519 – Increase sales and be more efficient: Tom talks Ask Me a Shopping Cart Question

Episode 519 – Ask Me A Shopping Cart Question
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and nineteen of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're doing an ask me a shopping cart question now if you want a complete, in-depth angle on shopping carts, you want to go back and listen to episode 10. And then I have a brand new blog posting on the school blog at IMTCBLOG.com/26things. These are twenty six things you're shopping cart system should do for you. All right, I hope you didn't miss episode 518. That was asked me an affiliate question, and this was from the perspective of. You promoting other people's products for a commission? I mean, I made millions of dollars doing this, and it's not that complicated, but there's specific things you've got to know about and that's what that episode's all about. Now, if you want an in-depth thing on affiliate marketing, well from both sides where other people sell your stuff and you sell other people's stuff that would be screwthecommute.com/52 or episode 52. And then I got to throw this in again. Episodes 511, 514 and 517. Those are all Monday episodes are about Pinterest for beginner, intermediate and advance. And I got to tell you, you got to listen to that webinar that this was all based on really inspired me to really start hitting Pinterest hard.

[00:02:00] And now I think we're up to in three weeks, fifty six times the number of views that I was getting before I started. So the link to that webinar replay will be in the show notes, and I'm always available for questions if you want to check it out. But five, 11, five, 14 and five 17 are the episodes beginner, intermediate and advanced? Okey doke. Hey, and today's episode is about shopping carts, which there's a lot of stuff that goes on with shopping carts that have to do with automation. Those of you that listen regularly know that I push this automation e-book on you because I know what it could do for you. Hey, I wish some people would start telling me the results they're getting by by doing the automation, what's in the automation e-book, and if you're new here, please grab your copy it. screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Download your copy and implement the stuff. And you will thank me because it'll knock your workload down. But and you can make more money because you can reach more people. You can handle more prospects and take care of them, and you're the first one that gets back to them because you're lightning fast. Because of these tools, then you'll get the business, you'll get a greater share than you're getting now.

[00:03:22] And so that's kind of what the shopping cart does to it. Besides just taking the sale, it up sells people, and you have affiliate modules where other people can promote your stuff for you and all kinds of things. We'll cover some of them today. But again, if you want it, the complete thing and if you're, you know, considering a shopping cart system, you know, the one I promote is kickstartcart.com. I've been using it over 19 years, probably about 20 years. I think I can't. I can't remember that's what this is going to be based on. However, the article that the blog post I just put out is all about the things that it should do if you somebody you know, what happens is, is these hosting services give you a piece of crap shopping cart as one of the perks to host with them. They just want you to host with them. It's garbage. You know, this is one area where you don't want to scrimp. You don't want free shopping carts because they're not going to do the things that are going to make you a lot of money. Oh, I forgot about the our podcast app, you got to get a copy of that too. That's screwthecommute.com/app and we have complete training and videos and screen captures so you can use all the cool features it has on your cell phone and tablet.

[00:04:42] All right. I always want to tell you about the pilot program we have going on with persons with disabilities. They are making progress in our school where it's a pilot program to get people with disabilities trained in digital marketing techniques so they can be hired or start their own business or both. So love to have your help with this. We have a Go Fund Me campaign. Any little bit helps. And you can go to my school website at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and you can click on the Go Fund Me campaign. You can see video updates of these people are very inspiring because I mean, two of them are blind and they're making progress through a distance learning school. So. So check that out. All right, let's get to the main event. Ask me a question about shopping carts. Well, here's the first one Tom. There's hundreds of shopping carts out there. Why are you all in on kickstartcart.com? Well, the thing is it has all the tools I need and they're consolidated into one place. See, I still suffer. I mean, a lot of times I have to. When I'm training my students, I say do as I say, not as I do all right because I had one hundred and 50000 email subscribers. And when I say shopping cart system, that means it's complete your sure autoresponders, your broadcast email, the sales, the upselling modules, the tracking, the you know, all this stuff that's that's in there anyway.

[00:06:16] I had one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers before the cart was even invented, and in those days we we couldn't do mail merge, which means, you know, personalize an email in the early days. So all I had was the email addresses. So I still to this day have active subscribers from 20 years ago, but I don't have their first name now. I may have their first name if they purchase something. And many of them did. However, I don't know. I can't connect the two things because maybe they ordered on a newer email address and they still get email from my old list that their old email address with no name in it. So I'm trying to protect my students and you from being in that situation. And I mean, it's not a bad situation to be in, but it does bug people a little bit. Sometimes when they get duplicate emails for me and you know, I got a reputation enough to it doesn't kill me and I apologize and I take them off the list and you know, I take care of it when I hear about it, but a lot of times I just don't hear about it, so I don't want you to be in that situation. But so everything is consolidated into one thing with the Kickstartcart, so that's a big, big reason.

[00:07:38] Now another thing is that it's easy to use. See, I there's other systems that do maybe even a little bit more than this cart, but they're three times as expensive. And I had one lady come to me because they're so complicated that she was spending $4000 a month for a part time person just to operate the thing. Well, that's just crazy. So it's a normal mere mortal can operate this thing. And and also, from your perspective, why you should, you know, put this card at the top of your list. One of the reasons is we give free unlimited one on one tutoring to teach you how to use it and that that helps maximize your sales. And you don't have to pay for training like a lot of the other carts. I mean, they'll give you some basics in a couple of videos. We have a whole line of videos, but still you're going to have questions for your individual situation. And so we give extra value by doing that, that there's there's lots of other reasons that, you know, stuck with the cart for 20 years and made millions and millions of dollars using it. But I would say check out that blog post that I just put up. IMTCBLOG.com/26things and you'll see all the things with a little explanation of why you know what the thing does for you. Ok, next question is how do you do split testing with the cart? Well, for everybody that's listening, I just want to make sure they understand what split testing is.

[00:09:18] However, I will tell you that most people that make lots of money online. I. Believe in split testing, and they made a lot of their money because because of split testing, I mean, good copywriting is my number one thing. But the thing is is you never know for sure what's going to push people's emotional buttons to make them want to buy your stuff. So basically, split testing is you take two different sales letters, let's say. And. The cart sends one person to the first sales ladder. The second person to the second sales letter, the third person goes back to the first sales letter, so it alternates so. So if you have one hundred people, 50 of them see sales letter one and 50 of them see sales letter two. So let's say you had a leadership product so you might start out with. You don't know what really people are looking for for sure with leadership. So maybe you you make a sales letter and the angle of the sales letter is all about how, if you're a good leader, you can advance in your career. So the whole sales letter is about that. And then you go to another sales letter and maybe the angle on that one is if you're a great leader, you will have high employee retention, high productivity and stuff like that.

[00:10:43] So you have two different angles on these sales letters. And so you put the them on separate pages in your website or blog postings or whatever. And then you take the link to each one of those pages and you put it in the shopping cart. And you say, OK, here's a sales letter one hears sales letter two and the cart generates you a special link that you're going to distribute. You put it on. You might say on your home page. Click here to check out our great leadership product. And so the first person that clicks is going to go to sales letter A. Or one second person goes to sales letter B or two. And then third person goes back, you know, back and forth like I was telling you. But here's the big difference, because it's easy and super cheap to get what's called a link click checker. So basically, it just counts how many people click on on each link. So the problem with that is it doesn't track people all the way through to see if they purchased or not. See, because maybe sales letter A gets a lot of people looking at it, but hardly any of them buy. And sales letter B might have less people looking at it or people say it's same number when you're split testing, but maybe it got way more sales. So then you say, Oh, sales letter B, you know, I thought that people were interested in career advancement sales letter one, but they must be more interested in productivity and doing a great job and maybe getting raises or I don't know what you can't predict what they're thinking.

[00:12:33] You just can see that sales letter to on on employee retention and productivity got more sales. So then you get rid of sales letter one and then you might make an exact copy of sales letter two. And then just change the headline. And now you're you're you've got two identical sales letters, the only difference is the headline. And then you run those for a while and maybe you see now headline one gets more people. So now you get rid of sales letter two. You see how this goes. So you're just basically checking things against each other and you can check all kinds of things like guarantees and the price and testimonials and bonuses and your actual offer and all these things, the colors. You can test all kinds of things. And what I can tell you is, is the people that make the most money are fanatic about split testing. The guy that taught me was such a fanatic. From the the best thing he had ever, the best results he ever had. It's not average, but this is pretty darn impressive. He, from his original sales letter on some product to the final version. The final version sold 19 times as much product as the first version, say.

[00:13:57] And you can't predict the numbers have to tell you. So that's what split testing is. So basically to answer your question. You make two copies of a sales letter with different angles to start completely different sales letters. Maybe one's a video sales letter. You're testing it against the written one, you know, so you can test whatever you want, but you what you do is you test you see which one wins and the which one wins is the one that brought in the most sales. All right. So and then you throw away the other one or you change something on the other one, do it again, see if the other one can win and and you keep doing that back and forth. The winner is always called the control in advertising part parlance or parlance. I don't know how you pronounce it. So that split testing is very easy. It takes it takes. Once you have the both sales letters set up, you can literally within two minutes. If we show you how to do it, you can set up a split testing thing. Ok, next question, Tom, I hear you talking about upselling all the time, how do you do that? Ok, well, we call that you want fries with this, and first of all, if you want complete, treat us a whole episode on upselling. Check out episode 22, so screwthecommute.com/22.

[00:15:18] All right, so there's two types of upselling. One is called point of purchase and the other one is after the sale. So point of purchase means that it's right at the time. The person is buying something. You're offering them something else. Now here's the thing you're not doing putting two things in front of them at once. You are getting them to make a purchase decision on one item. And then when they put that in the cart, you're offering them something else to purchase. See, people can only make one decision at a time if you put a hole in this cracks me up. When I was doing a lot of, you know, before the pandemic doing all these public seminars, I would sit back and I would see these people on stage trying to sell and they'd be saying, OK, the gold package and the silver package and the platinum, and you've got the diamond. If you really want to do this and that and the audience is looking at each other like, what? What is? I can't? And I'm sitting back there smiling because I know I'm going to take all the money home because I go up there. I got one deal boom done very clear, high value and high ticket item, but very clear. So you don't want to put a bunch of decisions in in front of people all at once because then they they get confused and vote no and do nothing.

[00:16:47] So anyway, point a purchase up selling as you, they make a decision, then you offer them something else. Now this does take the little tiniest bit of geek work. And what that means is in the cart. You want the upsell to look nice because it's presented in the cart. It's not on your web page, so you have to get a little like HTML generator where you can just type it in and make the colors and the fonts big and headlines and all, you know, whatever you want to say about the upsell. And then you don't have to know any HTML code, you just click code and then copy and paste it into the cart. See, I don't I know only the bare minimum of HTML. Once in a while, I need to put a paragraph tag in or something simple, but I'm no programmer. But that's all you do is, you know, there's plenty of cheap or free. Pretty much nowadays HTML generators. So you can type it in just like word processing, make it all beautiful and then click code. Copy it, paste it in the cart. So that's point of purchase upselling. And I'm going to give you a formula because I have made such a fortune over many years doing this. Now I couldn't do it really easily before the cart was invented. You know, you really need a good shopping cart to do this.

[00:18:14] So here's your formula. If you want 30 to 50 percent of the people to go for your upsell, here's the formula I kind of use as an example of you're going to buy a new suit. So you go in the store and for ladies, it might say, OK, I'm going to spend six hundred dollars on a new suit that men or women. But then you get in there and the salesperson says, Hey, for anybody who buys a suit this week, you get half price or two for one on shirts or blouses or shirts and ties or, you know, whatever makes sense for you. 30 to 50 percent of the people will go for that upsell. So what's the formula part of this? Well, the original purchase decision was six hundred bucks. So part of the formula is your upsell should be a cheaper product less than way less than six hundred bucks, and it should be related to the original purchase. So shirts and ties and blouses are related to men's and women's suits. All right. And then it should be a deal, so it should be a cheaper product related to the original product and a deal. I have never had less than 30 percent of the people. I've had more than 50 percent, but I would say average is between 30 and 50 percent of the people go for the upsell whenever it's presented. If you use that formula now, if you try to, somebody goes in for a tie and you try to upsell them to a suit.

[00:19:50] You know it. It's possible it can work, but you're not going to get 30 to 50 percent of the people that wanted to buy a tie all of a sudden buying a six hundred dollars or more suit. So that's upselling, but a complete treatise, all the little nitty gritty. That's episode 22. So screwthecommute.com/22. All right, next question Tom. I have PayPal. Why do I need a shopping cart? Well, there's two major region reasons. One is the stigma of only having PayPal. And the other reason is it won't do all the things you need done to make lots of money online. And what gets me is people they they hear all the riches buys a lot of these, you know, shysters that are telling you get rich, quick and stuff. And they say, Oh yeah, I can. I can be rich tomorrow and not, you know, no investment, no money down, you know? And it's just ridiculous. You have to have the tools to do this correctly. You have to have the knowledge of what to do with the tools. You know, it'd be kind of like a carpenter saying, you know, I'm going to buy a hammer and a saw and a tape measure after I get some jobs. So, you know, it's just ridiculous. You have to have the tools to do this.

[00:21:13] And when I hear people whining about it. I say, all right, you go buy a McDonald's franchise, $2 million minimum, eight hundred thousand dollars in cash necessary, you know? You know, so you can do all this with a computer and an internet connection. All right. But you still have to have the tools if you want to sell online. Now, there's all kinds of ways to sell online. You can do eBay and not have a website, not have a shopping cart. You know, it's just not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about serious people that want to sell products and services and make lots and lots of big money. And eBay ain't the place. All right. Ebay is good to have some money coming in quick and relatively easy, but it's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking to people that want to be serious about this. Ok. So anyway, back to the two major reasons. First of all, the stigma, you know, people don't know you, you know, maybe some people know you, but people don't know you, so they come to your website and you have a product. Maybe it did a good job with the copywriting. But what happens is, is they see you only have PayPal. And they're thinking, hmm, if this person is so great and substantial and is not going to disappear on me, how come they only have PayPal? That's what they're thinking.

[00:22:39] They're thinking, is he a reject from eBay? Is so. And first of all, nothing about PayPal. We love PayPal. I make fortune on PayPal. But the thing is is if you only have PayPal, you have a stigma involved. And and while I'm at it, I'll tell you if you have a full blown merchant account and PayPal. That's a really big plus because having the merchant account gets rid of the stigma of only having PayPal. But people do love to spend their PayPal money, so now they're not as worried about you because you've supposedly been vetted by banks and stuff to have a full blown merchant account. Visa and MasterCard Amex all that. But they can still spend. You don't care if they give you PayPal money or merchant account money. It doesn't matter to you. But the thing is is we've seen sales increase with people up to 15 percent having both. And you do have to have I understand you have to there's fees involved with the merchant account, but it's like I said, with the shopping cart, you've got to have the tools necessary. If I can't slap my Amex card down easily and your site, you say, Oh, Amex charges an extra percent. Ooh, all right. Digital products are 97 percent profit. All right. So and business people use their Amex card, you know, so, so, so anyway, that's the first thing is the stigma. And the second thing is is PayPal is wonderful.

[00:24:10] We love it. But it won't do five percent of what a good shopping cart system will do. And if you don't believe me on the article, I wrote that at IMTCBLOG.com/26things. There's a checklist at the bottom. You know, I explain everything that it should do on the top of the article, and then the bottom is a checklist you can print out and then just go line for line asking the questions of PayPal, of the things that a good shopping cart will do. And you'll see there's hardly any of them there. They'll take the money and give it to you. That's about it. Take their percentage. All right. So that's yes, you need a shopping cart. If you only have PayPal, just God help you. But we love PayPal. All right. Ok, next question is I'm using an autoresponder series in the cart. They already have the cart to try to sell one of my products. How do I shut off that series if they buy? All right. So a lot o you know, this is reminds me. I forgot something back on the question about upselling. I told you only about point of purchase. So let me go back and finish that question before I answer this question. So I told you about point of purchase upselling formula, but there's also after the sale upselling, and that's by use of autoresponders and more correctly, sequential auto responders.

[00:25:46] See, in the old days, we had autoresponders that would give you one message. If you'd sign up for something, you get one message. But now, and for many years, this is one of the most powerful things ever invented is sequential auto responders, which means you can send the first message the next one, the next one, the next one and next it just on. I have some going at six months follow up, not every day, but you know, the first couple of days they get the message every day, then once a week or once every couple of weeks, you know, something like that to keep in touch with people about what they bought or whatever they signed up for. So in one of those follow up emails, we usually base it on what they purchased and then the follow up email several weeks later. Possibly, you know, usually it's not right at the point of sale. This is after the sale to give them a chance to get involved with my product, to see how high quality, how it helps them, then they're more primed to buy the next thing. So then I might give them a coupon code like, for instance, with my wake him up professional speaking system. So they buy that and then maybe three, four weeks later, they get it. One of the emails that has a tip in it on speaking it says, Hey, you know, if you really want to get your fee up higher, you need to be better known.

[00:27:06] And so the way I did it was by publicity, radio, TV now, podcast and and in print and so forth. So here's a discount coupon for half off on my how to be a Kick Butt Publicity Hound book. And so those sales just come in automatically weeks later without me doing nothing. This is all part of automation. Remember, I'm a big stickler on that. Download that darn e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. So that's upselling after the sale using sequential auto response. Ok, now back to the the question. I'm using an autoresponder series in the cart to try to sell one of my products. How do I shut off that series if they buy? Yeah. So let's say you have a sequence of 10. Emails in your order. Autoresponder campaign to get them to buy a certain product. Well, if they buy it on auto responder three. They get, you know, you don't want them to feel irritated by getting four or five, six, seven, eight, nine and 10 autoresponders of something they already bought, right? Now again, this is one of those things do, as I say, not as I do, because you still might get an email from me. After you bought something because of what I said, I had one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers on multiple lists all over the place.

[00:28:33] And so you might have bought on one from one email and then you're still getting emails about that thing somewhere else. So that's that's my problem, not yours. If you do this correctly from the start, it won't happen to you. Or if you have a list one place and then we help you get it imported into the the shopping cart system. And you know, that's a little bit of a production we help you with. Then you can use a feature called Unsubscribe upon Subscribe. And that's a sophisticated thing. You know, you don't have this stuff in paper now and all these other places. So what that means is, is they're getting this autoresponder series where you are trying to sell them a product. So let's say on email three, they purchase the product when they purchase the product. They are now put into another autoresponder series based on the purchase. So you can set the card up that says Hey when they purchase and get in. This other autoresponder series shut off the previous autoresponder series. Unsubscribe when they subscribe to the new autoresponder series when they bought it. Listen to this if you didn't catch that. But anyway, it's a sophisticated thing. It keeps your people happy. They're not getting buried with emails that are just stupid and getting, you know, a bad feeling about you that you're too dumb to, you know? And I guess they feel that way about me sometimes.

[00:30:13] That's unsubscribe upon subscribe. If you need help, just make an appointment with myself or Larry, and we'll show you how to set it up. Very, very easy. Take me two minutes to show you. All right, before I get to the last question of what really, really powerful feature for you, I want to remind you about this program. I got helping persons with disabilities. I mean, this is one of the most proud things I've ever done. I mean, I've helped raise lots of money for homeless kids and and animal rescue animals and all kinds of stuff over many, many years. But this is something I'm going to change these people's lives forever by getting them a skill where they don't have to kill themselves, to try to travel, to go to school, they can legitimately learn at home and legitimately get hired from home or start their own business or both. So I'm really proud of this, but I need your help. So it costs a lot of extra money to to run this program because we have to give a lot of extra help to these people. And whatever it takes, we're going to do it one way or the other. But I'd love to have your help and something you can be involved in that you can be really proud of. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. That's Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, which is this. It's a distance learning school. It just happens to be located in Virginia. Click on the Go Fund Me campaign. You'll see videos from them. I mean, imagine this blind and creating videos. All right. It's very inspiring. When you are feeling down about yourself, you know, think about what they're accomplishing and what they're facing. So check that out. IMTCVA.org/disabilities any little bit you can throw in or help, or if you're really flush with cash, you can sponsor a person yourself. That'd be really something you can be proud of.

[00:32:06] Ok, last question Tom. I'm planning multiple websites selling completely different products. Do I have to get a separate cart for each one? Well, with a good cart, the answer is no, with a few caveats, and I probably have 70 seven zero different websites going through just one account on kickstart cart because it runs on its own server. You do not have to install it at each website. It just connects to each website or each product and different pages on your website, with the with links, so I can be selling bras on one hand and Bibles on the other, and the people don't know anybody that buys one doesn't know about the other. And by the way, I'm not selling either because I do have a good bra story from my eBay days. But anyway, yeah, you don't have to do that.

[00:33:08] And in other places, you would you'd have to. It would be such a nightmare because I told you about the trouble with having separate databases, so you'd have they wouldn't cross over if the if the products are completely different, but the management of multiple websites. Oh my God, you'd have to have either be massively analytical and organized. It's just crazy when you can do this with one cart and no, no extra expenses. Now here's the caveat you have to have the same logo on each cart and and you need to. Usually you want to keep that generic on the checkout page because one thing you absolutely have to be sure of is that people recognize the charge when they when they see it on their credit card statement could be 30 days later. See, so I just keep my generic Antion associates and in many of my auto responders on products that they wouldn't necessarily know me, like my wedding speeches and wedding toast and eulogies. Those people don't know me. They're just desperate to get a wedding speech or a eulogy done. So. So I might put in the auto responder, thank you message. Hey, remember your credit card is going to show up as Antion Associates, Anchor Publishing or whatever it is, say. And so that's a critical thing when you have multiple websites, but it's a big bonus because you can be making money with all kinds of stuff.

[00:34:45] I mean, you know, I have tennis stuff, I have protection dog stuff. I have entrepreneurship stuff, internet marketing, public speaking stuff, self-defense stuff copywriting, you know, so all kinds of things I sell, but it's all going through one cart now. The other caveat besides the logo and that they recognize who they're doing business with is that you can only deposit the money into one business checking account. I mean, to even get a merchant account, you have to have a business checking account. But but you can only have one. It can't, you know, you know, a lot of people say, Well, can't we split this with my buddy? And he has a different business. No, he can't. I mean, that's a legal thing. People have to know who they're doing business with. These have not stopped me from having all kinds of things that I sell. So that's the only caveat. But you know, with this cart kickstartcart.com, you can have lots of different websites going through it, but you just want to make sure people know who they're doing business with because if they don't, what happens is, is I mean, it happens once in a while with the eulogy book that people are distraught. They're probably crying when they bought it, and then they forget all about it. And then they see a charge from Anchor publishing some 30 days later, and they might call their credit card company and do what's called a chargeback.

[00:36:12] So I don't recognize this sale. And so I get this notice, and then I have to call them and remind them it was about the eulogy book. And then they apologized to me because they were distraught. And, you know, just, you know, it's touching, but it's just something you don't want to mess with. All right, well, that's my story, I'm sticking to it, make sure you check out episode 10, which is very in-depth on this and check out the new blog posting IMTCBLOG.com/26things and also sign up for your free trial at KickStartCart.com. Once you have the cart, once you commit to the cart we like, I said you don't have to worry about figuring things out. We get on the phone with you. Get on Zoom. We show you where to click. You know, you have to do some basic setup of ordering, you know, some messages. And when people buy stuff and and how to put products in and how to do all this stuff. Usually it's not just one session. We might do half hour to an hour and then you go back and play with a little bit and then we do the next, you know, usually three or four sessions, you're you're up to speed as good as me. So check it out. That's kickstartcart.com, and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.
 
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