Llama Commerce Show: Secret Product Page Formula

Brett: And I’m Brett Curry, also lead strategist at Classy Llama.

Kurt: And we are here to, as always, demystify eCommerce into digestible, actionable bites. Today, we have a special guest, Ezra Firestone. Not only does he have the coolest name I’ve ever heard of, but…

Brett: Really, really cool name.

Kurt: I know. I mean, you really can’t top that.

Brett: Ezra Firestone. I tell people…

Kurt: That’s not your real name, is it, Ezra?

Ezra: Well, I mean there’s a funny story behind that.

Kurt: We probably don’t have time for that funny story.

Brett: I tell people that I know don’t know you, that’s for like
people that are not connected to marketing or eCommerce. They’re like, “Oh. He sounds cool. He sounds famous.”

Kurt: We should probably do a segment just on the cool story behind Ezra Firestone’s name.

Ezra: Yeah. It’s kind of sad, actually. It comes from a hippie commune. It is actually my real name, but there is a story behind it.

Kurt: OK. Hippie commune. That’ll be next week. Everybody, tune in.

Ezra: Yeah. I’ll tell you what, man.

Kurt: Huge ratings next week.

Ezra: I learned how to sell on hippie communes, the truth of the matter.

Kurt: That’s even better. If you keep talking, our ratings are just going to go up now. .

Brett: I think that’s got gold written all over it, how to sell as
learned in a hippie commune. I like that a lot.

Ezra: Selling, regardless of venue, is the same process.

Brett: This is true.

Ezra: Right? So, if you’re building a little shack at a flea market, selling physical products there, I’ve just now transitioned to building my shack on the internet and selling products there.

Brett: That’s awesome. Well, good. So, Ezra is a good friend of mine, good friend of the show, eCommerce rock star. So, he owns his own consulting business, and also owns several eCommerce stores. So, it really separates him from a lot of experts out there, in that he is everyday running his own stores, testing, trying out new things. I’ve seen your product pages, Ezra. We’ve had several conversations about this. In my opinion, you really kind of cracked the code. You’ve got a really winning formula for your product pages. So, we’d love it if you just kind of pulled back the curtain and showed us a few of your product pages. Walk through what makes them so successful. Then, we’ll dialogue to go.

Kurt: Ezra, just so you know, don’t feel like we’re being impolite if we let you know you need to speed up, because we do try to keep this at 10 minutes.

Ezra: I’m going to move very quickly, and I’ve got…

Kurt: Also, we have this little trophy here. It’s part of every show. If you’re winning, and you’re really contributing the most value on the show, we’ll push the trophy towards you.

Ezra: OK.

Brett: Right over here. This is available for whoever is rocking out the show. So, take it away, my friend.

Kurt: Seven minutes. Go.

Ezra: Here we go. I spend several million dollars each year in my own eCommerce businesses. What I’m going to share with you is the evolution of my eCommerce product pages, specific to multi-skew eCommerce stores, because it’s different when you’ve got a single brand or a single line or a single item. The way that you leverage those product pages and retail those products is much different than it is when you’re selling on a multi-skew store.
So, let’s look at the evolution. I’m going to show you three
different product pages, and one that’s currently winning. This is the first product page. I run traffic from Facebook. I run traffic from Google AdWords. I run traffic from comparison shopping engines. I run email traffic. I run banner traffic. So, I have all different kinds of channels of traffic coming at these product pages. Of course, you’re going to convert differently on each channel. This was my winning product page for years. Notice there’s a left navigation. Notice that we’ve got the retail price, the ‘your price’ here. Right? So, it’s on sale. Then, we’ve got the ‘you saved dollar amount’ and the ‘you saved percentage.’ Notice that there are cross sales, because we want to be increasing our average order value. So, you want cross sales above your ‘add to cart’ button. Notice that we’ve got our unique selling propositions that you see everywhere else on the site. You see these unique selling propositions in video format. You see them in image format. You see them in text format, in the header, in the footer, on all the different pages. They are right beneath the ‘add to cart’ button. We added these USB’s and image format under the ‘add to cart button’. We saw a 10% boost in our ‘add to carts’. Notice that we’ve got ascroll of images. Right? So, they can see multiple quality product images. I click to enlarge. Social buttons, a unique selling…

Brett: I wish you would have warned that out for the show today, Ezra, because that’s completely a side note.

Ezra: I should have. Right? USB banner box down below the image. Then, we’ve got our description, and we also have our tabs of shipping information and frequently asked questions; because what we noticed was that we use traffic software, and people were leaving our product pages looking for our shipping information, our return policies, the frequently asked questions about the products. We throw those in tabs.

Brett: They might not come back. Right? I mean, if someone leaves, there’s always that chance they’re not going to get back to the product page.

Ezra: That’s right. We keep them there. We put all this information that is the same, the shipping info and this FAQ. It’s the same for every product. We put it in image format so that we don’t have duplicate content on our product pages. Right? We’ve got these as images. If you’re doing this properly, really you probably got a video in this description and a video for each of these, which I can show you sites that have that as an example. Scrolling down the page, we’ve just got product reviews and a USB banner and your security symbol. So, that was our product page that was winning initially. Then, we moved to this format here, which is more inspired by the Zappos model, where everything happens above the fold. Notice there is no left navigation. When we moved the left navigation from our product page, we saw a significant increase on the time on the product page and the engagement with the product page, because we got rid of that ability to navigate. We have the same content boxes. All the content, they can scroll through it on the left side. Why buy from the shipping information? This is an example page. It’s not an actual live page. These would have videos on them, product description, similar items. All that navigation, the middle of the page changes. So, you never have to scroll on this page. One of the problems we’ve had with our eCommerce stores in the past is figuring out a way to get the video on the product page above the fold. So what we did was, we put this little button down here that says, “Look inside the box.” We tested this against Go Behind the Scenes and a couple other different types of text. When you click that, it loads your product sales video right there, above the fold, without you having to go anywhere. Then, you go back to the photos. You got your ‘add to cart’ box with your USP banner and your USP images down below that cart. Of course, if you have cross sales or options, they would appear here above the ‘add to cart button’.

Then, we’ve got the ‘you might also like’, and we added.
Instead of having our USP banner like we do at the bottom of the footer of every page, we actually added a USP and features and benefits banner right at the bottom of the product box itself. We noticed a significant increase in conversion when we added that. Of course, customer reviews. Then, this is our traditional footer. Why buy from us, hello from the owner, testimonials. This is on every page.

One of the things that you want to pay attention to with your
eCommerce product page is that different styles of products will have different features on the product page. For example, what we’re doing now is we’re putting FAQ’s on every single product page, right down here above the customer reviews. So, frequently asked questions about that product. That allows customers to go ahead and ask a question, and then we can answer it. Then, it’s on that product page for the lifetime of that product for additional customers who want to come back. So, giving your customers a way to engage with your products and ask questions about them. Then, you have it there for all the customers who come back in the future. If you have products that people use, in some way or another, what we are noticing is that when you have the ability for the customer to upload an image or share their experience with a product, you can build in social proof.
If you do any kind of volume, you can build in social proof on your product pages by having a little tab here that says, “Share this product with us.” Then of course, you follow up in your emails with people who have purchased. You come back and get them to leave a video review, a testimonial. Upload a picture of them using that product. You just have a whole social proof tab. The stores that have that social proof tab are converting significantly higher than the stores that don’t. At least the products that we sell enough of to get enough social proof feedback on them. So, this was winning for a long time. Right? Product…

Brett: Seems like on this page, really quickly, seems like you made the product the hero. And also, you made it to where they didn’t have to move their eyes around all over the page to get the kind of information that they needed. That information populates in that same space that they’re looking at the product, and that seems really, really smart. It takes a lot of the effort out of the browsing experience.

Ezra: Look what else we did. We got rid of the description, dude. We don’t have a description when you land on the page. We just got an image. Then, you can click into the description. This is not actually what the winning description page looks like. The winning description page has a much smaller product image, and the description is a little bit higher up. We just got rid of the image. Now, check this out. So, this was winning. Right?
This was the winning product page for a long time. We thought, “You know what? Why don’t we see if we can go back to our more traditional style, and see what that does?” So, let’s just pull this thing up here. I can’t see what you guys see. Do you see this new product page that I’m pulling up?

Brett: It’s a little small. If you could zoom in a little bit, that
would be great. While you’re doing that, I want to make a quick comment. The social proof aspect. That is such a huge conversion booster. It’s also great for SEO, getting that unique user-generated content video, or whatever the case may be. Great for SEO. Great for conversions as well.

Kurt: It’s not just social, meaning Facebook and Twitter, but also like just reviews. Reviews are huge. That’s social proof as well.

Ezra: Yeah. We are not even going into the headers and footers and some of the different conversion elements and stuff. This is now our winning product page. Notice how we still have that hero shot. We still have the product featured. We don’t have the left navigation. We still got video. We’ve actually gotten rid of the social buttons. You see these social buttons? We no longer put social buttons on our product pages, because what we’ve found is that when we remove the Facebook light, the Tweet, the Google+, and the Pin It, and you should obviously test this, we actually get more engagement with our ‘add to cart’ button. We don’t get
people engaging with these buttons, and we get them engaging with the ‘add to cart’ button. We’ve put our description, our informational tab…I’m a big fan of putting information in tabs on product pages, instead of having it just scrolling down the page forever. This is now the winning product page, which is very much like my initial product page, except for it’s got no left navigation. It’s significantly more focused on the imagery. It’s got a cleaner tab to product boxes and a less in-your-face USP banner. Right? Sort of grade-out USP banner under that ‘add to cart’ button. So, the ‘add to cart’ button pops a little bit more in contrast with those USP’s. And of course, the ‘you might also like’. Obviously, every one of our products has cross sales. This page doesn’t show the cross sales, but we put our cross sales above the ‘add to cart’ button. We allow people to add additional items onto their order. That will then increase this cart value here. Notice we came back to the retail price, ‘you save’, and ‘you save’ percentage, which we didn’t have on
that other template.

Brett: I noticed that. I was going to ask about that. I didn’t see it on that last template.

Ezra: Yeah. We just kind of…

Kurt: I think, Ezra, the most… First of all, we’re just coming past 10 minutes here. I think one of the most important things to recognize, to our audience, is that one of the most important things Ezra is demonstrating here is that over time, he has had to change the product page, that evolution is critically important. Your existing product page, or whatever page it is, will not be effective in three years. You can’t sit on it. You have to continue to innovate and test and change, and respond to the market. So, Ezra, could you close us up by giving three or fewer, or just as many action words as you want to, but we try to break this down into digestible actions.

Ezra: I’ll close it down into action.

Kurt: Yeah.

Ezra: Let me close it down.

Kurt: Right.

Ezra: Number one. Get less busy with your product pages. Notice, if you look at the evolution of my product pages over the last eight years, they have significantly gone down in busyness. Yes, I still have lots of information, but the way this is laid out, it does not feel overwhelming to the user. They can see the product. They can see the ‘add to cart’ button, and they can see the content that they need to know about that product. Then, there’s stuff below the fold, like your customer reviews and your frequently asked questions and your social proof. That stuff is below the fold. So, above the fold is really clean. I think that’s a theme that I’m seeing on bigger box retail stores, a theme that I’m seeing across all my stores. I think really, if you can focus on making your product pages a little more simple, that would be a good thing to do. Also, if you have the ability to create product videos, which, dude, they’re super easy to create. You just do like behind the scenes or open the box videos.

Brett: I love that language. You can see behind the scenes, or open the box, or whatever.

Ezra: Yeah. It could be you opening up the box of your product. These are my two things for you. Number one; simplify your product pages, and watch your conversion rates increase. Number two: Put a video on every one of your best selling products, because you will see a significant boost in conversion. And number three: Take your unique selling propositions, put them in image format, and throw them below your ‘add to cart’ button.

Brett: Wow. That’s good stuff, Ezra.

Kurt: This trophy belongs to you. Brett and I basically did nothing on this show. Thank you very much for your input.

Brett: We smiled and looked cordial.

Kurt: Yeah. We did.

Ezra: You guys looked pretty.

Kurt: You get the broken arm trophy for today. Thank you, Ezra, very much. Guys, thank you for joining us. If you have questions for Ezra, or for us, about the product page layout, don’t hesitate to ask us via our social media outlets. We look forward to seeing you guys all next week.

Brett: And let us know, what are the questions you want us to cover, what other topics you want us to cover, and we look forward to seeing you next time. With that, we’ll bid you ado by saying stay classy.

Kurt: Llama commerce.