On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Shawn Khemsurov. Shawn is the Co-Founder of Electric Eye, our Shopify expert design and development agency. We talk about simplifying Shopify migrations, upgrading your online store for better performance, optimizing UX and design, and so much more!
Shawn brings over ten years of fashion retail experience to the table. He is the Co-Founder of Electric Eye–our Shopify design and development agency, and a Partner at Feel–a brand studio where art meets commerce.
A specialist in design, Shawn has worked with the likes of Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap Inc, Nike, Homage and Only NY. His time in the retail industry, from digital experience to product design, has exposed him to many facets within the business.
This has given him an undeniable ability to identify his clients’ needs; guaranteed to provide a unique experience and to deliver increased engagement across all channels of your business.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Shawn Khemsurov
If the numbers aren't looking good, then yeah, they can always be improved. But there might be time to make some changes. Taking a look at your store, like your UX, site speed, the theme, the design.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
To kick off 2025, I'm bringing my business partner, Shawn Khemsurov, back to the show.
Shawn, how are you doing today?
Shawn Khemsurov
What's up? I'm doing good.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome. So we did some homework and we want to approach this to basically help everyone formulate a strategy for Q1 essentially, based upon the learnings of what happened to them during Q4.
And basically answer the question: it's a new year. Do I need a new store? And there's a few ways that works out, I guess. But for the first part, if you're not on Shopify, you should probably migrate, is what I'd say.
Shawn Khemsurov
Not a bad place to start.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. These days, what's a typical migration project timeline look like?
Shawn Khemsurov
Things are definitely faster, just depending on what platform you're on. But if you're looking for something fairly straightforward, just like a basic Shopify store with a new theme. Get a theme from a theme store, dress it up a bit, don't have to go crazy.
And then obviously, take your data. Those two things can be worked on simultaneously. So that way you're designing the store and then preparing the data and moving it over all at the same time, as long as you have the hands to do it.
But yeah, I mean, it can be done in as little as a month, I would say.
But typically, things drag out a little bit. It's hard sometimes, depending on the platform, to get the data out and reformatted and into Shopify the right way. Using Matrixify.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Matrixify is dope. Shout out to Maris.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. The best. The best at importing, exporting data from Shopify, for sure.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. But that's always the rub with migration projects–because you can put the data into whatever platform you want, whatever way you want. And even if it's a familiar platform, like WordPress, it's like, you can still build your products in a goofy way. So there's still this manual component of identifying how it's set up to convert it into what Shopify wants.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. Saving time is key. Very cliche right now, but using ChatGPT or AI to basically get a starting point. So if I'm pulling data out of like a weird old rickety system, I can take the Matrixify template and then dump that into ChatGPT along with the original data set and it will spit it out reformatted.
Now you should probably check it and make sure it's done correctly. But it saves a lot of time just upfront, like identifying columns, moving things around. But yeah, migration can be easy. It can also be very complicated. So find a good partner if you need help moving over.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And this is probably a good time to shout out... Shawn and I wrote a migration checklist that we're pretty proud of. And he designed it up and it looks really cool. So if you are thinking about migrating to Shopify in 2025, you can go to our website and get that checklist or you can just email us and we'll send it right over.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. It's pretty comprehensive.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It outlines the entire process. Our process, at least, to the best of our ability is to try to just not leave any stone unturned and tell you what you should expect.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. If you want to have some fun and do it yourself, knock yourself out. But it's probably going to take a long time and be annoying.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's the thing. That's often what I'm talking about with potential clients. It's just like, I mean, if you feel you're tech savvy and you want to kind of fail through this for 3 to 5 months, go for it. Or we can just have it done and you can be making money as quickly as we can.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. I mean...
Chase Clymer
Time to value, baby.
Shawn Khemsurov
Definitely. I have someone working on my house right now. I'm doing a couple fixes. And it's like, yeah, I could probably put that vanity up in the bathroom, but it's gonna take me the better part of the year to get that done. So I'm not doing it myself.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Shawn Khemsurov
Probably won't be done right either.
Chase Clymer
So obviously, you and I are big proponents of Shopify. What are the reasons people are migrating to Shopify these days? What's their problems with their old systems? Or what about Shopify that they like?
Shawn Khemsurov
I'm looking at one right now that we're working on. You know which one it is? I mean, the system is so old, it hasn't been updated in probably 10 years. So just even updating it would probably break it.
But yeah, I mean, we have things spread out over different platforms. We got all kinds of crazy stuff going on.
And Shopify is one single dashboard with all of your stuff organized. Super user-friendly. It's designed well, designed with the merchant in mind so they can do stuff on their own and not rely on a developer all the time. There's a million reasons. It works.
The checkout works. I know they did a lot of testing and introduced the one page checkout and that's doing well. It's improving on an already good product. So I don't think Shopify is going anywhere next year. It's probably only going to grow and attract more enterprise business. It works.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I remember the client... I know the client you're talking about. And they told us during the sales call, he's like, “Our website just doesn't work sometimes. It just stops loading.”
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. We got locked out of it just for trying to use it, which is not good. Thinking from a customer perspective.
So yeah, I mean… If you want to streamline your operations, make it easy for you and your team. Make it easy for customers to find stuff. Check out and have a good site speed and everything like that. Shopify is the place to be if you're in Ecommerce. We've seen them all.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It's also if you are thinking about jumping from your old platform to Shopify, during that project, it's also a good time to think about maybe potentially updating your branding or what you have to do a redesign because there is no reason to migrate the same design over because it's just like extra work basically, which might be a lot to go into.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah, it's actually easier to start over. And that's not always the case in life. But in this case, yeah, it's like a good time to take stock of what you're doing and you can redesign, you can rebrand, and it will just make the project way more fun and way more interesting in the end, look really professional. Some of these old sites and old platforms just look crazy, it doesn't work.
And then you go through this 2-3 month process maybe and you got a whole new business. The design of it is just as important as if you have a brick and mortar store. It's like, you're not going to have the brick and mortar store be a complete mess with product everywhere. Stuff blocking the entryway, broken windows. It's crazy. You have to treat your online store like a business.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It's your number one salesperson. It's open 24-7. It's definitely something that people need to think about.
I mean, we obviously have beat that topic to death. We believe Shopify is the best for most use cases when it comes to Ecommerce, but I know a lot of our listeners are already on Shopify. So let's help them self-identify if they need to redesign their store or invest in a new theme in 2025 or potentially get into more strategic design stuff.
So if we're looking back on the sales during Q4, their Black Friday, Cyber Monday stuff, their Christmas stuff, what are some things that they might be looking at or trying to recognize that's like, “Yeah, we should probably take the money we made and reinvest it back in this experience?”
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah, I think just looking at the data. I mean, obviously, if you have customer feedback from customer service or if something wasn't working right or there was some friction in checkout or it was slow.
There's a lot of things there to look at. But diving deeper into the numbers, looking at your average order value, checking to see how our conversion rate held up versus the rest of the year and then also versus last year.
So is your conversion rate up? Did you do things during the year to improve that? Look at your bounce rate. Look at the revenue per session. You can look at all that stuff and see, “Did I do a good job compared to last year? Where are things trending? Is my whole business down?”
And if the numbers aren't looking good, then yeah, they can always be improved. But it might be time to make some changes. Taking a look at your store, like your UX, the theme, the design, the product even potentially if things didn't go well.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I know that what we often are looking at when we're doing diagnostics... We do this for clients, by the way. Here's a salesy part. You can hit us up and we do a Shopify diagnostic, which is basically doing this audit for a brand's existing store.
But things that you want to look at first: If you're not on a Shopify 2.0 modern theme, now's the time to start that project. I am not kidding. We have 3 or 4 folks that we're going to be talking to again this month that came up about a year ago that wanted to start the project and they just couldn't get their ducks in a row.
But just the performance gains of those 2.0 themes, utilizing Metafields, search and discovery is wild.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. You can do so much with them. It's just a no-brainer to upgrade. I just don't... I can't find any good reason not to. Even if you have a custom site, you can put some time into an upgrade and just redo everything probably faster than dealing with everything else on the current site that sucks.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Another thing that we like to look at when we're doing these audits is the actual performance of the store. And we're not doing anything fancy. It's just we're doing Google Lighthouse and we're taking a look at all the apps that are loading.
And that's... There are often clients where their site is good enough. They don't necessarily need to redesign, but there can still be improvements.
What are some of those improvements that we're doing? Or what are some of the low-hanging fruit per se?
Shawn Khemsurov
If you have an updated theme, it can still be slow. So I'm not saying that 2.0 is going to instantly solve all of the problems. But you might have...
Chase Clymer
Yeah. If you load it up with a bunch of bad apps.
Shawn Khemsurov
100 apps. Yeah. You might have 100 apps, like 50 you're not using. That's aggressive. But just proving a point, seeing some crazy stuff. But yeah, if you're not using certain apps.
But we're looking at the code in depth and seeing what's going on. JavaScript. I'm not a developer, so I don't know all the terminology, but there's definitely some things with treating images, how they load, identifying, things like that, and making, just streamlining everything so things load fast.
And there's some tricks to do. There's definitely some tricks out there that don't work, certain apps that increase your site speed that don't really do anything.
But yeah, there's taking a good hard look at the code, look at the apps, look at your images. You might have images or videos loaded in that are way too big. And Shopify supposedly shrinks them for you, but I've seen it happen where they don't. So it can slow your site down.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
Something we'll be doing more in 2025 is these landing pages on the back of a 2.0 template. Could you, in layman's terms, explain why that is better than just using a PDP or a product display page for people that don't know what that industry jargon is?
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah, there's a few reasons. What we're doing now is we're creating a specific landing page template, which is essentially a version of the product page. So it looks somewhat similar.
But we're going to, we often remove the header links, like the navigation, and we'll change the footer to simplify it.
And the goal of that is if you're spending money advertising, you want to send someone directly to a page that's optimized for a quick sale. And so we'll do a lot of different things, but we will have a sticky advocate button upon scroll. We'll put a ton more information on the page about the product.
I think sometimes merchants get bogged down with things like, “I have 100 products or 1000.” Writing all of that information, all the specs, educational stuff for every single product is difficult. I understand that. So it's like, let's take your top two products or the product you're advertising for the holiday and really, for lack of a better word, pimp the page out.
You're going to put a bunch of information there, education, benefits, testimonials, reviews, but maybe more images, images of product and action, people interacting with it, all of that stuff.
And then also, potentially discounts. So what else can you do to really entice the buyer? And there's some structures that we can probably put in the show notes that we follow.
Chase Clymer
With these landing pages, like you said, just focus on the top one or two things. And it's like if you have a flagship offer, or a flagship product, and you don't have a landing page built out for your direct response ads, which is just a fancy way of saying like your Google or your meta stuff where you're driving paid traffic to it, you're leaving money on the table.
Because your typical PDP has one goal and this landing page stuff will have a separate goal. And you can iteratively split tests with IntelliGems and get wild with slowly improving, be it your conversion rate, or if you're trying to increase your average order value building out this page in a way that is more bundle friendly.
It definitely helps you narrow your focus of what that funnel is and how you want to improve that funnel and that offer and those sales.
Shawn Khemsurov
Landing pages, definitely. It's something to do once you've done everything else. It's like, what's next? It's like, I'm definitely going to spend more money on advertising. I have a product. I know it's good. People just need to get to the page and check out. So just streamlining that and removing distractions is important.
But definitely, I would say putting together some landing pages for next year would be really smart.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And then once you have those landing pages, make sure that you get something cool on there to record heat maps and scroll maps and get some user testing, customer feedback, surveys.
And you can really start to go crazy with split testing and really crank those things up. And it's not unreasonable to get conversion rates up in the 5%, 6%, 7%, 8% on these landing pages if they're really dialed.
And a lot of it is off of the page as well. Your marketing has got to be on point. You have to be getting the message in front of the right people. But then also, the page has got to be on point. It's got to be answering all the questions that the customer might have and making that checkout process just as seamless as possible.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah. And the cool thing about online store 2.0 and all the changes that Shopify made. It's like, you can duplicate these landing page templates across products. So while obviously working with someone like us to design one might be a bit of an investment upfront, but then it's like you have that page, you can duplicate it and change the content out super quickly as long as you have it.
But you can change it out super quickly in the customizer of the theme and you can just keep going and do it for more products.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I guess that is worth mentioning. Yeah, we're not using an app or anything like that. We're just building this right within the theme. And you own it, you can clone it and everything is editable. It isn't hard coded or anything like that. And it plays extremely nicely with IntelliGems if you want to start split testing stuff.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yep.
Chase Clymer
The last question here I have for you, Sean, is around Shopify Plus. And we've been doing a lot more with them this year. And what should a merchant be thinking about? Am I ready for Plus? Is it a sales thing? Do I want to do super cool stuff at the checkout? What have you seen?
Shawn Khemsurov
It's both. But I definitely just think coming to terms with the size of business you are really is going to be a deciding factor. If you’re plugging along at a nice clip and sales are great and you have a lot of revenue, it's kind of an obvious choice.
I think if you're on the fence, it's definitely looking at the processing rates and seeing what makes sense for you if you're going to save some money with that.
And also, if there are just certain things that you really want to take advantage of, maybe if you're not quite big enough and saving money there but you want to take advantage of B2B, wholesale stuff or functions and advanced checkout, customizations and all kinds of crazy stuff, then yeah, you probably need to go plus.
But if not, then you might be fine just using advanced Shopify and just waiting until it makes more sense. But yeah, let's just see where you're at.
Chase Clymer
If you want some help figuring that out, reach out to us. We do that all the time.
Shawn Khemsurov
We can take a look. There are some calculators and fun stuff. Or if you have certain needs and there are things you want to get done next year and you can't do without the bus, then maybe it's right for you.
Chase Clymer
But I do know that one of the things is... If you are doing $5-plus million a year and you have a product offering that is upsell or cross-sell friendly, getting that into your checkout can probably pay for plus and then some to a pretty wild degree. Checkout customizations are pretty cool.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Other cool things, Shopify Flow is awesome. Shopify Audiences is pretty new. But if you are... If you have a good understanding of how your marketing works and plugging that in with your marketing team, those audiences have, I guess, been doing some really cool things for people's advertising efforts.
They are improving the Plus product. A lot of cool things are coming to it in 2025.
Is there anything I didn't ask you, Sean, that you think is worth sharing with the audience?
Shawn Khemsurov
I mean, Plus is awesome. But obviously, it's not a fit for everybody. But it's important to also mention that Shopify has got new features all the time. And a lot of the time, things will start Plus and trickle down.
But yeah, there's new customer accounts, and they come with a lot of cool stuff. It's been a little bit hard to just get it to a point where it's integrating with all the apps. But I think once that's figured out, it's going to come in handy for a lot of people.
And if you're not switched over and you have no apps to impede that process, it might be worth it to look into that and just take all the benefits of passwordless login and customers having a nice dashboard where they can see everything happening in one place. It looks much better.
And there's some advantages, like, you can do self-service returns without an app and a bunch of different cool stuff.
So Shopify is always adding interesting features. It's worth it, obviously, to keep an eye on those and see something that you're solving with an app might be solvable in the future without. Or you can add a new feature with relative ease. Click up a couple buttons without an app. So it's always good to have more native features.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Or a partner like Electric Eye to help you navigate that minefield. We are working with dozens of clients at a time. So we're learning, unfortunately, super fast. We have to keep up on it. It's basically our career.
Shawn Khemsurov
Definitely.
Chase Clymer
With that, I'm gonna let you go, Shawn. Everyone out there, if you need help in 2025, feel free to reach out to us. We would enjoy working with you. Our diagnostic is super fantastic. And I think it would make sense for a lot of people that want a second opinion on their store.
But yeah, Shawn, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Shawn Khemsurov
Yeah, thanks. Good talking to you as always. I'll see you in probably a couple minutes.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, probably.
Shawn Khemsurov
Alright.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!