Rumen Dimitrov

Do people have to start the checkout on your website to find out what the shipping cost is going to be?

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000

That’s the question I often ask brand owners when we get to review their Shopify cart page.

Lack of shipping cost on the cart page is one of the things that’s guaranteed to have people start checkout, without the intention of completing it.

If they start at all.

Most people, if tired and frustrated enough from the shopping process so far, just won’t move beyond the cart.

They’ve had enough.

They give up on the information “treasure hunt” and get back to their life.

Well, turns out most brand founders haven’t thought about this, until I show them their cart drop off rate…

So what can you do to prevent that?

Remember the relief you feel when you’ve done an order online?

You are happy that the checkout is over and more importantly, you know everything there is to know about the process — what questions you’ll be asked, how many steps there are in the checkout, how much the product + shipping actually costs…

Well, your goal is to help your visitors get in that satisfied, happy, “thank you page” state on the cart. That’s how you narrow the gap between a “visitor with cart items” and “a customer”.

Provide shipping information on the cart and you will:

reduce your visitors’ uncertainty — any uncertainty is increasing the mental effort required to jump over the obstacle, in your case tap/click on the “checkout” button
save them the disappointment — “I’ve spent all that effort to shop and enter my details and now they try to rob me with the shipping!” Surprizes when they see shipping costs bigger than they expected in the middle of the checkout are sure to make them think again if they want to continue checking out. You don’t want that!
give them time to make up their mind — even if they don’t like the shipping cost, as you are giving them the info earlier, you saved their effort from having to fill-in the checkout fields. This way you’ve saved them valuable energy, that they would have otherwise wasted. With some energy in their “shopping tank” left, they have the resources to pause and justifying in their mind paying for the shipping, instead of “rage quiting” later in the checkout. This means you’ll be saving them effort, which they’ll be thankful of, as most of the sites are still not doing this. Even if you haven’t won them as a customer yet, you haven’t negatively impacted your brand with a poor experience.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

I assume you are convinced that providing a delightful, compassionate experience that’s suited to the needs of your visitors is important for (the revenue of) your brand.

Don’t miss out my next customer experience insight post!

Why most e-commerce websites don’t convert as well as their owners want them to?

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 11:59:00 +0000

The answer is simple — brand owners are trying to do too much at once. Too much on the homepage, too much on the product page, too much in the header… but is that even enough?

Thinking that you have to do “everything” you’ve set your mind on (or saw on your competitors’ pages) puts you in the wrong mindset—you think that all the items you’ve listed to include on your website are equally important for your visitors. But they aren’t.

And the more items you have on your list to put on your pages, the more distractions you have for yourself and for your visitors.

You get distracted

…by trying to make the sections/elements better, thinking what more could you put in, instead of researching what is the one thing that is the biggest contributor to people buying from you.

Your visitors get distracted

…by the content of your pages. Content in itself isn’t distracting. But the existence of content, when you are in the search for specific information, could be distracting. How come?

People hope that somewhere on your website lie hidden the answers they’ve been looking for. When in “search mode” they keep they eyes peeled for potential keywords, icons, images. Anything that may hint the answer is near.

That’s why they click here, tap there… but after a few tries, if they haven’t gotten the information they needed, they lose hope. And leave.

The solution lies at the intersection between the goals of you two

You and your potential customer both want a certain problem to be solved.

And you have the solution — your product. Creating it was your first job in your entrepreneurial journey.

Once they’ve landed on your website, visitors want to know if the solution works and is the right one for them.

Their job is to find the answers to the above questions.

Your new job, after creating your product, is to help people find these same answers, so that they could confidently add to cart and survive through your checkout.

You both have a common playground — your website

Your visitors scroll and click around, as if they are playing a treasure hunt.

You, on the other hand, are the designer of the treasure hunt game.

In the case of e-commerce, both parties win if the “treasure hunt” is as obvious and as easy as possible.

How could you make your website easier for your visitors? How could you make it clearer for them what is your brand about? How could you make it obvious what does your product do and how would they benefit from it?

That’s your new job as a brand manager.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

What got you here won’t get you there

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 06:05:00 +0000

What makes “six-figure a year” stores “six-figure” is a good niche product that people want.

But… what stops six-figure stores from becoming seven-figure ones is the fact store owners don’t know much about their customers yet.

They don’t know much about why people buy this.

In other words, six-figure store owners are sitting on all the opportunities of understanding the context of customers better and finding ways to serve them better…

And all these opportunities go unused.

Why?

Store owners don’t know how important that is for their future growth. What got them from five- to six-figure yearly revenue won’t get them to 7 figures.
Most six-figure store owners are too distracted by running the business. But this kind of discovery requires patience and focus.
They don’t know where to start—all the data they have already available is overwhelming and instead of seein possibilities for gaining new insight… they feel swamped.

How to go about this?

Become curious about your customers. Pose questions to yourself and try to find answers using the tools you’ve got.

You’ll be surprised how much insight your Shopify reports, archived orders, ad manager dashboards and Google Analytics data hold for you.

You just need to ask the right questions.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

The better you know your target market, the higher your conversion rate goes

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:29:00 +0000

There, it is done!

What’s done?

I’m putting the finishing touches on a Data-based Growth Strategy for a website selling plus-sized clothing for women.

Did you know that 20% of the revenue actually comes from people who identify as male?

They may be crossdressers (not very likely, but possible) or just buying gifts for their loved ones (very likely).

This discovery surprised the store owner in our earlier call. And I didn’t expect that, too.

Not that I was surprised by the result, no. I was surprised that the store owner didn’t know their target market in detail.

Here’s the thing…

Not knowing your target market you are missing on the opportunity to serve them better.

In other words, not knowing your target market results in low conversion rates — your site is not what they would expect, so they don’t do what you expect them to do (buy). Still, the more you know about the target market, it becomes obvious for you what to do to serve them better and make the sale.

Do you know what you don’t know about your potential customers?

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

How often should you look at your Shopify store’s stats?

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 08:29:00 +0000

Being data-driven means you take your stats into account when making decisions. To do so, you keep on the pulse of what happens with your website.

When to review the stats for your store?

Once a year, once a quarter, once a month, once a week and once a day. These are your best times. Since the events are spread apart, your stats-review sessions will have different goals, too.

Here is how the different check-up periods help you:

At the end of every day

Your goal with daily check-ups is to see if anything critical has happened since you last looked. Daily is where you catch potential problems and nip them in the bud. That’s also when you could spot potential time-sensitive opportunities. You want to know about them sooner, rather than a week or two from now. Imagine the following: “Oh, last week on Monday we had a peak in referral traffic. I wish I caught that in time so I could trace it back to the Reddit discussion that started it and participate in the discussion. Uh, now it is too late”. You don’t want to be unaware of things like that.

At the end of every week

Once a week you should take more time (than you spend daily) to go through your Google Analytics data. Look for trends, check and compare the performance of key metrics. Look around the edges, too—metrics that aren’t critical, but are important should come into focus now.

At the end of every month

Now you can get strategic. Put your actions and the results you got side by side. Can you prove there is a correlation? Learn from that insight. Now is the time to look forward, too. Based on your findings you can plan to change your tactics for the next 30 days. Do you have stats for the upcoming 30 day period, but from a year or two back? If so, compare them with your past 30 days. Are you in a better position now? Based on the historical data, what could you expect from the next month? Could you prepare for it somehow?

At the end of every quarter

How did you do? Did you match or exceed your expectations? If you have data last year’s data for the next quarter, go through it now. Are there any holidays that you should prepare for? Is there a seasonal uptick or downshift in traffic and sales? Could you prepare for it if you change your actions now? What could you do to benefit from the situation more than you did last year when you haven’t anticipated it?

At the end of every year

Check your overall stats. How did your store perform this year, compared with the previous one? What is your yearly revenue? Can you calculate your profit? Where do you need to improve the most? Make that your theme for the following year.

With regular stats-review intervals, you’ll be on the pulse of your business. That’s the biggest advantage a data-driven Shopify store owner has over one who shies away from data.

And now you can see the forest for the trees.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

Becoming a data-driven Shopify store owner

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 08:15:00 +0000

We would be far more data-driven going forward with our goals for [our Shopify store]. We would then use this data to work on areas of weakness. That should give us incremental improvements as we go forward.

That’s what Sam Fothergill, the director of Hinders Bait, said when I asked: “What would you do differently from now on in your Shopify store?”.

But what does it mean to be data-driven?

As a company selling online, you are gathering tons of data.

To be data-driven you should:

check your analytics data at regular intervals
measure site changes/campaign results based on data, instead of gut feelings
“This gave us a 5% increase in AOV” instead of “The campaign was very successful!”

Once you know how to measure your visitors’ reaction to changes, make your final decisions based on data, too.

What are the benefits of being data-driven?

By observing your data you keep to the pulse of your customers’ behavior
You can make decisions from a position of higher certainty because you can answer the question “What should we change?” by inspecting the stats. No need for gut feelings and doubt.
Consulting the historical performance data can help you expect results with a degree of certainty. That gives you a baseline to measure yourself against when setting new goals.

When do you need to become data-driven?

The earlier you start, the better! If starting from zero, you’ll have to use other people’s data (what others report works well for them) until you find something that works for you.

As soon as you have your pool of analytics data, pay less attention to the others and decide from your source of truth. What works for you may turn out to be the exception, not the rule. After all, your analytics data is a codified version of the behavior of your visitors reacting to your website. The insight you extract can’t get more targeted to your business :)

Can somebody else do it for me?

Yes, you could outsource it. You can skip the nitty-gritty details of filtering, gathering and analyzing data. External help will result in the form of dashboards and reports. They’ll answer some of your questions and pose new ones.

You still need the right habits (to consult the data) and the mindset that your data is the oracle you need to ask when you have questions. Otherwise the reports will be useless.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

How to prepare for a successful BFCM shopping season

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 08:03:00 +0000

Black Friday/Cyber Monday is near. That’s the peak holiday shopping period when top brands get 20 to 30% of their yearly sales.

You may aspire to be like them, but in practice, most small businesses fail during BFCM. Why? Because they send traffic to a leaking funnel. Then the ad spend goes up, the campaign conversion rate goes down… and so does your mood.

Where is that heavy leaking funnel?

Your website has areas that stop people from buying. This way people are “leaking out” of your funnel before they buy. But your newly-set BFCM campaign funnel may have them, too.

Your job is to patch these before spending more money on traffic. That general rule is even truer in the high-pressure periods around the holidays.

To increase your BFCM success this year—patch the leaks in advance

Top brands start their preparation up to 3 months earlier.

“Why so early? BFCM seems like a quarter away!” you may ask.

They do this to avoiding crunch-mode work as much as possible. Starting early will help you reduce the “human under pressure” errors like:

broken product links
missing product/shipping info on the website
low product inventory
visual glitches and more

What should you do?

Gearing up to the holiday, you should first find the leaks in your website and then patch them. Only then should you prepare and test your campaigns. The testing is for the new potential leaks introduced.

September is an ideal time for looking over the past year of data. Check your store for leaks to know what to work on next.

October—once you’ve identified the leaks, a month should be enough to patch them.

November will be the busiest month of all, but that’s inevitable. Create your email and social campaigns. Test the links, test the emails. Inspect the whole campaign funnel. Once you feel ready, it is time to schedule the campaigns.

Do you know where does money leak from your store? Check my BFCM leak guide

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

You Don’t Have a Revenue Problem

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 06:40:00 +0000

Money is a multiplier of the systems it touches. If the systems are good, the money invested will skyrocket your store’s revenue. But what happens, when the systems are broken?

You’ve heard stories about lottery winners who 5 years later are even more broke than they started. So, putting more money in a broken system is not going to fix it. It is going to drive it down.

Should you pour more money into ads then? If you’ve got traffic, but revenue is slow, that is the worst time to run (more) ads. That’s increasing the velocity of a broken, already-leaking system.

What to do instead?

Work on the system, not in it.

With fewer orders to fulfill you have time that you can invest in improving your Shopify store. You could:

Educate yourself on sales funnels and common objections people have before buying
look at your Shopping behavior report to spot funnel drops
look at the pages that precede the drop on your smartphone, tablet, and computer. SLOWLY. Do you notice anything that might be detrimental to the browsing experience? Note that down.
show these pages to real people and observe their reactions. Were there any confusions? Note that down.

You now have a list of friction points that could be slowing your visitors on their way to becoming customers. Is any of the items in the list easily solvable by you?

“But I don’t understand much of this…”

I get it—you are not very technical and this kind of work is confusing. However, you can’t afford to be in e-commerce without the basic understanding of how your visitors move through your website.

Funnel leakage is a problem you are going to face over and over again. You have to at least learn how to spot it so you know you need an expert to fix it.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

Can you decide with confidence?

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 17:24:00 +0000

The last topic of the local consulting meetup I run was “Risk”.

The main insight from the meetup: the less information you have, the riskier making a decision is.

So, to reduce the risk in a decision you have to get more information on the case.

While preparing for the event, I stumbled upon two concepts from statistics — decision trees and expected value.

Trying to decide if you should hire that Shopify expert or perform the change on your website you’ve been putting off for a long while? Well, decision trees can help you. Take a look, the video is only 3 minutes long:

Running an online store, you have plenty of data. Now you could plug it into a decision tree and see the value of each of your options.

Bonus 1: How do you calculate the chance?

If you haven’t attempted that thing you are considering, in your mind, there may be a 50/50 chance. You’ll either succeed, or you won’t. If so, use that.

If you are aware that your (lack of) previous experience skews chance in one direction or the other, use your gut feeling.

Also, don’t forget to experiment with optimistic and pessimistic values of the skew.

After playing with the numbers for some time you’ll be better off than you started. You’ll know what values you are looking for, so this project becomes a success.

Bonus 2: How does more information skew chance?

This video shows how to calculate the value of using an outside consultant or not. See for yourself:

Have you considered optimizing your Shopify store for speed and conversion? If you would like to explore what would my services help you achieve, contact me here!

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!

Dig into the data

{"name"=>"Rumen Dimitrov", "email"=>"rumen@rumendimitrov.com", "info"=>nil} — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 19:59:51 +0000

Next time you find yourself not getting the results you want from your Shopify store, instead of switching to the next tactic, stop.

Take a deep breath and step back from the tactics.

Diagnosis comes before prescription

Are you sure you need that thing you intended to do? Is there another way to approach the root cause of the problem? Don’t know what the problem is? Examine the funnel step by step, channel by channel.

Can you spot the outliers? There always are.

Dig into the data until you can’t dig anymore. Make sure you understand the implications of the numbers.

Only after you are certain your diagnosis is correct, you can start experimenting (objectively) with potential solutions.

Otherwise you are just spinning your wheels.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!