Bonus Episode: Keeping Ecommerce Layouts Simple And Shoppable with Shawn Khemsurov

Shawn Khemsurov is the Co-Founder of Electric Eye, a Shopify design and development agency, and a Partner at Feel, a brand studio where art meets commerce. With over ten years of experience in fashion retail, Shawn has worked with iconic brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap Inc, Nike, Homage, and Only NY, spanning everything from digital experiences to product design.

Shawn’s journey started in retail, where he immersed himself in the many facets of the industry: from visual merchandising to customer experience, giving him an ability to understand exactly what his clients need. He combines this insight with design expertise to create unique, engaging experiences that drive sales and build brand loyalty.

Whether you’re running an Ecommerce brand or building your first Shopify store, Shawn offers a candid, insider look at what it takes to create digital experiences that sell and delight customers.

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

• [00:44] Intro
• [01:18] Avoiding hiring the wrong designer
• [02:34] Identifying gaps in specialized expertise
• [03:39] Assessing designs for sales potential
• [04:29] Evaluating expertise before hiring partners
• [05:06] Balancing creativity with usability
• [09:02] Providing consulting upfront for clarity
• [11:19] Avoiding overloading the homepage
• [14:42] Focusing on what users actually see
• [15:26] Choosing the right theme upfront
• [16:38] Collaborating with competent developers
• [17:29] Balancing custom design and Shopify

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect
• Brand studio and creative partner feel.studio/work 
• Follow Shawn Khemsurov linkedin.com/in/shawnkhemsurov/ 

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Transcript

Shawn Khemsurov

You don't need 20 sections on the homepage. Nobody's going that far. Nobody's reading it.  Keep it tight and well performing and fast versus just throwing the kitchen sink in there.  

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, welcoming back to the show the most frequented guest at maybe 3 or 4 appearances. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Oh man, that's crazy. I never would have thought.

Chase Clymer

Yeah. My business partner, Shawn Khemsurov. How are you doing, Shawn? 

Shawn Khemsurov

I'm doing pretty good. How are you? 

Chase Clymer

I'm doing great. Let's give the folks a fun fact. What is a weird band you saw in high school?  

Shawn Khemsurov

I saw a bunch of bands in high school. Geez, I don't even know. I saw Cradle of Filth.  

Chase Clymer

That's a fun one. So for those that listen and don't really pay attention, me and Shawn are big metalheads. The agency Electric Eyes is named after a Judas Priest song. That's enough about us. Shawn and I have an idea we want to talk about today that came from our project manager, Andrew. And it's a common thing we run into. It's hard to just quantify it down to one thing. But I guess oftentimes, we get brought into projects a little too late, I'd say. Right, Shawn? 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

And this has a lot to do with choices that were made before we got involved. And how those. They're not all design choices, but it is all about how you could potentially be led astray by some of those choices. So where do we think we want to start here?  

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah. Let's just go through. Picking the wrong designer is the biggest issue. We've had people come to us, clients, potential clients, and they say, like, “Oh, we already have a design. We just need development,” “So I already have this thing. It's good to go. I'm just going to hand it to you and you can develop it. That's going to be the store.” 

Chase Clymer

Can I ask you a question? 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, go ahead. 

Chase Clymer

Has it ever been good to go? 

Shawn Khemsurov

No, never. Never in the history of life has it been good to go. 

Chase Clymer

What are they giving us? And what are they pretending is good to go? And let's just go back. This isn't., this is less. We're not saying these people are wrong or we're not trying to imply that it's just that they don't understand how much work actually goes into building an Ecommerce site and all the sections and stuff that's needed there. So we're trying to say anyone's dumb. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Well, it also makes sense because yeah, you're like, oh, let me find the best designer because I want a beautiful looking website. So the intention is correct. And sometimes I'm not saying it's going to be 100% of the time. Sometimes it could work. But I'd say the biggest issue there is that the designer, while they may be amazing and have great aesthetic, great taste, they might not know Ecommerce specifically. And that's where things go south, I would say. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. So quite often, what we are delivered when they said we have a design already, quite often it's a homepage. It is maybe an about page design, maybe a product page design. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

And they say it.  

Shawn Khemsurov

I mean, we've also seen stuff that was fully fleshed out, I would say as well. So it kind of runs the gamut. But at the end of the day, yeah, it's like slim chance  that if a specific Ecommerce agency didn't take part in the design, that there's going to be things missing or just designed in a way that doesn't lend itself to maximizing sales. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. So I'd say the first major mistake in the design process would be choosing a designer or a partner that doesn't have specific Ecommerce UX experience. Because even a great designer, if they aren't familiar with what you're trying to display on screen for a shopping experience, they're gonna design something pretty. But it's gonna be probably at the detriment of conversion. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Absolutely. Sometimes they don't even design something pretty. So then you're really missing out on everything there.

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I've seen some things come in where there's like. It's overly designed and there's way too much going on in the way of  adding friction to the shopping experience. Extra pages that should just be collections. Pages that honestly should just be the product page but aren't for some reason. 

And it's just a lot of interesting choices. And I could almost see why these pages get designed when someone doesn't know Ecommerce and what the templates are that they're supposed to be designing for. I could see how they could get there. If they're used to designing for catalogs or for informational websites. But sometimes we have to come in and  push back a little bit and be like, these are not there yet. Who's going to fix them? 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, or you'll be missing something simple, but then they'll have the checkout redesign, which doesn't really need to do with Shopify. So things like that. I saw some pretty funky stuff. I guess another thing that happens is people want to reinvent the wheel and they'll have crazy layouts with the purchase area on the left side, imagery on the right. Well, sometimes you can push the envelope a little bit. You want to do that with your branding and your colors, typography, content.

You want to have cool video imagery. That stuff is all awesome and enhances the site. But making things different from your normal Ecommerce shopping experience just for the sake of it, I think will hurt sales in the long run because  unfortunately, people are very used to the Amazon shopping experience. And so not to say you have to copy Amazon in the least bit. Please don't do that.

But unfortunately, that's just how people shop online. It's the biggest website, biggest business. So people are used to it and they want that sort of experience. So the more outside the box you go on layouts, in the UX flow, I think the further away it gets from being easy to shop. 

Chase Clymer

I don't even think it's what they want. It's just psychologically they..

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah.

Chase Clymer

Expected. They have been taught this is how you buy stuff on the internet. And so anytime you break that pattern, you're introducing friction into the process  and your brand could be great. But no one listening to this show is Nike or Apple or Coca-Cola. If you are a true household name, you can break the mold and do whatever you want with your UX experience because you have that much trust built in. 

But when you are a startup trying to find a product, market fit, break the mold, get in there and just find customers. The journey that people expect on an Ecommerce website is not a place for you to take chances. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Can you ever really afford to lose customers? Some of the big dogs, they're doing the same nonsense. I can call a couple out right now but I hate shopping at Uniqlo. I think Zara as well. These are huge companies that have access to the best people, designers, CRO, everything. It's just that the sites are basically un-shoppable. And if we had the store here, I'd probably just go to the retail store. But this is happening at all levels from startups to enterprise level, unfortunately. 

Chase Clymer

Let's go back to the precipice or why this idea is always in our head. People come to us and they either want to use another designer or they already have something designed. And we don't necessarily have a problem partnering with other designers if we can vet them ourselves and say, here's our process. Will you work with our process? 

Shawn Khemsurov

Your consulting a little bit upfront helps. So that's happened before where someone said, yeah, I have my designer. I want to do this project with them, but we need a little help from you on a consulting level just to make sure we're not making mistakes. That's perfectly fine. And that has been successful in the past. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, that's how we'd love to see it if we weren't the ones that were going to design it ourselves. If it's the other side, if people already just go out and get designed. We already talked about some of the worst case scenarios. These people don't have that Ecommerce experience at all. So you get something that's weird. But also, oftentimes, it's just so much stuff's left out. And we already talked about that. But we've gotten it to where there just isn't a mobile view. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, definitely. Receiving a Figma file full of desktop designs. I mean, that's cool. It's a good start. But then, yeah, you're leaving. You're doing desktop first, which should be mobile first. It's very hard to design a mobile first, even though I'm guilty of it because it's not as exciting. It's smaller. But at the end of the day, we have clients that are 90, 95% mobile traffic. 

So if you're sitting there designing for the desktop, you're really missing out on 90% of your customer base and how they like to shop. So you really want to focus on mobile navigation. Just making things easy, making sure that your imagery is on the product page. If you're changing variants, you can still see the image. There's tons of things. But mobile first, mobile friendly. That's the way to go. Don't skip out on that. Don't let your designers skip out on it. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And here's the thing is like all these things need to get done. And I've seen it, some situations and this is very important. It costs money to have someone do this, be it us or your previous designer. And it's like, who is responsible for creating these things? Because no one's going to take just a desktop design and just develop that and make guesses to what it should do on mobile. Because it's not going to be what you think it's going to be. And so that's a corner that should not be cut.

Shawn Khemsurov

That's going to create a bunch of extra testing at the end and QA issues. And then you have the mobile design. Oh, I didn't know that was going to render like that or that it should be a carousel. So I mean, just do it up front and save the headache. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Put some time into it. 

Chase Clymer

This goes into that with these design choices that are being made without the input of development is functionality that is designed into the theme. And it's like, well, how are we solving for that functionality?  And that opens a big can of worms, especially  bundling or upsells or cross-sells. A lot of that functionality. One, you don't want to build it custom for your site because you probably want the ability to change that offer at some point. But two, all of them are different, how they work and how they integrate with the Shopify theme. 

And so just having someone design for, let's say, a build-a-box functionality without understanding what technology is going to power that build-a-box functionality, that's going lead to some very interesting conversations about how to solve for that, how far off from the design it's going to actually end up, and just actually how to successfully achieve that goal. 

Shawn Khemsurov

All right. Yeah. I mean, another one. I see a lot is just overloading the homepage. So I mean,  the Shopify themes are awesome. They have a huge plethora, the nicer ones do at least, of sections. And so you get onto the homepage and you're designing, you're utilizing some of those beautiful theme sections and there's 25 and you put all 25 on the homepage. 

So from testing in our experience, people rarely make it down, I would say, a quarter of the site. Some probably don't even make it down 10% scrolling down the homepage. So you're just really putting extra stuff in there because it's there, not for any reason. I think you want to have a really nice homepage structure, starting with a hero, a nice hero image called action.  

Then you want to get down into some of your collections, featured collections, bestsellers by category, then maybe you want to dig a little deeper into featured products. You might want to explain your story a little bit. Your About Us with links out. But you don't need 20 sections on the homepage. Nobody's going that far. Nobody's reading it. Keep it tight and well performing and fast versus just throwing the kitchen sink in there. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I think that people don't realize how quickly their customers are going to the next page from visiting the homepage. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Absolutely.  

Chase Clymer

Most of them are just seeing what's in the viewport before they go shopping for the collection that they want to shop. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah. There's  ADD just moving, buzzing right through the site. So not watching your slideshow.  

Chase Clymer

Oh my gosh. Homepage sliders still exist.

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, everybody asks for it. I want to get a couple, 2-3 images in there just to show everything. 

Chase Clymer

No one's gonna see it. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Nobody's gonna sit there and watch and wait 8 seconds for your slideshow to change. So it's not happening. 

Chase Clymer

You mentioned just a second ago, these themes have a lot of sections, etc. That is also sometimes something that isn't considered or thought of when people are designing. And also, if you have that foresight, it can make a lot of these missing elements a lot easier later on. If that is known by everyone on the team as to how we're going to solve stuff, but also anything in the future that's unknown, it can also make things a lot easier. Just make sure you're choosing the right theme and have it considered in the entire process.

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, that would be huge. Just ignoring the fact that you're probably going to start from a Shopify theme. I mean, you can do it fully custom, but that could potentially, depending on your level, be another mistake. But utilizing, figuring out the theme first, it would be huge. And that way you can  leverage a lot of that stuff that's pre-built. You can still change it. You can customize it to your liking, but it's going to save you a bunch of time and energy, just by utilizing some of the pre-built sections, or at least knowing  what you have available in the future. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. So that's something that we've come into some of these projects, like we said earlier, where they've got some stuff designed, some stuff not designed. And we'll be like, hey, what theme are you going to use for this? And they don't really care or know. And we're like, okay, well, this one looks closest to what you have designed.

The design of this is not easy, but straightforward to manipulate with a competent development team. So we can kind of solve these design things. But also, let's just all agree to also just let the default of everything else be the rest of the stuff that you guys drop the ball on designing, I guess. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, exactly. There's something there that's beautiful about the themes. There's a way to solve everything. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And so when Sean and I do tackle more custom projects. I guess what would be the preferred method of doing this, What's that process look like? 

Shawn Khemsurov

Hiring us. Yeah. I mean we would want to start from the beginning. Do some discovery, figure everything out. Have a clear idea of the site map and what we're doing. Pick the correct theme to start with. And then from there, depending on the level of customization needed or budgeted for as well. We're either going to design within the theme or we're going to bust out a Figma file, do the design, get approval, and  then move into development and launch.  

Chase Clymer

Yeah. it's definitely just a module, I think is the correct term. Shopify is getting sections everywhere and stuff. Modular.  

Shawn Khemsurov

Modular?  

Chase Clymer

I don't know, man. But yeah, it's like the conversations do get a little bit deep and you have to. You're almost getting down to this section on this page is going to be customized or it's going to be what's out of the box with the theme, just so everyone's on the same page. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, definitely. 

Chase Clymer

It takes a little upfront work, but then everyone knows later on. And then the advantages of using an off-the-shelf theme from the Shopify ecosystem. And we're not talking about a free theme, by the way. We're talking about spending a couple hundred bucks on these things. It will save you just so much headache and time and energy. 

Shawn Khemsurov

I didn't clarify that. Spend a few hundred bucks on it because there's definitely a range. I think I've been checked recently, but there are themes that are free. There are a couple hundred. There are around 400.

It’s not surprising that we tend to lead people towards those premium themes that are up there. Like 400, 500 bucks. I mean, at the end of the day, you're getting so much more with those. You're getting performance, you're getting sections, you're getting a team that has a lot of foresight and thought put into those themes. 

And it's worth the extra couple hundred bucks not to just skimp and just get a great theme by a trusted developer. You can always ask us if you have questions about that. We have specifics that we like. We've probably talked about it in other podcasts. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Just a quick advertisement for my previous appearances. But yeah, picking the right themes is clutch. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. So just to rehash this in one or two sentences, it's like, if you are going to be redesigning your theme or designing your store for the first time, make sure A, you're choosing a partner with Ecommerce experience, specifically design experience, and development experience. They know Shopify's ecosystem. If they've never designed for Shopify, you need someone that knows Shopify to be consulting on this thing for sure. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah. Doesn't even matter if it's a freelancer or an agency. I would just look at their portfolio, look at their work, make sure they've done really nice looking Shopify stores that work well and are fast. So that's the way to go.  

Chase Clymer

Yep. From there, choose the right theme. You're going to be spending at least $400 here probably,  which is going to save you money later on. So much money later on because here's the thing that a lot of people overlook and now I'm going on tangent. I know I said I was gonna finish this episode. But if you don't design for it with. If you're doing a custom design and a custom development project.

One, Shawn already alluded to it. Probably not the right choice for people making less than $5, maybe even less than $10 million a year. That's just a technical debt that you don't need. You just use a theme that's been vetted by tens of thousands of stores across the ecosystem. 

But I digress. If you don't design specifically for those additional looks or edge cases, say for a new sale that's coming up or just a complete new functionality that's in the pipeline. Now you have to hire a development and designer team to do that again if you're on custom verse. That stuff might be caked in already to a theme off the shelf and it just gets you to that solution faster. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, absolutely. I think we could go on this topic for a long time. But I don't know if you want to keep going or cut it off for now. It's up to you. 

Chase Clymer

No, let's wrap it up. Let's let these people know. Alright, so if you guys are out there and you're thinking about redesigning your Shopify store, come up in 3 different ways. 1. You're on Shopify, you don't like what the current look is. 2. You're on a different platform, you're looking to migrate to Shopify. 

That's a great time to redesign your site. Why inherit bad choices from your previous  platform? And then 3. If you're looking to open a new store. But in all 3 of those  processes, there is design involved. And then how that design integrates with Shopify ecosystem and apps and just the themes and how all that stuff functions. That takes someone that knows what they're doing. 

Shawn Khemsurov

Yeah, definitely. I would hire at least someone with the Ecommerce experience. You can always talk to us. We'll take care of you and make a beautiful Shopify site that performs well and makes sales. 

Chase Clymer

That's the goal at the end of the day. Shawn, thanks for coming on. I'm sure I'll have you back in a couple months. 

Shawn Khemsurov

I'm down. Always down. Thank you for having me.

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at https://honestecommerce.com/ to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!