🤔 Is Your Shopify Store Designed to Convert, or Just Look Pretty?

Jay: [00:00:00] Brands that AB test, every single brand saw an increase in conversion and it ranged from 27% on the low end to 550% on the high end.

Phill Moorman: We found out that it actually makes more sense to try to attract these new customers with point solutions or more direct, straightforward.

Jay: So like if you're not AB testing, you're leaving 20% on the table.

Phill Moorman: Yeah, absolutely. 

Philip Mormon is a seasoned marketing leader and vice president of marketing at Shogun from driving $50 million in GMV at SoFi to scaling brands like Stock Twits and Spark Fin. Philip brings deep expertise in growth. Go to market strategy and performance optimization. What we built is AI

Phill Moorman: generator for 2.0 sections in Shopify.

Within your admin, we provide you a prompt box. You tell it exactly what you want. It will generate the whole thing, and usually within one prompt. The benefit of personalization is you make just one landing page and then you make variance of each of that so you can build on an entire pretty robust influencer campaign.

Jay Myers: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Shopify 1% podcast. I am very excited for this one because it's not a repeat guest per se, but it's a repeat company. because the company's been up to a lot since the last time we had Shogun on. They are, I would say, as a company. Not pivoting, but expanding and changing and doing some really interesting things.

And so if you listened to an episode, I don't know when it was, it might have been about five or six months ago with one of the founders of Shogun. This will be very different because some of the products that we're gonna talk about today didn't exist back then. So I have Phil Morman with me. He's the COO, correct.

Right. COO. Yep. And all right, well first of all, welcome here. Thank you so much for

 Phill Moorman: joining. Thanks for having me. Excited to be on here. I've seen the episodes with Nick. Super excited to. Kind of continue on with that.

Jay Myers: Let's see if we can get yours to have [00:01:00] more views than Nick's. Yeah, that's the goal.

Exactly. So you can rub it in his face in the office. Absolutely. Alright, we'll just make, we like, we'll boost the YouTube video a little bit or something to get more views. Yeah. We'll put, some paid behind it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Don't, tell him. Oh shoot. He'll hear. Okay, so when Nick and I spoke, I don't know, I guess it was about six months ago.

All we talked about was Shogun page Builder, which everyone knows. Page builder, I think. When did that launch? Like it was like. 2015. Yeah, it's one of the OG page builder solutions on Shopify. When I think of a page builder, show Gun just comes to mind. So I think I was speaking with Nick and Page Builder does a lot, like Page Builder did.

There's a like advanced per like personalized sections and AB testing, and I think there was this realization that. Shopify merchants want specific tools or sometimes it was intimidating. even just AB testing is intimidating to, [00:02:00] to some merchants. And so the thesis was we need to make it more approachable.

I shouldn't be speaking for you 'cause we'll get into this, but I'm just talking about when Nick and I spoke before this was his thesis that to make it more approachable for Shopify merchants for more. Specific tasks rather than a big, large product that maybe is a little bit, I'll, even though I wouldn't, I'd say page builder's not intimidating at all, but maybe for some merchants it was.

And so the thesis was can we build, I wanna say more smaller, modular apps that serve a specific purpose that are very clean, elegant, and easy to use. That was the last time we chatted. That was about five or six months ago. Now, here we are today. And so a, I'd like to check in on that, how that's going, but before we do that, what did you launch?

What did you ship? And I know there's one around the corner that's coming out, but probably by the time this episode's live it's gonna be out. So we [00:03:00] can talk about that one too. So tell me what's happened in the last five months at Chauvin.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah, so absolutely. So just stepping back a little bit, we did try to go the sort of like robust platform route.

So we built. Into page builder personalization and AB testing. Two pretty important tools. It just didn't really work for the customer base. And we found out, that's why we've sort of pivoted, I guess a little bit, is we found out that it actually makes more sense to try to attract these new customers with point solutions or more direct straightforward apps.

So we actually pulled out, you can still get these things in page builder, but we actually did create separate third I guess outside apps. For AB testing, personalization, and we're about to launch an AI section builder. So, we're building out this entire suite of tools. This is just kind of the beginning but we're excited.

We're seeing a lot of early traction. I think this direction makes a lot of sense for a lot of the merchants we work with and also new merchants that aren't working with us [00:04:00] through the page Puter product that's sort of going through its own little moment right now, especially with Shopify 2.0. So we've kinda shifted to what the market needs.

And so I'm pretty excited to get these things out, especially AB testing that's been out for a couple months now. And it's still something I think a lot of merchants are kind of afraid to approach,

Jay Myers: Or

 Phill Moorman: they're

Jay Myers: just not sure how to approach it. It's actually, it's mind blowing.

I bet you if I surveyed our listeners, I bet you 9 out of 10 are not AB testing. Simple things like even just. Header copy. You know, like their homepage, like I'm, you know, maybe you don't have to ab test every product page, but like simple things. I bet you they're not, they're, going off their gut.

They're going off of what they think looks good. But the data shows, and I don't know, this was from one report I saw, but brands that AB test. Every single brand saw an increase in conversion and it ranged from 27% on the low end [00:05:00] to 550% on the high end. Like there wasn't a single brand ever in this one study that I read that AB tested and saw no increase or decrease, but every single one increase, like to me.

It's one of those things that like, it should be a no-brainer, but it's not,

 Phill Moorman: yeah. I mean, everyone's talking about it. You see it all over LinkedIn and x, I guess now I still call it Twitter. You still see people talking about it, how they should be doing it, and I think it comes down to when we're having conversations with merchants and agencies, it's actually interesting.

There's just the value to risk ratio is a little off. For especially bigger brands, they're just not sure if they run the test. If it doesn't work out, that's a lot of lost sales, right? Half your traffic or so, or 10% of your traffic may never see the actual converting page. So there's that fear of that, but also.

Especially the mid-size brands, they just don't know what to test. They're just not sure what they should start with. And I think they get a little [00:06:00] overwhelmed with all the options and they just never move forward with it. Sort of like an analysis paralysis situation.

Jay Myers: Yeah, and I think there's probably also I know five years ago if you wanted to AB test, you were using tools like Optimizely and

Google Optimize, and these were somewhat complicated tools to use. You had to go into your theme and add classes and wrappers around certain sections so that you could test them. And like it required a little bit of coding knowledge to set it up and then set up the tests and it wasn't super simple. Now, the ab shoguns, AB tester, when it first came out I took a peek at it.

I don't, it's probably evolved since then. But I remember thinking like. Holy cow. I could have an AB test up, up in probably like 30 seconds.

It was like, pick what do you wanna test? Walk me through the process now. 'cause sorry, I haven't logged in recently, [00:07:00] but I remember when I first came out, I was like, oh, I checked this out and I remember I, my mind was blown how quick with zero code that I could have a test set up.

What does that look like? So like someone's listening, thinking that AB tests are confusing or they needed a developer or. Someone uses this app, what's the process?

 Phill Moorman: Yeah. And so it's super straightforward and that, so that's the philosophy of Show Gun, right? It's the no code just easy to get going. So we built around that.

And so now this AB testing tool, literally just install the app and it's right in your Shopify admin. So you go in there, open it up, you can select your page, you'll get a list of pages, you can do an AB test on, pick the page you wanna work with. From there, we make a copy of that page. And so you'll see two kind of like.

Boxes, right? Your original page and your variant page. In the variant page, you can edit the layout. You just click edit your Shopify editor, change the text, move things around. It's seriously that easy, almost feel like I'm doing a disservice by just explaining it so quickly. But it is literally that easy.

You can go in there, make any changes you want, [00:08:00] save your variant, and then after that you just pick kind of what the goal you wanna track is, and how much traffic you wanna send to the variant. So typically a good test is 50-50 split between traffic, but. You can do whatever, 10-90 and anything in between.

So after that, you publish it and run it, and then we start collecting that data for you.

Jay Myers: Okay. So what are some of the pages you can test? Homepage collection products. So any

 Phill Moorman: 2.0 page. So collections, products homepage, anything, any of those pages. There's nothing

Jay Myers: off table? No. Okay. And then you can test.

What kind of elements can you test on those pages? Is it

 Phill Moorman: images, copy. Images, titles, copy entire sections. You can test an entire page. We allow it for URL testing, so you can have a completely separate page. So you can even do, so, not even just 2.0 pages, but you can do like a page builder page versus a 2.0 page.

 So you can do entire pages. Sections, yeah. And anything in between.

Jay Myers: Interesting. I mean, internally, we're having a bit of a [00:09:00] discussion right now at Bold. We have, a new app coming out in a little while and we were like, what's the best form of landing page? I often find myself, I enjoy long form landing pages, like, but I'm a reader.

I'll watch every video I'll read, but I think the majority of people want short form. Sweet. Get to the point and then an action. but we should test it of course, obviously and see what converts. So you said you, you then pick your goals. What would be different goals? Some examples of that.

 Phill Moorman: This type of click through rate, right? Clicking on buttons conversion rate from the page and that kind of stuff. So we have a series of set goals that you can test against. And you can even do custom goals. So if you can, this will require some code, but if you can set your own goal within your theme, we can pull that in and pull that data for you.

Jay Myers: So a conversion is some type of a. Action the user takes. So like they click a button or submit a form or add product, [00:10:00] or

 Phill Moorman: we can show you everything from like the sales you're making to the page. We can show you the exact products that are being sold because they landed on this page. So yeah. Oh, you

Jay Myers: meant actual sale conversion.

Sale conversions. Yeah, we can do, right? Yep. Okay. So show them variance. Which one had a higher chance of the customer editing? Of buying? Yep. So that's a bit, that's a good question there. So like the action you might want them to take. Might be more on the page, like they might stay on the page longer or they might click something, but maybe they have a less lower conversion in the end.

Right. So what you test really matters too. Absolutely.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah. Yeah. You gotta look at the end. So that's the thing too. I mean, even on my side, so my career's been marketing the entire time. AB testing has been a thing since, I can't even remember how long. It's just always been around, but people get really excited, like, Hey, this page is getting more click through, or this is, you know, like people are moving through the funnel more with this page.[00:11:00]

But if you're not tracking that end, like you, the actual revenue being generated, which is something that we look at and report back to you, it's, there's no point because clicks, I don't wanna call it a vanity metric. I think it's a leading indicator in some ways, but. If you're not tying it back to revenue I think it's almost a waste of time in terms of testing.

So we do that. We definitely make sure that's very clear and again, like I said, we do offer, it's in a higher tier plan, but we do offer and show you the exact products. So not just revenue you're making, but also exact products people are purchasing after reaching this page that you're testing.

And it could be a landing page you're testing or a page within the funnel you're testing. But we record that and give you that kind of journey output in the analytics that we have in there.

Jay Myers: Yeah, that's interesting. 'cause I could definitely see scenarios where a page might get good engagement but not purchases and maybe you just don't have a [00:12:00] good call to action to buy.

And maybe you need a sticky add to cart button because customers are scrolling down and reading but then they get. Lost in all the information and distracted and Right. So what your metric might be that, okay, my goal of higher engagement on the page is there, but it's not ending up in a sale.

Like, so that's, yeah. Can you segment, so you mentioned you can set different ratios. Can you control it all by a certain type of a customer or where they're coming from or anything like that? Or is it just. Random, randomized and you set a percentage.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah, absolutely. So we actually have taken some of our what we built into our personalization app and put that directly into the AB testing app.

Oh, nice. So you can target segments by like referral source or if they're logged in, logged out, and that kind of thing to give like a more personalized experience. And this is something we're always expanding and working on, but it's actually pretty robust in [00:13:00] even like in our personalization app, you can track segment by city look like country.

All sorts of things. So, yeah, segmentation's a huge part too, and you can actually test your segment to see which one is actually converting better on those pages. And then you can use that information and refine your marketing plans, right? Take that information back to your paid channels and improve your targeting there for that segment as well and see if you can, you know, build a more efficient funnel throughout the whole process.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Where do you find people using it the most? For? Is it for paid traffic, like optimizing?

 Phill Moorman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's still like the big one.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

 Phill Moorman: For e-commerce, right? I mean, we all wanna move into the organic space, but it's so hard, especially now with ai. I think it's gonna be very interesting to see what's, how organic plays out there.

But yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a paid play and the people that come to us speak to us on the calls are typically growth marketers, paid marketers. looking to optimize those landing pages,

Jay Myers: right. So interesting. Okay. Now do you find brands using it? [00:14:00] I guess this, I was gonna say not just for AB testing, but just to literally send tr different traffic, different places.

But that's probably where the personalization app comes in. Like if I wanna send all my logged in existing customers a page, but a new customer, I maybe want to greet them a little bit differently. Introduce the brand intro, introduce our story. Have a bit of a different homepage versus someone who's logged in.

I know they know us, they've purchased from us before, so I can maybe just show deals and or trending or best sellers on the homepage versus maybe a little bit of a brand story. Is that a better use case for the personalization tool or would you see people doing that with the AB testing tool?

 Phill Moorman: So that's exactly what personalization was designed for, but a lot of people are using the AB testing tool to do that.

So, 'cause you can row, you can, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it's fine, right? It doesn't really matter. But yeah we built personalization for [00:15:00] that. I will say personalization just hasn't gained a lot of interest in and of itself. We're still figuring out positioning there, but it is interesting to see people using AB testing for the personalization use case.

So we'll have to figure out, you know, what that actually means in terms of those two products. If we just merge 'em completely or. Go from there. But yeah, it is something that customers are using a lot of for, is that segment routing. and I think it's really important, especially as we move into this era of ads are just not as efficient as they used to be.

We also, budgets are probably getting cut with the way things are going. So building out more personalized campaigns at scale, basically with either a personalization tool or the AB testing tool is actually a great way to make your campaigns more efficient and hopefully reduce that cost of acquisition for you.

Jay Myers: Do you, would you say there's a point in which like, should a brand always ab test and continue, so they, you ab test, you find a winner, now you take that winner, you [00:16:00] ab test something else, like first you're AB testing the headline, then you're AB testing what's Best practices for that because if you're AB testing two complete different pages, you wanna know what made one better.

Right. So I would imagine you'd wanna like isolate one specific variant test, then test another. Or what do you recommend the brand does if there's, I think it really depends on the brand.

 Phill Moorman: So, I've worked at startups that have 5,000 monthly visitors. To like a million monthly visitors. If you're doing like a million monthly visitors, you can do an AB test every day and learn something new and probably make a half percent increase on your conversions.

And that's significant amount of money. Huge at that level, right? Yeah. But if you're doing like 5,000 a month in your, sales, I don't know, maybe 20, 30,000 a month in sales, like continuously AB testing, sure. You might get some nice tweaks and some, you know, additional boosts here and there, but is that really priority or is there other ways [00:17:00] that you should be focusing your time?

I think it just depends again, where you're at in the business. I think you should definitely launch your page ab, test it with some significant changes, and see if you can get bigger, five, 10%, 30% increases in your click through or conversions. But if you're, if you've got, if you've got to the point where you've seen those big conversions and like your tests moving forward, or just really small, like maybe small boosts or maybe not anything at all, probably pull away,

And either test something completely new. Or look at the rest of your channel or your customer journey and then go from there. But yeah, it just

Jay Myers: depends

 Phill Moorman: on the brand

Jay Myers: really. Yeah, it's interesting. And also at some point I could see brands wanting a certain look, but if you ab test it, the look might not convert.

Right. Like these, there's a lot of sexy e-commerce sites that I bet. Don't convert well. Like there's like, you know, like I always say, you don't [00:18:00] break something that works. And there's a certain menu structure that works and there's a certain people expect category pages to work a certain way.

When you try to reinvent it, you might have a neat look, but it confuses the customer. Right. And like,

 Phill Moorman: yeah. It's funny you bring that up. We've actually had customers and we've. It's done tests with them that actually did improve their convers rate significantly. Like it wasn't a small amount, but it was off brand.

Yeah. They didn't want it, it just didn't match the flow of the rest of the site. So that in some cases can be more important, especially if you're building sort of more of a, like a lifelong type of customer brand instead of like the one off stuff. So again, it comes down to the brand, but yeah, it is, it was interesting to see, again, as a marketer by career, seeing somebody turn down the prospect of like.

30% increase in conversions, and it's a significant amount of money just because it's just not on brand. It doesn't fit

Jay Myers: well. At least you know the numbers and then [00:19:00] you can make an educated decision. Right? I saw someone run a test recently on their collection page and they were testing to have a hero image or not on a collection page and.

The result was the pages without hero images converted better. So just when you go to shoes, literally shoes are showing right away. Not a big banner at the top showing like spring shoes are in or something along those lines. But as a brand, it hurts to know that because you want to have your hero image there.

And so like, but at least then you would know like, okay, when we have that hero image there. We see a dip, we see a 8% drop in conversion. But now you need to know, is there another reason why you want that hero image? Are you promoting something else? Are you building, I don't, I can't think of a good reason off the top of my head, but you can make an educated [00:20:00] decision, I guess, at that point, right?

Right. Yeah. Like at least you have that information.

 Phill Moorman: Well, it's the balance of you know, getting that initial sale versus telling the story of your brand. I think. Right, and so that's the other thing to be careful of, right? If you're AB testing and what you see is you're getting a lot of great sales upfront, but no one's coming back, are you really AB testing for the right metrics there or the right customer base?

So that's true. It's just, it's something that you have to just, I don't know, something you have to balance as a brand. I think actually now saying this out loud, I think chg. Should also just get better at sharing some of those analytics long term of the customer base too. What does the repeat purchase look like, rate look like, right?

 And that kind of thing. So it, there's a lot to it. It's not as simple and straightforward as just like testing, copy or image. Right. It's definitely more depth to it for sure. I did see actually on LinkedIn, I think it was like a week or two ago. Brand. So you know, like Image Gallery, especially on mobile, see the big image and then below it there's like smaller images of the product.

Yep. [00:21:00] When you landed a product page, they got rid of the rest of the gallery and just showed the big product image and their conversions went out. I think it was pretty significant amount, 30 to 60% something. I don't remember the exact amount, but I think that's the other thing too, to like interesting.

Optimizing for that mobile experience. Something that I think really could be test but also the social experience, right? We're so used to our social now, taking up the entire screen of the phone, either through video or images, making the shopping experience feel the same way. So when they do come from social channels, it's just a simple thumb movement to make that purchase instead of having to scroll down a little bit to see that purchase button.

So those are the other things to consider when AB testing, for sure.

Jay Myers: Okay. Now tell me about. Shogun. Personalization.

 Phill Moorman: Personalization. So that is basically just taking or allowing you to build segments. It's kind of like a mini CDP ish. Okay. If you wanna describe it that way. Customer

Jay Myers: data platform for the customer data

 Phill Moorman: platform.

So [00:22:00] basically you can take just similar to AB testing, you can look at the URL. They come from referral source city, or I should say location. And it's a logged in, locked out and all sorts of different little segment types. And you can build out with, we have a little dropdown. You can pick the different segments, what you wanna pick within those segments.

So let's say you pick Citi Miami and then you also pick they come from this partner source or something. This partner, URL or UTM. And so you can really refine who sees the page. And so how that works is, it's also just like AB testing. It's built right into the Shopify admin. You install the app, you're already in it basically.

And it shows you two different boxes. So you see your original page and then your variant pages. And so you create multiple variants, as many as you need by segment that you create. So again, let's say we're selling swimsuits and we have just our original page targets everybody. And then we have our Miami page specifically.

So when you go to make that variant, you can go into the page, edit it, change the copy, change the images, just like AB testing, change the layout of the [00:23:00] page. Can't do a completely separate page. It is, this is actually, you know, a variant of the original, unlike AB testing that does allow uur L testing.

But with that variant, again, changing that copy, changing the buttons, everything else to make it more personalized. And what happens is the people that meet that se those segment requirements will only see that segment page. Until it's gone. So as long as it's live, they will always see that page.

There's no like redirect, there's no flash. It's not like an awkward experience, it's just that's the page they see. That's what loads. Yep, that's what loads.

Jay Myers: So it's a pretty smooth experience. What is the best use case that's relatively easy to set up? Is it location? Like someone I could imagine East Coast, west coast, maybe summer, winter.

Like colder climates. Warmer climates, and like if you're selling clothing, different hero images or different speaking to like, to that location or like what's a real quick win for [00:24:00] personalization?

 Phill Moorman: So the one that we see most commonly used is actually location. And so we have these brands that sell locally.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

 Phill Moorman: And so they have different locations throughout various states. But they don't sell all the same products at all those locations. Gotcha. So they use that personalization to create these landing pages that just show the products of the store closest to the customer. So Oh,

okay.

Makes it, because they were getting, the issue was actually people were ordering things from like two states away.

It's like, either you drive here or we have to refund you, basically. Right. So that, and we've seen that actually with various brands at this point, just based on your location, certain things just are not available to you.

Jay Myers: So. Is the product. So what page would this be? Is this like a collection page or a homepage and you just are showing different

 Phill Moorman: products?

They're either making landing pages or collections pages. Okay. yeah, based on that. So when you do land on like the collection of what's available locally, that's just all you see. So they can still go through the site in some ways or get around it, which. It's unfortunate and something that we're [00:25:00] looking into, but

Jay Myers: like if they searched for it or typed in the URL.

Right, but they wouldn't just see it on the collection page. Exactly. And

 Phill Moorman: so again, this comes, a lot of this comes from paid, so right direct paid landing page, and you put them in the flow and you build your flow around that personalization. So it's not something that they would necessarily jump outta that flow, but it is possible to jump out that

Jay Myers: flow.

Like, I mean, could you do something too, like if you can do it by source if you have a. Influencer program, could you do it by someone, a specific, maybe someone's email newsletter. That might be tough. 'cause you wanna have a URL actually, could you add You could, yeah. So you can do ETMS

 Phill Moorman: So you can do, you can give your Perfect, yeah, you can give any of your partners or influencers, a specific ETM and then they would land on that page personalized for them. Right. You can show the influencer's face and a quote from that influencer. Everything else to make it really jive with the social campaign. I'm assuming you're running with that influencer.

Jay Myers: Well, that's been proven to [00:26:00] increase conversion when, so there's are you familiar with super affiliate?

Yeah. It's basically their business model is influencer landing pages, but they create full blown landing pages. I think you could probably get 90% of the win and I'm a fan of super affiliate. Great product. But if you didn't want to. Build full blown landing pages for each affiliate. You could probably get 90% of the effectiveness at least by having like their picture.

And Jay recommends or recommended by Jay and I see some products that I recommend or something like that. Even like that addresses the trust, the, I'm not just clicking a random affiliate link. It's actually, there's a connection with me and the brand like. Yes, a big fancy landing page would be nice.

Which I guess you could do that with show gun too, page builder and then send them to each one of those. But like quick win, this would probably increase conversion for sure.

 Phill Moorman: Well, yeah, this, so this is what person, this is [00:27:00] again, that like the benefit of personalization is you can take, you make just one landing page and then you make variants of each of that.

And then, you know, for the influencers, they each get their own UTM. So let's say you have five different variants of this page, and all you have to do is switch out, say the hero section, put the influencer space up there, put a quote by them, and then show the products most linked to that audience that influencer's audience.

Yeah. And so you can do that how many times you need to very quickly. So you can build on an entire pretty robust influencer campaign.

Jay Myers: So you could actually probably do exactly what super affiliate does with Shogun. If you built a template for a page that was. And I haven't looked at super affiliate for a while, but I know when they first launched the concept was if I'm an influencer for, let's just say a beauty brand, and you click on my link on my Instagram profile and I'm talking about beauty products, you land on a site and it's like, here's my recommendation, my products my seven favorite skin creams, or something along those lines.

And it's a bit of a curated list of [00:28:00] products I recommend, or whatever it is. Clothing, t-shirts, something. You should be able to do that very simply. I would imagine with Shogun, create the template, have a different, just slap in the, you know, create a template in Canva for like the influencer influencers, like headshot with a background color put in, and then in Shogun on a landing page, you can pick specific products to show in it, right?

Yeah. The whole thing could be personalized.

 Phill Moorman: So yeah, that would

Jay Myers: be gold. That would be

 Phill Moorman: you know, it's so. Funny though, like personalization is, it's just not, I don't know. It's not, and that the way it's positioned is just not something people are immediately searching for. So we've been playing around with different ways to position the product and you know, this might be the right angle.

Jay Myers: It's all packaging. Hey, it's like you can sell the same product but you package it as something else and then it sells. Yeah. And so like, really? What it is like you, if you package it up as like personalized [00:29:00] influencer landing pages, which really it does that. But anyways, just, I mean that's interesting.

You almost have to, you almost wanna think about like use cases, like what are, like the five ways that people would use this? Like for maybe like email campaigns for exclusive offers for VIP programs where VIPs get access to something influencer programs. Then you have these like prepackaged work workflows or solutions.

'cause it's like the power's there. It's just packaging it that way. A hundred percent. So we've had this conversation,

 Phill Moorman: Since it launched actually. Like how can we do, we split it up into like, I guess separate apps, but it's still really the same app. And position each specific for like specific use cases, or do we try to capture kind of like a broader use case and see if that brings people in?

So it's definitely, like you said, the packaging issue is the biggest one. 'Cause the tool is super powerful. The tool is great and it works very well. we just haven't brought in that [00:30:00] interest yet, so it's just kind of a stab in the heart as a marketer. We haven't quite figured that out. I love to see the numbers go up.

It's just the one challenge so far that we haven't quite cracked, but I think we will, we'll definitely get there.

Jay Myers: It's like you go to a hardware store and all the lumber can be there and all the tools and hammers and every saw you need. Yeah. But what people wanna buy they'll pay twice as much for the deck kit.

Yep, exactly. Packaged ready to go. Exactly what you need to build a 10 by 10 deck instead of half price for the lumber. And so like you're, you kind of have like, you've got the product to do anything. Yep. Maybe it's like themes, like you have a affiliate, themes and then something along those lines.

Right. So yeah. Yeah. That's super, that's very powerful. I can definitely like, I mean the data. Shows that, like when affiliates click in and then if you can pull in, it'd be super interesting. I just had a call, well, not a call on the podcast this morning. You're familiar with video wise? Yeah. Yeah. So [00:31:00] they just recently launched.

Like live video shopping.

 Phill Moorman: Mm-hmm.

Jay Myers: And so what they're doing is you can have live shopping on your of course, but you can also push it to every social channel, which is awesome because if you're have live shopping on your site, it pushes to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, everything.

But what they're seeing some brands do, and they're seeing incredible success with it, is it pushes they, they're pushing it to their influencer's pages. And so if an influencer has. A hundred thousand followers, they'll push the live stream. They'll say, can we push this to your channel and we'll give you 5% of sales generated during the live stream.

But then now, if you could make it so the link from that influencer. 'cause like if I just saw a live stream being pushed to an influencer channel or like Instagram account and I clicked on the product and there was no mention of the influencer, it feels like a very much like a okay. [00:32:00] Someone's just paying to put a post on their channel.

Yeah. Which we see all the time. But if I click the link and it says like, Kim Kardashian recommends these products, or whatever it is, right. That whoever the influencer is I think that would even close the loop even more too, to tie it all together.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, being sent to that kind of generic landing page would definitely, I think, turn a lot of people away.

So that's that's kind of what we were trying to solve for. Right. Making that whole journey more personalized. And I think maybe we need to be speaking with video wise to do some sort of cross promo partnership there. Yeah,

Jay Myers: totally. Yeah. I mean, you can do the live streaming anywhere, but they're just saying, he was saying that brands are seeing really good success by pushing it to their influencers, so Yeah.

Yeah. How hard is like to install it and get it set up? Like how fast can you have a.

 Phill Moorman: It's, again, it's all built in Shopify directly. So you

Jay Myers: can have personalization with zero theme editing [00:33:00] code at all. Correct?

 Phill Moorman: Yeah. And the segments that we do offer are just already prebuilt too. You don't have to like upload lists or anything.

It's just we pull that data for you.

Jay Myers: So if someone's listening right now and they're not doing personalization, what do you recommend? Where do they start?

 Phill Moorman: I would start with definitely. Holiday sales. We have Black Friday coming up. And so segmenting your audience, looking at your audience members certain locations, past year's, data, what areas converted the best, and create landing pages or variants for those specific segments.

So it could be, you know, LA might have converted the best for your product line during Black Friday. Create a special personalized page for them and, and run your Black Friday ads to that. Obviously you wanna run broader Black Friday ad campaigns, but yeah, definitely segment out a little bit of your paid to, to try that, to see if you could actually get more efficiency there, lower the cost of those, that acquisition, for that, for those segments.

Jay Myers: Yeah, because there's no, I mean, with Shopify you can have different country [00:34:00] sites, but state by state and city and province. Like there, there's no way. You'd have to have a different site for each one. Like this would, it would kind of be the only way that I know of.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah. It's a great solution unless you're really dedicating like your brand to establishing sort of a home base in a country this personalization route's the probably the best way to go.

And again, like you said, we get more, definitely more refined with the locations as well than just country.

Jay Myers: Right. And then the app that's coming out, which is probably gonna be out by the time this is live.

 Phill Moorman: So this is the AI section builder. So we all know AI is everywhere, right? AI is a part of actually my daily process at this point.

 but it's interesting. So we've seen kind of a mixed bag between Elks spend product here in a second, but we've seen a mixed bag between people really loving the idea of AI and injecting AI into their workflow. And people flat out telling us they will never touch AI. So it's been an interesting experience building [00:35:00] this one and speaking with the customer base.

What we built is basically an AI generator for 2.0 sections. So directly again, in Shopify within your admin, we provide you a prompt box. You tell exactly what you want. Say you want a hero, section, two columns and image on the right side, and copy on the left side with a CTA button. It will generate the whole thing usually within one prompt.

It's pretty, pretty solid. and it does animations and it does, you know, interactivity and all sorts of stuff. So it's like you have your own little personal developer building out a section. And so this is perfect for those campaign managers or e-commerce managers looking to build out quick landing page camp or campaign landing pages.

So like, say Black Friday and you want a new Black Friday hero section. Tell it what you want. So it builds a section. Then you can publish directly into Shopify into your Shopify editor and pull that section right into the page and use it wherever you want. multiple pages or.

Jay Myers: [00:36:00] Whatever. So these would be great for having different sections for your product pages where you're having like testimonials or user generated content or maybe info grids of learning about products.

Like is that where you envision it being used the most? Or like homepage or,

 Phill Moorman: yeah, so getting those more interactive sections that I think a lot of merchants just don't do because when it's time consuming, you have to go through design, you have to go through engineering, and then when you want to edit it, it's like impossible.

If you're not, you know, the programmer. So this allows you to build that section, publish it, and then go back and then tweak it later code wise. Or you can tweak it in the Shopify editor. Right. Change the copy, whatever with the The Shopify configuration inputs. but yeah, it's totally, so we've had customers use it for like an interact, like we had a furniture customer use it for a section at the bottom of their landing page.

Allowed you to hover over each of the different products and it gave you like a little more description of the product in the picture. So it's pretty cool to [00:37:00] see, like, it's pretty, it does really advanced stuff. It's not just like a basic section. It's pretty cool stuff.

Jay Myers: And it kind of ties nicely into the personalization because now you can quickly spin up sections that you can use for personalization, right?

Like you can then. If you wanted to Yep. To make 50 sections, one for each state. That would take a lot of time. But now with this, that can speed up that process and then you could have a, definitely, you could have potentially a different section or maybe returns are not allowed in certain states or different rules.

This actually comes up all the time, like if, depending on what you're selling, there's different guidelines and rules. State by state, you can have different disclaimers. Products in certain states. Yeah. Then use the personalization tool to show that if they're from Alaska, for example, and shipping is gonna be double or you don't ship to Alaska or whatever.

I dunno. But the I can see a real tie between those two. Absolutely.

 Phill Moorman: [00:38:00] Yeah.

Jay Myers: And so that's our goal. Well, and AB testing too, actually.

 Phill Moorman: Yep, exactly. So that's our goal, to build out this broader ecosystem that just works. Right. So you can kind of pick and choose what you wanna work with, like what, which app makes sense for you today?

We want them to be, get to the point where they're so integrated, where you have just a, like a streamlined workflow between each of the apps. So yes, generating those sections for personalized variants or generating those to test in an AB test. And it's, again, it's all built native Shopify, so that, you know, background native compatibility.

But we're working on ways to make that much more fluid experience between the apps as well. So,

Jay Myers: and none of this. You don't need Shogun page builder for any of this.

 Phill Moorman: Nope. It's all built outside.

Jay Myers: You have? Yep. I mean there's a potential plus if they do, because then they can actually, is there even, I mean if page builder is nice 'cause it's drag and drop and you don't, but you can ab test just your regular theme settings and everything else, right?

 Phill Moorman: Yeah. So yeah, back to AB test, [00:39:00] yes, you can definitely do theme. And yes, obviously your pages, but. With page builder, we have AB testing built in, so that's specifically for testing those page builder pages against each other. And we do have personalization built into page builder as well. The section builder is not yet built into page builder, but that's something we're looking to integrate.

But these are separate, so that's the call and that's what we're working through right now is the page voter AB testing and personalization. Personalization's actually separate from the separate AB testing and personalization apps, so they're a little different. And we are moving people into the new apps.

Those are more robust and that's where we're focused. but yeah, you can integrate with Page Builder, so you can do, like I was mentioning that URL test. So you can test a page builder page against a Shopify 2.0 page. So there is that option, but it's not like a native integration quite yet.

Jay Myers: And what are the cost to get started with these apps?

 Phill Moorman: so we've got free plans and we've got really cheap, less than $20 plans for these apps We're still working on, we [00:40:00] might just make personalization free is something that we're talking about to begin at least.

Jay Myers: But yeah, but even 20 bucks, like I'm just pulling them up here. But so I mean, that's incredible.

Like if I, if you want, there's no reason someone shouldn't do AB testing. So like what, what is that app specifically AB testing? Yeah. $20. Did you get a certain number of tests or is that's just a flat?

 Phill Moorman: yeah, so with AB testing you get, if you get one test, one active test, and from there you can expand to unlimited tests.

 but yeah, when you start a $20 plan, it pretty much covers what you need. For the most part, if you're a smaller brand, I would say it definitely covers what you need. It's a great entry Yeah. Into AB testing. but we do actually, we've scaled up to to the point where you can do unlimited tests with the higher chip plans.

We are also adding additional features to the advanced plan. Like price testing. It's a very popular thing. It's a little, it's not quite out yet, so I don't know if I'm supposed to share that, but it'll be out probably by the end of [00:41:00] August. So we're really excited for that one. We're gonna start promoting that very soon.

And that's a big big request we get from people. But we do have definitely more advanced testing options there.

Jay Myers: Will that be part of AB testing or will that be a standalone? Nope,

 Phill Moorman: that'll be part of it. Yeah. It just the higher tier plan? Yeah.

Jay Myers: Okay. Because I mean, I think there is a very good argument for that.

To be like dynamic pricing as a standalone tool where if it's testing pricing, seasonal pricing based off factors, I don't know. You know, every retail store now has these liquid LCD price tags. They look like paper. But they're actually. They're dynamic and they're changing, and if it's raining outside, the price of umbrellas goes up 10% or different things.

And based off inventory and all kinds of stuff. Like it's in brick and mortar stores and everyone's doing it. I feel like that is a, Amazon does it like it's all based off of like velocity of ordering how many times you've looked at a [00:42:00] product. It's interesting that, I mean, that's amazing.

If it's part of AB testing. It could also almost be its own standalone tool as well.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it's something that when we have shared with the merchants, like AB testing, especially the bigger merchants or larger merchants it's definitely something they bring up. It's something that like they're really what they wanna test when they're thinking about AB testing.

But totally, yeah, it could be separate app. We could really build that out into something where you do see that kind of surge pricing. As well. And you know, reporting on those metrics, testing against original pricing, against surge pricing, that kind of thing would definitely be a really cool option.

Jay Myers: What are some of the best results you've seen brands get with AB testing?

 Phill Moorman: You know, we regularly see 20, 30% of AB testing crazy in terms of conversion, like actual sales conversions. Yeah. That's pretty common. And so that's the part.

Jay Myers: So like if you're not AB testing, you're leaving 20% on the table.

Oh yeah. Easily. Absolutely. That's a safe statement.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah, [00:43:00] absolutely. I would endorse that statement. And we see it even at shogun, ourselves AB testing right? With, on the B2B side we see regular gains like that. So, it's just something that you can't ignore. Yeah. But I would say, again, it comes down to, and this is the feedback we get or the questions we get is like, where do we start?

What should we test? Why should we test this? And so we built tons of resources around, like we have a Navy testing library on our website. I dunno how many ideas, maybe 50 plus ideas of things to test on the site. We also built a personalization library, so all the location type of testing or UTM type testing.

We have tons of ideas for that. You know, it's just something I think people are still a little, just not sure of for the most part. If they've never done it before, I can definitely see how it's a little intimidating. It's a little concerning. 'cause again, you are taking a live page And diverting some of that traffic.

So if you're expecting X number of sales and you gotta hit that quarter. It's scary to be like, well, we might actually just cut that in half because we're gonna divert the traffic and see what happens. It might also be more, [00:44:00] it could be more, yeah, it's just scary. It's your risk appetite, I guess.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Well, I think that's, I, that's part of the game of e-commerce. Like if you don't have the ability to test, I think you're on a downward spiral because then you're just flying by your instincts and your gut. That can get you in a lot of trouble too yeah,

 Phill Moorman: well, especially like ad prices. I can't believe the cost of these things.

I remember when I started working at Shogun and, you know, our conversion, like our cost per conversion was significantly less than what it's now. Yeah. And it's like, and we've tested the pages, we got better conversion rates since then. Yeah. You shouldn't have

Jay Myers: the best conversion

 Phill Moorman: of any app company. Yeah.

We've been testing years and years and years, but just the cost in general, the it's just rising. Like there's nothing you can really do about it. So we see that on the e-commerce side too with our merchants. The cost to acquire these customers has become significant to the point where certain products you're selling don't even make you money anymore because you're just getting people in the door.

 [00:45:00] And so that, you know, that can be acceptable if they're loss leaders and you get good re repeat purchase rates, but you don't see that often either. So it's like you have to continuously test and what are you actually showing out there is extremely important. Right now,

Jay Myers: that's a whole nother show, but I feel like, that is a huge challenge right now is finding ways to acquire customers and leverage your existing customers and lean into your data on customers that you have to drive more repeat orders and referrals and everything else from your customer base versus like the days of just throwing money at Facebook.

You can still throw money at Facebook, but you can't really grow a sustainable business long term just by. Throwing money at Facebook anymore.

 Phill Moorman: Right. And it's, I mean, it's great. Top of funnel, Facebook is, but yeah, if you're not nourishing that funnel and optimizing it continuously. I think you're gonna struggle.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So what do you recommend someone start [00:46:00] with? Someone's listening right now and they're not using any of these tools, but they know, they're like, okay, I get it. I can increase my conversion. I know I'm not testing enough. I'm not doing any personalization. Where should someone start again?

I think it's,

 Phill Moorman: it depends on the brand, but I would say probably a good flow would be to actually use this AI section builder, come up with some unique new sections and see you know how those play out when you add those to your page with AB testing, right? So insert that new section. Could be a new collection section or new info section, or fax section, whatever.

 put that on your product page. Test out with AB testing, you see how that performs, if that increases those conversions, or even just if it actually helps increase just length of time on the page. Start small see if that actually is something attractive to your customer base, and then try to optimize from there further right.

To your next test.

Jay Myers: Yeah. That kind makes sense for that being the foundation because that is what is building the sections and then Yep. You personalize and test. So that does make, that [00:47:00] makes sense.

 Phill Moorman: Yeah. It's definitely the foundational tool, I would say. And we are. Obviously we still have the page builder product, but this, the section builder is great for those quick section inputs, right?

Right. Brand new section. You wanna test you don't have to go through a whole design or dev process. You have the idea. It takes that idea, puts out a really polished section for you. And then yeah, just try it out, test it, see what happens.

Jay Myers: Amazing. This has been very insightful. I'm super excited to see.

Where Shoguns going. I mean, shoguns has been a leader in the space forever. One of the OG Shopify app companies. And still 12 years later now innovating. 11 years later. Yep. Innovating like crazy, which is awesome to see. If someone wants to try these apps, is it,

 Phill Moorman: it's shogun.com or directly from the app store, so it's shogun AB testing, Shogun personalization, and it soon will be Shogun AI section builder in the next week or so.

Jay Myers: Amazing. And if someone wants to follow you personally, where are you? [00:48:00] What social platform are you using? I'm

 Phill Moorman: not on

Jay Myers: social.

 Phill Moorman: You're too busy? Kind of. I've moved away from that. I'm on LinkedIn, so Phil Moron on LinkedIn. Okay. that's probably the best way to find me. Or if you just wanna reach out to me, ask questions phil@getshowben.com.

I have every variation of Phil, but I typically spell it fill with two L's. but fill with one L will work. But yeah, that's the easiest way to get ahold of me.

Jay Myers: More and more people, I ask this at the end of the show, they say, well, I'm not really, I don't really do social anymore, but like, everyone has a LinkedIn account.

So you, I

 Phill Moorman: mean, you have to at this point. Yes It's basically the resume.

Jay Myers: Yeah. This has been great, Phil. Thank you so much. I'll make sure to include all of that in, in the show notes. And just really appreciate your time and all the best with the launch on the new app. It sounds exciting. I think it's gonna help a lot of merchants.

 Phill Moorman: I think so too. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate, you, you having us on here. It's great.

Jay Myers: My complete pleasure.

 Phill Moorman: Thank you.