Building Trust and Converting Online Sales with Simple UX Decisions

Marc McDougall:
Foreign.

Marcel:
Well, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Woo Dev Chat with me as always, Mike. Hi Mike, how are you?

Mike:
I’m also good.

Marcel:
I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and I’ve trying to improve my introduction to the podcast when we start recording. And I’ve been hearing a lot of Conan O’Brien, so get ready for some jokes in between. Now I’m just. That’s not gonna be the case. But he’s very goofy in his introductions and like starting the podcast, I’m a little bit inspired by that. Maybe not with the same results, but let’s see. How are you doing? All good.

Mike:
Good. The weather got worse for some reason, which is sad.

Marcel:
Yeah, it’s a bunch of storms coming in, but there’s no snow. There’s no like huge big issues with weather in Puerto Portugal. Just saying a little bit. Promotion. Yeah.

Mike:
You want more people to move here?

Marcel:
Well, I think it’s enough. You can stay there, people. It’s fine. I’m going to make one last invitation today for our guest, but that’s the last spot we have in Porto and then we’re full. I’m just joking. Cool. Cool. I’ve been working a lot with something that is very not WordPress related lately. Other stacks, other technology. And I’m talking about this because just the fact that sometimes reminds me how easy it is to work with WordPress and WooCommerce and how to set up stuff and more. I work with other frameworks and although they have all this kind of scripts and all the different tools that you can install and end up with 10,000 folders within the Node Modules folder, it’s always pleasant to go back to a project where you just install one CMS
, a couple of plugins and suddenly you have a thousand features. So just wanted to throw it out there.

Mike:
Grateful for WordPress and it’s how grateful.

Marcel:
We are, I guess.

Mike:
Grateful for WordPress and WooCommerce’s simplicity.

Marcel:
Yeah. And for the amount of features that comes out of the box. And more and more. Now these days.

Mike:
I’ve been working on a plugin skeleton for ElasticPress to convert queries from MySQL to Elasticsearch because I’m seeing more and more clients dealing with these weird. Well, just slow queries from like Facet WP
. But if you do have a few visitors coming and trying to filter, it will suck up even 128 gigabytes of RAM, which is impressive. Right. So that means you can’t always just throw resources at the problem when it comes to performance.

Marcel:
No.

Mike:
If you’re using 128 gigs of RAM probably, you know, for like five visitors or whatever, that’s.

Marcel:
There’s something wrong in there. Unless you’re running some AI model in the background, which. Yeah, that’s interesting. Very cool. I’ve the small project that I’ve still go back to WordPress nowadays and WooCommerce are pretty much related to SEO projects and also to AI projects. I’ll probably announce on the next episode or two episodes in whenever we’re done with this very special project that Bob knows about that involves. Yeah, just LLMs and AI and search features, which is very cool. Happy to share this in an upcoming episode. Cool. All right, let’s jump in then. Let’s introduce our guest today. He’s a seasoned UX designer and developer, over 13 years of experience and he specializes in creating high conversion landing pages and for software companies. His results driven approach has led to the completion of more than 670 design projects earning the satisfaction of over 550 clients. And I’m pretty sure these numbers are not up to date. We’ll know about that. He has estimatedly generated around $100 million in revenue. Marc McDougall, welcome to the show.

Marc McDougall:
Hey, thanks for having me, Marcel. Great to be here.

Marcel:
Of course. Welcome. So correct me in my introduction. Have I missed something? Do I need to add something to this introduction? I also have here something in regards to your expertise that you have been a guest appearance in multiple design and Marceting related podcasts. What should I add to a BO to your bio so that we have it complete?

Marc McDougall:
I mean you pretty much hit the nail on the head. I guess you could also include. I’m a crazy Scotsman. I’ve been living in the US now for about two and a half decades, so fully acclimatized. I guess the US culture But yeah, that’s essentially who am in a nutshell. Classic American perspective. Right. Who am I? And then you go straight to your occupation. So there you go.

Marcel:
You mentioned Scotland. So. And you were telling me before we started recording, you moved to the United States when you were 10 with your family. Is that right?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, yeah, we all moved over here. My dad got a job offer and.

Marcel:
Interesting.

Marc McDougall:
When we were 10, we were like, oh yeah, America. We moved to Florida and we thought America was essentially just Disneyland. And when you move to Florida, it is. So, yeah, we were stoked. I was like, hell yeah, let’s do it. Let’s get over here. And yeah, miss all my family though, man, that’s. That’s brutal. And that good free American or free European healthcare.

Mike:
That’s funny. I moved to the US when I was nine, but upstate New York, so super cold. And then I moved to South Florida when I was 12.

Marc McDougall:
Nice.

Mike:
Yeah. Swampland.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah. South Florida is a weird place.

Mike:
Very weird place. It was not made for human beings. That’s why they act so weird down there.

Marc McDougall:
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.

Marcel:
It’s very interesting. I moved to Portugal when I was 8 from Brazil. And my. And the reason I’m here is also because my dad got a job in a factory north of Portugal. He worked here for a year and then he said, yeah, why not everybody come here? It’s nice, it’s way more, it’s pleasant and the land is smaller. And he got a job in north of Portugal and we all moved in here. And since my parents always wanted to meet for to learn German and getting to a German school, we chose Porto. There are two German schools in Portugal, Porto and Lisbon. Lisbon was too crowded. Porto seemed to be a good choice in 1988, which is a very different Porto than we have today. And so I stayed here and I will probably never leave this place because I love it very much.

Marc McDougall:
You seem like Portugal’s number one advocate man.

Marcel:
I. Although I was not born here, it’s weird, but I’m about to become an official citizen as well, getting my citizenship very soon, I hope, after long two years of a bureaucratic process. Yeah, it’s a very nice place and I think Mike can also attest to that.

Mike:
Yeah, I’m staying as well. I’m tired of moving and this is the best place I’ve lived so far. So.

Marc McDougall:
Wow. Quite a budding developer ecosystem there as well, it seems then.

Marcel:
Yes. More and more we see social media posts about Porto and related to development and all of that. It’s really interesting times I hope it doesn’t become a little bit like Lisbon, which is too crowded, or like Barcelona or even Madrid. But let’s see. I think it’s at the end of the day we can say that Portugal was a poor country 30 years ago. And so every company that comes or every group of people that chooses Portugal or Porto to live in kind of contributes in a certain way for its expansion or for its growth. So I think it’s a good thing at the end of the day.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, absolutely.

Marcel:
All right, cool. Now that we’ve talked about Porto, which is my goal for 20, 25 in each episode. Stay tuned for next episode. We’re going to talk about food in Porto. Just kidding. Today we’re going to do a deep dive into CRO UX design, E commerce, any other topic that the conversation leads us to. I wanted to touch on how good design, great design decisions can either make or break a business. And I think Marc, you have experience in this. You are an expert in conversion focused UX design, I would say, and you have been over a decade experiencing, you have over decade lots of experience helping businesses, e commerce related businesses as well, maximize their sales with better designs. And I wanted to touch a little bit on that, generally speaking. And if we talk about CRO r o, what do you think? How many people think that it’s just like tweaking buttons and colors and changing the text on CTAs. How do you define the conversion rate optimization and what people often get wrong about it?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, fair point. When I first started my journey in conversionary optimization, I too thought that it was just I need to make every button red and people will just click it. And you know that’s actually true, right? Like people see red buttons and if they want to click it, they might. But yeah, people seem to think of conversion rate optimization. I would say the two biggest conceptions are one like you described, there’s that it’s kind of a tactical thing where you just like do certain things like make a button red or make text bigger and you see an increase in conversions. But the other misconception that I think is a little more damaging is that people tend to think of conversion rate optimization as like something you just, you something you do, like a website redesign, you know, when in reality it’s a, it’s an ongoing process. It’s extremely difficult to optimize some kind of software interface for a cohort of human beings and get it right the first time. Even if you have a really robust understanding of types of people, you’re Designing for, as you guys are aware, dealing with clients and their customers, people find the strangest ways to use your interface or they, you know, come up with some insane takes from reading your copy. It’s like, how could you ever have possibly done this? How could you ever possibly come to that conclusion? You know, so it’s something that just has to happen over a very long period of time, usually on the order of magnitude of months, to really dial things into kind of a Goldilocks zone where you’re really squeezing as much juice as you can out of that traffic.

Marcel:
And so I believe you work with multiple clients, as I said in the beginning, and with hundreds and hundreds of landing pages, what do you think are the most common mistakes you see over and over again? Like you mentioned a little bit, people tweaking colors and text sizes and all of that, but I’m guessing there are like, people don’t like to spend money on things that they think they, they can do themselves. Like they can manage themselves. SEO. I just get some articles and I take ChatGPT and I make changes for the content. I just give ChatGPT a couple of topics and I get the content. But I guess for design and for this work that involves fine tuning the design, there isn’t like still an AI system that kind of, you give them like some ideas and they give you all the tricks and the solutions for the problem. So what do you think are the most common mistakes people do when trying to optimize landing pages?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, not yet. It’s only a matter of time till AI comes for everything, right? But for now, we still need to use human. So in some part of the project, Right. Biggest mistakes. It’s interesting because like immediately coming to my head is like 20 things that I see all the time. But the most, the highest impact ones I think are misusing design flair. A lot of customers, especially if they’re like first order or, excuse me, a lot of businesses, if they’re like first order businesses, meaning like founder is the person who is building the website, they will get really obsessed with making a good impression and they’ll think, okay, we need like this to animate up. We’ll need some kind of like really flashy design and they’ll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on like a really beautiful website. But it doesn’t really achieve the goal because that the goal of the website was to impress people not to convert them into a customer. And there’s a time and place for design flare, obviously, right. Like if you go to stripe.com, probably every designer’s like panacea of well designed websites. They have mastered the, I guess the coming together of design flair and functional design because it’s very. They speak to the value proposition of like what they do. They’re a payment processor, right? But like, they talk a lot about taking the headache of dealing with the legal liability and all that. They’re really good on the copy, but then the design just lifts everything up. It’s really easy to torpedo a very good website or excuse me, a very high converting website with really invasive design flair. I had a client recently whose entire Marceting was just a Discord Group and a Google Doc. He built trust in the Discord Group and then the Google Doc did all the sales for him because I guess he just didn’t want to build a website. But the guy is, he’s raking it in because he’s got the copy just right in the Google Doc. And I’m like, this dude’s a genius. I don’t know if he maybe talked to someone about this, but like, man, it’s so easy to waste several six figures in like a giant redesign project. Only to, only to say, only to step back after the project’s done and been like, I probably should have just used the Google. I’ve got a couple of others that are also quite big offenders. I’ll just touch on one more for now and then we can get back to some other stuff. But messaging, or excuse me, a lack of like clear messaging is the, I think, second biggest offender, right? Because as you guys know, people don’t really read on the Internet. It’s really just like a scanning type thing. And nowadays it’s even more true because people are browsing the Internet on their phone while they’re doing something else. Like they’re watching Netflix, they’re watching YouTube, and they’re on the couch. So you have to sell from the second screen. So you’re not going to have someone going through your landing page and reading every single sentence. But the problem is when you’re designing your landing page, you’re reading every single sentence and you’re trying to make sure it makes sense. So what you have to do and where most people fail, and this is extremely hard, I’m not, you know, trying to talk bad about anyone here. I’m just saying this is extremely difficult, is communicating your message in a clear, simple and influential way without using very many words at all. If you can get that right, you really don’t need to do very much else. But that’s so hard to get right.

Marcel:
It is super hard to get right. And I do see people sometimes doing what I think is a path that is not the right correct way to do it. They start with the design, then they eventually go over copy. But if the copy messes too much of the design, they go back to what the design kind of defined to be shown on screen. And then sometimes the design doesn’t. It is not conversion oriented. It’s not something that creates kind of like grabs attention towards a certain subject or an action and tries to, to convince people to spend a couple more seconds or even a minute extra on your website. And you’re mentioning this client that had the Discord and the Google Docs is actually proof of that. Right. And he possibly even is like afraid that some of the design that he now applies in his third layer that will probably mess with some of the other two layers. Right. And that’s, I think it’s also the hard part of it. Right. It’s obviously copy is very hard, but copy, maybe you can test it, you can see how others are doing and try with help, some help of ChatGPT and some other tools to like get it there. But if you don’t have the right recipe to put that copy in a way that it convinces people with clean and good design, then it’s not going to work by itself. Right. You mentioned the Discord thing. The Discord is constantly getting validation by people he’s interacting with. Right. It’s almost like you’re stopping every single visitor you get on your website and you talk to them and say, hey, what do you think? What are you looking for? What is this? What is that? You need any help? So the Discord approach there is very interesting because he’s getting live feedback from whatever he’s doing, right? Whatever his business is promoting or offering there. And that’s very interesting to, to hear.

Mike:
I imagine like the cognitive and the emotional aspects of conversion rate and design are often neglected. Like people focus on like, oh, I need to be really pretty and attention grabbing. But I’m redesigning my site right now and I’m focusing very much on the, like, when the person comes to my site, I want them to know, why am I here? What do you do? How can you help me? Like, there’s some very basic questions that should be answered with as little effort on the visitor’s side as possible where people focus more on like, oh, I want the everything to be vibrant and like, I want the person to stay on the page because they’re Just so enamored by how beautiful it is. And it’s like no, but you people come to your site because you want them to do something, you want to service them in some way.

Marcel:
Right.

Mike:
And you want them to feel comfortable and trust you. Right. Which is hard to do when they don’t know who you are. Right. And this Discord guy, he has the trust element solid because of the. How he’s building the community, I’m guessing inside of Discord. So all he has to do, like he could put probably very little effort into the Google Doc part because people are going to buy when they trust you, they’re automatically going to be more willing to buy the stuff that you are selling. Right?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah. And these you touch on a good point there. Like websites, I guess most business websites, I guess most designers will approach a business website as kind of an art project. But the conversionary optimization or I guess really any kind of design that’s intended to be consumed by a human usually has some sort of functional purpose behind it and that should come first. Your website in particular, Mike, is a good example of how to do a lot of what I guess we’ll talk today really well, very results focused, obviously loads instantly and it kind of gets to the point everyone has a, I guess a different number for this, but there’s like something like less than 10 seconds you have including page load time to like explain your unique value proposition to a complete stranger. If you don’t get that right, you’re totally cooked. But yeah, it’s one of those things. If you do get it right, you kind of earn the user’s permission or the prospect’s permission to continue browsing your site. And yeah, it’s, that’s like the magic dust of conversion rate optimization is just really good copywriting.

Marcel:
I. I wonder, Mike, you said you recently did this design change and it’s actually right on the topic that we’re talking about. So my question and my wonder is how much does the design actually matter for conversion? When you compare that to the copy of the website or even maybe to, to the rates that you’re charging for your service, how much do you think design matters? Because I do understand and I’ve seen it already and it looks great, you did a huge upgrade in terms of design. Do you have some results already? If that was if you had a significant increase in number of visits or if that really mattered or if you maintain your copy or change your copy to. To match that design?

Mike:
My. I actually did a redesign because usually like I blessed with people Recommend me so I could kind of like the Google Doc. I had like my, the design of my website didn’t really matter too much. People were going to hire me because they already were confident in my skills and results and stuff like that. But I had a few clients tell me, they said your website doesn’t communicate clearly what you do. This like holistic approach that I look everywhere and that there’s different kind of services. I’m adding more content now too because there’s a lot of things that aren’t clear enough and I’m kind of a laid back guy. Like things to be fun and I wanted the design to reflect that as well that like what it would be like to work with me and my team. So the copy part, I don’t, I also don’t get that many visitors so it’s hard for me to draw meaningful conclusions about how much of a difference it’s making. But I think if I show like the people who said oh, your site doesn’t really communicate what you do, if I show them it now, they’ll be like, oh, this is much clearer. Like now I get a sense of what you’re offering me. And I got, I used a lot of my friends to gather feedback wise. So I showed them like, hey, what do you think of this? And they said oh well that should be moved up to the top. The like case studies like probably put that at the very top. So I know the proof that it works. Right. So you can dive right into. Yeah, how I can actually help you and that you could be one of these success stories hopefully that, that I worked with. So I wish I had data on it. Marcel. I think some of it is kind of intuitive when it comes to this stuff. Right. Like when, now when you go to the site, you saw what it was like before and now you see it now you’re like, oh, this feels more, I don’t know, like elegant or.

Marcel:
Well I, I read it as less cluttered, easier to read smaller chunks of text which I think is a good thing. But much on, on the type of the audience that you’re trying to get into the conversion part of it. Right. Because it depends so much on, on the different people that look at the, the website and as you said, maybe the people that you work with you they’re, they’re not looking for the best looking design to hire you as your services do not immediately offer design services. Right. So it’s kind of like interesting to observe these kinds of websites that you have and other people have where they Say design is not so important, but the UX part of it is what I think is important for you to have a high converting landing page, for example, and together obviously with the copy, right. And so you want to reduce some of the friction that you have when people visit your website by focusing them into a certain area. And I think your redesign works more in the sense of reducing friction and getting to know more easily and quickly what you do instead of just looking a bunch of text and well, not saying that the text is not important, but also saying that you had to read a lot more to know what you would do in your older version than you have right now.

Mike:
And I hired someone a few years ago to redesign the homepage, but they were an email Marceting guy, right? So he wrote this long form copy and that’s why it was so it was like a very long, persuasive email. But people who are coming for performance optimization stuff, like if their website is crashing or it’s really slow, you don’t want to give them a lot of stuff to read. How do I hire you? How do I help make this pain go away? And I didn’t want to overwhelm them with having to read a bunch of stuff, right? I wanted to reduce that overwhelm and just make it easy for them to get the help that they need.

Marcel:
Marc, I wanted to touch on the psychology of conversions for a minute and I think if we talk about reducing friction and offering you as an expert or professional in the area of offering that service, right, to reduce the friction of a website, what do you think are the main friction points that you see out there and that would stop users from either a sign up or checking out an E commerce site. What are the main issues that you see and the first things you work on when you get hired to do that?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, good question. So the way I like or the mental model I like to use for this kind of stuff is just thinking about in my own personal life when I’m making a large financial transaction, what happens in my brain, right? And it’s usually a very predictable thing, right? I’ll be, I’ll usually just come to terms with the fact that I am experiencing some kind of problem. And that problem could be something as esoteric as I’m bored and I want something to entertain my myself. Or it could be something super painful. Like as Mike was saying, my, my site is taking 5 seconds to load for some reason and I’m hemorrhaging customers. Like how do I need to fix this now? Right, right. But there’s some kind of abstract problem. And then from there I’m going to do like a cursory research to just figure out what my options are broadly. And I’ll probably immediately reach out to my people that I trust for recommendations. Friends, maybe not family, but like other colleagues that are domain experts and just like, hey, do you know someone that does X, Y and Z? And then I’ll just continue to evaluate from there, do comparisons, et cetera, et cetera, and then like make a short list. But the part I want to focus on is the trust thing because like Mike was saying earlier, he’s in a position now where he can kind of completely sustain his practice from referrals. And that’s because the hardest friction point, or I guess the most common friction point that I see is that people don’t trust you. Right? You’re a stranger to them when you’re hitting them cold from a PPC landing page or some like email Marceting call to action.

Marcel:
And you might even be a trustworthy person, but you have to sell that. And that’s the difficulty of it.

Marc McDougall:
Right, Exactly. Trust is relative. Right. Like your mother trusts you, but some random dude on the street that you just see for the first time, as far as they’re concerned, you could be an axe murderer. Right? Like, no one knows. Hopefully not. But the trust thing, I mean, if the way I see it is like if I have a problem and I deeply trust that someone is able to solve it for me, then the sale just becomes logistical. Right. Can I afford what they’re offering? Are they available? Are there any other logistical, like geography barriers preventing me from working with them? You know, there’s no like, magic to it once when the trusts there. So anything you can do to just like build up that trust is going to make everything else way easier. Social proof, links to third party referral, verifiable reviews, case studies, screenshots of tools that show that you’re actually doing something real. An important note there is that if your screenshot looks too pretty, people won’t believe it. So, like a dirty screenshot taken with your phone is way more compelling than like an extremely stylized picture of like an analytics tool.

Marcel:
Right.

Marc McDougall:
I don’t know why, if just, it’s more trustworthy that way. But if you can breach that threshold of trust with customers and you’ve clearly explained the problem that you solve for them, all you have to do is present them with a call to action and they’ll click it.

Marcel:
Right, Right, Exactly. Yeah. You mentioned to reduce the friction, you mentioned the trust part. Like tools that you can use, sort of like to trap people into some psychological feelings like FOMO or social proof, or create the urgency need to hire you to acquire you. Do you think those help as well to increase conversions without feeling too manipulative in your approach?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, this space is rife with dark patterns. You know, things that work, but they only work because you’re like hijacking a part of your human brain that you’re not supposed to be hijacking. And I think the most effective one by a long shot is a sense of urgency and scarcity. So a way that this guy isn’t a client of mine, he’s a competitor and it’s really brilliant. But the way he’s designed his site is just to level set for people listening. Most people in the like design services space, or broadly speaking, any kind of like development services, the first point of entry is a consultation usually. But this guy has a calendar link that he has configured to always show that he is unavailable no matter what. And on his landing page, he has a little form below it that says no availability. That means I’m booked up. Click below to get access to the VIP wait list. It’s so sneaky. And then every like two weeks he’ll say accepting new clients for two days, three slots available and the dudes like booked out for months. And it doesn’t matter if you actually have a booked out calendar, if you make it seem that way, people will be like, okay, like I might as well do this now, you know, but meanwhile, my calendar, you click it and it’s okay. It’s a normal calendar link. There’s a spot available a week and a half from now or something. Right. But that’s nowhere near as effective. But I just can’t bring myself to. To implement that dark pattern yet. But yeah, yeah, that’s extremely influential and it’s particularly useful in situations where customers are like, there’s no financial friction, there’s just like timing friction. So for example, it’s a free consultation. But people are like, ah, I don’t necessarily. I’ve got a thousand other priorities. I don’t really think I want to do like imaginary optimization now. That’s how you get them to pull the trigger.

Marcel:
Yeah, yeah, I totally relate to that because my wife has this photography business, she has this studio, she does newborn and maternity shoots and she initially didn’t want to do this, but I encouraged her to do that a little bit. So whenever somebody calls and is like, oh, I really need to get this session booked, I really need to do this. Never tell them that you have availability within less than a month. Like they have to wait a little bit for them to be able to book her, even if she has like a lot of space. Right. And what that make the people do the decision right now on the call and she does then just send like an invoice for guaranteeing their spot on the calendar. But it’s like the sense of urgency that you’re talking about, like, oh, you’re so busy. Let me just immediately book one spot right now so that I don’t miss it. Otherwise I can do it tomorrow, Wednesday, I can do it maybe on Friday. That gives you a little bit of different image. I. You’re the same professional. The result is going to be exactly the same, but it’s sort of like plays with that psychological part of the person wanting to. To book or to commit immediately. Right. And the commitment part is what’s very interesting about this nowadays it’s a little bit more like both situations. Competition is a lot higher at the moment here in Porto, that kind of business is. There’s more offering. She’s created also the trust part in the reputation part in the middle of time. But that worked very well in her favor. So I totally relate to that as well.

Marc McDougall:
That’s awesome. And it’s one of those weird things about, I guess, Marcet dynamics and human psychology where you kind of get punished a little bit for being extremely honest and transparent. Because at the end of the day, like people don’t want to work with people that don’t seem like other people want to work with them. It’s just high school lunchroom dynamics all over again. You know, we’re just reliving that same nightmare forever and ever.

Marcel:
And you want to tell the other people like, no, I hired that guy, he’s super busy but I was able to hire him. So yeah, and he worked on my project. So I’m also like bragging a little bit about the fact that I was able to book him.

Marc McDougall:
Right, exactly. Yeah. So it’s. There’s a principle I like to talk about when I’m consulting with clients called sell to the want and then deliver on the need. Because generally speaking, like conventional optimization, when you’ve been doing it for a while, the solution is pretty simple and it’s usually relatively similar for most customers. But if you try and sell to like the median outcome, it’s not very sexy. So instead you have to like do things like position yourself in somewhere where you’re inaccessible and talk about like the extreme outlier result. Double your conversions next week. Because if you don’t do that or at an extreme disadvantage in your Marceting positioning, but then once they’re in the door, you can then level set and be like, hey, look, here’s a realistic outcome to expect and actually be a good practitioner and deliver on a standard median outcome for them.

Marcel:
Like an example for E commerce website that this like fake client that we’re just inventing right now has, he’s selling, I don’t know, selling some kind of products. The products do not cost more than $20. The average cart size is 25, $30. What do you think are the main actions store owners can do in terms of building trust quickly to especially E commerce stores and E commerce users?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, okay. So for E commerce specifically, there’s a couple of patterns I see over and over again and it falls into two buckets. Generally speaking there’s like the mass Marcet E commerce folks, they just have like thousands of products. They’re basically competing with Amazon for those people. I’m usually recommending kind of just a lot of the baseline stuff like cart abandonment recovery techniques and showing like live sales purchased and building that sense of fomo. But for individuals and small businesses that usually have a very specific niche, I’m experimenting with a new approach that seems to be working quite well where instead of like a generic product page, we just have a sales page. Because the moment at least this is how I see things as a consumer that buys stuff from E commerce stores all the time. As soon as I see a generic product page with the quantity counter and an add to cart button, I’m just like, okay, unless this is the very End of the funnel and you’ve already sold me. I’m like, okay, like your product photos better be so good that they’re doing the heavy lifting for you. So like, instead of that, get rid of the product page and just have, just turn it into a sales page. You know, have one very specific problem that that product solves and then do what you would normally do on like a Marceting landing page. Speak directly to the customer’s emotional pain and do that throughout three or four sections. And then at the very bottom you’re like, oh, here you can get. There’s like three ways you can buy this. And, and if you buy the most expensive one, you get something for free. And they’ll probably pick the one in the middle. But yeah, that’s.

Marcel:
And do you think testimonials or social proof are also important in those cases?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, social proof is one of those universal principles that applies to both domains. Mass Marcet and like a niche e commerce store.

Marcel:
Exactly.

Marc McDougall:
You’re not getting sales without social proof in 2025. You know, anytime. Even if you go like Amazon. Right. The first thing, at least I do as like the nerd archetype is check the reviews. Like, check.

Marcel:
Scroll down a couple of folds.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, scroll down a couple of folds. And nowadays you have to also figure out, okay, how many thousand reviews are AI generated and which one. They’re actual real humans. Right. So that’s becoming an increasing arm. Increasingly hard to navigate arms race. But yeah, social proof mandatory. And if your product is. Anya.

Marcel:
No, I was going to say, and those reviews usually also they encourage you to take pictures. And you were talking about the other day, like those nice. Not the other day, a couple of minutes ago, the other, the screenshots that are very beautiful with those dashboards. Like if people take photos with their own camera from the products they bought in low light in terrible conditions in not a perfectly set up scenario. Yeah, that adds value to it. Right. Because one thing is to see the product in those beautiful images and then you have a couple of five stars people explaining why the product is cool and adding that picture on top of it. It’s golden, I think. Right?

Marc McDougall:
Absolutely. Like the best review you can get is like a four star review that has a decent little picture of it, of your product and then specifically talks about hesitations they had before buying it and how those hesitations went away after they bought it. If you can get that kind of testimonial, just put it at the top of your reviews no matter what. Even if you have a thousand reviews, that one’s always at the top.

Marcel:
Yeah.

Mike:
What if it doesn’t have a like avatar, you know, the faceless avatar versus real faces is. Do you know how much that influences the trustworthiness? Because I think taking a picture of the product and being honest like that, you can immediately relate to that. Right. If you’re like I’m going to write a review and want to put too much effort but like so I could, you know, I could do it on the couch watching Netflix the picture.

Marcel:
Right.

Mike:
Then you’re like, oh, that’s how I would have done it. Right. But then having an actual face to it I imagine just adds even more. Right. How good looking that person is of facial symmetry and all that kind of stuff. Right.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah. I’ll amend my previous assessment of the best review. You want like a Hungarian model to also have done that four star review and taken a picture, but you can’t really control that. Right. Of course having like a real human being, a verifiable human being is like chef’s kiss. Like that’s exactly what you want. Especially now with all the AI stuff, you know like actual human beings are starting to become a very rare commodity online. So like making sure that your reviews are verifiable by some like trustworthy third party is more important now than it ever was.

Marcel:
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of. Amazon is actually a very good example how design doesn’t matter and what matters is the content and how things are put into the screen and it’s really interesting to see how those reviews are coming more towards the start of the page. I wanted to quickly touch on applying CRO to E commerce and we talked about card abandonment and how we can chase that down. I wanted to your opinion on one page checkouts versus a multi step checkout because that’s probably one of the hardest things for us developers that we master the technology behind building these pages. We know how to implement it design that was offered. But sometimes we do get clients where we. They ask a lot of things that our opinion about stuff and me being as. As thorough as possible doing the best technological implementation of whatever checkout system is going to appear and how fast I can put it so that we don’t lose people waiting for the checkout to appear. Yeah, I was wondering like I. I know that one page checkout and multi step checkouts are obviously suitable for different use cases. Right. But is it always the case that is the less steps the better in a checkout procedure?

Marc McDougall:
No. The way the heuristics that I’ve been following are you need to be able, as an E commerce store owner, you need to be able to afford a multi step checkout experience. And by that I mean if you have a product that’s less than like 30 bucks and you’re asking someone to go through more than a single click to buy it, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Right? No one’s invested at that point. They’re just like, really? There’s some small percentage of people that are just going to be like, it’s not that worth it or it’s not worth that much, you know. And nowadays with Link and Shop, most people, if you’re integrating with Stripe, it is a one click thing, it’s very easy to do that. But if you’re offering like a luxury service, a bespoke product like this desk, I’m using the custom standing desk. If it’s just like a one click thing, I’m sketched out, man. Like I’m spending several thousands of dollars. I want to be able to go through this highly curated process where I’m like specifying the wood grains used and like telling them exact, the exact hue of paint I want. Right. Like that makes me feel like a vip. And at that point I’m a little more emotionally invested. So when you present me with that $4,000 result at the end it’s like, ah, well, I’ve just spent 20 minutes crafting the most perfect desk I could ever want. I’m emotionally invested now. There’s going to be a lot less friction when it comes to pulling out my credit card.

Marcel:
Right? Yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. And it’s kind of like the result of all the clients that I’ve worked so far is they tend to overcomplicate those. Like they, they think about, oh, I’m going to tell, try to explain the person exactly what they’re buying and what they’re paying for. And because usually checkout forms are so long they have to fill so much information. I’m going to split this into three or four pages and I’m going to show at the top how many pages there are and they’re going to be guided through the process. And I would say in most cases, most of the clients that I work with are not building $4,000 standing desks. They are over complicating it. And showing the steps above is harming as well because people start and see it’s a multi step. How many steps are there? Six. Oh my God. I would have to go through six it’s what’s working more nowadays in my opinion is a probably one page checkout where we have accordion types of content that expand and collapse as you move forward. It doesn’t look that big on the screen but then when you hit next button it closes up the one that you just had and opens up another one. So it shows you how many blocks you have. But it’s not a step thing, it’s not a hidden thing in a sense of wait until the next page loads and you see how much information you have to write. You know what it’s exactly like. It’s the shipping address, billing address, my account information, payment and done right, it works a little bit better. So I do tend to believe that this one page checkouts with the foldable content do work better nowadays than a multi step checkout.

Marc McDougall:
And it just translates so much better to mobile too. Right. Like you’re not showing a four step stepper on a 400 pixel width screen.

Marcel:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike:
Your browser will automatically fill in all the fields nowadays anyway. So I love when it’s like I just, you know, click address and it’s like boom. And then everything is there. I can just click next right away.

Marc McDougall:
Yep.

Mike:
And then for the credit card details it’s similar. Right. But the biometrics, it even puts the cbb. Nowadays I don’t have to be like oh which card is that? So yeah I do. Are more and more are the conversion metrics going more towards a mobile compared to desktop?

Marc McDougall:
Well, yeah, things tend to be trending mobile, especially in like the mass Marcet space. Because usually like if you’re making a very high dollar value purchase in a niche space, you want to be able to be on your computer to do all that customization. Right. But yeah, nowadays I don’t like the term mobile first but like your site just needs to work unbelievably well on mobile. There’s just no excuse if it’s not as easy to use as it is on desktop. What are you doing? You know it’s wild. And the point you made earlier, was it CCV or cvc, the security code for your credit card? I can’t tell you the number of times and I’ve been like right in front of an E commerce checkout page and the autocomplete fails for some reason and I’m just like I don’t want to go downstairs and grab my credit card, I’ll do this tomorrow. And then I just forget about it, you know, so geez, like having some way to bypass all of that is such a win.

Marcel:
That’s where this link service, that Stripebot, comes in very handy.

Mike:
Right.

Marcel:
It’s just an SMS or a text message to your phone confirming a code and that’s it.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah. And then it’s like bottom of the brain stem. Just like I can be a zombie and just spend all my money. That’s the capitalist dream.

Marcel:
Right. Then you don’t even really know which card was that. Yeah, it doesn’t matter. I’m just going to press. Ok. Yep.

Mike:
Do you do any test Marcs for like after you’ve done a design or you’re evaluating an existing one of like, I think it was called like the drunk baby test or something like that. It’s something where like someone who is severely inebriated should be able to use and navigate your website easily because then you will appeal to as many people regardless of their intelligence and motor skills.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, no, that’s. It’s funny, it’s a funny concept, but you’re totally right. Yeah. I like to tell people to pretend like your customer is drunk. And having worked with in client services for as long as I have, like I said at the start, conversion rate optimization, it’s an ongoing process. You have to ab test things and a good test is like the drunk tax, like just the drunk test. Just scroll really quickly and try and only read the headers. Does your product still make sense or excuse me, does the value proposition still make sense? Is it clear what, what problem you’re solving? If so, then you’re probably on the right track. There’s also the mum test where you just give your phone to your mom and just let her. Don’t say anything, just like, hey, check this out. And like let her scroll for maybe 30 seconds and then just snatch the phone back and then be like, hey, can you explain what that land? Like what were you potentially going to buy from that service? You know, and if they can’t clearly articulate it, you failed. And it’s not like your customer’s an idiot, it’s just that especially nowadays you’re selling from the second screen, you’re not getting 100% of your customers or your prospects attention at any given point. They’re scrolling on the couch, they’re talking to their wife. So Write for a 5th grade reading level and don’t write that much. Try and use as much like visual storytelling as you can and just get them to the end of the checkout process without having to engage their brain if you can.

Mike:
I think that’s what Amazon does so well.

Marcel:
Right?

Mike:
Like you’re like, I’m already done. You know, like I spent less than five seconds and I’ve already purchased the thing that I needed. They just did buy now the. Or, you know, like they’ve really removed all the friction possible. And one of my clients calls it eating the complexity. Like, like they do all of the heavy lifting so you can just be guided through with pretty much no effort. It’s beautiful.

Marcel:
We talked about mobile and mobile first. I as a developer hate that concept as well. But I think we’re all just ignoring or not ignoring, but not having or wanting to deal with a more difficult starting point when we do our work, and that is obviously to prioritize mobile. Because the screen is smaller, it’s more difficult to put all the information that we want to put in the screen and organize it, but it has to be done right. Are we already in the 70% rate of globally of mobile usage and E commerce websites being visited by mobile? If not, I think we’re very close to that and it’s kind of important for us to think about that. And when we are trying to work on the conversion part of it, a smaller screen is more challenging and it needs or demands from you to have a different concept or different approach when you’re improving that for a customer. Almost like you have to have two recipes, right? One for mobile and one for desktop. Is that an accurate statement?

Marc McDougall:
Are you asking if you need to have a different approach to solving the conversion problem on mobile?

Marcel:
As to desktop mobile versus desktop? Exactly.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of obvious things that you need to consider when you’re working with a mobile interface, especially in the software space. A lot of companies will have a demo video on their homepage, which is really asking a lot for a mobile device if you’re, you know, trying to deal with folks that only have access to 3G or like slow 4G connections. But no, there’s nothing really off the top of my head that I think is like fundamentally different other than the obvious stuff. Right. You’re dealing with a very constrained medium. So you. Everything that you had to do previously for desktop, you have to do even better now because it’s that you have less screen real estate to do it in. I’ve seen a couple of people that will. Or a couple of patterns where if you’re on a mobile device, you can take advantage of the extra, I guess, capabilities you have. The obvious one being, hey, just place a button on the screen and if you click it, it’ll just call me. Immediately as opposed to having to go through a contact form or something.

Marcel:
Right.

Marc McDougall:
And then there’s like other fun things you can do to get people, you know, interested in browsing further on mobile. But beyond that, it’s all just human psychology, regardless of the format. Right.

Marcel:
Well, I saw the other day one page that got my attention when I was browsing on my mobile phone, and that was they had the sticky buttons at the bottom, which weren’t occupying too much space, but they were changing according to the sections I was browsing in the website. Right. So the their CDA’s were constantly being displayed without me having to scroll down to them until they appear. Right. So let’s say for example, was in a certain section that talked about their testimonials. So one of the CDAs would be read More for the testimonials and the other one would be Buy now or subscribe or whatever the actual call to action was. And the buttons were changing and for some reason I was like, just, oh, this is interesting. I was browsing and wanting to know more about what button comes next, right? And it almost like immediately forced me to keep scrolling and seeing, oh, what other buttons do you have here? And what else can I click on? So, and that didn’t happen on desktop. And then, okay, let me see. Desktop and then desktop. It was just the regular usual positions for the CDAs. And there was not that much interest in knowing about the subject. And I found that very interesting because buttons were two buttons only small enough or they had the ideal height to be Pressable and was very interesting context to see in a mobile website.

Marc McDougall:
That’s a cool idea. And I’ve honestly never really experimented with something like that. It does kind of, I guess, seem to fit in the same domain of things that are like a really good way to spend a lot of time doing something that might not have very much impact. And you had, you would have been better, right? You would have been better off if you had spent your time just making your copy 10% more compelling.

Marcel:
No, you’re totally right because the paragraphs were long, right? And what you’re saying is spend more time working on those paragraphs to make them shorter but still compelling enough so that the button can also appear at the same time the reading text. Right. So you don’t have to resource to sticky options so that you can scroll longer texts. It makes sense.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah.

Mike:
There’s nothing more frustrating than like, you know, when you’re on one of those long sales pages and you’re like, okay, I’m Sold. Like, give me the button to so I can give you my money and move on with my life, right? And then you have to scroll around up or down. You’re like, oh, where the hell is it? But equally, I’ve seen. I see this with. When I do performance audits for clients. You have a lot of people who, like, the owners, usually really want some widget or section of the website to be engaged with a lot, right? Like, they’re. They put a lot of thought and effort and they’re like, this is. I know this am what my clients need. And then that’s something that could be causing performance issues for whatever reason if it’s like, fetching a lot of data from third parties. And then I said, well, how, you know, do you have any data on, you know, are people actually. Do they care about this? Right, because what you want people to care about on your website isn’t necessarily what customers and viewers, you know, prospects are actually going to care about when they visit your site. So then I try to have a gentle conversation with them about this is sometimes part. It feels like their baby to some extent, right? Like, they put a lot of effort and time and energy into, like, building this thing. I’m like, but if people aren’t using it and they aren’t engaging and they don’t care and it’s causing performance issues, like, you know, you gotta get rid of it, right? And so how do you have those kind of those conversations with. With clients where you can tell they’re very emotionally attached to some design choice or content piece where you’re just like, this isn’t it, man? Sorry.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, yeah. It’s an art in and of itself to try and, you know, finesse a client towards what they really need, you know, but on the other hand, I have to check myself all the time because I come into a project and I’m like, okay, I’m assuming that your goal is to get the most revenue you possibly can in the shortest amount of time, because who doesn’t? And then it’s like, here’s how you do that. And oftentimes it does include lots of what you’re describing. Mike. Hey, this particular part of the site is providing no value. It’s hurting your business goals. We should remove it. And I get lots of pushback. And sometimes I have to just check myself and be like, look, maybe the goal isn’t maximum revenue at all costs. Maybe it’s maximum revenue and also, like, preserving a little bit of my ego just to, like, because it’s my business and I want to do it that way. So I’ll cave to people all the time. I do the three strike rule initially. I’ll just design something without the widget and then if they ask me to put it back in, I’ll say, hey, look, you tasked me with solving this business problem. Here’s this is how you solve the business problem. And it doesn’t include the widget if they push back again. The thing I say is, look, as an expert here, I know that you’re going to be shooting yourself in the foot by doing this, but it is your site. So if you ask me one more time to do it, I’ll do it. So then you get it in email that they know that it’s going to hurt their results and then you do it. And that’s really the only way. I’ve had a handful of times where getting people to email you the request explicitly has caused them to second guess it, you know, so your site, I’m not gonna. At the end of the day, you get to choose what goes on it. So I try not to fight too much after the third strike at least.

Mike:
Well, they agree to like I’m. Because you can just a B test things too, right? It’s like, all right, let’s let the data decide because yeah, emotions are not rational, right? So yeah, if it’s like, you know, let’s find out if people actually care because of it. If that element is giving people a warm fuzzy feeling and it helps them buy, then even if they’re not engaging, it could be having some other subtle effect. Right?

Marc McDougall:
That’s a good point. It could just be working behind the scenes. It’s like how a lot of really poorly designed websites convert really well because they feel like it was made by someone in their community or something and they just feel connected to that particular brand for some random reason. You know, not everything needs to be like a flashy Apple site with like gradient text. So yeah, ab, test it if you want. But in my experience, when someone’s like, when a client’s like emotionally attached to something, no, you can’t throw. There’s no amount of data you can throw at them that’s going to get them to be like, okay, we remove it. You know, you’d be like, hey, this is causing you direct sales damage. And they’re like, I know, I just like it though. That’s the most frustrating conversation I have. But hey, it’s their website, you know.

Marcel:
I guess we all had that little doses of clients wanting to do their way and then later on seeing for themselves that it didn’t work. Kind of, kind of gives us like a weird pleasure when finding out about, oh, I told you something, right? There were other topics I wanted to talk to you about, Marc, but we’re running out of time. One last thing I wanted to really touch and this is something that I would like to ask every single person that we have as a guest on our show, how everything that they do relate to AI. And I think it’s automation, AI, machine learning, all those buzzwords are coming towards us. If we want them or not, if we use them or not, it’s up to us, but we will somehow have to deal with it being it for our own sake and set of tools that we add to our repository or coming from the client, right? The client saying, yeah, but I heard you can do this with AI and I wanted to implement this and I wanted to do this. So in regards to your area of expertise, how much do you think we talked about this in the beginning of the episode, that it’s not much still that you can do with AI in relationship to design and UX design and CRO, but is how do you see the future shaping in terms of AI and automation in your area of expertise?

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, so I’ve got a broad answer based on, I guess, where I see the industry’s going and then a specific example for you. But broadly speaking, we’ve touched on a lot of different topics around conversion rate optimization today, but a common theme throughout everything we’ve discussed is making sure that the message you’re trying to communicate, your unique value proposition is clear to the person that’s consuming it. And the large language models we have access to today are shockingly good at generating text that does that. Now I will say they need a lot of fine tuning to get to the point that I would be comfortable using them on a production site. Like if you try a one shot generate conversion focused language for a particular product nowadays, you’re going to get some really bad garbage output from like even GPT 4.5. But you know, if you really highly curate the responses and give them lots of training data of your own, you can get some really powerful stuff. I’m actually building a tool right now that’s going to do that for people. So if you can’t beat them, join them I guess. But a cool example I saw in the E commerce space that leverages AI to presumably boost conversions is I recently bought a better version of these glasses. They’re like medical grade blue light Glasses that have a very specific filter for other kinds of light that you see in digital screens. And the site I used is called theraspecs.com if you want to check it out. But they have, they have a little chatbot on there. If you click the. I think it’s not the primary call to action, but the second one that says like help me decide. It just puts you into a conversation with a chatbot that helps you to disambiguate between their product offerings. So instead of like for E commerce stores that have lots of similar products that just do slightly different things, it’s kind of like when you go to get some ice cream and you’re just struck with decision fatigue because there’s 20,000 options, but they’re all ice cream. AI is really good at helping people make those kinds of decisions. It’s like, well, what’s the main problem you have? How often are you looking at screens? It can get like all the context it needs and then give you a single recommendation. So yeah, folks want to check that out. That’s I think going to be used a lot more pervasively in the next few years. Because chatbots, they used to be crap, they’re still kind of crap, but they’re getting a lot better.

Marcel:
Once you build a custom LLM for your business and once you train it properly and the training part is still the one part and most developers will still struggle with and don’t know exactly how to do it and how to deliver to a client. Once we have super fast ships that we can train all this little specific models for chatbots, for example, that helps you out with a certain subject that they have been trained on, that’s going to be the golden solution for all this kind of stuff. And once you can put those models in smaller devices and in chips, they are available anywhere without Internet, then we are all done. Then the machine is controlling everything, I.

Marc McDougall:
Guess then it’s the end game. Who knows what’s next after that ends up.

Marcel:
Yeah, get to your retirement home in the middle of the jungle and stay there until you’re out of here.

Marc McDougall:
Yeah, it’s going to be wild, man. I mean, I know we’re wrapping up. I could talk about this for hours and hours.

Marcel:
Oh, me too.

Marc McDougall:
There’s going to be a point in the near future where you just can’t look at a digital screen anymore because it’s all fabricated content. You don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. You’re in this crazy information vacuum and it’s Scary times, man. So use it while you can and then put it down and walk away. Very far away.

Marcel:
That’s exactly it. Mike, do you have any other final reMarcs or questions you want to ask to Marc before we wrap this up?

Mike:
I’d like to know where people can learn. You have a YouTube channel where you’re sharing some information and stuff where people can learn more about your work and how to work with you. Do you do any training for developers or to like who want to learn more about CRO?

Marc McDougall:
I don’t do any ad hoc training probably, honestly. But if you go@Marcmcdougall.com that’s M A R C M C D O U G-A-L-L.com I’ve got a little course on there, just a little 12 day email course that talks a lot about the fundamentals and a couple of things we didn’t discuss today. And the YouTube channel is called Demystifying Design. I just redesign popular landing pages every week or so. Haven’t posted in a while but it’s like a real life example of this website is probably not converting very well and here’s why. And then you go through the process and show, you show the thinking and then the result and hopefully people will be able to like reverse engineer that for their own products if they’re interested in doing it themselves.

Mike:
Very cool.

Marcel:
And we haven’t mentioned this but Marc is also available as a an expert on Codeable. So if you guys want to head up to Codable and Marc, that’s also an option. Just saying, just putting it out there. Very cool. Marc, thank you so much for joining us in this episode. It was a very interesting conversation. Once again, Mike, we had a guest where one hour is extremely little time for us to talk all about all the subjects that you wanted to talk about. And it’s always fun to put AI in the end because otherwise you would just talk about AI the whole episode. And I don’t think AI Diverse deserves that much attention nowadays to be honest. Thank you so much for coming on and we’re wishing you all the best and hopefully we meet sometime someday in a word camp or so you were mentioning before we were starting recording. You’ve never been to one and here’s an invitation and this testimonial from two experts in attending word camps I would say and conferences in general. There’s so much to learn in them and so many people you can meet and change perspectives and opinions that you have formed otherwise and I think it’s very cool yeah. So next word camp is Europe is in Basel, just saying a couple of months away. June. It’s a very little town in Switzerland for you to fly to. Very easy to fly to.

Marc McDougall:
We did our honeymoon in Switzerland. Yeah.

Marcel:
Okay. So there you go. Let’s go. Let’s revisit our your honeymoon country again and take some family with you. It’s always a good opportunity to an excuse to just travel a little bit.

Marc McDougall:
So tax deductible. I love it.

Marcel:
Number one in the list of reasons why we do it. Okay, thank you so much. I think this wraps up this episode. Thank you everybody. Until the next one.