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E92: Cas Majid

How to Level Up Your UX to Increase Conversion Rates

Cas Majid

Podcast Overview

With over 20 years of digital experience under his belt, it was a no-brainer to get Cas on the pod.

As CEO of a group of 5 companies, Cas knows a thing or two when it comes to driving more sales online, and shares his wealth of knowledge around UX so you can be sure you’re delivering the best experience possible to your customers.

Listen in as Cas shares his favourite tools and tips to get the most out of your eCommerce store. 

eCom@One Presents:

Cas Majid

Cas is the CEO of Wow Group of Companies, which is home to several digital brands with a core focus on the design and development of eCommerce solutions. These include Wow, a digital marketing agency which was featured on Channel 4’s TV show The Job Interview. Raw Jam, a digital transformation company, Neely There, a content agency specialising in the hospitality and leisure sector, vGoose, an IT support company for small businesses and Artwork Creative, a design agency based in Malvern.

Really understanding your consumers and how they interact with your website is essential for when you want to drive more sales through your online store. In this episode, Cas talks all about how having a data-driven approach to UX is the key to creating a successful online store that converts. He shares real life examples of how he’s exploded conversion rates by using his solid approach to replatforming stores, as well as the top things you can do to improve the UX on your existing site. 

If you want to know what’s coming down the pipeline for UX and want to find out exactly what you need to do to develop a winning customer experience, then give this episode a listen for some great actionable insights. 

Topics Covered:

01:56 – The mission at WOW Group

04:24 – Why is UX so important for eCommerce stores?

05:49 – How to balance good design and good UX

11:56 – Top things you can do to improve your UX

17:55 – Best tools for testing site speed

20:40 – How avoid the biggest eCom store mistakes

23:44 – Quick wins to level up your UX

26:35 – How Cas increased a client’s sales by 5x

31:20 – How to tackle a site restructure effectively

33:05 – What’s coming down the pipeline for UX

35:37 – Book recommendation 

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 92nd episode. In this episode, I speak with Cas Majid. Cas spends his time managing the Wow Group, a collective of digital creative agencies with a core focus on design development of eCommerce solutions. In this episode, Cas talks all things data driven approach to UX and replatform in your store. Why are some merchants doing so well and how do they use their data to guide decisions? How the replatform process has exploded conversion rates with real live examples? And, finally, Cas rounds everything off with his opinion on what's next for user experience?

Richard Hill:
If you enjoy this episode, hit a subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to the podcast, so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode. This episode is brought to you by eComOne, eCommerce Marketing Agency. eComOne works purely with eCommerce stores, scaling their Google shopping, SEO, Google Search, and Facebook ads through a proven performance driven approach. Go to ecomone.com/resources for a host of amazing resources to grow your paid and organic channels. How you doing Cas?

Cas Majid:
I'm really well, Richard. How are you?

Richard Hill:
I am very, very good. Looking forward to this one. Me and Cas met a few months ago and have become good pals, basically, through different events and partners in the industry. I thought it'd be great to get Cas on. Cas has got a wealth of experience in the eCom space and dev space and all sorts of tech areas and that are very relatable to our listeners and to you guys listening now. Cas, how are you doing?

Cas Majid:
I'm absolutely fantastic, and we were speaking just before and it's gone crazy for us over the last few weeks. Just trying to get projects out the door, yeah, but very busy and very blessed.

Richard Hill:
Oh, brilliant. That's great. Great to hear. I think it'd be good to kick off with, tell our listeners very much about the Wow Group and your mission at Wow Group and what Wow Group does?

Cas Majid:
Yeah, thank you for the question. Really appreciate it. So Wow Group of Companies, we're a group of creative and digital agencies. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now. This was before it was called agency, we were just a web development agency back in the early 2000s. I've seen the highs and lows of business and I've exited a few businesses as well, which I've been very fortunate to do that. Wow Group of Companies is predominantly five different brands who've got Wow, which specializes in design, implementation, integration, and activation of eCommerce stores. We're agnostic across the board, so all the big eCom platforms, Shopify, BigCommerce, OpenCart, Magento, and WooCommerce. The stuff that we would be working on.

Cas Majid:
And really helping businesses scale to some of the numbers that they want to get to. Traditionally, it might be a business that's doing a couple of million quid and they really want to scale to £10, £15 million online. That's the kind of customers that we deal with. We have another business based in London called RawGen, which specializes in developing web applications and apps on iOS and Android, and specialize in their technology called Python. So really large scale projects in terms of web applications. We have a little creative agency that does like design and what not for very small organizations, and we have a content agency in IT sport companies as well. My mission, personal mission, is to grow our group of companies through acquisition. Yeah, we're on this mission and it's a really exciting time for us.

Richard Hill:
That's brilliant. It sounds like we could probably do an episode on quite a few of the parts that make up eCommerce from dev to UX. I mean UX I'm keen to talk about very much today and acquisition, M&A, that stuff is very interesting stuff. We don't talk about that too much. That's as an eCom store listening in, if you're doing £2 million a year, whatever that number may be, to acquire, that's an interesting topic. Maybe that's something we get you back on for a bit further down through the months of the year.

Cas Majid:
Love to do it.

Richard Hill:
But I think UX, I'm super keen to move into. In its simplest forms, I think UX gets banded around in the terminology in the industry. But I think a lot of eCom stores are going to get a bit confused with it. I think it'd be good to dive in, why is UX so important to eCom stores?

Cas Majid:
Well, I think first and foremost, it's a very in-vogue thing, isn't it? And UX touches every part of our life. In the context of online, it's really how your users experience your website. How easy it is to purchase your product, to look at your product, and to buy your products. In a nutshell, it's really how the interaction is, basically, saves what it does on the same. It's user experience, how easy is it for people that are coming to your website to buy your products or services.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, and so obviously it's pretty important because if the UX is poor, the set of the experience is going to be short and swift and bye, bye, I'm out of there. It's like walking to, potentially, you're walking into a store, into a physical store I think flipping out, "What a dump [inaudible 00:05:37]," or I can't find what I'm looking for. Where's the tills? Where's the checkout? I guess it's very similar to, if not the same, in a different way. But so UX's very important. That user experience, walking around the websites and making sure that things are easy to navigate, easy to flow.

Richard Hill:
I think when we start talking about UX, we quite often have this internal, obviously, we have an SEO agency here. We have two in effect, and very much, we quite often have this battle between design and SEO. Battle's probably a bit strong actually, but some quite heated conversations over the many, many years. You get the elements of they have this website designs like wow. But then the SEO piece, maybe that technical piece is quite often overlooked, and then you have go, "Wow, we can't do that. Looks great." But, obviously, ultimately looking nice is one thing, but that doesn't mean the UX has been looked at, does it? How can a marketer balance? How can a marketing team or a store get that balance between having a good UX and having a good design? What would you say on that?

Cas Majid:
Well, the key thing to all of this is to understand the people that are actually interacting with the product or service that you're designing online. If you keep them at the heart of that process and answer the questions of not what you think, but actually what the user will be thinking. If you put yourself into their shoes, that's the place to start. Also, look at what problems that you are looking to solve because, ultimately, user experience really fulfils a positive experience for someone to come to your website. As we know now, and as you will know because you're the experts in SEO, one of the things that Google says to websites, and one of the things it looks at is how easy do you make it for my user to navigate your website?

Cas Majid:
Am I getting the right information delivered to me in a way that's concise and that allows me to really get through it as quickly as possible? I think good UX starts with, and always should start with the people that are going to be your customers. Therefore, where sometimes designers fall down is it's very much a self image of themselves, what they're trying to create because-

Richard Hill:
It's their opinion, isn't it?

Cas Majid:
100%, it becomes like back in the day, we used to watch that program, Changing Rooms, and it used to be the designer and his image or their image or her image of how they wanted the design of that particular room. When, actually, when you talk about location, location, location, or there was that lady, Marianne Foster, used to sell houses. She always used to say, "Design the house. If you're going to sell it just to decorate the house in a way that someone else is going to buy it, not in your own image." I think UX is very much about that.

Richard Hill:
I love it.

Cas Majid:
It's absolutely critical to that, critical is the human beings that are going to be interacting with your website. You must keep that what we call customer persona at the heart of everything, and what problems you're going to solve from them.

Richard Hill:
It's very similar to... I've just had a call with somebody and we're talking about data, specifically, and it's the same thing. As a business owner, as a strong minded individual that owns an eCom store, I have a strong opinion naturally and it is good. But that can be dangerous, very, very dangerous because everything is just led by you. And, especially, in UX where you just think this is what we need to do. Of course, you've got a strong opinion and you'll have a lot of good insight but you won't know.

Richard Hill:
You won't know your thousands of customers what they're doing and exactly what you think. Obviously, we can layer technology and to really find out. An opinion could be quite dangerous in times, and I think when it comes to UX, definitely, strong opinion, strong negotiating skills potentially could be quite dangerous in this scenario, would you say?

Cas Majid:
100%, and Richard, what I would say is that every interaction that we create when we're doing eCom stalls, there are slight nuances. So what we're doing is we're working off reference points of data that we've collected in the past from other websites and applying that data to new websites. We know that the principles of having the product on the left hand side, having a good description, having a clear call to action to buy the product, other basic principles. But we won't know how that's going to behave and interact until we actually throw data onto the website, i.e. traffic, or we... Sorry, not so much data we throw onto the website, but you throw traffic onto the website is what you do.

Cas Majid:
And then glean from that data. Actually, this is what's happening. All of a sudden now, eCom merchants that are doing really, really well, they're the ones that really understand that actually we're going to be driven by the data that we get and actually move accordingly and take our personal opinion out of the equation.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, and I think I know you're speaking to a lot of our listeners and they're at that stage where they are doing multiple millions. And to get from a zero to a 100K, yeah, I guess that is quite challenging. But we're not talking about that. Probably your opinion will do the job. But when you're trying to get from five mil to 10 mil, 10 mil to 20 mil, that is quite a dangerous piece. I think, or obviously, can be a very... You've got to invest in it. You've got to commit to it, you've got to step aside, bite your tongue, bite your lip, I think, and then make sure that you're using the data, you're using the tools, you're using a collective rather than that opinion.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's a great, great piece. Obviously, you've worked on, I think, you've referred to it as 2020. That's like more than a lifetime in this game, isn't it? You've worked on a few things, let's say, you've got five businesses, agencies. I've obviously seen a lot of sites and worked out every problem and solution probably known to man that anybody's sitting there now listening, thinking, "Well, we have this problem with this problem." I would say that Cas has seen it, done it, rebuilt it, and redone it again. What would you say in terms of improving UX? What are some of the reoccurring things that you see? I know it's probably a tricky question because obviously it varies, it depends and that type of thing, but ultimately what are some of the things, top tips, you would give for improving UX on a site?

Cas Majid:
Once again, for me, it's got to be data driven. Look exactly where exit points are, and very much have it as iterative process. Not try to change things too much because things aren't working. You got to really... it becomes a trial and error scenario where, and very much a testing scenario. Number one, I think is the attitude. The businesses that we work with, they've scaled. They understand that the testing process. The feedback process is at the heart of everything, and that the heart of that is the customer. So speaking to your customers, listening to your customers, asking them really simple but tough questions like, "How can we improve this?"

Cas Majid:
Asking then, that's a really, really good way of improving UX. Now some of the stuff is very basic, it's slow enough of size. Are the pages too heavy? Does it take too long to load? Am I getting enough information? Am I getting too much information? Are the descriptions too long? Are they too short? Do I get enough views of the product from different angles? Simple things like is it easy for me to pay? Is it easy for me to click on a button and go straight into the payment basket? Actually, one of the other things that we find that works really well is many years ago, someone told me about doing presentations and they told me this basic thing, "Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them and then tell them again."

Cas Majid:
And that principle is true for a website, so if you know exactly where you are in the buying process of the website, that actually this is going to come next and that's where you've come from. That really helps stickability. The stickability was a big thing in back in 2007. It was a commonly known phrase of people sticking on your website. It still holds true today that people, you should be telling your users exactly where they are on the page. You know what, there's all these other little nuances about using different colours. Are you using greens and reds? Are you using colours that just wash away in the background for buttons, for example, or for tab tabs at the top?

Cas Majid:
These are the things that really make a better and light to use experience. But one of the biggest things now is that most people, most people that are browsing online, they are very educated buyers. If someone's looking for someone, they've probably looked at that product probably five or six times. If your brand is visible to those people and you make it easy for them, they're more likely to buy your product. And you probably do a lot of work around this is where people are in the buying funnel. If someone says, "I'm looking for a mattress, they usually hire up the buying funnel because they're browsing it."

Cas Majid:
But if your product and services is delivered to them and your brand is in front of them, they're more likely to buy that product from you because they recognize your brand. But if someone says, "I've got a back problem that needs solving," they probably know exactly the type of product that they're going for.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, it's very specific. Yeah, very orthopaedic mattress potentially, or certain type of content page that is talking about the benefits of insert mattress name, brand, type. Yeah, I can imagine the listers were not alone there. I was definitely not alone there because it very much resonates with me. I think, obviously, speed, you touched on that. That goes across so many things in digital now. I think speed, obviously, SEO, I think everyone listening will know that it's a major, major factor. But it's not just a factor for SEO. At the end of the day, just think of it as a human being. You've sat there and you're waiting for something to load and something's not fitting right and not loaded.

Richard Hill:
It's just, "You know what, we haven't got time for that. I'm off." Just a simple human nature, isn't it? Even more so I think now. Speed, people just won't put up with slow websites anymore, and Google certainly won't. If you are scrolling through a website and you can't find what you want because something's not loading or something's overlaying something or... so I think speed and checkout is such a big one. We would talk about it a lot on the podcast, but just some of the things you see, it's just I think guys listening in those checkouts. How many payment providers do you have? Can you take Apple Pay? Can you take Amazon Pay? I would imagine there's quite a few people going, "Oh, crap. We can't." It's just simple things, isn't it?

Richard Hill:
Some of them are simple tools, I guess, and to yourself. But I think some of these things can get over a lot of stuff. Like, yeah, real good hit list there guys. I would maybe pause now and I'll rewind that last five minutes and just have a little listen through, or look at the show notes and just tick off. Do you know what, we need to do some work on speed. What's your go-to tool for checking speed then? Is it GTMetrix or PageSpeed Google?

Cas Majid:
Yeah, so Google's PageSpeed and GTMetrix. Believe it or not, Richard, we need some work for an eCom store right now and we put in to see what... The site is extremely slow, so we put the site into Google PageSpeed insights. They keep changing the name, so I call it Google PageSpeed. I was doing some work and I'd left it in the background, and I put it in at 9:00 and it didn't give me any data back until... and 6:00 it was still churning. So PageSpeed-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, and I think PageSpeed is usually some quick wins there, isn't it? It's not always [crosstalk 00:18:47]-

Cas Majid:
Really quick wins, really quick wins.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. It can quite often be a resize of an image, which can take 30 seconds in some. Obviously, it's not always that, but it's not always that simple but it could quite often there are images that can be tightened up. But, obviously, then there's some more heavier, little bit, heavier duty stuff and then server site stuff.

Cas Majid:
I think the analogy that we did a Google seminar couple of years ago was rock on eCommerce. I think the analogy that Google gave is that we have the attention span of a lazy goldfish, which is absolutely bound [crosstalk 00:19:23]-

Richard Hill:
Goldfish have no [inaudible 00:19:24].

Cas Majid:
Exactly. No memory, it's gone.

Richard Hill:
Gone. They're lazy.

Cas Majid:
Yeah, so speed is really important. I think what this also highlights is the interaction and the relationship between SEO, the stuff that you do, that you do is brilliant and understanding that right from the outset. You're designing a site, you got to design it with speed and functionality and usability, and is Google going to read my website and my PPC ads? I'm going to think about all these things right from the outset. The good businesses that are replatforming, for example, they have got to their business to a certain stage and they've started off on a rudimental kind of eCommerce platform and now they want to go a bit more heavy duty because their business is scaling.

Cas Majid:
One of the things that we will always talk about is talk about those fundamental things, and those are those fundamental things about content, about SEO, about how you're going to market your products. These all have a factor in building the right foundations for a site to be successful and to scale.

Richard Hill:
I think on the flip side of that, it's a similar question. We're talking about some of the top tips to improve, but what would you say are the two biggest mistakes? Is it what you just said? The two biggest mistakes that you see eCommerce retailers making. Obviously, we've gone through things that people should be improving and working on, but in terms of like the biggest mistakes you see. If you were to go to any website, what's the biggest say two things that you see normally or quite hard, it's quite a recurring thing?

Cas Majid:
I think, number one, is if it's an eCom site, then you land on the homepage and you don't see any products.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, just some nice banners.

Cas Majid:
Just some nice banners [crosstalk 00:21:22] stuff. There's no offers.

Richard Hill:
Tell us all about [crosstalk 00:21:27]-

Cas Majid:
You have to scroll down. You got to look at your home page as your shop window. That's your opportunity to use that real estate to really sell that product or some offers that you've got. To really entice them into the shop. It's a little bit like a window dressing, isn't it, when you go to a store. You don't actually really like that suit and once you're in-

Richard Hill:
Oh, absolutely. No, but you need to see some suits, don't you? [crosstalk 00:21:51] nice brand and some nice, you know, get a feel for the quality of the business because the branding is nice. But it's just a big banner saying, "Look at us." You think, "Well, what do you actually sell?" You obviously going to get a feel for it. But you want to see the products, don't you? Yeah.

Cas Majid:
Then the other big thing is how easy is it for me to look at the product and buy it? The processes that are in between or the pages that are in between, that buying a product just become so procrastinated and so lengthy that people just want to get out. I want to click the button, and the thing is you Amazon it's a blame for this because they've made it so easy to buy products. You see a product and you buy it and it's gone. All of a sudden, you've bought it and that's the way that we as consumers now want our experience. I think making sure that you have a fast payment process with choice, whether it's your standard bank merchant, [inaudible 00:22:55], you know?

Richard Hill:
Oh, yeah, [crosstalk 00:22:59].

Cas Majid:
Or Clear pay. So these choices are really, really coming into the marketplace now where people are expecting to do it from my mobile. Obviously, mobile phones-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, to pull your credit card out and sit there and try and type your numbers into a little box that's the size of a peanut or whatever.

Cas Majid:
Yeah. Now it's just double click on the site and you've purchased the product from the wallet you want [crosstalk 00:23:25]-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, which is what you want, isn't it? Head wise, so many people buy from them. Well, a major part obviously is that speed of checkout with Amazon one to click or even obviously one click, isn't it? One click and you're out, if you've got everything.

Cas Majid:
Yeah, you'll make friction, reduce the friction on your website.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay, so moving on to... That's brilliant. I think so moving on to tools and specifics. If the guys that are sitting in now thinking, "I just want to find out it's all very well and good. We need to ask our users, we need to find out more about what they actually do on the site, and obviously, there's various things out there. But have you got any specifics that you would recommend to our users around tools or tactics for tools, tactics that they're going to pull after you say this now? That they'll be able to pause the episode and go in and have a look at X, Y, Z, or install X, Y, Z, or look at X, Y, Z?

Cas Majid:
Yeah. I think obviously there's a lot of the eCom stores now themselves come with a lot of tools within things like Shopify and BigCommerce. You can have log in tools that tell you what users are doing, abandon the basket kind of stuff. If someone gets to the basket and they've abandoned it, it sends them an email reminder. That's really good stuff. Stuff like basic stuff, is your Google Analytics set up correctly? Are the goals set up correctly? Are you looking conversion attribution across all the different channels? Across people are coming in looking at your website, they're going off to YouTube, they're reading a blog about you. They're going to your social media channels, how those channels interact with each other.

Cas Majid:
Do you really understand that working with someone like yourselves can really give them any insight of how to... and what the understanding of where people are coming from and what they're using to find you. Google Analytics set it up correctly in the first instance. Stuff like Hotjar is a great analytics tool that tells you how people are interacting on your website, where people are coming, what they're doing, how they're doing it, where they're falling out, what pieces of content they're spending lots of time on? And how that's working. How each individual page is working. Hotjar gives you a lot of insight around that. The other thing is like-

Richard Hill:
[crosstalk 00:25:45]... Sorry, go on.

Cas Majid:
Then the other thing is Mouseflow. Mouseflow really tells you, it's quite an old product, but they've obviously updated it and stuff. It really tells you how people are flowing through your website. Where the sticky points are. We talked about friction earlier, where the friction points are and think actually you can then hone in on, "Well, actually, you know what, we're getting 30% of people dropping out here, we're getting another 30% dropping out here. Actually, we're only getting this amount of conversions. So let's just analyse exactly that journey." Again, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them again and then tell them again. I think analysing that funnel is so, so important.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's brilliant. Thanks Cas. So going back to this 20 years in the trenches, long, long time, same as me pretty much.

Cas Majid:
Yeah.

Richard Hill:
[crosstalk 00:26:39] boy pretty much. I think, yeah, pretty much left uni and there was this thing called the internet and started [crosstalk 00:26:46]-

Cas Majid:
Yeah, 100%.

Richard Hill:
... to say the least thing. But so, obviously, you've worked on a lot of websites. Can you step us through? If you can mention a brand, fine, if not, I understand, but a project that you've worked on where you've improved UX, what things that you did and what were the outcomes?

Cas Majid:
Okay, so I can tell you there was someone in the brand industry, all our clients are on NDA. We've done a lot of work in the furniture industry, and it was a client that came to us that was doing a couple of hundred grand initially. They had got it to a certain stage, and what we said to him was, is that we need to really look at, A, changing your platform, B, part of that replatforming process will be to look at your pages. He was spending quite a lot of money actually on PPC, and we felt that he could get far more sales, A, if he changed platform, and B, didn't have to spend anymore. It took us about six months to persuade him, to really get him around to thinking that actually, "Yeah, it is this problem."

Cas Majid:
Richard, within the first month of the site going live, with the same traffic, didn't change, he'd increased his sales by five times. Within the first quarter, his sales had... With the same traffic went from five times to 10 times in terms of his sales revenue, which was a massive, massive thing for us. The thing that we did was we just simplified those interactions with the client, with the user, as it were. Looking to the homepage, building some offers around the homepage, building really good product and category pages, making it easy for people to search on the site and making the product page is really rich and informative for them, and keeping it simple in terms of clicking on the buy button and it takes you through the buying process. It was really simple as that, whereas before it was really clunky. It was taking them back and then it was very confusing, very confusing.

Richard Hill:
I think it's quite surprising when you look at sites there may be doing, whatever the numbers are. But something as simple as a replatform... Well, I shouldn't say simple, it's not simple, but a replatform, and obviously, stepping through everything. Would you say if somebody's got a store listening in and maybe had the same tech stack for many, many years and then maybe we can't change it, "Jim built this back in or Brian used to work here built this back in." It's quite common. You find that maybe not as much now, but, "Oh, it's a bloke who used to work here built this four years ago." Then we started doing a couple of orders and now we're doing seven million quid and we didn't touch anything because Jim don't work here anymore entire thing.

Richard Hill:
They're taking that, and I think that's where you guys definitely specialize a lot, don't you? Taking, well, all sorts of build, shall we say, and then building them into, or grading them into whether that's, like you said, Magento, Aero, Shopify. But something as say simple because its quite complicated, but a replatform can be quite a... If it's done very well, can very much be a success. But, at the same time, there's obviously a lot of moving parts with the SEO side as well so you've got to be careful, haven't you?

Cas Majid:
You have to be careful and you've got to really plan out strategically the replatforming process because it's just not about... Let's just say you've got 3- or 4,000 products on your side. It's not just about moving the products across, moving across the, as you mentioned, the SEO juice that you've created, that goodwill that you've created online with your digital assets. But also about customer history, how do you really move that across to the new site? It has to be a very planned out strategic process that you have to go through, and we'd spend a lot of time planning that out first rather than just jumping straight into it and doing, "This is the design." There's a lot of work in the background, particularly, for replatform that you have to think about.

Richard Hill:
I think with the replatform, probably, a follow up question for that would be also site structure. We've got our site, we narrow the structures, the products are all maybe a bit all over the time. We've got not as many sub caps as we should have, and there's a multitude of things. What would your 30-second, maybe we'll give you a minute, 60-second version on restructuring a site? Are you going to move from one platform to another? Maybe you're not, but you know you need to restructure. If you're going to go from one platform to another, is that not a good time to do it? How would you tackle a restructure?

Cas Majid:
It's a really good question. I think one of the first things we do is probably do the site hierarchy. So, actually, mapping out the site and then working with people like yourselves that are doing the SEO and saying, "Actually, look, this is the complexity of what they've currently got, but we want to simplify that to make sure that, A, the SEO juice is maintained on that site. But actually is a lot simpler as well. Looking at the URL structure, the categories, and making sure that everything is in the right category and the product and the URLs reflect that as well/boxes and then you've got white boxes as it were.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:32:34]-

Cas Majid:
Or just following a really simple hierarchy really eliminates a lot of those problems. But from the ground up, it's so, so important, even before UX, is to really look at the site structure and making a site map. Then working with someone like yourself to say, "Right, this is what we want to achieve. How is that going to impact your SEO or the marketing of the website?"

Richard Hill:
Yeah, brilliant. Thank you for that.

Cas Majid:
You're welcome.

Richard Hill:
So crystal ball time, we're sat here in 12, 18 months, we're talking about UX. What do you think is going to be what's coming down the line? What are the things that our listeners need to be very aware of and need to be thinking of now so they can get in front of it to really improve that customer experience, that user experience?

Cas Majid:
I think this whole thing about this metaverse is coming into play now, and I think very much is going to be very much immersive experiences where people can really interact with products. We've seen that already where people are really looking at how they can navigate through a site, but they're physically there. Or they can really interact with a salesperson, not just on an auto attendant or you go into a site and a thing pops up. But actually really immerse yourself into the site, and I think that's happening. It happened 10 years ago with this thing called Second Life. That's [crosstalk 00:34:01]. This is second version of it. This is second version of it. I think immersive experience is going to be so, so important.

Cas Majid:
I think those people that really think, "Well, actually, that's beyond me," it'll happen and it'll happen in a very organic and natural way. But just simple things like, and it's happening now with some of the really, really big brands where you can really look at the products in a 3D manner and understand that, actually, this is the products. But actually the next step to that is how does this product work inside my environment or on me? If it's a clothing brand, how does it look on me? Or if it's a piece of furniture, how does that piece of furniture look and behave in my own environment? This whole thing about personalization and customization is going to be more and more now. See, if it's food online, how can I create my own burger? Not just I'm going to pick this, this and this, but how is it look in real-time?

Richard Hill:
Yes, that is absolute genius. I love that. That's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant finish. I think this two or three things there is the future. I think metaverse, that's something I am so like I know this much of it, speak to me in three month's time, that's where my brain's at at the moment. I had spent two hours today talking to two different people about this, and had a very similar conversation. Which maybe we'll have a catch up at the end about this, but also I'm going all in on it, but definitely from my personal point of view, yeah, I'll be buying a few things very, very soon. Put it that way. Well, thanks for being on the show. We always like to end every episode with a book recommendation. Cas, what would you recommend as a book for our listeners?

Cas Majid:
So a book that I'm reading right now is Who Not How. It's by Dan Sullivan, and it talks about a lot of entrepreneurs they get stuck in the how when actually you should be thinking about the who's. We're all surrounded by who's, people in your network, your social capital who can help you do this rather than how can I do this?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, great thinking. Great thinking. For the guys that want to find out more about Wow Group, more about yourself, what's the best place to do that and how to-

Cas Majid:
Well, you can visit our website, wowgroup.co.uk. You can cross all the social platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. If they want to connect with me personally, just connect with me on LinkedIn. It's just Cas Majid.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Well, Cas, it's been an absolute pleasure [crosstalk 00:36:31] again soon. See you later.

Cas Majid:
Cheers. Bye-bye.

Richard Hill:
Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to the eComOne eCommerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce Marketing Agency.

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 92nd episode. In this episode, I speak with Cas Majid. Cas spends his time managing the Wow Group, a collective of digital creative agencies with a core focus on design development of eCommerce solutions. In this episode, Cas talks all things data driven approach to UX and replatform in your store. Why are some merchants doing so well and how do they use their data to guide decisions? How the replatform process has exploded conversion rates with real live examples? And, finally, Cas rounds everything off with his opinion on what's next for user experience?

Richard Hill:
If you enjoy this episode, hit a subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to the podcast, so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode. This episode is brought to you by eComOne, eCommerce Marketing Agency. eComOne works purely with eCommerce stores, scaling their Google shopping, SEO, Google Search, and Facebook ads through a proven performance driven approach. Go to ecomone.com/resources for a host of amazing resources to grow your paid and organic channels. How you doing Cas?

Cas Majid:
I'm really well, Richard. How are you?

Richard Hill:
I am very, very good. Looking forward to this one. Me and Cas met a few months ago and have become good pals, basically, through different events and partners in the industry. I thought it'd be great to get Cas on. Cas has got a wealth of experience in the eCom space and dev space and all sorts of tech areas and that are very relatable to our listeners and to you guys listening now. Cas, how are you doing?

Cas Majid:
I'm absolutely fantastic, and we were speaking just before and it's gone crazy for us over the last few weeks. Just trying to get projects out the door, yeah, but very busy and very blessed.

Richard Hill:
Oh, brilliant. That's great. Great to hear. I think it'd be good to kick off with, tell our listeners very much about the Wow Group and your mission at Wow Group and what Wow Group does?

Cas Majid:
Yeah, thank you for the question. Really appreciate it. So Wow Group of Companies, we're a group of creative and digital agencies. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now. This was before it was called agency, we were just a web development agency back in the early 2000s. I've seen the highs and lows of business and I've exited a few businesses as well, which I've been very fortunate to do that. Wow Group of Companies is predominantly five different brands who've got Wow, which specializes in design, implementation, integration, and activation of eCommerce stores. We're agnostic across the board, so all the big eCom platforms, Shopify, BigCommerce, OpenCart, Magento, and WooCommerce. The stuff that we would be working on.

Cas Majid:
And really helping businesses scale to some of the numbers that they want to get to. Traditionally, it might be a business that's doing a couple of million quid and they really want to scale to £10, £15 million online. That's the kind of customers that we deal with. We have another business based in London called RawGen, which specializes in developing web applications and apps on iOS and Android, and specialize in their technology called Python. So really large scale projects in terms of web applications. We have a little creative agency that does like design and what not for very small organizations, and we have a content agency in IT sport companies as well. My mission, personal mission, is to grow our group of companies through acquisition. Yeah, we're on this mission and it's a really exciting time for us.

Richard Hill:
That's brilliant. It sounds like we could probably do an episode on quite a few of the parts that make up eCommerce from dev to UX. I mean UX I'm keen to talk about very much today and acquisition, M&A, that stuff is very interesting stuff. We don't talk about that too much. That's as an eCom store listening in, if you're doing £2 million a year, whatever that number may be, to acquire, that's an interesting topic. Maybe that's something we get you back on for a bit further down through the months of the year.

Cas Majid:
Love to do it.

Richard Hill:
But I think UX, I'm super keen to move into. In its simplest forms, I think UX gets banded around in the terminology in the industry. But I think a lot of eCom stores are going to get a bit confused with it. I think it'd be good to dive in, why is UX so important to eCom stores?

Cas Majid:
Well, I think first and foremost, it's a very in-vogue thing, isn't it? And UX touches every part of our life. In the context of online, it's really how your users experience your website. How easy it is to purchase your product, to look at your product, and to buy your products. In a nutshell, it's really how the interaction is, basically, saves what it does on the same. It's user experience, how easy is it for people that are coming to your website to buy your products or services.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, and so obviously it's pretty important because if the UX is poor, the set of the experience is going to be short and swift and bye, bye, I'm out of there. It's like walking to, potentially, you're walking into a store, into a physical store I think flipping out, "What a dump [inaudible 00:05:37]," or I can't find what I'm looking for. Where's the tills? Where's the checkout? I guess it's very similar to, if not the same, in a different way. But so UX's very important. That user experience, walking around the websites and making sure that things are easy to navigate, easy to flow.

Richard Hill:
I think when we start talking about UX, we quite often have this internal, obviously, we have an SEO agency here. We have two in effect, and very much, we quite often have this battle between design and SEO. Battle's probably a bit strong actually, but some quite heated conversations over the many, many years. You get the elements of they have this website designs like wow. But then the SEO piece, maybe that technical piece is quite often overlooked, and then you have go, "Wow, we can't do that. Looks great." But, obviously, ultimately looking nice is one thing, but that doesn't mean the UX has been looked at, does it? How can a marketer balance? How can a marketing team or a store get that balance between having a good UX and having a good design? What would you say on that?

Cas Majid:
Well, the key thing to all of this is to understand the people that are actually interacting with the product or service that you're designing online. If you keep them at the heart of that process and answer the questions of not what you think, but actually what the user will be thinking. If you put yourself into their shoes, that's the place to start. Also, look at what problems that you are looking to solve because, ultimately, user experience really fulfils a positive experience for someone to come to your website. As we know now, and as you will know because you're the experts in SEO, one of the things that Google says to websites, and one of the things it looks at is how easy do you make it for my user to navigate your website?

Cas Majid:
Am I getting the right information delivered to me in a way that's concise and that allows me to really get through it as quickly as possible? I think good UX starts with, and always should start with the people that are going to be your customers. Therefore, where sometimes designers fall down is it's very much a self image of themselves, what they're trying to create because-

Richard Hill:
It's their opinion, isn't it?

Cas Majid:
100%, it becomes like back in the day, we used to watch that program, Changing Rooms, and it used to be the designer and his image or their image or her image of how they wanted the design of that particular room. When, actually, when you talk about location, location, location, or there was that lady, Marianne Foster, used to sell houses. She always used to say, "Design the house. If you're going to sell it just to decorate the house in a way that someone else is going to buy it, not in your own image." I think UX is very much about that.

Richard Hill:
I love it.

Cas Majid:
It's absolutely critical to that, critical is the human beings that are going to be interacting with your website. You must keep that what we call customer persona at the heart of everything, and what problems you're going to solve from them.

Richard Hill:
It's very similar to... I've just had a call with somebody and we're talking about data, specifically, and it's the same thing. As a business owner, as a strong minded individual that owns an eCom store, I have a strong opinion naturally and it is good. But that can be dangerous, very, very dangerous because everything is just led by you. And, especially, in UX where you just think this is what we need to do. Of course, you've got a strong opinion and you'll have a lot of good insight but you won't know.

Richard Hill:
You won't know your thousands of customers what they're doing and exactly what you think. Obviously, we can layer technology and to really find out. An opinion could be quite dangerous in times, and I think when it comes to UX, definitely, strong opinion, strong negotiating skills potentially could be quite dangerous in this scenario, would you say?

Cas Majid:
100%, and Richard, what I would say is that every interaction that we create when we're doing eCom stalls, there are slight nuances. So what we're doing is we're working off reference points of data that we've collected in the past from other websites and applying that data to new websites. We know that the principles of having the product on the left hand side, having a good description, having a clear call to action to buy the product, other basic principles. But we won't know how that's going to behave and interact until we actually throw data onto the website, i.e. traffic, or we... Sorry, not so much data we throw onto the website, but you throw traffic onto the website is what you do.

Cas Majid:
And then glean from that data. Actually, this is what's happening. All of a sudden now, eCom merchants that are doing really, really well, they're the ones that really understand that actually we're going to be driven by the data that we get and actually move accordingly and take our personal opinion out of the equation.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, and I think I know you're speaking to a lot of our listeners and they're at that stage where they are doing multiple millions. And to get from a zero to a 100K, yeah, I guess that is quite challenging. But we're not talking about that. Probably your opinion will do the job. But when you're trying to get from five mil to 10 mil, 10 mil to 20 mil, that is quite a dangerous piece. I think, or obviously, can be a very... You've got to invest in it. You've got to commit to it, you've got to step aside, bite your tongue, bite your lip, I think, and then make sure that you're using the data, you're using the tools, you're using a collective rather than that opinion.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's a great, great piece. Obviously, you've worked on, I think, you've referred to it as 2020. That's like more than a lifetime in this game, isn't it? You've worked on a few things, let's say, you've got five businesses, agencies. I've obviously seen a lot of sites and worked out every problem and solution probably known to man that anybody's sitting there now listening, thinking, "Well, we have this problem with this problem." I would say that Cas has seen it, done it, rebuilt it, and redone it again. What would you say in terms of improving UX? What are some of the reoccurring things that you see? I know it's probably a tricky question because obviously it varies, it depends and that type of thing, but ultimately what are some of the things, top tips, you would give for improving UX on a site?

Cas Majid:
Once again, for me, it's got to be data driven. Look exactly where exit points are, and very much have it as iterative process. Not try to change things too much because things aren't working. You got to really... it becomes a trial and error scenario where, and very much a testing scenario. Number one, I think is the attitude. The businesses that we work with, they've scaled. They understand that the testing process. The feedback process is at the heart of everything, and that the heart of that is the customer. So speaking to your customers, listening to your customers, asking them really simple but tough questions like, "How can we improve this?"

Cas Majid:
Asking then, that's a really, really good way of improving UX. Now some of the stuff is very basic, it's slow enough of size. Are the pages too heavy? Does it take too long to load? Am I getting enough information? Am I getting too much information? Are the descriptions too long? Are they too short? Do I get enough views of the product from different angles? Simple things like is it easy for me to pay? Is it easy for me to click on a button and go straight into the payment basket? Actually, one of the other things that we find that works really well is many years ago, someone told me about doing presentations and they told me this basic thing, "Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them and then tell them again."

Cas Majid:
And that principle is true for a website, so if you know exactly where you are in the buying process of the website, that actually this is going to come next and that's where you've come from. That really helps stickability. The stickability was a big thing in back in 2007. It was a commonly known phrase of people sticking on your website. It still holds true today that people, you should be telling your users exactly where they are on the page. You know what, there's all these other little nuances about using different colours. Are you using greens and reds? Are you using colours that just wash away in the background for buttons, for example, or for tab tabs at the top?

Cas Majid:
These are the things that really make a better and light to use experience. But one of the biggest things now is that most people, most people that are browsing online, they are very educated buyers. If someone's looking for someone, they've probably looked at that product probably five or six times. If your brand is visible to those people and you make it easy for them, they're more likely to buy your product. And you probably do a lot of work around this is where people are in the buying funnel. If someone says, "I'm looking for a mattress, they usually hire up the buying funnel because they're browsing it."

Cas Majid:
But if your product and services is delivered to them and your brand is in front of them, they're more likely to buy that product from you because they recognize your brand. But if someone says, "I've got a back problem that needs solving," they probably know exactly the type of product that they're going for.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, it's very specific. Yeah, very orthopaedic mattress potentially, or certain type of content page that is talking about the benefits of insert mattress name, brand, type. Yeah, I can imagine the listers were not alone there. I was definitely not alone there because it very much resonates with me. I think, obviously, speed, you touched on that. That goes across so many things in digital now. I think speed, obviously, SEO, I think everyone listening will know that it's a major, major factor. But it's not just a factor for SEO. At the end of the day, just think of it as a human being. You've sat there and you're waiting for something to load and something's not fitting right and not loaded.

Richard Hill:
It's just, "You know what, we haven't got time for that. I'm off." Just a simple human nature, isn't it? Even more so I think now. Speed, people just won't put up with slow websites anymore, and Google certainly won't. If you are scrolling through a website and you can't find what you want because something's not loading or something's overlaying something or... so I think speed and checkout is such a big one. We would talk about it a lot on the podcast, but just some of the things you see, it's just I think guys listening in those checkouts. How many payment providers do you have? Can you take Apple Pay? Can you take Amazon Pay? I would imagine there's quite a few people going, "Oh, crap. We can't." It's just simple things, isn't it?

Richard Hill:
Some of them are simple tools, I guess, and to yourself. But I think some of these things can get over a lot of stuff. Like, yeah, real good hit list there guys. I would maybe pause now and I'll rewind that last five minutes and just have a little listen through, or look at the show notes and just tick off. Do you know what, we need to do some work on speed. What's your go-to tool for checking speed then? Is it GTMetrix or PageSpeed Google?

Cas Majid:
Yeah, so Google's PageSpeed and GTMetrix. Believe it or not, Richard, we need some work for an eCom store right now and we put in to see what... The site is extremely slow, so we put the site into Google PageSpeed insights. They keep changing the name, so I call it Google PageSpeed. I was doing some work and I'd left it in the background, and I put it in at 9:00 and it didn't give me any data back until... and 6:00 it was still churning. So PageSpeed-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, and I think PageSpeed is usually some quick wins there, isn't it? It's not always [crosstalk 00:18:47]-

Cas Majid:
Really quick wins, really quick wins.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. It can quite often be a resize of an image, which can take 30 seconds in some. Obviously, it's not always that, but it's not always that simple but it could quite often there are images that can be tightened up. But, obviously, then there's some more heavier, little bit, heavier duty stuff and then server site stuff.

Cas Majid:
I think the analogy that we did a Google seminar couple of years ago was rock on eCommerce. I think the analogy that Google gave is that we have the attention span of a lazy goldfish, which is absolutely bound [crosstalk 00:19:23]-

Richard Hill:
Goldfish have no [inaudible 00:19:24].

Cas Majid:
Exactly. No memory, it's gone.

Richard Hill:
Gone. They're lazy.

Cas Majid:
Yeah, so speed is really important. I think what this also highlights is the interaction and the relationship between SEO, the stuff that you do, that you do is brilliant and understanding that right from the outset. You're designing a site, you got to design it with speed and functionality and usability, and is Google going to read my website and my PPC ads? I'm going to think about all these things right from the outset. The good businesses that are replatforming, for example, they have got to their business to a certain stage and they've started off on a rudimental kind of eCommerce platform and now they want to go a bit more heavy duty because their business is scaling.

Cas Majid:
One of the things that we will always talk about is talk about those fundamental things, and those are those fundamental things about content, about SEO, about how you're going to market your products. These all have a factor in building the right foundations for a site to be successful and to scale.

Richard Hill:
I think on the flip side of that, it's a similar question. We're talking about some of the top tips to improve, but what would you say are the two biggest mistakes? Is it what you just said? The two biggest mistakes that you see eCommerce retailers making. Obviously, we've gone through things that people should be improving and working on, but in terms of like the biggest mistakes you see. If you were to go to any website, what's the biggest say two things that you see normally or quite hard, it's quite a recurring thing?

Cas Majid:
I think, number one, is if it's an eCom site, then you land on the homepage and you don't see any products.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, just some nice banners.

Cas Majid:
Just some nice banners [crosstalk 00:21:22] stuff. There's no offers.

Richard Hill:
Tell us all about [crosstalk 00:21:27]-

Cas Majid:
You have to scroll down. You got to look at your home page as your shop window. That's your opportunity to use that real estate to really sell that product or some offers that you've got. To really entice them into the shop. It's a little bit like a window dressing, isn't it, when you go to a store. You don't actually really like that suit and once you're in-

Richard Hill:
Oh, absolutely. No, but you need to see some suits, don't you? [crosstalk 00:21:51] nice brand and some nice, you know, get a feel for the quality of the business because the branding is nice. But it's just a big banner saying, "Look at us." You think, "Well, what do you actually sell?" You obviously going to get a feel for it. But you want to see the products, don't you? Yeah.

Cas Majid:
Then the other big thing is how easy is it for me to look at the product and buy it? The processes that are in between or the pages that are in between, that buying a product just become so procrastinated and so lengthy that people just want to get out. I want to click the button, and the thing is you Amazon it's a blame for this because they've made it so easy to buy products. You see a product and you buy it and it's gone. All of a sudden, you've bought it and that's the way that we as consumers now want our experience. I think making sure that you have a fast payment process with choice, whether it's your standard bank merchant, [inaudible 00:22:55], you know?

Richard Hill:
Oh, yeah, [crosstalk 00:22:59].

Cas Majid:
Or Clear pay. So these choices are really, really coming into the marketplace now where people are expecting to do it from my mobile. Obviously, mobile phones-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, to pull your credit card out and sit there and try and type your numbers into a little box that's the size of a peanut or whatever.

Cas Majid:
Yeah. Now it's just double click on the site and you've purchased the product from the wallet you want [crosstalk 00:23:25]-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, which is what you want, isn't it? Head wise, so many people buy from them. Well, a major part obviously is that speed of checkout with Amazon one to click or even obviously one click, isn't it? One click and you're out, if you've got everything.

Cas Majid:
Yeah, you'll make friction, reduce the friction on your website.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay, so moving on to... That's brilliant. I think so moving on to tools and specifics. If the guys that are sitting in now thinking, "I just want to find out it's all very well and good. We need to ask our users, we need to find out more about what they actually do on the site, and obviously, there's various things out there. But have you got any specifics that you would recommend to our users around tools or tactics for tools, tactics that they're going to pull after you say this now? That they'll be able to pause the episode and go in and have a look at X, Y, Z, or install X, Y, Z, or look at X, Y, Z?

Cas Majid:
Yeah. I think obviously there's a lot of the eCom stores now themselves come with a lot of tools within things like Shopify and BigCommerce. You can have log in tools that tell you what users are doing, abandon the basket kind of stuff. If someone gets to the basket and they've abandoned it, it sends them an email reminder. That's really good stuff. Stuff like basic stuff, is your Google Analytics set up correctly? Are the goals set up correctly? Are you looking conversion attribution across all the different channels? Across people are coming in looking at your website, they're going off to YouTube, they're reading a blog about you. They're going to your social media channels, how those channels interact with each other.

Cas Majid:
Do you really understand that working with someone like yourselves can really give them any insight of how to... and what the understanding of where people are coming from and what they're using to find you. Google Analytics set it up correctly in the first instance. Stuff like Hotjar is a great analytics tool that tells you how people are interacting on your website, where people are coming, what they're doing, how they're doing it, where they're falling out, what pieces of content they're spending lots of time on? And how that's working. How each individual page is working. Hotjar gives you a lot of insight around that. The other thing is like-

Richard Hill:
[crosstalk 00:25:45]... Sorry, go on.

Cas Majid:
Then the other thing is Mouseflow. Mouseflow really tells you, it's quite an old product, but they've obviously updated it and stuff. It really tells you how people are flowing through your website. Where the sticky points are. We talked about friction earlier, where the friction points are and think actually you can then hone in on, "Well, actually, you know what, we're getting 30% of people dropping out here, we're getting another 30% dropping out here. Actually, we're only getting this amount of conversions. So let's just analyse exactly that journey." Again, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them again and then tell them again. I think analysing that funnel is so, so important.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's brilliant. Thanks Cas. So going back to this 20 years in the trenches, long, long time, same as me pretty much.

Cas Majid:
Yeah.

Richard Hill:
[crosstalk 00:26:39] boy pretty much. I think, yeah, pretty much left uni and there was this thing called the internet and started [crosstalk 00:26:46]-

Cas Majid:
Yeah, 100%.

Richard Hill:
... to say the least thing. But so, obviously, you've worked on a lot of websites. Can you step us through? If you can mention a brand, fine, if not, I understand, but a project that you've worked on where you've improved UX, what things that you did and what were the outcomes?

Cas Majid:
Okay, so I can tell you there was someone in the brand industry, all our clients are on NDA. We've done a lot of work in the furniture industry, and it was a client that came to us that was doing a couple of hundred grand initially. They had got it to a certain stage, and what we said to him was, is that we need to really look at, A, changing your platform, B, part of that replatforming process will be to look at your pages. He was spending quite a lot of money actually on PPC, and we felt that he could get far more sales, A, if he changed platform, and B, didn't have to spend anymore. It took us about six months to persuade him, to really get him around to thinking that actually, "Yeah, it is this problem."

Cas Majid:
Richard, within the first month of the site going live, with the same traffic, didn't change, he'd increased his sales by five times. Within the first quarter, his sales had... With the same traffic went from five times to 10 times in terms of his sales revenue, which was a massive, massive thing for us. The thing that we did was we just simplified those interactions with the client, with the user, as it were. Looking to the homepage, building some offers around the homepage, building really good product and category pages, making it easy for people to search on the site and making the product page is really rich and informative for them, and keeping it simple in terms of clicking on the buy button and it takes you through the buying process. It was really simple as that, whereas before it was really clunky. It was taking them back and then it was very confusing, very confusing.

Richard Hill:
I think it's quite surprising when you look at sites there may be doing, whatever the numbers are. But something as simple as a replatform... Well, I shouldn't say simple, it's not simple, but a replatform, and obviously, stepping through everything. Would you say if somebody's got a store listening in and maybe had the same tech stack for many, many years and then maybe we can't change it, "Jim built this back in or Brian used to work here built this back in." It's quite common. You find that maybe not as much now, but, "Oh, it's a bloke who used to work here built this four years ago." Then we started doing a couple of orders and now we're doing seven million quid and we didn't touch anything because Jim don't work here anymore entire thing.

Richard Hill:
They're taking that, and I think that's where you guys definitely specialize a lot, don't you? Taking, well, all sorts of build, shall we say, and then building them into, or grading them into whether that's, like you said, Magento, Aero, Shopify. But something as say simple because its quite complicated, but a replatform can be quite a... If it's done very well, can very much be a success. But, at the same time, there's obviously a lot of moving parts with the SEO side as well so you've got to be careful, haven't you?

Cas Majid:
You have to be careful and you've got to really plan out strategically the replatforming process because it's just not about... Let's just say you've got 3- or 4,000 products on your side. It's not just about moving the products across, moving across the, as you mentioned, the SEO juice that you've created, that goodwill that you've created online with your digital assets. But also about customer history, how do you really move that across to the new site? It has to be a very planned out strategic process that you have to go through, and we'd spend a lot of time planning that out first rather than just jumping straight into it and doing, "This is the design." There's a lot of work in the background, particularly, for replatform that you have to think about.

Richard Hill:
I think with the replatform, probably, a follow up question for that would be also site structure. We've got our site, we narrow the structures, the products are all maybe a bit all over the time. We've got not as many sub caps as we should have, and there's a multitude of things. What would your 30-second, maybe we'll give you a minute, 60-second version on restructuring a site? Are you going to move from one platform to another? Maybe you're not, but you know you need to restructure. If you're going to go from one platform to another, is that not a good time to do it? How would you tackle a restructure?

Cas Majid:
It's a really good question. I think one of the first things we do is probably do the site hierarchy. So, actually, mapping out the site and then working with people like yourselves that are doing the SEO and saying, "Actually, look, this is the complexity of what they've currently got, but we want to simplify that to make sure that, A, the SEO juice is maintained on that site. But actually is a lot simpler as well. Looking at the URL structure, the categories, and making sure that everything is in the right category and the product and the URLs reflect that as well/boxes and then you've got white boxes as it were.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:32:34]-

Cas Majid:
Or just following a really simple hierarchy really eliminates a lot of those problems. But from the ground up, it's so, so important, even before UX, is to really look at the site structure and making a site map. Then working with someone like yourself to say, "Right, this is what we want to achieve. How is that going to impact your SEO or the marketing of the website?"

Richard Hill:
Yeah, brilliant. Thank you for that.

Cas Majid:
You're welcome.

Richard Hill:
So crystal ball time, we're sat here in 12, 18 months, we're talking about UX. What do you think is going to be what's coming down the line? What are the things that our listeners need to be very aware of and need to be thinking of now so they can get in front of it to really improve that customer experience, that user experience?

Cas Majid:
I think this whole thing about this metaverse is coming into play now, and I think very much is going to be very much immersive experiences where people can really interact with products. We've seen that already where people are really looking at how they can navigate through a site, but they're physically there. Or they can really interact with a salesperson, not just on an auto attendant or you go into a site and a thing pops up. But actually really immerse yourself into the site, and I think that's happening. It happened 10 years ago with this thing called Second Life. That's [crosstalk 00:34:01]. This is second version of it. This is second version of it. I think immersive experience is going to be so, so important.

Cas Majid:
I think those people that really think, "Well, actually, that's beyond me," it'll happen and it'll happen in a very organic and natural way. But just simple things like, and it's happening now with some of the really, really big brands where you can really look at the products in a 3D manner and understand that, actually, this is the products. But actually the next step to that is how does this product work inside my environment or on me? If it's a clothing brand, how does it look on me? Or if it's a piece of furniture, how does that piece of furniture look and behave in my own environment? This whole thing about personalization and customization is going to be more and more now. See, if it's food online, how can I create my own burger? Not just I'm going to pick this, this and this, but how is it look in real-time?

Richard Hill:
Yes, that is absolute genius. I love that. That's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant finish. I think this two or three things there is the future. I think metaverse, that's something I am so like I know this much of it, speak to me in three month's time, that's where my brain's at at the moment. I had spent two hours today talking to two different people about this, and had a very similar conversation. Which maybe we'll have a catch up at the end about this, but also I'm going all in on it, but definitely from my personal point of view, yeah, I'll be buying a few things very, very soon. Put it that way. Well, thanks for being on the show. We always like to end every episode with a book recommendation. Cas, what would you recommend as a book for our listeners?

Cas Majid:
So a book that I'm reading right now is Who Not How. It's by Dan Sullivan, and it talks about a lot of entrepreneurs they get stuck in the how when actually you should be thinking about the who's. We're all surrounded by who's, people in your network, your social capital who can help you do this rather than how can I do this?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, great thinking. Great thinking. For the guys that want to find out more about Wow Group, more about yourself, what's the best place to do that and how to-

Cas Majid:
Well, you can visit our website, wowgroup.co.uk. You can cross all the social platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. If they want to connect with me personally, just connect with me on LinkedIn. It's just Cas Majid.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Well, Cas, it's been an absolute pleasure [crosstalk 00:36:31] again soon. See you later.

Cas Majid:
Cheers. Bye-bye.

Richard Hill:
Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to the eComOne eCommerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce Marketing Agency.

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