Ready to transform your e-commerce business? In this episode, we sit down with Matthew Stafford, a managing partner at Build Grow Scale (BGS) and a leading expert in e-commerce optimization. With over 27 years of experience, Matthew has helped hundreds of online brands (many hitting seven- and eight-figure revenues) turn their digital storefronts into high-converting, profitable sales engines. His secret? A data-driven approach that leverages deep insights into customer behavior. Read the full transcript of the episode below.
Episode 40 of The Seller’s Edge – Matthew and Jonathan talk about:
- [00:00] Matthew Stafford from Build Grow Scale
- [00:44] Common Issues with D2C Websites
- [02:28] Recent Shifts In Website Optimization
- [03:59] Short Term Boosts Vs. Long Term Brand Building
- [06:01] Unconventional Strategies
- [08:32] Avoid “Banner Blindness”
- [09:42] Using Website Pop-Ups
- [11:03] Ways To Identify Issues with UX
- [12:58] Surprising Feedback From Users
- [14:44] Most Effective Use of CTAs
- [18:16] Building Trust With A Website
- [20:04] Content Optimization
- [21:25] Search Terms Vs. Keyword Implementation
- [22:22] Strategies To Reduce Cart Abandonment
- [24:33] Limit Product Offerings
- [26:10] A/B Testing Pages
- [28:14] The One Thing Sellers Should Focus On
- [29:27] Recap and Closing Remarks
Key Takeaways:
- Prioritize Clarity Over Patches: Don’t use FAQs or pop-ups as a crutch. Instead, optimize your product listings, storefronts, and landing pages so customers can find answers naturally and effortlessly.
- Identify and Fix Purchase Friction: Use post-purchase surveys to pinpoint why customers almost abandoned their carts. By understanding their exact pain points, you can make targeted improvements that boost your conversion rate.
- Reduce Choice, Increase Conversions: Too many options can overwhelm buyers. Use data-driven SKU analysis to identify and remove underperforming product variations. Fewer choices often lead to higher conversions and better margins.
- Build Trust with Transparency: Authenticity is key. Highlight genuine customer reviews—both positive and negative—and show how you resolved any issues. This builds more trust and credibility than a page full of perfect five-star ratings.
- Optimize Forms with Clear Explanations: Explain why you need specific information in your forms (e.g., “Email required for order confirmation”). This simple change reduces user friction, improves data quality, and increases checkout conversions.
- Embrace the “Simplicity Scales” Mindset: Strip away anything that doesn’t serve the customer. Every design element and piece of copy should directly answer a customer’s question, eliminating distractions and focusing on a smooth, efficient user experience.
Full Transcript of Episode:
JONATHAN: In your experience looking at websites, what do you find are the most common, you know, shortcomings or mistakes that sellers are making out there?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: A lot of times they’re too busy. They do their own customer service and they think that because one person has a problem, they need to go correct that on their website. And what they end up doing is they take a lot of people that don’t have any common sense that are writing in questions and they put it on their website. And now they’re forcing everybody to go through all of that information when probably only 20% of them were really struggling with it. The other 80% were not.
JONATHAN: I mean, I feel like that’s what an FAQ page is good for, right?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, because, you know, we care so much about the website and the user experience. My question to the site owners is, if you have a faq, that means you’re not doing a good job with your website. Because if you’re getting frequently asked questions, you should be able to go onto your site and answer them so that they’re not asking them anymore. Doesn’t mean you don’t want to have one because people do look for it. But if they’re truly frequently asked questions, that means the website’s not doing a good job of answering it. We’ll use that to go in and actually optimize the site even more.
JONATHAN: Interesting. I’ve always thought of FAQs as a good kind of catch all for SEO, just because there are questions that are usually showing up in search.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, you could use, like buyer intent questions. Yeah, for faq that is good for SEO. But typically like putting it up in the header and all that. We want to reserve that for money making links.
JONATHAN: I like that. I’m interested because, you know, there’s been a lot going on in the last few years. I mean there was a pandemic and then AI has been blowing up. I’m curious, has there been any drastic shift in the way that websites are optimized?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: I think we’re able to use AI now to really comb through a lot more data and get better insights. So, the results that we’re getting are improving because the AI can cross reference all of the GA4 data and all of the Shopify data all at once. Where the act of us doing that manually and going in and finding something inside of Google, it’s much harder. We’re okay at it. I mean, obviously that’s what we’ve done for eight, nine years. But yeah, the AI is augmenting our ability to do much deeper research and come up with bigger wins for our clients.
JONATHAN: That’s great. I didn’t even think about that. So it’s marrying the GA4 data and the Shopify data and all of that.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: And you know, where we look at things linearly, A plus B equals C, et cetera. It can actually rise up above it and look at it in a totally different way than we ever have. And we tell it, hey, we want to increase, you know, from one and a half to three percent. And we want to add 25% to the average order value over the next 90 days. What do we have to do to do that? And then we’ll start trying to predict it. And so it’s coming up with good ideas for us to then test and you know, improve the website for sure.
JONATHAN: Getting into conversions a little bit. I know a lot of businesses sort of try to balance short term conversion boosts with long term brand building. I’m curious, is there an approach that you have to do that balancing act?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, I always lean towards the sales side. So if the data shows that you get more sales, I tend to prefer that over the branding. Because how do you actually have a brand is by making sales so you have happy customers. You find a lot of people, I think fall in love with colors and other different things that doesn’t actually move the needle for sales. And they think they have a brand and they come to us and say they have a brand. I’m like, okay, can you shut your ads off and stay in business? They’re like, no, so you don’t have a brand. Like you literally are getting in front of people and creating sales. The more sales you create, that’s what creates a brand. And so for me, I always, I always prefer to use the data. We don’t always get to do that because of the brand guidelines. But you know, 99% of the time, if they’re amicable to it, you can get it within the brand guidelines and still do the same thing. I think function over form is better because I want the sales and the customer’s telling more people and coming back again rather than looking exactly perfect.
JONATHAN: When I was working at an agency and I was going over social media for a client and they were so married to their brand guidelines and just like keeping the same specific colors and it’s just like, why can’t. Let’s try one post where we go a little differently. Yeah. Got the highest engagement of any of their posts. Cuz I’m like, people are looking, they see that it’s you, they’re just gonna get. Their eyes are gonna glaze over at some point, like, yeah, spice things up at some point.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yep. And, and the brand is, you, you build a brand by making sales. That’s just, you can’t convince me anything other than that.
JONATHAN: I think that’s a great perspective to have. Are there certain, you know, unconventional or unexpected strategies you’ve seen kind of pay off recently or that you’ve tried?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: I would say, you know, we have a set of best practices that we’ve developed over the last eight or nine years that work for everybody. And sharing a couple of those that people probably don’t think about. One of them is a question that we ask on the thank you page. So right after someone has just purchased, we ask them, the question, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy? And when they give you that answer, we use that to go back into the website and clean it up. And so you’re getting someone who was just on the website who just spent money and they’re going to tell you what was frustrating or what they didn’t understand or what took them extra work. And I would say that that’s probably been responsible for six of our 10 biggest wins. And all of those 10 biggest wins are worth millions of dollars on the size of the sites that we operate with. So multi million dollar answers, when they give you the right thing and you fix that and then you can correlate it straight to revenue.
JONATHAN: That’s amazing. I love that. That’s a great question.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, and you can use it on digital, you can use it on Legion. You can use literally anything that you do, right after someone performs the action that you really want them to do, ask them what was difficult and get them to answer. And when you do that, we used it the other day on a digital site that sells training and they sell it to a VSL. Wow. We got 500, 516 or 526 responses. And 457 of them said the video was too long. 90% of them, like, it was a huge number. And they’re like, no, no, we can’t change the length of the video. We’ve tried shortening it. We’ve tried different versions. None of them come close to converting what this one does. And so I just asked them, well, we actually talked about it internally and came up with a solution. But we Said, do you watch your videos on 1X or do you watch them at 1.2 or 1.5? Or they’re like, oh, yeah, I always watch them 1.2, 1.5. They want to give them the opportunity to be able to just speed the video up so it doesn’t feel as long. And they’re like, oh, okay, we’ll try that. And it’s a 10% lift. Well, they do 60 million a year, so that was a $ 6 million win for them to give them the option to speed up the video.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I feel like people always. That’s again, like, brand guidelines. I feel like people get married to certain things and they just can’t let go.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah. Or they just don’t. They literally. It creates banner blindness. They’re so used to having it a certain way that they no longer see any other option. That’s how their brain works. It’s not because they’re. Not necessarily because they’re trying to be difficult, but when you, I mean, you get in your car, you drive to work, if you ask, if you go to the office anymore, you can get in your car and drive to where you’re going. Not remember if the light was red or green or if you stopped the stop sign or you passed a car or any of those things. Like, literally, you’re zoned right out. Well, when you look at your website all day, every day, and you’re always going through there, you develop that same type of banner blindness. Because that’s how the brain works. It just says, oh, I already know what I’m looking at. I’m just gonna put this on autopilot. And so you don’t even see the things that are creating the friction.
JONATHAN: I do that all the time. The whole driving thing and not remembering if the light is red. Like, did I hit someone? “Did I run a red light? Did I stop at a stop sign?”
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, I have no clue. I don’t even remember driving here.
JONATHAN: So funny. Yeah. And then one of the questions I. One of the questions I was really excited to ask you about was pop ups. Because I always feel like I’m being held hostage by a pop up. I’m curious if there’s a way to effectively use them without impacting conversion rate.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah. So we believe that the pop up should be on exit. And then the other thing that we do, because, I mean, they do work and they do develop customers. We just don’t want to interrupt the buying experience. And so what we do is we look at the average time on site and if it’s say it’s a minute and a half, then we’ll have the pop up. Pop up at like 75 seconds rather than like as soon as you get there, as soon as you change a page. Because in that process it gives them quite a bit longer to go ahead and get comfortable without going, oh, here’s a discount, oh here’s a discount. And then give us your phone number. Like all of those are very personal and a lot of times people will just exit off the site when that stuff pops in front of them. So we’re looking for reasons not to give them friction that would make them decide to, oh, I already interrupted now I’m just going to leave.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I am absolutely one of those people. Because when the pop up comes I’m like, oh no, I got, no one’s got time for this.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN: What are some ways in which businesses can identify and fix issues related to poor user experience that harm conversion rates?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, so we would, for that particular issue we would do user testing. And what you do is you come up with a very specific set of questions that you’re looking to see if the website clearly answers it. And there’s a service that you can go on and essentially say, I want someone, I want a woman, from 30 to 40 years old and has never visited the site. And here’s the five things I want her to do. And she’ll video her screen and go through that and describe what she’s thinking and feeling. And you can use that, and we use that all the time to get a new perspective and see what first time visitors see and think when they come to the site. So a lot of times we’ll test a new option that we’re getting ready to roll out and see what people think of it before it ever even goes live. And it works really, really well.
JONATHAN: I mean that’s so important, right? The testing piece and getting the feedback. A lot of people don’t do that. I always, I mean I just, I can’t stress that enough about how important that is.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, well, you understand what you’re trying to do and so it’s not confusing to you. You think that you’ve expressed it in a very clear and concise way. And then when you watch someone go through it, they’ll bring up things that, you know, we do this every day and we’ve done it every day for eight, nine years. We still are not as clear as what we need to be. And that saves us, having a poor conversion on a test. We can get some immediate answers before it goes live and then know that that’s going to be a good test.
JONATHAN: I’m curious, have you, after going through that process, has there been, if you can think of one, like, has there been like a specific observation that someone’s brought back to you from having them walk through the site that really stuck out and you’re like, “Wow, that’s surprising. I would have never thought about that.”
MATTHEW STAFFORD: We’ve had like, fitness, supplement or women, A, site that the women sell supplements. And the first couple pages, she literally thought it was like a workout. She thought it was workout videos and workout gear. And that’s not even what the lady sold. She sold the supplements. And, we were trying to explain that to the owner. And then when she saw other people going through the site because they recorded it, we gave her the user testing videos and basically showed her when we audited the site what people’s impression were. And you know her, I think her bounce rate was upwards in the mid-60s. And so more than half of her traffic was leaving after they landed on the page thinking that, no, I’m not looking for workout gear, I’m looking for supplements or whatever they thought they were looking for. And when we edited that and took care of that problem a lot, a lot more income for her, that was a really big win.
JONATHAN: That’s a really great example. I like that a lot. Yeah, I think that that’s probably very common for supplements as well.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, I would think most people, I mean, we’ve worked on quite a few of them, they try to lead with it. But hers, she basically has a community and sells the supplements to the community. And so over time it just, I think that the habits turned into poor marketing and thinking that she knew what she, what worked. But you know, her sales kept going down and she kept trying harder and, and it really was just because it was conveying the wrong message.
JONATHAN: Kind of along those same lines. I’m very curious about your thoughts on CTAs, and is there, is there a perfect balance to them? Is there, should you have a lot of them? Should you have very few of them, but use them effectively?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: We say the best practice is each page should have one very clear what’s the next most important action. So one button and maybe a secondary one. And our call to actions are always whatever the next step is. Not buy now or quick add or any of that garbage. Because people aren’t ready to Buy Now. They want more information. And so if you have Buy now on your homepage, that’s not trustworthy. And a lot of people won’t buy. Won’t click those Buy now buttons because they’re like, no, I’m not ready to buy. I want to look at the details. So, we want to move them just to the next page and to the next page. So it would learn more or more. More options or see more. And then add, to cart, Not Buy now it would be added to cart and then proceed to checkout and then, you know, shipping, then complete purchase. And so you want to make them the next action or the next place that that button is going to take them to, not three steps down the funnel because people will literally not click it for that reason alone.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I just don’t like Buy now as a writer because I just think it’s really obvious. So I like to be a little bit more nuanced than that. Yeah, I always see CTAs and when I’m just assaulted with them. There was a boss that I had at an agency that just wanted a CTA in every single module on the page. And it was just like, I’m like, you’re killing me. Like, it’s just way too much like, you cannot. You’re assaulting people. You’re like that person on the street being like, can I give you this? Can I give you this? Can I sell you this? And it’s just like, yeah.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: The way I look at it is your website is the conversation that you can’t have with your client, when you’re not around. And so it needs to be a gentle conversation and something where they want to know, like, and trust you, not, like you said, feel like they’ve been assaulted.
JONATHAN: I love that. That’s a really great way to look at it. And which is, yes, absolutely.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah. The website is a living, living, you know, breathing thing, in my opinion, because it is literally doing. It’s taking people through that sales process. And so, you know, I always think of the question that Dean Jackson talks about is what is the question that they have in their mind that you can join, that conversation based off of where they’re at on the website. And so a lot of times we also see wrong information at the wrong time. If you’re on the product page, they care about shipping times, they don’t care about shipping times on a category page. They don’t care about Shipping times on the homepage maybe, but, not near as much as it’s a lot more important on the product page. So put it right below the add to cart button. If you ship within 24 hours or ship within 48 hours, put that right below the button. Because then they’re like, oh, okay, that’s. We consider that like your unique value proposition. Put the things right there. That’s going to nudge them to go ahead and make the decision and that’s answering the questions that they’re having right then, like, is it, you know, USA owned or is it, built in the usa? All of those things are things that get people to add to cart.
JONATHAN: That’s interesting. I never thought about it like that. So you’re almost thinking about it as a value prop for the act of purchasing it rather than the product itself.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah.
JONATHAN: I’m somebody who. It’s funny because I grew up in like a, less digital age where you could go into a store if you were upset and you know, you’d have a grievance and nothing would happen except you talk to a clerk and now you leave a bad review and the CEO of like a multinational corporation contacts you and asks you to take it down. Obviously trust is important to brands. I’m curious, like, how integral do you think trust is to a website and how do you kind of let that navigate you through that process of troubleshooting or creating that website?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah. We think it’s critical. And the amazing thing is people don’t realize until you actually track the data. Two stars and last reviews are the highest converting. So people click on the two stars and less reviews more than any other ones, and they look at how you handled the problem. And so people do not expect you to be perfect, but they do expect you to take care of it. And so if you push those and take care of them, they actually convert higher than the site average, almost double the site average. So those are sales tools that a lot of clients aren’t using because they’re afraid, oh, they’re going to. If they see that we had a problem, they’re not going to trust us. Actually, they don’t trust it when you only push five star reviews. So, the one, you know, the ones that you took care of, those should be front and center on there. Because people want to see those.
JONATHAN: Yeah, not only that, I feel like the customers that do have a bad experience, especially me, like if I have a bad experience and I bring it to a company and they go above and beyond responding to it, I’m like, oh, like I’m a huge fan of this company now, even though I hate them. Yeah. And then as far as like, what role does content optimization play in supporting conversions?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: For us we know that, good images and copy that you can browse. Rather than have to read through everything, people like to skim it and find the part that’s relevant to them. So we love progressive disclosure or tabs and different things so that they can literally go to the information that’s relevant to them and try not to present it in a format that feels like a wall of text where they have to read through the whole thing. And you know, as a writer, copy matters. And so we’ve gone through and redone the copy and then measured how much that changed. You know, the add to cart. And it can be significant with rewrites. One site dealt with a drinking crowd and so, you know, like the hat we put in some funny stuff like cures bad hair days and things like that that would make people laugh. And we had a 30% lift in the add to carts and on the ones that we added humor to. So knowing your audience, understanding how they speak and then giving them something that matters to them, actually does make a big lift.
JONATHAN: Yeah. And then as far as how can businesses address a disconnect between keywords, between search terms and keywords on the landing page?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: That would be through their Google Analytics, their data so you can see what’s referring people and then use that. The other thing that we recommend people all have is a search bar. Because having that search bar people will type in their problem that they’re looking to solve and you can use that information, for big wins. One of them we did was for a site called Cubcotes and the two most searched words were unicorn and unicorn spelled wrong. And they didn’t have a unicorn product and so they built one because it was searched thousands and thousands of times. And they launched it on Amazon prime day and they did. Just short of a half a million. It was like 490 some thousand dollars. So it was a half a million dollar day, by them knowing what people were typing in the search bar.
JONATHAN: That is amazing. Yeah. And then what are some strategies that you think that could be employed to reduce frustration, form and cart abandonment?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, I have one that I will give you that has never ever not produced a lift. So inside the form field, I had read the book Persuasion by Robert Cialdini and he was talking about how people don’t mind giving you information if they have a reason why. And he used the example of people asking if they could cut in line and if they didn’t give a reason, 80% of people said no. But if they did give a reason, like, oh, my kids will be late for school or I’m running behind, 80% of people now said yes. And they could literally just. Didn’t even have to be a real reason just or any reason, got people to give them permission. And so in the form fields, we ask for very personal information. We ask for their email and their phone number and we track the errors there and we always have a lot of errors. And so what we did is we changed the form field text to email required for order confirmation. Well, order confirmation is literally the most opened email that’s ever sent on the planet. It’s an 85% open rate. And so, we get their very best email. We watched our abandoned carts go up. We watched our form field errors go down. It produced more money, a lot more money, because that’s right at the transaction level. And then we realized, okay, how do we do that for the phone? And so for the phone we put required for shipping notification because everyone wants to know when the product is shipping. And so requiring those two, instead of leaving them optional and telling them why we wanted it, we reduced our form field errors by like 270%. And we have their best information because we gave them a legit reason that they would want to give us their. They would want to be notified.
JONATHAN: Really solid ideas.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Anybody could go through their site and add these and they will definitely get a lift from them.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s just funny just hearing these. I was like, yeah, of course. Like, these are, it seems like no brainers. I’m like, why do people do this as standards? This is kind of crazy. I’m curious about too many product choices.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Too many choices actually creates a paradox of choice. We have literally tripled conversions on clothing options when they’ll pare it down to three colors instead of 14. They all think like, oh, no, but I’ve sold three pink ones. Yeah, but you’ve also sold 80 black You have all these other options. They think like, oh, if I take those down, I’m going to get less sales. And it actually is the exact opposite. Because if someone goes, oh, I like that fuchsia one and oh, I like that rose colored one. Oh, and red. I can’t decide which one I like from these three colors, I’ll just come back later and then they gotta pay to get em back. So we have always, always, always found that less choices converts higher 100%.
JONATHAN: I worked at a coffee shop when I was younger and it had the most extensive overpowering menu. It took up an entire wall and customers would come in for the first time, look at it and they’d have no idea what to look at. They’d figured they’d have to make their decision in like a minute or two and then they’d just be like I’ll just have a black coffee.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: What’s popular? What does everybody else get? Because they want to just get what everyone else gets because it must be okay, right?
JONATHAN: And it’s like you got 90 things on this menu that you’re not selling. Just take those off, make it simple.
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, we always tell people to go back through and you know, do a cart basket analysis and get rid of the things that just aren’t selling. And the site, convert the site, overall site average will go up.
JONATHAN: Yeah. We talked about testing before and experimenting. I’m curious, are there some best practices you have for AB testing landing pages other than having fresh eyes on it?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah, like there’s certain things that are required for it to be an actual test. You know it needs to be at least seven days and we want statistical significance. It’s just way clearer. And the test is winning. And we know that the test is winning because we removed information. Typically those ones will push right away if we knew it was kind of going to be a win. But we just wanted to make sure it was communicated clearly. But other than that, just that it needs to run for at least seven days and obviously you need enough traffic for it to matter. The problem with most sites is they don’t have enough traffic to get statistical significance in a short period of time. So you need a lot of volume in order to get that. That’s part of the nice thing of our best practices that we’ve developed over the eight, nine years is it’s been done on hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of data. And so it’s basically a principle that works. Not necessarily this trick or tactic which is great.
JONATHAN: It’s so funny how many times I’ve seen A/B tests and it’ll be like a red button or a blue button. I’ll be like “That is not going to do anything.”
MATTHEW STAFFORD: No, yeah, that sounds And the other thing is people for some reason are hung up. We were literally looking at search traffic on our site today. And one of them was about button colors. And that just always cracks me up because it’s not the button color that matters. It’s that the button stands out and doesn’t blend in with everything else. So if your theme is black and yellow, don’t make your buttons black and yellow. Make them blue or make them green or orange or some other color that doesn’t match everything else. You want it to stand out that that’s the next most important action that you take.
JONATHAN: For sure. If you could give e commerce sellers advice on focusing on one thing to improve their conversion rates, what would that one thing be?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: I would say to shift from looking at your website, as how can I sell as much stuff as possible to view your website through the eyes of your customer, and how do I find what I’m looking for, or how do I solve this problem that I’m coming here for? And that little paradigm shift will take your site from a lot of times looking like a flea market to being much easier for the end user to navigate and find what they’re looking for and make sales solid. Yeah, I would just say, you know, simplicity scales and chaos fails. 90% of our wins in the beginning come from removing stuff, not adding. And for so many store owners, they think they need to add something to get it to convert better. And the truth of the matter is, literally, they need to remove stuff, not add it.
JONATHAN: Agreed. Less is more, right?
MATTHEW STAFFORD: Yeah. Clarity trumps persuasion.
