Aaron West ⁽¹¹¹⁾

Aaron West

Discounts Are a Loan Against Your Margin

A discount feels free to give, and that is exactly why it is dangerous. It is a loan against your margin, and like any loan it gets repaid: in the margin you hand over, in the reference price you quietly reset, and in the customers…

Aaron West

Gift Cards Are a Cash-Flow and Acquisition Tool, Not a Stocking Filler

A gift card is two valuable things at once, and most stores treat it as neither. It is an interest-free advance, a customer paying you today for something you deliver later, and it is a customer-acquisition tool, because the person who redeems it is often…

Aaron West

The Down-Sell Nobody Offers (and Why It Saves the Sale)

Almost every online store has an upsell. Almost none have a down-sell. We pour energy into getting customers to spend more, the upgrade, the add-on, the bundle, and we completely ignore the move that saves the sale when a customer is about to spend nothing.

Aaron West

Upsell, Cross-Sell, Down-Sell: The Three Moves Most Stores Get Wrong

Raising the average order value, getting each customer who already chose to buy to spend a little more, is usually the fastest and cheapest way to grow an e-commerce business. You are not paying to acquire anyone or convince anyone, you are making more of…

Aaron West

The Thank-You Page: Where Conversion Ends and Retention Begins

The moment right after someone buys from you is the single highest-trust, highest-goodwill moment you will ever get with that person. They have just said yes. They have handed over their card, their email, their address. Their guard is down and their momentum is forward.

Aaron West

Retention Metrics That Actually Predict Growth

The cornerstone of this pillar ended on a deceptively simple instruction: do the work consistently, and measure it. This is the reference for that last word. Retention has a long list of possible metrics, and most teams fall into one of two traps with them:…

Aaron West

Cashback, Loyalty, and the Overlap Where Money Quietly Leaks

Cashback sits in a strange place in how you run a store, because it shows up in two completely different parts of the business that rarely talk to each other. In the affiliate channel, cashback sites are publishers, third parties who send you customers and…

Aaron West

The Engagement Trap: Why "More Emails" Is Not a Retention Strategy

When retention numbers are soft, the most common reflex in the building is also the most damaging: send more emails. More newsletters, more promotions, more "we miss you" nudges, on the theory that more contact means more engagement means more sales. It is intuitive, it…

Aaron West

Automating the CRM Lifecycle: The Customer Motions That Should Never Be Manual

The cornerstone of this pillar made one demand that quietly does most of the work: decide what should happen next for each kind of customer, and then do it consistently. That word, consistently, is where almost every retention effort falls apart. The welcome that goes…

Aaron West

CRM Is Not Software. It's a Discipline

Here is a scene I have watched play out more than once. A team decides they need to "do CRM." They evaluate platforms, pick one, pay for it, migrate their customer data into it, and tick the box: we have a CRM now. Six months…

Aaron West

Reviews Are the One Voice on Your Page a Shopper Trusts More Than Yours

There is exactly one voice on your product page that a shopper trusts more than your own, and it is not yours. It is other customers. Everything you write about your product, however honest, carries an unavoidable discount in the reader's mind, because they know…

Aaron West

Payment Friction Is the Last Gate, and the Most Absurd Place to Lose a Sale

The most absurd way to lose a customer is at the very last step, when someone has chosen the product, accepted the price, filled in their details, reached for their wallet, and then cannot pay the way they want to. Every other lost sale is…

Aaron West

Site Speed Is a Conversion Tax You Pay at Every Stage

Site speed is not a separate conversion problem you can deal with later. It is a tax applied to every stage of your funnel at once, quietly shrinking the result of all the other work you do. A slow site loses people at discovery before…

Aaron West

Trust Is Not a Badge You Add to Your Checkout

The moment a customer is about to type in their card number is the most anxious moment in the entire buying journey, and it is where a surprising number of otherwise-willing buyers quietly back out. Around a fifth of shoppers have abandoned a purchase specifically…

Aaron West

Guest Checkout and the Tyranny of the Extra Field

Two of the most damaging things you can do at checkout are entirely self-inflicted, and they come from the same mistake: putting your convenience ahead of the customer's. The first is forcing people to create an account before they can buy. The second is making…