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If you’re selling creams, soaps, hair or other skin care products online, one of the highest-impact ways you can increase sales and conversion is to address common customer objections.

In this overview, we’ll dive into how you can empathize with customers, address their concerns head-on, and, as a result, sell more skin care products.

Welcome to Ask Shopify, a series where ecommerce experts tackle real questions from store owners who are trying to launch, build, and scale their stores. We’re here to help with every aspect of your store, from marketing to HR to accounting.

“What’s the number one thing you wish more ecommerce entrepreneurs knew about your discipline?”

That’s the question I posed to 19 world-class conversion rate optimization (CRO) and growth experts.

From growth heavyweights like Sean Ellis and Noah Kagan to optimization legends like Joanna Wiebe and Peep Laja, the responses came flooding in.

Before you spend another dollar, another minute on traffic acquisition, hear what these experts have to say. By optimizing your site for conversions, you can increase your revenue without increasing your traffic.

Before you buy something in a brick and mortar store, you interact with it. You test drive cars, you touch blankets, you smell candles.

In ecommerce, that interactivity is missing, which puts a lot of pressure on product photos to fill the void.

Fortunately, your brain can process images in as little as 13 milliseconds. It can remember more than 2,000 images with 90% accuracy over the span of a week.

So, product photography can be used to persuade, influence, motivate, and direct attention. Product photos are lean, mean selling machines and they deserve your undivided attention.

What sites are referring traffic to your store? Where in the world are your visitors? How did your Black Friday Cyber Monday marketing campaign perform last year? What products are people searching for most?

You have a lot of questions about your business, your customers and your marketing efforts.

Fortunately, answers to many of those questions are in your Shopify reports and analytics.

Understanding psychology is the key to understanding decision-making processes. Often, what you think you know about how decisions are made and why conversions happen isn’t so black and white.

Many people think a logical argument with facts, figures and product specs is the best (and only) route. The truth is that the brain is quite emotional.

A better understanding of how the brain makes decisions and how emotional persuasion works will help you improve conversions (and your bottom line).

We like to think we’re rational people making rational decisions.

We pore over the data in our analytics dashboards, looking for trends among our customers. We carefully weigh the pros and cons of our own purchase decisions, arriving neatly at a logical choice.

Right? Wrong.

The truth is that the human brain is incredibly complex, contextual and emotional. There are dozens and dozens of cognitive biases, for example, influencing every decision you and your customers make.

Here’s everything you need to know about some of the most common biases (and how to use them to your advantage).

Google Analytics is like an iceberg. 91% of it is below the surface.

So, when you’re browsing around the standard reports, checking your monthly visitor count or your daily revenue, you’re only getting about 9% of what Google Analytics has to offer.

The rest is hidden below the surface, just waiting to be discovered.

One of the best ways to start exploring the Google Analytics iceberg is through segments, both simple and advanced.

When running an ecommerce store, it’s easy to forget that visitor #3456 is a real, live person. A person subject to cognitive biases, persuasion techniques, psychological theories, etc.

Having a basic understanding of some of the most popular persuasion techniques can put you ahead of the competition. You’ll have insight into how you can turn theory into practice, science into cold, hard cash.

Here are 13 persuasion techniques that will give you an unfair advantage in the most important battlefield of all: the human brain.

When you open Google Analytics, what do you feel? For many people, the answer is “overwhelmed”. There’s a lot of data sitting in those reports, just waiting to be analyzed.

The problem is that those overwhelmed marketers and business owners end up poking around a few default reports, recording some monthly metrics, and leaving until next month.

Going beyond those out-of-the-box, default reports to custom reports, advanced segments and custom dashboards can help accelerate your store’s growth.

Feeling less overwhelmed by the data, you can focus on what matters instead of burying your head in the proverbial sand. You can zero in on the insights that’ll drive smarter business decisions faster.

Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, once said, “UX is everything. It always has been, but it’s undervalued and underinvested in.”

Ecommerce UX is no different. Stores pour thousands into Facebook ads, into product research, into design. Yet, UX goes undervalued and underinvested in.

It’s a big problem. One that affects your visitors, your customers, your profits. One that affects you. Because if you’re not optimizing your ecommerce UX yet, know that your competitors are.