Back to EcommercePodcast.com

Shaun Ryan: [0:02] Hi, I’m Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems, and this is the eCommerce podcast. Today I’m talking to Tim Ash, CEO and President of Site Tuners. [0:10] Hi, Tim!

Tim Ash: [0:11] Hi, Shaun. I’m happy to be on the show.

Shaun: [0:14] Yeah, thanks for coming along. Now Tim, can you remember what was the first thing you ever bought online?

Tim: [0:19] Boy, it’s been so long. I guess it was probably a book on Amazon I would think.

Shaun: [0:25] Yeah, now that’s a very common answer to that one. How about your most recent purchase, can you remember the last thing you bought?

Tim: [0:32] Stroller parts direct from a manufacturer, actually in New Zealand, for my Phil and Ted Stroller for my kids.

Shaun: [0:41] Oh, they are great strollers, aren’t they?

Tim: [0:43] Yeah, they are. They’re the only double Decker strollers if you have two little ones.

Shaun: [0:47] Yeah, my sister in law has one of those. So, you’ve obviously got a couple.

Tim: [0:53] Yeah. Two, a boy and a girl, and I plan to keep it there.

Shaun: [0:59] Oh, that’s great! Now, can you give me a little bit of background on yourself, Tim?

Tim: [1:04] Sure. I like to say I’m a recovering technologist. I almost got my PhD in computer science and neural networks, artificial intelligence, that sort of thing. Then I started on the entrepreneurial path. This is my third business, and one of these years as I joke, I’ll probably be a 15 year overnight success.

Shaun: [1:25] Yeah, those overnight successes take a long time, don’t they?

Tim: [1:29] They do.

Shaun: [1:30] So, tell me about Site Tuners. What do you guys do?

Tim: [1:37] Well, we’re kind of at the cutting edge of landing page optimization. As you probably know, a year ago or so I wrote a book on the topic entitled “Landing Page Optimization.” We offer consulting services, as well as full service landing page tests where we guarantee the results or prorate our fees. We also have a class leading technology for doing landing page testing called the “Tuning Engine, ” which we license to other companies.

Shaun: [2:10] Fantastic! So how long has Site Tuners been around?

Tim: [2:13] About five years now.

Shaun: [2:15] About five years.

Tim: [2:17] That sort of makes us one of the dinosaurs in the group, I guess.

Shaun: [2:20] Yeah. No, that’s testament to say that you’ve got something there that can last. You’ve got a real business I think if you can hang around for five years. I am aware of your book. I’m actually reading it on the iPhone edition of the Kindle at the moment, and it’s great. It’s one of those books I struggle to read lots at one time, because it stimulates you. It gets you thinking, which is fantastic.

Tim: [2:55] Yeah, thank you. I wrote it and packed a lot of stuff in there, so it is pretty dense. I wouldn’t encourage anybody to take it on their beach vacation, and try to read it there.

Shaun: [3:06] It must be a phenomenal effort to write a book like that.

Tim: [3:10] It is. It was quite a bit of work. The hero in that whole situation was my wife, because she was pulling the load. We had an 18 month old at home, and then our second baby was just born, and then a big yard to remodel, then of course running a company on the side while I wrote the book.

Shaun: [3:29] Yeah, that’s crazy! So, Tim what sort of customers do you have at Site Tuners?

Tim: [3:35] Well, they really range in size. On the small end for our consulting services, we can just do a quick triage of a landing page on a Go To Meeting online. On the large end, we work with some of the biggest companies in the world; including Texas Instruments, and Verizon Wireless, and others, to do large scale testing. So, they really stand the gamut.

Shaun: [3:59] Excellent. So, tell me what sort of problems do they have? What sort of problems are you solving for your customers?

Tim: [4:06] Well, basically the problem is the same. Their process, whatever the mission critical parts of the website are is inefficient, and they’re losing money there. The reason for that is pretty simple. Up until now for the most part, all the mission critical parts of the site were built by people inside of the company. On the web, the intended audience, your customers, have never had any input. [4:34] Now, with landing page testing it’s really turning around. For the first the voice of the customers or the visitors is being heard, and that’s really reshaping the way that content is created. The good news is it’s more efficient for the company, so they make more money. It’s also a better user experience for the visitors, so they’re more likely to act.

Shaun: [4:56] Right, so you’re basically making everyone happier. The users don’t have to think so hard to try and workout what they need to do, to achieve what they want to get done.

Tim: [5:08] Yeah, in a way if you want to be cynical about it, you could say that all of the visitors coming to your site are like the little mice you run through the laboratory maze and you get to move around the maze, so they make it easier for them to find the cheese.

Shaun: [5:21] [laughs] Very, good! So, can you give me an example of the sort of thing you might do for an eCommerce site?

Tim: [5:33] Well, absolutely. Well, first of all there is a big difference between say stand alone landing pages or micro sites, and the eCommerce catalog. I say that because there’s no real expectation of what goes on a landing page, it could be pretty free form. Whereas, most people have some experience with online catalogs, and so they already have a mental framework if you will, in their minds about how they work. So you can’t get the really huge gains that you can get with an arbitrary landing page design, because people already have that model in their heads. But you can improve the experience and the flow through the site, so that they’re more likely to act. [6:14] So, essentially a catalog if you really think about it is really just a few pages; it’s your home page, it’s maybe a category or a sub category page, it’s your search results page, and then it’s the product detail, the cart, and all the steps in your checkout process, so maybe a ½ dozen to one dozen templates. [6:35] So, what we do is we would try to take that whole process from the top of the funnel, wherever they enter your site, through the bottom and the funnel in the checkout, and try to improve every step along the way. [6:49] One of the things we commonly attack first is say, the product detail page, because everybody who is going to end up buying from you, at some point or another, has to pass through that product detail page. So, it affects 100% of your value stream.

Shaun: [7:05] Yep. Well, actually just to maybe question that, I suppose if you have a search results page that has an “add to cart” on the search results page, then you could bypass that product details page.

Tim: [7:21] In theory, yeah. Although, I think that for any kind of considered purchase, unless you’re buying sugar by the pound or something, people are going to want to look at it, and it’s unlikely that they’re just going to from a summary result place at the cart.

Shaun: [7:35] Yep. So, what sort of things do you see often broken or need fixing on those product detail pages?

Tim: [7:46] Well, before I answer that, let me just step back for one second. One of the other things that we look at is also the page shell, something that is site wide; how your page lays out, the use of real estate, the colors, the information architecture, how many categories and choices you give people on your navigation menu. All of that is …. [8:07] In a lot of cases, catalogs are fundamentally flawed because they have all of these barnacles, if you will, that have, over time, stuck to the hull of the ship, and they’re slowing you down. And in the same way, you can mess with the insides of all of your page templates, but it’s the casing or the shell that’s really the problem, in many cases. So sometimes we’ll attack that, but that’s a little more open ended exercise, if you will.

Shaun: [8:31] Because I imagine a lot of those things can be distracting, and removing them can just offer a few less options to the customer.

Tim: [8:41] Yes. And less is definitely more. Removing choices is key to success. So the organization of your categories and subcategories and how easy it is for somebody to find the right individual product is often the key to success. [8:56] We have a process called a conversion jump start that we often do for e commerce companies. And we’ll go through and diagnose all the problems with the site and then actually give them mock ups of a new page shell and the new mission critical pages so that they have a visual representation of what a best practices fix looks like. And they don’t have to interpret anything. You can just hand it to their web designers and say, “Here, build this.”

Shaun: [9:24] Yeah.

Tim: [9:25] And as part of that, we often fundamentally rethink the organization of the information on the site.

Shaun: [9:31] Right. So you’ll help your customers create a new taxonomy for their products?

Tim: [9:39] Exactly, yeah. How the menus operate, how many levels deep you have subcategories, and so on. When you start showing product detail pages: is it on your home page or on a category page? Sometimes, if you have 50 or 100 choices in a category, you might as well have a million, because no one’s going to look at any of them.

Shaun: [10:01] Yeah. So you’re better to add another layer and have less choices.

Tim: [10:05] Exactly. So how do you get people to a reasonable set of choices that they can then explore in more detail.

Shaun: [10:11] Yeah. And what is that reasonable sort of number of choices for people to scan through and make? I suppose it depends on the context…

Tim: [10:20] There’s the theory of chunking, and why most telephone numbers are only seven digits long, and that’s because that’s all people can hold in their short term memory. But if you’re just going to select one from a list, we say a matrix of maybe three by three, or three by four at the most. We recommend six to eight high level categories. And a page that’s going to have 20 items on it’s definitely too long. Anything above a dozen would be extreme in our world, and we would recommend, like I said, eight or nine or fewer.

Shaun: [10:54] Excellent. So, to get back to the product detail pages, what sort of things do you see that are broken on those?

Tim: [11:03] Well, one of the things is that, often, the product isn’t the focus of the page. There’s no clear page title saying, “This is what the page is about.” Often, if there is a page title or a description, that’s pulled straight out of a database, so it’s a really long winded, technical name for whatever the product is instead of something a little more human readable and intuitive. [11:28] A friend of mine recently came up with this phrase that I’m going to be blogging about soon. She said, “SLAP or be slapped.” [11:35] And what she means by that is SLAP is an acronym for “speak like a person.” [11:39] So all this technical jargon that we use, we don’t even realize that if we’re specialists in a particular area and we have a catalog about it, we use all these acronyms, and what I would call “terms of art” or things that are specific to our profession, that most common people don’t understand. And we need to remember that it’s got to be obvious. It’s got to be obvious to your mother in law. It’s got to be obvious to the general public. I mean, there’s a stupidity pandemic going on out there; don’t assume that anybody has any knowledge.

Shaun: [12:13] And my mother in law’s part of that is what you’re saying.

Tim: [12:17] Oh, not mine.

Shaun: [12:20] No, no, no. [12:22] And I think that can be very difficult, to realize that you’re using language that your customers don’t understand, because everyone in your company understand that language. And so that can be difficult to see.

Tim: [12:36] Right. But one of the things. I mean, as you know, your company specializes in site search. You can go to site search, and often that’s going to be one of your best clues for what’s broken with your site and what you can fix. And often, you’ll see people typing in terms. And they’re typing them in not just because they prefer search as a navigation method, like Google or something, but they’re typing in because they can’t easily find something on your site. [13:03] So that gives you great clues about how you should call things, what information you should promote or make more prominent, or make clearer on the site. So there’s lots of ways to get at common language, and actually, looking through your search logs is one of the best.

Shaun: [13:20] Yeah, it’s one of the great ways of seeing the language of your customers is what are they typing into your site search box. [13:27] So the title was one thing. Any other things you see on the product description page?

Tim: [13:36] Yeah. One of the things is, especially if your products are visual, it amazes me, always, the range of image quality that you see in a catalog. I mean, get nice, high resolution shots of your stuff. If you have an enlarge button, have one of those light box pop overs that will enlarge it to full size or full screen, so people can really see the detail. [13:59] And then, also, have an action block. So I would suggest having a title that spans the whole product detail page; on the left, a nice, clear shot; and on the right, an action block that’s an area that’s outlined with a light background color that says “It’s in stock, ” “Here’s how much it costs, ” “Here are your configuration options in pull downs, ” and a big, fat, “add it to cart” button.
[14:24] And below that is where you should have kind of a tab with description, specs, recommendations, reviews, all of the other information. That tab bar should still be above the fold, above the visible area of the page, without scrolling. But at the top, you should have a title, clear shot of the product, and the action block.

Shaun: [14:45] In your experience, an optimal layout for putting the reviews and the recommendations in the product detail is to use tabs to do that, so people click on the tabs?

Tim: [15:01] I think that’s kind of a modern, very well established convention, and you might as well piggyback off of it. I mean, the first tab should obviously be the description, and that’s what it should be opened to when you come to the page. But the other tabs… You can put a summary. You could put, say, a four out of five star rating within the action block, just to emphasize the quality of it or the satisfaction that people have, but then the details of that should be hidden in the testimonials or reviews tab.

Shaun: [15:33] Yep, excellent. Now, so that’s kind of the product detail page. Are there any other pages where you see big gains for e commerce sites?

Tim: [15:43] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all the way through the shopping cart and the checkout process, there are a lot of things that are often very mangled and disjointed. A lot of people have shopping carts that go off to third party sites, for instance. You’re in the catalog, but when it comes to the transactional part, all of a sudden the whole page shell switches and you’re on somebody Else’s site. [16:05] So, if you don’t have a payment gateway that allows you to customize the look of the page and exactly match your page shell switches and you’re on somebody Else’s site. [16:18] So, if you don’t have a payment gateway that allows you to customize the look of the page and exactly match your page shell and layout, it’s time to think about switching, because right there is a big leak in your bucket.

Shaun: [16:21] Yep.

Tim: [16:21] Also, just unneeded complexity and asking a bunch of questions or information that you don’t really need to complete the transaction, that’s often a big mistake. [16:30] And then, finally, asking people to create an account to buy something. That’s often the first step in a checkout. When you think about it, if you walk into a store and you want to buy something, you just hand them your money and they give you what you want. They don’t say, “Hey, create an account in case you want to come back next time!” [laughs]

Shaun: [16:52] Yeah. I presume it’s valuable to have people create an account, but it’s more valuable to have the transactions occur in the first place.

Tim: [17:01] I would think so. [17:03] In other words, it’s a value proposition to a tiny segment of people that are going to come back to your site, one, and really, really need that time savings of not having to enter their information again. And if you really want to do that, you can ask them at the end of the transaction, after they’ve paid, saying, “Hey, would you like us to save your information for next time?” [17:23] Now, that’s maybe a reasonable place to ask, and they’ve already opened their wallet and given you their money. But for goodness sakes, don’t interrupt everybody and annoy them before they’ve opened their wallet.

Shaun: [17:36] And I’ll mention, at the end of the transaction, they’ve also given you most of the information they need to create an account anyway.

Tim: [17:42] Yeah, all of it. “If you want to create an account and save this, OK, give us your email and create a password.” That’s the very last step, not the first.

Shaun: [17:51] Yeah. And they’ve probably given you their email for confirmation of delivery and all that sort of stuff anyway.

Tim: [17:59] Exactly. And you don’t really need to create a password. Entering an email’s fine because, if someone loses a password or you need to create one at a future point, you just email it to them.

Shaun: [18:10] Yeah. So you can make it really easy. [18:13] I know, well, your philosophy very much is to test things. And you try something new, test it to see how it improves the conversion rates. Now, I imagine, when you’re doing that, you occasionally find things that are non intuitive that you wouldn’t have otherwise guessed.

Tim: [18:35] Mm hmm.

Shaun: [18:36] Have you got any examples of those sort of non intuitive things you’ve come across in your experience?

Tim: [18:41] Right. Yeah, we see non intuitive stuff all the time, in the sense that ideas that we think are going to do better don’t outperform the original. [18:50] Well, I guess one way to look at it is everything is non intuitive. If you’ve tested something in the past in another context, test it again in this context because the audience is different, the traffic sources, or the fact that two years have gone by since you did your last test. People’s behavior changes, even among the same population of users, as they become more familiar with the Internet. [19:16] But specifically, one of the things for e commerce is button colors. We get asked about that all the time: “What’s the best button color?” There’s really no answer to that. But the reason that people think button colors are important are wrong and kind of counter intuitive. So what we found is what’s important is not the actual color of the button, but its contrast with everything else on the page.

Shaun: [19:44] Oh, right.

Tim: [19:46] So, if you have an orange theme and a blue button, which is on the other end of the color wheel, on the opposite side, the only blue thing on the page will draw they eye. If you have a red page, then a green button might do better. [20:03] Also, the relationship of your brand colors and the button are important. For example, when we did a test for RedEnvelope as you can imagine, they’re a big e trailer their brand colors are red, and so the “add to cart” button on their product detail page was also red. Well, we tested a blue and a green one, and they lost. Normally, those would do better, but because that was their brand color, that was actually the best choice for them and their customers.

Shaun: [20:35] Right. So the sort of norms that you find don’t always hold. [laughs] And that’s interesting. But I think the biggest takeaway for our listeners there is that you should test your assumptions.

Tim: [20:50] Yeah. Testing is not a luxury. It’s not an option. Every mission critical piece of content on your website should be tested.

Shaun: [20:59] And from what you were saying earlier, it should then be retested, potentially a couple years down the track.

Tim: [21:05] Periodically, exactly.

Shaun: [21:05] Periodically. Yeah. This is all fantastic stuff. [21:10] So, another question I commonly ask is: do you have a site that you particularly admire, whether it’s one of your customer’s or not, that you look to, you hold up as an example of someone that’s doing most of the things right?

Tim: [21:25] Well, there are individual pockets of goodness, but on the whole I would give current landing pages and catalogs on the web about a D grade, so just one step up from failing. So there’s just so much room for improvement that even most of the good people would probably only earn a B minus or a B plus in our book. [21:48] So the short answer is don’t try to benchmark other people’s stuff. Don’t go copy their landing page or their catalog or, “Oh, gee, look, they all went to one of those more modern, wispy looking white headers on their site.” [22:03] Don’t just follow the herd. Your job is to come up with out of the box ideas. They don’t have to be right. They don’t have to be good. In a particular test, you might not even be able to outperform your current version. But the point is thinking from a testing viewpoint of, “Gee, what might my visitors prefer?” and not get locked into the box of, “This is what I want, ” or “This is what my competitors are doing.” You don’t know their reasoning. They might be making things worse.

Shaun: [22:33] Yeah. That’s interesting. I think that underlines the opportunity that a lot of e commerce sites have. If there’s that much room for improvement, then they can significantly improve their businesses. There’s a huge opportunity there.

Tim: [22:49] Absolutely. I think there are double digit gains to be realized in just about any e commerce catalog that I’ve seen.

Shaun: [22:58] Wow. That’s fantastic news, and I think we’ll wrap it up there, Tim. So I just want to say thank you very much for those insights you’ve given us over the last 20 minutes or so. I think our listeners will be able to take away, or it will stimulate them to hopefully do some testing themselves.

Tim: [23:23] And then, Shaun, I just want to leave your readers with one little takeaway. I think I mentioned our Express Reviews that we do of landing page or websites over at Go To Meeting, and we record them. For your listeners, for this podcast, if they go to our site and they sign up for an Express Review, they can enter the promo code “SLI” and save $100 US off of the Express Review.

Shaun: [23:52] That’s fantastic. So the website’s Site Tuners, and the promo code is…

Tim: [23:56] If they go to Site Tuners, and then under “consulting services” they find the Express Review page, when they go to the checkout there, they can enter the promo code “SLI” and save $100.

Shaun: [24:09] OK, folks. Save $100. Site Tuners. Thanks very much, Tim. That was fantastic. Thank you.

Tim: [24:16] Oh, my pleasure. I hope to be on again sometime.

Shaun: [24:19] That was Tim Ash from Site Tuners. And I’m Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems, and this is the E Commerce Podcast.