Sylvie Wilson: Don't make your customer go and guess. You really cannot just set and forget anything. So the car is like very valuable real estate. It is the billboard that people are neglecting. I'm Sylvie Wilson from Unicorn Car and in this episode of Add to Cart, I talk about the ways that top Australian brands are increasing their AOV and conversion rate by optimizing their cart.
Nathan Bush: The cart is often the last thing
Speaker C: a customer sees before they hand over their money.
Nathan Bush: It's the last checkpoint. But on most stores it's also the one page that nobody has probably touched in a year. Sylvie Wilson calls it the billboard that everyone is neglecting and she has the data to show you what that is costing. Sylvie is the co founder of Unicorn Cart, which is an app built for Shopify stores that want more out of that cart moment. She came at it as a merchant first.3e Commerce businesses before this one. Which is why the app that she's built solves problems that most e commerce businesses really do have. Unicorn Cart now runs on more than 400 stores across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Europe and US across fashion, beauty, supplements and at least one business selling excavators. She and her husband James still take setup calls themselves. So everything that you're hearing today is firsthand knowledge. Sylvie sees everything that's working across all of these carts and the brands that are using Unicorn cart are averaging $44 back for every dollar that they spend with the app. So we've done over 600 episodes and never once have we pulled the cart apart to this level of detail. So I thought it was a great time just to cover the lot to make this the cart episode. Everything from gift with purchase, cross sells, returns, protections, abandoned emails, selling into different markets.
Speaker C: We covered it all.
Nathan Bush: And Sylvie also came with her own
Speaker C: set of AB tests which we pick apart, including one where a brand dropped
Nathan Bush: its free gift threshold for from $120 to $99 and surprisingly saw the average order value go up by 64%. If there's one episode that is hugely tactical and will give you so many ideas on how to take advantage of one of the most important pages on
Speaker C: your website, this is the one to listen to.
Nathan Bush: Now, somewhere in the middle of all of this conversation, I told Sylvie that I was going to need three newsletters to fit all of the tips and the tactics and that she shared with
Speaker C: us into our cheat sheets.
Nathan Bush: And I wasn't joking. There is so much in here, but if you want the short version of it, and I promise you it'll be one newsletter head on over to add to cart.com where we send the cheat sheet for every episode on the day that it drops.
Speaker C: You can sign up for free there
Nathan Bush: and we can only do deep dives like this, especially on e commerce topics that we love. Thanks to our partners Shopify and Klaviyo. Thanks as always for making the show possible and helping us now nerd out in e commerce. So here's our chat. Here is co founder Sylvie Wilson from Unicorn Cart. A quick one before we get into today's episode. Shopify have just released a new report
Speaker C: exploring the hidden costs of integration.
Nathan Bush: This report unpacks how retailers can cut maintenance costs by 25% and grow revenue by 8.9% by unifying online and in store systems using Shopify. Download the report to explore how retailers can build a more unified commerce foundation with the link in the show notes or head on over to shopify.com resource
Speaker C: retail digital transformationreport let's get into today's episode.
Nathan Bush: Sylvie, welcome to Add to Cart.
Sylvie Wilson: Hello. Great to be here.
Nathan Bush: Great that you are here.
Speaker C: I actually had that you would come on to Add to Cart on my vision board for the year and I'm really glad that you're here.
Sylvie Wilson: Likewise. I think you can say it mutual. I manifested this so here we are. Manifesting works.
Speaker C: There we go.
Nathan Bush: Well, welcome. I met you properly at the Thread
Speaker C: Together event that we had before Online Retailer.
Nathan Bush: So it was great to have you
Speaker C: there and we got chatting around what you're doing at Unicorn Cart and I
Nathan Bush: just thought it was fascinating because I
Speaker C: think it's a part of the e commerce experience that often gets overlooked.
Nathan Bush: Like it's just treated like it's a
Speaker C: step towards the real outcome.
Nathan Bush: Is that what you're finding in market?
Sylvie Wilson: So it's funny because it's either people have a cart page and haven't done anything or they have a cart drawer which has like their items and checkout button and that's it. Or they're doing a lot of things and not really optimizing the cart experience at all. And it's funny because the ones that are not doing anything are really like leaving a lot of opportunity and money on the table because the car is a really high intent buy a moment. And so if you're not thinking about the cart as part of your overall like CRO strategy, like as deep as you should, then you're missing a massive opportunity. It's not just about like the PDP itself, it's also like the place where people decide whether they want to go ahead or not. And check out.
Speaker C: Yeah. And when you're talking about the cart draw versus the cart page, I think we're all very familiar with adding things to cart, but are you talking about when you've got the top right, if you're on a desktop, being able to click that and seeing the mini cart pop up or taking to a dedicated cart page, that kind of takes that whole experience.
Sylvie Wilson: There's so many different, like terminology, like names for it, but a cart draw is essentially like a cart that slides out and doesn't interrupt what else you're doing on the website. So you could be like halfway through a collection page and added from there, or you could be on a product page and added from there and it will just kind of slide out and give you the contents of your car and show offers, upsells or anything that's in there as well, without navigating you away from where you're currently browsing. And it's shown to have a higher conversion rate because it's more frictionless. And it also just doesn't annoy people too much because it doesn't take them away from where they are in that browsing experience. Especially for a large catalog, it can be so frustrating.
Speaker C: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we're going to unpack all cart best practices, including the problems that you're solving with unicorn cart. But I want to get a little bit of background. What's made you so passionate around the cart?
Sylvie Wilson: So I have an interesting journey. I have started e commerce businesses before. My first one was a Matcha green tea business back in 2015.
Nathan Bush: Back before Matcha was cool.
Sylvie Wilson: Yes. Ahead of our time, I like to say. Now I also had a fashion brand that I ran for like three years and during that time I was wanting to optimize and basically increase our average order value because fashion is obviously very notoriously competitive and we had such a low conversion rate and we're really struggling to kind of make the most of return on ad spend for what we were spending on meta ads. And so the strategy we wanted to do was to increase our average order value and increase our conversion rate. And it was during Black Friday of 2023 that we actually wanted to do a gift with purchase for an item that we already sold. And we were looking on like the Shopify app store and basically like trying to like find an app that could do this with an existing product. And it wasn't possible. You could only do a gift of something that you had to like duplicate and make a $0 product and like, we didn't have time to like trawl through. Like, there's so many apps doing it on that.
Speaker C: It's one of the most clunky experiences.
Nathan Bush: I love Shopify and I love the
Speaker C: crew at Shopify, but gift with purchase, how has it not been solved?
Sylvie Wilson: Well, here we are, Here we go.
Speaker C: Have I got something for you.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah. So luckily my husband James is a software engineer, so I was like, please, can you like just build it for us? And he did. And we were able to do a gift of purchase of an existing product because as many people could attest to, like, how annoying is it if your 3pl can't then deal with that gift because it's a duplicate of a sku, but then you've already got that sku and like, there's just so many complications and complexities there. So that was also a bit of a learning experience because we did a gift of purchase using a like, item that wasn't that popular. So it was like C grade stock.
Nathan Bush: What was it?
Sylvie Wilson: And then it was just these like pants in a color that like we just had too much of. And I thought, oh, we'll just do a gift with purchase of them and get rid of them.
Speaker C: So you just get rid of your shit.
Sylvie Wilson: I know. Spoiler alert. If people don't want to buy it, they don't want it for free and spend up to whatever to get it either. So that's like a bit of a takeaway as well is like if you are doing gift with purchase, you got to make sure it's something that people actually want. But we can circle back to that. Anyhow, fast forward through that year where we would just had like basically a private app started to tell people in our network about it and community because they were struggling with like essentially the cart and gift of purchase and cross sells in particular. And slowly but surely like more people wanted to use it. And so then we officially launched it on the App Store and within like a year decided to sell the brand and focus full time on unicorn because it had grown so much.
Nathan Bush: So when you built it, you were
Speaker C: just building it to solve a problem. Were you building it in mind that you'd put it on the App Store eventually if it worked?
Sylvie Wilson: Not initially, it was just kind of for us, but then it was like, hmm, maybe this could be something and could help people. And then, yeah, since then I've like worked with, well, we're over 400 brands now that we've been working with across mainly fashion and beauty, but also some like very random things like diggers and like what?
Speaker C: Diggers? Yes, as in like actual diggers, not toy diggers?
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, like actual like construction tradie diggers. Yes.
Nathan Bush: Can you add a digger to your cart?
Sylvie Wilson: But it's like accessories around it. It's stuff for tradies. It's so random.
Speaker C: That's amazing.
Sylvie Wilson: I know. But yeah, we mainly, I think work well for brands that are in kind of like fashion, beauty supplement, pet lifestyle because it gives people the opportunity to kind of add more items for order, cross sell things that work best in that kind of flow, build a stack of jewelry and like that kind of thing and keeps them coming back for more. So that's like the origin story.
Speaker C: I love how you like we just built this app to solve a problem. We've got 400 clients using it now.
Nathan Bush: Like we were doing this run sheet.
Speaker C: I think I sent it through to you on Monday, Tuesday, it's Friday now. And I was like in there. I did my research and thought I'd done my research really well. I'm like, oh, you've got 300 clients, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're like, Nathan, it's 430 something now. Like, holy moly. It's insane.
Nathan Bush: And a lot of those are in
Speaker C: the U.S. is that right?
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, US, UK, Europe, many in Australia and New Zealand as well. And it's mainly just been from like word of mouth and referrals and we get really like highly rated on the App Store as well because it's like James and myself are a small team but we provide really kind of one on one customer service. And I think that level of service and also the fact that we have been in E commerce ourselves and can have that like strategic lens and viewpoint has not only kind of shaped the features but also shapes how we like deal with our clients. So that's been really like one of the reasons that we've grown.
Speaker C: What's better being a tech founder or a retail founder?
Sylvie Wilson: There's other challenges. Like we obviously are a cart. We're at a very like critical point in the journey. So we built it in such a way that like we've, you know, gotta protect everybody's business and make sure it works well. So it's like high pressure moments, especially around large sale periods, ensuring things work. Sometimes it is like a user error thing where people have just set something up wrong. But sometimes, yeah, we just have to make sure that it's all working fine.
Speaker C: And are you shopify only? Yes, shopify only and available for basic. Nice.
Sylvie Wilson: It's available on all the Shopify plans. So yeah, it's one of those things where it's really, really beneficial for like a small to medium sized business that is trying to grow and they're trying to be smart about how they're growing the brand. But then we're also used by like larger, more like established businesses as well that want the agility of being able to edit their cart without having to go through chains of command for like developers to change, like the custom code or anything like that. So there's a real range of brands that we work with.
Speaker C: All right, well, let's unpack the cart. Hey. And let's have a look at some cart best practices.
Nathan Bush: I like that you just flick the hair back. You're like, all right, we're in go mode. Let's, let's do this. I want to first start around.
Speaker C: What do you see as the role of the cart, Especially across different categories, different roles of the cart that I see.
Nathan Bush: And sometimes a cart can just be a wish list.
Speaker C: Like the intent to buy might not always be there straight away, which is very different to the checkout, I think. And what this something that differentiates it and sometimes it is actually just let me get this job done as quickly as possible. What do you view the role of the cart as?
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, so some customers do use it as a wish list. They're kind of gathering all the things they like putting it together and then they might need to have some consideration and think about it and then they'll come back at a later time to convert. I think the role of the cart is super important in the sense that it's a way to build that final trust and get people to kind of move from consideration into like buying mode. And there's a lot of levers that you can pull there to be able to get them over the line. So in one respect it's like a way to convert and another respect it's a way to increase your average order value and allow people to see like more products that go alongside what you're already offering. So that's like a massive kind of optimization area for people who currently just have items under checkout button is they're really missing the opportunity to align the complimentary products that are really relevant to people and like highly personalized. And I think where some carts go wrong or where some brands are just adding in like a generic cross sell that doesn't really have anything to do with what the person has already added, they're also kind of missing a trick because People then choose to ignore that because it's just not relevant to them. So the car is a place where you can basically serve your customer directly and speak to them more like personally based on the behavior that they have shown you on your site. Because if they've added like top to cart, for example, if it's fashion, then if you can surface them the matching bottoms or something that's going to coordinate well with that, then you're just reducing the friction that they might have because they've got to go find something else. So I'm a mum, right? And sometimes I'm like having a little browse and shopping and adding items to car and if something is made available to me quickly to allow me to check out more seamlessly and more quickly, then I'm more likely to be able to convert in time before my toddler decides that he's not focused anymore and wants to jump on me. And like, honestly, at the moment that is my biggest car abandonment reason is childhood. Yeah. So reducing the time it takes for people to like have to make decision like add more bounce around, wait for pages to load is going to increase your conversion rate. Another behavior people do is they shop while they're on the train or on the bus, that kind of thing. If you've coming up to your bus stop and you've just finished adding things to cart, but then it's like bouncing you around the website to a cart page before you can check out, that's like an added step that's going to stop you from being able to do that. So I think the cart is really key at driving efficiency for the customer as well. And that's something that's often overlooked.
Speaker C: Is that something you work with your clients on around trying to make a call, whether you're using the car to drive aov, in which case you probably want to try and keep them there for a little bit longer and keep adding to that basket and keep adding and building it up first. Conversion gets me through this as quickly as I can before my toddler takes my phone with her grubby hands and it's all over for me. Is that a decision you need to make or can you set the cart up so they can do both jobs?
Sylvie Wilson: It can definitely do both jobs. I think a lot of the time customers do come to us with like, I want to increase average order value or my biggest problem is actually my conversion rate. My average order value is kind of okay. In which case there's different things that you can do in the car to basically pull on those levers and like make that happen. But then obviously a lot of the time people like, well both I want, I want more money and I want more customers. So like obviously you can kind of combine that as well. And what we've created with Unicorn as well is that you can actually target certain blocks to appear in the cart depending on what the customer's buyer journey is or even things that they've added into the cart. For example, you could surface different cross sells depending on what they've added to cart. Or you could even surface like different type of checkout button or different gift with purchase offer depending on if they are a VIP customer or if they are a new customer. So you can really like personalize that journey. And I think either for AOV or conversion rate, whichever one of those is like the metric that you're like most focused on, you want to like be able to serve the right offer at the right time to the right person. And that is where I see E Commerce has kind of changed the most over the last few years. And the direction it's heading in even more now is making sure that personalization is like, yeah, dialed in basically.
Nathan Bush: What would you do if you had 80% of your time back sleep? Obviously. Well, that's roughly what Pillow Talk's marketing team got back. The Aussie betting institution with 73 stores and nearly 50 years of history was burning hours every single week just building segments and reports. It was a job that took multiple people, people across disconnected tools, nightmare stuff. So they moved everything into Klaviyo. Suddenly, tasks that took an hour and three people takes a few minutes and a single person. That's an 80% cut in time spent on segmentation and reporting, freeing the team up to actually build relationships instead of wrestling spreadsheets. And the results are anything but dozy with Klaviyo attribute attention revenue up 120% year on year last quarter for a betting brand. Those results, they'd give you a decent night's sleep. Head to klaviyo.com au and see how brands like Pillow Talk are doing it right. So if I was to ask you
Speaker C: what is one tactic that you would highly recommend from all the data that you're seeing to increase AOV and one tactic to increase conversion. What would be the top of your list for each?
Sylvie Wilson: Okay, so the gift with purchase strategy is obviously like tried and tested.
Speaker C: Yep.
Sylvie Wilson: But I think there's some really interesting data that we've seen about how it affects conversion rate and in a positive way. So we looked at Cart data over the last like 365 days, like thousands and thousands of carts, and saw that the average conversion rate for carts that had a gift with purchase offer active versus when they didn't was 23.7% higher. Okay, so I think that shows that a gift with purchase can create scarcity, create this like limited time added value offer that can push people to convert faster and convert then and there rather than waiting because they have the perception that might not be there anymore, it might have run out of stock, or the offer is only for a limited time and it gives them the reason to buy. And of course gift with purchase can also be used as a way to like, like increase average order value because you can set it at just above your average order value where you're wanting to target people to spend. However, as a conversion rate piece, it's actually super important as well, as long as it is in a attainable price range for your site and your average order value.
Speaker C: And it sounds like it's really important that you put either a time bound or a quantity bound limit on it so that it has that sense of urgency as well.
Sylvie Wilson: I think if you do have that, then it can really drive a bit of urgency, like especially the quantity bound. I think sometimes people look at like countdown timers and they're like, is this legit? Like is it really running out in 15 minutes or whatever? But generally like quantity works very well because it's kind of like you've only got a set number to give away. Once they're gone, they're gone. Having said that, we've noticed that brands also do use countdowns towards the end of the sale. Say they're like running a sale. We've got Black Friday coming up. Obviously it's really top of mind for people now as they're in planning mode. But if you've got your sale planned for like seven days, on like day six, you could run a countdown timer in the cart which shows that the sale and therefore the gift of purchase offer or whatever you've got is ending soon. And then it's actually tied to the actual end of that promotion. And that can also just help people to kind of make the decision, okay, yes, I will purchase this now because this offer is ending very soon. And in that respect a countdown timer can work really well.
Speaker C: It's really interesting because even queues like that, it all makes sense. But say you do a new campaign or a new gift with purchase offer, it's very obvious that you need to put on the homepage you need to put it on the landing page, maybe the product page. I think a lot of people would miss the cart.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, I know. And yeah, it's the place where, especially on mobile, which is where like 80% or more people shop. Even as a slide cart takes over the page, it's just then, you know, obviously easy to kind of close it and like get back to where you were browsing. But your car. When people have like added to car and then they're thinking about going ahead and buying that thing, it's a way to like get it in their face. Which is like the number one rule. Get your offer front and center, big and bold, so that people know that is available, so that they decide to buy. Like that's essentially what we're trying to help people do is make that purchase decision. So the car is like very valuable real estate. It is the billboard that people are neglecting.
Speaker C: Yeah, okay. And you very kindly before this sent me through some A B testing that you were doing and there is a few gift with purchase examples in there. Can you share what makes a good gift with purchase offer like we talked about, just don't give away your shit stock before that you can't sell.
Nathan Bush: That's a pretty good rule.
Speaker C: What are the other rules that you think we should be looking at when determining what a good GWP is?
Sylvie Wilson: So a good GWP gift with purchase free gift is something that your customer really wants. And that is going to depend and change depending on your brand and your product offering. Whether it's something you already sell or something that would be complimentary to what you sell but is not something that you currently have available. So for example, a great gift of purchase, if you're like a beauty brand or even in supplements or that kind of thing, is doing a Mini or travel size version of your bestseller. Because you know, people love that, you know they want it. And even if they buy your bestseller at full price, the little Mini is like perfect for going on weekends away or like wherever they're going on holidays. So it's never something they're not going to want. And so that's like a great example I've seen from brands that have like leveraged gift of purchase in that particular space.
Nathan Bush: In that instance, just asking for your
Speaker C: opinion, if you had a hero product, say it is a moisturizer for example, and someone's got that in their cart, they've got the full size bottle, would
Nathan Bush: you want to give a Mini just
Speaker C: to get that conversion or would you rather give them a Mini of A complimentary product that they may have never bought before to kind of cross sell them in the future.
Sylvie Wilson: I think both are obviously great opportunities. Like depends on your overall plan. But you could give people with like, especially with like unicorn is super easy. You can give them a choice if they want to choose. So you can have like choose your travel size and then like within the car it will give them a pop up to choose their desires.
Nathan Bush: People love choice, but not too much
Speaker C: choice, not too much choice. And people like control. I think control is probably more of it than choice.
Sylvie Wilson: Yes. One of the mistakes we see actually is when people do like a gift of purchase and they give people a choice of like 10 things and then it like completely not only just takes over the cart but it gives people like decision fatigue because they're like, oh my God, which one do I go for? This matters a lot. It's the thing I'm getting for free. I need to make sure it's the one I really want. What do I want? Ah, you don't want to have that
Nathan Bush: moment, especially when you get to cart
Speaker C: too because you're like, oh, I've done the hard work of making the decision. I've pulled the pin, I've made the choice, I'm going to buy. Oh shit, I've got another choice in front of me.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, so you do want to make it easy. So in sometimes that respect is like oh well like great, a travel size of a thing. I've already decided to buy. Perfect little gift with purchase or if you are testing a new product then this is also a great way to do it is like see like what the uptake is of like and how people respond to that. Or you could have it as a cross sell as well. So yeah, I think from like from a beauty brand lens or like something where you've got like consumables, that kind of gift is great. But we've also seen like complementary things to somebody's routine going back into like beauty, like whether that's like a device, like a gua Sha tool, or like a satin pillowcase, satin scrunchies, like the things that people are using as part of their routines. Like really thinking about how is my customer interacting not just with my products but shaping their like evening routine, morning routine, how are they getting dressed, like how are they thinking and like behaving in their life and then how can I add value to them with this gift of purchase that is brand aligned. That is the perfect way to think about the gift of purchase. And if it has A good value as well, then you can obviously pin it to a higher spend. But that higher spend also needs to be within reach because otherwise it's just not something people are going to take up. And I actually do have some data to support this because we saw a brand run an A B test where they had a gift with purchase in cart A. So basically you can run AB tests within Unicorn where you set up your cart with one offer and then you can basically within the A B test, duplicate and like change one thing, whether it's design or offer or text or whatever you want to do. They decided to test a gift with purchase threshold at $99 and also at $120. And $120 was like their like usual go to because it's a higher amount. So you think, yeah, I want people to spend more money. However, the gift of purchase at 99 had a 64% higher AOV. And so actually more people were able to like basically get that free gift, but also like spent more because when they looked at their products, they realized it made more sense to be able to add the extra items and hit 99 than it did to get to 120. It was just more attainable for the customer. And so overall, all those carts had a higher aov.
Speaker C: I mean, I would have expected a higher conversion rate at $99, but I wouldn't have expected a higher AOV.
Sylvie Wilson: No. Right. So I think this is like one of the things as well that I have like been working with with brands over the last six months is that you really cannot just set and forget anything and like think you know exactly how it should be or like have an idea in mind and just like run with it forever. You should always be testing, trying new things, and basically just trying to figure out like where are the sweet spots are. And when you find that sweet spot, it might change again. So it's reacting to customer behavior, what your current product range is, and basically just like keeping it fresh for the customer as well and like letting them like play along with the game.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Speaker C: And does that kind of behavior also work when it applies to free shipping thresholds, for example? Because the common approach is to take your AOV and then add 15 to 20% on top of it just to extend over that AOVA and then set your shipping threshold there. Have you done any experiments around that?
Sylvie Wilson: Yes. Well, obviously each brand is going to be different and I think the, the test that I've seen recently that I found really interesting was where they had a higher free ship threshold at 160 and then another car running in the A B test at 140. So $20 difference and the conversion rate for the lower free ship was like 27% higher, but then the AOV was 28% higher for the $160 one. And I'm really sorry, I feel like that like meme now where she's like doing all the sums, I'm like painting
Speaker C: pictures in my head and they're turning into monkeys now. So.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, literally. But what was interesting about this test where they were looking at the free ship threshold was the fact that the conversion rate height was higher on one but higher AOV on the other. And so they're actually still testing this because they feel like they need to like find the perfect amount and it's not where they thought it was at all.
Speaker C: Okay.
Sylvie Wilson: So I think yeah, there's like free shipping is such an interesting one as well. Because the other thing you have to consider of course is your profitability. And you can't just like willy nilly do free shipping if you've got bulkier items or if adding more things to the basket is then going to send you over to the next weight limit. And how is that going to affect your profit? Because ultimately that is the most important thing for brands. So when you're doing tests, it's not just like plucking a number and like, okay, let's like try like 5% more with this one. You have to like look at the entire kind of holistic viewpoint of your business and figure out if this works for you as well. Because okay, maybe it gets you more sales, but did it make you any more money?
Speaker C: That makes a lot of sense.
Nathan Bush: I think the gift with purchase, a
Speaker C: great example of that is I've seen that trap a few times that people like.
Nathan Bush: I'll do all the maths on gift
Speaker C: with purchase and forget about shipping and how much it changes the shipping structures as well.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah. The perfect gift with purchase is also very lightweight.
Nathan Bush: Yes, exactly.
Speaker C: It's the Tim Tam effect. Can pretty much go in any adore beauty box without screwing up the postage.
Sylvie Wilson: Yes, until it melts obviously.
Speaker C: Gift with purchase. Fantastic for driving conversion. If I was to ask you around aov, is there a tactic that stands out for you there when it comes to the card?
Sylvie Wilson: Yes, and that is personalization of the cross sells or upsell items that you want to give people. So I mentioned before, like have the top. Here are some matching bottoms for example. Or for example we work with a lot of swim brands and they'll like have like the bikini top and then show the bikini bottoms or the, the matching activewear set so that you can write quickly build that outfit and then reducing that friction and ensuring that the items that are cross sold are personalized to the customer. What they've already got is a really great way of increasing average order value. Another thing is like if this is available to brands and like makes sense is things like gift wrap as a one tick upsell that works really well, we've noticed and basically just thinking about how you can add value to the customer with what you're suggesting for them to buy next. So yeah, the cross sells thing is like such a underrated. Like especially the personalization that's like the true key thing that I would have people think about. And within Shopify you can use like the search and discovery app, which is completely free, it's the Shopify one. And set up complimentary items yourself so that you can really like match everything or use their related suggestions. You can either do it manually or you can use their AI related suggestions which like 80% of the time are really good but like sometimes they'll like show the wrong color. So if you want to get very granular, you can do that complimentary recommendation. And then within Unicorn, for example, you could use the complimentary recommendation intent as the thing that you then show in the cart.
Speaker C: Okay, the cross sells that you're surfacing within Unicorn. Have you created that logic yourself or are you using the personalization tools that a merchant might be using, Whether that be Athos, whether that be Noster or whatever? Or have you kind of got your
Sylvie Wilson: own algorithm so you can use the other tools as the things that are then recommended. You can even set up specific products. Like for example some brands have, you know, a small number of SKUs, they know exactly what they want to cross sell to everyone. So they just set up what those specific things are. And Unicorn won't show them if they already are in car or if they are sold out or whatever. But we tend to recommend using a recommendation engine for the suggestions because they are just one source of truth and very reliable and usually like the best recommendation that you can do. But most people with unicorn just use the Shopify search and discovery.
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Speaker C: Yep, that makes sense. Okay. I'm literally putting in a recommendation engine at the moment with a client and it's so complicated.
Nathan Bush: It's actually once you, once you scratch
Speaker C: the surface, you can do the basic ones and then it gets really complicated. So I think it's a really smart move to use the tools that you, you're already doing to continue that journey throughout the website.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah. One thing we've also seen is some brands, especially in like jewelry, for example, they have different price points of items. So for example, they've got like really expensive 14 karat gold pieces or they've got like their gold for mail and they've got different buyer Personas that they're trying to hit with this stuff. So the cross sells that you do really need to kind of be in line with like what that person is shopping for. There's no point selling like a 14 karat gold key ring to somebody who's got a charm that's like the like cheap offering in the cart. You know, like it's just not relevant and feels completely inaccessible. Which is why we built out cart value targeting as well, so that you could target different sections and segments, messaging, anything like that based on how much somebody's spending. And that has been used in surprising ways, for example, around this whole tariffs business that's going on in the US because people were realizing that they were. I'm thinking of a swim brand in particular that came to us with this problem. They were receiving these very large orders and they were offering free returns via like a checkout plus button in their cart and realizing that actually people in the US were trying things on and sending it all back and then they were still on the hook for paying the tariffs because part of their policy, they had said we pay the tariffs on your behalf. And that was like a huge problem. So we've made it possible for you to remove that as an option for customers who spend over a certain amount in certain markets. Because you can target different carts to different markets as well. And then even like that level of personalization can protect the brand on one hand. But then on the other hand can mean that you can show that customer different offers or different cross sells depending on the season because obviously northern hemisphere summertime completely opposite to when we have our Australian summertime. So you can make sure that people are seeing the correct messages. Cross sells, you know, returns information, whatever. It is very cool in a targeted way.
Speaker C: I didn't even think about personalizing based on location. That makes a lot of sense. What about are you doing anything around omnichannel experiences once you start doing in store pickups and things like that.
Sylvie Wilson: So we don't have anything for like POS as such. But some people are using. We have a feature called Access cart via URL only. And brands are using this basically to create specific offers that you can only access if you scan a QR code and then you access their website and get a distinctive cart which is only available to that URL. And then they're able to do like I say, a secret gift of purchase or a secret x percent off that only is able to be used by these people. And then they can track how well that IRL activation actually worked. And they're. I mean this tool is really useful as well for like if you wanted to have separate carts for first time customers versus like your VIP customers, you can send people to different carts depending on where they are in the journey. So I think that's like a very exciting and unique feature that we have that really helps you also just like get some data on like how that thing's performing.
Speaker C: I haven't heard of anyone using cart as a promotional tool.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, the way that Unicorn works is that all the offers that you create because we have our own like reward and discount engine, they're all scoped to the cart. So you could have multiple carts all operating at the same time for different markets, different customer segments. And each offer is only valid in each one of those carts rather than like site wide. So that's how you can get really granular with like what you can like offer to people as well.
Speaker C: Very cool. You've given us so many tactics there around how to increase AOV and conversion in the cart when it comes to UX in the cart because we know that anything that touches a cart or a checkout is ultra sensitive. And that especially you know, businesses like oh, I don't want to play with anything because Shopify has developed me a really good checkout and cart based on best practice. I'm nervous about touching anything when it comes to ux. Do you have any do's or don'ts in how you lay out a cart?
Sylvie Wilson: Definitely. I think everyone should a B test as well. You could have your like plain cart versus your cart with frills, bells and whistles, whatever you want to like, describe it as optimized cart. That's the true term.
Speaker C: Yeah. Well, we could have a unicorn cart versus a pony cart.
Sylvie Wilson: Exactly. Donkey cart.
Nathan Bush: A donkey cart.
Sylvie Wilson: Which one would you rather? Anyway? Yes, you can. Obviously UX is the most important thing and I think always coming back to like, how is the customer actually using this experience? And mostly people are shopping on mobile, obviously desktop as well. And having a sticky checkout button is key. We found because the checkout button is always there, visible sticky in the footer. Some people move it to the top of the like main section. You can have it wherever. But having that sticky so that you can like scroll everything else and have a look what else is in your cart. But making sure the checkout button is prominent is really key for UX and ensuring that like there's not too much going on where you've like not personalized it enough and you just like adding everything in where it becomes an overwhelming experience with too many messages. Yeah, that's also not a good user experience. And one thing I've found speaking to brands when they're setting up car offers is if they get confused explaining the offer to me, then how do they expect the customer to understand it? From glancing. Yeah. So making sure not only is your layout simple to understand what I need to do next, but also that your offer isn't so overly complex, that the customer is the meme doing all the maths, trying to figure it out. Because that can cause friction and decision fatigue as well.
Speaker C: Yeah. So it's the old don't make me think basically.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah.
Speaker C: What's your view on how much detail you need to give people about the products they've added to cart once they're there is an image, a title and quantity, is that enough?
Sylvie Wilson: I think it's good to basically have the images large enough so people can see exactly what they have and make sure they've got the right size if sizing is an element and then be able to like change the quantity. I think it's also really interesting to see brands use the like the limited stock messaging per item, if that is relevant, because it's a way of creating and communicating the scarcity of something if you are running low in inventory but without too much of a like countdowny effect where it looks spammy. Yeah, we've seen that be quite successful for brands, especially more premium brands, to have that as part of like the product detail. We've also noticed because we've now got like integrations with a few different apps. So like adding in reviews into the cartoon, especially under like cross sell items and just like showing like the star reviews. That can be really helpful just to like add some social proof. Give people that extra tiny bit of confidence whether it's subconscious or not that they are making a decision that other people think was good. Yeah, but yeah, I think you want to keep it clean enough that people just know what they've got and I think just making sure that they've understood that their selection is the one that they wanted and ensuring they know that they've chosen the right size for example, because often that's a reason they have to like edit their order afterwards is because they've chosen the wrong size. So making sure that that is visible enough in the cart is really important.
Speaker C: We only want people to go back into the website if they're adding more into their cart or if they're making a change for something that would have been a mistake. You don't want people going back just because they're uncertain.
Sylvie Wilson: Yes. You want to give people certainty and like give them the trust that they've got everything right. We do have the ability for people to also like just add items to wish list rather than remove from the cart and then they can be reminded later of, of items that they've got on their wish list. I think that's like been quite a cool little integration we've added recently. But yeah, I think from a product point of view you do want it to be clean and clear and also reflective of how you've displayed products on your site. So making sure that the images rendering in the correct size format, stuff like that, these like little tiny details can really just ensure that the trust and the consistency of your brand is going through all the way through to checkout.
Speaker C: And if you do have those recommendations, making sure it's really clear what the customer has added to the cart versus what's a recommendation that's not actually in the cart is actually a bit of a skill too.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah. So definitely sectioning it off and making sure that the add to cart button is visible. For the cross sell we have, well the way we call it is we have your primary button which is your checkout button. You can also style up secondary buttons which look a little bit different to the like primary design for example. And that tends to be a best practice as like the button to have for the cross sell items because it just like makes a little bit for differentiation but it also highlights that this thing doesn't exist in the cart yet. But yeah people are saying stuff like obviously there's a. You may also like. But actually what we found is to flight complete the set or complete your routine. This kind of subtle messaging change but can actually make a real impact for people adding those items because they realize that it's part of a bigger.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Sylvie Wilson: Thing that they should have as part of the experience of the brand rather than just you may like.
Speaker C: Well it's not as passive is it? It's almost like you're completing a task, you're taking something off.
Sylvie Wilson: Yes.
Speaker C: What's your view on cart abandonment emails? Obviously we have trained customers to add as much into the cart as possible and hope that you get a discount afterwards. What's your thoughts on that?
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, so I think cart abandonment is going to happen at some level. I think even just like a global the data something like it's like 70% of carts are abandoned. We've actually seen from unicorn data looking at the like the last like 365 days that the highest car abandonment rate actually happens in September and October and the lowest is in November. What happens in November?
Speaker C: I've heard about this thing.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah. So I think that's really interesting. But obviously then you want to reduce that abandonment as much as possible and one way that you can do that is by providing an offer. But you don't always need to do a discount and then train people that you know that's what they can expect. Maybe it's a gift with purchase, maybe there's like another like bundle thing that you can upsell them to or like gain their trust with. But yeah, I think discounting it's an interesting one isn't it because you don't want to devalue the brand. But also if it's a first time customer sometimes like a little discount can just help to get them over the line to then trust your brand and then be able to reconvert them over and over again and create that lifetime value.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Sylvie Wilson: So I think it's dangerous to site wide discount very often. I think you should be thinking about your offer strategy using things like gift with purchase, using like free shipping, rewards, that kind of thing. And then for car abandonment if there's a like cheeky discount in there, don't show it again and again. Show it one time and then they forget it.
Speaker C: I think that's the trick, isn't it? It's not to make it predictable. You're not training in behavior. So it's either actually have a Promotional calendar for card abandonment like you would with any campaign where it changes up. Sometimes you might get an x percent off, sometimes you might get a gift with purchase. Sometimes you might get nothing but a recommendation or a reminder that you should come back and do it. Or you can personalize it to the journey, saying that, hey, if this is a new customer, we've never had an order from them. Give it a big percentage or give it a decent percentage. If it's a customer that we know has shopped with us before, maybe.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah, I think as well what's an interesting one is like the notion of like a Free Ship Friday as a promotion is something that you can run quite often. Weekends are a funny time, aren't they? Because sometimes you'd be buying on a Friday and thinking, well, it's definitely not going to get shipped till Monday. So the customer knows they've got to wait longer from the time they purchased to when that item is going to be delivered. So Free Ship Fridays we've seen as quite a good conversion tool for a Friday. If you do notice there's like a drop off of conversions on Fridays and smart, you can actually schedule that in Unicorn as well because we have an automatic shipping discount that you could turn on for different shipping thresholds of shipping methods that you have and then you could set it to basically turn on and turn off on Fridays. And that's an example of a predictable offer that can actually work in your favor because people are less likely to convert on a Friday. But then it kind of gives them a bit of a reason to. And maybe they're just like waiting for that promotion, but it actually gets them over the line. As always, make sure it works with your profit. But like, and test it.
Speaker C: You can have some fun with the messaging too, can't you? Is like, don't give our warehouse team a chance to bludgeon on Friday. Whatever it is, it's like make them work. Like, let's get it, let's do it.
Sylvie Wilson: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: I want to pick your brand on
Speaker C: one more UX item and get your opinion on it.
Nathan Bush: What do you think about express payment
Speaker C: or express checkout being in cart versus making people wait until checkout?
Sylvie Wilson: So we're seeing some really good early results from this from brands who've started to adopt it more within Unicorn. I think it's a great way of reducing friction and increasing conversion rate because it's a way to kind of like get people to just make the decision there and then they don't have to fill out the checkout page. Maybe that's where the friction is occurring. Or they've like, left their card in the other room and they can't be bothered getting up off the sofa to go fill it out. So if you've got those express checkout options within the car, then again, it's just another place where you can remove the friction. From a technical point of view, it's very interesting because when we were building this feature in Unicorn, the number of express checkout buttons that Shopify will make available to show is basically based on all the payment options you have available plus what the customer has. So sometimes you could actually be showing too many express checkout options because it would just load in everything. So it would be there, like your checkout button shop, Pay Apple, Pay PayPal, and then all of a sudden you've got like five buttons, like, all stacked on top of each other. And then that's not good ux. So that was like a realization for us. It's like, oh, we really need to limit the number that you can choose to show and so that you're not, like, overwhelming the customer with, like, too much checkout potential, basically.
Speaker C: What did you limit it to?
Sylvie Wilson: You can choose how many you want to limit it to. And ultimately the. The order of things are shown in is kind of dependent on Shopify. Like, it always pushes Shopee, if that's available as, like, the first one, for example. But what we've seen brands do is they tend to run it as a stacked checkout button. So, like, on top of each other and tend to have just two express checkout button options in the cart. But you could also make it just one, as well as your checkout button as well. A B Testing is the name of the game.
Nathan Bush: I'm picking up a theme here, Sylvie.
Sylvie Wilson: Yes, there's no one size fits all. I do think that I would love to just kind of get that on the board, is that even if it's worked for a while, you want to keep testing it for your own brand, and what works for another brand might not work for you. It's always good to, like, try things out and see what's moving the needle and getting you those incremental improvements.
Speaker C: Read the terms and conditions that apply and speak to a real financial advisor before you make any decision.
Nathan Bush: Is there any other cartoon features or
Speaker C: functionality that you've developed at Unicorn that we haven't called out? I feel like we've gone so deep on the cart, which is fantastic, but
Nathan Bush: is there any interesting, exciting ones that we've missed?
Sylvie Wilson: One thing that we have noticed recently and we actually talked about a thread together event was free returns, right? And how nowadays like most brands are getting customers to pay for the returns and aren't offering free returns anymore. It doesn't work for the bottom line. And there's only like a few retailers where they're like offering like the blanket free returns still. And we've noticed a big uptick in the number of brands who are using services like refunded to do like checkout plus options where they can offer like returns protection and seeing how that affects conversion rate and average order value. And there was a maternity brand that had a conversion rate uplift of 8% by basically having returns protection because they're essentially giving customers the option to have returns protection for $4 rather than the risk of having to pay $12 themselves if the item didn't fit. So that I thought was really interesting kind of early data from them and then like an AB testing format. But I've noticed across like of the broader E commerce space that returns protection is definitely becoming more of a thing within the checkout button. And brands are playing around with different ways that they can offer this service essentially to customers and improve trust that way. So that's definitely one to think about if you are considering ways to kind of increase conversion rate. And if I want to be like back to kind of personalization is targeting your carts. Two different markets with different offers in. And one thing we've noticed is if you have free shipping in Australia but you don't offer free shipping to New Zealand yet your New Zealand customers are seeing free shipping has been unlocked, they're going to be pissed.
Speaker C: No one likes angry Kiwis either.
Sylvie Wilson: They're chills most of the time, but not if they think they're getting free shipping and then they don't.
Speaker C: That's a great tip.
Sylvie Wilson: And the same in the US like it can really affect your conversion. And if people think they're getting an offer, then it's actually not available to them. So actually having different carts to different markets where you showing the right offer, for example, free shipping is the most prominent thing I can think of for that one especially because you don't want to piss your customer off and you don't want them to have a higher fee than they originally expected to pay. So I think that's another thing to think about is like localization of the car offer and don't make your customer go and guess and like go and check that shipping and delivery page to check. Wait, do I get free shipping or not because that's. Don't make them think.
Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. AB test and don't make them think.
Nathan Bush: I love that you've developed so much
Speaker C: here for the car, which is a lot deeper than what I thought and raised so many great considerations to increase both that AOV and that conversion rate. Why wouldn't you also take on the checkout?
Sylvie Wilson: We may do we just focus on the cart like for now, because that's where we saw so much opportunity. I think the checkout is an interesting one because a lot of the things that we offer are then just like validated at checkout and then you, like, go through. But checkout is another, like, big opportunity for brands as well. Just because customers then very much in that, like, buying decision place. So who knows?
Speaker C: Who knows? I love it.
Nathan Bush: All right, so Sylvie, if people want
Speaker C: to check out unicorn cart, obviously it's in the Shopify App Store. How's it set up commercially? Is it a subscription model? Is it pay per use model so
Sylvie Wilson: you can install it from the App Store and then basically like build, start building a car? And then there's a couple of different plans that you can choose from. The grow plan is like a starter plan that's just for the cart that starts at 1999amonth and there's some usage, but it is capped as well. All our plans are capped so that you never get like some crazy bill because nobody wants that. And they scale gently as well. No, because I'm thinking long term. Like, we've got to, you know, it's important for us that the customer for us is getting good ROI. And like, so far our clients are getting like 40, 41 ROI as an average across everyone. So we're really pleased that it's such a ridiculously high number because it shows that we're adding a lot of value with this stuff. But we do also have a plan which includes bundles and AB testing and advanced analytics and that has a little cheeky discount for add to cart listeners.
Speaker C: Oh.
Sylvie Wilson: Hopefully you'll include in the show notes.
Speaker C: You are too kind. We will take that discount and we
Nathan Bush: will put it in our show notes.
Speaker C: If you're listening. As well as the link to unicorn cart in the Shopify App Store. And we will also put that in our Add to Cart newsletter that goes out every Monday, which gives the cheat sheet. And I'm not looking forward to writing your cheat sheet from today's episode because there are so many tips. And I always think about, like, as I'm saying this, I'm like, what am I going to put in the newsletter, like, what are the. The tips that you can practically take away and put in your business? I'm gonna have to write three newsletters for yours.
Sylvie Wilson: Oh, I'm really glad that it's been packed full of, like, information that's actually useful because I think I said to you this offline, but I love listening to Add to Cart because of the value that you give your listeners and like, all the kind of ideas it sparks. So hopefully I have been able to spark some ideas for brands today. Cause there's so much opportunity in the cart, guys.
Speaker C: Amazing. No, you've given so much value today, Sylvie. So thank you so much because it was one of those ones where I was like, we've never done a show where we just get to dive and nerd out on the cart. So we've done that. I think we've ticked that box. But also, I've just loved your vision for unicorn cart and how you're taking on the world. Like to have 400 brands on it
Nathan Bush: and be influencing probably, well, the prime
Speaker C: real estate on an e commerce platform for over 400 brands around the world. That's pretty incredible. So well done to you and the team.
Sylvie Wilson: Thank you. It's very exciting and yeah, this is a dream come true. So thanks for having me.
Speaker C: Silvi, thank you so much for joining us on Add to Cart. My goodness, how good is Silvi?
Nathan Bush: I always love when we get people who, who are so not even granular, but just nerd out so hard on one part of the e commerce journey. Because E commerce in itself is a bit of a niche topic.
Speaker C: But then when we niche down even
Nathan Bush: more and we get all the expertise and all the tactics and all the granular detail out of that, I think that is so useful to get down to that level sometimes because we can actually go ahead and implement. Whether you are using YouTube Universal, whether you're using unicorn cart or not, I've got no doubt that you won't look at your cart page the same again
Speaker C: after listening to Sylvie for one hour. Amazing.
Nathan Bush: All right, there are three big lessons
Speaker C: that I want to bring you from that conversation.
Nathan Bush: The first lesson is that once someone has decided to buy, stop asking them to decide more things. It's called decision fatigue. We all get it all through our lives. Lives. Silvi sees brands run a free gift and then offer 10 to choose from and it stalls the whole cart. The customer has already done the hard work. They've picked the product they are in
Speaker C: and you've handed them A fresh decision
Nathan Bush: at the worst possible moment, give them one gift or ask them to select
Speaker C: from two or three at most.
Nathan Bush: It's the same story with express checkout buttons where Shopify will lock every payment option going and leave you with five stacked up. That's more decisions to make. Most brands just land on two, so try and reduce that decision fatigue as much as you can on that cart page while still giving control and still giving optionality. All right. The second lesson is that you can absolutely put urgency into the cart as long as it doesn't cost you trust. Sylvie's Reid on Countdown time is is the same as your customers, which is that a 15 minute clock on a
Speaker C: page that you can refresh fools nobody.
Nathan Bush: And once they've worked that out, you've
Speaker C: probably lost more than a sale. You've lost a lot of trust.
Nathan Bush: What holds up is scarcity that you can point at a set number of gifts gone when they're gone. A countdown that appears on day six of a seven day sale because that sale really does end. Low stock messaging on a product when the stock is actually, actually low. That's actually helpful and useful for a customer. We all know that urgency works, but it can be counterproductive. Urgency that you have to invent or force is usually a sign that the
Speaker C: offer isn't good enough. Go back and try again.
Nathan Bush: The third lesson is that you cannot pick a threshold from your gut in either direction. A beauty brand that Sylvie talked about tested a free gift at $120 against a free gift at a $99 threshold. And that $99 cart came back with a 64% higher average order value, which is the exact opposite of what you would expect from dropping that threshold. Then a tea brand tested free shipping at 140 against 160 and got the bigger basket from the higher number. So both are based in data but probably weren't as predictable from the get go.
Speaker C: It goes against a lot of gut
Nathan Bush: feel that we have. So Sylvie's advice, and she mentioned it a fair few times in this episode.
Speaker C: A B Test everything.
Nathan Bush: Don't assume that what you've seen, even in what Sylvie told you today, is going to be true for you. You've got to test it for your brand and luckily we have the AB tools to be able to do that. Now if you want to go and test any of these tactics, I want
Speaker C: to hear how it went.
Nathan Bush: Come and tell us.
Speaker C: In the add to cart community it is free and it's over at add
Nathan Bush: to cart.com au and there are about 700, 800e commerce professionals in there right
Speaker C: now sharing this kind of nerdy behavior. Come in and join us. All right.
Nathan Bush: Thanks again to Shopify and to Klaviyo for backing us at ADD to cart. We always love their support and appreciate that they help us bring you these great conversations.
Speaker C: Until next time.
