right to checkout. It's just a, it's just a cool type page. Get it loading fast and you get a conversion boost on one client. The Niche page is running twice as many conversions as the incumbent. So you can get like quite a crazy boost on that. That's the first thing we can do. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm.

A (8:05)

Wait, I love that one. I know Richard too. I went out for dinner with him when I was in Toronto. Great guy.

B (8:10)

Have you had him on the DTC pod?

A (8:12)

I haven't had him on the DTC podcast, no. We'll have to. Have to look at that.

B (8:15)

Get him on the pod and talk about it.

A (8:17)

So Niche, Niche, down with your pages. And these are PDPs, these are directly These are product pages that go right to Shopify checkout.

B (8:24)

Well, we do it on PDP because it's again, we're talking about like it's the 7th of November. Right. What could you possibly do right now?

A (8:31)

Well, you take speed bumps off the Runway is what you're saying.

B (8:34)

Bumps off the Runway. Yeah. That's very good. Hey, good one. And like, if you've got like a listicle or whatever, you've got another landing page in between, you can build any landing page you want on Niche, but it's going to have to go through that pdp. It's a choke point. I've got a recent episode on the world's best email retention podcast where I talk about eight critical choke points on a website. And the add to cart button on the PDP is a critical choke point. Everything must go through that. So just make that thing better. And your whole site is better, right?

A (9:03)

Yeah. Laser focused.

B (9:06)

Yeah.

A (9:06)

The other was bundling. What are we doing to maximize the value of each of these sessions?

B (9:13)

Yeah. And. And again, this is something we can do, we do do to just really get results fast. By the way, if anybody wants to get an idea for what we do, rebuy a case study for Pilothouse for what we've done with a brand, KMtools. So you can go to rebuy, check out that case study to get a better idea of what we're like a really deep idea of what we're doing. But, like, importantly, you can, like, increase your AOV by 8% with rebuy very easily. We find that very common. And that's 8% more revenue. So let's just say you were $12 million brand or whatever, Right. Well, that's an extra million dollars a year for no ad spend.

A (9:54)

Yeah, incremental no ad spend.

B (9:57)

That's the kind of thing that, like, if you're. If you're in one of those spots, I've been there, where you're like, I've got these huge targets. What you're. If you've got these huge targets, what you're looking for is what's the one thing I can do this year especially. I mean, we're talking Black Friday. But let's just think about 2026. You're like, oh my God, I got 2026. What you want is what's the one thing I could do to just make this number? Is there one thing I can do to make this number? Well, let's say you had this like 10% number. I'm telling you, depending on your on your catalog, if you've got a big catalog, if it's, if it's appropriate, we use rebuy primarily. There are other tools that do it. But if you've got a catalog that's appropriate for on site recommendations, bundling and you got like a 10 growth number, you could do your whole growth by just rolling that tool in. It's possible.

A (10:44)

Talk to me about what's different because I know we've bundled like we've been talking about bundling on this podcast for years. What's different about the, I guess hard coded or manual bundling that we would do on a page versus what rebuy does?

B (10:56)

So one, it's more flexible, it will interact in more touch points. We did just analyze this against another tool that a prospect was using and their tool didn't offer recommendations or bundling in as many places in the site. Right. I mean we're told that niche has higher quality recommendations. I mean I've never analyzed their machine learning, so I don't know that.

A (11:21)

But it's working.

B (11:23)

It's working great.

A (11:24)

It's working. Yeah.

B (11:25)

We use this to take clients from here to here really fast. Like within a month you can have results. Technically speaking, it's the seventh. If you said I gotta have this for Black Friday and I mean Christmas is still after that, right? And you said I gotta have this, you could get set up with that in time and get some results. You can get results within a month. And yeah, again, someone can go check out on the world's best email retention podcast. I go through Urban Outfitters and their kind of recommendation system, their complete the look system. If anybody wants some ideas of how you might use that. But realistically, just at every stage of the purchase journey saying, why not add this? How about this look, add this to this, right? If you do three of these, get this discount if at every single point. And the, the way to think about this is if you walk into an apparel store, you're browsing around, okay, you're browsing around, maybe you're going to buy something and then someone comes up and goes, hey, you know what? Actually customers, I had a customer just like you who bought this and it looked great with his look. What is that? That's a recommendation. That's other people like you bought. So stores in real life, stores do this because they know it increases sales. Why wouldn't you do it on your site as well?

A (12:43)

You mentioned choke points and I thought that was interesting. Let's walk through a scenario where I've clicked from an ad onto the page. Talk to me about the critical choke points that have to be optimized for that person.

B (12:55)

Yeah, very good. Look, I'll just give you the eight choke points. But then I think we did talk about pdp so we can talk about Homepage after that. But if we just think about home category PDP and let's just say cart checkout, put them together because sometimes the cart slides around, you know what I mean? To just theoretical. So homepage, category page, pdp, cart checkout. At every stage you've got theoretically two choke points. The one choke point is where you must click to progress on the pdp. You must click add to cart to get it into your cart. Everything goes through that button. That's a critical choke point. Of course there are, there are systems that you can sometimes you can go right to check out. But let's just keep it simple, right? You must click on add to cart to progress. That's a choke point. Also if you do heat mapping on a page, the place where the people focus their most attention, where they stop scrolling, where there's lots of clicks, right? That area is a choke point as well. Because it is, it is actually. I mean it's, you don't know. It's either stopping people from progressing or it's helping people progress. You know, you gotta, you gotta look at it. You know, you gotta look at each case individually. But it is a choke point. If you put, so if you put attention on that, you've got high leverage for your time. And if you put attention, that's the secondary choke point. And the primary of course is what they must click to progress. So if we thought about it, we've got, let's say you've got Homepage and you've got a button to a category page, right? Category page, you don't necessarily have a button, but you would have some recommendations and also you would hopefully have your category ordered like automatically ordered with products that are going to appeal to that person based on their browsing history and similar users browsing history, which you can kind of do with rebuy. That's that to a point. And then there's wherever they're focusing on the hot jar or whatever, right? And then pdp, you've got the button, they must click on the button and then you've got wherever they're focusing their, their attention, which might be the slider with all the videos, it might be some, some guarantee warranty information, right? And then same deal with, with cart checkout. So that's your Choke points, the primary and the secondary based on progression and heat mapping. Makes sense.

A (15:17)

It does. I think the other thing we talked about, I did this podcast with Nate Lagos who was talking about the biggest levers for helping him forex his revenue at his previous company, Original Grain was had really like the text on the page was just so, so important and the who the text spoke to, how it compelled them to do the action. What are you seeing about text optimization on pages and how important it is.

B (15:41)

The text that works is the text that you would want to focus around those choke points. Right. To fit it into that model. But if you guys check out on the recent pod where I had Sean from the founder of Alia on, he confirmed what, what I've been saying on the pod for years. It was nice to have him come on the pod and just basically say exactly what I say. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's nice when it does, was that it's the text, it's the copy that optimizes their pop up. So and a pop up is just, let's just call it a page. They do a full takeover. So it's a page in my mind, the design, the quality of the design, the imagery that justifies the price point. But what actually puts the idea into someone's mind, you know, click on this, buy this. You have to use language, you require words. That's why it's called a call to action. Hey, check this out, right? Shop now. So learn more. I fully agree. And if we thought about where we would apply that again, we would apply, generally think about applying it around, around a button where someone has to progress, but also to flip that on its head like we were talking about, we talked about PDP which is this way down funnel choke point with really high quality traffic. Everything must go through it. Now not everybody has to go through the homepage, but a lot of people go through the homepage. You're probably going to find your best two pages are best. Two pages for visits, for traffic, for page views are your homepage and your top category page. That's gonna be where the mo. Where you get your most eyes. Unless you've got some like just crazy blog post, you know, then like that just went crazy viral. Unless you got that right. So because of that, getting people to progress properly from your homepage is where you can get a lot of leverage. And so of course, one look, go to mobile, make sure that the whole product is visible, right? Make sure the homepage looks good, the product's visible, you Know, maybe someone using the product, whatever. Right? But then that banger headline and a button, that button should progress either to a product if you've got a small catalog, or it should progress to a category page if you've got a large catalog. That way it does the whole thing. We did talk about what about below the fold? But the fact is we do know not everybody scrolls below the fold. So you want to have your above the fold homepage make people progress. And so, yeah, sure. One, add a button, make sure you're going to a good place like category, make sure the product is not covered over, and then everything should be focused on that one headline. And here's the trick. You don't know on the homepage. Like, if you knew, for instance, that they were problem aware, you'd be sending them to a problem aware landing page. Right? If you knew they were problem unaware, you'd be sending them to a problem unaware landing page on the homepage. You've got just seriously, this headline and this headline, this one line has to really spell it out. Was talking to a brand that did organic cotton pants, and the line was feel organic again, Seed Pants client of ours.

A (18:44)

Yeah, I know seed pants. He came to our event, Blake.

B (18:47)

So, yeah, they're great. You guys should check out the pants. Actually, you know what, I watched their video on one of our landing pages, and they've been our client for, you know, for a while. And I used to do a bunch of. I used to do a bunch of rock climbing and yoga and stuff before I had kids. Now I'm just doing jiu jitsu. And so anyway, I, I kind of had a feeling for their product and their whole. But after watching the video, I love the power of marketing. After watching the video, I was like, I went to my wife, I'm like, we gotta. This is the kind of stuff we need to buy for our kids. The whole thing about it being organic and none of the plastics and stuff like that, and it's like, it's amazing, the power of marketing. So he says, feel organic again. And the thing is, it's a, It's a. There's two things going on there. One, it's feel the organic clothing, but then also you yourself feel real. Don't feel fake, don't feel the office.

A (19:35)

You know, and it's asking you to feel. And another thing that came up with the podcast recently with Seth Waite, the CPG buying expert was like, often people think of their founder story as just being like, here's my story with the product and Why I made it. But there's also like, if you can reflect in your marketing how it will make another the customer feel, rather than how you felt in building it. It's more about the customer. So that that headline really speaks to that.

B (19:58)

Well, first of all, it must be about them, right? Like, why did the. To go to. Just to. I've saved this lot for email, but it should apply on website as well. It's like, look, if they're going to be persistent audience for you, it's because they feel that being on your list or whatever is helping them become the better person they want to be. And so it has to speak to them. So it's saying feel organic again. And to wrap. To bring this back in. What are we saying here? We're saying that sentence and maybe a subhead is all you get. That is what's going to make your homepage work or not. And if you get that sentence and subhead right, and then just some normal stuff like don't have the copy, totally cover your product. If you get those right, people are going to progress to that next stage. And there's so much traffic that hits home that you're like, whoa, my God, look how much more we got on our category page. Or look how much more we got on this product page, right? And you, you increase product transfer to a product page because it's a choke point. Everything, everything goes up. And I'll close this by saying we do plenty of audits where we just have a gotcha above the whole fold. Homepage mobile version. And it's like, this doesn't make any sense. What you're doing here doesn't make any sense. And so many people see it.

A (21:13)

As you're talking about Homepage, it makes me think of the experience I always have when I go to the Uniqlo website. You ever go to the Uniqlo website? I think they, they have so many skus and they have so many categories that I've. I've had difficulty at times, like just browsing their clothes, trying this, because it's like if you go to their homepage, you can see they just have so many features on each thing. They gotta win a trip to Tokyo, they've got their new Labubu or whatever kind of characters. And it's like, I just wanted to, like, I guess it didn't know that I wanted to see men's sweaters or whatever. And I can go up and navigate to it, but I just. I'd be interested to know if you just took a Quick look at their homepage. Like what you would. What you thought of Uniqlo's homepage. Let me just do a little. Just. Just go to Uniqlo's homepage and see if it's like. I think maybe it's just so such a big brand that it's got to have all these different branding exercises on the homepage.

B (22:01)

But it seems I'd love to feature it on the world's best retention podcast, where I do a lot of fashion brands, but, I mean, yeah, there's a lot going on here. Oh, look, this is very similar to something I saw when I did recently. I did. Yeah. American Apparel, Everlane and Urban Outfitters. And one thing I'll say is, as I said, we don't know much about what's going on with that consumer when they land on the homepage. If we did know, we would have actively sent them somewhere more appropriate for their needs.

A (22:32)

More relevant. Yeah.

B (22:33)

So when. Yeah, there's so much going on here. I mean, also, if you're going to put some, like, some weird, campy video, you're going to put it on the homepage. You're not going to put that.

A (22:44)

You know, that's true.

B (22:45)

Over. Over the category page, you put a still because you don't want people to focus there. You want people to scroll down. But you can do really brandy things in the homepage because, again, you don't know their level of intent. The level of intent may be very low. So that's where you would take a swing on some interesting video, like these little guys running around that I see here. And then down, trip to Tokyo. Okay. That's where you're taking a swing on this stuff and saying, hey, can I? Can I? Because you got such a wide audience, you have so little. It's so low intent, relatively speaking, to a PDP that you want to try your widest reaches and say, how can we get someone and progress them to another category page or another. Another page. So as I scroll down, that's what they're doing. And then we get to actually get into clothes. You know, third one down is close. And they're going to just try to peel me off and kind of send me into somewhere. So, look, I'll say, you're right. It's more chaotic than, you know, an experience on a category page. It is similar to what a lot of other large apparel brands are doing. I don't have access to their metrics.

A (23:49)

Right. The trip to Tokyo is a really interesting approach because that's going to appeal To a lot of people. It's going to like instantly maybe enhance the shopping experience knowing that if you, you know, you can go visit them in Tokyo. I visit them in Fukuoka actually in 2004. I remember buying a jacket in 2004 from Uniqlo and being like, this store is cool.

B (24:07)

Yeah, yeah. And so like I see multiple apparel brands doing this with their homepage. So my guess is they've tested it and, and it's what works. And so, you know, I would certainly what like what I've been doing my whole career. What is the best brand doing? How can I copy it? Period? Right. So I would want to run this exact same thing, you know, kind of with my, with my apparel brand homepage. Have the, the coolest content and then just peel people off into different kind of themes.

A (24:38)

Probably add some buttons though. There's no buttons on this page. You got to have something click. Something looks really clickable.

B (24:43)

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think you're right. It's. I mean I did kind of notice that on the scroll. I didn't really see anything. But I mean you're right. It's like it's kind of button free. And the reason people use buttons is because they work. We were actually, we're actually just talking about being more scientific about being ever more scientific about button placements in email because we say an email is a shoppable landing page. So button button density is one of the things that we are going to research in 2026.

A (25:13)

I can't wait to have you on the podcast to talk button density. But let's wrap it up there. So just to recap, we are talking about making lightning fast PDPs using products like Niche. We are talking about bundling and absolutely maximizing every session upwards of 8% with bundling tools. Like what was it called?

B (25:35)

Well, no, go check out the, the case study we discussed. It's like upwards of 20%.

A (25:40)

Yeah, I was going to ask you said cam tools, they can go find that. What was the, what's the headline on that Cam tools case study?

B (25:45)

I just Google rebuy cam tools and it comes up nice.

A (25:50)

But it was good.

B (25:51)

The results were good enough that we did a case study on it.

A (25:54)

There you go.

B (25:54)

For sure. You know, the results can be at least what, what they show in that case study. Of course if anybody wants to work directly with us, they can come to Pilothouse Co, fill out the lead form, we'll speak to them directly. But you guys can just go out there, you've got weeks left and Then you've also got Christmas. You've got time out there in the audience of Sphere to just get this stuff installed and start running this stuff to still capture, you know, some of that upside during Q4.

A (26:16)

Nice. 32%, by the way, I just googled it. 32% KM tools using rebuy's personal personalization post purchase tool. So job well done. If you're not listening to TWA Burp, you've got to go Google the world's best email retention podcast with Jordan Gordon TWA Burp and start listening to it. Because this guy's a madman and always fun to reconnect. We gotta have you back on. See, we gotta stop just running reruns when like your podcast. I. I like it when you come on. I like the interaction. We gotta do it more.

B (26:44)

You know what it was, we launched the pod and I mean, I had to just focus on getting content on that pod.

A (26:49)

Yeah, we still do.

B (26:51)

Yeah, totally. But not just the time thing. I needed to like what I'm saying on that pod has evolved. It started out very basic. We, then we started talking. Hey, let's talk to like, let's speak to nine figure brands and see what they, you know, and then let's. Let's talk about channel kind of integration. So now that I've done that and I've got over a year worth of those episodes, I think it does make sense for me to come back here and, you know, help, help, maybe package. Not everybody necessarily wants to go back and listen to 56 episodes or whatever it is and just have some conversations with what, with what you're going through right now and see how any of that kind of fits in. I'd love to come back on more often now.

A (27:29)

Let's do it. Thanks, Jordan.

B (27:30)

Ciao.

A (27:37)

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.