[DECODED] Additive to the Cart: CRO Decoded

Phillip: [00:00:02] Welcome to Decoded, a podcast by Future Commerce, brought to you by BigCommerce. Hello, and welcome to Decoded, on this, the final episode of our 2nd season. This is Episode 5 of Decoded as we've been talking about taking a new product from concept to cart. I'm Phillip.

Aaron: [00:00:24] I'm Aaron.

Phillip: [00:00:25] And we are putting a nice little bookend on this season, and I thought maybe we could start here at the top about the way that we've covered a lot of ground and how we've talked about the way that you create products in the world, and then now we're going to move into the cart portion of it. Aaron, what are some of the highlights of this season and ways that we can bring it together for today's final episode?

Aaron: [00:00:51] I think a lot of highlights and a lot of good insight from here, but I go back to something, that Loretta Soffe told us on the 1st episode around the the process of how you innovate inside of your product assortment, inside of your business, your categories, the amount of intuition and data that have to come together to generate the case for making a change, bringing a new product to market, going into a new market maybe, or even creating a new category. And I think that's something that as we've progressed throughout this season, we've talked so much about measurement. We've talked so much about customer satisfaction, customer service, all the touch points along the way, and how it all cycles back on itself ultimately to that marrying of intuition and data.

Phillip: [00:01:42] And I think that when you bring intuition and data together in the concept of the cart, it's hard to talk about the way that the shopping cart, exists in 2023 at the time of this recording without looking at it as sort of a fixed paradigm. It has a known, and expected way of functioning in delivering both the catalog experience and the checkout experience to a customer. And I think the general idea and the generally accepted principle in dealing with eCommerce websites today is that you have to sort of play into those customer expectations and you can't deviate too far from them because if you do, it's either not a best practice or it somehow will be disruptive to your business and your efficacy in that channel.

Aaron: [00:02:36] I believe I've heard someone say that there are no best practices, but I bet we can find that in the show notes later. I think this is sort of at the root of something that, Phillip, I think you probably heard a few times in your professional career, which is that the cart is a commodity. It's the end point of the customer journey, the brand story, there's all this exciting creative stuff and multiple journeys that get orchestrated to create the path from discovery, from discovering the brand, discovering the product, populating a wish list, populating a shopping cart, a lookbook, interacting with influencers, with media, and then at the very, very end of all this exciting creative orchestration, there's this sort of banal little click at the end, and then it's over, and then you die? I don't know. I don't wanna follow the metaphor too far, but I think it's the fact that checkout cart technology is so ubiquitous and has been abstracted into such simple solutions, on various platforms anyway, that it's not interesting. It's not interesting to brands. The money part is interesting to the CFO maybe at the end, but the exciting stuff, the brand stuff happens all before the cart.

Phillip: [00:03:58] I would even say that there's a school of thought today that maybe the exciting stuff doesn't even happen in the catalog or in shopping and merchandising. It's happening in the ad unit that got you there. So the ad unit, the creative, the UGC, wherever that point of inspiration was, it's not always in your website today. Some of the discourse in the ecosystem is that the innovation is happening where tools have fewer limitations. And there are a lot of limitations on the way you design for the web, with some of the tools and, I don't know, the HTML box model, things that have existed for 30 years where pixels and video have very little in the way of limitations, and there's a lot of creativity in those channels. So the further down the funnel you can shove someone from that point of inspiration, maybe it skips over the whole eCommerce experience and lands people right in the cart. And so the cart actually becomes a place where it is yeah, maybe it is commoditized.

Aaron: [00:05:15] I love it. The exciting part happens in the ad unit. Is this episode also sponsored by a retail media network? Possibly.

Phillip: [00:05:23] {laughter} $10,000,000,000 opportunity. What I think challenges all of this is that there is a thriving ecosystem around optimization and testing and how you can make those web experiences change and evolve over time by challenging some of these strong and maybe sacrosanct sort of held beliefs that there are things that are true. Maybe there are things that are able to be proven as untrue, and conversion rate optimization in particular gives us a method to test all of these hypotheses, with scientific rigor, Aaron.

Aaron: [00:06:04] That was a really long way of saying, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."

Phillip: [00:06:08] That's true. And, today, actually, we're going to get into some of that. Our guest here today on our 5th episode of Decoded Season 2 is none other than Brian Schmitt. He is the Co-Founder at surefoot, which is a conversion rate optimization testing company. He has 20 years of experience in delivering optimization. And by his account, testing hasn't really changed all that much in these 20 years, and maybe the shopping cart and the nature of the shopping cart really hasn't changed all that much either. Do you have A perspective on what types of brands should be testing and what types of tools they should be using in their journey?

Brian: [00:06:54] So we're, so definitely not the cheapest option out there for A/B testing personalization service. And our general client is north of 8,000,000 through the website annually. A) They have proper ROI coming out of the engagement. And B) it's do they have traffic? And that's really the limiter that most people run into is they try to test, and they'll run a test for a week when they have 4,000 monthly uniques coming in. That test will have to run for 9 months to hit statistical significance. And people don't realize that. They see it in the testing tool whether that's Convert, AB Tasty, Masto, there are so many out there. Bloomreach. The tool will say it's hit significance, but it's only looking at a real small slice of data, and you haven't hit the sample size needed yet. And those tools don't often calculate that for you, and that's something you have to do before the test even starts to know how long you have to run it. That's just a factor of how many people are just gonna see the experience and how many people are gonna convert to the next step in the experience that is your primary metric. And so [00:08:09] a lot of those sites just don't have the traffic to support testing in the proper way. And they're making decisions then on bad data, and that's where people get frustrated with A/B testing. [00:08:18] It's like, "Oh, we tried it, and it didn't work because we saw this test that ran for 4 days, and the tool told us it was great. We made it 100%, and we didn't see the revenue gains from it after that, and it was supposed to be a 30% revenue jump." And it's like, "Well, you were slicing it on too small of data, and it was a false positive because of that."

Aaron: [00:08:35] And we set our targets already. Do you find that it's true that there are, sort of universal UX patterns that work? I can remember being told that, every cart should have a countdown timer on it. And if you don't have a countdown timer, you're losing sales. Can modern CRO make definitive statements about all cart and conversion paths like that or maybe not so much? And is it true that a timer will boost everyone's conversion by 20%?

Brian: [00:09:09] {laughter} First, let's talk about that timer thing. I think [00:09:12] there are opportunities for a timer to actually improve conversion rate, but I would say, in general, no, a timer is a bad thing, creating a dark pattern of false urgency for your customer, and they trust you less over time. [00:09:26] But, yeah, I think there are some general rules of thumb that should be followed in UX. Navigation probably should along the top for the most part, on a desktop website. You probably should have a hamburger menu for a mobile website unless you have a really basic, navigation that you could have 3 things across the top or something on mobile. And then people wanna use their cart to pick and choose. They throw a lot of things in their cart, and then they'll cultivate it from there and decide what they actually wanna buy and what they don't wanna buy. And I think that's a practice a lot of people have adopted over, especially in the last 3, 4 years, of shopping. When you have a home page, you have to tell people what you sell. We still run into clients who talk about all the good things they're doing, and they never actually tell you what they're selling or what their Offering is on the home page, and you gotta show what you're selling, have some basic architecture in the eCommerce side: category pages, product detail pages, and those kinds of things.

Phillip: [00:10:29] You mentioned the homepage, and that kinda got me thinking about, well, how do people get to home pages anymore? Most people are discovering your site through a specific means. Maybe it's through meta ads or through Instagram's customer acquisition through Instagram. So how important is it that a customer's perspective of you follows them around through all experiences with your brand, especially if that's coming through one door these days? That may not be the home page.

Brian: [00:10:58] True. Yeah. One thing we're definitely seeing a lot of traction with is what we're calling ad landing page parity. So based on UTM brands, we can identify at least what campaign they came from. So many of the ad platforms mix and match for you now the different aspects of your ad. But if you can contain it in the campaign, creating that landing page parity where you use at least some of the same copy, some of the same imagery to grab them when they come in is a really good thing. It improves click-through rate, which then impacts your CAC, and builds trust with the customer. They clicked on an ad. They landed on a page that enforced that trust of "This is the ad copy I saw and the imagery I saw, and I'm seeing it repeated here," it's a really good thing. As far as pervasive throughout the entire site, I think it's important, but it's a big task to handle. It takes a team to do that kind of stuff, especially as fast as ads change over time. I mean, you see some companies are changing ads daily, weekly, and having that parity set up in your site is a whole huge endeavor. Especially if you wanna really make it an experience that goes throughout the site. If they click to a different page from the landing page and you're still perpetuating some morsel or thing. My favorite thing to talk about is remember the movie ET And the Reese's Pieces trails? You lead your customer on a Reese's Pieces trail through there, and it can be a big endeavor. So if you just start, I think just starting with the landing page and getting that going and measuring it and making sure that you are connecting those bits for people, and seeing how they click through and if they add to cart, if that's possible, on the landing page, is a good way to get started.

Aaron: [00:12:51] How should a brand prioritize what's testable surface area, and what's really something they shouldn't screw around with? How do you think of that? How do you advise your clients to think about where the valid points are to test and how much is too much?

Brian: [00:13:08] So for our eCommerce clients, it's really all the way up to checkout. Everything's testable. The checkout gets to be pretty locked down, especially by the platforms. And they've done a lot of testing in general as as I'm sure you're aware, Aaron, of what an optimal checkout experience is. But the cart, I feel like is by brand, b site, really. Getting people to the cart and then what they do on the cart. Sometimes you can have products. It's really good to have some other product recommendations in the cart. Sometimes you have clients where that is the worst thing you do, you're just distracting the user from getting on to the checkout. And we see that from client to client, among our portfolio of clients. It is not a best practice to have product recs in the cart. It's not a best practice to have product recs on the PDP. Having them there can also be... And where you place them, whether it's up higher closer to the fold or down at the bottom of the page can vary from site to site, and where the buyer is. And maybe that's a good thing to test. You've got a repeat buyer coming back who's already been on this page before, and you know that from your cookie if it's in within the 7 day window, but they haven't bought yet. So maybe you start servicing product recs higher up the page to get them to maybe see something else and be more inclined to buy. If they're a new shopper, push that down at the bottom of the page. Don't distract them with that. Let them dig into the details of the product they're viewing.

Aaron: [00:14:43] Phillip, when I was a young man in eCommerce, a long time ago, I was told that, as a developer at an agency, we weren't supposed to touch the cart. Now this is back in the Magento Day. So it was a different proposition then.

Phillip: [00:14:57] Are you allowed to say that word on this podcast?

Aaron: [00:15:01] It's a dead brand that has no corporate ownership. So shout out to certain friend, mutual friends. So, yeah, I haven't said anything that's that's an actual competitor. {laughter} Good one. And I think what was really underpinning a lot of that is the notion that, one, you said at the outset of this episode that you have to meet customer expectations while the cart's been solved. The checkout's been solved. And if you go deviating from that, you can only really hurt yourself, which is, maybe that's an untrue thing or something that can be, exploded with data, but it was definitely a perception at the time that, "Look, cart's been solved, guys. You don't wanna touch it because you'll just cause problems for yourself by introducing variables into what is a known happy path," basically. There's a best practice, and the vendors have figured out there's no reason to do anything else.

Phillip: [00:16:05] Well, okay. I have kind of an alternate take there because the agency days that I experienced were the exact opposite. We used to sell the aforementioned software product on the basis that it was the only one at the time that gave you the freedom and flexibility to make alterations to the cart and to the checkout. Now that sometimes came at great cost, but the idea that being creative in the cart, where you were closest to where the transaction, like, high intent, high risk, high reward sort of a territory is that you could most make meaningful changes to the conversion rate by tweaking and making more efficient things that happen lower in the funnel. For instance, it it was well beyond just colors and theme, it was, also testing things like what legal wanted us to put into the cart and checkout. Today, you might see terms and conditions checkbox, which big big corporates were putting in place before. The best practice of the day, had you listened to it, would be "Remove all friction from checkout." That means no CAPTCHA, no TNC checkbox. That means no email capture in cart or checkout. But what we found is that enterprises actually required those sorts of things because, I don't know, arbitration clauses and not being sued. There were all kinds of reasons that they were pushing against us at that time of what the prevailing best practices were. It's like removing all of the friction. In reality some of that friction was necessary for the business to actually justify experimenting in the channel. And so also being really creative was part of the way that some of the brands were able to justify to their brand and marketing teams that the eCommerce team that was owned by IT, were being good stewards.

Aaron: [00:18:06] Yes. And think you might have just put your finger on it a little bit. And I'm really curious, in hearing more from Brian too about how we disentangle creative from data in terms of experimentation with the cart and the checkout. So how much of what a technologist does in that part of the funnel is driven by the brand identity and the brand values, and the need to infuse all parts of the process with that brand? And how much of it is driven by "We ran these set of experiments over time and determined that if we move this block here or we remove this offer or we add a different offer, conversion rate goes up some number of percent?" I think for your experience, what you're saying is those were maybe separate conversations. And for me, those were often the same conversation. And I think maybe pulling those apart would be very valuable for any brand that's thinking about how much they want to invest in a custom conversion path, how much they want to spend on it, how much they wanna measure it.

Phillip: [00:19:11] Last thought there too is the customer can be irrational depending on what they perceive the value of the product is. And so there might be a type of a checkout experience, doesn't matter how much class you have to crawl over that you're willing to go through because you feel like it's worth the investment because you feel like you're receiving something in return. We see that with celebrity brands quite often. Celebrity brands tend to be high creative, but the high creative actually lends to a lot of friction in the way that you discover product, add it to your cart, and check out. And sometimes that's like the chief criticism. That criticism doesn't seem to hold customers back from actually, I don't know, stocking out the store. So it's an interesting perspective on how much that product innovation and what we talked about in the 1st few episodes can drive the way that you make decisions in the cart itself. I think when brands get to a certain size or scale that they become very internal process focused as opposed to customer obsession... So you sort of start turning away from that, and you're trying to make the business more efficient. And that focus on efficiency often leaves you with one view of your customer, which as you grow probably changes over time, which I guess comes back to the why for optimization. I have heard, Brian, that there's a new concern around optimization these days, which is not that it doesn't work, but maybe it works too well. I've heard people say that sites can be overly optimized. Is there such a thing as too much of a good thing? Is there a balance?

Brian: [00:21:01] I think, you have to take it all in context. Overoptimization tends to be people running tests for too short of a period because they're worried about throughput of test. Because you hear, you definitely hear in CRO circles of the biggest factor to a successful optimization program is the number of tests you can crank out in a year. And, yes, that is true as long as you have a rigor around those tests. And you are doing the thing we talked about of calculating the sample size you need with the minimum detectable effect, and you're getting statistical significance on your test, all those things. And so overoptimization, is an ever evolving thing. Like you hinted at just a second ago, Phillip, of your customer is changing, and then the profile of who they are changing. And maybe it's you started out with three personas that you were targeting in your business early on, and now you've got six, and you're not even aware that you've got those added three. You need to go back and revisit that, and then learn how to talk to those new three customers through your website. So it's an ever evolving thing. We have one client, and this is an anecdotal story, but it's a good one to tell just to illustrate what it's like to have a continual optimization program going. This company essentially had a really static home page for a very long time. It was kind of untouchable. We finally convinced them to let us test on it. And then about a year down the road, one of the other higher ups saw the site and kinda just commented like, "Wow. I really hadn't seen that we've done a redesign on the homepage. I love it." And our person on their site said, "We actually didn't redesign. That is seven tests over the last 14 months." And we know four of those were winners and three of those were losers, and so we know exactly which ones added revenue to the bottom line, which ones didn't, and those changes obviously are no longer live on this site or there's things that existed on the site before we found out we're hurting revenues, so we removed them. And the comment back was, "We'll never redesign. We'll always be iterating, and you may look at it another year and think we've done another redesign. It's just been iterative process to get where we are."

Aaron: [00:23:17] That's the right way to approach it, I think. I wonder sometimes as you were, Phillip, when you asked the question about oaveroptimizing, I was thinking a little bit about Apple, which you name dropped earlier, Brian. So let's make sure that gets into the show notes for SEO reasons, Apple Apple Apple Apple, iPhone 15 Titanium. But you think about brands that, obviously, they want to convert. They want the money, but they want you to linger a little bit. They want you to spend time with the brand. Maybe they want you to explore lifestyle content, maybe they're trying to hook you for a possible upsell or a social endorsement later. And so the way that, say, a retailer approaches CRO might be different from the way a brand approaches, CRO. And have you ever run into a situation where maybe someone had over optimized in a sense they removed all the friction, and it was just a speed run through the site into the cart checkout for a $10 item while they're trying to sell you on $100 items or to get you into a store, a physical store, let's say, for fitting or something like a custom like a style engagement or something. Does that ever come into the conversation where you actually have to slow down a little bit or recommend that they slow down a little bit?

Brian: [00:24:36] Yeah. One of the more surprising ways we've seen that manifest is in quizzes. And less a quiz, more of a guided shopping experience where you have them answer questions and then you filter the products down. And [00:24:56] we've certainly had clients where the longer that quiz is, the more bought in the customer becomes by the end of the quiz because they really feel like it's been optimized to them and what products they're seeing. And if you make that too short, too easy, and you have too broad of answers at the end, people don't believe to quiz, and so they're less likely to trust the answers that come out at the end of it. [00:25:17]

Phillip: [00:25:23] One of the things I witnessed back in my agency days and also on the brand side was the readiness of teams, especially creative teams and management to look at the standard bearers of the day. Of course, they were Apple and Amazon back then. There's still the standard bearers today, but the idea was that they were training our customers how to shop online. And while that might be true, we made the assumption that they were doing the testing for us. They were figuring out the best place to put the buttons. They were figuring out the best text for call to action, the color of the button, the placement of the H1 on the page. And so looking at those sorts of things took the creative decision making out of the mix, and we started looking at them more as, I don't know, like the venture capital model. Like, if so and so put their stamp on it, it must be okay for production.

Aaron: [00:26:16] Yes. Yes. I mean, right. And this is partially by job today as well. I think a little bit about those conversations, though, with brands where the perception was the right creative, the right button style, the right taxonomy, the right imagery is what made Apple really successful, which is a ludicrous idea. The brand and the products came well before the parallax was invented or whatever the particular CSS trick that this customer really wants to emulate is implemented on Nike's website, for instance. And so, yeah, I completely agree. I think it's very low hanging fruit to go look at a lifestyle brand, a wildly successful brand, and say, "My digital strategy should mirror theirs because, look, they're big." It's the causality backwards, I think.

Phillip: [00:27:13] I think it comes back to a few things too. One is that the actual technical architecture of most catalogs and then the shopping carts that are grouped with the catalogs, requires a team of people to make changes to, and that requires a lot of consensus. It requires a lot of planning, and it requires a lot of orchestration amongst many people and all of their opinions. And so there's a trump card that you can sort of play by saying, "Well, so and so is doing it, so we should be doing it too." The other thing is I think that this industry in that era was very dominated by IT. And I don't want to say they're fundamentally uncreative, but their job is not to be creative. Their job is to quantify risk and to manage change in an organization. And that generally is not open to a lot of creative testing ideas. So let's actually get back into our conversation where I think you bring out this idea of how competitive analysis can be both a crutch and potentially a differentiator.

Aaron: [00:28:26] You were talking about the split testing, and I was thinking about sometimes my job includes competitive analysis, competitive intelligence for eCommerce platforms, for BigCommerce. And so I spend a fair amount of time on either my competitors' websites or on sites built on that platform and things like that. And I always wonder, am I getting A/B tested? I'm curious how much competitive analysis drives the testing hypothesis because, one, is that sort of a thing that you would recommend that people do... "Hey, I'm looking at my competitors. This is how their cart is set up. This is their flow. These are their calls to action. We should emulate that because they're kicking our butt." Or not. How do you know that what you're seeing is their actual flow and not some split test you got jumped into?

Brian: [00:29:13] How do you know? You don't know often unless you're hitting it continually, and then you see it update, from one day to the next. It changes. And I think you can take inspiration from your competitors, but you have to remember that they're advertising differently than you. They're doing different ad budget than you. They might be reaching for a deeper audience on their ad budget sending traffic in, and so they're trying to optimized depending especially on how you picked up the site or how they're bucketing you in their traffic segment. You may be getting an experience that's different than everyone else. Test or not test. And so take those ideas with a grain of salt and test them yourself. Don't emulate them without testing.

Phillip: [00:29:59] So I do think there's also this idea of if you can do too little of something, you're not optimizing enough, then there's probably the other example where you probably can optimize too much. And in our conversation with Brian, Aaron, I asked the question of how much can you overoptimize? What are some risks of sort of feature laden websites that become a little too frenetic, and maybe are trying out too many ideas all at one time in hopes of finding some dopamine hit. I don't know. Some means of moving a customer through the funnel that maybe actually start to work against each other. I think that this is really interesting modern outcome of optimization, but I don't know if Brian totally agrees.

Aaron: [00:31:44] Yeah. I'm not sure that he did, but I do think he had some good points to make. And I would say that when it comes to overoptimizing, the other piece that can sometimes get dropped is the brand identity that we were talking about earlier, where if I have a team that is dedicated to optimizing for the transaction, you can tend to sand off the rougher edges of the brand that might be the pieces that stick with someone and make them come back for another visit, and I think that's definitely worth talking about. When we talk about goal setting, I think that's a theme that's run through the entire series is what are the goals. The goals, could there be higher goals, Phillip? Is there a higher goal than simply that transaction? Let's listen.

Phillip: [00:32:29] Could be. I think that that's a question that every brand is going to have to ask themselves now in a plurality of channels, and some you have more control of than others. I would say eCommerce you have the greatest control, and that might be the place where it can lend itself to being a higher experimentation channel if you allow it, but that requires, again, coming back to our prior point, you have to be creative, to get the most out of it. And while you might have the tools to be really creative, maybe sometimes being too creative can work against you. I think that some of the characteristics that people have said are optimization, but maybe you don't consider them to be optimization are more around the lines of one weird trick. Like spend to win being a really good example, where some people might call that optimization, but in reality, they are maybe a cheap parlor trick. What's your perspective on those things being called optimization? How would you differentiate what the practice of optimization looks like in a modern eCommerce business?

Brian: [00:33:41]  [00:33:41]I think the practice of optimization is not a specific treatment of a website. It is the practice of trying things and measuring the difference, of the new thing versus the old thing. That is it. [00:33:58] And it's really about what... So many people, I think, orient it to the bottom line of the business and what's best for the business may lose sight of what's best for the customer. And that is what is really the difference between a short term and a long term viewpoint of all of this. And I think a long term view for healthy business over many years is to optimize for the customer experience and what serving the customer and what they really want to be served and the experience they're looking for, versus a short term, what is best for us in this quarter or this month or literally in this test. I've seen that definitely happen.

Aaron: [00:34:38] That's interesting. And it kind of implies there's a level of maturity needed from the business to engage in CRO. I'm curious if you've ever had a brand or a retailer approach you, for services, for advice, and you go through, you do a review, and you're like, "No. You actually don't need CRO. You've got other foundational things you need to deal with." I know for me personally, I've worked with brands who were like, "Hey. I'm ready to start doing split testing," and for a long time my response was like, "Hey, are you segmenting your email sends?" "No." "Start there and then come back to me when you have more meaningful than data about your customer base and who's engaging with you." I'm super curious. Are there prerequisites for CRO success for a brand or retailer? In your mind, is there anybody you would ever say, "Maybe not today, but tomorrow?"

Brian: [00:35:47] Yeah. The obvious one being enough traffic. And then I think that's the key thing. I think after that, it's really a team. Having the right team on the client side is super important. You gotta have someone who has ultimate decision making capability. When you start having a lot of cooks in the kitchen who are providing input and thumbs up, thumbs down on test ideas or designs, you really get a backlog of things, and it just it gets bogged down and and when you get to that throughput issue, you can't get test live if someone is holding it up, and you need someone who's got real authority power on that side to be like, "Nope. We're moving forward with this," or "We're not. We're killing it," or whatever the case may be. And then, of course, having the engineering support that you're gonna need to hard code the things that do win. And sometimes that hard coding isn't as straightforward as you think it might be, especially if you're trying to serve a specific experience to a specific audience. You gotta be able to have some sophisticated things on the back end. Maybe that's managed through the testing tool. It gets a little dangerous sometimes if you start running, especially if you're doing ad landing page parity stuff and you have 15 experiences running through a testing tool, the snippet overhead gets really large and can slow the site down. And you have to balance that piece too of it.

Aaron: [00:37:13] I hired a conversion rate optimization, and then now I need to hire a performance optimization because my time diversified is... Yeah.

Phillip: [00:37:22] But, you know, a dentist would tell you that not every temporary cap that's put on a tooth results in a permanent crown either. I think there's a certain kind of a person who will probably run their testing tool like a CMS at some point and utilize whatever is out... Every day we drift further from God's light, if you will. It's like every day, we drift further from whatever the base Experience on the website was.

Brian: [00:37:51] At one point, we had a client who had their Christmas home page up from two years prior as the base layer, but no one was seeing that because we had everything managed to the testing tool on the homepage. So if the testing tool ever went down, people were gonna Christmas in July from two years ago.

Phillip: [00:38:08] Yeah. You get the flash of unstyled Christmas.

Brian: [00:38:11] Yes.

Phillip: [00:38:12] There are technical barriers that you encounter on the way to optimization. Some are technical, in that do you have the technical team and the technical staff? Some of them are organizational and do you have the buy in of leadership to be making these types of changes. But are there actual limitations in the year of our lord 2023 that there are just some platforms or some pieces of software integrations that are harder than others that make you sort of say there's still room to grow up, but testing may not be for you. What does that look like?

Brian: [00:38:46] A couple years ago, everyone was going headless quite a bit, and that was difficult on the testing side for a little bit until we figured out some ways to manage that on the testing side, and we figured that out. It's still a lot of overhead in the test build itself, but it's not instrumental by any means anymore. I think the other big piece of it is people have so many custom code bits in the background or they've got a homegrown platform. We've got a makeup, personal item client that's all homegrown. And so everything we need, they have to have an engineering team go back and create an endpoint for us to grab on to an API or something like that. And so that can be difficult, if you don't have, again, the resources to support it. Whereas BigCommerce and platforms like that typically have all that stuff out of the box, so it makes it much easier to test.

Phillip: [00:39:52] We've come a long way, baby.

Aaron: [00:39:54] We really have.

Phillip: [00:39:54] This has been five episodes, but we've covered a lot of ground. But it does feel like this particular episode is a bit of a microcosm for the whole series of the impact that you have of making things in the real world comes with longer timelines. They're atoms. They're not bits and bites. But it's effectively this idea of CRO and optimization hypothesis and testing, goal setting. It's what we've been talking about all along.

Aaron: [00:40:24] That's right. I think the series title was From Concept to Cart, And I think we've been to all the axis of history, all the way back around, and it's from concept to cart and back to concept again because the data that you gather from your eCommerce channel, from that cart, from that transaction, goes in and feeds the next concept, which is going to feed the next experiment in the cart. And it's a virtuous cycle that, hopefully, makes money and delights customers.

Phillip: [00:40:55] And I think that's where we could come back to the way that we opened this, which is [00:40:59] the leaders that excel in businesses that are generational, like the Nordstroms of the world, that can continue to stay culturally relevant over time, they have high conviction and high intuition because they are in tune both with what the brand delivers and what their customer expects of the brand, and that has to come through in the eCommerce channel today more than ever before. Maybe [00:41:20] a great way to end this would be to call back to Loretta's words.

Loretta: [00:41:28] It's funny. I learned about that BS meter way back in my day when I was talking myself through something like this. And Blake Nordstrom came into my desk, and he was like, "Boom," pretending he hit it and goes, "Your BS detector is broken. I can't believe you bought that line of answers." So because of that, I think my BS detector is is on higher alert. I would say that series of questions, again, [00:42:03] if they haven't really dug in and detailed out customer desire, behavior, life stage, priorities and if they're not really able to articulate that, the rest of the whole thing is gonna be garbage. I mean, it can be food and beverage. It can be accessories. It can be beauty, wellness, but you've got to get to a pretty significant and specific level of detail to develop product. And if you're not able to develop that level or have that level of knowledge, your product isn't gonna be good enough because you don't even understand what you're going up against. [00:42:43] So I'm an eternal optimist, and I kinda feel like I can find opportunity anywhere, but it's gonna fall flat if customer and competition isn't really, really kind of specified and decoded, if you will. When I think about when you said, like, a low margin, high volume item category brand kind of almost being like a halo effect. I think that just comes down to what's your tolerance. What's your tolerance for lower margin business and its effect on the total. And in some cases, like designer, if you don't have a regular price designer customer and they're waiting all year for it to go on sale at the end of a season, that might be a drain on the total margin. However, those designer customers or that designer section in your store might bring aspirational customers in that browse, look and see, and then buy the cheaper version. And that halo effect is probably pretty tolerable if it's contained. So I think it's like if you're managing the business, you just have to have that understanding of what's the goal for the total, and every category, segment, channel isn't gonna perform the same, and I'm willing to kind of sacrifice a little here because I know it's gonna bring traffic or sales or attention or some halo to my grader. It can't creep so that it negatively impacts the grader. And I think, again, that's where experience, intuition, and the balance of art and science in the business comes in where you can have a number of different scenarios. I'm so visual that I would draw three different pies, a pie with no low margin business. Okay. Well, what does that look like, feel like, make customers kind of do when they come into our our store, our website? Then let's have the hybrid of a little low performing with a lot of high performing, and we can tell great stories and/or really big, low performing, and we can tell amazing stories, but it's gonna kill our profit because they only buy on sale. And the the the answer is probably gonna be again, it's gonna be a blend of data and economics and intuition and creativity and storytelling and ebb and flow. And maybe there's times at the beginning of the season when you wanna tell a full designer story knowing that none of that stuff's gonna sell a regular price, so you better not too many stories. You better start promoting the stuff that's high volume, high margin. And so it's just it's that's where the creativity and the experience comes in.

Phillip: [00:46:10] Aaron, thank you so much for joining me on this season of Decoded.

Aaron: [00:46:14] It's been a pleasure, Phillip.

Phillip: [00:46:15] It has been my pleasure, And it's been a pleasure to have all of you who have been listening. We do have more episodes of this podcast and other Future Commerce properties for you to check out. If you wanna go deeper, beyond the concepts of the cart, maybe, you wanna see around the next corner, and we can help you to do that at Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast and all Future Commerce properties at FutureCommerce.com. And, of course, we want you to check out our partners, BigCommerce, who helped us to make this season of Decoded possible. Thank you so much to BigCommerce, who I think are doing really interesting and creative work in the way that They're helping the eCommerce industry move forward. So thank you so much for your partnership. Thanks so much for listening to Decoded. You can find more episodes of this podcast and all Future Commerce podcast properties at FutureCommerce.com. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, which comes out three times a week at FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe.