Gemini AI Fixes Conversion and AOV Problems Matthew Stafford

Episode Overview

Matthew Stafford is the Managing Partner at Build Grow Scale (BGS), a performance-focused CRO agency helping e-commerce brands maximize the value of every visitor. With more than a decade of experience and having worked with over 1,000 e-commerce stores, Matt champions a customer-first, data-backed approach rooted in psychological research.

Matt and his team have pioneered methods like using post-purchase pop-ups to identify friction, applying behavioral economics to form design, and treating site visitors according to their intent stage—whether browser or buyer. He’s an advocate for smart AI integration, currently experimenting with Google’s Gemini ecosystem to supercharge insights across Shopify, Google Analytics, and more.

At BGS, Matthew helps clients increase revenue per visitor and achieve exponential growth without simply throwing money at ad platforms. His mantra: “Simplicity scales, chaos fails.”

Want to grow your eCommerce business fast? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Build Grow Scale. Their expert team will review your goals and help you plan the next step to increase profits and scale smart. Schedule your free call now.

Episode Transcript

Matthew Stafford: The way people use the data is going to fundamentally change because we’re playing with Gemini right now, which is in Google’s ecosystem, which has Google shopping and email and all the rest. And we can pump in all of Google Analytics. We can pump in the Shopify orders, the reviews and then ask it, say, hey, our conversion rate is 1% and our average order value is $100. We would like to get to 2% and have our average order value be $125. Can you analyze all this data and teach us how to get there in 90 days?

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there! Welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for being here. Most ecommerce businesses are constantly chasing more traffic, more visitors, more clicks, more eyeballs. But what if the real opportunity isn’t in getting more people to your site, but in making sure the people already there are actually buying something? That’s the specialty of today’s guest, Matthew Stafford, managing partner at Build Grow Scale. With years of hands-on experience helping online stores dramatically boost sales without spending an extra dime on advertising, Matt has developed a deep understanding of why so many websites silently lose sales, and how small changes can lead to massive gains. In this episode, we go beyond the surface level advice and we dig into the psychology of online shopping, why most websites are designed to fail, and how understanding your customer’s mindset can transform your business. So without further ado, please welcome Matthew Stafford. So conversion rate optimization. Let’s talk about that. I feel like that’s something that e-commerce owners they’ve heard may not fully understand. Can you break down what it really means in simple terms and why it’s a game changer for online businesses. Yeah.

Matthew Stafford: Essentially, if you think about it, when someone comes to your website, they’ve raised their hand and said, I’m interested in what you’re selling or your solution to my problem. And then they either buy or leave. While the average e-commerce conversion is around 2%. And so that means for every 100 people that have a need or that have raised their hand to come look at your product, 98 of them left without buying. In that industry, I ran traffic and I thought, this just feels backwards. Everybody wants more traffic for more sales. My thought process is if I can get two of those 98 people that raised their hand to come to my site to convert, I doubled my business on the same amount of spend that everyone else was doing. And so led me down this path of how do I make the website much more user friendly, build trust, and create more sales. So the experience is good. And then also they’ll want to come back again. And that really started my journey over the last 8 to 9 years of continually optimizing the website to make it create more sales.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. And you’ve worked with a lot of different online stores. What are the biggest, most common problems that you see that silently drive customers away?

Matthew Stafford: Confusion. The wrong information at the wrong time. Uh, interesting for commitment. Uh, way too soon. Like you’ll see. Like add to cart or buy now buttons on the home page. And I always ask the owner, your product’s $100. Your product’s $200. Do they have enough information to make a $200 buying decision on that home page? Like, no. So then literally what you’re doing is you’re basically walking up to the girl at the bar and asking her to give you a kiss before you’ve even given her your name. So I think you got it.

Kevin Rosenquist: It doesn’t work. I know that that does not work. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah.

Matthew Stafford: You need to get the priorities right, and that’s give them the right information at the right time to help lead them through the process. And in all reality, most websites are made by developers to be an online store catalog, not a sales funnel. That’s a good point. We just started looking at the website as like the homepage as top of the funnel. The checkout is when they’re going to give you money and everything else is the commitment in between. How do we make that process smooth, and what are the questions that are in the client’s head when they’re on the product page or when they’re on the category page?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I mean, I mean, people talk about the customer journey all the time when it comes to UX and UI and all that, that stuff. But I guess, you know, you’re kind of taking that same approach to a website.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah, I would say I’ll give you a couple of really cool things that your audience can do to their website that will automatically make them more money and it’ll give us more talking points. So the one thing that we do, the very first thing we do when we engage with a client is we put a pop up on their thank you page. So right after someone has spent money with them, we ask them a question. What was the one thing that almost made you not buy? And what they will tell you is anything that was confusing, anything that they didn’t like, what was friction, what they didn’t understand on the website, even though they spent money with you, they want to help you make that better because it was just annoying to them. And we take those recommendations and we fix the website, and it’s responsible for six of our ten biggest wins over the last 4 or 5 years, which resulted in millions and millions of dollars in revenue for our clients.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I keep going back to the whole like, you know, apps are something that, you know, people work tirelessly to make sure they’re not confusing, to make sure there’s no friction, to make sure that everything is seamless and easy. Do you feel like people have forgotten that that is important for websites too?

Matthew Stafford: Yeah, I think that. I mean, if you think about it, closing percentage for talking to someone, if you were only closing at 2%, you would be like something’s broken or you’d fire that salesman. So why do we accept that from our website and the. It’s just because I don’t think people view their website as a conversion mechanism. It’s really the conversation that you’re having with your client that you can’t have. And so the less confusing, the less cognitive load that you create on your website, the better the conversation is.

Kevin Rosenquist: There’s been some chatter in recent years that I’ve heard where people are talking about how, oh, you know, I don’t know if I, you know, the the website isn’t as important as it once was because you have your social media accounts and you have LinkedIn has kind of made a resurgence in the last couple of years. Is it shifting back to people going, oh, actually, no websites are important? Or are people still lagging behind on that?

Matthew Stafford: No, I think the websites are critical. Like, most people do business through a website and or at least they warm up their audience even if they need to talk to them or click to get a call. Education has to happen at some point. And if you don’t have the hours to talk to every single person, your website needs to do that for you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Right. Very good point. And when it comes to optimization, how much of the work you do is rooted in understanding human psychology and biology 100%.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah, 100%. That’s literally the only type that we do. I don’t care about little tricks or hacks that work right now, but won’t that will stop working. Uh, we 100% care about the psychology behind a person that’s browsing the website and by asking them, you know, what’s one thing that almost made you not buy that creates a reciprocity. It also creates an investment. Those people that, uh, share their ideas with you. Now, they feel vested in you succeeding because they want you to do better. So what are they going to do? They’re going to tell people about you. They’re going to come back and shop again. Uh, a lot of the time we look, return customer rate, uh, repeat purchases to see if the experience is better, because that’s an indication that they were happy and now they’re willing to come back and buy again.

Kevin Rosenquist: What are some of the more surprising ways psychology influences conversions?

Matthew Stafford:  I can give you another one that every single website that has a form to fill out, uh, you see, whether it’s lead gen or it’s even physical products, they ask you for your email and phone number. They don’t tell you why. If you read Robert Cialdini, his book, Pre-suasion, he talks about an experiment that they did where people are standing in line and eight out of ten are turned away when they ask if they can cut. But when they say, hey, I need to cut the line because my kids are late for school. Uh, now they let eight out of ten cut in front of them. So it wasn’t the cutting that was a problem. It was the lack of a reason as to why. And so when we were tracking form field errors, that was one of the most that’s where we got the most errors on a website was when people were putting in their email and their phone number. And so we thought, oh, okay. If we give them a reason why, we can maybe reduce that. And we were shocked by the results. So we put in the form field, instead of just asking for email, we say email required for order confirmation. And by saying that we reduced the errors by 279%. So we had three times less errors. And then how’s that worked so well. And we got their best email. We noticed our abandoned recovery percentages went out. We were collecting more money. So we started testing with the phone number. What could we say there? And so we said phones are required for shipping notifications and as soon as we did that, now our SMS recovery is actually our highest revenue producer on our ecom site. So giving them a reason why or thinking through the process of what’s going through that customer or client’s head at that point on your website?in order to get them to take the action that you that you need and why are why do you need that? Just be honest.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And you know, you mentioned trust before. Obviously trust is a big deal when it comes to, you know, buying online. I mean we all hear the horror stories and nobody likes going to a, you know, going to a payment page that looks sketchy and all that kind of stuff. Can you unpack why? You know, trust is so critical, you know, in the e-commerce space and, and how you help clients build that trust.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah. Well, so our brain focuses on the negative seven times more than the positive.

Kevin Rosenquist: Really? You wouldn’t know that if you looked at the public discourse. Yeah.

Matthew Stafford: They could have had a positive experience five times. And then that one bad experience will literally negate it.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s the one they remember.

Matthew Stafford: We’re very careful of the entire process to make sure that we’re removing friction and that we’re super clear. We actually use the phrase, it needs to be so simple that Homer Simpson would understand it. Because if that’s the case, then it prevents their mind from creating all these scenarios. And I always tell everybody simplicity, scales and chaos fails because if you try to put all the information on the page, you’re forcing everybody to go through a journey that maybe only 20% need all that information. And you’re getting rid of a lot of your good quality clients.

Kevin Rosenquist:  Yeah. There’s also like a lot of times you got to figure people are doing some shopping around so they don’t want to read a novel or have to go through this crazy journey to get to where they really need to be.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah. And we’ve watched thousands and thousands of videos of how people are interacting with websites that we’re managing. And for sure, people browse,  and skim, and then they’ll come back to the area that’s relevant to them. And so another thing that I would remind people of when someone tells you that something worked well, find out how many other places on the site you can put that element, because we used to test and when we would get a win, we’d go, all right, cool. What do we test now? And go find something else. And what we realized is if we can take that winning element, put it in other places on the page, we would still get even more lift because not everybody browses the page the same way. And so we were actually getting more people to use those winning elements to convert higher.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. That’s interesting too. Yeah, I love the psychology of this kind of stuff. It’s really fascinating. And another thing that’s so big now is personalization. You know, people like personalized experiences. Social media has helped push that, I think. But people also don’t like being tracked too much. So it’s like there’s a weird balance there. How do you help your customers strike that balance?

Matthew Stafford: You know, for us, we care. I care way less about a lead than I do about a customer. I think if you have a good product and you take good care of your customers, that one person is going to be way more valuable than a whole bunch of leads.  It’s not that we don’t want them, but our goal is we consider someone that’s browsing the site, a browser. We consider someone that’s added something to their cart, a shopper. And those two people should be treated differently in order to make sure that the experience is something that you know, you want them to be wowed by the experience, and that doesn’t mean you have to do something over the top. It means you have to be really simple, very easy, and it doesn’t require a lot of problem solving for them or anything. Like I always tell people each page of your site, if you can come up with a reason why that page exists and then make it do that better than anything else. The whole process is easier. So like your home page, uh, the main purpose for it is when they land there. Did I land on the right site? Do I trust you? And easy navigation to what I’m looking for.

Matthew Stafford:  It’s not meant to sell. It’s meant to build trust and then get them narrowed down to a choice that they made a micro commitment to get down to something smaller instead of all the stuff that you do. And then the category page would just be a filter. That’s all it is. It’s a filter page to, again, give them the ability to refine what they’re looking for so that when they land on something, uh, it’s very close to what they were looking for. And then that’s when you have the highest percentage of conversion. And then from there, you know, obviously, like we shared filling in the form fields and then following up with them. I will say out of the you know, we’ve worked with about a thousand stores, a little over a thousand stores in our membership. The most successful by far, the ones doing 10 million or more, uh, they have an insane, uh, position around how they take care of customers, how they handle customer service, uh, refund policies, etc. and it’s a long term strategy. It’s never a quick cash grab. And those people tend to be successful over a long period. And the brands get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Kevin Rosenquist: When it comes to the data. Obviously there’s lots of data. You analyze data. Everybody analyzes data. But not all metrics are created equal. What are the KPIs that you think every business should really focus on?

Matthew Stafford: I think repeat, repeat visitors.  I also, because we’re in e-commerce,  I think revenue per visitor matters. I think, uh, as the site gets better, your revenue per visitor should be going up. That’s a good metric because conversion rate can fluctuate a lot.  We can game the conversion rate. By putting on a sale, you’re going to have a higher conversion rate. Doesn’t mean you made more money. And so what we really care about is revenue per visitor. And that’s increasing. And the other thing that I’ll say about the data is I think over the next 6 to 12 months, the way people use the data is going to fundamentally change, because we’re playing with Gemini right now, which is in Google’s ecosystem, which has Google shopping and email and all the rest. And we can pump in all of Google Analytics, we can pump in the Shopify orders, the reviews and then ask it, say, hey, our conversion rate is 1% and our average order value is $100. Uh, we’d like to get to 2% and have our average order value be $25. Can you analyze all this data and teach us how to get there in 90 days? And it’s getting better and better. And the more that we start interacting with it, it’s coming up with insanely good ideas that we don’t see, because as humans, we look linearly. It’s kind of got a grid up above all this data, and it can analyze it 80 different ways and then give us really good ideas. Hey, what are some things that you see that we would never think of? And it comes up with great ideas. And so I believe over the next six, eight months that we’ll see conversion rates on sites, uh, go way up just from being able to leverage the, you know, these really, really smart language models.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. I could see that though, because I use AI in a lot of different situations, very similar to that of saying like here’s a bunch of stuff. Help me make sense of it, help me make a plan, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it’s insane just how much better it’s gotten. Just in the, in since, you know, since it’s come up, come around since we’ve all been introduced really to it. Yeah. And even in the last six months, it seems like it’s changed. I mean, it’s just exponential now.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah. A lot of stuff that we created six months ago, the new tools are already way better than what we created six months ago. And so it’s like at first I was like, oh, yeah, well, we’ll just wait till it kind of settles down. I don’t think it is. And so we just made a commitment as a company. No, we’re just keeping on building.  again and again and again as stuff gets better, because, uh, we’ll stay ahead of the curve and we’ll learn things each time that will make us better at it.

Kevin Rosenquist: When it comes to the expectations of customers. How have those expectations evolved over the years that you’ve seen and where do you think the next phase of that will head?

Matthew Stafford: Yeah, I think we’ve been doing it about ten years now. And ten years ago it was the wild, wild West. You could put up almost anything and it would sell because it was so novel. The novelty of it.  Now the competition has gotten so much better and so many people have been sold garbage. Uh, yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s true too.

Matthew Stafford: Really?hurt people don’t necessarily hurt. If the trust, if the trust isn’t built on the site, it’s just not going to convert that. Well, because, uh, they’ve been sold junk enough times that they’re like, I want to make sure that what I’m getting, I’m actually, you know what? I’m paying, I’m going to get something for it. And so I would say the competition, uh, continues to elevate and those drop shippers and the wild, wild West stuff’s kind of over. It’s really requiring you to, uh, treat it like a business. And, uh, I think there’s the potential to create generational, you know, generational businesses online,  at a scale that you could never do, uh, in the past. So, yeah, I think if I likened e-commerce to a baseball game, I’d say that we’re probably in the third inning.

Kevin Rosenquist: So you think that there’s going to be and this, this, this change, do you think it’s going to happen rapidly?

Matthew Stafford: Yeah, I think I will speed it up for sure. It’s speeding everything up. Uh, but if you think about it, before Covid, only about 10% of sales were done online during Covid. Yeah. It went all the way up to 33% during Covid. And now it’s like 27 something. So it’s still drastically more,  because people kind of adopted it through a need. And I think that, you know, we’re going to hit that critical mass too, you know, over the next 4 or 5 years, I think it’ll be 70, 80% of people will buy stuff online.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, honestly, it’s not crazy. It makes sense, but it’s just the number. The jump sounds crazy, but it definitely makes sense.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah, I mean, always,  adoption is slow in the beginning. You have early adopters, and then they’re the ones that take the arrows in the back and figure it out and get, you know, lose money and set an example. And then everybody else comes along and goes, okay, we see what’s working, and let’s go ahead and copy that first. And then you have a lot more adoption.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, They figure out a way to really to really make it work. And then and then it just then it’s the large-scale adoption.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah. And then you have the big brands that at that point they’ve seen enough of the stuff that they can go ahead and introduce it.

Kevin Rosenquist:  Absolutely. All right. Fascinating stuff. Well the company is uh build grow scale. I want to make sure I get that right. Bags build grow scale comm Matthew Stafford, thanks so much for your time.

Matthew Stafford: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.