Episode Summary
In this episode of the Seven Figures and Beyond ecommerce podcast, host Greg Shuey interviews Ben Sharf, co-founder and co-CEO of Platter, to debunk the common misconceptions around building high-converting eCommerce storefronts. Ben shares his entrepreneurial journey, from hockey and corporate detours to launching Platter, and explains how most brands overcomplicate conversion optimization by relying on bloated tech stacks, slow decision-making, and design-first mindsets.
Drawing from his experience building over 150 Shopify storefronts, Ben emphasizes simplicity, high-quality assets, and guiding users through intuitive buying journeys. He outlines actionable strategies for improving conversion, like reducing clicks, prioritizing above-the-fold CTAs, streamlining the add-to-cart experience, and using mega menus, while warning against branding decisions that sacrifice performance. The conversation is a practical, high-impact playbook for brand owners looking to redesign or optimize their storefronts with a focus on ROI rather than just aesthetics.
Key Takeaways
- Simplicity Wins – The highest-converting eCommerce sites reduce friction by minimizing clicks, answering customer questions on-page, and offering clear CTAs and navigation paths.
- Assets Are Everything – High-quality product images, UGC, and lifestyle visuals are essential. They build trust and elevate brand perception far more than animations or overly designed interfaces.
- Avoid Frankenstein Stores – Constantly stacking new apps and code on old infrastructure creates long-term tech debt. Brands should assess whether it’s time to rebuild clean rather than redesign on a messy base.
- Design for Conversion, Not Just Brand – Conversion-focused design (like sticky CTAs, mega menus, and smart upsells) often clashes with brand-first aesthetics. For most DTC brands, revenue should take priority.
- Low-Lift Changes Drive Results – Conduct a quick audit: count how many clicks it takes to buy a product, ensure there are clear CTAs above the fold, and confirm that trust elements like reviews and guarantees are easy to find.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- How many clicks does it take for someone to purchase my hero product? Can I eliminate one or more?
- Do I clearly tell visitors what I sell, above the fold, and back it up with social proof?
- Am I forcing customers to consume information they don’t need before making a purchase?
- Do my product pages end at a strong CTA, or leave customers scrolling with no action step?
- Is my site designed to look good, or is it designed to convert? And which matters more to me right now?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Ben Sharf LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-sharf-b554a5b3/
Platter: https://www.platter.com
Turning Pro Podcast: https://www.turningpropod.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.262)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond Ecommerce Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Greg Schuey. I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers who are stuck and who are trying to find a way to grow their businesses. My guest today is Ben Scharf. He is the co-founder and co-CEO of a company called Platter.
If you are not familiar with platter, what they do is they help Shopify brands convert higher value customers, which is what we all want, right? Higher value, more profitable customers. So they’ve built a platform to make it easy for those of us who aren’t that smart, including myself, or don’t have the time to figure it out. So I’m super pumped today to be able to dive in and, and have this discussion today. We’re going to talk about the misconception.
about what it takes to build a high converting e-commerce storefront. So many brand owners, everyone I talked to, including myself, I think we all have the wrong idea about conversion optimization. We end up wasting too much time and spending way too much money than we actually need to in order to build this and get this in front of customers and get them buying. So Ben, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be with us today.
Ben Sharf (01:19.407)
Thanks for having me today, Greg. Stoked to be here.
Greg Shuey (01:21.952)
Yeah, and I also understand you’ve got a podcast as well, so I want you to plug that in just a minute. But before we dive in, can you share a little bit about your personal story, how you’ve gotten to where you are today? Please mention your podcast. I’ll make sure to include that in show notes, but I’m going to let you take it from here.
Ben Sharf (01:39.183)
Yeah, I’ll give you a quick overview of my background. I definitely didn’t expect to be here, which I think is the fun part about entrepreneurship. Yeah, probably. I was playing the visual in hockey and had full intention of playing professionally after school. And then this crazy thing called COVID happened. My senior season got cut short by a global pandemic. I know everyone had it with them in some way.
Greg Shuey (01:46.25)
Isn’t that most of us though, right?
Greg Shuey (01:54.818)
Really?
Greg Shuey (02:01.304)
There you go.
Ben Sharf (02:03.759)
in tandem with that, I had also gotten a corporate job. So when COVID happened, I realized that hockey was no longer in the cards because I didn’t want to sit around for 12 months in the unknown. what, when are seasons are going to start? How much guys are going to get paid? Whatever. It served its purpose, ran its course onto the next. And then I also realized in the midst of this that I didn’t want to go to a corporate job either.
So 12 hours before my first day, I told them I wasn’t coming. So what went from thinking I was going to play hockey after school to joining one of the big four consulting firms actually turned into me forgoing both of those and jumping into the world of entrepreneurship. I ended up joining an early stage COVID testing startup that scaled to 50 million in revenue in five months from inception where I met actually my now co-founder, one of my two co-founders in Platter.
Greg Shuey (02:48.675)
Dang.
Ben Sharf (02:58.947)
And then between there and starting this company, I spent a year at GoPuff, if you’re familiar. GoPuff is essentially an Uber Eats for convenience store goods. They started in college towns. At this point, they’ve raised like $4 billion. It’s a pretty large business at this point, but I was working on an e-commerce business unit there to enable instant delivery from .com websites. So the idea was if you were to buy a case of water from Liquid Death online,
Greg Shuey (03:04.6)
I’m not.
Greg Shuey (03:09.102)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (03:21.55)
Hmm.
Ben Sharf (03:25.997)
and you’re within the geo fence of the fulfillment center, you can actually choose GoPuff as the delivery option. So 30 minutes or less from a DTC purchase, which is revolutionary, right? It’s insane, but you need the coverage that they had to be able to offer something like that. All that to say, I spent my entire time there talking to e-commerce brands, understanding how they build and manage the e-commerce storefronts. We were building a Shopify app at the time at GoPuff.
Greg Shuey (03:34.252)
Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah.
Ben Sharf (03:51.355)
So I also had the opportunity to work with some of the largest household names as we know it today, right? Athletic Brewing, Liquid Death, Truff, like all the big brands that were using GoPuff to understand their e-comm experience and how we could plug in. Through my time there, I was like, I don’t understand. Like, why is there no like gold standard for how to build and manage an e-commerce storefront?
Greg Shuey (04:04.206)
Hmm.
Ben Sharf (04:11.803)
It’s like I’m talking to the Ecom Director of a brand doing 50 million in revenue online. They’re like, yeah, it’s just so complicated. Like we have all these apps and we had this one agency that like overcharged us and I can’t change the color of a button. And I’m like, wait, so you guys also deal with this, right? Cause the common misconception from the outside looking in is you’re a big business. You must have everything figured out. And that’s just not the case at all. Right? So like after a couple of these conversations, I kind of just went down this rabbit hole.
Greg Shuey (04:25.411)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (04:39.843)
of curiosity that now turned into what I’m building today, which is Platter. So I think to bring it full circle, it was basically synthesizing a lot of these conversations I had and a lot of depth and knowledge in the ecosystem to realize a couple big things. The first one, there’s an incentive misalignment between traditional dev agencies and brands because when you get paid for your time only, you’re incentivized to make things really expensive and complicated.
Greg Shuey (05:03.854)
Yep.
Ben Sharf (05:04.591)
The second piece to it is that there’s a lot of apps in this ecosystem that in our opinion are point solutions. So feature is not products. And so you sometimes get into these situations where you either have a super custom storefront from a developer that you can’t change unless you have them at your disposal. So they essentially handcuff you or you have a storefront that has a hundred third party apps on it.
And that results in more expenses, slower website, more people that you have to deal with or a combination of the two. Right. So our whole thesis was if there’s a way that we can productize parts of this process to offer you a tech enabled service offering, we can build something for you. That’s more cost effective without compromising quality in the realm of building a storefront and fast forward to today with Platter. We’ve built over 150 storefronts in the last two and a half years.
Greg Shuey (05:50.403)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (05:56.098)
Wow.
Ben Sharf (05:56.867)
Which if you look at the industry, would say a typical agency probably eclipses that in like a decade. and so now, you know, for the last three years have been, have been building Platter. And I, this is, this is about your podcast, but I will say you also have a podcast called turning pro. it’s an in-person podcast. It’s really focused on interviewing founders, creators, entrepreneurs on the turning pro moments in their building journeys. but yeah, not, not important.
Greg Shuey (06:03.628)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (06:22.382)
Yeah.
No, we’re only getting show notes because they should listen to that as well. I love founder stories. That’s amazing. That was quite the story, From hockey to doing 150 websites a year. It’s amazing.
Ben Sharf (06:28.891)
Bye.
Ben Sharf (06:44.367)
No, not a year. wish that’s over the course of our last three years. No, I, no, no, God, no. I don’t know if we’ll ever get, I don’t know if we’ll ever get to that scale. because the, but, look at the end of the day, it’s like the way we think about it is we, at its core, we have a service offering, but we also build their own technology. And so the idea is to incrementally improve that technology to just ultimately become more efficient over time.
Greg Shuey (06:47.234)
that’s over the course of the last three years. Got it. Got it. Okay, I thought you said the last 12 months. Okay. Cool.
Greg Shuey (07:09.25)
Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (07:13.742)
Amazing. All right, man, you ready to impart some wisdom to us? It’s rock and roll. OK, so first question I’ve got for you is what are the most common misconceptions that brand owners have about what it takes to build a high converting e-com site? I you said you talked to a ton of them. Let’s hear what the most common are.
Ben Sharf (07:18.747)
Let’s do it.
Ben Sharf (07:37.721)
Yeah, I think the first one is making assumptions about the knowledge that your customer perspective customer has when they land on your website. Right? Like you need to explain it sounds and to preface this, it sounds very simple, but you’d be shocked how many large businesses we’ve worked with who don’t do the simple things. Right? As simple as like you land on the homepage and the hero section, what are you selling? Like, what are you selling? Number one.
Greg Shuey (07:58.03)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (08:07.547)
Do you have social proof to actually give someone who’s curious, but maybe skeptical, like the reassurance that you’re a real business and you’re a product that they can and should trust. And the third one is how easy are you making it for them to actually buy your product? Right? Like one exercise that I always tell brands, um, is go on your own website and try to buy whatever you deem to be like the hero offering, right? Every brand wants to guide you somewhere and.
Determine how many clicks it takes for someone to actually go from landing on your website to making that purchase. Odds are there’s probably one or two clicks in that funnel that you could probably eliminate from that buying journey. So the way that we think about it is like every click you’re adding into the conversion funnel is likely going to be a decrease in conversion at scale because you’re just making it harder for people to buy things. So think like if I could simplify that for someone listening, it’s like
Greg Shuey (08:42.84)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (08:48.428)
Hmm. Yep.
Ben Sharf (09:04.685)
Make sure you answer all the questions that you think someone would have before they come so you can get ahead of it. Right? Like if you’re selling a supplement, you should probably tell them what ingredients are in that supplement so they don’t have to leave the page trying to figure out.
Greg Shuey (09:10.734)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (09:15.902)
Answer all your FAQs on page. One click to cart, one click checkout.
Ben Sharf (09:21.322)
100%. All those things. And then the other thing I’ll say is like, don’t underestimate the value of good social assets, like good assets. Nothing, nothing is more unfortunate than when you see an amazing product that has terrible assets and it’s like, you guys are not doing yourself the justice that you deserve. And the other one that I’ll add as well is know what you want the consumer to expect when they come to your site, right? I’ll give you an example. I spoke to a brand.
Greg Shuey (09:45.71)
Hmm.
Ben Sharf (09:47.739)
They have a lower price point. they really want their customers to subscribe into like the build a bundle functionality. Right. So like increase AOV, but their build a bundle is like a sec. It’s like a CTA to a link hidden inside of a mega menu with 15 different options. If that’s what you wanted the person to do, like, why is that not either the primary or the secondary CTA on the hero section? And then if you have a mega menu, why is there not like a big graphic with an offer of like
Greg Shuey (09:54.434)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (10:04.878)
Poof.
Ben Sharf (10:17.189)
Click here, like this is where we want you to go.
Greg Shuey (10:19.724)
Yeah, just make it stupid simple.
Ben Sharf (10:23.765)
Simplicity is a superpower. think that is like the biggest mistake I would tell you that brands make.
Greg Shuey (10:29.45)
is complexity over complicating everything. I think I would probably agree with you on that. Yep. Okay. So what are, when, when you think back to all of these 150 websites, like what are the core elements? Unless maybe let’s core could still be broad. Let’s maybe say like the top two or three elements that actually drive conversions on a storefront. And then which things are usually just expensive distractions.
Ben Sharf (10:59.471)
It’s an interesting question. think the ones to start on the first part of the question, which are the core drivers, I think to your point is the way that you’re driving people through the funnel. I think a really good example for that is brands that don’t use a car drawer, but use a page load instead.
Like we have found, we have found that when you’re adding additional page loads into the funnel, just to be able to buy something, it’s an absolute conversion killer. think another one that’s at the top of that list is if you’re doing any sort of upsell cross sell functionality anywhere on the website, whether that be like a, may also like section on the product page or cart drawer upsells or even checkout upsells. Do not send your customer backwards in the conversion funnel.
Greg Shuey (11:28.088)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (11:48.377)
You need to have the ability for people to like add those products to the cart on that page or to enable a pop-up. Like think about it logically, right? Like I got you all the way to the cart and then you saw another product that you were interested in adding and you click it and it takes you backwards to the.
Greg Shuey (11:48.821)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (12:07.052)
right back to the PDP. How often is that happening?
Ben Sharf (12:13.627)
I mean, I see it, I see it pretty frequently. I would say it’s a lot more, I see it a lot more common on PDPs. So like if you have like a, may also like section or like a add this product right under the hero CTA instead of it having like quick add functionality, I see where people are taking you to a different page or elsewhere, which again is just adding distraction and friction. So I think that’s another big one. And then.
Greg Shuey (12:35.34)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (12:42.573)
I would say another one is around just like what I thought were like simple accessibility things. Like I can’t tell you the number of brands I see that have like announcement bars or pop-ups that cover CTAs. And then the other piece of that as well is like you should have CTAs available on page load. Like forcing someone to scroll down the page, add the product to the cart. I know it seems like very simple.
Greg Shuey (13:03.138)
Hmm.
Ben Sharf (13:10.543)
But like the way that we as Planner think about building and optimizing sites is like making a 1 % improvement in as many places as possible that leads to like the better outcome. don’t ever want a brand that we work with to come to us thinking we have some like magic, like novel, you know, ideal white ball that like the no eight ball that no one else can understand. Cause it’s not the case. It’s just like incrementality and iteration. Cause I think the other piece that I would say.
Greg Shuey (13:10.755)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (13:32.056)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (13:39.259)
without going down too much of a rabbit hole is like the recommendations that I would make to you are going to change depending on the size of your catalog, the price point of the product, the vertical that you’re in the seasonality, so on and so forth. So it’s not to say that it’s like one size fits all. It’s more about like, I would say there’s two categories in my opinion of like CRO. They’re just like inherent best practices around like how to make the buying journey for a customer easier.
And then there are recommendations based on your category and all these different inputs I had mentioned, because I would never suggest a brand selling like a $500 piece of jewelry to have like an upsell in your car and expect someone to impulsively do so. Right. So there’s a little bit of nuance in that sense. So yeah, I’ll pause there. Cause I know it’s a mouthful.
Greg Shuey (14:09.912)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (14:15.811)
Right.
Greg Shuey (14:26.71)
No, that was great. Those are some great examples. very, very, very good. So if we kind of pivot here for just a minute, we’ve talked about PDPs, we’ve talked about homepage, you know, headers, heroes, can you walk us through, let’s start with homepage and then let’s start this, go to PDPs. Can you walk us through what a conversion focus homepage should look like?
and then what a conversion focused PDP should look like.
Ben Sharf (14:57.881)
Yeah, starting on the homepage, think the biggest thing is the hero section, right? It’s like the thing that a lot of people get wrong, which is surprising. I think there’s a couple of things. First one, I can’t emphasize it enough. Having high quality assets is so important. Like that at the end of the day, if you think about it is like the first impression that a new potential buyer is going to have on your brand. So having high quality assets, another one is social proof.
Right? Like if you have 20,000 five star reviews on your product, like tell people that you do that should be like, it should be in the hero. It should be absolutely above the fold. Right? Like you need those quick hitter opportunities for someone to take you seriously. It’s kind of the way that I would describe it. And then the other one as well is that you would be shocked how many brands I see that don’t have a CTA in their hero section. Like it’s just like the graphic.
Greg Shuey (15:32.214)
and get that high on the page. Get that above the fold. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (15:50.828)
Hmm. It’s just like either an image or a scrolling image. Interesting.
Ben Sharf (15:54.989)
Yes, but you need to guide, like you have to think about it is what they look at is what you are deciding to show them. So it’s on you to guide them where you want them to go. Right. Whether it’s like a primary and a secondary CTA, depending on if you have like a hero offering or a certain collection, that’s number one. As you move down the page beyond the hero section, again, depending on what category you’re in, the size of your catalog, there’s a couple of different things I would recommend.
The first one is if you have very clear hero skews, uh, we’re a huge proponent of making those shoppable on your homepage. Cause odds are if you’re a brand that’s known for like one or two products, you’re going to have high intent shoppers that are like, I know what I want. I’m coming to get it. Like make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
Right? So that’s having the ability to transact without having to go to the PDP. It’s all about optionality. Like one of the misconceptions around information is give them the option to consume more information if they want it, but don’t force them to consume it if they don’t want to. So the way that I would describe that in the context of the homepage is if you have high intent shoppers, give them the option to transact. Don’t force them to go to the PDP. If they want to go there, then allow them to do so, but don’t make that step one.
Greg Shuey (17:07.49)
Hmm. Yeah.
Ben Sharf (17:10.747)
And then if you’re a very large catalog, very clearly communicating your different collections to guide them where you want them to go. And then again, it’s social proof, social proof, social proof, right? It’s whether you’re doing testimonials, we’re a huge UGC content thing. Like social proof is the number one piece of advice that I would give as you think about like a homepage, like to simplify it. It’s do you make it very clear where you want someone to click and you give someone a reason to actually believe that you’re as good as you say you are or do they think you do?
Right. Those are like the two questions I would ask myself on the homepage. When you get into the product page, there’s a couple of different things to think about. First one is information hierarchy. Right. Oftentimes I see brands who get that wrong. Right. So my example for you is like a very common feature that you see is either a block of text that highlights like the important components, whether that be how to use FAQs, ingredients, cetera.
Greg Shuey (18:07.107)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (18:07.449)
We always suggest putting those in minimized text dropdowns with a header. And the reason for that again, goes back to the point I previously made. Don’t force someone to consume a piece of information unless they want to. So when I get to a PDP and it’s like image and then like a paragraph of text that they could not eliminate. It’s like you’re utilizing the most important digital real estate that you have that should be social proof again. Right? So it’s like title price, social proof of some sort, very seamless, variant selectors.
Greg Shuey (18:18.786)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (18:37.155)
And then the CTA, of course, I mean, it’s hard to like verbally describe this, but like, it’s just the hierarchy. The information is very important. Like you want to think about that subsequently of like, okay, social proof. What’s the product? How much does it cost? What are my options by the product at other products? Seems obvious. Not that obvious. Apparently the other one that I see often, and I think like,
Greg Shuey (18:58.83)
Ha
Ben Sharf (19:03.483)
If you’re a big enough brand, have statistical significance to test this like fine, but I don’t subscribe to brands who put all the product information on the left side of the page and the images on the right side of the page. I’ve seen, I’ve seen two brands in the last week do that. Before that, I have not seen it in over two years. Right. And I’ll tell you why I don’t subscribe to that. People read left to right. You want their eyes to end at the buy button, not on a beautiful image of the product.
Greg Shuey (19:14.796)
Hmm, okay.
Greg Shuey (19:22.305)
Interesting. Okay.
Greg Shuey (19:33.186)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (19:33.339)
Because now what’s happening is you’re seeing the information, you’re looking at the images of the product, and now you’re having to go back to buy. It’s every incremental friction point that you can reduce is going to be helpful. So I’d say those are kind of the high level pieces. And then the other one again is assets. You need high quality assets. I we’re not strongly opinionated on grid images versus collection images versus scroll images. think as long as you’re utilizing all the white space on the product page, the worst thing you can do is have images.
Greg Shuey (19:39.022)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (19:43.436)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (20:03.235)
a of text and like this huge block of white space under the images. Like you don’t want to do that. but as you go below that, it’s, it’s, again, it’s all the things that I said before, which is get ahead of the questions you think people are going to be asking. Right. So we like, reasons to love sections are great. It’s a more playful way to say like, you know, it’s a, whatever vegan, like no dairy, like all the things you think someone might be asking, depending on what your product is.
Greg Shuey (20:08.706)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (20:31.547)
It’s more social proof so shopable videos, content sections and then Sticky CTA is another great one that we strongly recommend so the idea of being able to enable a consumer to transact on your PDP at any point in the scrolling journey versus forcing them to scroll all the way back up to the buy box to do so is another another CRO thing that we typically suggest to most of the brands we work with but ultimately it’s like
There’s a lot of different ways you can slice the pie. I think I preface everything around CRO with at the end of the day, like you need to do like testing at scale and most brands don’t do enough revenue or have enough website traffic to really get the statistical significance, which is why, like, I think the most helpful part of this conversation for brands is just thinking about simplicity, right? Like do you give them the social proof? Do you have the assets? Do you say what you, you say what you do?
and does someone walk away from looking at your product page with trust and can they easily purchase? That’s really what that’s the formula. It’s not like rocket science.
Greg Shuey (21:33.122)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (21:37.098)
Yeah. OK, so if I had to guess, I wish I would have been counting. You’ve probably said assets six to eight times in these first 25 or so minutes, right? So as we think about assets, as we think about design, as we think about branding, how do you recommend balancing all of that with performance and conversion? It’s like I swear half the time we deliver creative for Metta.
It comes back. It’s not on brand, but it performs right like it’s a hard conversation to have with people who are very focused on the brand. So how do you recommend that from your side of things?
Ben Sharf (22:20.475)
So we’re very, very opinionated on this topic to the point where we will tell brands that we’re not a good fit if they feel so strongly in a different direction than we do. What I always say to people is you can tell in two seconds if a website was built by someone who’s conversion focused and wants to make money versus a branding agency who cares about beautiful experiences. Right? So for us, when I refer to assets, I’m not talking about like
Greg Shuey (22:31.488)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (22:42.328)
Sure. Yep.
Ben Sharf (22:48.995)
the cool animations that are flying across the screen and like all these things that someone’s looking at and they’re like, Whoa, that’s so cool. I’m talking literally like the product photos that you use or like the UGC videos that you have of like a creator using your products or like the quality lifestyle shot that actually makes your brand look elevated. We are very much conversion focused. I tell a brand you come work with us. If you want to make more money.
Greg Shuey (22:53.111)
Right.
Greg Shuey (23:05.87)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (23:17.047)
Not if you want to be like a beautiful site and to be clear, there are a lot of industries and brands where the main goal is not just money, right? Like think about a retail brand that’s fashion where they’re like, we don’t want to like upsell and cross sell someone everywhere. We don’t want it to be like super functionality and feature rich. We just want it to be like an easy, elegant experience. I’m like that. And that’s, and that’s great. And there are people in the market that will give that to you.
Greg Shuey (23:39.734)
A premium experience, yeah. Yep.
Ben Sharf (23:45.689)
That’s just not where we sit. Cause like our wheelhouse is brands that are typically like medium to large catalogs, low to medium price points that really can lean into like gamification, right? Cause everything we do is around my cross-sell upsell and driving incrementality for every extra dollar. we’re not the one that’s going to build you like the award winning branded website where someone’s like, it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t convert with that being said.
Greg Shuey (23:57.261)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (24:13.453)
Everything is possible. we have some brands who’ve like aired towards that, but I say that to say that like, we take the approach of creative through the lens of like, what’s going to make you the most money, like, except the fact that it might not be the most beautiful thing, but if your bottom line is better than it was yesterday, like you’re probably happy with it.
Greg Shuey (24:33.462)
Yeah, it’s wild. It’s wild. mean, I’ve had a couple of clients that have brought in a branding person that have rebuilt their websites and are making less money. And it’s my fault because I’m the guy who’s driving the traffic. you know, brand branding people can do no wrong. No offense to branding people. But like when they’re hooked on brand and a branding person, like they can’t literally do no wrong. And even if it goes wrong.
Right? It’s hard. It’s hard to get them out of that mindset.
Ben Sharf (25:06.799)
I mean, I think my perspective on it is when someone asked me like, find a branding agency to do your branding and find a conversion focused agency to build your website. Right? Cause like, think it’s when branding agencies say they do end to end, typically one of a couple of things happen. One is they outsource the dev and white label it. We have branding agencies that send us the work all the time, to be honest with you, but we don’t even, there’s been instances we didn’t even interface with the customer. We don’t do that anymore because it just causes like issues.
Greg Shuey (25:16.354)
Yeah, that’s brilliant actually.
Greg Shuey (25:28.618)
that’s awesome.
Greg Shuey (25:35.277)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (25:36.005)
But we also will never tell a brand like we’re not a branding agent. We’ll never tell brand. are a branding agency. So if you come to me and you don’t have good assets, we’ll be like, look, we can build the guardrails to give you a good storefront, but just know we’re calling this out. At the beginning, we highly recommend you either do a rebrand or go get really good assets because you don’t have those today. So you will not be able to maximize everything we would tell you to do.
Greg Shuey (25:57.068)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (26:00.748)
Yep. I like that. I like that a lot. okay. I mean, we’re, we’re, we’re getting close to coming up on time, but I wanted to, to get to two more questions that I had for you, that will hopefully lead to some really amazing takeaways for the folks who are listening to this episode. for a brand owner who is trying to do this themselves or maybe has a small team.
They don’t outsource to someone like you. Are there any like low lift changes or very small things that they can take and start doing tomorrow that have, let’s say an 85 to 90 % chance that they’re going to see some kind of a conversion left.
Ben Sharf (26:49.061)
think, I think it’s basically like walking through an audit of some of the things that I called out that are very low lift, like seeing if you do that, right? Like I actually, funny enough, I sat on a panel, two weeks ago and talked about this topic and I had a brand founder send me a LinkedIn message two weeks later. And like she said to me, I went home after your talk and I counted how many clicks it took for someone to buy my product and I couldn’t believe it. And I was able to reduce.
Greg Shuey (27:19.202)
Wow, it’s as simple as that.
Ben Sharf (27:19.547)
And I was like that even if it’s one click, I’m like, that’s amazing. But like my advice would be like run through your website, really like pressure test. How easy is it to make a purchase? Give it to your grandma and give it to your six year old child. Right? Like run that test, like see, see like how easy it is. I think the other one is, um, looking at like, do you have the, the clear CTA? Like, is it clear what someone, what you’re trying to get someone to do?
Greg Shuey (27:24.62)
Yeah. Okay.
Greg Shuey (27:36.078)
That’s smart.
Ben Sharf (27:48.571)
Do you have the assets and are you checking these three boxes? Social proof, trust, and ease of use. Right? So it’s about like, can you reduce the clicks? Can you give all the information someone might need in a format that is digestible? And is it very easy for them to go through there? Right? Like I think I can give some other ideas, but in spirit of trying to keep it simple for someone who’s just looking for like low lift, high impact, I guess the other one that I would say is if you’re not using a mega menu.
Greg Shuey (27:52.451)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (28:20.102)
I don’t think we have a single brand in our entire 150 brand portfolio that doesn’t use one. And the reason for that is because when you just do drop down menus, you’re not leveraging that digital real estate in a way where you can utilize assets. Consumers are lazy. They don’t like to read and think so that to the extent that you can use visuals to guide them through the buying journey, a mega menu is like a very low lift way I think to make the initial impression of your suite of products a lot easier. I’m going to digest.
Greg Shuey (28:24.984)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (28:32.898)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (28:46.306)
Yeah. Interesting. that, because I’ve never personally built one. Is that like a plugin that you just add an app? Yeah. Okay.
Ben Sharf (28:55.003)
I think apps exist. Mega menu apps do exist.
Greg Shuey (29:01.048)
Got it. Cool. All right. If someone listening is about to invest in a redesign, what’s the what’s the one piece of advice, the one takeaway they should know in order to do it right the first time besides hiring you? Because that would be the ideal takeaway, right?
Ben Sharf (29:18.811)
You said it, not me. No. no, I think the biggest, the biggest piece of advice I can give there is understanding the differences between redesigning an existing code base and storefront versus rebuilding a new one. It’s a very, very important distinction. When you are redesigning an existing storefront, what you are doing is adding new code and new apps on top of an existing infrastructure.
Greg Shuey (29:37.302)
Interesting. Yeah.
Ben Sharf (29:49.435)
The risk you run in the long-term when doing so is it becomes archaic because you have so many different people who’ve been in and out of the code base. Right. So like the most common use case for our business is when a brand comes to us, been around for several years. like, Hey, I had five agencies, three freelancers, 150 apps and all the deleted over the course of the last five and eight to eight years. It’s so complicated. Now we need a new clean infrastructure.
Greg Shuey (29:56.91)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (30:06.725)
my gosh.
Greg Shuey (30:11.053)
Yeah.
Ben Sharf (30:15.705)
Right. So my, the point, the point that I’m making here is just assess like, what are the trading, what are the trade-offs and the opportunity costs of having like a clean infrastructure that might be more scalable 10 years from now versus just adding new things on top of an existing thing that might be the quick fix. cause I’m not saying I suggest every brand to do an entire rebuilds. it depends on where you’re at in your journey, but just be wary of investing in a full redesign on top of the thing you already have.
Greg Shuey (30:30.914)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (30:36.482)
Sure.
Ben Sharf (30:44.827)
because there’s just trade-offs in like renovating the existing thing versus rebuilding the new one.
Greg Shuey (30:51.202)
Got it. That’s gold. That is, that is gold. That’s a great stopping point. Well, Ben, I really appreciate it. Appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us. I think that we all learned a lot today. I know I did.
Ben Sharf (31:04.813)
I appreciate you having me, Greg. It was a pleasure.
Greg Shuey (31:06.744)
Yeah, absolutely. And to our listeners, I hope that you’ve been able to take away one or two golden nuggets that you can take and start implementing and make sure that you tune in next week. So thank you everyone for joining.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
