How To Find (And Fix) The Real Reasons Your Store Isn’t Converting — Matthew Stafford | Why Conversions Matter More Than Traffic, Why Clarity Beats Persuasion, Why Theme Mistakes Hurt Your Sales, Which Checkout Tweaks Increase Your Sales (#407)

In this episode, we dive into why 98% of online store visitors don’t buy and how to fix it. 

Our guest, Matthew Stafford, is a veteran e-commerce expert and managing partner at Build Growth Scale. 

He shares simple strategies to boost conversions, build trust, and grow your store. 

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why fixing conversions matters more than more traffic. 
• What theme mistakes silently hurt your sales. 
• Why clarity beats persuasion in e-commerce. 
• How filters and menus boost category conversions. 
• What checkout tweaks lift sales fast. 
• How one post-purchase question reveals issues. 
• Why AI boosts teams, not replaces them. 
• How customer language improves descriptions. 
• What a $60M growth story teaches about scaling. 
• Why now is the best time to start e-commerce. 

Links & Resources 

Website: https://buildgrowscale.com/book-a-call
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewstafforddotcom
X/Twitter: https://x.com/BuildGrowScale
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/build.grow.scale 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/367rhzxy 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Did you know that 98% of people who visit the online store don't buy anything? Didn't problems? Stop customers for making purchases. Most people know that, but they don't know what [00:00:20] to do about it. So today's episode, we'll talk about how to uncover and how to fight and fix real reasons why your store is not converting.

Joining me today on the show is Matthew Stafford. Matt is a veteran e-commerce expert and managing partner at Build Growth Scale, and with 30 plus years in business, he has helped scaled hundreds of e-commerce stores to seven and eight figures even higher. [00:00:40] E-commerce speaker, mentor, and event host.

Matthew also owns equity in multiple DTC brands and leads BGS. So let's welcome to the show. Hi Matt. How are you today? Hey Claus, how are you doing? I'm very well. Matt, you have helped many stores over the years, seven, eight figures and higher. In your view, what's the biggest [00:01:00] mindset secret that separates a good store owner from a truly great one?

I would say that people believing that you can run a. A large e-commerce store with the laptop lifestyle. That was probably true six or seven years ago. But e-commerce continues to evolve [00:01:20] and I believe we're in like the third or fourth inning of the baseball game, and we are seeing the competition get better and better.

One thing that I do think. Makes a difference is that I'm seeing very large stores use AI with their team [00:01:40] in order to make their team do much better, but not replace them. Interesting aspect. I wanna dive into AI a little bit later in our chat. Right now. I wanna find out the biggest issue that people see.

Traffic is always a topic. Getting traffic, paying for traffic. It's one way, but it's not really key to success. [00:02:00] Talk to me about your point of view on that. I always tell people, traffic's not your problem. 'cause most people's stores convert at 2%. And so that means for every a hundred people, they send, only two people buy.

For me, that always felt broken. It's like, why only two people? Or Dan Kennedy's saying. He who can spend the [00:02:20] most to acquire the customer wins. And I thought if I can get four people to buy or get two more of those 98 people that left, I've actually doubled my business on the same amount of ad spend.

And so when I originally started my e-commerce journey, I was actually really good at Facebook ads and it sold. [00:02:40] Multiple seven figures in the T-shirts. I told about almost $15 million worth of t-shirts. So I was really good at ads, but it was still very frustrating that only two or three people would buy out of a hundred.

And so I dove into the analytics and realized, wow, if we can make the website UX UI [00:03:00] better. Then our conversions go up and that makes our ads more profitable and it gives us the opportunity to try to have a successful e-commerce business. Now, I think a perception of a lot of merchants, specifically beginners starters in the e-commerce space, they think they have either a free theme or their buyer theme, and I [00:03:20] think they're just, everything works out of the box because it's a theme they just bought for it.

So it should be optimized. Yeah. What's wrong with this idea? The themes are built by developers, and developers aren't really conversion rate optimizers. And so I believe that most themes are built [00:03:40] very generically for everyone. And so they have a lot of features and people think, oh, if it has a lot of features, I need to use all of those.

And what they end up doing is actually confusing the process. I know you and I have known each other for a lot of years. Our phrase is, let's Homer make it so simple. [00:04:00] Homer Simpson would be able to figure it out. And so what we're saying is simplicity clarity always trumps persuasion. And so if you're trying to be fancy and persuasive that never works, as well as just being very crystal clear and super simple.

I like the approach of simplicity. People are [00:04:20] overwhelmed. There are so many notifications going on, and people are just permanently distracted. So I think the e-commerce journey through a store purchase should be as easy as possible. Let's talk about this. Talk me through a perfect world scenario from somebody arriving to your website until they buy from you.

Yeah. I would say your homepage [00:04:40] is designed for two reasons. One, did I land on the right site and do I trust these people? What's their unique value proposition? And then easy navigation to what I'm looking for. And what I mean by that is the main menu it's shocking to me how many people have blog and about [00:05:00] us and all these other things in there when those.

Links should be your money making links. If eight outta 10 of your sales come from three products, then have those three products on the main menu so that. People have, it's much easier to find them. We find that the search bar [00:05:20] also is the most valuable traffic on your website. So if you have search track what people are typing in there, see what they're searching, those people convert twice as high and spend twice as much.

And for us we're always trying to figure out why things are working or why would that work. It means that they found what they were looking [00:05:40] for, and so now they're converting much higher. That means the people that don't use it are probably struggling to find what they're looking for, and that's probably hurting your conversions.

So on the homepage, is it the right site? How do I find what I'm looking for? The next page would be your category page or your filters. [00:06:00] You want them to say, okay, I'm interested in shirts. Now, when they get to the category page that has your shirts, they can pick if they want blue ones, red ones, yellow ones, whatever colors you offer, and so now then they'll just see the blue shirt and the chances of them converting [00:06:20] is.

As much as three to 500% better if they use your filters again, what does that tell you? The closer that they land on the page of what they're looking for, the much higher they convert. So all of our steps are always trying to give them the clearest possible path [00:06:40] to find what they're looking for. And so what I always tell the store owner is stop looking at your website as, Hey, I have all these things.

Come look at what everything I offer and look at your website from the consumer standpoint, how do I find what I'm looking for? As soon as you do that, your [00:07:00] site will convert a lot better and it won't feel so salesy and so people will know and trust you better too. I. The next step is you get to your product page, and this is where it becomes very important.

What the next most important action you want them to take on the site is. And we call it the hierarchy of focus. So if your theme is [00:07:20] black and yellow, you don't want black and yellow buttons. I. You want green or blue or red? We try not to use red. 'cause red typically means a mistake on a website, but even red works if it doesn't match anything else.

So it's not the color of the button, it's the fact that it stands out. So when they come to your product page, [00:07:40] it's really obvious what you want them to click. And then from there in the cart we always. I don't think upsells in the cart are a good idea. It will raise your average order value, but it typically costs to sales unless it's a no-brainer option.

Double the product for, X amount of discount where they don't have to leave the [00:08:00] cart to go find what the offer is. That can work. And then obviously, optimizing your form fields on your checkout, all of that helps. I'll give you a couple, I'll give a couple tips for your listeners that will make a difference.

99.9% of every checkout I've ever seen asks for your email and phone number. [00:08:20] If you put in there the reason why you're asking for it, you'll actually get a lift. And so how I came up with that was I read Robert Cialdini's book called Persuasion and he was talking about people were asking the cut in line.

And eight outta 10 people, they told them [00:08:40] no. But as soon as the people gave a reason, now eight outta 10, they let caught in line. So the theory behind it was a lot of times people don't mind giving you information or letting you have their information. They just wanna know why. So we thought, okay, let's tell them why we're asking for the email.

So we put [00:09:00] email required for order confirmation. And when you do that the order confirmation email is open to 85% of the time. So by putting that in there, people wanna know that they've got their order. They go, okay, I'll give them my good email. They give us their good email. Now our abandoned recovery goes up.

We have less form field [00:09:20] errors. And because that works so well, 'cause we tracked that, we then said, okay, for the phone, let's work on making that better. Because SMS is a huge. Abandoned recovery. So we put phone required for shipping notifications. So by changing that form field tax, we get a lift in the checkout [00:09:40] right at the point of transaction where the transaction happens.

So we actually create more money, more sales, which is exactly what we're trying to do. I think there's a very clever strategy behind it. Beside of that is a very good book that you just mentioned there, so whoever has not read the books, go into it. You'll learn so much about preservation, the name of the title of the [00:10:00] book, but it's really what it is now.

I think a lot of merchants out there, brands out there, they do not even know what's happening on their website. What are kind of strategies, tools that you use to find out what's really happening? What's the customer experience on the site? Yeah, so we, we use Google [00:10:20] Analytics and Tag Manager. It was.

It's suffered for a little bit when they got rid of the old legacy and put in the GA four. But they've continued to make it better and better. And it is actually, we use it across all of our brands, even some really high volume lead gen sites that we take care of now. And the granularity of it and how good it is [00:10:40] actually it's a really good system if you know how to use it.

The other thing that we use for like split testing, we use Convert and we also use visual website Optimizer. So both of those are good for split testing. And then I'm gonna give a one more tip that I think is just as valuable as the tools. We [00:11:00] put. We use Lucky Orange to do it, but there's different services that you could do it.

We put a question on the thank you page, and this has been responsible for four or five of our biggest wins over the last few years. And this question that we ask is, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy. And so right after [00:11:20] someone has purchased from you, they obviously said they trust you with their wallet, they gave you their credit card, all this other stuff, and now you're asking them, Hey what's one thing that almost made you not buy?

So when they tell you what they didn't understand or what they thought was a problem or friction that they had, or. The [00:11:40] video was too long or whatever. You then take that information, you can go back and optimize your site in real time based off of what someone who just gave you money, gave you for feedback.

And those are, they're gold. Like we do it as fast as we can. When we get on a site, we want the customer's [00:12:00] input to tell us what they didn't. What they were struggling to understand because we get banner blindness. We look at these websites so much, so often it's like driving to the grocery store.

You don't remember if you went through the red light or if it was green or if you stopped at a stop sign or any of that because your brain does it on autopilot. And so getting this feedback [00:12:20] in real time from people that are first time users or first time buyers is super valuable. I think you mentioned trust, and I think trust is very important.

If you're a big brand like Mikey or Aidas people will trust you because you are a long around for a long time. But as a new brand, an unknown brand, what are some ways to [00:12:40] build up trust on a website? I think using the language that your customers use. So one good trick that we do is we go find a lot of reviews like on Amazon or other products that are very similar.

And we put that language into chat, GPT and re rewrite product [00:13:00] descriptions in the consumer's language. And we've found that's actually very effective. It's one good way I. While we are on ai, there's a lot of changes going on in the e-commerce space right now. AI is all over the place. Give me your take on it.

What do you think works best? What shouldn't you do? [00:13:20] Yeah, I think a lot of it creates noise and it's probably distracting people but there's also some extremely good tools. The truth of the matter is the large language models can analyze the data way better than we can. It just works better than our brain.

The way that I try to [00:13:40] describe it to people is if all of your data's in a library. And has all your Google Analytics, has all your email responses, has all your reviews, everything. If you wanna go look at all that data, you gotta go in there book by book, pull it out, read it, and then figure out how to tie it together.

AI is like this [00:14:00] brain up above the library where it can cross reference all the books at the same time. And look at your data totally different than how our mind works. And then build you a roadmap to improve the areas that you want to improve with a lot more data points than what we can even fathom.

And so we're using it to really break [00:14:20] down that journey the way that. I think about it is if I personally talk to all hundred people that visited the store, I would probably close 60, 70% of 'em. 'cause I could answer their questions, take care of it build the trust, all of those things. So the [00:14:40] website. Is where the website falls short, is it's not communicating properly with that customer for them to know and trust the website enough to give it money.

So if we could get your conversion rate up to six or 10 or 20% even a third of what you could do closing in person, that would [00:15:00] be so much better. And so we're using AI to try to bridge that gap and make it work, close our clients. Yeah, ai definitely a huge helper there. Now over the last couple of years, you have worked with some very big brands in the DTC space.

Can you give some examples or case studies? You don't need to name the brand of what kind of results they saw. [00:15:20] Yeah, so we have probably this is literally we're working with the, our best client ever right now. Three years ago. He started a little over three years ago he started, he came to one of our workshops and he had already made about.

I don't, I wanna say less than 10 grand in sales. So not a lot. But he [00:15:40] was very coachable and right, right off the bat, he started implementing the things that we were teaching. And the first year he ended up finishing the first, actually took 13 months to hit a million dollars in sales. And then the second 12 months he hit 13.6 million.

The [00:16:00] third. Year he did 36.8 in the series on pace to do over 60 million. So in his fourth year, he's got a huge business and it's really fun to watch. And it even, it's even good for me to witness it. And I've learned a lot through that process. 'cause we I actually work with three people on his [00:16:20] team every single week.

And so watching that growth and progression has actually helped me get better at, being right on the forefront of things that are working. And also when you work with a really smart owner that takes the ideas that you give them and then optimizes 'em, makes 'em better, and shares what worked. A rising [00:16:40] tide raises all ships.

You mentioned coachable, so who's your perfect customer? Somebody that wants to grow and somebody that wants to learn. I don't think that e-commerce is a very static business. So what works right now probably won't work as well a year from now. We're [00:17:00] very principle based, so I believe in the principles of, trust and simplicity and the hierarchy of focus and, um.

Clarity trumps persuasion, things like that. But how you accomplish that is going to continue to change. And the one thing that I do notice is the people that are [00:17:20] using AI are able to put out more work. They're not like reducing the size of their team, but the output of their team is so much better.

That's really where I've seen them move the needle. I don't see people that are like. Going, oh, I'm gonna get rid of a bunch of my people actually having a great business after [00:17:40] doing that. I don't think businesses have a business problem. I think they have people problems. And so if you really focus on the people on your team, making sure that they have the tools that they need I think that e-commerce is still a very fun business and it's very profitable when it's done well, for sure.

And e-commerce [00:18:00] won't go anywhere talk me about the scope of the services that you provide and walk me through a typical onboarding process. How long it takes, what kind of steps are involved and so on. Yeah first off, to make sure it's a good fit. We do an audit. So we'll get on a call walk through your site, see if we can actually provide some value.

We'll give you some free advice. [00:18:20] So even if you don't decide not to work with us, you can go apply that and make some more money. And then if you feel like it's a good fit we have a eight week program that we call wrap, which is a revenue accelerator program. And so where we spend eight weeks and we go from your checkout all the way back to your homepage.

And implement all the best practices, [00:18:40] kinda look at your email flows, try to optimize it based off of, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data that we have of what works and what doesn't work. And that's a eight week program. And then if I. If we do that and we're happy working with you, and you like working with us, then we offer to partner with them [00:19:00] and actually help them scale and grow their business by taking care of everything on their website, their data and analytics, the split testing, the implementation, and let them worry about sourcing product, running ads, customer service, stuff like that, but they don't have to worry about their website at all.

You mentioned that your one client, [00:19:20] you're working with them for many years. What's the average duration of a client? Yeah, it varies. If we go past the eight weeks, which a lot of 'em do I would say realistically the average is two to three years. Many times they grow to the point where then they can have an in-house team do what we do.

And we've taught them how to do that. And it's all [00:19:40] just part of the process. We have no issue. We don't try to hide anything. Our goal is to grow them as fast as possible. 'cause a percentage of more is more. And so we want them to grow and improve. So I feel like our goals are aligned in that.

And it's worked really well for us over the last 10 years. Can you talk to me about your pricing [00:20:00] structure? How do you charge for your services? Yeah, the eight week program is it's split up into two payments. It's 15,000, so it's 7,500 down and then 7,500 after four weeks. And so it needs to make sense, obviously for the brand to see if they would get that.

Our goal is to always try to make the [00:20:20] program itself pay for itself by the end of the eight weeks. I would say that we're probably 80% successful at that. There's some that it takes a little longer. And then the other one, it's it's really based off of their metrics and what size they are when they come.

So it's probably, it'd be hard to just [00:20:40] give a blanket price for that. But it it's obviously doesn't cost any anything to jump on an onboarding call and figure it out. I think it's definitely a good decision to have someone coming from the outside with a fresh pair of eyes. Because as a owner, as a manager, sometimes you can't see the forest because of the trees.

And then somebody who has this [00:21:00] process has done this process for many years and comes with the right mindset. That definitely helps in growing a business. Before our coffee break comes to end today, Matt, is there anything that you wanna share with our listeners that we haven't talked about? Complete.

So I think I would like to tell e-commerce business owners that, like I do this [00:21:20] all day, every day, seven days a week. And I truly believe that this is the greatest time to be in e-commerce and to be doing this. So if you're struggling, I keep at it like a lot of times, like it's amazing how many people I've quit that I've seen quit that were so close, and then someone else comes along and [00:21:40] takes their idea and, or takes their product and blows it up.

Fight the good, fight it, it's worth it. It's an entrepreneurial rollercoaster. You just need to stick long enough with it and then success will come on its own. For our listeners, I know Matt for many years. If you wanna reach out to him, I can give you a really trusted advice there. He will point you in the right [00:22:00] direction and he will find someone who really will help you to make your business better.

Matt, we can go people and find out more about you. Right at our website, build growth scale.com. And then my email is just matt@buildgrowthscale.com. So you can email me and I see all my emails. I'd be happy to jump on a call and do an audit with you. [00:22:20] Excellent. I will put the links in the show notes, then you just one click away.

Matt, thanks so much for your time today. I hope a lot of people would reach out to you and scale their business together with you. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks Cost.

Hey, Klaus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests [00:22:40] on the show. It'll also make it easier for others to discover the podcast.

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