Ecom Growth Insider · Podcast episode

Nizar Abdul-Halim: Liquidate the Acquisition Cost at Checkout

With Nizar Abdul-Halim · Published 2026-04-13 · 51 minutes · Hosted by Andrej Tumachowitsch

Nizar Abdul-Halim: Liquidate the Acquisition Cost at Checkout

Nizar Abdul-Halim has spent close to a decade in ecommerce, ran his own stores and then an ad agency, and has more than a hundred million dollars of paid spend behind him. What he works on now is the part that starts the moment someone clicks buy.

His case is that post-purchase is the only channel that pays you the same day. Email pays back in thirty or sixty days. A post-purchase funnel adds to the order that just happened, at gross margin, on a customer you have already paid to acquire. He puts the typical contribution at ten to fifteen percent of revenue.

This is for operators running at break-even or a loss on the first order and waiting on lifetime value to rescue it. You get the three layers he thinks about, why he leads with the most expensive offer, the metric he says most brands optimise in the wrong direction, and how far the segmentation actually goes.

What you will take away

• Ten to fifteen percent of revenue, at gross margin. That is the number Nizar uses for what a properly run post-purchase funnel contributes. The percentage sounds small until you notice where it lands: the ads are already paid for and the sale already happened, so it falls to the bottom line rather than the top.
• Revenue per visit is the number people watch. Profit per visit is the number that matters. Chasing conversion rate pushes people to give away margin until revenue per visit looks good and profit per visit collapses. He describes dropping RPV deliberately and multiplying profit per visit in the process. His rough target for RPV is ten to fifteen percent of AOV, so a sixty dollar order should be carrying six to nine.
• Lead with the most expensive offer. Two reasons. It anchors everything after it, and it is the offer closest to what the customer just decided to spend. Build up from cheap to expensive and the buyer gets more price sensitive at every step. His funnels see conversion and RPV rise down the funnel, where most funnels fall away.
• A discount needs a reason attached. What devalues a brand is not the discount, it is a discount with no explanation. The same offer framed as something unlocked, personal, and not available publicly converts without making the buyer feel the price they just paid was fiction.
• Premium brands trade the discount for a gift. Where a brand will not discount, he adds something instead: buy the accessory and the extra item comes free. The saving is real and the price integrity holds. It converts less well than a straight discount, and it still works.
• Five buckets, tested in order. Products and their order first, then pricing and offers, then angles and copy, then the page itself, then segmentation. Only after a funnel is dialled does he split the traffic and run the whole sequence again on each segment.
• The segmentation goes further than most people imagine. Returning against new, what they bought, how much they spent, VIP membership tags. Big brands end up running fifteen or twenty live funnels, each a different customer journey, and that is what separates a funnel that ten times its RPV from one that twenty times it.
• One thing you can do this week. Ask Shopify which product is most often bought alongside your hero SKU, and make that your first upsell. It is data you already have about your own store, and it takes about ten minutes.

Jump to a chapter

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 01:33 - Why post-purchase became the lever
• 02:43 - Break-even on the front end is the norm now
• 04:13 - The first funnels, and eighty brands later
• 05:28 - Email pays in thirty days. Post-purchase pays today.
• 07:29 - The moment the model clicked
• 10:10 - Ten to fifteen percent of revenue, at gross margin
• 12:39 - Liquidating CAC is a goal, not the goal
• 14:49 - When the hero product is not the profitable one
• 17:06 - One-time buyers against subscribers
• 19:33 - What a ten million dollar brand should expect
• 22:09 - The three layers: cart, post-purchase, thank-you page
• 27:02 - Do upsells devalue the brand?
• 30:49 - Premium brands trade the discount for a gift
• 32:19 - Revenue per visit against profit per visit
• 34:47 - Lead with the most expensive offer
• 37:11 - Pricing the upsell against an eighty dollar order
• 39:47 - Subscriptions, and the upgrade play
• 42:25 - Five buckets, tested in order
• 45:39 - How far the segmentation actually goes
• 50:19 - One quick win this week
• 50:59 - Where to find Nizar

Full transcript

Lightly edited from the episode captions for readability. The episode is the record - where they differ, the audio wins. Lightly edited from the episode captions, which carry timings but no speaker labels, so the transcript runs unattributed.

00:00 - Introduction

Welcome back to Ecom Growth Insider, the show where we actually break down what's working to scale ecommerce brands profitably. Today's guest is Nizar, Abdul Haleem. A guy who's been in E Comm for almost a decade, has built multiple 7 figure E commerce brands and spent over $100 million on paid ads for his brands and clients. But what he's obsessed with now isn't paid ads. It's what happens right after the customer clicks to buy.

Because if you break even or even losing money on the first order, Nizar shows you how post purchase funnels can flip your entire unit economics by increasing AOV and first order profit without even touching your front end conversion rate. In this episode, we go deep on his exact system. The three layers of liquidation. Why upsells are a logical yes and not an emotional one. Why he starts with the most expensive offer first.

And how he tests in five buckets to scale revenue per visit and more importantly, profit per visit. If you run a Shopify brand and you want to unlock a real margin without increasing the ad spend, this one is a must. Let's dive in. Hi Nizar. Excited to have you on.

Likewise. Thank you for thank you for hitting me up man. I know it's been a long time in the making and I obviously been moving around a lot but hopefully now we can hop on this and give some people some value. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean You've built multiple seven figure brands before.

You spend more than 25 million on ads. I think probably way more by now. And you're obsessed with what happens after the checkout.

01:33 - Why post-purchase became the lever

What was the moment where you realized that post purchase was the growth lever for brands? Yeah, I mean to give you some context, I mean obviously like you said, I've been in E Comm for almost a decade now, ran up my own stores, ran an ad agency. We spent over 100 million on ads over the last couple years. I mean up until like a couple months ago, we were even spending close to two and a half million a month. So I mean that alone is pretty decent, I would say volume wise.

But the idea of post purchase isn't new. It isn't something that we just found out about. Like ever since I was running my own stores, it was kind of like a default thing everyone did. Like you just set up a post purchase funnel. Now the actual attention to detail that went into building a post purchase funnel, that's the thing that changed because like before, we would just set it up, like put random offers, like anything just to get like a little bit more, even $5 more and call it a day.

But the reality is, is like when I started to work with a lot of these bigger brands, like brands that are spending 50, 60, 70, 100k a day on Facebook, we started to realize that yes, we're willing to lose money on acquisition or break even, especially if you're a supplement brand.

02:43 - Break-even on the front end is the norm now

Almost everybody I know who's doing over a million dollars a month on a supplement brand is running break even or at a loss on the front end and then they recoup all of it on the back end, whether the back end be the subscriptions because that's where they're getting the majority of the revenue, or email marketing for the non subscribers, etc. What we found is when we came in and built post purchase funnels and actually you know, gave this channel the attention it deserved when it came to like proper split testing, genuinely taking this seriously, we were able to not only offset the like break even or loss on the front end like we were, there was points where we were actually profitable. So it changed the Entire dynamic of the business. Because, you know, Initially someone's spending 35, $40 or let's say $60 to acquire a $50 subscription. They're losing $10 plus COGS on the first order.

They have an LTV of three to four months. That's how they're making their money. Now we can make them back $10 from the funnels. And now all of a sudden, they went from losing to making money. Which means on, you know, if we're, if they're doing, you know, 50, 60, 100k a day, that could be easily like 15,000 or whatever, 10,000 orders a day or whatever the number is.

Right. So in that case, you know, they can not only recoup it, but now they're cash flow positive day one. Or if they're at a loss, they can get to break even. Or in general, like, this doesn't work for subscriptions pretty much everybody. But the reality is, is that we kind of saw that on one of the brands we were running.

So we did it on another one and it worked. Did another one and it worked. And then we were like, okay, let's see if people pay for this. So then I started posting about it on Twitter.

04:13 - The first funnels, and eighty brands later

I had one guy, his name is Frank Gabriel. He's one of the first people that reached out to me. We set it up for him. He was one of our first ever case studies as well. We crushed it for him.

He told all his friends, they were all doing like eight, nine figures. They all came in and very slowly, very quickly, sorry. The business grew and it became basically way bigger than what we do now, what we used to do with ads. And now, like I said, we got like, you know, 80 plus brands are doing post purchase for most of them are in like the 1 to 5 million. We have some people doing 10 million, 15 million, $20 million a month.

And post purchase is like a huge lever for them now more than ever because CPMs keep going up. So they have to figure out ways to come combat, like the higher CPAs that they're getting on Facebook. Not just Facebook, any platform, but I mean, Facebook's the biggest spending one. So, yeah, I mean, long story short, we. There was a problem.

I figured out this was a solution. We spent a year and a half testing across hundreds of stores until we became the best at it. And now, I mean, even the software after sell, they send us, you know, eight and nine figure brands all the time. So, you know, they sent us like partnerships like true classic, some of the other ones you see on my page, like huge, huge, huge. Like multi nine figure brands.

And yeah, I mean it's kind of just kind of went from there.

05:28 - Email pays in thirty days. Post-purchase pays today.

Yeah, I mean that's amazing. And I know so many brands that would kill for like to be profitable on the first order or at least to break even. Because yeah, as you mentioned, especially in the supplement industry and especially if you want to scale fast, pretty much every brand loses a lot of money on the customer acquisition and then if they're lucky, they make it back after maybe 30 days. For some it's even 60 or 90 days. And obviously that puts a lot of risk on the business, leads to a lot of cash flow issues.

Like they can't scale up the ad spend as fast as they would like to because they will always need to wait those 60 days, 90 days until the customer comes back. And if you then can plug something in that makes sure that the customer is profitable right away, that's like life changing for them. Yeah, I mean that's also a big thing as well. Like email marketing is very important, don't get me wrong. But the problem with email marketing is that it pays you back in like 60 days or 30 days, versus when you do this, you get paid back now and in 30 and 60 days from emails.

So it doesn't hinder emails. If anything it does better because when you email your existing customers or customers that didn't convert the first time, they're coming in even warmer, they're going to convert higher on those funnels. So what we've seen is the ltv, the lifetime LTV of a customer goes up by like 50 to 100%. When you have these funnels set up properly, where day one you're making 15, 20% more AOV, but then day 60, when they come back from an email and they've already tried your product and liked it, if you have the proper funnel for that now, their AOV is going to be double what it would have been. So that's also a big key part that people don't really think about because everybody's focused on front end.

They just need to scale front end as much as possible. No one's really thinking about the back end. They have all the other stuff that gives them a little bit of money here and there, but like nothing is going to beat post purchase on the front end on day one.

07:29 - The moment the model clicked

As soon as somebody purchases to bump the AOV and increase the profit per order, then post purchase follows. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What Was the moment where like, did you have a moment where it was like, holy shit, this is where I have to go all in on this. This is what really prints money. Or was it like slowly through, like testing it on like a bunch of different brands?

Yeah, I mean, I would say the popularity is very low still. I don't think anybody really is doing it. There's only one guy who ripped my entire website and is trying to do what I'm doing. But you know, he can convince people, but he can't get them the same results. Other than that, like, there was low competition obviously.

But the biggest thing was once I cracked it and I realized how quick it could be ROI positive, like from an ad agency perspective, like maybe if you're lucky, you onboard a client in the first month, you crush it for them, you scale up, spend, everything's great. But that's not usually how it goes. You know, it's usually a couple months or at least like a month or two of proper testing to crack a winning ad and scale. Now some people do it faster, they have better teams, some people do it longer. That's like, you know, we can argue about that all day but.

But the reality is that that's what happens. So, you know, before it was very much like a, you know, two to six month ROI play with a client where they're going to work with us, we're going to scale them up and we do. But again, it takes time. With this, it was a service that I'm providing where, you know, within, with our systems, within 24 hours, they're ROI positive. So from a client kind of relationship standpoint, it's like way better for me than what I was doing.

So that's kind of like the biggest like, aha moment where I was like, like I need to just let, let go of everything, just do this. So that's what initially did it. And then the second thing is like we worked our offer quite a bit and we ended up with a, performance only offer. And that's been absolutely crushing as well. So it is more lucrative, but at the same time it requires a different type of focus than what we were doing with the ads.

So with the ads, like, it was a lot of like creating research and creatives and stuff like that. With this, it's more like human psychology and trying to understand like why somebody's buying and how can we kind of position this other product in a logical way for them to take it and then testing different prices, different copies. So it's like Kind of the same thing. Although the, that you feel the effects of it right away. Like if I launch a funnel and it does well, tomorrow we're making more money.

Not, you know, in six months or three months. Like tomorrow we'll go from $5 to $20. Yeah, the feedback loop is crazy fast. And I assume based on that you can improve and learn. Improve the funnel just way faster.

Yeah, 100%.

10:10 - Ten to fifteen percent of revenue, at gross margin

And you mentioned that it's still a pretty untapped market and I think a lot of brands and a lot of founders still don't have it on their radar and don't spend enough time and effort to improve the post purchase funnel. Like what do you think, what do the founders misunderstand about post purchase? I don't necessarily think they misunderstand. I think they just are way too focused and rightfully so on the front end. Because without the front end, the back end doesn't even exist.

So we have to kind of put that out first and make sure everybody knows. I'm not saying that post purchase files are more important than your ads. Obviously without ads you will have no money to make in the post purchase. However, you know, it's, it's a neglected part because like it only generates 10 to 15% more revenue. But when you think about the fact that that 10 to 15% is at your gross margin, that's when it becomes interesting and that's what people don't really think about.

Now the other thing as well is that they are already investing in ads, they're investing in CRO, they're investing in creatives, they're doing Google, they're doing emails. Nobody's really doing this. Like there was no provider, there was the apps like after Cell, ocu, etc, they come in, they set it up for you one time and then they leave. But again like if it's not required, if they're not doing continuous testing, you're just ending up back at square one, which is basically, you know, you have a half decent funnel and that's about it. And that's not necessarily what we're doing.

What we're doing is like CRO on the back end. So we're constantly testing stuff every single week, split testing pricing, products, angles, copy funnel, segments, like pretty much everything every single week. And I think with a lot of the founders out there, they just didn't really think of it as like a channel that can generate much money. Like I've, I've audited so many accounts. Like we work now like I said with like 40, 50 plus brands are doing over a million a month.

All those people when they came to us would do a million dollars a month on the front end and make like 2k from their post purchase funnels because they were set up by either like an email marketing agency six months ago when they onboarded them or like OCU or aftercell just kind of turned on. Like they just turned like the AI funnel or whatever that is and they're making 2k a month. I come in, build a funnel, all of a sudden they're making 100k, 200k a month from this right away and they're like holy shit. Like why don't we not do this before? So definitely every time I do onboard someone and we do this for them, they realize like holy, like I've been sleeping on this for so long.

12:39 - Liquidating CAC is a goal, not the goal

Yeah. You mentioned before like the, the goal is for, for you or one of the goals is to, to liquidate the, the customer acquisition cost at checkout. In general, like for you, what are the like the success criteria that look for that you look for when you set up like a new post purchase funnel. So it all depends on the business model on the front end. So not everybody is running at break even.

So like for example we work with other people that don't sell supplements and not don't have subscriptions. Like people that sell like home decor items or clothing or stuff that's not on subscription. Like they have to be profitable day one. So people like that, we're more so focused on what are the actual goals the business have. Some of them have so many skus but they only sell two so the rest are all like dead stock that they need to get rid of.

Okay, cool. How can we use post purchase to liquidate all of the dead stock at you know, decent margins so we don't have to run ads to it later a clearance section and lose money for a month just to get rid of it. Right. So because it also what people don't think about is that it also costs brand owners money to just have inventory parked. Like if they're using three PLs, they're paying storage fees.

If they're not, they're just losing money on the money they invested into that stock if they're not selling it. So that's like one way. And another way for example would be if somebody wants to kind of introduce another product line because they have one product line that they're really good at selling but the second product line doesn't get much sales except for returning customers, we can try to use the funnels to potentially get people to buy that second product before having to go through the whole, you know, 30, 60 days and then go through email, etc. So we can bypass that. So then the email could sell them the third thing, for example.

So it really just depends on each brand and what the goal that they have is. But I would say for the most part, if any brand made it to like 1 or 2, 3 million a month, they most likely have some sort of retention figured out and they know how to get people back. So if that's the case, then it's more so liquidating CPA or just increasing profit on the front end so they can spend more on ads.

14:49 - When the hero product is not the profitable one

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I just wanted to say something. Yeah. Because we have a few, A few brands that, where we have like one clear hero product that like, on the outside, we just want to advertise that one product. Product and everything else just.

It doesn't make sense on the front end. But the brand obviously still wants to sell that and they always, like, try to push us to push it more on the ads. But from a customer acquisition standpoint, it just doesn't make sense to push those products. So with those kind of products, I always tell them like, that is something that you need to sell on the back end, either through email marketing, through the post purchase funnel, because for the customer acquisition, it doesn't work, but it's still like an amazing product that the customers wants to buy. Like, want to buy.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, again, it really depends on what their goals are and like, what, what their needs are. Like sometimes we have a client say, I need to get rid of like, the 15,000 units of this product. How can we get rid of it? And that's where we come up with like, you know, similar to how people do like flash sales on the front end.

Like, we'll do like a flash sale on the back end and say, you know, you know, Mother's Day flash sale. Choose any of these and get 60 off. And then we usually do like a three pack or a six pack just to get rid of as much stock and still have margin. So there's a lot of ways to go around it. But, like, it really depends on what the problem the brand has.

Whether it's like, they don't have enough margin or if they have too much stock or if they have very low returning customer rates. Because if they have very low returning customer rates, we need to make as much profit as possible from every single order because otherwise we know we're never getting these people back. Like I work with a lot of people that are like dropshippers, they have like one or two products or maybe just one product and that's it. Like they just know someone's going to come buy this and never buy again. And they're just constantly under the fear that as soon as a CPA goes up a little bit, they are in the negative.

They start losing thousands of dollars every day versus making thousand dollars every day. You can easily bypass that with a post purchase funnel. So what exactly is the difference in strategy that you approach when it comes to like a store that sells that has primarily one time customers versus a store that has like a lot of returning customers?

17:06 - One-time buyers against subscribers

Yeah, so I mean the biggest strategy is going to be around messaging and segmentation. So like if we're upselling for a brand that only sells once, the messaging and everything around the offer that we make, whether it's the same product again or a different product, is more so urgency based in the sense that like this offer will never be here again. You know, this is a limited time offer, etc. And mainly the offer itself, how it's positioned is way more aggressive because we know that they're not going to come back. So like we're just kind of trying to make as much as we can right now because we know they're never going to come back versus somebody who has returning will usually be a little bit softer with the messaging.

And what we'll do is we'll build a different funnel for the returning customers. So then the returning customers will see different offers than the new customers, which means we can now play into their purchase behavior. So if they bought like one product and they came back and bought it again, clearly they like it. Let's upsell them like a three month supply, six month supply or like you know, again, five pack, ten pack, whatever, whatever the case may be, whatever the you know, unit that you use, depending on the brand that you're working on. But the idea is, is like how can we put as much product in their hand right now?

Because even though your cohort analysis may show that a customer like 20% of your customers at month 12 are still coming back. Cool. But that's not guaranteed. So why, why not try to get as much of it as possible every single interaction you get. And then if they stay for 12 months, even better, you just made four times more money.

So that's the difference. Mainly if like somebody I Guess, has like a one time brand or you know, something that comes back. It's just mainly the messaging and how we position the offers. Like we can almost kind of do more of like what we call a Hail Mary strategy on the brands that only have one time purchase. Like oh, like we could pretty much sell them anything because we know they're not coming back versus if there is returning customers then we really have to think about like this person's probably going to come back to this brand.

Like we can't use that type of messaging or that type of offer because it's going to devalue the brand in their eyes the next time they come back. Yeah, so some more aggressive, more direct response style on the one time customers and a little bit more like softer and relationship building on the retention brands, right? Yeah, 100% got it. And I assume it's very difficult because it depends a lot on the brand.

19:33 - What a ten million dollar brand should expect

But going into a little bit more into the specifics, like for a brand that's doing 10 million a year in revenue, like what would you say should post purchase contribute to their, to their revenue or to the results? Yeah, there's a couple of like things that play into that just because if they're on Shopify for example, and they're using After Sell, After Sell doesn't support Shopify markets. So if somebody checks out in any other currency than your default store currency, they won't go through the funnels. Hopefully Shopify will remove that restriction soon and then they'll be able to do it. But right now like it's just out of their hands.

They can't do it. The other thing is Apple Pay and Klarna and any of these other third party payment processors. They're also not supported by After Sell, or any app for that matter, OCU or any other one. Even like specific payment processors like Molly, I think in the Netherlands or ideal, like all those other ones, they don't work either. So you're very much limited to Shopify payments and Shop Pay and PayPal.

Those are the main ones that will go through the funnels. Now in an ideal world, assuming you have a brand doing 10 million a year in the U. S. all your store, your orders are in USD. You don't have any Apple Pay orders.

Everyone is seeing the funnels. You should be able to get 10 to 15% of your revenue, no problem. Like it should probably be more than that but like 10 to 15% of your revenue, no problem. You should be able to get that so easily. Could be One to one and a half million a year, probably even more, like I said.

And that's all at the gross margin. Most people are running at like 70% plus margins. So it's easily like a million dollars a year in profit. Yeah, because the brands have already paid for the customer acquisition and everything and everything goes to the bottom line. Yeah.

Whether they show this offer or not, they already paid for the ads, already got the sale, now they're just tacking on more profit. So yeah, it literally just goes straight to the bottom line. Yeah. So much free money. Yeah.

I mean it's crazy because people don't actually genuinely think about how big this is. Like a lot of people think, oh there's going to be extra like 10k a month, 20k a month. Which to be fair if you're running like worldwide and multiple currencies and multiple payment methods, like yeah, you're only going to get whatever you can get out of it. I would still challenge that because a lot of people's RPVs, which is revenue per visit on the funnels, that's like the main metric people use. Most people's RPV is way too low anyways.

Like some of them have RPVs as low as like 50 cents when their AOV is like $60. Which for context you want to aim for 10 to 15% of your AOV. So six to, what is that? $9 essentially. So if you're at 50 cents like you've got, you've got a 10x from where you are right now.

22:09 - The three layers: cart, post-purchase, thank-you page

So I think that's also another thing that a lot of people don't really think about. Yeah, you you talked before about like three different, three different layers of, of liquidity liquidation. Like one is the, the pre purchase, one is the in cart and checkout and one is the, the post purchase. From, from your experience, what is like the job of each of those layers? Well the ones that are in cart are more so like we don't really play around with them too much just because they affect conversion rate.

So like with our service specifically what I do with post purchase, I remove all the risk both monetarily because it's performance based and just kind of external risk because we don't actually touch their front end. Which means like if their ads were converting at 10%, they're going to still convert at 10% because nothing we do could ever break what's happening on their end already. Right. So I think that's like a big thing to think about but like if I was to just think about it like more so from a strategic perspective. And also don't quote me about that because we might start doing cart stuff soon just because, you know, a lot of our clients are asking us for it.

But we do tell them that this could affect front end conversion. So we have to be careful. But I think with cart upsells you kind of, they, they kind of get, if I had to guess, and also based off some of the testing we did, they almost get considered more than post purchase ones do. And this is, this has to do with like the psychological theory of like the peak of the customer journey is when somebody buys like as soon as they buy the clock of like what's it called? Whatever they buy, like the regret afterwards.

Basically like that starts right after. Which means like basically from that point forward they're already starting to think like oh, I probably shouldn't have bought this or oh, that was expensive. Or even like oh, I can't wait for this to come. So at that point it's like anything else you add on is there's still that high. But the thing is in the beginning when they land on, especially if it's a new customer, cold traffic, they land on your page, you're still building trust.

They add to cart, they get to the cart. The upsells in the cart should usually be there to fulfill whatever offer you have. That's usually the strategy everybody's doing. That's why they have those progress bars and stuff. So those upsells people really look at the price more than anything to see if they will fulfill that goal.

Now after they get past that point on the post purchase side, there's no goal anymore. It's whatever you put in front of them and how you position it. So whether that be a limited time offer where for that month or for that week or for that specific segment, like you know, you're the hundredth customer. Some people do that, you know, strategy. And it does pretty well.

And then the last thing is the thank you page. I think that's what you're asking. The thank you page is like basically after they buy. Usually what we find with the thank you page offers. People that take the post purchase offers don't necessarily take the thank you page.

The thank you page ones we use are for the people that don't see the funnels. Because if they don't see the funnels, whatever currency or whatever, we can still upsell them on the thank you page. Now there's more friction obviously because they have to go through the whole checkout process again versus the upsells within the funnels are one click upsells. So because of that we see a drop in conversion. We see a drop in like the RPV on the thank you page.

But again, like, don't be mistaken by the fact just because it's a drop doesn't mean they don't make a lot of money. Like, you know, we have a brand doing 50 million a month right now where we make over a million dollars a month in the funnels. And then the thank you page as well makes like 200k a month. So still decent amount of volume from there. But again, before us they were probably making like, I can't even remember the number, but it would be like 5 or 10k from their thank you page and maybe like 40k a from their funnels.

So again, it was like they had the smart funnel set up. It just runs whatever RPV they get. They're like, whatever, it's free money. But they about, I think eight or nine months ago. Yeah, almost a year now, they came to us and we started working on this and you know, we took their RPV from like $2 to $3 to $4 to $5 to $6 and now we're trying to crack $7.

So that's basically using the combination of thank you page and post purchase. We're not, we're not touching like the, the cart ones, checkout ones as well. Like that's another thing that you could do. We also aren't playing around that too much just because it's on the front end. And again, it could hurt conversion rate.

But what we've seen is you can kind of carry over the same offer you had in the cart to the funnel, to the, to the checkout. So if it's like, you know, you're $50 away from free shipping, putting that same thing in the checkout right under the shipping where it shows the shipping is $5, then it says there's a progress bar and it's like add this and then the shipping will be free, then they'll do it and then it'll be free. That also works pretty well. So yeah, those are, those are kind of like the main way we would use each one of those ones. Like the cart, the upsells, the funnel, the checkout and the thank you page.

And what would you tell founders that are like.

27:02 - Do upsells devalue the brand?

I think a lot of founders that I've talked to, they're Always afraid of adding like too much, too many like upsells cross sells because they think they are like to salesy or putting too much pressure on their customers and they don't want to like hurt the relationship that they have with them. Yeah, I mean I've heard that before and we tested this now obviously on massive brands. So we know that that's not the case. It's more so of a limiting belief. There's a right way and a wrong way to do upsells.

I will say that there's like people that will devalue their brand with their upsells and not because of discounts, because people think that the discount devalues a brand. That's not the case. It's a like discounts with no context or reason. Like oh, here's another one for 80% off, no reason whatsoever versus you know, because it's Father's Day or you know, Father's day weekend exclusive, buy another one for 70% off today only. Right.

The framing is very different. Or for example like if they bought a product now with after sell, there's a lot of personalization you can do. Like you put their name, you can put their, you know, you put their name, you can put like the product they bought, etc, like it'd be dynamic. So you can basically say, you know, you know, Andre, today your customer number 100 that bought this product and because you did, you're eligible to get another one at 80% off just for you. This offer expires in two minutes or whatever and then underneath you can explain that, you know, we are a brand that likes to give back to our customers and you know, etc like to, to as a token of appreciation we want to offer you this.

Don't confuse this with what you see on the store. You'll never see this publicly anywhere. This is purely just for you. You cannot share it with anybody, take it or leave it kind of thing that makes A, the customer feel like more special and B, doesn't hurt the brand's image where they feel like they got you know, scam because they spent $80 on a hoodie that you're not offering for five versus if there's a reason why it's offered for five. You're like sick.

This is amazing. I like this brand. Like if you went to gymshark to buy a, a workout shirt and they offered you five more for the price of one, just like that, no reason whatsoever. You give me like sick. Good deal.

Take it. But you might Think in the back of your head after like, well, how could they afford to do that? And I just paid $50, you know what I mean? So it doesn't. Versus if you positioned it as like, you know, you unlocked, you know, you have to make it eligible, like why did they unlock it?

Then it becomes more logical for them that like I should seize this opportunity, you know what I mean? And then we've seen this also happen on the, on the retention side when they send emails and then we get those huge spikes in post purchase revenue for those days because they send out an email, people come back and buy. We have returning customer funnels that absolutely demolish all of the, like they get so much stock sold through that every time that they start to realize that people, when they come back they spend more as well. So they spent more initially and they spend more as well. So if anything it actually complements it if it's done properly now, if it's done poorly, I could definitely see how a customer can be, you know, can feel like they were scammed because they bought the first product for 400 and now they're being offered it for 25 bucks.

Yeah, the messaging and the reason behind the offer is super important. I mean it's the same on the ads. You can have very aggressive front end offers and if you communicate it properly you can do it without devaluing the brand. But if you just always have an 80% off, sale running, then people will just assume that's the way it is and that's the brand.

30:49 - Premium brands trade the discount for a gift

Yeah, makes a, makes a huge difference. Yeah. What is your approach when it comes to like more, more premium brands or brands that don't want to do like those, those aggressive discounts, would you say like post purchase funnels also work for, for those brands? 100%? They're not gonna, I will say this very clearly, they will not perform as well as others that do offer more discounts.

That's just the reality of it. You can't upsell someone the same product they bought for the same price. It just, you don't have a good enough reason to do so. Like as in like the customer doesn't have a good enough reason to say yes, so you have to sweeten the deal somehow. What we've done with premium brands is we may not offer it discounted, but you might include a free gift if they take that offer.

So if they buy, if you bought like this DJI thing we're going to give you like this thing's like whatever, 200 bucks, 300 bucks. We're going to give you a tripod for free if you buy the battery pack, for example, in that case. Now the tripod doesn't seem like something cheap because, like, and the discount becomes the value of the tripod, which is probably like 150 bucks. So now they get $150 saving if they take this battery pack with this product. So it's not going to convert as well as if I just offered the battery pack at 40% off.

But it could still perform and it still generates a lot of money. So it still works. It just like, requires a little bit more finesse.

32:19 - Revenue per visit against profit per visit

So just to like, make it actually work properly. Yeah. And how do you find the perfect balance between just like maximizing revenue per visitor but also making sure that the profit per visitor is high? Because obviously you already like, the brand already paid for the customer acquisition and for the ads, but they obviously still have to pay for the product itself. So if you give out, give out like 10 products at 80%, 80% off, the brand might not make as much profit from it.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is actually very interesting because we, the way that we structure our offers, our profit splits for the most part, we do some Rev shares as well, but mainly profit splits. So like with our team specifically, like, we're incentivized to maximize the profit because we get paid a cut out of it. Right. So when we test stuff, we're mainly focusing on how could we increase profit per visit more than we are on revenue per visit.

Usually they go hand in hand, but the biggest player is conversion rate because, like, a lot of people tend to try to increase conversion rate as much as possible. And what happens is they end up lowering their margins so much where now their RPV might be $10, but their profit is like 42 cents or a dollar versus we might come in, drop the RPV to 7 or $5. But now the profit per visit is like $3. 50. So they essentially like 7x their profit per visit by lowering the RPV.

So there's actually a, you can actually track your PPV in after sale if you have your cogs set up on Shopify. We also do it manually with our funnel trackers. Like we built our own. We could just kind of figure out what the PPV is because we ask for our cogs and everything. But in reality the main metric you're focusing on is ppv because sometimes you might be giving up too much margin to increase the conversion rate, and then the increase in conversion rate isn't enough to justify it.

And now you have an inflated rpv, but your profit's actually lower. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you want to test a lot of prices like price testing, offer testing, bundle testing, product testing, all of those to try to find the perfect balance. And then you can use stuff like, you know, the actual copy, the angle, the design of the pages to increase the conversion rate after that point. Because, like, if you found the sweet spot price, now you just want to keep increasing the actual conversion rate.

So it's good for when you're testing to always know what metric you're aiming for first.

34:47 - Lead with the most expensive offer

Yeah. And when it comes to structuring the different offers that you're doing, I've heard multiple different approaches. Like some people, say that it's better to start with a pretty cheap offer to get the person to say yes to commit to it. And then you give the second offer and the third offer and try to get them into the yes loop of just taking everything. And other people say you should do the most expensive offer in the beginning.

And Even if only 10% or 5% of people take it, you massively increase your AOV. And also, in comparison, the second and third offer will look way cheaper, so they're way more likely to take on those offers. What is your, your approach? I'm, the other people, so I'm the ones you're talking about. So all of our strategies involve us upselling the most expensive products first.

So the idea is like, in some cases we'll change it, but in most cases that's how we run it. Because, you know, like you said, as soon as you upsell them the most expensive item, everything else looks like a better deal, first of all. So it price anchors. The second thing as well is that it's the closest thing to their current aov. If anything, when you upsell them, cheaper products leading up to higher AOVs, what happens is like, they start, they start to get more price sensitive every step they go.

Because the last offer they took was $5 or $10, now it's 25, now it's 50 versus if it was 50 and now it's only 25, now it's only 10. It's a very big difference. Right. And we see that that's one of the biggest differentiators between our funnels and other people's funnels, or just like people that set up their own funnels in general, our conversion rate and RPV down the funnel. So from upsell one upsell two upsell three goes up versus most people's funnels go down.

So like they might have the first upsell like 30% conversion, rate $4 RPV. Then their second one's like 10% and the RPV is like $2 and then the other one's like 10%. The arbitrary is like $2 versus ours. The first one would be like 4, second one would be like 8, third one would be like 14 because that's where that's, that's like we're stacking on top of it. Like I would rather the people that say no to the higher priced item, I will downsell them the cheaper one.

But I want the people that say yes to the higher priced item to go through to the next because those are the customers that are worth the most because they will if they say yes to the most expensive one, the other ones look way cheaper to them.

37:11 - Pricing the upsell against an eighty dollar order

They're just going to take them all. Yeah, yeah. Let's say you work with with a supplement brand that does, that has a let's say $80 average order value. Like roughly, roughly. Where would you price the different upsells in the beginning, like when you're just starting out and if you have like no data from, from prior tests.

Yeah, I mean I guess it depends like $80. Is it just one box or is it like a buy 2 get one kind of offer? Or like what's the, Is it just one box for $80? Yeah, I would say, I would say average card size like one and a half, one and a half boxes of like a, a basic protein. So for example, like there's, there's, there's a couple different type people we work with.

So there's like the supplement guys who run like kitchen bundles like setups like buy one, get one, buy to get one and then they usually are on subscription. Then 60, 70 subscribe, the other 40 or 30 don't. And then basically the people that subscribe, we upsell them different products. The people that don't subscribe, we upsell them volume like more. So I guess $80 if they're buying let's say two bottles.

So we would probably upsell them. If they only have one sku one product, we probably sell them two more, then sell them one more. If they say yes, then sell them another one. And then if they say no to the two we'd probably sell them one. That would be one funnel.

We would try another funnel. We would try would probably be like a 3, 6, 12 month supply setup. So we might say here, buy like a 1212 month supply and if they say no, we might say cool, 12 months is a lot. Buy a 6 month supply. Then we might test 6 and 3.

Then if they say yes to the 12 month, we might upsell them then an extra 6 month for a friend or whatever, like a, like a loved one who has a similar issue that they're trying to fix, etc. We use a lot of copy there, like emotional copy around, like help them kickstart their journey because you know, they may not even know they have the problem that they have, stuff like that to kind of build into it. But usually we recommend they have other SKUs to be able to upsell. But the pricing of the upsell, if they have an $80 AOV, like I'll probably start testing around $60, $60 for the, for the first one. And then cheaper ones, cheaper ones, like I'd probably go 60, 40 and then 20 if I could if the margin allows me.

Or I'd probably go, you know, and then downsell will probably also be 40 and then from there I'll just split test. So I might do 60, 55, 57, 52, 49 and then just see where can I get the most amount of conversion rate boost with the highest price possible.

39:47 - Subscriptions, and the upgrade play

Got it. And I assume for the, also like for a subscription brand that sells, for example, the supplement on subscription, you just try to move as much cash forward as possible and sell them like the 12 month, 6 month, 3 month upfront rather than getting them on a subscription right away. Right. Well if they already were offered a subscription and they said no, it kind of doesn't make sense to upsell them again on a subscription. So that's that, that's at least what we've seen so far.

So it's like if somebody didn't subscribe, why would they subscribe now? So the idea is instead if they subscribed you can either. This is something that's very new that we're playing around with right now is upgrade your subscription. So someone subscribes to the monthly. We're like cool, you know, if you want you can upgrade to a quarterly and we'll give you an extra $10 off.

And then they would. Then there's a button now with integration with after sell and I think recharge. I mean they, I shouldn't probably be saying this because like some of it's like still beta mode, but they are going to Launch it soon, I think. So we're testing it on a couple stores, but basically you can upgrade subscription so they go from a monthly to a quarterly. So that same like month when they renew, they'll renew for three months instead of one.

So now the expected cash went from the $30 to maybe the, I don't know, $65. Because now they're going to the quarterly instead of the monthly. So that one also works very well for non subscribers. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to put them on another subscription instead. I would just focus on quantity and focus on like you said, six month, 12 month, three month, two month even.

Like it doesn't just have to be three, six 12, like it literally be two months. It could be one month. You could literally do three. And if they sell us. No, you could test two and then if that doesn't work, you can test one, then you can go two and one.

So again, a lot of it comes down to testing and I think just in general, people just don't do that on the post purchase because like they don't care to. It's just too much work considering they could do that same amount of work on the front end and make more money technically, but it's only more money revenue, not more money profit. Yeah, yeah. I assume the quarterly, like changing them, the subscription to a quarterly basis will have a massive impact on the, on the ltv because obviously you get the quarterly one right away. And then also if it renews after three months, you get another like really big payment.

And you also just move a lot of cash forward. And cash today is always way more worth than potential cash in like three months. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's, that, that's a great offer. Yeah.

42:25 - Five buckets, tested in order

When it comes to the, to the testing, like what is, what do you focus on the most? Is it just like different products, different offers? Or if you like, if you would only be able to test one thing, what would it be? So I'm not really a fan of testing one thing. I like to test a lot of stuff.

We have our own strategy that we developed over the last year and a half now and so far it's served us very well across over a hundred brands. So essentially we test in five different buckets initially. We start with products and within products you can test obviously different quantities, different, order. So like Product A, Product B, Product C versus Product B, Product A, Product C versus Product C, Product A. So you get what I mean, like the order of where that product is, and then the type of product.

So that's the first type of testing that we do. The second testing comes down to pricing and offers. So once we crack those products like those are the product orders that work well. So you'd be surprised sometimes if you just upsell the AirPods before the DJI one, it does bad. But if you upsell this versus this, all of a sudden it works.

So we always want to test all the different variations that are possible. Then when we find the ones that perform the best, the next part is doing price testing and offer testing. So testing different prices, again different offers. Usually we're running split tests, sometimes we have ABCD tests. So like we have four different versions that we're testing at the same time.

So that's also pretty cool that you could do on aftercell. And then basically from that point, once you crack the price or the offer, you can go into the angles and the copy. So that's where like you know, going back to their winning ads, seeing what the winning angle is, what the main desire awareness sophistication, like the more of the ad stuff that we focused on back in the day, we're now using that for our post purchase funnels as well. So we take their ads, we pull the transcripts, we put them into like a cloud that we built that is filled in with all the information from Eugene Schwartz and all the best copywriters for direct response. And we try to pull from those, okay, what's the main desire awareness sophistication of this customer?

Why are they buying this product? How can we position this second product using the copy that we have as the highest priority item they should get next logically. Because what I found is that upsells are logical. They're not like emotional people don't take the upsells because of emotion. They take it because of it being a logical.

Yes. At least that's what our testing has found. I mean there's probably other people that have found the other. Like this is the fun part about econ. There's always one person doing one thing and saying it's the best and then someone else doing complete opposite.

And it's also the best. So the reality is always all the best until you test it. But, essentially that's step three. Step four is the actual landing page ui, like how the page actually looks. This is a secret that I will keep to myself.

But we have ways to build funnels that no one knows how to do it other than us. So we can build funnels that look like Full on landing pages. Whether that's like a, you know, tsl, like a, like a text sales letter, whether that's a advertorial, listicle, three reasons why, whatever the case may be, we could build whatever funnel we want in the, in the post purchase. And that will also help with conversion rate, although it's not as important as the first two or three that I talked about.

45:39 - How far the segmentation actually goes

And the last one is segmentation. So you kind of repeat this process after you segment. Because let's say the brand is selling two products, you have one funnel. Right? Now you're doing all this testing.

Cool. Now you got this funnel dialed in. Cool. Now you can split the traffic into two funnels and repeat the whole process again. Products, pricing, offer.

Because now they're buying something. Like now you control what they bought first. So if they bought this product, this, this, this works best. They bought this product, this, this, this works best. And you can keep testing that.

Then when you finish that, you can go into the next layer, which is, how can I segment this further? By either how much they spent or how many they bought. Like, you know what I mean? Or if they're returning versus new. So a lot of people think that this, this thing that we do is like, we set it up and forget about it.

Like, oh, I'm going to come in and 10x your RPV and then you're just going to, you know, fire me and then leave. And you're just gonna make 10x more money. You could make 10x more money, but you could also make 20x more money if you just keep testing. Because, like, the more of these tests that you crack, the higher the RPV gets, the higher AOV gets. Like, I have accounts that we've been working with, like I said for a year now, or more.

Like I have a specific one that I'm going to do a case study on pretty soon that we onboard them at a $30 RPV. Within the first month we were at 10, which is obviously a big jump. But then over the course of the year, now we're at 20. So, you know, over, over the course of a year they've 20x their RPV or I guess 18x their RPV. But.

Or maybe the math is not adding up, but you get the point. Versus, you know, if they had just let it off there, they would have only 10x and only 10x is still a lot of money, but 20x is a lot more than 10. And it all came down to just Continuously testing and again, just continuously splitting and testing more, splitting and testing more, creating more what we call like customer journeys. Like every customer, if they bought one, they're gonna go through this path. If they buy two, they're gonna go through this path of this product or if they buy three, but one of them is this product, they're gonna do the other path.

So it's starting to look at the order patterns of like what are the most common orders, how are they coming in and how can we then use the winning funnel that we've built to further increase the RPV of that specific path of customer? So if they bought like a water and a Coke Zero, how can we maximize how much they make versus the bought two waters? How much can they make? So you, you start creating all these customer journeys, it starts to look more like a mess. Unless you're the one who built them because there's going to be like 15, 20 funnels live.

But that's the level that some of these bigger brands are operating at. To be making, you know, millions of dollars a month in profit from this. This. Yeah, that makes so much sense. Like to be honest, I never even thought that you could segment the, the post purchase survey to post purchase funnel to that degree.

I mean it makes sense that based on like what the person bought and what kind of products they're they're looking for, they want to, to buy different products afterwards. And also depending whether it's a first time customer or returning customer that you want to give them than different offers. But I think like most founders don't even know that that's possible. Yeah, I mean no one, again, it's not their fault because like it's not the biggest thing in the world. You know, we're still talking making an extra million a month if you're doing like 10 million.

So I mean it's still a million but this guy is making 10 million so like he has more stuff to deal with. But I would say yeah, like you could, you could segment so much like you could do returning customer funnel where the minimum they spend is $60 and they are part of this segment that has this tag. So like we have a client who had like a VIP list. So this is like people that are paying for a VIP kind of membership. Those people, when we upsold, we had returning customer with this tag and then the funnel that we had, everything was discounted more than the normal.

And it was also written on the page that this is a VIP customer upsell only. Don't share this with your friends, don't show this to anybody. This is offers only for you to take. And that, also obviously converts hell a lot better than the normal returning customer. One that's not vip.

So even that, like, when you really start to think about it, it's like, how can we get people to buy more and be happy buying more? You have to make it personalized, you have to make it logical. And most importantly, it has to benefit the customer experience. It can't make it can't negatively impact it.

50:19 - One quick win this week

Yeah. If a founder listening to this once, like one quick win this week, like, what would you recommend to him? Yeah, I'll give him a more detailed one. Go to your Shopify Sidekick AI thing that they now did and ask it, what are the what like based off of my Hero sku, what is the top product that is sold with it? And then put that product as your upsell one in your funnel and you will.

That will be like the easiest way to get more revenue from funnels. Again, that's like the first easiest thing to do. But I mean, that's data driven based off your store right now that you could probably do in like 10 minutes.

50:59 - Where to find Nizar

Yeah. So much free money. Nah, of course there's a lot of money. Where can people follow you and learn more? Yeah, I mean, I've got YouTube, Nizar Abdul Haleem, my name.

I've got, Twitter, Ecom Nizar and I've got Instagram. Nizar Abdul Haleem underscore. Although I am trying to get at Nizar, so we'll see. But yeah, that's pretty much it right now. It's where you'll find me.

I'm posting a lot of stuff. Definitely should be posting more than I am right now on YouTube, but I will be. And I, post a lot of Twitter, a lot of game there. And then also we're going to be posting soon on Instagram. Awesome.

Thank you very much. So much, so much about you and here and yeah, yeah, thanks for having me, bro. Appreciate it.