What to think about when opening an online store | Ep. #19

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We’re drinking Blackboard No. 06 – Peach Belgian Blonde with Coriander and man was that sweet. We’re also discussing an incredibly important topic around what you need to know when starting an online store. E-commerce websites cover 20% of the internet so this topic is crucial!

Beer of the Episode

Blackboard No. 06 – Peach Belgian Blonde with Coriander

victorybeer.com

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Transcription of the episode

Errors courtesy of automation

00:07 Hello I’m

00:08 BGC, and this is neely and this is craft thinking. Today we are talking about things to think about when building in on online store is actually a lot that goes into it. We’re going to keep it to the basics, but after that you’re going to have a basic idea of what you should be focusing on when creating an online store to get us all ready for this important topic, competitive topic. So what we need to do is we need to get some, some beautiful liquid gold. We’ve got to get loose, loose, get relaxed,

00:45 kneeling.

00:46 What do we got here in front of us? So we’ve got some victory beer. It’s a blackboard series, Belgian blonde with coriander. It’s a mouthful to say to be honest. What is coriander? Um, I can’t answer that. So at that time we were in the park and we went skipping to the coriander fields, hand in slow motion with the music. It was a beautiful, beautiful somebody maybe that might show up on our facebook.

01:17 Yeah,

01:18 I will never release those ever. Fair enough. Let’s go and open this up, see if I can taste the coriander. Smells good, right? Just like how I knew, didn’t know how. Keep a huckleberry this phase. I don’t know how it tastes.

01:38 Yeah,

01:41 it is very sweet. I tasted the syrup and the after taste almost like a sour. Ah, where did you get me into a man? Uh, so this says I’m. Oh God, that must be the coriander. All right. So

02:09 yeah,

02:10 bursting with fresh peach and spice room was. They’re not lying. That’s bursting with some peach for sure. This Belgian style ale features stone fruit notes. I don’t want to. Stone fruit notes are with a touch of sweetness. If this is a touch of sweetness, I feel like I just got punched in the mouth with sweetness, which normally would sound like a good thing, but this isn’t a very bad way. This is like if like Mike Tyson was a really sweet dude but could still punches hard.

02:41 Like

02:43 that’s where this would be like, ah. And it says with a refreshingly dry finished, this is more of a sour finished to me, this, this Tommy’s almost tastes like a sour beer on the after taste. Just back to back bad beers. Like I, oh my God, to the injury, the first episode that I do not finish your beer. We have to finish it. It’s under our contract, man. We did pinky swear brew Masters Approval. Apparently bill wrong approved this because that’s so they put on the bottle bill. Bill, you should maybe have. Maybe he had to put his name on this. Maybe he’s the victim here. Besides us. Maybe it’s one of those things. If he doesn’t put his stamp of approval, we’re gonna fire him because his job is to approve the beer. I’ve had some victory of beers before.

03:41 Um,

03:43 I was expecting at least decent, but I just, I can’t bill. Bill. Why? Why? Oh Man. Uh, I don’t know if I can finish this honestly. We have to do it. We have to do it. It’s like a death packed we have. So our, we’re going to, we’re going to try to drink these all the way through our, through this episode. Guys, I, every time I take a drink of this than I am to Justin. Oh, I’m, I’m trying to take them as like big shots. Just super quick and done. I will say when you do as a giant gulp it a tiny bit better. Just a tiny bit though because I originally. Yeah, we’re about the same. Before that I had more than you. I took a giant gold gold and now we’re even. So, uh, you know, we’re okay. We’re, we’re not gonna. Let this reflect on victory brewing. We will come back to trying other things where there’s. What’s your rating on this, Justin? I’m a beer. Not The brewery

04:58 man.

05:00 Like, like a one point five, one point five or one point five or two point five. I think we’re in complete agreement. Is it the coriander? Maybe that we’re tasting peach. Maybe it’s coriander and maybe it just doesn’t belong in beer or is like a syrup. I don’t feel like it’s like, uh, I went to starbucks and ask just for like Peach Syrup with fucking coriander, which whatever that is, I don’t know. And then I drank that. Okay. Yeah. Let’s, let’s talk about something different than this. The original topic at hand. Things to think about when building an online store. It’s a, everyone’s selling something online these days. It’s pretty easy to do that, but only about 20 percent of ecommerce. That’s interesting fact. I mean, it’s

05:58 something that um, majority of websites or business informational. Right. And when you shop online, how many people are really selling online? When it comes down to it, there’s Amazon. Of course, Zappos, I get a package almost every day because I’m a girlfriend or. Yeah, no, every time we’re here there’s another package coming in from Amazon or Zappos. But wait a minute. Who Owns Zappos? Amazon, right? I’m trying to drink this beer quiet because I was asking Justin, but I saw the look in your eyes. You’re like, oh, he’s drinking that beer. It’s going to be well, but then there’s, there’s some other online retailers. You may have a couple, but guarantee you that majority of what you’re doing online when you’re looking at a business business, informational type of website, it doesn’t minimize the importance of e commerce. There’s a lot of people. Twenty percent of a few hundred million sites is significant.

07:01 It’s very competitive. It’s very tough. I want to start at the beginning. I want to start at the homepage. What do you feel? What do you think about that? How many sites have you been to that you’re just like, here, buy my products, products, products, products. What’s the point? Just to get in sync with that feeling. I’m going to take a sip of this beer. It’s awful. It’s awful. Seriously. What if you guys have an online store when you’re building it products. People don’t come to your site just for products. Well, yeah. Think about it this way. Having A. Having a homepage on your for your online store where all when they go there, what they see as our products and prices. It’s not a welcoming, welcoming feeling. Home page has to welcome your customers. It has to invite them to do what you want them to do. Right now, having just that homepage with products and pricing, that’s pretty much it. Like a lot of small business owners make the mistake of doing is like going into a car dealership and the car salesmen sees you. There’s no, Hey, you know, my name is brandon or what are you guys looking for?

08:21 Models of cars and prices that are around you. That is what you are doing. They are coming into your digital storefront and here you are going $25, android cases, $15, blackberry cases. Well you have a blackberry. Put $5 right there. Just yelling, just yelling at a product and a price at them and the thing I have to ask yourself, do people really want to be sold? People don’t want to be sold. They want to feel like it was their idea to buy and that you provided an experience that could give them a solution so that they could make the decision to buy and you can use psychology so they feel it was their idea. When you’re building your website, if you do some basic things. So with the homepage, if you’re building an ecommerce site and you’re going to have the homepage, just what would you have on the homepage?

09:19 So pretty basic. You’re going to have your header image, a nice, beautiful image, a quick little call to action either welcome, I store and shop now a type deal and then below that you’re probably gonna. Have some of your featured products that you were most popular or the ones who are really trying to push for, but how many are you talking about here? Because again, people, three products that we’re both in agreement. We didn’t rehearse that part there. A study with a candle shop. They basically had all their products at once. I think it was like 24 different candles and they did a split test where they had all 24 candles out that they were selling it at one time and then they had the next day. All they did was sell three candles with the. The day that they only had three products, they sold so much more.

10:10 It it’s tough to sell. Have that many choices. Like if you went to a car lot and you. You’ve seen all those cars or those indra cases and there’s a ton of them. You don’t know what to pick. Well, yeah, imagine before you even talk to a salesperson, you just walked through the entire lot and looked at every single car. It would be overwhelming and they don’t want you to do that. That’s why right when you walk on your out to find you, to provide you an experience because they know it’s too many choices. Restaurants, most menus there have been simplified massively because too many choices up front as a bad thing. When you are building your home page, make it inviting, like have a beautiful logo on there. Have your slogan, um, have a greeting card company. Go to Walmart.com. You’ll see they have practically no products on their home page.

11:09 Get the card for dad on father’s Day. Click here to shop father’s Day cards, and then the image will change, uh, celebrate graduation the right way, the car that they will have forever to commemorate this amazing occasion most days during that same time, give the gift, the most sentimental gift you can to mom who’s made all the sacrifices for you. Click here to shop most day cards, cards on the homepage, beautiful slogans and they’re calling and they’re a welcoming and always other ngs that I could come up with, adjectives I can come up with to get you to a page that you will then want to see prices so that you don’t feel sold to. Right, and if they have a monitor, again, there’s going to be maybe three. There might be an example of a father’s day card guard and they graduate and they’ll typically say, starting at these prices, like an example, starting at $4, ninety nine cents. Mother’s Day card starts at 5:00 tonight and since father’s Day card, right click here to see more. They’ll just feature usually that category. So remember your homepage had been fighting and you should get, you should try to use it to get them to a place where they will then be comfortable buying with calls to action.

12:42 Now with the home page to what I would actually include is add social proof. The majority of people base an online review, the same as if they’re a personal friend gave them that recommendation. So if you add some other, some reviews that people have said about you right on your homepage, obviously not right in the view port, right? The very first thing they see, but down a bit. So when they scroll and then they see it, it adds emphasis. It’s like, okay cool. So you are legitimate business people do like what you do. I want to take their recommendation more so than just you saying hey, my stuff is awesome. I have been more inclined to actually buy from you.

13:20 No, it’s our own episode on how to build effective homepage. Stay tuned for that episode once I get rid of this damn beer. So stayed tuned for that. In the next couple episodes. We have one, I’m sort of visits planned next, next time a record. I think that’ll be on the top of the list, um, because you need to have a great homepage and, and they’re 10 minutes. So I think we’re going to put the rest of it on there. Well, let’s talk about some other things on there. I’m in. I’m going to bring up this next one. I, I’m a very visual person. You need to invest in good images, meaning if you want to show care through your products were just give our take on this. Hire a product photographer. You can usually get them for very affordable prices because they’re photographers and they’re hungry for business. Typically there’s a billion of them out there, but finding a photographer, she can showcase your products. You don’t have a retail store. You’re doing this online. You need to make them feel as if they had the equivalent of holding in their hand. So you need good images of all angles of your product. If you don’t, if you have a tangible product and you have less than five images, if you don’t have five inches of it, you don’t have enough images. I’d say five is the sweet spot tenant most

14:46 now I see brandon kind of prefaced that because I’m an advocate of free. Um, if you, if you can accomplish with three without wasting a ton of your time, then I’m all for it. And I have sort of different little life hacks. But I agree with Brandon, you have to hire a photographer for your business. So again guys, I build websites and when when clients provide me images that just the god awful, I have to have that conversation with them and let them know that me putting this image on your sites actually hurt you more than it actually going to help you. Like we need to invest in.

15:25 Yeah. Think about the sites you’ve been to. Think about the sites you’ve been to that the, the, the like you saw that they propped it up against the wall so you have like corporate and then fall behind and what’s your thought about that one? It’s an Ebay seller, whether it’s their own website, whether it’s on etsy versus that one where it was taken any photo light box by a professional photographer, and it really just showcases how beautiful this product is. Which one are you going to buy? Not you’re thinking about these two separate products. Even if the one with a better photographer present your $5, you’re going, that just looks like this is coming from me to legitimate seller. That’s what I’m going to go invest in. Good images on the actual product page itself. Have multiple images, showcase your product. Where do you want to tackle next yearly?

16:13 Um, so basically what that, what a website that’s selling anything should have an SSL certificate or secure socket layer. If you’re super interested in what that actually stands for, but an SSL, what does an SSL guys, if you don’t know what it is, I’m sure you’ve kind of run across it at the top of any address. Go to craft thinking dot calm and you’ll see the https colon slash slash. You’ll see a lock symbol. You’ll see brandon over here just like gagging on this beer.

16:46 I just finished it by the way. He’s got a quarter left. It encrypts your website so your data’s secure. The credit card information’s jumbled up. I’m going to phrase it a different way, right when it comes down to it, you don’t need to know exactly what dps. It protects your customer’s information when, when they, when they, when they’re on their computer and they type in any information, they click on submit. It pretty shields it and protects it. As information is transmitted across the Internet to your website. It was a lot of places hits along the way and helps protect that. It protects your customers’ personal information. It boosts their confidence in you that you’re protecting their personal information. It makes Google happy, makes Firefox happy. It makes a google chrome happy. It makes everybody happy and more willing to list your website in the search engines, so there’s a lot of benefits to an SSL.

17:39 We’re probably going to have another episode on that one. I think we’ve actually talked about like four or five times probably. I don’t care what type of e commerce site. You had to have an SSL. Now you have to have an SSL on your current commerce site. If you invest on the next topic we’re going to cover here, and I was a merchant provider. I personally prefer my small business owners to be able to accept credit cards on their site rather than click and pay pal link button, it goes to pay pal. It’s more expensive to have your own merchant account. I get it. It does look more professional because most of the time we stay on the website and put our credit card information and I’m okay if you have that option and the paypal option care to your customers, but given that option now you will not get approved to be able to process credit cards with any merchant account in the world or at least in the US, mostly to the world even in, unless you have an ssl because otherwise the information you can get hijacked as it goes across the Internet because it’s not being protected. It’s not being encrypted, as Justin said. So make sure you get necessarily before you pay application fees and get yourself into possible contract with a merchant account company. Um, we’re going to come a little bit back to that. We’re talking about building wordpress versus maybe a, um, a like a template builder because those different capabilities built in already.

18:59 So before we jumped into the next part, I really want to talk about stripe. Stripe is a phenomenal merchant provider. It’s similar to paypal, but you can accept credit cards right on your site. You don’t even need anything super extra. You actually doing an ssl on your site, which is kind of scary. I don’t know how they set it up, but yes, I’ve tested it and it is secure and it’s encrypted at the SSL SSL. Guys. Don’t skimp out. Just those that kind of like the those fun facts. Stripe is huge. Here’s the reason why they’re not going to. The cells are there to protect your information, have the customer’s information, and to build trust. One hundred percent is to build trust. Even if they’re not buying anything, they’re just looking around. You want to build trust. We were taught, if you don’t see https,

19:49 don’t put information in and even if you don’t, if you’ve never heard that, understand nine out of 10 of your customers live and die by that, don’t, don’t alienate 90 percent of your customers on this.

20:03 So now going back into kind of what brandon was a segway into, um, there’s online store like website builders, and then there’s word press with woo commerce. We’re going to talk about woocommerce and using word press and if it’s actually right for you in the next episode, next episode, preview hosts that teaser freezer. It’s like the next to the vendors movie except a lot more boring and I feel I feel it’s equal, but either way. Um, this is, I mean, I just wish I was being paid to do this. Like Robert Downey junior on the vendors know that. I know it’s, it’s interesting. But, um, yeah, that’s, we’re going to talk about that a little bit differently. We’re going to talk about more on next episode when it comes down to it. If you choose a hosting provider that you’re using their proprietary builder, um, it’s all, it’s easier.

20:57 Commerce usually more custom looking, more capabilities, more merchant accounts you can choose, but at the same time, usually if you’re using something like go to your shopify, whatever, they just give you the merchant account options that you just, it’s easy to integrate right then and there. So it is, there’s an advantage to go through places like got it. And shopify, those are the main two I know of personally. I’m a big cartel, they tried to be big and I, I haven’t seen any, anything cartel. They’re little. Yeah, yeah. Twenty four. It’s like the that like six foot five guy, that guy that called tiny. It’s, I think it’s more ironic. Right? So, um, we’ve got that on there. Some of the things we want to touch on. I think these are some pretty basic things. Keep it organized. I have put your products in categories.

21:44 You have multiple types of products that make the navigation organized as well. Just making sure that everything on the site looks organized and uniform and consistent all the way through. Last couple episodes ago, I forget, but mouseflow.com. If you, your sites up and running, if you want to kind of see what your visitors are doing a, this is not a sponsor anything, it’s just just our personal opinion, but you can see what roadblocks are hitting. So if you don’t think your site super organized, recorded what your visitors are doing to figure out where those roadblocks are and fix it. But to add on to the next part, make sure whoever provider you’re using has some sort of way to actually capture emails so they place an order, it goes to your email marketing list, or if they want to sign up for like a discount, you have it in your email marketing list.

22:33 Yeah, there needs to be somewhere on checkout and option for them to sign up to receive promos, coupons and product updates and hopefully auto checked and yeah. And you want to have auto check. Think about every ecommerce site you have ever been to, one that has been seen as credible and professional. Established that box was there, it was pre checked for you, liquid Amazon has done. That’s how one of the reasons I have such a loyal following that policy has been pre check since the beginning of their launch. The low average for a subscribers about a dollar a month, right? The low average. Yeah. So definitely have that on there. And then with just like when we talked about Google analytics test everything, test, everything was far as what feature products worked. What didn’t, uh, if you’re, uh, when you, when you try to cross sell how that worked, the images that you use in order on your site and make sure that we’re exactly. Make sure it’s nice and seamless. Um, test, you know, look at the text on your homepage. Does it, does it flow properly? A test, multiple versions of your ecommerce. I have two different homepage. See which one has more clicks, do anything you

23:46 can do to test every aspect of it. We’re even talking about during checkout, test it out. Does it flow properly? Does it encourage people to continue on the test, the invoice afterwards, you know, test as much as you possibly can to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

24:03 So yeah, that’s uh, that’s kind of the basic overview of what to think about when building an online store or having an online store. I’m just general outline there. Uh, what’s, you have the question of the day, didn’t you?

24:15 I did have the question of the day, you know, I want to focus on small businesses, specifically small ecommerce businesses. So I want it to be positive. I wanna I want to know what small business owners out there are doing ecommerce, right? So I want to know is what small businesses have phenomenal e commerce looking websites like rivals soon as you notice that rivals the big companies out there like Amazon and like the best buys and the walmarts and stuff like that. So go ahead and post on our facebook page,

24:50 twitter anywhere else that you can post everywhere. Itunes review. I turned to review, I think run their instagram, you know, right, right. Just in a letter, but a craft. And then search. Search on a site for a while. You should be. Why should have an online store? Uh, the show notes pop up. You can add a comment there, right? We will accept certified a certified pigeon carrier. It has to be usps certified pigeon. Like we, it has to be legit. We’re still kind of on the fence about smoke signals. Yeah. And we’re in Arizona and California is on fire. So smoke students, find out about it everywhere. Yeah, exactly. So anyways, that’s our episode, uh, for the day on the basics of a building new ecommerce site. This is BGC neely and I still hate that beer was horrible and this is craft thinking.

25:47 No.