Business of eCommerce: Recent Episodes
Charles Palleschi
eCommerce tips, tricks, strategies and tactics to help new and experienced eCommerce retailers start, launch or grow their eCommerce Business. If you like eCommerceFuel, Shopify Master, Tropical MBA, Build My Online Store or eCommerce Momentum, you’ll love The Business of eCommerce.
Sam OvettCo-Founder of Mobile Pocket Office
Notes:
5 buckets
AttractConvertFulfillDelightRefer
Bio:
Sam Ovett is the Founder of Mobile Pocket Office. Sam is a professional guide turned automation mega nerd, Mobile Pocket Office is leading the way to help new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity. As a previous professional whitewater kayaker and guide Sam has translated his experience navigating Class V whitewater and mitigating life threatening risks and hazards into the business world. He leads a team of 15 to a profitable bottom line over $1M ARR.
Sponsors:
Spark Shipping
Links:
https://mobilepocketoffice.com
Transcript:
Charles(00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Sam Ovett about using automation to grow your e-commerce business. This is a business of e-commerce episode, 161. [inaudible] Welcome to the business of e-commerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host, Chelsea [inaudible]. And I'm gonna tell you what Sam Ovett, Sam is the co-founder mobile pocket office, where they help businesses grow and streamline using automation. I asked Sam on the show today, talk about using automation to grow your e-commerce business. He goes through a five-part framework. They're really segments, where should we auto using automation, some of the best places. And he kind of has a nice nice way of thinking about it in this interview. As you know, I love talking about automation. So I get, you know, don't, it's not often I get to geek out with someone on the same topic. So I had fun talking to Sam Herr, and I think I think this would be good to listen to, and it gets you thinking about where are some places in your business. You can start adding some automation to really improve the customer experience, not just standard chat bots and that sort of thing that take away from experience to really enhance the experiences, what Sam's in here for. So let's get into the show and listen to what he has to say, Hey Sam, how are you doing today?
Sam (01:28):
Good. I'm excited to be here. I'm hoping we can share some stuff that people can dig into and use.
Charles(01:33):
Yeah. I'm excited to dig out about some automation. This is kind of my thing too. So I saw that and I was like, Oh, let's let's chat about this. So yeah. What are you guys? So mobile pocket office just real quick. You guys help folks automate, is it more on the marketing side typically or
Sam (01:53):
Yeah, so we help people automate their marketing and sales customer journey. That's our core focus and then that's where it starts. So we, the, the big picture view of how we work with people is we look at a business that has a lot of manual steps. Usually people are overwhelmed and they're deciding whether or not to hire more people or to invest in some technology. And then that's usually where the limitations are as well. What do we do? How do we set this up? How do we think about this? So we do a, an engagement with people where we actually like, think about and consult on what is the journey that you want somebody to have. And then from there it's process, and then understanding from the process, what of that can be automated and taken off your plate to create a better customer journey, to follow up with people longer, all those kinds of things. And we can get into the details, but that's the big picture. And then we actually have helped people. We, you know, we do it, we implement it for them.
Charles(02:50):
Yeah. I mean that whole customer journey, right? Like from when somebody first engaged with the brand to, you know, after the purchase, post-purchase all the way down to follow. There's
Charles (03:00):
A lot there. And if you're not, if you're not automating it, it's very easy to go off the rails. Right. Like it's very easy. Yeah.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Usw7BbIx6RQ
Luc SimmonsCo-Owner of Scope16
Notes:
5 KeysTimeConversionOrganicDataMoney
Sponsors:
Spark Shipping
Links:
https://www.scope16.com/https://www.instagram.com/lucsimmons/?hl=enhttps://www.facebook.com/scopem16arketing
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Luke Simmons about the five keys of a successful e-commerce business. This is the business of e-commerce episode 160.
Charles (00:19):
Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow the e-commerce business. I'm your host, Charles Buskey and I'm here today with Luke Simmons. Luke is the co-owner of scope 16, an agency that works with e-commerce retailers to help them scale from six to seven figures, I asked Luke on the show today to chat about what are the five key elements that are required for successful e-commerce business, like how he runs through this list. And they really are all things that you should be thinking about when you're first starting or just trying to scale your business. And he helps to really set some expectations for a lot of retailers, usually early on that kind of starting what they should really be looking at and know what they're getting into. I think anyone starting off this is going to be super helpful. He goes through the five different topics. I'll link to those in the show notes, but let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
So, Hey look, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (01:11):
I'm doing really well. Charles, how are you? Good.
Charles (01:13):
Happy to have you on the show. I think I think this topic is great for people kind of starting off. I see a lot of retailers kind of trying to get going and they kind of get stuck right at that very beginning phase.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Absolutely. Especially, you know, this well, everything that's happened in the last 12 to 18 months, it's definitely, everyone's noticed that, you know, going online and e-commerce in particular has been something that, you know, a lot of people wanted to jump on and take advantage of and you know, don't blame them whatsoever. So, absolutely. I think it's definitely a question that relates to a lot of newbies, if you like, in terms of the e-commerce, I'm really getting their brand up and up and up.
Charles (01:52):
Yep. Yeah. We've seen 'em I know his hair, at least we've seen a lot of brick and mortar retailers in the past 12 months say like, you know, the brick and mortar is just zero. People coming in were shut down to some government you know, the government lockdown sort of thing. We need to do something and we're like, we still have these distributor relationships. We still have all these products. We still have all the stuff we just need to sell it somewhere. So a lot of them jumping online just because of that, but it is different, right? Because let's say you're a brick and mortar. You're used to, you know, putting on your sign, doing your local advertising and you're competing against the people within a X number of mile radius versus you online. Now you're competing against everyone in a it's a niche. So it's like this like virtual radius. And does a mind shift a mindset shift there?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Absolutely. You know, everything from the way that you position yourself as a brand to, you know, even the community, because you know, like you said, brick and mortar, you understand the community that you're living in, you understand what their needs and their wants going online and one competing, but also then trying to understand how your audience can change from whether they're on the East coast or the West coast is completely different. So yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely not something that is just, you know, a quick fix and it's definitely not something that you can just kind of jump straight into it takes time.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/2T14dthjDOc
Michael SeneDirector of Sales at Deliverr
Bio:
Michael Sene is the Director of Sales with Deliverr. He works with more than a dozen fulfillment specialists, oversees the onboarding of all new sellers, and helps those sellers increase revenue through current and new sales channels.
Sponsors:
Spark Shipping
Links:
https://deliverr.com
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk with Michael Sene about how to ship today or next day without breaking the bank. This is a business e-commerce episode 159.
Charles (00:19):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm Charles and I'm here today with Michael Sene. Michael is the director of sales at deliver where they help retailers get faster next day or two day shipping on all their products. I think they're doing something new here, and it's pretty interesting to see how, as a independent retailer, you can actually get next day, two day shipping to try to really compete with the big guys like an Amazon or a Walmart. And this is something that's becoming more and more important in the game of retail. Now folks are expecting it and it's something that people are just becoming very used to. So they've really changed the model they're using technology to do this. I think it's kind of interesting chat to kind of go into how they're doing this and to put some thought into where as a retailer, you want to be now, and in the future, when maybe the expectation goes from two days to one day or one hour, wherever it is. And he kind of talks about that and kind of get you in that mind space of thinking, what do I want to be now and in the future. So it's going to show, so, Hey, Michael, how are you doing today? I'm
Michael (01:25):
Doing great. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
Charles (01:27):
Yeah. Awesome. I have you on, I think this topic is very timely on fast shipping. This is, this is the era of the whole shipping pocalypse where we've seen a lot of people struggle with this. So it's good to kind of talk through this.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So we're talking. Oh yeah. It's it's
Charles (01:45):
I think Amazon, especially this year has kind of got us all addicted to like quick shipping, right? So two day shipping, we talk about that next day shipping. And I think a lot of retailers want to provide this on their own and everyone's kind of struggling to, how do I get from my standard ups ground? You know, that could take a week and try to like, bring that down to close it, to match Amazon or compete. And you can pay that you can pay for air obviously, but doing that affordably, I think it's kind of a trick and I think you have some experience with us, right?
Michael (02:17):
Yeah, I do. I think you bring up a great point just to start. When you think about the problem is you need to do it at a low rate and really fast. And I think everyone's trying to tackle this problem from your big retailer to your smaller Shopify merchants, your e-commerce merchants on marketplace. Everyone's trying to solve this. I think the issue is they're taking at it the wrong approach, right? When you think about it to get today at a low rate, your items need to be in at least four to five warehouses to get next day and same day, your items need to be in 10 to 18 different warehouses. And a lot of large retailers are overly invested in their current setup. That's for retail, right? And the position of their FCS are not in the right places. So, you know, getting to that same day or next day is a, is a massive challenge of capital that you would have to invest in.
Michael (03:07):
And your smaller merchant, you know, naturally wants to do this, but doesn't have the capability. And then when you think about companies that are offering this, you really have, Amazon is the only one.
Jeff OxfordFounder and CEO of 180 Marketing
Show Notes
eCommerce SEO is a different scale and sizeLink build strategiesProduct ReviewsHARO - Help a reporterGuest PostsReach out, send your bioTop blog listsBudget< $100 per link - Bad$200-300 - More common whitehat linksSend examples of past linksAsk if they own the blogs
Sponsors:
PrisyncSpark Shipping
Links:
https://www.180marketing.com/https://linkhunter.com/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business eCommerce I talk with Jeff Oxford about whitehat link building for e-commerce. This is a business of eCommerce episode 156.
Charles (00:20):
Welcome to the business of e-commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi with Jeff Oxford. Jeff is the CEO and founder of one 80 marketing and SEO company focused exclusively on SEO and content marketing for e-commerce businesses. As Jeff on the show today, talk about link building specifically for e-commerce businesses. There's definitely some nuances that make link building different when it comes to e-commerce. So I think he really digs into that and this is his focus. So he brings some great tips that I think really everyone should listen to. It's something that link building isn't talked about that often it's something that I think a lot of folks kind of focus more on the on-page more and some, some other factors when it comes to SEO. But I think link building really is one of the keys to making your SEO strategy work.
Charles (01:14):
And Jeff really goes deep and specific when it comes to e-commerce link building. So I think you should watch the entire show. He gives three strategies on how to build links and some concepts on budget. And we should be looking at if you're thinking of getting into us. So let's get into the show and listen right to the end. He also talks about his product which I think is actually great. You should check out I'll link to in the show notes. So let's get into the show. Hey Jeff, how are you doing today? I
Jeff (01:42):
Am doing great. Charles, how about yourself?
Charles (01:45):
Doing good. Thanks for coming on the show. I've had a few guests there in the past. Talk about SEO, but kind of more of a focus on link building. I feel like that's not something I've touched upon at least here in the past. So I'm kind of excited to get into that aspect of it real quick. First one, any marketing you're the founder, how you've been doing SEO for, for how long
Jeff (02:07):
I would do an SEO for about a decade now, mainly on e-commerce sites. So I'm little side stories. I've built my own in the past, back in like 2012, built my own e-commerce sites, drop shipping sites had success there and then decided just to kind of pursue the e-commerce marketing side of it and focus less on the operations.
Charles (02:27):
How would you say? So when you say you focus on e-commerce, how is e-commerce SEO different than, you know, if I'm a SAS or whatever any other sort of company, how has e-commerce SEO different?
Jeff (02:40):
I'd say the bit, one of the biggest differences is just the scale and size. I mean, of course you can have a small e-commerce site. That's just selling a few products. Maybe they have like a small catalog under 10 products. In which case that's going to be pretty similar to how you'd approach SEO for a SAS or your typical brochure website. We, when you start having a website with, you know, hundreds of thousands of products and dozens or hundreds of categories, it's a whole nother, separate set of challenges. And the biggest difference is just prioritization. Prioritization is super critical. You know, you don't have all the resources in the world to make, you know, optimize every change perfectly. So you have to prioritize, you know, apply the 80 20 rule, which products and categories can bring the most results and traffic.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/z4z8RbHnUUA
Chloe ThomasAuthor & Host of eCommerce MasterPlan
Show Notes:
Think in quartersFocus on 3 thingsTraction - https://amzn.to/3tJZ1Y1The 12 Week - Year https://amzn.to/373dIvkeCommerce Marketing: How to Get Traffic That BUYS to your Website - https://amzn.to/3a8Hy3BProductive Planner - https://amzn.to/2Z4XDRAThe Customer Master Plan ModelCustomer JourneyThemesTrafficConversion RateAOV
Sponsors:
PrisyncSpark Shipping
Links:
https://www.brandox.com/ecommerce-masterplan
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Chloe Thomas about choosing where to focus your time and attention. This is a business e-commerce episode, 158. Welcome to the business of eCommerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow your eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Chloe Thomas. Chloe is an author and the host of the eCommerce Masterplan Podcast, where they provide online training, advice and information for growing e-commerce businesses on the show. Me and Chloe go really deep into the topic of mindset and specifically choosing where to focus your time and attention and how to focus that attention. I think this is super helpful for anyone, and this is a big topic that I think this is often overlooked and it's really one of those things. If you get this right, it doesn't just have linear effects, but it also kind of multiplies and it, it can really move the needle. So super interesting interview is a bunch of book recommendations that I definitely think you should check out and I'll drop those all in the show notes. So let's get right into the interview. So, Hey Chloe, how are you doing today?
Chloe (01:14):
I'm good. Charles, so it was great to be here getting to talk to you about all things e-com
Charles (01:19):
Yeah. I love having also another podcast or on the show. You are the whole, you're an author, right? But also the host of the e-commerce master plan.
Chloe (01:29):
I am, yeah, yeah. Hosted the e-commerce most fun podcast, which is a we're in a few retailers and of the keep optimizing podcast where we focus on a different marketing method each month with mainly supplier side guests and experts. So, so yeah. Podcasting seems to take up a huge amount of my time these days.
Charles (01:47):
Yep. Nice. I like, yes. Well kind of we were talking earlier before the show two ideas and I mentioned kind of the whole going into the mindset and every once in a while, I, I love talking to someone about this exact topic just on, I feel like it's, it's like a force multiplier, right? Like you can talk all you want about like Facebook ads and like that works. But like, if you want to make any sort of large shift, it always comes to changing just like a complete mindset change, a direction change. And the easiest way to do that is changing your mindset about what direction you should be moving. Do you agree? Or,
Chloe (02:22):
Yeah, I think it it's. I mean, I've been been helping people solve their marketing problems in e-commerce and their e-commerce problems in general for about 15, 16, 17 years now. And there's kind of two questions that everything I ever get asked, get boils down to, and one is Chloe, what should I be doing? And the other one is glowy is what I'm doing, what I should be doing, because I think it's, there's so much we could be doing success comes from focusing in on the right things. And unless you've got your head in the right space, you know, you know what you're trying to achieve in your life for your business, you know what your strengths are, your weaknesses on you, what your head in the right place, unless you've got all those things in place, you can't make good decisions about what you should be focusing your time and effort on.
Chloe (03:09):
And it's, it's very easy to spend, you know, an I,
https://www.youtube.com/embed/GyD6cHnjfdA
Dr. James RichardsonFounder of Premium Growth Solutions
Sponsors:
PrisyncSpark Shipping
Links:
Ramping Your BrandPremium Growth Solutions
Bio:
Dr. Richardson is the founder of Premium Growth Solutions,a strategic planning consultancy for early-stage consumer- packaged goods brands. As a professionally trained cultural anthropologist turned business strategist, he has helped more than 75 CPG brands with their strategic planning, including brands owned by Coca-Cola Venturing and Emerging Brands, The Hershey Company, General Mills, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Brands, and Frito-Lay as well as emerging brands such as Once Upon a Farm, Peatos, Ithaca Hummus, Mother Kombucha, Rebel Creamery, zaca recovery, and others.
James is the author of Ramping Your Brand: How to Ride the Killer CPG Growth Curve, the #1 Best-seller in Business Consulting on Amazon. He also hosts his own podcast—Startup Confidential, and his thoughts appear regularly in industry publications such as Foodnavigator.
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Dr. James Richardson about what causes exponential growth. This is a business of eCommerce episode, 157.
Charles (00:20):
Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow the e-commerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. And I'm here today with Dr. James Richardson. James is the founder of premium growth solutions, a strategic planning consultancy for early stage consumer packaged good brands as a professionally trained cultural anthropologist turned business strategist. He has helped wasn't 75 CPG brands with the strategic plans. Some of those brands include read them off air Hershey's general mills, Kraft food. Frito-Lay a list goes on how he's helped a lot of brands. And he's super interesting take on growing the business and what to really focus your time and attention on. And I think that's the big thing here on. If you really want to double down, he kind of talks about here's the exact segment and here's how you should find that segment and who should be focusing on. So I think that part's super helpful on really kind of nailing who to focus on if you want to be able to really scale your business and see that year over year exponential growth. So let's get into the show and I think he has some great tips. Also, he links to his book at the end that we'll link in the show notes. So let's check that out. So, Hey James, how you doing today?
James (01:32):
I'm good. How are you doing Charles?
Charles (01:34):
I'm good. Awesome. To have you on the show to dig into this topic a bit, we're talking earlier about exponential growth and how there's some DCC brands that seem to get it and others wish they got it and others never do. And it seems to be this like magic formula people think, but you've kind of talked about this a bit. So curious to kinda get your thoughts on that.
James (01:59):
Yeah, so I I do work with a mix Adidas C and retail only brands, but I think what I, what we were just chatting about, I think before we hit record, was that I meet a lot of DTC folks who thanks to the internet itself are well-versed in all the KPIs of D to C business management. And they're, they're drowning in data and lifetime value and average order value and all this stuff. They try to measure the health of their business purely within the context of those data points, which are coming in through Shopify essentially. But they're not necessarily asking at any point, even if they're doing well, which is actually just as important. And in my view asking why, why are people repeating what behavioral is attracting them to like constant purchase on a monthly basis or weekly basis, if you're really lucky and you're able to sell like drinks to people or stuff.
James (03:00):
But I mean, if you're not asking the question,
https://www.youtube.com/embed/6JKRRdXpX9s
Jim ColemanCo-Founder of xFusion
Sponsors:
PrisyncSpark Shipping
Links:
https://www.xfusion.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-coleman/https://www.linkedin.com/company/xfusion-support/https://twitter.com/jim_coleman1https://twitter.com/Groove_Jar
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Jim Coleman about how to get started outsourcing customer support. This is the business of e-commerce episode, 155.
Charles (00:18):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps e-commerce retailers to start, launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Jim Coleman. Jim is a co-founder of X fusion where they provide outsourced customer support for e-commerce businesses. I asked him on the show today to talk about if you're a founder and you're thinking of hiring your first support person or outsourcing support, what are some of the do's and don'ts and what are some things you should absolutely do to make your first support hire or outsource successful? You works with a lot of e-commerce retailers. So I think he brings some great advice to the table and has some great tips out. So let's get into the show and if you have any questions, leave in the show notes and I can forward them over to Jim. So let's get into this. So Hey Jim, how you doing today? Good, Charles, how are you? Good. Awesome. I have you on the show. I'm excited to dig into the topic of customer support and outsourcing. It's very near and dear to my heart. So, so real quick, what do you, so you run an agency. Oh, so I was saying support essentially, right?
Jim (01:31):
We do. Yeah, it's called X fusion.io. And we, we provide customer support customer success to founders. We started kind of scratching our own itch. My, my co-founder David and I are both business owners and we built out a team internally on, on each of our companies. And then wanted to bring that to the broader market so that we kicked off mid 2019. And it's been growing since then.
Charles (01:54):
Okay. Yeah. So I feel like support is one of those things where everyone just want to, like the, it's usually one of the first things you see, like you're trying to word this correctly, the biggest time sink at the beginning, where you're just spending a ton of back and forth. And a lot of founders want to kind of get it off their plate early, but I don't think a lot know how or know the right way. Maybe they're like running out of their inbox or just as no docs, just kind of doing everything out of their own head. What do you kind of see that? Do you folks usually come to you at the beginning when, Hey, you know, I'm a founder, I'm doing a hundred percent of support and I want to get this moving somewhere else. So [inaudible],
Jim (02:35):
Well, we have a really nice mix of both. So we have, we have solo founders that come to us and they're just overwhelmed and swallowed up in support requests and other responsibilities. And then we also work with the existing teams to help them scale. I enjoy both, but I particularly enjoy working with, with founders because of the, the wins that we can help them achieve at the earlier level. And, and what I mean is just that we, we like to focus on helping founders get back to the highest and best use of their time. And I recognize that like everybody has to make the decision on like when is the right time to pull the trigger for them. And I recognize that, you know, we have to build up revenue before we have the, the, the bandwidth to be able to hire a team to handle support.
Jim (03:12):
But one thing I'd like to consider is like, if, if you're at that place where you can afford to do so, and you don't, then you're spending a good chunk of time working on tasks that are not the highest and best use of your time. In other words, things that other people can effectively handle ...
https://www.youtube.com/embed/UbnQrRDTuZQ
Jeremy BodenhamerCo-founder & CEO of ShipHawk
Show Notes:
5 API of the ApocalypseAmazonWalmartAlibabaJDShopifyThe Power of HabitGrove CollaborativeParker Clay - Leather ProductsAll BirdsBoneless Knee Pads
Sponsors:
PrisyncSpark Shipping
Links:
Jeremy BodenhamerShip HawkAdapt or Die: Your Survival Guide to Modern Warehouse AutomationJeremy Bodenhamer LinkedInJeremy Bodenhamer Twitter
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk with Jeremy Bodenhamer, about about how independent retailers can compete with the giants. This is the business of eCommerce episode 154.
Charles (00:20):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host Charles Palleschi. And I'm here today with Jeremy Bodenhamer. Jeremy is the co-founder and CEO of Ship Hawk, and also the bestselling author of adapt or die, a leading expert at the intersection of shipping. And e-commerce I asked Jeremy on the show today, talk about how in 2021, an independent retailer can compete with some of the largest e-commerce companies out there like Walmart, Amazon, and how you can not just compete, but also win. Jeremy has a lot of insights on both the logistics side, but also how you can attract more customers by talking about your brand. And I think it's super interesting. So let's get into the show and I think you're going to enjoy this. Hey Jeremy, how are you doing today? Doing well.
Charles (01:09):
How are you doing Charles? Doing good. Awesome. To have you on the show. I love the topic and want to kind of get into us. I've been seeing, kind of been following the the Shopify guys for a while, and I love the whole concept of, you know, arming the rebels, right? Where, how can you know, how can the smaller retailers compete against some of the big guys? And it's something where I think the world is going to very different ways, right? Where you have these like marketplaces kind of Amazon, like the big ones everyone knows about, but then you have these new brands that are kind of just popping up and becoming almost household names. In some cases you see this with, you know, some of like the big companies, like some of the, some of these, there's just so many retailers now that all of a sudden you, they can just build a brand name. So you're are okay. So you've been around with ship for, you said about seven, eight years now, you guys started that for about eight years. Okay. And you recently came out with a book on also basically competing with the giants, right? Adapt to die.
Jeremy (02:11):
Yeah. Adapter die came out a few weeks ago and is a survival guide for the independent merchants and how to compete against the giants.
Charles (02:21):
I love the cover also with the, the dinosaur on there. Very cool. Yeah. It's sorta my voice.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
So
Charles (02:30):
If you're talking to a small retailer, if someone's starting, you know, 20, 21, right. And they're, I want to get into e-commerce, you know, I have some products, but they're looking at all the expectations of what you need to do nowadays. How would you start kind of guiding someone to say, okay, you have to compete. You want to come up with a product X also sold on Amazon and tons of other marketplaces. How would you start kind of guiding someone through that process of competing?
Jeremy (02:57):
Yeah, good question. I would start by challenging them to understand the state of the current marketplace. The fact that these marketplaces by and larger, not friends but competitors. In the book, I talk about the five APIs of the apocalypse. Those five API APIs are Amazon Walmart Alibaba, jd.com and Shopify. And I predict a, a future that I think is a very real scenario where those five companies own global commerce, every transaction, every dollar spent,
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk about why 2020 year end review. This is a business of e-commerce Episode 153.
Charles (00:17):
Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I mean, host house plus ski, and I'm here today to talk about some of the highlights do a review of 2020 at the end, we're going to show some of my favorite clips, different interviews, different things we've spoke about over 2020. And let's just review this year. 2020 has been one wild ride earliest. You had the coronavirus hit. The world has changed. E-Commerce forever. We've seen back orders and shipping delays. You've seen issues in e-commerce that have happened at a scale, never imagined before, but we have all seen an influx of new buyers, trying comments for the first time. People in quarantine have had no choice, but to shop online, they've tried e-commerce and these are folks who've never tried it before. And now all of a sudden their buyers, their uses of e-commerce.
Charles (01:16):
And I believe that they're here to stay retailers I've talked to have said 2020 has been the best shower for them. And I think this is going to the trend is going to continue. So we can go and talk about all the downsides of 2020, but also there's been some huge upsides and we should definitely acknowledge effort and know that this might be the new normal, and we might be living in a world that's more connected than ever. And we start to understand how a delay in shipping can really affect the delay, getting a product into the hands. I want to look back at some of the episodes, some of the interviews I've done the share and highlight some of the really cool folks that I've talked with. There's a lot of interesting things that have come up. So let's do a little clip episode and I hope everyone has a great new year's and look forward talking to everyone in 2021. So let's get onto a few clips. A few highlights from this year is episodes.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Well, the first thing that I just want to kind of start with is the difference between e-commerce and M commerce. For those of you that are listening, that may not really have a definitive knowledge, but e-commerce is commerce conducted via the internet and commerce is business done on a mobile device.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
I recommend you go all in. So if you don't have money for the course, but you want to launch a product and you, you are short in cash because I had some savings. If you don't have it, don't buy a course, go to YouTube, check out. You can find all this information on YouTube. I'm the kind of person that needs guidance, especially in a start. So just like Instagram marketing, Facebook marketing, any other kinds of marketing, it's, it's a different beast. But has most similar benefits and this year has been as you know, unusual
Charles (03:02):
To say the least. Yeah, for me, if anything is just evolving.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
Well, the important thing is that the email is that especially the past 12 months with also what's been happening in the world, the way the email has been used with other channels has become a lot more important. So the likes of SMS, the likes of messenger using things like quizzes to pull any email addresses.
Charles (03:24):
So what you do is your photos or 3d renders for your listing need to be showing the value of the product, not just, Oh, mine's a great photo, but the differentiation you did with the product.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
So when you start looking at, I need to get into a warehouse I'm, you know, maybe. So I think the first thing you have to do is you have to identify what is the warehouse in e-commerce we can be dealing with people who are operating out of a basement,
Jennifer GlassCEO of Business Growth Strategies International
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Show Notes:
eCommerce vs mCommerceCustomer AvatarBuyer JournalTractionIt's the Bottom Line That Matters: Quick Tips & Strategies You Can Use Right Now to Grow Your Business in the Next 12-Months
Strategies
How are you driving traffic?Look at shipping - Increase AOV - Average order valueLook at costsAre you using Level 2 or Level 3 data?Hotspot VideosKiosks and AppsEmail MarketingLead magnetAbandon Carts -Omni-Channel MarketingThe Journey from $0 to $200k per Year Selling on Amazon Hot items Shopify - 12 Trending Products to Sell in 2020 Spark Shipping - Best 50 Dropshipping Products Of 2020
Transcript
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Jennifer Glass about the seven strategies to grow your e-commerce business. This is the business to be commerce episode 152.
Charles (00:19):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow the e-commerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. And I'm here today with Jennifer Glass. Jennifer is a CEO of business growth strategies, international. She is a business growth expert who works with small to medium-sized businesses to help them find the money that they are leaving on the table. On this show today, she maps out seven strategies that you can use to grow your e-commerce business. I love the kind of list format, which kind of has different bullet points and kind of, we go from really different parts of the business anywhere from growth to saving money, but basically ways to just increase the business and not leave money on the table. So think it's a great episode to check out all seven and I'll also link to them in the show notes. She goes a lot of good links. So we'll put all that there. So check that out if you can too, and let's go onto the show. Hey Jennifer, how are you today?
Jennifer (01:13):
I'm doing great, Charles. Thank you so much for having me. I hope all is well with you as well. Yeah.
Charles (01:17):
Have you on the show, definitely excited to dig into this. I love having a list of things in particular, so seven strategies to grow your e-commerce business. So we were talking about this earlier. You kind of mapped out just seven things. Is this generally for e-commerce or you've worked with, and you work with small business owners in general, right?
Jennifer (01:39):
Worked with, I work with small business owners and general but it really is, you know, a lot of the strategies that we're going to be focusing on are focused for the e-commerce folks. Yep. A lot of strategies without a question are work both ways, whether you're online or offline, but there are certain strategies that are going to be focused specifically to the online businesses and how they can take that and really convert even more clients into people wanting to buy. So if you're an e-com client econ business, you're definitely going to want to pay close attention. If you are in an old world you know, one of those professional brick and mortar or whatever kinds of businesses, this is totally going to be up your alley as well. Cause a lot of the strategies are really working both ways in terms of what you need to be paying attention to and why, why not? Okay. All right. Let's get into it. Absolutely.
Charles (02:43):
Where would
Jennifer (02:43):
You start? Well, the first thing that I just want to kind of start with is the difference between e-commerce and M commerce. For those of you that are listening, that may not really have a definitive knowledge, but e-commerce is commerce via the internet and commerce is business done on a mobile device. And there is a difference in terms of the way that people are looking at things, the way that they're shopping,
Anatoly SpektoreCommerce Entrepreneur
Notes:
Started 3 years agoSelling 200k yearJungle Scout and Helium10Spent 10k on the first order buying Green BinocularsPickFu
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Links:
https://www10millionjourney.comhttps://www.instagram.com/anatolyspektor/https://www.instagram.com/10millionjourney/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Anatoly specter about his journey from zero to $200,000 a year, selling on Amazon. This is a business of e-commerce episode, 151. [inaudible] Welcome to the business of e-commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host [inaudible] and I'm here today with Anatoly specter, and it totally is a serial entrepreneur, six figure, Amazon seller, an it consultant, and the host of the 10 million journey podcast, where he shows his experiences scaling his Amazon business from 200 K to $10 million a year. And this episode, and totally gets really into some numbers on his business, which I think is super helpful. He does into when he started, how much it cost, some initial product runs, how much he's making today and where he's hoping to go and how he's hoping to get there.
Charles (01:02):
He's super transparent, which I think is very helpful when you're listening and taking advice, because a lot of it is contextual. If someone is giving you advice, you kind of need to know, is this advice for a new seller or someone doing a million a year? He kind of gives exactly what advice you would do at what step and what he has done. And I think it's super helpful. So let's get into the show and follow along right to the end where he gives some real helpful tips to both new sellers and also folks scaling the Amazon business. So Hey until you, how are you doing today? Amazing. How are you doing good. Awesome. To have you on the show. Your journey is super interesting. I've been doing some research about it and just kind of looking at talk about some of the numbers. So as far as an Amazon seller, and we're talking before the show and just kind of getting into some of those numbers, I think it's going to be super addressed in a kind of go into so real quick, you're an Amazon seller, right? That's kind of, that's your main focus? I mean,
Anatoly (02:05):
I like to call myself online through preneur and Amazon is the way I make sale these days. But yeah most of my revenue comes from Amazon
Charles (02:14):
And you're currently in you kind of, so you have a podcast and you talk publicly about the number is where you're at. Right? So that's yeah,
Anatoly (02:20):
Yeah, yeah. I created a podcast to sort of document my journey, how I scaled my business to $10 million. And I'm still in the process right now in the beginning, about 200,000. And I'm moving to a million who have charged me for that and then 10 million. So they'll come in to everything. I pick up brain. So other preneurs who are several steps ahead, or some of them multimillion dollars hundred million dollars businesses. And I just talk to them and pick up their brains to help me out and off. My last question is always, what can you give me as an advice I'm read here is how much you're making is what I'm doing. Tell me, and then they give me advice. So you're lucky. I'm pretty lucky first.
Charles (02:55):
Nice. yeah, it's a dual purpose podcast and you're helping other people, but getting advice. So I love that you aren't, so you're a 200,000 a year right now. And most of us like 90 plus percent is Amazon product sales, right?
Anatoly (03:09):
Yeah. Yeah. We do have a Shopify store, but it's like minimal because we were focused just on Amazon these days.
Charles (03:15):
How long did it take you to get there so far?
Anatoly (03:19):
So it was hit or miss.
Alisa MeredithPinterest Product Specialist At Tailwind
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Notes:
2x3 ratio for photoThe title does the hard workText on the image is important#3 search engineBoard - Relevant title & descriptionMatch Product Categories from the shopping cartFind other ways to appeal to peopleNot about the followers, more about engagementUse Audience InsightsSecret Boards - Be Consistent97% of searches are unbrandedhttps://trends.pintrest.com - What's trendingStory PinConsumed on PinterestNo link to the websiteIn beta, must Applyhttp://pintrest.com/source
Links:
https://tailwindapp.comhttps://www.instagram.com/tailwindapp/https://www.instagram.com/alisammeredithhttps://www.twitter.com/alisammeredith
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business of eCommerce. I talk with Alisa Meredith about using Pinterest to increase e-commerce sales. This is the business e-commerce episode 150. [inaudible] Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show. It helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host, Charles [inaudible] and I'm here today with Alisa Meredith. Elisa is the Pinterest product specialist and marketing manager at tailwind. She's a speaker and teacher of topics, Pinterest marketing and Pinterest ads. On this interview, we go really deep into using Pinterest to generate more traffic and orders for our e-commerce business. She has a ton of insights that I didn't know about Pinterest, who are super interesting. You'll see me during the interview, taking a lot of notes. A lot of these topics are things that were very new to me. She gets into a lot of new things as well on how to find new topics.
Charles (01:03):
So you can create new boards, almost like Pinterest SEL, which I didn't know, something you could do. Also some new features like story pins, she talks about and re and really some Pinterest for different retailers that were very surprising on who can actually use Pinterest. She reframes it in a very different way that I think a lot of people would find helpful. So let's go into the show and if you like it, we have a like subscribe and hopefully this helps you. Thanks. So, Hey Alyssa, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. How about yourself? Doing good? I love it. I love the topic. We haven't talked about this actually ever. I mean right now, like, you know, you hear Instagram all the time, Facebook, but you don't hear Pinterest coming up as much. And I think it lends itself though, to certain types of products I think are really like the per, like the Pinterest products. So first when you say kind of Pinterest, is it Pinterest marketing, would you call it a Pinterest? Like how would you even describe using Pinterest?
Alisa (02:07):
Totally Pinterest marketing. So just like Instagram marketing, Facebook marketing, any other kinds of marketing, it's, it's a different beast. But has some of the similar benefits and this year has been as you know, unusual
Charles (02:23):
To say the least. Yeah, exactly.
Alisa (02:26):
But it has been really reflected in Pinterest and the way that people are using it. So for example they're up to 442 million monthly active users, which is up 20% in just six months, which is enormous for them. Yeah. And the number of people buying. So the conversions on Pinterest are, are up three X since the start of the year. So there's a tremendous potential for sales growth from Pinterest. And so I'm excited to talk about it.
Charles (02:58):
So you'll saying the number of people buying, when you say buying, are they people buying them on Pinterest or is it, are you tracking people that came from Pinterest and bought directly on like the shopping cart side? Right. It's
Alisa (03:11):
From Pinterest to your site? Yep. Okay.
Charles (03:14):
So a attribution.
Adam PearceCo-founder and CEO of Blend Commerce
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Notes:
Ask how they want to engage.Benchmark - Open Rate 30-40%Shop Quiz
Links:
https://blendcommerce.com/https://www.facebook.com/BlendCommercehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/adampearceblendcommerce/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talked with Adam Pearce about proven strategies to increase revenue using email. This is a business e-commerce episode, 149. Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Adam Pearce. Adam is a co-founder and CEO of blend commerce, a Shopify agency, specializing in growth of six figure brands. Adam is a passionate advocate of email marketing and aims to make blend commerce. The world's most supportive agency, and this interview had him give some very interesting strategies on what's working with email marketing today. He helps talk about how to blend some of these strategies that, you know, it's been around for a while with some new tactics and build something that's kind of best of both worlds, right? Where you're not just emailing the same old five five sequence emails until you get a response.
Charles (01:08):
He saw my blending SMS messenger, a lot of new, a lot of new technologies with email to get the best results. And I think that's really powerful. One of the things that I haven't gets into is quizzes, and how to use that, to get to know your customer, to collect more data and how to offer them products that really fit their needs. This is a great strategy that I see retailers using now. I think it's super powerful. So let's get on the show and let's see what Adam has to say. So head on how are you doing today? Yeah, really good. Yeah. Awesome. To have you on the show, email marketing, just kind of grow through email. I think I've done SU I do similar episodes like this, like once a quarter and you keep seeing it come back up on like email's dead and this isn't working anymore. And then you do an episode and you dig into it and it's, it's almost like we've been talking about the same thing for years on like emails, definitely dead this, this quarter of this year. And it turns out it might not be happening. So is it dead this quarter?
Adam (02:09):
Good question. Well, look, the answer for me 100% is no, it's not dead, nothing, you know, for me, if anything, it's just evolving. And I think one, the important things that the email is that especially the past 12 months with obviously what's been happening in the world the way the email's been used with other channels as become a lot more important. So the likes of SMS, the likes of messenger using things like quizzes to pull any email addresses. So, you know, for me, and, and kind of looking around at the people that I work with, the clients I worked with, you know, clients are generating 30, 40, 50% of the revenue from email. So yeah, 100% email is not dead.
Charles (02:47):
Yeah. I think that's how it's changing as the interesting part. Right. Because we all still get email, it must be working. There's something going on here. And I know from lists, we have like, that's still one of our channels. And I'm curious though, so you say SMS messenger, like how are those things kind of plugging into it now? Yeah.
Adam (03:08):
So, I mean, with, with email, I think, you know, the great thing is that you've got, you know, you've got people like Play-Doh, for example, who now have email and SMS in one platform and equally you've got other people are SMS, but you can equally, you know, kind of use SMS and email very easily together. And I think what's definitely changed with those is that rather than kind of looking at them as distinct different channels now people l...
Seth KniepCo-Founder & CEO of Just One Dime
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Bio:
With 9.6 million views on YouTube and 226,000 subscribers, Seth Kniep and his company, Just One Dime, have been featured on Yahoo Finance and Chicago Weekly. Today, they have members in over 150 countries and manage over $100 million in annual revenue for Amazon stores.
Links:
https://justonedime.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethkniep/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Sh9yuLqlpnQdBdcfwFErA/featuredhttps://www.instagram.com/justonedime/https://www.facebook.com/groups/jod.amazon.warriors/https://twitter.com/justonedime/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talked with Seth Kenep about why would someone buy your product over the competition? This is a business be commerce episode 148. [inaudible] Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Chelsea Leschi. And I'm here today with Tesco leap. Seth is a CEO and co-founder of just one dime where they help retailers launch and grow Amazon businesses. They have members in over 150 countries and they manage over a hundred million in annual revenue on Amazon stores set this clearly an Amazon expert. Very good at launching products, knows how to really kind of get into Amazon and promote not just a product, but grow a brand. So I asked him on the show today on how you can show off your product and differentiate it from the competition. And we, we go into why someone would buy your product versus a competing product that looks just like it on Amazon. And this is something that I think a lot of retailers struggle with. So this is super good show. If you're thinking of getting to Amazon, you struggle on Amazon stuff has some great tips. So let's get into the show. Hey Seth, how are you doing today? Good.
Seth (01:19):
Thanks for having me on Charles. I appreciate it. Yeah. Awesome
Charles (01:22):
To have you on. I love talking this kind of conversation about how to actually get people to buy your products. Right? This, we were talking before the show and you know, years ago you were the only game in town, right? Where if you were selling this online, it was kind of a unique thing and okay, I sell this type of coffee and I'll this, whatever, right. Are you going to Amazon 10, you know, Shopify? And there's a hundred of the folks on a very similar ish product. Very true. So to get into it. So you work with a lot of Amazon sellers, right? Through them, through the business. How do you make your listing? How do you recommend your clients listening to actually stand out from everyone else? That's selling something like that online.
Seth (02:06):
I love how you cut straight to the heart of it. Cause it's, it's so good. Thank you. So what you do is your photos or 3d renders for your listing need to be showing the value of the product, not just, Oh, mine's a great photo, but the differentiation you did with the product. In other words, if I am selling a microphone, but this microphone's a wireless microphone, it has an internal battery. My battery lasts three times longer than the competition. What does the photo demonstrate that? Or if it's a garden tool, does it demonstrate the photo that these handles on the gardens who are more comfortable? In other words, the photo needs to show what is better about my product. It can't just be, we have the best photos it has to be. How did I differentiate my product from the competition? What is the problem?
Seth (02:55):
I in solving a lot of people, Charles, they get overwhelmed. They think, well, wait, Amazon saturated. Because if I go search garden rake, there's 10 million garden rakes. Why would anyone buy a mine? Well, they're looking at the competition the wrong way. Instead. They need to say, okay,
Kim WrenDirector of Business Development at SkuVault
Sponsors:
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Bio:
Kim Wren is the Director of Business Development at SkuVault, a cloud-based Inventory & Warehouse Management System. With over 20 years of eCommerce experience, Kim has held many roles. She has done everything from multi-channel eCommerce seller herself to launching products and brands, to leading an award-winning customer service team.
Kim currently works with partners, consultants, affiliates, and 3PL’s to assist in the growth of SkuVault. She has a passion for Small-Medium eCommerce businesses and is always available to answer questions & assist etailers to enrich their businesses.
Links:
http://www.skuvault.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/skuvaulthttps://www.instagram.com/skuvaulthttps://www.facebook.com/SkuVault/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce businesses. I'm here today with Kim Wren. Kim is a director of business development at SkuVault, a cloud-based inventory and warehouse management system. I've known him for a while. She's an expert in everything skew vault inventory lid, where I was managing unrelated. So I asked her in the show to talk about if you're a retailer and you're looking at setting up a warehouse, what are some do's? And don'ts, what are some things you should definitely be looking for? And just some random tips that can really help you in the initial setup and save you some time in the long run. So it's a super interesting show. I hope you guys enjoy it. Leave any comments, any likes, always appreciated, and we'll get onto the show and his interview with Kim. So again, how are you doing today?
Kim (00:57):
I'm great. How are you today, Charles? Doing good.
Charles (01:00):
Glad to have you on the show. It's
Kim (01:02):
Hi. I appreciate it. Thank you for giving me the time. Yeah.
Charles (01:04):
Yeah. Well, inventory management, I feel like there's something I haven't spoken about very much on the show. And from working directly with quite a few retailers, everyone kind of does it, but it's not, it's just not a topic you kind of see discussed very often and I'm not really sure maybe, cause it's not like, you know, there's like optimizing ads. There is the boring side of it, but it is what comes down and makes, you know, makes a lot of these businesses work. So it's just interesting that it's not something we duck into very often. It's kind of excited to get into the details. So director of business development, ski vault ski vault is a WMS right where I was managing system.
Kim (01:44):
We are we're WMS with IMS and WMS built together. We like to make sure that people understand we do both. But there's a lot of crossover in the industry. Everybody has their hands in inventory, some way shape or form. We just go really deep in the warehouse and do a lot in the warehouse as far as routing workers, making sure that people can find things and keeping your warehouse organized in addition to all of the inventory functions as well.
Charles (02:09):
Yeah. I think that's the thing when everyone kind of has the inventory management, right? Like everyone has a shop in Congress and it's inventory, but when you actually start talking about warehouse management, there's a whole different layer of that, right? Like the barcode scanner is, and like people moving around and like what pallet is in row 36. So all of that is like actually, you know, managing the warehouse. Right. That's what I stopped.
Kim (02:31):
Making sure that you're getting the people in the right place. Yes. Using the barcode scanners, making sure that you're picking the right item and the right quantity and getting it to the right station for shipping. So that you're, you know,
Show Notes:
Places to retarget:
Facebook/InstagramGoogle DisplayGoogle Search
Length to Retarget:
7 days to start
Visitors to Retarget:
Visitors no add to cart (last 7 days)Add to cart with no purchase (last 7 days)Initiate checkout with no purchase (last 7 days)Purchase (last 7 days)
Content to retarget
Visitors no add to cart - Product page or product videoAdd to cart with no purchase - Your purchase is waitingInitiate checkout with no purchase - Coupon with urgencyPurchase - Upsells/cross-sells & support
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of The Business of E-Commerce I talk about retargeting strategies for 2020. This is a business of e-commerce episode, 146. [inaudible] Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow the e-commerce business. I'm your host, Charles [inaudible] I'm here today to talk about retargeting strategies. This is a topic that I want you for a while and I've been building. So I wanted to dig into a four-part tale. I'll kind of lay them out different places to retarget the length to retire guest type of visitors, to retarget, and also the content you should use in your retargeting strategy. Also, just note, if you're watching the video currently moving the office right now. So excuse the background, it's a little different today and hopefully I'll be back and have a better set up pretty soon, but let's get started. I want to kind of jump into the first point here, different places to retarget.
Charles (01:04):
So first this is 2020, and currently there's several places where you want to run your retargeting ads and I'll list them in order of where I would start if I was running a new retargeting campaign today. So number one, Facebook, Instagram, it's kind of your social platform. It's the first one. I'd probably choose to start a retargeting campaign. And depending on what creative you use, it's very easy to post it also on Instagram. So that's probably the first place I would just get started with retargeting. Next up the Google display network, Google display is banners. That sort of thing, everything that's not searched, let's call it. That's the general other one. Normally I would not recommend the display network except for retargeting campaign. When you're getting started. The great part is you can spend far less per impression, still get your name out there. You'll still be in front of an audience, but you won't have to spend the same, you know, search CP social CPC display really just gets you a lot of impressions and a lot of brand awareness that you can use to kind of expand your reach.
Charles (02:17):
So that's always, probably the second place I would recommend to start. Third place is Google search, but search for retargeting, right? So you can, you can show search ads only to folks that have already been on your site. So that's the third place. Each one's a little more complicated, but what I do there is when you're setting up Google retargeting search ads, you'll add your audience. We'll get into this in a bit, but once you have your audience, you can also add in search terms. So if you're selling a particular product, you know, the audience has been to your site and you come up with some search terms that sound very familiar to, you know, that if someone is typing in these, they're thinking of your industry. So if you're selling life S you're a life vest retailer, someone's typing in terms about some nautical terms, terms of all boats in terms of the ocean, the tide fishing.
Charles (03:13):
That's when you want to show your life S every targeting. So you can really get inside their head. And, you know, if there anything having to do with boats, Marine, anything like that, that's when you want to fire those ads. So search is the other great option,
Notes:
Marketplace ExamplesAmazon https://sellercentral.amazon.com/eBay https://ebay.comWalmart https://supplier.walmart.com/Category SpecificGunBroker - https://www.gunbroker.com/Weapon Depot - https://www.weapondepot.com/
Marketplaces can be jet fuel, a fast way to scale or burn your business if you're not ready.
Optimize the Product ListingToday quality wins over quantityNo more 'spray and pray'Spend time researching competitive pricingFactor in all the costsMonitor where you rank in the listingAmazon - Search results then Buy BoxeBay - Search resultsOver-invest in Customer ServiceSeller reviews are prominently displayedOn Amazon, slow customer service response times are used against youNail FulfillmentUse a 3PLNever ship late (closely monitored on Amazon)Follow the rules of the marketplace
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of The Businesso eCommerce I talk about tips for selling on marketplaces. This is the Business eCommerce Episode 145.
Charles (00:18):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow the eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. And I'm here today to talk about some of my tips for selling on marketplaces. So to start off marketplaces, I kind of think of them as jet fuel for any commerce seller, right? A lot of folks are selling on their own Shopify site, their own big commerce, their own Magento site somewhere. And at some point they decide to move their operations over to a marketplace to kind of add that as a way to enhance our augment, the current offering. And this can be done in many different ways. And I see a lot of sellers do this and the ones that do it right, can drastically increase the sales and the ones that kind of aren't ready for it have issues right out of the gate and can really cause actual problems for their business.
Charles (01:11):
So I want to outline a few tips on some do's and don'ts and just things that I've kind of found over time. So, first few marketplace examples. When we're saying marketplaces, we're talking some of the big ones, obviously Amazon, eBay, Walmart, that sort of thing. Also there's some specific marketplaces you'll find for different niches. So clothing has theirs, for instance, firearms, aren't allowed to be sold on some of the larger marketplaces, but there's folks like gun broker weapons, Depot, they have marketplaces just went bash. So even if you're selling a product that maybe can't be sold on Amazon, there usually are other places where it can be sold or just places, for instance, like clothing there's places where community sold better, right. Where folks are actually looking for that sort of product. So I'd always say first, do your research on what marketplaces are available.
Charles (02:06):
And don't just jump right to Amazon eBay, the big ones, because there are some specific ones that might actually get, you might be smaller, but might get better sales. So we'll sit out six steps here to kind of reveal things that I've just kind of found from talking to different sellers, different retailers that would be better off knowing from the beginning. So tip number one is be sure to optimize your product listings. The sound may sound obvious, but at the same time, what, I just hear a lot of new sellers saying first time they get on the platform, they always have these aspirations that they want to have 10,000 listing, a hundred thousand, these big 500,000, these big numbers, right? And this actually used to work this back in the day was actually a strategy that did work, right? You just went on Amazon. You just listed as much as you could.
Charles (02:58):
You did the spray and pray. And it worked actually just because there weren't that many of our listings and you go on eBay,
Vincent PhamvanFounder of Vyten Career Coaching
Notes:
Polish vs AuthenticityAbout Me, should be about the customersStorybrand Framework, Don MillerWays to talking directly with customersCall customers directlyUse Instagram Live/StoriesEmail is KingSMS will increase in the futurePaul Graham - "Do things that don't scale"Accelerate your learning"Get bigger without your customers feeling like you got bigger"
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Links:
https://www.vyten.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/vphamvan/https://www.linkedin.com/company/vyten/https://www.instagram.com/vytenprep/https://twitter.com/vyten
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
On this episode of the Business of eCommerce, I talk with Vincent Phamvan, about building relationships with customers at scale. This is a business of eCommerce episode 144.
Charles (00:19):
Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow the eCommerce business. I'm here today with Vincent and we had talking about how to build relationships with customers at scale. And this episode, he has a quote from Paul Graham that I really love that I'm going to link in the show notes. He also gives a list of different ways. You should be talking directly with your customers to get better customer feedback. I think there's some great tips there in this episode. So I will link to those in the show notes, but let's get right into that episode. So Hey Vincent, how you doing today? Hey, I'm good, Charles. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Awesome. To have you on the show, I'm just chatting a bit on the kind of pre show here, but I want to kind of get right into it.
Charles (01:04):
So talking about building relationships with customers at scale, so quick, quickly, a little bit of background, you're the founder of a career coaching platform. That's right. What exactly is that? So career coaching is if I'm looking for a job, that sort of thing, I've kind of switching jobs and you kinda, your platform helps folks do this, that kind of at scale, basically. Yeah, absolutely. So we saw a digital membership to a program that's called Vitan and Vitan helps people grow in their careers. So, you know, the average corporate job posting today gets 250 applications or resumes for every single application. So it's normal for job seekers to be pretty frustrated with the process you think about you're competing. And right now, especially with the pandemic, you're competing with a lot more people. And so we provide support job search strategy from everything, from your job search all the way through to your next promotion.
Vincent (01:55):
After you get that job to help people find fulfilling careers and you know, a life that they really love. And it's been really interesting when you take the look at how the pandemic has really impacted how people learn online. You know, as you know, e-commerce has taken essentially a five-year jump from the previous trends with this pandemic and has really accelerated consumer shopping online, which is why, you know, building relationships online is different than you do face to face. You know, when you have a brick and mortar store, if you were opening up a store, you know, if you sell cooking gear, you can have cooking demos in your store and invite your customers to come in. You know, you think like the, the home Depot style workshops where families come in and, you know, the children are building a bird's nest in the store. Now the challenge ends up being, how do you do that online? And you know, the good news is you can scale that to a lot more people. Bad news is though is it's not as easy as just setting up a table in store and just having a bunch of people come in where that's a pretty simple strategy to do.
Charles (03:00):
Yeah. So it's almost like you need a playbook on scale on that. Right?
Kevin UrrutiaFounder of Voy Media
Notes:
Worked with the TSA for approvalPicked from a catalogCost 150k for the moldsThe factory recommended other suppliersFounder factories via Alibaba, AliExpressHow to US port documents -> Panjiva Looking for high barrier to entry productsGet reviews from bloggers and influences
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of a business. E-Commerce I talk with Kevin Urrutia about how to find suppliers in Asia. This is the Business of eCommerce episode 143.
Charles (00:17):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm always Charles Palleschi I'm here today with Kevin Urrutia. Kevin is the founder of Voy media. We just started several eCommerce companies, his most recent company producing luggage. We probably showed it chat about how he went through the process of finding suppliers in Asia to produce the luggage. Super interesting, just talking to Kevin about his whole background process and how we kind of thought through the process of getting this business started. It's very addressing, I think, helpful for anyone just starting off or even someone experienced right at the very end of the show, he also dropped some really helpful, helpful nuggets on what he would do if he was just starting off today. So I think it's well worth listening right to the end. Let's get into the show. Hey Kevin, how you doing today?
Kevin (01:06):
Hey, I'm doing good. How are you
Charles (01:08):
Great to have you on the show. I'm super interested in we're talking about earlier. So about finding suppliers in Asia. But I guess some of your background real quick. So we're talking in 2020. And what do you guys do? So, so luggage currently.
Kevin (01:25):
Yeah. So for tester, we are sound luggages online when we did, so that's a carry on probably the, one of the most proper sizes, but then we pop like maybe eight months ago we released like the other two sizes. The medium wanted to check one. But yeah, for like almost a good year and a half, we only sold the carry on because we didn't have any cash to make the other ones.
Charles (01:44):
So you actually, so you started what? A year and a half ago? Or how long has it been around?
Kevin (01:49):
Oh, now, yeah, like actual selling, but then we were in like product development. We're good. Like six months being up, like the products and stuff. Yeah.
Charles (02:00):
So when you say product development kind of let's go. So what, at what part did you actually, when you say product development, what part were you developing? What part are you talking to suppliers and like, how did this whole process happened?
Kevin (02:10):
Yeah, so for the, for the chest of luggage, so this is my second e-commerce company for Chester. Everything on the luggage is actually custom made a supplier that we've worked with, which is great because obviously you probably know e-commerce like, you can say, Hey, like, this is one thing that I'd like to kind of funny. We're like, Hey, we want to make a of agent. And they're like, okay, like, can you make that look just like this corn company? And they're like, nah, like we don't work like that. And we're like, no, cause like we're so used to that. Right? Like you see that align well with them. They wanted us to pretty much pick everything like, and that was pretty exciting and also scary because we'd never done it. But like, I kinda liked that. So we were able to pick the wheels, they send us like a catalog.
Kevin (02:48):
You find out like a catalog of like wheels, shells interior, interior lining, and then colors. And then we have to just design the whole shape of it. And then they need to be like AutoCAD for that. So then my brother is actually art.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk about mixed vendor drop shipping. This is a business of eCommerce episode, 142.
Charles (00:17):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow a eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. And I'm going to tell you about mixed vendor drop shipping. What we'll cover in this episode is how to use Mixpanel drop shipping, to beat out your competition in both product, selection and price at the same time. So let's get into us. Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It's a world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you are running an eCommerce store, you need to have drip a try. And here's why drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing. One of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder.
Charles (01:05):
It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It's powerful, but also to learn, unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drift.com/b O E. Now onto the show. Often when I'm talking to retailers, they kind of go one of two ways when it comes to drop shipping, they're either working with very large established distributors that have a large breadth of products, or they're working with smaller mom and pop type manufacturers, even just very, very small run tech manufacturers. And that's kind of their decision on how to source products, right? And often it's, you know, one of the other AOV mixed vendor drop shipping is where you take the best of both worlds and combine them.
Charles (02:06):
So you have hair and I've seen some retailers do is very successfully. They work with large distributors. They're able to get a large breadth of products, right? So some of these largest submariners can have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of products. So it allows them to scale up very horizontally and everything in their niche. They can go very wide, have a lot of auxiliary type products, right? So ways to kind of mock up their products cross sells upsells, that sort of thing. So it looks very well at the larger distributors. But when you start combining that with smaller manufacturers, this is kind of the Trek. You could find very rare products that maybe distributors don't yet carry don't yet know about not everyone has on their sites. And also sometimes you're able to then negotiate better on price with larger distributor. There's good chance unless you're doing any sort of real large volume, you really can't go in and negotiate that with them.
Charles (03:05):
But if you go some real small manufacturers, you might be able to get a lot better price. And even if you have a distributor kind of in the mix, you can cut out the middlemen on some of these products and go right to the manufacturer, talk to them. So you can get your breadth of products from the distributor, but then go deep on a very small subset of those products. So on those you can get better prices and also products that just maybe a half made to distributor when you're a retailer and you blend both of these on your site, what that gives you is these unique products you can kind of hook in uses with, right? You can put them in your ads, not everyone has seen them. So if you're targeting Facebook ads, for example, social ads, someone's going to see a product in your niche that has never been,
Show Notes:
Nitch downResearch what others are selling to find brandsContact those brands directly to find out what are the options fora. Becoming a reseller of their productsb. If they have a list of distributors they currently work with
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk about the three steps to find drop ship suppliers. This is a business of eCommerce episode, 141. Welcome to the business of eCommerce. They show the health eCommerce retailers start launch and grow your eCommerce business. I mean, it was [inaudible] and I'm here today to talk about the three steps of finding dropship suppliers. So we talked about buying drop ship suppliers specifically, in this context, we are talking about domestic drop-ship suppliers. So these are suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, domestic locally in your country. A lot of folks starting off want to either find that first supplier or expand the network of suppliers and have a little trouble doing so. And if you Google around, there's a lot of folks kind of recommending different things, selling a product, selling a list, providing that their base supplier, and maybe, maybe they are not.
Charles (01:02):
And kind of everyone wants to get a piece and a lot of middlemen. So it's kind of hard to Wade through that sometimes and figure out who's really the person you should be talking to and how you should do this process. This episode is sponsored by drip, drip it's of world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're running an eCommerce store, you need to have to portray. And here's why drip offers one click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing. One of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation rules.
Charles (01:47):
It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe. That's drip.com/b O E now. So I want to have this quick episode talk about the three steps of actually finding the correct suppliers, correct who you should be talking to for particular products. Step one is niche down. So this is the first thing you want to do. You want identify what niche are you in? Let's say you're selling tens for camping or you're selling and kitchen. Pup away are pots and pans. That sort of thing. You need to be in a very specific vertical, because that helps you. And a lot of people skip over this. And that's why I want to mention it. That helps you kind of identify who even who's the universe of suppliers you should be talking to in these cases, there's usually only a handful, right?
Charles (02:46):
Most industries might have two to 10 suppliers and maybe the manufacturers, maybe these are distributors, but it's not unlimited. And as soon as you start niching down, you start getting a sense of what's the ecosystem. How many are there? Who should I be reaching out to first? And kind of, you can start building a hit list. So always step one, start with finding your niche, going into your niche and understanding that is step one, step two, find other folks or the retailers in that niche and see who they're selling this of course is if you don't already know the manufacturers in the niche, but let's say you don't, you decided, Hey, I'm going to build this new site, selling a certain product. You're not really sure what, who actually builds products in an industry.
Show Notes:
Retail ArbitrageInternational DropshippingDomestic DropshippingHybrid Dropshipping
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Links:
Retail ArbitrageDomestic DropshippingHybrid Dropshipping
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk about the 4 methods of dropshipping. This the Business of eCommerce episode, 140.
Charles (00:16):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow the eCommerce business. And I want to talk about today, the four different methods of drop shipping. What I realized is talking with different users and different online forums is drop shipping is a very, um, confusing term where a lot of folks seem to have one method in mind. When they're speaking about that method, they usually kind of push that as the, that is the method that is drop shipping. And I think it's kind of helpful to map out these different discreet types of drop shipping. I've kind of mapped out as four different types. The fourth is less common. So I think that's an interesting one to talk about. Well, it's kind of go through each one, go through a pros and cons. Why? I think, you know, each one definitely has its benefits and let's kind of talk about each.
Charles (01:05):
So number one, and a lot of blogs, we'll talk about this as drop shipping, but retail arbitrage is kind of a niche inside of drop shipping. Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It's a world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're running an eCommerce store, you need to have drip to try. And here's why drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing. One of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation rules. It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drip.com/b O E.
Charles (02:03):
Now onto the show drop shipping is when you don't take physical whole of the product or for very long sort of thing, it kind of just moving the product, right? So retail as a form of that, what that is is when a product is sold in one place, more than it's being sold in another retail location, a retailer, or the retail arbitrage, or 10, essentially sell on Amazon for a hundred and buy that same product on eBay for $60 when they get that order and Amazon finally buys it for a hundred, they say, grace, they get that shipping address. They go directly to eBay buy the exact same product, put in that, use a shipping address and have it shipped directly there for a hundred, right? So they make that 40 in between minus shipping costs, minus taxes, things like that. So it's very easy to get into.
Charles (02:57):
And that's one of the biggest benefits, right? Well, most folks are starting off. You might not even have a LLC set up any sort of actual business entity. You could literally do it all within your, um, Amazon account. You can just use a personal account and just start listing products. Super, super, super simple to get into the issue is, well, first one issue is I believe mature the reality here of the terms rather, but I believe it's against the Amazon's terms of service. So it's something that if you start doing it, any sort of scale and people find out, you can get reported, where that happens is a lot of times somebody gets a product and they think they're buying it from XYZ store,
Reggie BlackCEO of Better Way Health
Show Notes:
Customer service is in-houseCall every new subscriptionHave a preferred customer service repAOV over the phone is double80% to 40% over the phone3.5 to 7.5 orders once they talk on the phone$1,200 LTV3 Months of training for Customer ServiceStarted in as IT guy in 2010Brooks at SpringBotBook - Customer Service Revolution
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Bio:
Reggie Black is a Christian first, husband of 10 years to Amy, father of four (and counting), and CEO of Better Way Health.
Links:
https://www.betterwayhealth.com/
Transcript:
Charlie (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Reggie black about building a culture that truly cares about the customer. This is a business e-commerce episode, one 39. Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow the eCommerce business. I'm your host, Chelsea [inaudible] and I'm here today with Reggie black. Reggie is a CEO of better way health, a high quality supplements company that focuses on customer service. They have a very interesting approach on calling customers and talking directly to their customers have to purchase is something I don't have very often from eCommerce brands. So I think it's very interesting and everyone should have a listen. So let's get into the interview. Hey Reggie, how are you doing today? I'm wonderful. Charles, how are you? Good to, yeah, I'm doing good. Good to have you on the show. I think I'm disinteresting topic where it's not talked about very often, right on kind of focusing you here.
Charlie (01:03):
And we do a lot right on talking to folks in on how to talking about growth and marketing and that's how the business, but, and that's all kind of the top, right. Of getting the customer. Well, I, they, they're focusing on the customer after you actually acquire them after maybe as they made the purchase during the purchase process and what that looks like and how to kind of improve Ash. So I think it's super under under talked about topic. So definitely interested on this one. So your background, so you guys CEO of better way health, you guys sell supplements, right. But I know you have a big focus on the customer service aspect of it, right?
Reggie (01:44):
Absolutely. So we, we really focus in, when I took over the company, we had about 50 different skews and products and we took that down over about a year period to just four products. And now we're up to five. So we're very focused on the products that we carry. Just, we want to be true experts and knowledge of those products. And then we really focus on the customer service side, the customer experience side. I mean, that's one of our core values here at the company is creating amazing customer experiences. And our goal is to get the customer to say, wow, like I've never experienced anything like this before. So we almost backed into that. You were mentioning before about the marketing and the growth and everything because, because the product is such a high quality, we have really high margins that cost a lot of money to make products that are that quality.
Reggie (02:35):
So I didn't really know any different when I started, I was just thinking, Oh, like everybody pays this much money for supplements. And so there's not a lot of margins to really go out and spin, spin, spin, and like acquire all these new customers. So we really had to focus on keeping the customers that we had. And now I think everybody's playing catch up a little bit as costs of Facebook, customer acquisitions, Google ads, and everything is really rising. People are starting to realize like, Oh, it's so expensive. Now in that space is getting so crowded to acquire new customers. We've got to figure out how to keep the customers that we've acquired.
Charlie (03:11):
Yeah.
Chris LamontagneCEO at Teespring
Show Notes:
Teespring Founded 2011Became CEO of Teespring January 2019350 people now220 people when Chris startedStudy the ecosystemAdjacent macros and sectorsTeams - Are they growth-focused?
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Bio:
Chris Lamontagne is CEO of e-commerce platform Teespring, the innovative social commerce platform behind Youtube’s Merch Shelf that allows creators to design and sell their highly-customised products online. He is a data-driven, entrepreneurial leader with a breadth of start-up knowledge across high growth environments. Chris began his entrepreneurial journey aged 20 years old, founding a sports-focused brand engagement platform that served top clients like ESPN and O2. In 2009, he was awarded with the title ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ by The Prince’s Trust. Post a successful exit, aged just 23, he went on to found an all-electric car-sharing business and Hiremarket.com - a marketplace disrupting equipment rental.
Links:
https://teespring.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-lamontagne-a6754b28/
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talked with chase climber about the three KPIs to focus on to grow your eCommerce business. This is a business of eCommerce episode one 31.
Charles (00:17):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Chuck [inaudible] I'm here today with chase climber. Chase is a cofounder of electric eye, an agency that increases sales for eCommerce brands. Chase also hosts honesty, commerce, a weekly podcast, community and educational resource providing online stores owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business. I asked Jason on the show today to talk about the three KPIs that you should focus on to grow your eCommerce business. So, Hey chase. How are you doing today?
Chase (00:53):
You know, doing fantastic other than the sump pump exploding. I would talk to that a little bit. Yeah.
Charles (00:59):
Yeah. You're a landlord as well, right on the side.
Chase (01:03):
Yeah. And today I learned some pumps can't explode, but we got, we got it. We got it sorted. And you know, I was on time for the podcast. So that's all that matters.
Charles (01:12):
Good to hear. Well, I appreciate you still making us very good. So one thing is I'd love the topic on what to focus on. Cause I feel like one of the things that happened right, is when you kind of early on, you start kind of growing and you're doing all sorts of different things in the business. But as you start getting a little traction and as, or to start coming in and you start getting customer support, all these different things start happening, your focus gets very diverted very quickly, right? There's you come, right? You're coming here today and there's one of a hundred different things you can do. And they first I think the expression is when you knew you knew new businesses die of starvation. And then as you get running, you kind of, as soon as it takes over, you dive into inner Justin, Justin, basically too much, right?
Charles (02:00):
We're going to have too many things to deal with. Now you can focus on marketing and customer service, your funnels, like there's just so many different things. And the question of what you should be focusing on at any given day is something I think a lot of people struggle with or just people. The other side of the coin, right? Is they don't struggle what they used to ignore it. Just go about their day and hope for the best and hope that, you know, they use our emails, basically their to do lists, which I don't think is the right strategy.
Chase (02:26):
No, it's not a great strategy. So you mentioned a keyword there which has traction,
Show Notes:
Seth GodinWhat are you really selling?Tires = safetyWho is the spokesperson for your brandAnswer as that characterSpoke at ECF LiveIssuesTell too many storiesTell 1 storeFind out who your customer issue
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Bio:
For the past 25 years, Michael has been a professional TV writer/showrunner. His many writing credits include King of the Hill, Maron, Wilfred, Just Shoot Me, Rules of Engagement, Beavis & Butthead, Tacoma FD, and more. By applying his knowledge of storytelling to his wife's clothing brand, he helped grow TwirlyGirl into a multi-million dollar brand.
Links:
https://www.facebook.com/MichaelJaminWriter/http://www.cardboardrocketships.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-jamin-01233621/https://michaeljamin.com/video/
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of a business e-commerce I talked with Michael Jamin about how to tell your brand's story. This is a Business e-commerce Episode, 137.
Charles (00:17):
Welcome to the Business or eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here with Michael Jamin. Michael is a director of communications and marketing at twirly girl. We're using his knowledge of storytelling to his wife's clothing brand. He helped grow trolley, grow into a multimillion dollar brand. I asked Michael on the show today to talk about how to tell your brand story. So, Hey, Michael, how are you doing today? So, Hey, Michael, how are you doing today? I'm good. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Awesome. To have you on the show. I love talking about brand and kind of, this is a little more like higher level with some of the topics I feel like sometimes folks are very, you know, tactical in the weeds, like SEO content, like that sort of thing, but it's always nice to kind of zoom up a little bit and think kind of a little bit higher level from a strategy perspective.
Charles (01:09):
That's the difference between selling a product and selling your brand, the product at first, you know, you style it, you have to sell a product, right. To get something off the ground. But at some point you might have competitors come into the space you might have, you know, and even if you don't have a direct competitor, you're always competing against something else. Right. They could always just go and spend their money on another type of product. Right. So it might not be exactly your product, but it could be something in that space. So first actually real quick about your product. So you guys it's twirly girl it's, is it dresses themselves or kind of, could you describe the product for people kind of listening? Yeah. They're they're poorly dresses for girls. So there are, many of them are reversible. They're very high quality they're made in America.
Michael (01:55):
So our price point is a little higher and we focus on quality, not we're gonna talk cheap kind of disposable clothing. So that was kind of the obstacle we had to get over. When we first got into the business, how do we, how do we show people that these dresses, because they cost more and why, why they're worth more, what's the price point that you guys sell at? Our lowest dress is non-reversible and it's it's actually usually around $48, but our reversible dresses can be 80 or $85. It depends on the dress, but there, cause they're twice as many choices. So 80, 85. And this is before what age? They started 12 months. And they go up to a six, you know, young teenagers this 12 months, year old twirling around swirling at that age. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, so I mean, that's definitely a high price point, right? If you are. Yeah. You know, I'm thinking of, I have a two and a half year old at home and she goes through clothes, like, you know, rips falls down that sort of thing. So these are like older.
Joonas GebhardFounder of the Kawaii Group
Show Notes:
Started in 2014Moved 2008Early in the influencer spaceStrengthNo taxesNo profit taxesSuper cheap shippingClose to ChinaSubscription boxHigher LTV
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Bio:
Joonas started his first business when he was 15 years old and his first e-commerce store around 2004. Now Joonas runs 2 online stores and 2 subscription boxes from Hong Kong. He sells cute Japanese stuff to kawaii fans worldwide.
Links:
https://www.blippo.comhttps://www.kawaiibox.comhttps://www.japancandybox.comhttps://www.instagram.com/joonasgebhard/http://m.me/joonas.gebhard
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Jonas. Gebhart about running an eCommerce business in Hong Kong. This is the business of eCommerce episode 136.
Charles (00:17):
Welcome to the business e-commerce to show the helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Chelsea [inaudible] and I'm here today with Jonas hired. Jonas is a founder of the quiet group, the company that he launched in 2004 in Finland. He since moved to Hong Kong and has been running it their sentence, I assume in the show today to chat about what are some of the benefits and difficulties running an eCommerce business in Hong Kong. So, Hey Jonas, how are you doing today? Fine. Thanks. How are you? Good. Great to have you on the show. It's a, where are you? So you're still currently the founder of the quiet group rice. All right. And you're not currently in Hong Kong about right.
Joonas (00:59):
Corona, evacuees, and currently in Finland flew here in late, late January.
Charles (01:06):
Okay. So are, but your home still is Japan, but you're just kind of Finland.
Joonas (01:13):
Yeah, we live in Hong Kong, but we have a apartment here in a house.
Charles (01:17):
Okay. Gotcha. And you're originally from Finland, Finland. Okay. So I'm curious, can I talk about the background of how you got started? And so first actually the quiet group I was looking through your products, but what exactly, how do you describe what you guys sell?
Joonas (01:36):
We sell everything cute and Japanese cute, like a hello kitty. And character's like, hello, kitty and everything. Pink. Fluffy.
Charles (01:47):
Okay. And what markets do you sell into?
Joonas (01:50):
Mostly North America and Europe.
Charles (01:52):
Okay. So you and you sell them and where is it? I mean, just a few questions here. Cause this is a very different, most folks are either in North America or Canada and they're selling to their local market, but you are in, did you start the business when you were in Finland or in Japan?
Joonas (02:13):
Yeah, we started about 15 years ago in Finland. So we had a few physical stores and then we sold, sorry, Hong Kong. I should have said Hong Kong. Sorry. Yeah. So we sold from Finland, Finland. We imported the stuff to Europe and it's just impossible to sell from Finland to any other countries. It's too expensive. Everything from shipping and labor and storage and all the fees. So then we moved the business to Hong Kong about 10 years ago. So now we are able to sell everywhere in the world and beyond the same, same basic like cost structure as all our Chinese competitors and other Asian companies.
Charles (02:56):
So you're you moved the business to Hong Kong, but I wanna make sure I understand. So you move the business to Hong Kong, but the products now are being distributed from both Finland and Hong Kong and North America. Where do they actually, where, where is it? The distribution come from?
Joonas (03:11):
We S we ship everything from Hong Kong. We have a warehouse in Hong Kong and everything is shipped
Charles (03:16):
So direct, like basically Hong Kong to North America and Hong Kon...
Jake CookCEO of Tadpull
Show Notes:
RFMRecencyFrequencyMonetaryMaster KeyAlign dataSocial Media Slot MachineGoogle AnalyticsSpeed to buyIf people buy in the first day, run heavy retargetingScalingDoes not have good RolesBad cash flow cyclesNot knowing marginsQuarterly GoalsHave a process that's repeatable
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Bio:
Jake is a forever curious entrepreneur that works across digital marketing, analytics, and AI.
Jake started out as a lost physics major that stumbled into online marketing and eventually design thinking and data science. Helping clients and students use empathy to unlock growth at the intersection of art and science are where he loves to spend his days.
Links:
https://ondigitalmarketing.comhttps://www.tadpull.com/https://benchmark.tadpull.com
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Jay cook about using data science to profitably scale cross channel e-commerce marketing campaigns. This is a business of eCommerce episode one 35.
Charles (00:21):
Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm the host Chelsea [inaudible] and I'm here today with Jake cook. Jake is a founder of tadpole company. He started in 2013 where they use data to help e-commerce brands, profitably scale, their marketing campaigns, as joke in the show today. Talk about how you can use data science to scale your marketing campaigns. So, Hey Jake, how are you doing today? I'm wonderful. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I am awesome to dig into this topic a little bit. We're talking before the show about, but a few proposed topics and the Xi learning and data science. I feel like this is a new we're in 2020. There's a lot of new things going on, but this is kind of the new hotness right on using with we've now pulled all this data.
Charles (01:08):
Right. And I feel like everyone's kind of getting a sense of yeah, you can like get all this stuff and now it's like, what do we do with this? So, yes. Yeah. So what do you guys, so first you, so your product, right? Usually don't go into the product the beginning, but it's just kind of interesting right on you guys basically hook into a lot of different pieces of data and start predicting what customers basically gonna want before they know they want it. It's that kind of a, yeah, it's it's we work a lot with mid market companies. And so, you know, there's lots of data and we always say, it's kind of like the kitchen drawer or, you know, the junk drawer you have in your house where you open it up and there's like birthday candles and bandaids and all sorts of junk.
Charles (01:51):
And that's kinda how their data is structured. And so a lot of what we do is kind of suck into a, we call it a data pond. I mean, there's like Lily pads of data, if you will. So you have Google analytics, data or Shopify data inventory date, and we're sucking all into one place. And when you can kind of get all organized and neatly put together, you start to find some interesting insights. So for example, you might find that customers out of email by, at 30% higher than people that come through Facebook or products that you know, don't have great margins, but they turn like really quick turn out that their total cash cows. And so, you know, well, how do you find the customers that buy those products that turn quickly? Well, now we're trying to map the inventory to the customer data.
Charles (02:32):
So a lot of that has kind of just drawn those correlations and help them customers see what's possible off these assets. They already kind of already own. Yeah. I feel like a lot of this, even I was looking at something that I did with, ah, just like ad attribution and there's still, it's really tough, right? Because there's the same,
Carolyn LoweCo-Founder of ROI Swift
Show Notes:
CPCSponsored ProductSponsored BrandsProduct Display AdvertisingSponsored Brand VideoMake sure you have text overRetargetingNot as effectiveGood for less than $100 AOV$400 AOVRetargeted on Amazon properties69% of Amazon Searches are non-brand70% of Amazon Users don't make it past page 1Start with auto campaignASIN Product TargetingFind all products with a higher price and lower starsUsed to have a 35k Min ad spendUse Certified Agency PartnersAgencies have access to betasSnapChat - Low CPC in 2020TicTac - Testing now
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Bio:
Carolyn is the co-founded ROI Swift an agency that she started in 2015 which helps consumerbrands with Amazon, Paid Ads for Facebook/Instagram, andPaid Search.
Links:
https://roiswift.com
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Carolyn Lowe about selling on Amazon in 2020. This is a business we commerce episode one 34.
Charles (00:18):
Welcome to the Business eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles pesky. Now I'm going to tell you what's Carolyn Lowe. Carolyn is a cofounder of ROI Swift and agency that she sided into 2015 to help consumer brands with Amazon paid Facebook and Instagram ads and paid search as Carolina show today to talk about as a retailer, what you should know, selling an Amazon in 2020. So Hey Carolyn, how are you doing today? Great. How are you Charles? Great to have you on the show and yeah, I'm doing well. I here in the COVID world, I saw, I normally have to watch on video. I normally shave every morning and my dollar shave club razor broken half this morning. So waiting for a new one. So if you're watching on YouTube and you wondering why I have a bed, that's why, so we'll see how fast dollar shave club ships. That's all I'm doing. So how about yourself?
Carolyn (01:11):
I'm doing well. It's just hot, hot and humid in Austin, Texas. It's pretty much summer here, so I'm happy to be inside.
Charles (01:18):
Nice. We're just talking like the razor because I can't run out and just buy a razor, this COVID world. We were talking before the show about Amazon and just some of the changes that have been affected recently. Shipping times, logistics I've have a few guests on and just going to talk about recently, it feels like 2012. Like the entire world is like shifted and the way I'm seeing it is this could be not a temporary thing. This could be the new norm. I think there's a lot of retailers now we work with have that. Let's talk with someone the other day and they're like, yeah, we're doing black Friday numbers. I'm like, Oh, that's great. They're like, yeah. Every day though, like every single day is like basically black Friday. And I think for certain folks, this is a new norm. And we've been talking about, you kinda mentioned Amazon has some big weaknesses that have been shown right in the past three, four months at this point. So could you kind of talk about those?
Carolyn (02:17):
Yeah, I think there's a few things. So Amazon's competitive advantage was always that they could get it there faster and cheaper than, than retail. Right? So you would get, when I had young kids, I had a subscribe and save subscription for diapers and I wouldn't have to run out to target and go get diapers every month diapers would appear and I wouldn't have to go pack up my kid and go get them. And now, as you've seen, you know, target Walmart, they have curbside, they have online shopping, they have much faster delivery and they're finally taking advantage of their competitive advantage, which is they have all that inventory within five miles of you. So Amazon is opening a lot more fulfillment centers. They've gone to one day, one day for a bunch of customers.
Brian MillerFounder of Easy China Warehouse
Show Notes:
Start on Alibaba Making 1 type of productTrading Companies make many types of productsSizeBiggest may not be bestA lower price may not be badOrdering SamplesPay for samplesMLQ - Min Order QuantityAlways negotiableGo for a 1/4 of the amount"We want to try a sample batch with you first"You won't make money on the first batchFreight forwardingAsk for referralsQuestions"As a % of your business, how much eCommerce do you do?""How many of your shipments go directly to Amazon?"
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Bio:
Brian Miller has been living in China for the past 10 years. He previously worked for one of the largest Chinese government owned manufacturers managing their North American Export operations. He now runs a 3rd party logistics warehouse in Shenzhen China called EasyChinaWarehouse.com. The company provides 3rd party logistics and shipping for Amazon FBA sellers and any ecommerce company creating products in China. Previous to Easy China Warehouse he founded and an E-commerce company which sells Bluetooth speakers.
Links:
https://www.easychinawarehouse.com/
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of The Business. eCommerce I talk with Brian Miller about importing products from China. This is a business eCommerce Episode 133.
Charles (00:19):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow the eCommerce business. I mean, host Charles Palleschi I'm where with Brian Miller. Brian is the founder of Easy China warehouse. He specializes in importing goods from China, and this is the second time I've asked on the show to chat about the entire process. Start to finish about how you can import goods from China. Brian's an expert in this. So I think that shows me very interesting. He answers a lot of great questions here. So onto the show, Brian, how are you doing today?
Brian (00:49):
Great. Thanks for having me on the show again.
Charles (00:50):
Well, yeah. Awesome to have you back on the show. I don't typically we do do repeats very quickly like this, but repeat guests you're on episode one, 27, we're talking very COVID specific. So I figured we actually started talking after the show and just kind of just on the general you know, working with getting products over from China. And I was like, you have a background in this. You're, you're a lot more of an expert than I think most people, right? Like all the people talk about this on kind of this theoretical level, but you feel, first of all, we kinda mentioned this. People want to look back in one 27, kind of mentioned your background, but just real quick. So you've been living in China for how long?
Brian (01:30):
Yeah, I've been living in China for the last 10 years. And I used to work at a Chinese state owned manufacturer. So I used to work for a Chinese company that manufactured industrial products. And then from there I started an eCommerce business where I sell Bluetooth speakers and also a logistics company that helps eCommerce companies shipped from China. So that's kinda my story. So I've done everything from manufacturing to e-commerce and also to shipping and logistics.
Charles (01:59):
So you have a little bit of experience sounds like. Yeah. Okay. So that's why, so when we start talking after about just getting, I think a lot of people get in the weeds when they want to source from China, they start looking at Alibaba or wherever else and just the whole process. There's so many little steps. It's one of those things that people just say, getting products from China and, you know, it's like this, it sounds easy. Like there's one little statement, but there's so many little things wrapped up in that. And they're very different, right. From talking to a factory finding the right products,
Gene CaballeroCo-Founder of GreenPal
Show Notes:
3 co-foundersStated in the spring of 2012Sent 125k on v1Did customer development to figure out customer demand2013 second launchFocused on Nashville areaMet vendors at Starbucks2017 all 3 co-founders full-timeThe Mom Test - https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-ebook/dp/B01H4G2J1U/The 4 Step to Epiphany - Steve Blank - https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful-Strategies/dp/1119690358
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Bio:
Gene Caballero is a co-founder of GreenPal which has been described as Uber for lawn care. GreenPal started in one market and now has grown to be available in 46 states.
Links:
https://www.yourgreenpal.com/https://twitter.com/yourgreenpal
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce, I talked with Gene Caballero about what it takes to build something from nothing. This is a business of e-commerce episode 132 .
Charles (00:16):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi I'm here with Gene Caballero. Jean is a cofounder of green pal, which is described as the Uber of lawn care. Greenhill started in one market. It has now grown to over 46 States. I, as you on the show today to have a, how he got his stash, some advice you can give to other retailers who are just starting off and his origin story. Super interesting. Watch the whole show. He gives some tips at the end that I highly recommend you check out. So now onto the show, Jean, how are you doing today?
Gene (00:51):
I'm doing fantastic. How are you
Charles (00:52):
Doing good, Austin, to have you on the show. I love chatting with retailers and kind of get into the origin story, kind of how you got your start and that's first where you are today or let's even back up. So you're the founder of GreenPower right? That is correct. Co-Founder so make sure some people get that. It's important thing. There's three of us total three total. Okay. So three founders, three co-founders that? Uber for lawn care. What exactly is that?
Gene (01:22):
Yeah, so I guess back a little bit back up a little bit, I've been in the landscaping industry, me and another, co-founder kind of in a landscape and industry your whole entire life, you know, did it in middle school, high school and college, just for beer money, you know? And when I graduated college, I actually got a job in tech sales. My territory was the West coast, so I was kind of privy to, you know, the new technologies, the Uber, the Lyft, the Airbnb, and kind of knew that if somebody was gonna, you know, someone, a stranger to come pick them up for dinner or, you know, stay on a stranger's couch that at some point they would do the same with lawn care. And so we launched green pal in the spring of 2012. And as of now, we're in 46 States and over 200 major markets.
Charles (02:12):
Okay. So it's something. So if I understand, let's say I want my lawn mowed or trimmed or whatever it is, right. Instead of having a call one random, like a couple different random, long companies, I use the app of the site and that kind of finds Harrison folks in my area kind of connects me with them. That sort of thing. Yeah.
Gene (02:31):
So you need your lawn mowed. You put the address the day that you want it done, that alerts all the pre-screened vendors in the area that there's a new lawn up for bid those vendors bid on it. All those bids go to the homeowner and the homeowner, or can see the vendors, writing reviews and price and decide who they want to work with. So our software basically just kind of connects and you know, is a kind of whole connection process.
Charles (02:57):
Got it. Okay. Anything for like snow removal
Gene (03:00):
Orders,
Chase ClymerCo-Founder of Electric Eye Agency
Show Notes:
Traction by Gino WickmanProfit FirstClockworkDon't make me think3 Main KPIsTraficPaid MediaDon't put all your eggs in the paid basketOrganicKeep the current system goingDelegate contentConversion RateCheck mobile vs desktopFocus on UXAverage Order ValueBundlesUpsellsPost Purchase UpsellsJordan Gal From Cart HookPre Purchase UpsellsCross-sellsBonus - Customer Lifetime ValueNeed 10k users per month to start to optimize conversion rate optimizationKlaviyo or DripFind most engaged subscribers and ask 3 questionsWhy do you buy our product?What could we do better?What do we do good/bad?HotjarGoogle Analytics AnnotateFocus on one project at a time
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Bio:
Chase Clymer is the Co-founder of Electric Eye, an agency that increases sales for eCommerce brands. Chase is also the host Honest Ecommerce, a weekly podcast, community & educational resource providing online store owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business.
Links:
https://electriceye.io/https://honestecommerce.co/https://twitter.com/chaseclymer
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talked with chase climber about the three KPIs to focus on to grow your eCommerce business. This is a business of eCommerce episode one 31.
Charles (00:17):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Chuck [inaudible] I'm here today with chase climber. Chase is a cofounder of electric eye, an agency that increases sales for eCommerce brands. Chase also hosts honesty, commerce, a weekly podcast, community and educational resource providing online stores owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business. I asked Jason on the show today to talk about the three KPIs that you should focus on to grow your eCommerce business. So, Hey chase. How are you doing today?
Chase (00:53):
You know, doing fantastic other than the sump pump exploding. I would talk to that a little bit. Yeah.
Charles (00:59):
Yeah. You're a landlord as well, right on the side.
Chase (01:03):
Yeah. And today I learned some pumps can't explode, but we got, we got it. We got it sorted. And you know, I was on time for the podcast. So that's all that matters.
Charles (01:12):
Good to hear. Well, I appreciate you still making us very good. So one thing is I'd love the topic on what to focus on. Cause I feel like one of the things that happened right, is when you kind of early on, you start kind of growing and you're doing all sorts of different things in the business. But as you start getting a little traction and as, or to start coming in and you start getting customer support, all these different things start happening, your focus gets very diverted very quickly, right? There's you come, right? You're coming here today and there's one of a hundred different things you can do. And they first I think the expression is when you knew you knew new businesses die of starvation. And then as you get running, you kind of, as soon as it takes over, you dive into inner Justin, Justin, basically too much, right?
Charles (02:00):
We're going to have too many things to deal with. Now you can focus on marketing and customer service, your funnels, like there's just so many different things. And the question of what you should be focusing on at any given day is something I think a lot of people struggle with or just people. The other side of the coin, right? Is they don't struggle what they used to ignore it. Just go about their day and hope for the best and hope that, you know, they use our emails, basically their to do lists, which I don't think is the right strategy.
Chase (02:26):
No, it's not a great strategy.
Notes:
Startups for the Rest of Us - E500
Stair StepThe Business of eCommerce - E5Startups for the Rest of Us - E222
Atomic HabitsJames Clear
Pit traps
Waiting to get startedComing out of the gate too hot
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business of eCommerce, I talk about consistency. This is a business of eCommerce Episode, 130.
Charles (00:14):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host Charles Palleschi, and I'm here today. Talk about Consistency. This is something that this week or last week time of this recording, I listened to an episode. It's a podcast I've been following for hundreds of episodes. Now they do one a week. It's called startups for the rest of us. It's by this guy named Rob, another guy named Mike. They talk about SAS. Businesses have been following for many, many, many years. And recently this week, they just hit that 500th episode. And this is making me think about consistency and just how these guys have showed up every week for 500 weeks and recorded. And even top of the episode, some episodes are better, some, a little misses, but they do it every week. I think that consistency speaks a lot.
Charles (01:07):
And I think that's something that a lot of folks underestimates today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip it's of world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're ever running an eCommerce store, you need to have drip to try. And here's why drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing. One of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation rules visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe.
Charles (01:55):
That's drip.com/b O E. Now under the show. And I've cited them before. On an early episode mentioned that stair step approach. That's actually originally by Rob look guys on the podcast and it just talks about building businesses kind of in this more incremental way. And I'll link to that in the show notes. But I think everyone's checked that out, but the concept of consistency I feel like is very underrated. I've read the book atomic habits by James, Claire. I think you should all read that or at least check out James's Twitter account. He posts very insightful little pieces every few days. And it just talks about over time slowly having these habits that build on top of one another and great example of something like podcasting blogging, any sort of content where the very first time you publish a podcast, publish a blog post.
Charles (02:50):
It doesn't really do anything, right? Like episode one, not many people, no one followed me. We've had the blog first post. No one really checks it out, but if you're consistent over time, that's what you start to actually get the wins. Same thing going into the gym. You can go to the gym or run and just going and lifting a waist. Doesn't actually do anything for you lifting at once. But that building reps, which build sets that build workouts that continue each day, that's where you start to get that impact. And I think entrepreneurship is very, very, very similar, which this to come pick traps. I see a lot of folks fall into what they don't do this. And this is total out for the first is people that don't ever start. They kind of, they wait to stash,
Notes:
Exposing a new generation to eCommerceRemote work is more popularLogistics will need to catchupImpacting certain segments - Luggage, wedding supplies, GYM bags, etc.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business of eCommerce I talk about what COVID-19 is doing for the eCommerce industry. This is the Business of eCommerce episode 129.
Charles (00:16):
Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip it's of world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're running an eCommerce store, you need to have drip to try. And here's why drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing. One of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drip.com/b O E.
Charles (01:04):
Now under the show, welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I mean, host Charles [inaudible] and I'm here today to talk about what COVID-19 is doing for the eCommerce industry. So notice I said, what COVID-19 is doing for that eCommerce industry. When this first started, a lot of folks are very gloom and doom. They thought kind of the sky was falling. This was in a close, everything was getting shut down. I know a lot of folks kinda laid off their employees looking forward saying, okay, we're going to have this big recession. And in the past few months that hasn't happened. Well, we've actually seen what I've seen through the business hair, through talking to different retailers is there are some folks that have been hit, but more of them have actually seen a drastic increase in business.
Charles (02:00):
Some have been on this piece where they've got a huge boost there we're in the right place at the right time selling products that really resonated, but others have just seen a very steady increase. And I think that's due to several different factors. So first as we all know, people are staying home or ordering online more, makes it very obvious. They can't go to stores, right? You can't get in your car. You can't just drive to the local store, pick something up. So there's that there's is a short term. And what a lot of folks are thinking is that's kind of where the boost is coming from. But I think to unpack there's some longer term effects there that we're going to see for not just, you know, the next few weeks and months, but this could turn it indefinitely. We're going to see a boost.
Charles (02:47):
So one big shift has happened in the past few months. There's a whole generation, an older generation, maybe folks in their sixties, seventies, eighties, that have never purchased online, have all of a sudden been forced to do so. So would they couldn't run out and just run to the local store or pick something up. There are folks out there that the very first e-commerce order it ever fulfilled, ever created has been in the past three months. So where are this time where all of a sudden this entire generation has been essentially forced to use e-commerce as a tool. And they've kind of found out this is something we can do. Let's create an Amazon account, let's start searching online. We need a product. Let's learn how to do that. Let's not be so fearful of putting our credit card into a website. And I think a lot of people are underestimating t...
Notes:
Start off the day with water1 literChill the night before5 minutes of silencePray, meditate, or just breathInsight TimerCalmJournal5 Minute Journal5 Minute Journal QuestionsMorningI am grateful for…What would make today great?Daily affirmation. I am…Evening3 Amazing things that happened today…How could I have made today even better?Leave it on your nightstandLeave the pen insideReadJust a few pagesKindle is greatLeave it on top of your journalDo not consumeNo emailNo newsNo social mediaPlanTake time to plan your dayProductivity PlannerMost Important Task of the dayImportant Tasks of the WeekKeep the pen insideKeep it next to the journalI prefer pen/paper, less distraction
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce, I talk about 6 tips for entrepreneurs to supercharge their morning. This is a business of eCommerce episode 128.
Charles (00:16):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow the eCommerce business. I mean, it was Charles Palleschi and I've had today had talked about six tips to help entrepreneurs supercharge their morning. So I'm a big fan of frameworks and routine and having a certain way of kind of going about your day, where you kind of know this works for me, here's a pattern and his kind of a way of doing something to know to start the day on the right foot. So I've kind of lined up six steps and this is stuff that I personally do. And I think it's super helpful for entrepreneurs in general, but also anyone that just wants to start off the morning in the right direction. And this kind of just built up a time. So let's get into us. So tip one, always start your day, drinking water.
Charles (01:07):
I know this sounds ridiculous, but I always start my day by drinking a liter of water. Very first thing, some things to make this easier is a night before I have a very specific water bottles. I put them in the fridge, chill, the water they're actually I use the soda stream. So my whole family knows these are my water bottles. It's two of them kind of my thing. And that makes it, so I know in the morning they're in the refrigerator. I like cold water. They're ready for me. So there's no thinking involved. And that's kind of one of the big things with this. There's no kind of decision making. I know I'm going to wake up. Very first thing I do is go grab one of these bottles, put it in the soda stream. I like the bubbles of carbonation or just have regular cold water, but just do the same thing I found before most folks.
Charles (01:57):
And I was doing this for a long time. Starting my day off with coffee. You're already dehydrated from sleeping the night before. And when you have coffee, you kind of further your dehydration. So you starting your day off this very dehydrated state going deeper into dehydration. The coffee gives you a quick little boost, but very quickly you start to crash because you're dehydrated and then you usually compensate by coffee. So by the time you start working at this point, you're starting your day off this at this extreme, low, this kind of dehydrated. And you're trying to dig out of this like dehydrated whole how else to explain it, but you're already like in, in a very bad place. And then you're trying to play catch up the whole day. And a lot of times what happens is just so tired and you work at, you know, eight, 9:00 AM that you drink more coffee and it just starts this downward spiral.
Charles (02:48):
So I've kind of found by starting your day off. Very first thing, basically just chucking a liter of water. All of a sudden you have all that water back that you've kind of lost overnight and you start your day off this much better place. And when you do drink coffee, you'll find that you don't drink as much because a stomach full of water.
Brian MillerFounder of Easy China Warehouse
Notes:
Air shipping50% Shipped in passenger flightsOver 30 day shipping timesDirect LineLabel with USPS label in ChinaUsing DHL Express shippingWait and ship by seaOpportunitiesSmaller factoriesLower quantitiesImprove the supply chainMore people are buying online
Bio:
Brian Miller has been living in China for the past 10 years. He previously worked for one of the largest Chinese government owned manufacturers managing their North American Export operations. He now runs a 3rd party logistics warehouse in Shenzhen China called EasyChinaWarehouse.com. The company provides 3rd party logistics and shipping for Amazon FBA sellers and any ecommerce company creating products in China. Previous to Easy China Warehouse he founded and an E-commerce company which sells Bluetooth speakers.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.easychinawarehouse.com/
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of The Business eCommerce I talk with Brian Miller about how COVID 19 has affected shipping and supply chain from China. This is the Business of eCommerce, episode 127.
New Speaker (00:18):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce to show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Brian Miller. Brian is the founder of Easy China Warehouse, a third party logistics company in Shenzhen. I asked Brian on the show today to talk about how COVID 19 has affected shipping and supply chain from China. So Hey Brian, how are you doing today?
Brian (00:40):
Great. Thanks for having me.
Charles (00:41):
Yeah, awesome to have you on the show. I'm super interested in this topic. I feel like obviously kind of covert right now, everyone's going to talk to you about it, but seeing that from the eyes of how it affects e-commerce, I think we've all kind of felt it, but so you're on the ground right now in China, right? And you've been there for,
Brian (01:00):
Yeah. So yeah, so our company is located in Shenzhen, China, which is the S in the South of China. If people are familiar with Hong Kong, we actually bought Hong Kong. So a lot of people probably know Hong Kong over Shenzhen and that's where we are right now.
Charles (01:14):
And Shenzhen is basically the shipping capital of the the world at this point. Right? I know that one of the big,
Brian (01:20):
Yeah. Yeah, it's one of the shipping capitals. It's also one of the hardware capitals of the world. So most of the hardware in the world is actually manufactured at a Schengen. And most of the big companies that we know that make hardware like Apple any of the Bluetooth speaker companies computer manufacturers are all here. So it's an important supply base for that type of manufacturing as well.
Charles (01:44):
Okay. So this episode will come out next week, but we're talking right here on probably good to know. May 12th 2020. Right. In case someone looks back at us. So cause, cause just topics moving quick, right? Like everything we say this week is very different than last week and last month. Right. But you've been on, you've kind of been seen this since the very beginning, since what, January, right. Chinese new year.
Brian (02:09):
Yeah. So around that time, basically in December when I was in China in, in 19 we kinda heard a little bit about a virus that was around and people didn't know much about it and that we shouldn't be that concerned. And at that time, no one really knew what it was about. And actually at the end of January, it was when the Chinese government made a formal announcement that there was this virus, the Krone virus that we know today. And so in January is when kind of the ramp up of everyone starting to try to protect themselves with masks and kind of stay inside started in China.
Christina ScaleraFounder of The Contract Shop
Show Notes:
Reach out to someone who markets to the same demographic to offer contentNeil PatelPunchline CopyKurt ElsterTeam Structure- Marketing- Operations- Support- Graphic DesignerFunnels- Checklists- Example: http://www.lawlesstoflawless.com/Ways get traffic- Collative Content- Paid- Newsletter- Main blog- Affiliates
Bio:
Christina Scalera is the attorney and founder of the seven-figure, award-winning legal template store for creative entrepreneurs called The Contract Shop®. She lives in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, surrounded by a fortress of 14,000 ft. mountains in every direction that is not only beautiful but fun to hike after big eCommerce shop sales days.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
http://thecontractshop.comhttp://christinascalera.comhttp://instagram.com/thecontractshophttp://instagram.com/christinascalerahttps://www.facebook.com/TheContractShophttps://www.facebook.com/christinascalerallc/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Christina Scalera about driving traffic through content. This is a business e-commerce episode 126
Charles (00:16):
Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It's of world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're running an eCommerce store, you need to have drip a try and here's why. Drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing, one of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation rules visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation rules. It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation. To get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drift.com/b O E now onto the show.
Charles (01:06):
Welcome to the Business eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi, and I'm here today with Christina Scalera. Christina is the founder of the contract shop, a legal template store for busy entrepreneurs by building content. Christina has grown the contract shop to over seven figures in revenue. I started the show today talking about you can drive traffic to your eCommerce store by using content. I urge you to listen to the very end of the episode because she gives some very good hints on how you can build funnels to your eCommerce store. So let's go into the show. Hey Christina, how are you doing today?
Christina (01:41):
Great. Thanks for having me, Charles.
Charles (01:43):
Yeah, awesome to chat. I love I love the topic of kind of using content. I know this is kind of the tried and true, but I feel like it, like if he goes out of fashion every couple of years and then comes back in. How long have you been doing it for first all
Christina (02:02):
So I started my, I guess you can call it e-commerce. You know, the shippers might have a little bit of qualms with that, but my, I started my store on Shopify. Well it, it didn't start out on Shopify, but it started in November of 2015 so almost five years now. And we moved to Shopify in October of 2017. So I've been on Shopify for almost three years. So I've been doing this for a decent amount of time. I feel like in internet land, that's a long time.
Charles (02:32):
That's a very long time in internet land. It so it's all digital products, right? You guys sell and promote, so it's all there's a digital contracts, like it must have been like a download sort of thing.
Chase DimondPartner at Boundless Labs
Show Notes:
Map out the touchpoints2 bucketsPost-PurchasePre-PurchaseCampaign side20% Open Rates1-3 Campaigns Per WeekHoliday's as an anchorSend 7-10 Days ahead of the saleExtended SaleBuild 2-4 Master TemplatesDrip emailsGreat to educateDaily newslettersThe HustleMorning BrewThe SkimmJoanna From Copy Hackers80/20 Rule - You need to be strict 80% of the timeSegment ListSending people who engagedPredict gender based on the nameGeolocationBonus TipsSend email based on what they click in the first emailPopups for users on the listSite abandonment
Bio:
Chase brings a unique and advantageous perspective to email marketing having experience in almost every aspect of email (from ecommerce email marketing to cold email marketing to even building and scaling email newsletters and everything in-between).
Chase is the Co-Founder of Boundless Labs — a top ecommerce email marketing agency. Since launching Boundless Labs in June of 2018, they have helped their clients send hundreds of millions of emails resulting in over $25 million in email attributable revenue. A few of our clients include: The Chive, IBEX, Original Grain, TUSHY and Vinyl Me Please.
Additionally, Chase, as briefly mentioned above, has tons of experience with cold email, having delivered millions of cold emails into users' primary inbox. Lastly, he's helped acquire millions of email subscribers for brands he's built personally as well as for his client's businesses.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.boundlesslabs.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/chasedimond/https://www.instagram.com/chasehunterdimond/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talk with Chase Diamond. Well, how to leverage email marketing to grow your business. This is the business of eCommerce episode one 25
Charles (00:16):
Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It's a world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're ever in an eCommerce store, you need to have drip to try and. Here's why. Drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing, one of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation. To get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drip.com/b O E now under the show. Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Polaski and I'm here today with chase diamond. Chase is the cofounder of boundless labs, a top email marketing agency since launching boundless labs in June of 2018 they have helped their clients and hundreds of millions of emails resulting in over a 25 million and attributable revenue. I asked chase on the show today to chat about how you can use email to help grow your eCommerce business. So, Hey chase, how are you doing today?
Chase (01:38):
I'm doing well, thank you. How are you doing? Yeah. Awesome to have you on the show.
Charles (01:41):
So email marketing. I kinda, we were talking before the show about this and this, it's a very wide world. We kind of talk about that. What do you usually, when you kinda start looking at initially the eCommerce business, right? What do you kind of focus on first? Are you looking at a kind of a transactional sort of thing? Marketing? Like what makes sense [inaudible] to begin with?
Greg MeadeCo-Founder of CROSSNET
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
CROSSNETCROSSNET TwitterCROSSNET FacebookCROSSNET YouTubeCROSSNET Instagram
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talk with Greg Meade about how to identify your target market. This is a business eCommerce episode one 24
Charles (00:15):
Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It's of world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're ever in an eCommerce store, you need to have drip a try and here's why. Tripp offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing, one of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation rules visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools and offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drip.com/b O E now onto the show. Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles
[inaudible]
and I'm here today with Greg Meade. Greg is a cofounder of cross Nash, a full way volleyball game that merged official volleyball with Foursquare that he created with two of his childhood friends. I asked Greg on the show tonight to chat about his process and identifying a target market. So, Hey Greg, how are you doing today?
Greg (01:31):
Doing well, how are you? Thanks for having me.
Charles (01:32):
Yeah, awesome to have you on. First real quick about the product actually. So kind of explained in the intro but, and I've seen videos and for people that are kind of just listening in what, what is the product exactly? It's a game that's, and I've played Foursquare, I remember playing and I was a kid from new must be around the same age I guess. I guess in the eighties. Foursquare was like a big thing. So, so I remember that, but people who don't remember that, I haven't seen the site. What exactly is the product?
Greg (02:02):
Yeah. So crossing it is the world's first Foursquare volleyball game. Like you said, it is traditional Foursquare, but we incorporated volleyball. So you gotta hit in there this time instead of bouncing on the, on the ground.
Charles (02:13):
Okay. So it's something a lot of people play. Like I'm guessing, I looked at the site people hit the beach and stuff like that, right? So it's kinda, you know,
Greg (02:21):
The beets beach grass, we just got an indoor model. So what we're going to get in a lot more physical education curriculum in schools. So yeah.
Charles (02:30):
Yeah. So I think kind of the idea of identifying your target market, I feel like this is one of those things where if you come up with a product for us, then you're trying to figure out like, how do we get it in the head? Like, like you could see the product, right? You could see exactly how this happens. You get the product and you're like, Ooh, this is fun. We can play this. And you play yourself and you're like, who are those people that want to play? Like, who are the people like us that want to play this game? I'm guessing that's how that kind of started.
Greg (02:54):
Yeah, exactly. So we would bring it to the beach to start off and we'd get a lot of traction. A lot of people will come up to it. Get in line, ask questions, take photos, take videos, want to play. It gets crazy. So when you set it up it's the first time seeing it for the majority of people in the world. So they'll, they'll,
Raitis PurinsHead Of Marketing at Printful
Bio:
Raitis is the Head of Marketing at Printful, one of the market’s leading print-on-demand/ drop-shipping business with more than 800 employees, and five fulfillment centers in North Carolina, California, Mexico, and Latvia. The company has fulfilled more than 15 million items since its founding in 2013. Raitis joined the team 3 years ago and has since then led the winning marketing strategy and execution and scaled the marketing team from 5 to 40 people. He is responsible for content marketing, SEO, PPC, CRO and affiliate marketing.
Before joining Printful, Raitis has been growing his skills in various roles in digital marketing since 2011. In his previous role at one of the leading telcos in Latvia, he was working as Media and Digital Communication Manager where he was responsible for media strategy and coordination, as well as digital channel optimization.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
PrintfulRaitis Instagram
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business of eCommerce. I talked with Raitis Purins about Dropshipping VS Print on Demand. This is the Business of eCommerce, episode 123
Charles (00:15):
Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It's of world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you're ever in an eCommerce store, you need to drip a try and here's why. Drip offers one click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing, one of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation, will visually see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It's powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drip.com/b O E now onto the show. Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Raitis Purins. Raitis is a head of marketing at Printful, one of the leading print on demand suppliers. I asked him on the show today to chat about the difference between drop shipping and print on demand. So Hey rod, it's how you doing today.
Raitis (01:27):
Good, how are you? It's glad to be on the show.
Charles (01:29):
Yeah. Awesome to have you on. Finally a talk to a lot of folks about drop shipping, but I don't think, I think this is a what, 120 third episode and it never actually talked to them about print on demand. So that's a, I'm pretty excited. So you're the head of marketing for Printful, right?
Raitis (01:46):
Yes. I'm head of mining at Printful actually joined the team a little bit more than two years ago. At the start I managed five people and now we almost 50 50 people doing marketing for Printful print on demand company.
Charles (02:01):
Yeah, you guys have been everywhere, so it's definitely you doing something right. I can definitely tell you that had a lot. So that's it. Thank you. Yeah, so and so you see a lot of folks kind of starting off. You have drop shipping all the time. That's kinda like, that's kind of everyone knows about that at this point. But I feel like print on demand, it's kind of a lesser known option. And we work with a lot of folks who are either just starting off the kind of use it or even much larger pretended man folks. And I don't even think a lot of people know that they're print on demand. They don't even know. That's a thing. So real quick just for us, just in case someone's watching, they don't even know what it is.
Andrew HendersonManaging Partner of Nomad Capitalist
Bio:
Andrew Henderson is the managing partner of Nomad Capitalist and the most sought-after expert on global citizenship.
Andrew Henderson lives by five magic words: "go where you're treated best". Nomad Capitalist helps people to find the best places to live, bank, invest, incorporate, start a business, hire, date, and more.
After nearly a dozen years visiting and living in 100+ countries, Mr. Henderson has become an expert on the growing field of global citizenship. He is the author of "Nomad Capitalist", a book discussing the concepts of global citizenship that anyone can apply.
Mr. Henderson is unique in that unlike other consultants who merely sell products, he lives the lifestyle he preaches, having multiple passports, homes on three continents, and international business.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
Nomad CapitalistNomad Capitalist InstagramNomad Capitalist FacebookNomad Capitalist Twitter
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Andrew Henderson about how to move to a tax Haven and pay zero taxes. This is the Business of eCommerce, episode 122. Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. They show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Andrew Henderson. Andrew is the managing partner at nomad capitalist where he helps people find the best places to live, bank invest, incorporate, start a business higher and days. I asked Andrew on the show today to chat about how you can move to a tax Haven and pay zero taxes.
Charles (00:43):
Hey Andrew, how are you doing today?
Andrew (00:44):
Great. Great to be with you.
Charles (00:46):
Yeah. Awesome. I have you on, I'm super interested in the topic on kind of moving to a tax Haven. There's somebody I have not actually talked to someone about before and it's one of those things you hear but you don't even know or at least I don't know sometimes what it means. You hear of tax havens and you hear, you know, large companies doing this thing where they just move somewhere and pay less taxes. But I never really know, like, is that something we can do as, you know, smaller businesses or like how does this even work? So this is something you, so we're not actually offering tax advice here.
[inaudible]
State that, but so what exactly, when you start talking about moving a business to a tax Haven, what does that mean?
Andrew (01:35):
Well, there's actually four parts to it. I call it the, the tax friendly quadrant, right? So what people think is, Oh, you just put your company somewhere else. And you can pay less tax by just moving your company that the Cayman islands did. You sit around in Boston or Los Angeles or Sydney or whatever. It's not quite that easy if you're not Google or Amazon or Starbucks. But the reality is, I mean, what they, those companies have done is they have basically planted a flag of convenience in places around the world that allow them to keep more of their own money. And so what my five magic words are, are go where you're treated best. You know, in the United States I paid North of 40% in taxes as an entrepreneur. I ran several businesses there before selling a couple and, and letting a couple go and moving overseas full time. And so now, you know, I'm able to establish my company in a place that charges basically zero tax or, or very close to it. I'm able to live overseas personally in places that don't demand tax from me personally. And so by matching those two things up, I'm able to pay a very, very low rate of tax. And you know, people can do this, including Americans.
Charles (02:52):
So the two parts are you can put the business in one country and you physically live in another country, right?
Kyle GoguenFounder of Paw Struck
Bio:
Kyle Goguen will always be an entrepreneur at heart. Kyle founded his first eBay store at 16 when local restaurants refused to hire him—apparently having zero work experience isn't a desirable attribute! From electronics to designer women's clothing, Kyle sold anything and everything he could get my hands on. He spent most of the profits purchasing inventory, which filled my parents' garage. Every other cent went straight into his savings account.
At 18, Kyle put his eBay business on hold and headed off to USC—majoring in Industrial & Systems Engineering. Rather than jump back into eBay, he scooped up a few part-time jobs—one on campus as a Video Technician and the rest as a College Ambassador for brands like PlayStation, Monster Energy, and Ubisoft.
Kyle rode that wave until he finished his Bachelor's and eventually my Master's in Engineering Management. With his degrees in hand, he made an illogical decision (in the eyes of many) and chose to avoid a career as an engineer—the thing he had been training to do for over 5.5 years. Instead, Kyle returned to his passion: eCommerce entrepreneurship.
Pawstruck.com was born in January of 2014.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.pawstruck.com/https://www.thedapperdogbox.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylemgoguen/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Kyle Goguen about starting the an eCommerce business in 2020. This is the Business of eCommerce episode 121. Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi, and I'm here today with Kyle Goguen. Kyle is the founder of PawStruck, a e-commerce dog treats company, Kyle side of the company in 2014 and has since grown to 12 13 million, I assume on the show today. Tad about if you're starting an eCommerce business now in 2020, what are some of the best things you should be doing? So, Hey Kyle, how are you doing today?
Kyle (00:43):
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
Charles (00:45):
Yeah. Awesome to have you on the show. Love the new thing. Kind of focus in more towards retailers, just starting off on kind of what they can do, kind of getting into 20, 20 to kinda just help wherever they are today. Get to that next level. You see kind of a lot where they don't really know, kind of, everyone's kind of trying a lot of different things. What I've noticed. So it's kind of always interested in saying what's the one thing you should actually be focusing on? Cause I feel like that's of the, the big thing right on. You could do a little PPC, a little social ads, you know, do some Instagram, do some random blogging, but that's usually not the right thing to do. So I guess to fit, to start, what would you, if you're talking to a new retailer today, they're just starting off, or at least I have something going, what would you say they should be focusing on in this upcoming year to help kind of grow their business?
Kyle (01:39):
Sure. So something that we've found to be extremely effective is email marketing. I think it's something that, especially new eCommerce stores hesitate to jump into and really focus on. It's something that I personally failed to do for the first couple of years of my business as well. At least for me, like I, I didn't see email is it's kind of the future of marketing. I thought it was kind of old school cause it didn't really work on, on me personally as a consumer. It wasn't something like I keep my inbox pretty clean. I feel like those email campaigns don't work on me. I just get annoyed if retailers are emailing me. But frankly, in, in most most categories of products and almost every e-commerce owner I've talked to, email marketing is like the number one most successful and profitable m...
Chris CageFounder of Greenbelly Meals
Bio:
Chris is the founder of Greenbelly Meals, a company he founded in his mom's kitchen after thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Greenbelly makes a ready-to-eat meal loaded with dense nutrition for hikers and adventurers. Chris also wrote a book called "How to Hike the Appalachian Trail" and has appeared on podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience. When he's not hiking, he can be found rock climbing, playing board games or nerding out on punk rock.
Show Notes:
Cottage Food LawsKickstarter raised 19kApril Dunford - Obviously AwesomeChad from Boardgame Tables4 Hour Workweek
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.greenbelly.co/https://www.facebook.com/greenbellymeals/https://www.instagram.com/greenbellymeal/https://www.youtube.com/c/greenbelly
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of The Business of eCommerce. I talk with Chris Cage about founding an eCommerce foods business. This is a business of eCommerce episode 120. Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I am Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Chris Cage. Chris is the founder of green belly meals, a company that he founded in his mom's kitchen after hiking the Appalachian trail, green belly makes a ready to eat mills bar loaded with dense nutrients for hikers and adventurers. I as Chris on the show today to chat about his experience launching an eCommerce foods brand. So, Hey Chris, how are you doing today?
Chris (00:44):
Charles, what's up man? Thanks for having me.
Charles (00:46):
Yeah, awesome to have you on the show. It we're just chatting before the show. Currently your abroad, right? So you're originally from the U S but currently you are?
Chris (00:55):
Yeah, I'm in Chiang Mai, Thailand right now. If you can tell the it's dark. Yeah. But yeah, we are worlds away right now. Yeah, I'm in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Charles (01:07):
Yeah. So, and that's, I know we had to do some time-sucking here. It's early for me, late for you. But so thank you for taking the time.
Chris (01:14):
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me do. Yeah. But yeah, we are a little bit off on time, so that's for sure.
Charles (01:17):
Yeah, exactly the opposite of most. I think actually it might be the opposite. It's super interesting. You're kind of the background. So ready to eat backpacking mail. Right? So this is a bar. So you guys sell it's a bar specifically if you're a backpacker like a protein bar sort of thing or what exactly is it?
Chris (01:37):
Yeah, it's two large fluffy meal bars inside a single package that provides 650 calories. So we use all natural ingredients and really just try to focus on a high macro nutrient label. So high calorie protein, fat, fiber, all that good stuff. So for hikers, which is, my background is I was a hiker and hiking the Appalachian trail and hiking 20 miles a day for six months. That, you know, I said, Hey, you know, I was losing a lot of weight and weight, is it weight on your pack as a huge priority because you generally have maybe a hundred miles or five days in between resupply points that you need to make sure that the food you are carrying in between those resupply points is as nutritionally dense as possible. So that was kind of where the idea came from is get creating a product that's going to be nutritionally dense. So if you're burning 5,000 calories a day and you could have to and you have to carry all the food, you know, in your pack for the next five days, it really needs to be dense. So I started thinking about creating a really dense lightweight ready to eat meal that, you know, was all natural.
Charles (02:52):
So, okay. Yeah. I don't talk to too many people that are in that kind of actual food space. I feel like that in itself, it's like its
Arlen RobinsonCo-Founder of Omnistar Interactive
Bio:
Arlen Robinson is a seasoned business owner and co-founder of Omnistar Affiliate Software which gives businesses the opportunity to set up and manage their own affiliate and customer referral programs.
With over 20 years of experience managing and running various aspects of the company, Arlen has a wealth of information that he can share. His current responsibilities involve leading all business development activities for the company as well as hosting a weekly podcast known as the eCommerce Marketing Podcast in which he interviews various marketing experts about successful eCommerce marketing strategies.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.osiaffiliate.comhttps://www.ecommercemarketingpodcast.comhttps://arlenrobinson.com
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talked with Arlen Robinson about how to set up a successful affiliate program. This is a business of e-commerce, episode one 19. Welcome to the Business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow the eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Arlen Robinson. Arlen is the co founder of Omnistar Interactive software. I'm going to star helps businesses set up and manage their affiliate and customer referral programs. I asked Ireland on the show today to chat about how you can create your own affiliate program. So Arlen, how are you doing today?
Arlen (00:41):
Great. Great. How's it going, Charles? Good. Awesome to have you on the show.
Charles (00:45):
It say to talk about the whole affiliate program. It's something we've been doing a bit hair [inaudible] and it's kind of top of mind, so pretty exciting topic. So just to kind of get everyone into it, when you say an affiliate program, which is for us to find it real quick it's basically, how would you define it? What's that off there?
Arlen (01:05):
It's a great question and I'm, I'm glad to define it. A lot of times when people say affiliate program, a lot of times the term referral program gets tossed around as well. But there they're actually two distinct programs actually. So first off with an affiliate program and if the
[inaudible]
program is actually when you get any outside person, whether they're an actual affiliate and that's what they do for a living or they're an influencer. When you get these outside people to promote your product or services to an audience of people that they typically don't know. So these are, you know, affiliates or influencers, they have a audience of followers and these followers are usually people that they don't know, people that are just following, you know what it is that they do and these affiliates with the affiliate program, they're doing this in exchange for some type of commission or you know, or offering whether it's cash commission per referred sale or whether it is a in exchange for like maybe product free product or things like that.
Arlen (02:04):
So that's what an affiliate program is. Now the referral program on the other side is when you actually get your customers to refer you other customers and you incentivize your customers. So your customers are going to be, you know, people who of course that are using your products or services. And they're reaching out to typically people that they do know, people that are in their ecosystem, friends and family, colleagues, anyone in their, in their kind of a sphere of influence. And so that's what an F referral program is. And with the referral program, the incentive can be the same as well. It could be a percentage of our order total. It can be a fixed amount, it could be free product, it could be bonus items, a gift or whatever you decide they commission it is up to you. And so that's, that's really the difference.
Zee AliFounder of Z-SWAG
Bio:
Zee Ali is the founder of Z-SWAG, full-service custom apparel, promotional merchandising, and fulfillment company. Zee has worked with brands including Chik-fil-a, Sony, Cricket Wireless, General Mills, and LinkedIn.
Zee graduated from Triton College with a Culinary Arts and Restaurant Management degree, in addition to studying graphic design and web development. While attending school, Zee discovered an opportunity to sell chef coats to his classmates by sourcing chef coats from the local flea market, filling his duffle bag and going classroom to classroom at Triton. His side-hustle transformed into a chef uniform and equipment company which later morphed into what it is today.
A true renaissance man at heart, Zee has many passions. His various talents place further emphasis on his versatility, which compliments his knowledge in business. To follow his journey, learn about what he is working on, and from his successes and failures, you can follow him on IG at @ZeeAli and ZSWAG.com.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://www.zswag.com/https://thezeeali.com/who-is-zee-ali/https://www.facebook.com/theZeeAli/https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeeali/https://www.instagram.com/ZeeAli/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talked with Zee Ali about running a remote team. This is the business of e-commerce. Episode one 18. Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi , and I'm here today with Zee Ali. Zee is the founder of Z swag, a full service custom apparel, promotional merchandising and fulfillment company Z works with brands including Chick-fil-A, Sony cricket, wireless, general mills, and LinkedIn. I assume on the show today to chat about how he runs a remote team. So hazy. How are you doing today?
Zee (00:42):
I'm fantastic. Thank you so much for having me on.
Charles (00:45):
Yeah, it's awesome to have you. I love kind of talking about other folks who have kind of done the whole remote thing. I feel like that's, that's one of those reasons fundamentally why a lot of people get into this business because it's something that you can run remotely, right? Not like there's a lot of businesses, it's just not possible. But e-commerce is one of the few things that it truly is like completely. Location independent. So how long have you been running this particular company for?
Zee (01:13):
Almost 10 years and years. Okay. And remote the whole time. So, so our team isn't enormous. We certainly have, we have two offices currently. People go if they want to go, if they don't, they, they can work from home. That's up to them. For me remote is just easier. We accomplish this by providing clear outcomes of each job role. Here's what we're looking to achieve. So you don't measure success by the time that they're clocking in, clocking out. It's by the results themselves. So if you provide clear KPIs and clear outcomes, it makes things a bit easier.
Charles (01:54):
[Inaudible] Are, so where are, where are you located for our stuff right now? Physically?
Zee (01:59):
Right now I'm sitting in Louisville, Kentucky, and tomorrow morning I will be in Chicago where our HQ is.
Charles (02:05):
Okay. What does office number two
Zee (02:08):
That's in Chicago? That's, that's our flagship Porter's that's, yeah. Where the company all started
Charles (02:14):
And then it was the second office
Zee (02:16):
That is in Louisville, Kentucky. I'm in one of the conference rooms.
Charles (02:19):
Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Okay. And about how many employees?
Zee (02:21):
You're both ten-ish. Say we have like seven full-timers and we've got like three to five kind of floating around here and there as, as
George Lawrence Founder & CEO, MerchantWords
Bio:
Bold, dynamic, and innovative are just a few of the words that come to mind when describing MerchantWords founder George Lawrence. Overcoming personal obstacles to build a multi-million dollar technology company, George has used his remarkable ability to creatively solve problems to help over 100,000 entrepreneurs achieve e-commerce success.
A software developer by trade, George got his professional start at the beginning of the internet with the Peter Norton Consulting Group, where he worked on Norton Utilities. He was a founding member of the Citysearch team; and helped create the software that launched the world’s first online automobile shopping platform at CarsDirect. At TigerConnect, George developed the web and mobile platforms for their clinical communications software. Discovering a gap in the data-driven e-commerce market, George derived an innovative way to collect shopper keyword phrases, so Amazon sellers could find unique opportunities to bring new products to market – thus, MerchantWords was born. Since 2012, MerchantWords has helped entrepreneurs, brands, and agencies discover new opportunities, achieve successful product launches, and run profitable advertising campaigns online – on Amazon and beyond.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
http://merchantwords.com/bizofecomhttp://youtube.com/MerchantWordsOfficialhttp://facebook.com/MerchantWordsOfficialhttp://instagram.com/MerchantWordshttp://twitter.com/MerchantWords
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with George Lawrence about how to get into the minds of your customers. This is a business of e-commerce. Episode one 17. Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps e-commerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I mean host Charles Palleschi and I talk today with George Lawrence. George is the founder and CEO of merchant words or the merchant words. He helps entrepreneurs, brands and agencies discover new opportunities that chiefs discussion with product launches, run profitable advertising campaigns online, Amazon and beyond. I asked George and the show today chat about some ways you can get into the minds of your customers. So, Hey George, how are you doing today?
George (00:46):
Fantastic. Thanks for having me on.
Charles (00:48):
Yeah. Awesome to have you on. Definitely love the concept kind of getting into the mind of your customers. Um, I like from a high level and then kind of talk about, I love talking about kinda how you actually do that tactically. Like, what are some ways, um, you know, as an eCommerce retailer, everyone says that everyone says you need to get in the mind of your customer is, it's kind of something we've heard again and again, but I love talking about some ways on how to do that as a retailer. I like, and you know, I've heard before like reach out to them and talk to them, that sort of thing. But you specialize in this. What are some things you would recommend as far a retailer out there?
George (01:25):
Great question. You'll, you know, let me tell you first. What I see people do and when I see people do is they chat with their friends. First of all, I was like, Hey, if I built this, would you buy it? I'm like, Oh brother, you know, you gotta you gotta get some real opinions. Uh, but you know, the interesting thing is it's so easy to do this, but so few people really kind of make it a priority and that, that astounds me. So one of the things that I like to tell folks is, look, you got to remember that people don't search using the physical aspects of the product. People don't search for, you know, I need something that's so many inches tall and so many inches wide, et cetera. People search for the need that they have or the problem they're trying to solve.
John GhiorsoCEO of Orca Pacific
Bio:
John Ghiorso is the founder and CEO of Orca Pacific, a Seattle-based agency focused exclusively on helping brands sell on Amazon. He started the agency about 12 years ago and now manages over 100 top brands in a variety of product categories. After 10 years of studying Amazon, Mr. Ghiorso has earned a reputation for approximating industry reaction and forecasting shifts within the Amazon marketplace. His insights have been featured in prestigious publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Vox, Modern Retail, and Digiday.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.orcapac.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/johnlouisghiorso/https://www.linkedin.com/company/orcapacific/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of The Business of eCommerce. I talk with John [Ghiorso] about how to grow your Amazon business in 2020 this is the business of e-commerce, episode one 16. Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I mean host Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with John Ghiorso. John is the founder of Orca Pacific. A Seattle based agency focuses exclusively on helping brands sell on Amazon. You started the agency 12 years ago and is now managing over a hundred top brands and a variety of product categories. I asked John on the show today to chat about how you can optimize your Amazon listings in 2020 so, Hey John, how are you doing today?
John (00:48):
Good, good. How are you
Charles (00:49):
Doing well, thanks for coming on the show. I love the topic. Kind of the all Amazon stuff right now. Lot of retailers are either on Amazon or moving to Amazon, thinking about selling Amazon. So everyone's, everyone's kind of somewhere touching on Amazon right now. So I love the kind of top, Whoa, just how to grow that. So do you guys normally work with, so you work with brands, but is this just brand selling their own products or what kind of retail is typically do work most with,
John (01:22):
Yeah, sure. So you know, our, our, our primary client archetype is a branded manufacturer, but we also work with distributors, retailers, direct to consumer brands. So it, it kind of runs the gambit. In terms of folks reselling other brands, products, reselling white label, private label products or you know, sort of traditional national brands. So really, you know, our clients are essentially entities that are trying to increase their sales top line growth on the Amazon platform. And kind of the, the simplest way of saying it.
Charles (01:56):
Okay. So if you're a white label brand [inaudible] white label retailer you could still get some value out of, basically you should have stopped listening at this point. They can get some value out of these types of things. Yeah. Hopefully. All right. So are we talking when you typically kind of start working with someone, are they already on Amazon? Are they competing for the buy box or are they competing to shop at a search or where's a good place to focus?
John (02:21):
Yeah, so primarily they're, they're going to be competing in, in search. I mean competing to win the buy box is it's certainly a game that we play, but our primary goal is to drive more demand for a given product. So, you know, then there's kind of the secondary consideration. Is that demand going to you? Are you the, the seller that winning the buy box? I guess the way we look at the platform primarily is our sort of assumption is that you will be winning the buy box. And then you know, we're really trying to drive demand for the product. Overall if there's, if there's lost by box issues or competitive by box issues, we see that as a problem that needs to be solved, but more of kind of a shorter term consideration. And then longer term macro is, is really how to,
Rich GoldsteinPatent Attorney
Bio:
Rich Goldstein is a patent attorney that helps Amazon sellers to protect their products and brands. He has obtained more than 2000 patents for his clients and is the author of the American Bar Association’s "Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent”. Rich is passionate about helping Amazon sellers to become ‘patent savvy’ so that they make good business decisions and protect themselves while avoiding problems with other sellers.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
goldsteinpatentlaw.comBook: The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business of eCommerce. I talked with rich Goldstein about using patents to protect your products. This is the business of eCommerce. Episode one 15
Charles (00:15):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I mean it was child's plus ski and I'm here today with rich Goldstein. Rich is a patent attorney that has helped Amazon sellers protect their products and brands. He has obtained with the 2000 patents for his clients and he's authored a book for the American bar association called consumer's guide to obtaining a pattern. I just listen to the show tonight to chat about how you can use patterns, connect your products and Amazon listings. So, Hey rich, how are you doing today? Doing well. I'll ask him to have your show. Thanks for coming on. I love the, this is one of the topics we don't talk about often enough and I feel with especially a lot of Amazon sellers, they don't really get enough exposure to kind of how to protect themselves legally.
Charles (01:02):
With this, right. So you do a lot of work with, is it mainly Amazon folks or is it all kinds of just private label in general? What do you kind of focus typically? Well, I've been working with entrepreneurs for 25 years and the last few years it's been very much e-commerce, Amazon entrepreneurs. And and yeah, I, I agree with you totally. I think patents is a topic that Amazon sellers at e-commerce people don't focus on enough. And I think it's the thing that could have the biggest impact on their business that they probably know the least about. So it is something that
Richard (01:37):
It's very important to talk about. I think it's very important for Amazon sellers to learn about and just to get a reasonable level of competence with how patents work and,
Charles (01:47):
And how to better utilize it in their, in their business. Okay. Yeah, I see this a lot. And also this is my, I have a childlike understanding of how the legal system works, but the difference between patterns and trademarks, cause I know trademarks is also another big thing, especially on Amazon. How does, how does a trademark play into that? So do you need a, do you need a patent to get a trademark or are they not at all related?
Richard (02:13):
They are not at all related. There are different subject matter altogether. And so when you think patents think products like product ideas themselves, the way a product functions, the way product looks, that's what a patent could be used to protect. Trademarks on the other hand offer branding. Okay. So you know, trademarks are for the, the name that you use to sell your product, the logo that you have. And in general they protect
Charles (02:46):
Different types of things so they serve different purposes. Okay. I see. So in which case, let's say you're selling an Amazon if you're doing any sort of private, would that be the time when you want to look at pattern or is it, if you're completely producing a new product from the ground up, like when would you cross the line of being, you know, wine, that kind of protection?
Richard (03:09):
Yeah, I mean in general, if you, if you're white labeling
Chris BrewerCo-Founder of OMG Commerce
Bio:
Chris Brewer is the co-founder of OMG Commerce, a digital eCommerce agency based in Springfield, MO. OMG Commerce is a Google Premier Partner that places them in the top 2-3% of all Google Partner agencies worldwide. Chris is a frequent speaker and guest at industry events and digital marketing podcasts. He currently manages inbound inquiries and acts as a strategist for OMG Commerce clients. In addition to the incredible growth and success with “OMG,” his entrepreneurial accomplishments have included building and selling an outdoor advertising company and direct mail publishing company. He is the author of the book, Does Your Marketing Make You Money: 7 Quick & Easy Secrets to Create A Booming Business Now and resides just outside Springfield, Missouri with his wife of 24 years.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://omgcommerce.com https://facebook.com/chrisbrewermarketerhttps://chrisbrewer.cohttps://twitter.com/momarketer
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talked with crisper about the best practices when working with a marketing agency. This is a Busby commerce episode one 14
Charles (00:16):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Polaski. I'm here today with Chris brewer. Chris is a cofounder of OMG commerce, a digital e-commerce agency. OMG commerce is a Google premier partner that places them in the top two to 3% of all Google partner agencies worldwide. I asked Chris to the show today to chat about what are the some of the best practices when working with an agency. So, Hey Chris, how are you doing today? And I'm fantastic. I am enjoying the winter weather where I'm located, which right now is Missouri, but soon we'll be back in sunny Florida. So enjoying both places. Yes, Florida traveling down there actually next week for a [inaudible] to see some family and it is fantastic getting out of the Northeast. Same thing with the winter weather.
Charles (01:13):
So this, this timing is very good for that. So great to, great to have you on the show though. It's super interesting talking about kind of the whole agency side. Right on. So this is episode one 14. It was one 11. I talked to John from credo all about hiring SEO agencies, kind of the initial how to find the agency, how to hire. And it's a super interesting show. So sticking, you know, there's a lot, you guys do it with agency work on how to actually the work with the agency and also kind of were talking before the show, how to fire the agency is also kind of another thing and just how to and your relationship, let's say with an agency, it's laid a different way. So I guess first, you know, tell me a little bit of your experience kind of as you are.
Charles (02:01):
You're on the agency side, right? So you guys absolutely. Yup. Yup. We're on the agency side. So we've been hired and we've also been fired. So I got, we got both ends of the spectrum covered, but you know, seriously for about 10 years, my business partner, Brett Curry and I was pretty well-spoken on around the circuits and events and has his own podcast as well. He and I have grown this agency mainly focusing on Google services, search shopping, YouTube and display. And then also in the last couple of years, Amazon as well and have a team. It's getting close to 40 people, which is just mind boggling to me. But you know, I'm, I'm fielding personally two to three leads a day. And on the hiring side, I'm on the other side of that. Right. Like your other podcast that talking about how to hire, I'm on the other side of that because people are hopefully have done their homework before they've called us and then we're engaging with those brands.
Charles (03:02):
Joanna WiebeFounder of Copyhackers
Bio:
The original conversion copywriter and founder of Copyhackers, Joanna Wiebe teaches a world of digital marketers in SaaS and eCommerce how to get the yes using li’l ol’ words.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
CopyhackersCopyhackers Twitter
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talked with Joanna Wiebe about how to write e-commerce emails. This is the business of e-commerce. Episode one 13.
Charles (00:15):
Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Polaski, and I'm here today with Joanna Wiebe. Joanna is the original conversion copywriter and founder of copy hackers. She teaches a world of digital marketers in both SAS and eCommerce. How to get to yes, using little old words. I just started the show today to talk about what are the best practices for sending e-commerce emails. So, Hey Joanna, how are you doing today? Doing good. I love the topic of writing e-commerce emails, right? I've heard you speak in person a few times, so hear you have some experience writing emails. So what do you guys do? So what do you guys do at copy hackers?
Joanna (01:01):
Yeah, sure. So, well, there's two sides of the Copyhackers business. One is the, basically the front of it, which is free and paid content. So we have a very active blog and video tutorials that we do. On helping, our real mission is to help entrepreneurs, whether that's like a startup founder or somebody who's running their own small service business, like a freelancer basically get their word out there. So there's a lot of people who [inaudible] want to write better copy because they understand copies or online sales person, but it can be a very murky sort of thing to figure out. So our job is to help people that you're out how to do that. And we did that with free and paid content. But the way that we make up the free and paid content is we work with not only in our own business on optimizing copy, but with clients as well. On, on doing the things we're talking about right now. So testing emails that actually convert in this current world. Not just old ideas for email, but what's new, what's happening, what used to work that doesn't seem to work anymore, things like that. So we have the two sides, the training business, which is free and paid, and then the agency side.
Charles (02:16):
Got it. Okay. So you guys focus mainly on the transactional email side of the promotion legal side.
Joanna (02:23):
So mostly like just coming up with a better email strategy for people, which largely focuses on segmentation first, but also like where are these communications coming from? What are they saying? What should they be saying? Most people we find, you know, there's a lot of emails in play, like transactional emails, but the transactional email was set up by the person who set up the tool in the first place. So they tend to like, Oh, I'll just write something quickly for a transactional email, which is a fine starting point. But there's a lot you can do with a transactional email, just like there's lots of, you know, promotional emails. So yeah, lots room to optimize in there for both, for everything, including outside of eCommerce. You know, the SAS world has triggered emails galore based on what you do or don't do. So there's a whole world, let's stop to the right for now.
Charles (03:12):
Yeah. It's one of those things where I feel like even the water has got a little muddy, right? Where even transactional emails still have a little promotional content in them. So it's something you can almost do both together. I've kind of found,
Joanna (03:24):
Yeah, there's room in transactional emails. Of course there's like rules with these
Paulina MassonFounder of Shopkeeper
Bio:
Paulina is an Amazon seller and a founder of Shopkeeper. She calls herself a ‘numbers girl’. Her favorite topics are on optimizing profits, pricing strategies, cashflow management and ways to save on Amazon fees.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://shopkeeper.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/paulinamasson/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talked with Paula Masson about pricing strategy. This is a business of eCommerce. Episode one 12. Welcome to the business e-commerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce. Miss us. I'm your host, Charles [inaudible] and I'm here today with Paulina Mahsan. Paulina is an Amazon seller and the founder of shopkeeper. She calls herself a numbers girl. Her favorite topics are optimizing profits, pricing strategies, cashflow management and ways to save on Amazon fees. I started the show today to chat about how you can tweak your prices to make more sales to eCommerce products. So, Hey Paulina, how are you doing today?
Paula (00:44):
Hey Charles, thanks for having me on.
Charles (00:46):
Yeah, it's awesome to have you on. I love the topic of pricing strategies. I feel like it's one of those things that once you kind of established it's a very easy way of just increasing that profit margin on what you already have by like just some strategies. It's one of those things, it's very easy to just optimize. And if you're already getting X amount you can kind of squeak up to more margin. So it's a very cool topic for retailers. How'd you, how did you get into this? So you originally an Amazon seller, right?
Paula (01:15):
Yeah, I'm actually a software developer by background, so I am quite technical in nature. So all technical people like the numbers and I'm one of them. And so I liked math, I liked the calculus, you know, those types of things. And so I became an Amazon seller first and then I decided to build this little software for myself on the side that now became a successful commercial product called shopkeeper. But while I was doing that, I researched a lot about different fees that were not like explained. And I usually, if you get some fee charged on Amazon, it's not explained anywhere very much. Like for example, compensated underscore clawback, like what is this, you know, compensate a glove. Like, and it's not even in the help files and supports is not so helpful. So I've been researching a lot about numbers that are to do with Amazon and then eventually I just drifted out into optimizing my own pricing because that's also a numbers related and started looking into different psychology things that I could use for my prices. So I actually experimented quite a bit with that and I could share with you some of the learnings that I have and what I had tested them, what worked for me and what worked for other sellers when I shared with them as well.
Charles (02:27):
Yeah, that'd be great.
Paula (02:29):
Cool. So basically I guess I would start with the big picture first. I'll just tell you two sentences. The big picture, the big picture is that when you think about your pricing strategy, it's not enough to just, it's not the flow that you first create a product, then you publish it on Amazon, create the listing, ship it to Amazon, and then you sit there and think what price I should put. Actually the price strategy should start before you even go design your product. And the reason I save is because there are different of buyers that you can actually target. So there's been research done for general e-commerce and online research has discovered that there are three general types of buyers. One is called screws, those bargain hunters. And the other type is the luxury spenders. So the big spender, and then there's this middle somewhere,
John DohertyFounder of Credo
Bio:
John Doherty is the founder of Credo, where they connect businesses with the right marketing provider from Credo's exclusive network. Since 2015 they've helped over 3,000 brands, including some of the world's most well known, work with great marketing firms.
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.getcredo.comhttps://twitter.com/dohertyjfhttps://twitter.com/getcredo
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talked with John Doherty about how to hire an SEO agency. This is a business of eCommerce, episode one 11 welcome to the business of eCommerce to show the helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi, and I'm here today with John Doherty. John is the founder of Creo where they connect businesses with the right marketing provider from cruise exclusive network. Since 2015 they've helped over 3000 brands work with great marketing firms. I asked John on the show today talk about what you should look for when you're hiring an SEO agency, so Hey John, how are you doing today?
John: 00:44 Good, Charles, how are you? Thanks for having me on.
Charles: 00:46 Yeah, great to have you on. Super interesting to talk about this side of SEO, right on working with a consultant and how to actually kind of do like the high level of when you should be doing it, if she should be doing it, and kind of all the strategy around that. I've talked to a bunch of guests in the show on kind of the tactical SEO, but this is kind of a different level, right? You kind of focus more on when to work with a consultant, how to work with them. Is that kind of what you guys focus on at credo?
John: 01:14 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I actually come from the SEO world. I've been in SEO doing SEO for about a decade now for the last four years has been helping companies basically find the right firm to work with through credo. And so really I've kind of more from like being in the trenches, tactical, that sort of stuff. I can still do SEO quite well, but I find a lot more interesting on the business side. How do people do a good job of hiring for for SEO, for digital marketing? Really? you know, I've learned a lot of lessons over the years. You know, my background is I worked, I worked agency side couple agencies. I worked in house for a couple of years with Zillow and then I've also been a solo consultant and then seem 3,500 plus companies come through creative looking to hire. So I've talked to a lot of companies.
John: 01:53 I've seen a lot of companies sign with firms and in a lot of companies not signed with firms. I've seen companies signed with the wrong firms. And so it's a, you know, I've seen people hire the wrong type of, of firms so it consultants have an agency or vice versa. And so yeah, I learned, I learned a lot of lessons and it's something not a lot of people talk about. And I think it's something that we should be talking about more, especially in the digital space as we're growing companies. Because once you get beyond just you and you found product market fit or you're starting to get some traction with your eCommerce company then it's a, you know, basically the question becomes how do I scale it more? And doing that well is really, really hard. And as we were talking about offline, that like, you know, this stuff is really hard and so whatever I can do to help people do it better and give them kind of more signal in a very noisy world I love to do that.
Charles: 02:36 Yeah. Sq is one of those things too where if you're hiring some external, they don't really,
In episode 110 of The Business of eCommerce, Charles talks with Ben Wieder, the co-Founder of Chassis.
They discuss what it takes to build a successful eCommerce brand in 2020 and what steps to take to grown to be a truly great brand.
Bio:
Ben Wieder is the founder of Chassis, the first and only premium men’s care line specifically formulated for better performance "down there”, keeping guys fresh, dry, and friction-free all day long. He's a branding expert, a published author, and is also an owner in Level 6 Marketing, a full-service brand performance agency.
Sponsors:
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Links:
chassisformen.com level6marketing.com
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 This episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk with Ben Weeder about how to build a truly great brand. This is the Business of eCommerce, Episode 110. Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Ben Weeder. Ben is a founder of chassis, a men's skincare product. Ben is also a branding expert, a published author and the owner of level six marketing, a full service brand performance agency. I asked, Ben on the show today to talk about how you can build a truly great brand. So, Hey Ben, how are you doing today?
Ben Wieder: 00:43 Great, Charles. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Charles: 00:45 Yeah, awesome to have you on the show. So it kind of kept it short in the intro, but can you explain what chassis is? Kinda just throw it at a men's product, but I think you'd be better equipped to explain that one.
Ben Wieder: 00:56 Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Yeah. So, so chassis we've really transformed that men's grooming really for, for hundreds of thousands of men at this point. And you know, if you look at the men's grooming space, you know, there's, there's a clearly defined roles for, you know, shaving obviously is a very familiar thing. You know, fragrances, things of that sort. But there's one area that we recognize when we launched in, in late 2015 and that was the area of what we call. And our tagline is man care for down there basically powder for guys. Guys had been using powder to prevent sweat and odor and chafing for hundreds of years actually. And but they've always been using products that weren't actually designed for that purpose. Many times it's baby powder. Sometimes it's you know what they would call medicated powder.
Ben Wieder: 01:50 A lot of you know, people are familiar with that term. Usually it smells either like a baby or an old man. It usually doesn't work great. It works okay. So we had this idea, you know, could we make a better powder and then could we build a brand around it? And that's what, that's what chassis is. So this is actually a habit. Just a, anyone wants to see that's there's one of our products. This is our, our ice powder. And this is a extra cooling one. I just haven't had sitting around and but you know, that's, that's kind of what it is. We have a couple of other products. We have a shower primer and a a restoration cream that compliment the powders as well. And you know, it's been going great.
Charles: 02:29 It's funny, a lot of guys use baby powder. It's one of those things like the locker room at the gym, it's like, Oh, that guy smells like a, you know, like a three year old, which isn't,
Ben Wieder: 02:37 Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And so we had a theory that guys, if we were upfront about it, if we just had an honest conversation in a very mature way, not sophomore, that they would respond really well to it. And, and, and it's
Robert PattonFounder of SHEATH Underwear
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Links:
https://www.sheathunderwear.com/https://facebook.com/sheathunderwearhttps://www.instagram.com/sheathunderwear/
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of a business of eCommerce. I talked with Robert Patterson about some of the lessons learned growing $1 million eCommerce business. This is a business of eCommerce, episode one Oh nine welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show of it helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles [inaudible] and I'm here today with Robert Patterson. Robin has a founder sheet underwear, a veteran owned and operated clothing brand that he started while deployed in Iraq in 2008 I've asked Robert on the show today to talk about some of the lessons he's learned scaling his business over $1 million. So, Hey Robert, how are you doing today?
Robert: 00:43 Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on your show.
Charles: 00:46 Yeah, it's excellent to have you on. I'm super interested in dig into the brand and kind of how you started. I love talking to retailers that, you know, this is on the whole like journey and kinda how they began and where they are now. So first of all, what is the brand? What do you guys sell and what did you, you started this when you were in Iraq, you were deployed in Iraq, correct?
Robert: 01:05 Yes sir. I, I joined the army in 2006 during the height of the Iraq war. And I was in Iraq that same year, six months after I joined. And as you all know, it's hotter than the devil's balls there. If you've heard things, it's very hot. And there's a, as the guys, we typically, when we get hot, we can get uncomfortable in different places, primarily in your underwear. And I, you know, typically men will have to readjust when it's too hot. Things get sticky, sweaty, uncomfortable. And I was there wearing my full army battle rattle gear. And when you're wearing all this gear, it's hard to readjust. And so I had this epiphany because I was really uncomfortable. It was very, it's not the funnest subject to talk about. Like it's not, we're cool per se, but a lot of guys understand they get the point and get the idea behind the underwear immediately.
Robert: 02:13 So what I, what I thought of was if there was a pouch inside the underwear isolated and your boys from your inner thighs, you wouldn't have to readjust. And I wasn't trying to create some million dollar company. I just was trying to prevent myself from having to readjust at the moment, you know. So I literally went to the, we have like little stores in Iraq, like little mini Walmarts and I bought some underwear, some scissors, and I drew out kind of the design that I kind of envisioned in my mind. And I took it to Taylor. We had some tailors out there and Iraq because in the army you have to be your uniform needs to be fitting you properly. So we always have tailors available and I, but they've never had bring underwear, I would presume, to have underwear tailored. And so they snickered at me a little bit.
Robert: 03:08 Real fancy getting a runaway tailored. Yeah. They were just like, what is this guy doing here? But they made them and it was a very raw prototype. The pouch was actually too small and there was a lot of, that was in 2008 it's 2019 we've had multiple revisions in generations issued and produced since, since then. And you know, we didn't even start the company until two years later because like I said, I was just doing it for myself, you know? And as I told other people, you know, just in conversations they were like, that sounds like a good idea, you
Kyla Gardner
Bio:
Kyla has published more than 35 books on Amazon, writing and designing many of them herself. She studied journalism in college and worked as a journalist covering crime and then human interest stories in her hometown of Chicago. Kyla transitioned into online business by working in Vietnam for a software company geared toward FBA sellers. When she was let go in 2017, she combined her writing skills and knowledge of Amazon to start a Kindle business. She now travels full time as a “digital nomad” and is working on her first novel set to be published under her real name.
Sponsors:
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Links:
kylagardner.comGoodreads
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talked with Kylar Gardner about selling info products on Amazon. This is the business of eCommerce, episode one Oh eight, welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles
[inaudible]
and I'm here today with Kylar gardener. Kyler has published more than 35 books in Amazon writing and designing many of them herself. She's currently traveling full time as a digital nomad and working on our first novel. I asked her in the show today to talk about selling info products on Amazon. So hi Kyla, how are you doing today?
Kyla: 00:41 I'm good. Thanks for having me. How are you?
Charles: 00:43 Yeah. Awesome to have you on the show. I love I love talking to retailers and I don't know if you'd call yourself a retailer. Good folks kind of out there selling and doing things. It's always kind of interesting to really get by, you know, the tactics and someone who's actually doing it today. So super excited for this. Yeah, me too. So you, so currently you publish 35 bucks on Amazon, right? And these are all under, are they under your name or the under different names of, what do you typically do?
Kyla: 01:12 They're all under fake names and quite a few different fake names as well because I batch them by the niche or the genre they're in. So they're mostly nonfiction. They're pretty short around seven to 15,000 words and they come in all different formats. I sell eBooks, paperbacks, hardcovers and audio books.
Charles: 01:36 Okay, thank you. So I need to unpack this a little and the whole digital nomad things. There's a lot here and this is super interesting. So first nonfiction, why, why are you publishing nonfiction under and what's the terminal? Is there a different term when you say someone else's name? Like a made up
Kyla: 01:53 A pseudonym? Yeah. Or a pen name. Yeah,
Charles: 01:56 Pen name. Why would you publish nonfiction under a pen name?
Kyla: 02:01 So I, when I started it, I just, I was just doing it for the money. I just wanted to see if I could make a buck on Amazon. And I wasn't saying like this is, you know, a topic that I want to be known for as a writer myself. I just want to see if I can put it out there and it gets a good response. So that's been my tactic.
Charles: 02:23 So you didn't want us, so, so it sounds like if it didn't do so you have a background in journalism, right? It's kind of, okay. So it sounds like if it didn't do well it was a complete flop. You wanted to just say wasn't me.
Kyla: 02:36 Right. Yeah. So yeah. But then if it's successful, I also can't really take credit for it. So it's kind of a double edged sword there.
David HoffmannFounder of GlobalTQM
Bio:
David is considered an expert in China sourcing, supply chain, private label, and brand licensing and founded GlobalTQM.com, after he saw an incredible opportunity through helping friends and family to assist SMEs, start-ups, and entrepreneurs with a range of educational and actual done-for-you services with his resources of +57 people in China.
Aside from his core business, David has built an international technology team and has a number of investments all of which he is an active advisor.
Sponsors:
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Links:
http://www.globaltqm.comhttps://www.facebook.com/GLOBALTQMhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/globaltqm/
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of the business of eCommerce. I talked with David Hoffman about what are the hidden risks importing from China. This is a business of e-commerce, episode one Oh seven
Charles: 00:16 Welcome to the business V commerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Polaski and I met today with David Hoffman. David is the founder of global TQM, is an expert in Chinese sourcing, supply chain, private label and brand licensing. I as David on the show today chat about what are some of the hidden risks importing from China. So, Hey David, how are you doing today? Very good. How you doing? Good. Awesome to have you on the show. I love the topic of some of the risks importing from China. I think it's one of the things a lot of people kind of tell folks just to kind of jump into it, but a lot of people don't talk about the other side of like what you can run into and there are a lot of potential risks. So first, where are you? So I'm in Boston Hill and I know we kind of had to get a time-zones lined up. Where are you located?
David: 01:05 So I'm located in Hong Kong. I've been living out here for about 16 years. I've got offices in China, so I spend a lot of my time between Hong Kong and China. So we bought a 12 hour time zone apart.
Charles: 01:16 Okay. And that was, and where are you originally from?
David: 01:19 Originally? From South Africa.
Charles: 01:21 Okay. And you moved there for this specifically? Right.
David: 01:26 We will purchasing a whole lot of products from China and I've got the top utility to move out to Hong Kong, which at the time seemed like a, I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. And you know, my plan not to come back here for one year and 16 years later just got absorbed by this world in this industry. And here I am.
Charles: 01:46 So that was 16 years ago. You've been there and this has been the, what you do is focus?
David: 01:52 Yes. So, so we, we do a lot of sourcing quality control in China. You know, I've started different businesses and you know, those businesses that all started because I've always had this habit and base in China, you know, being able to source products, deal with manufacturers and really get the right quality product. And that's always been for our own businesses in my own business. So then, you know, from here it's just kind of accelerated into, you know, helping more and more people on the ground in China. And as such, I haven't been able to leave.
Charles: 02:25 Yeah. I've heard a number of folks that once they start kind of scaling in the sourcing but let's say there's two partners, there'll be like one partner that stays local and then one partner goes out there, you know,
Derek O'CarrollCEO at Brightpearl
Bio:
Derek O’Carroll has had an eye for business since he turned his school’s unused tennis courts into a paid tennis club as a 15-year-old. As CEO of Brightpearl, a cloud-based ERP for retailers and wholesalers, he has refined go-to-market strategies and led innovations that have increased deal size of nearly 500 percent and yielded 75% growth year-on-year.
Sponsors:
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Links:
BrightpearlLinkedIn TwitterFacebook
Derek LinkedInDerek TwitterDerek Facebook
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of The Business of eCommerce. I talk with Derek O'Carroll about how to create a customer focused omnichannel experience. This is a business of e-commerce. Episode 106 to The Business of eCommerce to show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. I'm here today with Derek O'Carroll. Derek is a CEO of BrightPearl, a cloud based ERP are retailers and wholesalers at bright Pearl. He has redefined the go to market strategy and led innovations that have increased the deal size. We 500% in yield at a 75% growth year over year. I've asked Eric on the show today to chat about how you create a customer focused Omni channel experience. So Hey Derek, how you doing today?
Derek: 00:50 I'm excellent. Charles. Delighted to be with you. Yeah,
Charles: 00:52 To have you on the show. I'd love the topic, kind of the whole omnichannel and kind of bringing it all together first real quick, bright Pearl. You've been there. How long?
Derek: 01:01 A three and a half years. Just over. I joined in May, 2016
Charles: 01:05 Gotcha. Okay. And cloud based ERP. So for those who don't know, I feel like years ago I feel like this, the term ERP was just this thing that like other people had. But then as you kind of grow and you don't really know what it is, you know, like I don't need one of those. But as you grow, you start to realize maybe you know, you start to learn what it is and kind of realize who needs it and why. Can you explain real quick, who needs an ERP? What is it and kind of generally like how does it work?
Derek: 01:34 Well, I think to be successful, any merchant needs to provide a very high level of personalized service irrespective of the channel that they are using to engage with a client. That's, that's where everything starts. And in order to be able to do that, you have to orchestrate all of the operational tasks that come about when an, when an order hits your store through a point of sale, hits your marketplace through maybe an Amazon store, you're running our hits your website through your own website. And so retail ERP our cloud based ERP as you called it, essentially the way I would ask your listeners think about it is it's essential point to orchestrate all of your orders and all of the following on actions that you need to bring to bear upon those orders to get to the bottom line where you can see the Holy grail of what's my margin, what's my fully landed cost on each channel. And you need to know that because then you can decide how much do I order for the next season or the next phase. And also what's my pricing strategy in that particular channel? Cause as we know, every single channel has a different cost of doing business on it. And that's essentially what an ERP does. So it covers where people order from, how you handle that order it overs, fulfillment, logistics, payments, all the way through. So just think of the life cycle of a customer and then think of all the tasks needed to serve that.
Charles: 03:00 Yeah,
Nate GinsburgFounder of SellerPlex
Bio:
Nate built up his eCommerce business and sold for $1million in 2017. All while living around the world and doing lots and lots of yoga.
Now, Nate helps other entrepreneurs run better, more profitable and more scaleable businesses with SellerPlex.
Nate is passionate about living a free and balanced life helping others do the same!
Learn more about Nate on his Instagram @nteginsburg.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://SellerPlex.comhttps://SellerPlex.com/audithttps://NateGinsburg.comhttps://www.instagram.com/nateginsburg/https://www.facebook.com/nateginsburg
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of a business V commerce. I talk with Nate Ginsburg about putting systems in people in place to help you scale your business. This is a business of eCommerce, episode 105.
Charles: 00:17 Welcome to the business to be commerce. They show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow [inaudible] eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Polaski. I'm here today with Nakeds Berg. Nate is a founder of seller Plex where he helps Amazon and other eCommerce retailers grow their business by scaling their supply chain. I asked him on the show today to talk about how you, you can scale your business by putting systems and people in place. So, Hey Nate, how are you doing today? Doing good. Doing good? Thanks. Yeah, doing good. So wanted to make sure. So sell a Plex. Is it just supply chain or do you guys do finance as well? You were just saying.
Nate: 00:52 Yeah, so we basically you know, our sweet spot is all the things that need to get done to keep a business running, but are, you know, not really the fun stuff. And so I like, I believe that as an entrepreneur it's all of our best opportunity. Me, you you know, all the e-commerce listeners to do what do what we're best at and double down on, you know, where where we can add the most value and then you know, delegate and you know, offload the other areas that are, you know, necessary to run the business well but you know, aren't going to actually grow the business. So that's where that's where we come in. So our services include a supply chain, finance admin so that, you know, you as the owner can yeah, double down on, on growing the business.
Charles: 01:49 Got it. So it goes very well to show topic then. I love the idea of putting systems in place. It's one of those things and e-commerce is a business where there's a lot of repetition where a lot of things like orders come in and the goal is, you know, 99% of orders follow the exact same path. They do the same thing. Hopefully 9%, nothing goes wrong. They just kind of ship. So there's a lot of this like work that just needs to be done every day, multiple times a day. So putting systems in place, e-commerce is like this, like soup compared to some other businesses like consulting where everything's almost a one off e-commerce. The goal is there, it's a factory, it's assembly line, they just kind of move through. Right?
Nate: 02:30 Yeah, absolutely. And so a little kind of background on me and the business. So I had my own eCommerce business, you know, started maybe five or six years ago and you know, I'm, I'm the kind of person that I'm not good at very many things and so needed to get help in all these areas that I, you know, were necessary and important, but you know, it wasn't particularly good at or didn't want to be good at, you know, for example, the customer service you know, supply chain, finance, admin and and yeah, like, you know, that allowed me to, you know, build this business that, you know, was you know, running very well. You know, sales were good,
Joseph LiebermanDigital Marketing Director at Antlion Audio
Bio:
Founded the first indie game PR company and went on to be the marketing guy behind a successful casual game publisher, ArcadeTown, which was purchased by Demand Media and IPOed in 2013. At Arcadetown Joseph grew an eCommerce game network and subscription service to 13.5 million visitors per month with 8 million newsletter subscribers.
Joseph joined Antlion Audio in 2016, where we revamped a small CE company with a generic Shopify template into what people think is a major audio CE player. Joseph's initiatives have focused on drawing more earned media and PR attention to the company and it's product line, focusing on growing the brand and allowing their distributors to take lead on sales, though direct sales still represent a sizable portion of the overall business.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://antlionaudio.com/https://discordapp.com/invite/ZqDGNFg
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of The Business of eCommerce. I talked with Joseph Lieberman about how to deal with unhappy customers. This is the business of e-commerce. Episode 104,
Charles: 00:15 Welcome to the business of eCommerce they should have that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Joseph Lieberman. Joseph is a director of marketing at ant audio where he focuses on growing the company for brand awareness and earned media. Is Joseph on the show today to talk about how to deal with unhappy customers? So, Hey Joseph, how are you doing today? Doing great. I'm a happy customer currently. Well, I'm happy to have you on the show. This is one of those topics that I love chatting about and not many people, not many people talk about this side of e-commerce and I feel like it, it's one of those things as even the owner of the business or anyone customer service, you spend a ton of your time dealing with like the 1% of users that are unhappy. Most orders, you know, going out, things just work great. Hopefully. but those orders that don't cause us like a reduction in time and everything. So how do you deal with this or what do you know, what are some best practice for this?
Joseph: 01:18 So the, to be clear, to be clear, you know, as the marketing person in our company I, I view customer services of very different things and say maybe the customer service manager at our company who's in the trenches as it were. Like he's the one you know, emailing and talking to these people constantly and that kind of thing. So when it comes to the marketing side, my approach of dealing with might be a little different than, than the expectation of, you know, I need to send this guy an email. I need to, you know, get his shipping info. I need to figure out what the problem is. You know, those kinds of things. I'm thinking about more of the, the big scheme of things. What is going on here, right? What is caused somebody to be upset and what systems can we fix that will prevent this from happening again? So on the one hand unhappy customers are bad, but on the other hand, unhappy customers are good. And so I actually kind of want to talk about if I may that second part, which is how can unhappy customers be good? So rather than sort of get bogged down in the details of like, how do you fix a problem, I guess.
Charles: 02:35 Yeah, I like that. I feel like some of the, some of the unhappy customers, they're the ones that kind of push you further along to put like push you to do better, for lack of a better term though, where you, you have, you have to get better at dealing with certain issues and over time, you know, every time you set up
Jason BerkowitzFounder of Break The Web
Bio:
Jason Berkowitz is the Founder & SEO Director of Break The Web, a boutique Inbound Marketing agency based in NYC. Through trial & error, Jason officially started freelancing, offering SEO back in 2010 and as demand grew, the transition into an agency was the natural course.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://www.breaktheweb.agency/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonberkowitzseo/https://www.instagram.com/jasonberkowitzseo/https://facebook.com/breaktheweb
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of the business of eCommerce. I talk with Jason Berkowitz about three secret SEO tactics. This is a business of e-commerce, episode one Oh three
Charles: 00:16 Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles [inaudible], and I'm here today with Jason Berkowitz. Jason is the founder of break the web, an inbound marketing agency based in New York city who has been helping clients with SEO strategies since 2010 I asked Jason on the show today to talk about how you can use SEO to help grow your eCommerce business. So, Hey, Jason, how are you doing today? Hey, Charles. Doing well. How are you doing? Good. Great to have you on the show. SEO is one of those things that you can almost never get enough of. Like it's always this evolving thing, right? Where you know, 2019 today and even the stuff from last year or even the stuff from earlier this year, right? It seems outdated by this time, so it's always nice to kind of keep talking about this, right?
Jason: 01:03 Yeah. Google is definitely keeping the SEO community on their toes with ever evolving changes, updates and everything's that's happening all algorithmically. But yeah, just simply keeping us on our toes. So probably the best way to put it.
Charles: 01:19 Yup. Yeah. SEO, it's also unique for e-commerce, right? Where you know, the very page page heavy, I guess what you'd say. You know, people have blog content but they might only have, you know, several, a hundred posts I would say. But with e-commerce you could easily have thousands of product pages. And you need to kind of differentiate, differentiate each one. So what are some challenges and what are you kind of recommend with eCommerce clients to actually help them, you know, stand out from the noise?
Jason: 01:49 Yeah, I think you actually nailed one of the biggest challenges is that creating that differentiation on specific products. People might create multiple product pages for the same product where there's just one different variation that's different. Whether it's the color size, those are typical, are trying to make them as unique as possible would be the goal. Whether that's a completely unique product description to build a unique meta-description page. How to as much as you can. The reason is because you want to avoid the two pages possibly competing with each other on Google search results. That is called keyword cannibalization. And what they essentially do is cancel each other out and neither will rank just the school doesn't know which one might be the most appropriate. So with creating that differentiation, the goal would be to try to make them as unique as possible and that is a challenge in and of itself trying to make a product description for the same product.
Jason: 02:40 Unique. Obviously even in a more ideal world would be to have those filters set directly on our product page where they can adjust size, color, but essentially trying to make each product as neat as possible. One thing we see also a lot
Bio:
Noah is the Chief Sumo at Sumo.com where they help eCommerce retailers grow their email lists. Previously Noah was employee #30 at Facebook, #4 at Mint, and worked at Intel.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://sumo.com/https://okdork.com/https://appsumo.comhttps://twitter.com/noahkaganhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/noahkagan
Transcription:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of the business of eCommerce. I talk with Noah Kagan. This is the business of eCommerce, episode one Oh two, welcome to the business V commerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles [inaudible] and I'm here today with Noah Kagan. Noah is the chief sumo@sumo.com where they help eCommerce retailers grow their email list. Previously Noah was employee number 30 of Facebook, number four at mint, and also worked at Intel. He's an expert in marketing and growth hacking and just like myself, he loves eating tacos. So, Hey Noah, how are you doing today?
Noah: 00:42 Today, today was actually a really good day. I did boxing the morning, floating float tank. We talked a little bit about Noah just getting into the office.
Charles: 00:51 Yeah. And so the float tank is you float in the darkness, right? Complete in this tank.
Noah: 00:56 Yeah. So I actually, it sounds strange when you say it to like your parent or probably someone listening. It's like you get butt naked in a room and you get in a box, kind of like seems like a coffin and then it's quiet and you're floating on basically super salty water for an hour.
Charles: 01:11 And when you, you pay money for this. So people, yeah, if you don't use this concept you're like, yeah and I pay to do all this.
Noah: 01:16 You know it's funny you say that. So it's 75 bucks for an hour. I mean maybe it's different. You can get them on Groupon actually if you're looking for it, get up, go look up Groupon if you want to do a first time. But I actually thought about my handyman and a handyman working on the house yesterday and I was like, yeah, it was him and it was like his apprentice, his cousin. And I was thinking about them in the, in the float and I was like, they must think this is so good. I swear this is so fricking weird. Like I was just imagining them being like, hold on, you paid what you pay us in a few hours. You pay to sit in water and do nothing. And do not. Yeah.
Charles: 01:53 Yes. Yeah. It's a very, all these things are very tough to explain to other people why you pay to do nothing. I feel like that's kind of partially like the mental game, entrepreneurship in all of us, right? Where you're like so busy throughout the day and you literally have to then pay to not be busy, which just seems bizarrely counter-intuitive.
Noah: 02:13 Well I think that's actually a common problem with most business owners trying to grow. And what I mean by that is that there's this balance of like, I want to do everything myself or should I hire someone else to go do it and then what's worth the money? Yup. Like I was talking with a young entrepreneur yesterday over dinner and it's like, yeah, I'm going to do all these things myself. And I was like, right, well let me know how it goes. You don't really see most like, you know, restaurant owners or eCommerce store owners or Amazon, Jenn Bazell st pack boxes.
Charles: 02:41 Yeah. But, but at the beginning, how do you get around? Cause I didn't see people go the other way. Right. There's folks said kind of when they're starting off,
Dylan KelleyFounder of Wavebreak
Bio:
Dylan Kelley is the founder of Wavebreak and host of the popular Wavebreak Ecommerce Podcast.
He helps to lead eCommerce brands to maximize their email revenue and stop leaving money on the table.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://wavebreak.co/http://www.wavebreakpodcast.com/
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of the business of e-commerce. I talked with Dylan Kelly about the best email marketing strategies for 2020 this is a business of eCommerce episode 101 welcome to the business of eCommerce. They show the helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles
[inaudible]
and I'm here today with Dylan. Kelly. Dylan is the founder of wave break and he's an email marketing expert. I asked him on the show today to talk about what marketing strategies you should be using going into 2020 so, Hey Dylan, how are you doing today?
Dylan: 00:36 Doing well. Good to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Charles: 00:38 Awesome to have you back on the show. You are repeat guest. You were here in, what about about a year ago? Episode 60. I think, right?
Dylan: 00:47 Yeah, we're getting here. We're getting on almost a year. So it was last January, well, January, 2019
Charles: 00:51 January. Okay. And at the time we talked about email strategy, email marketing strategies for 2019. So now, almost a year later, we're talking about 20, 20, so
Dylan: 00:58 20, 20 emails still a thing. It's still making money. And I'm going to tell you how to make more of it in 2020.
Charles: 01:05 Awesome. So a year later, and what do you, what do you know, email still works? How about how about bash?
Dylan: 01:10 It still works, you know, and despite all the fear and EV, everyone, you know, freaking out like, Oh, this and that email's dying. But no, I mean it's still, I mean it's still crushing it for our clients and I mean, it's going to keep doing that. It's not going to be like this thing that just one day it's like, Oh, email just completely dies. Yeah, I mean,
Charles: 01:28 And I feel like every year this becomes, this is a thing, right? Where they're like, well, social and you can like it, you know, you can build like a Facebook following and like everyone starts doing that and then all of a sudden Facebook kind of locks it down and makes it so well you need to actually pay it every year and followers and like, okay, well, and everyone moves back to email and then like something new comes along and it just, it keeps, it just keeps going around in a circle. But email ever. That's the one thing that everyone keeps coming back to, it seems
Dylan: 01:54 Right. Like literally over the last 20 years, right? Like basically entire history of, you know, e-commerce on the internet as no a email has been there and you always own your email list. So it's this asset that just like unlike, I mean, you think about all the social networks that have come and gone, you know, in the beginning, Friendster, MySpace, all these random ones that don't even exist anymore. I mean, back then you could just rank and bank and it's not the same anymore. If SEO that changes, you know, every few months you get Facebook doing, you know, their whole, like the whole law with Cambridge Analytica and all these things. Like if people start freaking out, like, you know, they have their new Netflix documentary on it, even I was watching and I was like, wow,
Description:
Thank you to our viewers and listeners for all your feedback on the past 100 shows!
To celebrate the past 99 episodes of the Business of eCommerce we put together this show with clips of the past guest interviews.
I hope you enjoy it and I'm looking forward to the next 100 episodes!
-Charles
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Rick CesariAuthor of Video Persuasion
Bio:
Rick Cesari has been a pioneer in Brand Response advertising since the early 90’s. He helped create the concept of “sell while you brand” and has been the force behind the creation of many of today’s iconic consumer brands including Sonicare, The George Foreman Grill, OxiClean, and many others. He has helped take companies like GoPro from start-up to over $1 billion in sales in just a few short years.
Rick’s newest book, Video Persuasion, puts his experience with winning companies in the hands of everyday business owners, marketers, brand managers, and more. His innovative ideas around video marketing are changing the game for brands big and small alike. Today he’s focused on video marketing as a powerful tool for increasing sales and building your business. In Video Persuasion, Rick shares his best practices for influencing customers by creating and leveraging compelling stories on video.
When not working, Rick enjoys reading, skiing, fishing, and hiking. For his 50th birthday, he achieved one of his lifelong goals: successfully summiting Mt. McKinley. Rick resides with his wife Martha and daughter Anna in Seattle, Washington.
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Links:
https://www.rickcesari.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rickcesaridrtv/https://www.facebook.com/rickcesaridrtv/https://twitter.com/rickcesaridrtvhttp://rickcesari.tv
Jared MitchellSenior Ecommerce Analyst for NeilPatel.com & QuickSprout.com
Bio:
Jared Mitchell has been working in eCommerce as an owner and consultant for over 14 years.
Currently, Jared is the Senior Ecommerce Analyst for NeilPatel.com & QuickSprout.com, assists in formulating and teaching digital marketing courses with Neil Patel, runs his own 8 figure eCommerce business skincarebyalana.com, and services clients under his consulting brand of beefysites.com that represent revenue in excess of 150m/year.
Recently Jared started a line of skincare products with his wife Alana, and it is trending the be a 7 figure business within its first year after launch.
Jared’s primary priorities in life are his family of 4 and marriage of over 15 years. He enjoys volunteering at church, surfing, spearfishing, and playing music.
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Links:
https://skincarebyalana.comhttps://alanamitchell.comhttps://beefysites.com
John J. WallPartner and Head of Business Development at Trust Insights
Bio:
John J. Wall speaks, writes and practices at the intersection of marketing, sales, and technology. He is a Partner and Head of Business Development at Trust Insights - trust insights.ai.
He is the producer of Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program that discusses marketing and technology with his co-host Christopher S. Penn, and has been featured on iTunes. Notable guests include Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Simon Sinek and Seth Godin.
He has held positions specializing in Customer Relationship Management, Marketing Automation and sales support systems at both venture funded and privately held businesses, working with clients such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.
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Links:
https://www.trustinsights.aihttps://www.marketingovercoffee.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjwall/https://twitter.com/johnjwall
Lianna PatchFounder of Punch Line Copy
Bio:
Lianna Patch is a conversion copywriter and comedian whose greatest dream is to make your customers pause, smile, and click (in that order).
Trained in the not-so-dark arts of buyer psychology and customer research, she specializes in punchy, engaging landing pages and email copy. She’s written for Freshbooks, Manly Bands, GhostBed, and The Contract Shop, among other delightful clients, and regularly speaks at eCommerce and software conferences around the world.
Not sick of hearing about her yet? Great! Conquer campaigns with Lianna at Punchline Conversion Copywriting, or get quick copy jobs done at SNAP Copy.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://www.punchlinecopy.com https://twitter.com/punchlinecopy https://www.linkedin.com/in/liannapatch/https://www.snapcopy.co
Logan ChristopherCo-Founder of Lost Empire Herbs
Bio:
Logan Christopher owns Lost Empire Herbs along with his two brothers. This eCommerce company is dedicated to bringing the superheroes of the herbal world into the lives of humans to help assist health and performance. This includes herbs that most people haven’t heard of such as pine pollen, shilajit and ant extract. Some of the main focuses for both men and women are hormone optimization, sexual health, enhancing workouts, longevity, and cognitive performance with guaranteed results. This company was born out of seeking to enhance athletic performance, starting from his first company.
Logan also runs Legendary Strength which teaches people the lost art of strength training. Everything from bodyweight training, kettlebells, barbells, grip strength and oldtime strongman feats. As a performing strongman Logan has done such feats as pulling an 8800 lb. antique fire truck by his hair, juggling a kettlebell that was lit on fire, supporting over half a ton in a wrestler’s bridge, ripping a deck of cards into eighths and much more. These can be seen online at https://legendarystrength.com/best-of/
He has written over 15 books, including Mental Muscle, Powered By Nature, Upgrade Your Breath, Upgrade Your Testosterone, The Master Keys to Strength & Fitness, The Ultimate Guide to Handstand Pushups, The Indestructible Body and more.
He is also a Neuro Linguistic Programming Trainer and holds certifications in Hypnosis, Emotional Freedom Technique and Energy Medicine. All of these methods he has taken and applied to health and fitness.
He lives in Santa Cruz, California along with his wife Charlotte, daughter Elka and three cats, Ragnarok, Valhalla and Thor.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://lostempireherbs.comhttps://legendarystrength.comhttps://www.instagram.com/strongmanloganhttps://www.instagram.com/lostempireherbshttps://www.facebook.com/lostempireherbs
Nathan ElleringHead of Marketing at CoSchedule
Bio:
Nathan Ellering heads up the marketing team at CoSchedule, the family of agile marketing tools that help you stay focused, deliver projects on time, and keep your team happy. He's a big fan of content marketing, blogging, and strategy stuff. When he's not at work, you'll find him listening to vinyl, sipping craft beer, and exploring the Minnesota wilderness.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://coschedule.com/https://coschedule.com/marketing-statistics/https://coschedule.com/state-of-agile-marketing-report
Bashar KatouAmazon FBA Seller and Mentor
Bio:
Bashar J Katou is a serial entrepreneur who migrated to the U.S in 2006 with his family after fleeing the war in Iraq to chase The American Dream. After his restaurant burnt down in 2015, losing over 400k, 3 years of his life and being 150k in debt, Bashar was able to turn his life around when he discovered the digital world.
Today, he is a 7-figure Amazon seller, has taught thousands around the world to do the same, and in fact, one of his top students went from 0-130k/mo in under 8 months and he also plans on launching a book and his speaking career in 2019.
Bashar initiated a movement in 2019 called The Under Dawgs Movement with a mission to impact the lives of 2,500. His life goal is to create awareness of the missed opportunities and help as many people gain financial freedom.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://mentor.basharjkatou.com/free-case-study-training
Mark WillisCertified Financial Planner
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Links:
nyafinancialpodcast.com
Connor Folley CEO of Downstream
Bio:
Connor Folley is CEO and co-founder of Downstream, an eCommerce advertising technology company based in Seattle, WA. Co-founded by a pair of Amazon veterans, Downstream’s Amazon marketing platform applies machine learning to provide brands with an overwhelming competitive advantage on Amazon. And as someone who has lead teams internally at Amazon and on the agency side, his understanding of Amazon and its unique demands is truly one of a kind.
The world’s largest consumer brands have sought Connor’s ability to decode the confounding black box that Amazon represents and hundreds more use Downstream's technology to drive share on the platform. Connor lives outside of Seattle with his wife and four children.
Sponsors:
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Links:
DownstreamDownstream TwitterDownstream LinkedIn
Chris JoneseCommerce Blogger
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Links:
https://www.guerillarealty.com/https://instagram.com/chrisjonzhttps://twitter.com/chrisjonz
Tommy GriffithFounder of ClickMinded
Bio:
Tommy Griffith has been doing search engine optimization for more than 10 years. He was previously managed SEO at PayPal and Airbnb, and now runs ClickMinded, a digital marketing training platform for marketers and entrepreneurs.
Tommy started ClickMinded as a side project while working full-time at Airbnb. He grew it until it started generating more revenue than his annual salary. Two years ago, he quit Airbnb to go full-time on it and ran into a number of problems in trying to grow the business from there.
Sponsors:
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Links:
ClickMindedTommy Griffith TwitterClickMinded Digital Marketing Strategy GuideClickMinded SEO Strategy Guide
Scott VoelkerHost of The Amazing Seller Podcast
Bio:
Scott Voelker is the founder and host of The Amazing Seller podcast, a TOP Ranked Business show where he helps regular, everyday people start and grow their own online business in E-commerce. Scott is a serial entrepreneur that has built and helped others build 6 and 7 figure brands online over the past 15 years and has now taught and inspired thousands all over the world, through his “Take Action” approach!!!
Sponsors:
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Links:
The Amazing Seller: TAS HomeThe Amazing Seller FacebookThe Amazing Seller InstagramThe Amazing Seller YouTube
Stephen SomersCo-Founder of Marketplace SuperHeroes
Bio:
Stephen Somers is a co-founder of Marketplace SuperHeroes, an education platform that teaches members how to create a 5-7 figure income stream selling products on Amazon.
He and his business partner, Robert Rickey, are both 7-figure Amazon sellers, and serial entrepreneurs who have built Marketplace SuperHeroes, as well as a full Freight Company and Accountancy Service for Amazon sellers.
They have spoken all over the world, helping over 3,800 individuals build real, sustainable, and global businesses on Amazon selling boring, everyday items across multiple markets (not just .com!).
Sponsors:
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Links:
Marketplace SuperHeroesMarketplace SuperHeroes FacebookAmazon SuperHeroes Facebook Group
Christian ZeronFounder at Theo & Harris
Bio:
In 2014 whilst studying Law, 19-year-old Christian Zeron started selling pre-owned watches from his college dorm room. Fast forward to 2019 and he’s turning over 2.3 million a year through Theo and Harris his luxury watch shop, and his website generates 1.3 million monthly page views using free traffic strategies
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Links:
Theo & HarrisTheo & Harris YouTubeTheo & Harris InstagramChristian Zeron Instagram
Mendel KurlandFounder of Geek Adventures
Bio:
Mendel is the Head Geek at Geek Adventures. In the past, he helped build the pro evangelism, training/education, SMS marketing, and online advertising programs at GoDaddy, and further back ran the Web Development engineering team at West Music Company. He's also a trained software engineer (Pascal, C++, Perl, PHP, .net).
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://geekadventures.orghttps://twitter.com/geekadventureshttps://www.facebook.com/geekadventuresorg/https://www.instagram.com/geekadventuresorg/
Jordan SteenFounder of Rest&Bar Marketing & Cereal Entrepreneur Academy
Bio:
Cereal Entrepreneur, AKA, Jordan Steen has been an entrepreneur his entire life…and we mean that quite literally. Jordan started his first business when he was only 11 years old selling candy out of his locker at school. Making about $1,000 per month, Jordan knew then and there that he would be an entrepreneur for life.
This eventually turned into Jordan becoming one of the early pioneers for Social Media Marketing and Ads campaigns. In 2008 Jordan started running social media marketing campaigns on Facebook for businesses before the platform even had an advertising platform.
Then in 2013 Jordan took a job in the corporate world with Gannett ($4 Billion/year media company) learning even more about Digital Marketing and running a marketing agency. He received about $200,000 in marketing and sales training and used this training plus other pieces of training (worth $10,000+) he has purchased as the foundation for starting Cereal Entrepreneur Academy.
After he left Gannett Jordan found that there was a HUGE need for training in the marketing space. He noticed that there were several “gurus” teaching people how to start an agency and was able to determine that there was a lot of missing information that’s necessary for someone to start an agency properly. After finding that there was a definite need for quality training Jordan decided to start a YouTube channel and release free pieces of training. After only 3 months of running the channel for free he reached out to his audience and they were begging for a full course that would actually give them the value and information they needed to really make a change in their lives. A little over a year later, and here we are with one of the most helpful, resource-rich, and practical Digital Marketing courses for someone wanting to learn Digital Marketing and how to build a business online.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://cerealentrepreneur.academy/https://facebook.com/cerealentrepreneurhttps://twitter.com/cerealentrephttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN-rPSim-zOSUkxOIg7lIw
Rafael LourencoEVP at ClearSale
Bio:
Leading smart people to solve complex problems in dynamic environments is Rafael’s signature skill. As ClearSale’s Executive Vice President, Rafael combines the company’s innovation-driven culture and emphasis on communication with a deep understanding of the statistical tools that underpin excellent fraud protection.
Rafael represents one of the world’s most experienced and largest firms of its kind, with more than a decade of e-commerce fraud detection and prevention services in major international markets. From his base in Miami, he oversees ClearSale’s US anti-fraud operation by leading its commercial, statistical intelligence, and IT teams and providing technical and executive management for all the operation’s employees, both in the US and in Brazil. During the decade he has spent with the company, Rafael planned and executed ClearSale’s international business unit, directed ClearSale’s statistical intelligence area, and helped manage the company’s growth from 25 to more than 700 employees, including more than 500 highly trained fraud analysts.
Rafael is multilingual (Portuguese, English, and Italian) and has a distinguished academic background. He earned his master’s degree in economics and finance at FGV-SP (Fundação Getúlio Vargas-São Paulo), one of the world’s leading policy and economic think tanks.
Rafael holds a bachelor’s degree with great distinction in statistics from UNICAMP (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), internationally recognized as one of the top universities in Brazil and in the world.
Sponsors:
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Links:
ClearSaleClearSale TwitterClearSale LinkedInClearSale FacebookClearSale Instagram
Karon ThackstonPresident of Marketing Words
Bio:
Teacher. Guide. Simplifier of the complex. Since 1999, Karon Thackston and the Marketing Words copywriting agency have been devoted to delivering high-value training that empowers online entrepreneurs to communicate, convince and convert leads into loyal customers.
Need to master the art of snappy, short tidbits of copy for social media, headlines or calls to action? Or tackle the multifaceted task of Amazon Enhanced Brand listings? Regardless of the type of writing, count on Karon to break down the process into easily understood steps.
If you want to sharpen your copywriting skills and elevate the performance of every word you write, you’ll love Karon’s easy style. In 3 words… it’s all about focus, not fluff.
Sponsors:
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Links:
Marketing WordsMarketing Words FacebookMarketing Words Twitter Marketing Words PinterestMarketing Words LinkedInMarketing Words InstagramMarketing Words YouTube
Stephen CarlFounder of Needle Movement
Bio:
Stephen Carl is the owner and founder of Needle Movement, an e-commerce strategy company. Stephen began his digital career as an early employee at an Amazon-funded start-up in 1998 and has been chasing online conversions ever since. His past digital marketing experiences cover a wide array of categories: luxury fashion, movies, horticulture and not-for-profit – all with the common thread of translating digital trends into online revenue generation. In 2015, Stephen decided that his true passion was to "help the little guy (or gal)” – to empower emerging brands by passing them the same playbooks learned over two decades of directing e-commerce inside of larger companies. He now advises retail brands at Needle Movement on how to achieve sustainable digital growth and profitability. Four years ago, he headed up digital strategy at Lafayette 148 New York, a luxury brand that quintupled sales to reach $49 million in annual online sales and more recently, managed growth for ecru, an apparel retailer which increased sales 700% to reach multi-million dollar sales in 2018.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://www.needlemovement.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/stephencarl/https://www.instagram.com/needlemovement/
Eric BandholzFounder of Beardbrand
Bio:
Eric Bandholz is the founder of Beardbrand, a men's grooming company that offers products for the hair, beard, and body. With this help of his two business partners, he bootstrapped the business to 7 figures and national distribution of the product line. He currently resides in Austin, TX with his wife and daughter.
Sponsors:
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Links:
BeardbrandBeardbrand YouTubeBeardbrand InstagramEric Bandholz TwitterEric Bandholz Instagram
Rytis LaurisCo-Founder and CEO of Omnisend
Bio:
Rytis Lauris, the Co-founder and CEO of Omnisend, the powerful marketing automation platform that’s focused on moving ecommerce marketers beyond the generic email marketing tools. He believes that rich customer data and an omnichannel approach empowers ecommerce businesses to generate more sales by sending highly personalized messages via various channels, including email, SMS, Facebook ads, Google retargeting and others. Rytis is successful entrepreneur who has spent more than last 10 years building and driving a few startups which has brought him to ecommerce field. He has shared his knowledge and expertise in numerous podcasts and ecommerce conferences, including Litmus Live and Meet Magento.
Sponsors:
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Links:
https://www.omnisend.com https://www.facebook.com/omnisend/ https://twitter.com/omnisend https://www.linkedin.com/company/omnisend/https://www.instagram.com/omnisend/https://twitter.com/rytislauris
Kim KohatsuDirector of Marketing at PickFu
Bio:
Kim Kohatsu is the Director of Marketing at PickFu, an instant polling service that e-commerce sellers use to optimize product listings. With PickFu, online stores can quickly test product photos, description copy, and UI layouts with shoppers who reflect their target demographic, including Amazon Prime members, those within a certain income bracket, or people based on traits such as homeownership, marital status, or exercise habits.
Sponsors:
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Links:
PickFuPickFu Blog
Burc TanirCo-Founder and CEO of Prisync
Burc Tanir, the co-founder and CEO of Prisync talks about the different strategies eCommerce retailers can use to correctly price their products.
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Links:
PrisyncBurc Tanir LinkedIn
Chad DeShonboardgametables.com
Chad DeShon, the founder of boardgametables.com used Kickstarter to raise 2.5M for his board game table, The Duchess. He went on to raise another 780k on his second Kickstarter for his second table, The Jasper.
Sponsors:
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Links:
BoardGameTables.comKickstarter - The DuchessKickstarter - The Jasper
Jay GibbFounder of CloudSponge
Links from the show:
Referral Program SoftwareFriendBuyExtoleTalkable
Bio:
Jay is the CEO/founder of Cloudsponge, a SaaS company which sells software to eCommerce companies focused on growing sales through referral programs. Instead of a customer typing out each individual email address for the referral, CloudSponge populates and imports your address book from over 50 email providers. Jay's company is utilized by big eCommerce companies such as StitchFix and JustFab along with many other businesses. Jay’s knowledge and systems help businesses engage with their user’s contacts to generate more leads, referrals, and virality.
Sponsors:
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Links:
CloudspongeJay Gibb TwitterCloudsponge Twitter
Do's
Get close to the problemDon't just listen, have empathySlow down.Get the full picture. Listen.Finally… offer a solutionVerify
Don'ts
Don’t be passive-aggressiveDon't use cliché - "What I'm hearing is"Rush to solve the problemRush to offer cash/refunds
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Drip - Get a 60 day trial of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
At least once a month there's a post, thread or video proclaiming "Drop shipping is dead!".
In this episode of The Business of eCommerce we bust some myths on what dropshipping is, what it is not and if dropshipping is on death row any time soon.
Sponsors:
Drip - Get a 60 day trial of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Neil PatelCo-Founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics
Bio:
Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP, and Viacom grow their revenue.
The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 online marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world.
He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives
Sponsors:
Drip - Get a 60 day trial of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Links:
Neil PatelNeil Patel DigitalNeil Patel InstagramNeil Patel FacebookNeil Patel YoutubeNeil Patel Twitter
Meg ClarkeFounder of Clapping Dog Media
Bio:
Meg Clarke is the owner and founder of Clapping Dog Media where she is a master at growing organic traffic. By using data, proven techniques, and years of experience, Meg and her team help to turn web visitors into raving fans that stick around. Meg is a passionate cheerleader for businesses. She teaches entrepreneurs how they can harness the power of Google so that they can make a larger impact on the world. When she is not learning the ins and outs of the latest algorithm update, Meg enjoys playing with her three boys, husband and golden doodle - and company mascot, named Vader.
Sponsors:
Drip - Get a 60 day trial of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://clappingdogmedia.com/https://linktr.ee/clappingdogmediahttps://instagram.com/clappingdogmediahttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTxyvLn23J24eqb5Oi9-PwQ
Show Notes:
Find out the latest tactics and strategies Talk with other attendees about what's working and what their challenges areFor tighter relationships with other attendeesGet your mind out of the day-to-day
Sponsors:
Drip - Get a 60 day trial of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
James ThomsonPartner at Buy Box Experts
Bio:
James Thomson is a partner at Buy Box Experts, a managed services agency supporting brands selling online. Earlier, he served as the business head of Amazon Services, the division of Amazon responsible for recruiting tens of thousands of sellers annually to the Amazon marketplace. He also served as the first Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) account manager. Prior to Amazon, James was a management consultant and banker.
In 2015, James co-founded the PROSPER Show, a continuing education conference for large Amazon sellers, and in 2017 published the book “The Amazon Marketplace Dilemma”, designed for brand executives seeking to control their brands on the Amazon marketplace.
He holds a Bachelor of Science from University of Alberta, an MBA from Vanderbilt University (Owen School), and a Ph.D. in Marketing (B2B Pricing and Distribution) from Northwestern University (Kellogg School). James has guest lectured at more than a dozen top business schools around the world, including Stanford University, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, and Manchester University. James has been featured in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., CNBC, Bloomberg, Internet Retailer, Globe and Mail, CBC, USA Today, and many more.
Sponsors:
Drip - Get a 60 day trial of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Links:
https://www.buyboxexperts.comhttps://www.prospershow.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jblthomson/
Beka RiceHead of Product at Jilt
Bio:
Beka is the head of product at Jilt, where they focus on helping merchants increase revenue through automated lifecycle emails. Jilt is built by SkyVerge, the top WooCommerce.com extension provider, and maker behind some of the most popular extensions, such as WooCommerce Memberships. Beka loves leveling the playing field for eCommerce growth, making enterprise-level tools accessible to any online store.
Links:
JiltSkyVergeBeka Rice (Twitter)
Sponsors:
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Jeff WhiteCo-Founder of Kula Partners
Bio:
Jeff is the co-founder of Kula Partners, an agency designed to help leading manufacturers digitally transform their marketing and sales.
A User Experience (UX) and usability expert, Jeff began building sites for the web over 25 years ago. He leads the design and development practice at Kula Partners, Canada’s first Platinum HubSpot Partner agency. A number of years ago, Jeff returned to NSCAD University as a sessional professor, bringing his understanding of web standards to a new generation of design students. A passionate advocate for usability and an open web that is accessible to everyone, Jeff frequently speaks on web design, usability, accessibility, marketing and sales at events such as HubSpot’s Inbound conference. He is also the co-host of the The Kula Ring, a weekly podcast that focuses on talking technology, marketing and sales with some of the most interesting minds in manufacturing marketing.
Jeff is a father of three and his non-work time is filled with shuttling kids back and forth to the pool, riding bicycles in the woods, and smoking meat on the kamado.
Links:
Kula PartnersThe Kula Ring Podcast Jeff White on Twitter Jeff White on LinkedIn
Sponsors:
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Rose NicholsFounder of Lip Ink
Bio:
Lip Ink International was founded on January 1, 1995, by Inventor, Mother, and “Lip Diva” Rose Nichols. Lip Ink’s International’s revolutionary concept began with Rose’s senior thesis project in Merchandise Marketing at FIDM-LA. (Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising) It has since grown into a multi-million dollar international enterprise. Rose set out to invent an extraordinary Wax Free, Semi-Permanent Liquid Lip Color because she was tired of her old fashioned lip color coming off on her teeth, clothes, coffee cups, and food. Rose wanted a lip color that would stay on until she was ready to take it off. She wanted the staying power of ink, without actually using ink.
Links:
https://www.lipink.com/http://blog.lipink.com/https://www.facebook.com/LIP.INK.INTERNATIONALhttps://twitter.com/lipinkhttps://www.instagram.com/lipink/https://www.youtube.com/user/lipink
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Teri MiyahiraFounder of Teri Miyahira Beauty
Bio:
Teri Miyahira completely bootstrapped Teri Miyahira Beauty without investor funding or bank loans. Teri broke $100k sales in her first 11 months back in 2016, and since then have done $300k sales to date (through our website). Teri will be featured in an upcoming Harper's Bazaar article on vegan and cruelty-free beauty. Teri also runs traffic outside of social media now, which has been a recent experiment in the last few months (even though she already amassed a 150k social following across all the platforms).
Links from the show: (Some links are affiliate)
Shopify (For online store building that’s easier to use than BigCommerce and has much more app integrations)https://bit.ly/2VPfsjQBuilderAll (All-in-one digital marketing software for unlimited email marketing, sales funnels, landing pages, website/blogs, webinars and more. This combines ConvertKit, ClickFunnels, WebinarJam, and LeadPages to name a few, and it’s really inexpensive with 24/7 live chat support)Free 7-day Trial: https://bit.ly/2THKrRABuilderAll (All-in-one digital marketing software for unlimited email marketing, sales funnels, landing pages, website/blogs, webinars and more. This combines ConvertKit, ClickFunnels, WebinarJam, and LeadPages to name a few, and it’s really inexpensive with 24/7 live chat support)Free 7-day Trial: https://bit.ly/2THKrRAStim Social (For rapid Instagram growth that won’t get your account banned. We get 700+ new real followers per month using this on multiple IG accounts)Free 5-day Trial: https://bit.ly/2VQtammUnsplash (Free high-quality stock photos for commercial use)https://bit.ly/1gNw4icCanva (Templated graphic design tool that’s better than Fiverr and cheaper than 99Designs even if you’re doing it yourself)https://bit.ly/1ixSEy9
Links:
Teri Miyahira Beautyinstagram.com/terimiyahirayoutube.com/tbeautytv
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Edward WimmerCEO of ROAD iD
Bio:
Edward Wimmer is Co-Founder and CEO of ROAD iD. In 1999, armed with a dream and two credit cards, Edward Wimmer and his father Mike Wimmer founded ROAD iD in Mike’s Northern Kentucky basement.
With only $10,000 of start-up capital, Edward quickly learned how to carefully leverage small marketing spends to drive a positive ROI. Very early in his career, and in the infancy of eCommerce, Edward saw the value of building a niche company online. That niche company became an eCommerce pioneer and category creator of Athletic Safety ID.
From early on, Edward firmly believed that it’s easier to deliver a first-class, hyper-personal, and human experience in a digital environment than it is in a physical store. A passionate growth-hacker, Edward’s ongoing goal at ROAD iD is to deliver a product, journey and experience so blindingly awesome that customers can’t help but share it.
Since 1999, Road ID has helped millions of people feel safer while being active, which has led to countless stories and testimonials from customers who have used Road ID in their times of need. Many of these customers say they might not be alive today if it had not been for their ROAD iD. This confidence, peace of mind, empowerment and impact is what Edward and the team at ROAD iD are most proud of…and most humbled by.
Today, Edward has a bold vision for ROAD iD. Rather than being content running a successful company, Edward wants to drive a paradigm shift in safety - to see the day when wearing ID is as common as a seatbelt or strapping on a bike helmet - safety items that were rarely worn a couple decades ago.
Edward also realizes that he’s only as good as the people that he surrounds himself with. To that end, he endeavors to create a strong company culture by delivering a product that has deep meaning and purpose. ROAD iD bolsters that core culture by providing a fun/casual work environment, creative benefits, and competitive compensation.
In addition to his role at ROAD iD, Edward is the managing partner for both Tri-State Record Storage and Management and Blue Bridge, LLC, a property management company.
He earned his BS in Marketing and BS in Finance from Georgetown College. While at Georgetown, he was captain of Georgetown’s soccer team and President of the Interfraternity council. He has previously served on the Georgetown College Alumni Board and currently serves on the board for the Covington Business Council.
Edward resides in Lakeside Park with his wife Elisabeth and two boys (Edward V and Anderson), and their dog, Scout.
Links
roadid.com instagram.com/roadidfacebook.com/roadid
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Roberta PerryFounder of Scrubz Body
Bio:
After years of taking care of everyone else, Roberta's skin was dry, itchy and irritated. In 2005, at 43, she finally realized that taking care of her skin and herself was important. She discovered exfoliating products, but like the proverbial Goldilocks, none were completely satisfying her needs and wants. She headed for the kitchen and worked like a mad chemist to create her own. With lots of research and trial and error, she mixed up different combinations of botanical oils and came up with a winner. Roberta brought in her late sister, Michelle and in 2006 they started ScrubzBody in Roberta's kitchen. The business moved to a renovated garage and then to a small manufacturing store front, in Bethpage, NY in 2011, moving again in 2014 and once more in Nov. of '17 to a fabulous location at 245 Main St. in Farmingdale, NY. After all these years, she and her team are proud of the fact that the products are still hand made in small batches. ScrubzBody hosts Make Your Own Scrub parties for kids of all ages. They also ship the party to you. They sell retail, private label and wholesale. The business also donates to 6 charities, on a regular basis, with different scents of our products that give back.
ScrubzBody Skin Care was the highlighted business on the Season One finale of Sell it Like Serhant on Bravo TV.
Needing exposure for the business, but on a really tight budget, Roberta turned to Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and started pitching to writers and reporters. Since 2010, she has been published and quoted in over 100 skin care and business articles, blogs and beauty magazines. Roberta's book, “The Power of Free Publicity, Using HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to Build Relationships and Get Press Without a PR Firm.” was published in August 2016. She was a natural remedy segment guest of the Dr. Oz show, which aired on 10/24/14, as well as a food related segment which aired on 2/29/16. Roberta received the 2016 Nassau County Legislature Trailblazer award for charity work. She is a proud member of Indie Business Network, American Made Matters, Farmingdale Chamber of Commerce and Bethpage Kiwanis Club.
Links:
Scrubz Body TwitterFacebookInstagramPinterestYouTube
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Dale BertrandFounder of Fire&Spark
Show Notes:
Product Page Keyword researchTargeting gift keywordsHoliday SEOAlternatives to written content Internal linking
Bonus Tip - Link building for eCommerce
Bio:
Dale is a customer acquisition specialist with 15 years of experience applying my academic training in engineering and artificial intelligence to online customer acquisition campaigns (focusing on e-commerce SEO, pay-per-click, social media advertising and content marketing).
Dale began his career working as an engineer, most notably building high performance computers for the National Security Agency. Then, Dale was recruited by an MIT-based start-up to solve analytical marketing problems. As a marketer, Dale has developed search marketing strategies for Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed startups.
Dale is the founding instructor at the Digital Marketing Leadership Program and Boston’s Growth Hacking Breakfast for marketing professionals. Dale has trained marketing professionals from TripAdvisor, Microsoft, HubSpot, Digitas and Proctor & Gamble.
Dale is a speaker at industry conferences and lead corporate training events on search engine marketing, online advertising and content marketing topics. Dale has taught digital marketing workshops at MIT’s Enterprise Forum, Harvard University, Northeastern and Boston University.
Currently, Dale runs Fire&Spark, a results-driven e-commerce marketing agency, specializing in search marketing, content marketing, PPC advertising, and social media advertising.
Links:
https://www.fireandspark.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalebertrand/
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Bio:Ben is the founder of Privy.com the leading website conversion platform for small and midsize ecommerce businesses. Privy is now used by over 300,000 sites around the world to help them convert site traffic and reduce cart abandonment.
Links:
https://www.privy.comhttps://twitter.com/jabbawyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminjabbawy/https://benjabbawy.com
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Bio:Dylan Kelley is the founder of Wavebreak. He helps Shopify Plus stores maximize their email marketing revenue. He's also host of the popular Wavebreak Podcast where he dives deep into the secret tactics and strategies behind some of the world's biggest ecommerce brands.
Links:
https://wavebreak.co
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Bio:Nathan Resnick is the CEO of Sourcify, the fastest growing sourcing platform that helps hundreds of companies manufacture products around the world. In the past, Nathan has brought dozens of products to market, ran three e-commerce companies (sold one), and been a part of projects on Kickstarter raising over seven figures. He writes for media outlets like Entrepreneur, The Next Web, Business.com, and more. Nathan also used to live in China and speaks Mandarin.
Links:
https://www.sourcify.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanresnickhttps://twitter.com/naterez94
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Bio:
Chris Lema has been working in the eCommerce space since 1996. Today you can create online stores in 2 hours that took Chris and a team 9 months to build back then. He’s the VP of Product at Liquid Web, the first hosting company to create a Managed WooCommerce offering.
Links:
https://chrislema.comhttps://liquidweb.comhttps://twitter.com/chrislema
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Show Notes:
Reasons to not delete products SEODeep linksWhat to do instead Redirect product URL to another URL301 Permanent Redirect: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=enOther redirect types: 302, 307, 308Full list of redirect types: https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/redirects.htmlAdd links on the current product page to an updated version of this productOther ConsiderationsSet discontinued products as not searchable
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Show Notes:
Keep your finances in orderGet buy-in from important people in your lifeProfessional Support Network Master Mind GroupsIn person networkingConferences Personal Support Network FamilyFriendsHobby friends - Ex. Rock climbing friends Lunch dates with other foundersFind a mentor or coachYou don't have to do it alone Delegate when the time is right Disconnect MeditateWalkHikeSpend time aloneWatch Netflix Prioritize sleep & exercise Schedule regular workouts Have a purpose Simon Sinek Starts with Why - https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/0241958229/ref=asc_df_0241958229/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=266244150619&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6711132624775233988&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9001991&hvtargid=pla-448425245675&psc=1 The Infinite Game - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079DWSYYB/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Guest:
Duane BrownFounder of Take Some Risk
Bio:
Duane has been called an international man of mystery and digital nomad by friends. He has lived in 5 cities across 3 continents and visited 40 countries around the world. He uses his curiosity for people and love for people watching to run better marketing campaigns for clients.
After leaving Toronto, Canada in 2011 to gain an international view of the world. He has worked for Telstra in Australia and brands including ASOS, Mopp (bought Sept. 2014), NSPCC, Jack Wills and Grant Thornton while in London, UK. He now lives in Vancouver, Canada helping brands grow through data, CRO and marketing.
Links:
https://www.takesomerisk.com/ https://www.instagram.com/TakeSomeRisk https://www.Twitter.com/DuaneBrown
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Guest:
Lance JohnsonFounder of ScaleXL
Links:
Agency: scalexl.coPodcast: leancommerce.co
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Guest:
Jim Huffman Author of The Growth Marketer’s Playbook
Bio:
Jim Huffman is the author of The Growth Marketer’s Playbook, the #1 new release on Amazon in marketing. He is the co-founder of the growth agency, GrowthHit. Jim also serves as a growth mentor for TechStars, a startup accelerator. Jim has led growth at three different startups that went from idea to over $10M in sales and got featured by WSJ, TechCrunch or the TODAY Show. He has advised and taught marketing to brands that include Sephora, General Assembly, OREO, Hot Wheels, FedEx, Clorox and more.
Links:
https://growthmarketersplaybook.com/ https://growthhit.com/ https://twitter.com/JimWHuffman
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Guest:
Tom Casano SEO Strategist
Links:
http://www.tomcasano.com http://www.sureoak.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomcasano https://twitter.com/TomCasano https://www.sureoak.com/seo-top-ranking-factors/ https://www.sureoak.com/tools/domain-authority-checker
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Guest:
Matt Ward Host of the Disruptors Podcast
Links:
https://fringe.fm https://thesyndicate.vc http://mattward.io https://twitter.com/mattwardio https://medium.com/@mattwardio https://disruptors.fm/free/ https://mattward.io/
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Guest:
Tanya Heath Founder of Tanya Heath Paris
Links:
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/TanyaHeathParis/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tanya_heath Email: tanya.heath@tanyaheath.com / contact@tanyaheath.com
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Transcript:
Charles: In this episode of Business of eCommerce, I talk about how to handle fraud shipping returns. This is the Business of eCommerce, episode 49.
Charles: Welcome to the Business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi.
Charles: I'm here today to talk a bit about the topic of how to handle returns for drop shipping, for drop shippers, anytime where you're as an eCommerce retailer shipping products where it's not coming directly from your warehouse. It's coming from a third party warehouse. What's the best way to handle those?
Charles: I found an blog [inaudible 00:00:46] actually that given an outline that I wanted to kind of start with, and I kind of go into each topic a little bit, give my own kind of comments on it. I thought it was a good place to start, so I'll also link to that in the show notes, that blog [inaudible 00:00:59] which was great.
Charles: First, two parts. Let's talk about what's going on, what the issue is. So, you're a drop shipper or you work with some manufacturers, that sort of thing, ship directly from their warehouse, however you want to define it. But essentially, when you're shipping product, it's from a third party. They have a return policy. It's not your return policy. What do you do? This is a totally common issue. Lot of folks have this.
Charles: What also makes this a bit more difficult that you have to always think about is you might ship from multiple suppliers, so it's not just one, one warehouse, one supplier, multiple. So, how do you handle that?
Charles: First, let's say two things. First part we'll talk about how to actually get ready for it ahead of time, how to start, and then when it actually happens, how to actually handle the returns themselves.
Charles: So, how to [inaudible 00:01:54]. First, talk to each supplier and learn their policy. Each supplier is gonna have a different policy, right? Where some might allow 90 days, others 60, others 30, some maybe not at all. Some are gonna have a restocking fee. Some of them who pay shipping costs, also that might depend on if the product was defective, if it was the wrong size, damaged, there's a lot of different things. You need to go through each one of their return policies before you even start down this road, just to get an idea of what are you working with here and what are they willing to do for your as your supplier.
Charles: Once you know that, then it's important to understand your return policy. The goal here is you're working with multiple suppliers, let's say. It could be simple. You're working with one. If you're working with one, we'll do the simple case first, you might honestly might just want to copy their return policy. That's the easiest, right? They offer 30 days, you offer 30 days. You know it's in that window, easy, right? If there's a return, can you get the return? It's the supplier's return policy, yes. Very easy answer.
Charles: But what happens when you work with multiple suppliers? The goal here is there's some wiggle room and it really depends on how you want to handle this as a retailer, where you're comfortable, but the goal here is to try to come up with your return to closely merge this and it ends up being kind of the lowest common denominator of all their return policies. For example, if one offers a 90 day window and another one offers a 30, you might only want to offer a 30, right? Cut yours down so that you know any product sold in your stores will be covered under your manufacturer return policy.
Charles: If you want to go over, now you're in the gray area. It's up to you. There might be some manufacturers that offer 15 day or shorter, so once you get below 30 it starts to get a little dicey, so you do want to think about this,
Notes:
International dropshippers - Examples: Aliexpress, BangGood, etc. Domestic dropshippers - Examples: Manufacturers or distributors that are will to send 1-off products
International Dropshippers - Pros - Easy to get started - Wide selection of products
- Cons
- Easy to get started (Everyone can do it)
- Slow Shipping times
- Returns are a hassle/ do not make sense to ship back
- Very little quantity control
- No discounts as volume increases
Domestic Dropshippers - Pros - Not just anyone can buy from them, more barriers equal less competition - Faster Shipping - Can help handle returns - Tighter quality control - Volume discounts - Cons - Can be more difficult to get started - Typically sell nitch products
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with: Jennifer DiMotta Founder of DiMotta Consulting
Bio:
For over 20 years, Jennifer DiMotta, founder of DiMotta Consulting LLC, has lead successful aggressive growth strategies for several direct to consumer brands and retailers with a proven and highly sought after method coined “The DiMotta Method” (TDM). The DiMotta Method has been proven in a variety of industries and company sizes to foster and sustain triple-digit profit growth.
In her fast-growing consulting firm, Jennifer educates her clients on how to employ The DiMotta Method in their organization. TDM is about an unrelenting alignment of (1) building a financial foundation (structure) (2) designing expert-driven strategies and (3) empowering top talent. After a highly successful career, Jennifer desires going beyond her current clientele and reach as many businesses as possible.
Jennifer believes the eCommerce landscape is at a critical impasse and must forward-focus on diversification beyond the eCommerce giants (ie Amazon, Walmart). The imbalanced economy online drives the DiMotta Consulting firm to passionately expand their reach in the education of The DiMotta Method and empower direct to consumer brands to power up their growth strategy.
While The DiMotta Method brims with novel ideas on aggressively growing e-commerce and digital marketing success, its core is a straightforward, strategic-planning approach that ensures business, financial and cultural strength. It includes innovative approaches on how to improve the links between the P&L, Business Vision and Top Talent, and can be applied to any phase of business growth.
The Strength component of The DiMotta Method is particularly special to Jennifer as she has personally mentored and coached several women, particularly those who struggle with confidence and courage in the workplace. As Jennifer recognized the lack of confidence in women as well as a lack of resources to develop, she developed a coaching method she calls Six Steps to Coach Yourself To Leadership Excellence where she helps women take ownership of their career development and has proven her methods on herself as well as her executive clients.
Jennifer presents her Six Steps to Coaching Yourself to Leadership Excellence at several conferences and was awarded the 2014 Colorado’s “Most Powerful/Influential Woman” Award and “Top 100 Women to Watch” by Brand Innovators. Jennifer also mentors women at The Wharton School in Pennsylvania and gives time to other women seeking mentorship from other universities. She also currently takes on clients looking for guidance and coaching in their careers.
Links:
DiMotta Consulting DiMotta Consulting Twitter DiMotta Consulting LinkedIn
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with: Jon MacDonald Founder of The Good
Notes:
Type of conversion rate optimization data
Analytics
Paths Drop off Google Analytics
Heat Mapping
What content they are engaging with? HotJar
User Testing
WhatUsersDo.com UserTesting.com
A/B Testing
Google Optimize VWO - Visual Website Optimizer Optimizely
Recommended Reading
TheGood.com Insights Google Optimize Blog
Bio:
Jon MacDonald is founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm that has achieved results for some of the largest online brands including Adobe, Nike, Xerox, Verizon, Intel and more. He regularly contributes content on conversion optimization to publications like Entrepreneur and Inc. He knows how to get visitors to take action.
Links:
TheGood.com TheGood.com Insights
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with: Jordan Gal Founder and CEO of CartHook
Bio:
Jordan is the Founder and CEO of CartHook, a solution that provides a customizable one-page checkout with post-purchase upsells.
Links:
CartHook Jordan Gal [Twitter] The Bootstrapped Web [Podcast]
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Show Notes:
What is a content generation engine? 3 Sources of Content
Sales Support Reddit/forums
3 Tips to help generate content
Build a swipe file Produce Evergreen Content Quantity over quantity
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with: Erica Liu Williams Founder of gr8nola.com
Bio:
Erica Liu Williams is a Stanford grad, Olympic Trials swimmer and ex-techie-turned-food-entrepreneur. After graduating from Stanford in 2008 with a BA and MA in Communications, she began a career in Silicon Valley working for Yahoo, Intuit and various startups until starting her own healthy food brand, gr8nola.
Erica came up with the idea for gr8nola by “accident" when she was searching for a delicious yet healthy snack during a clean eating program she and her NFL pro husband do every year. Unable to find any good options on the market, she decided to create her own granola recipe. Her product was so delicious that she created a side business out in 2013. As of Oct 2017, Erica officially left her career in tech to pursue gr8nola full-time.
Today, gr8nola is supplied at some of the biggest tech companies like Google, Dropbox, Twitter, Uber, Square, Microsoft, Netflix, Slack and more. It's also sold online on Amazon and on gr8nola.com
Links:
gr8nola.com gr8nola Instagram gr8nola Amazon gr8nola Facebook gr8nola Twitter
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with: Carole Rains Founder of Rustic Artistry
Mentions in the show:
Plugin - Yoast SEO Plugin Podcast - ECommerceFuel Podcast - My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast - eComCrew Podcast - Marketing School by Neil Patel Book - Profit First Ecommerce Influence
Bio: Carole doesn’t fit the mold of the majority of entrepreneurs today, which skews towards men in their 20s and 30s. She didn’t start her own business until her mid-fifties, making her one of the few women in that demographic who become an entrepreneur as her mid-life crisis event.
Prior to that, Carole was a chef (she makes a killer crab cake) and before that, she did pharmaceutical advertising and marketing. It was her adult daughter’s foray into entrepreneurship that inspired Carole to take the leap.
Having become an expert at online shopping through plenty of practice, she decided e-commerce would be her next venture. In 2013 Carole launched Rustic Artistry, an online shop that provides custom rustic chic furniture and décor handcrafted by American artisans.
Parlaying off the knowledge she had learned about e-commerce, Carole founded a second business in 2014, Emu Joy, after learning about the outstanding, but not well known, benefits of emu oil for dry skin, eczema, pain and more.
Links:
Rustic Artistry Rustic Artistry Facebook Rustic Artistry Pinterest
Sponsored by:
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Nathan Hirsch Founder of FreeeUp
Nathan's Book Recommendation
Start with Why - Simon Sinek
Bio
Nathan Hirsch is a 28-year-old serial entrepreneur who is an expert in hiring online and building eCommerce businesses. He co-founded his first eCommerce company out of his dorm room in 2009 drop shipping products on Amazon.com and built it to sell over $25 million worth of product over 5 years. While scaling, Nathan discovered the power of outsourcing and ended up building a remote army of freelancers.
In 2015, Nathan co-founded and became the CEO of FreeeUp, an online hiring marketplace that allows business owners fast access to a hand-picked network of top talent freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing, web development, and much more who have already been vetted for skill, attitude, and communication. FreeeUp interviews hundreds of freelancers each week and only allows the top 1% of applicants into the network. The company has been growing at rapid paces (500%+ YoY) and has quickly become a top destination to hire online for over 3,000 businesses around the world.
Nathan has built his personal brand to be synonymous with online hiring and entrepreneurship through 75+ guest appearances on top podcasts: Entrepreneur on Fire with John Lee Dumas, Eventual Millionaire, and more. Nathan has also become a regular speaker at industry conferences where he teaches other business owners how to hire freelancers and gain back more time in their growing businesses.
Links
FreeUp - https://freeeup.com/ Nathan Hirsch [Facebook] - http://www.facebook.com/nathan.hirsch FreeUp [Facebook] - https://www.facebook.com/FreeeUpMarketplace/ Nathan Hirsch [Twitter] - https://twitter.com/realnatehirsch FreeUp [Twitter] - https://twitter.com/freeeup Online Hiring Mastermind Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/OnlineHiringMastermind/?ref=br_rs Nathan Hirsch [LinkedIn] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/ FreeUp [LinkedIn] - https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/10455467/ Nathan Hirsch [Instagram] - https://www.instagram.com/realnatehirsch/ FreeUp [Instagram] - https://www.instagram.com/freeeup_/ Nathan Hirsch [YouTube] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSWdjdeVEWmk6f6wrsMeZcQ FreeUp [YouTube] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqoq7EGvwLQXgiYuIG8_iMg
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Michael Veazey Amazing FBA
Show Notes
3.5 Years on Amazon FBA Build a mindset by action 18 -24 months replace your FT income working PT Start with retail arbitrage Adam Hudson - Primed - https://www.amazon.com/Primed-Building-Amazing-Business-Amazon/dp/1546637362 Jim Cockrum - Silent Jim - https://silentjim.com/podcast/ Tim Ferris Podcast - https://tim.blog/podcast/ Pat Flynn - https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/Social Media Marketing
Bio
Michael Veazey is a UK based (London) Amazon Entrepreneur and Amazon podcaster and consultant.
Background Having been a musician and music teacher for a couple of decades, Michael got tired of the low pay and unresponsive students.
He discovered the Amazon Private Label opportunity and loved the creativity of being an online entrepreneur, as well as the time freedom it gives once it’s up and running.
Michael had always loved listening to intelligent “talk” radio (mostly Radio 4), that expanded to include a great liking for listening to business podcasts over the last decade.
Having been very inspired by many great business podcasts and blogs over the last few years, like those by Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin, Michael wanted to create one to inspire and help others.
Although there were many other good podcasts about selling on Amazon in the USA, they all had a US perspective. There seemed to be no podcast specifically with a more international perspective, specifically starting from a UK perspective. Michael felt he could fill in the gap.
Amazon business Michael has been selling on Amazon USA since December 2014 and started selling in the UK in July 2015, branching out into other European marketplaces in late 2016. In Autumn 2016, he launched a new Europe-focussed brand with a business partner.
Michael hit $100,000 in sales within 2 years with his own brands. Total sales with Michael and his business partners have passed $250,000 so far.
Amazing FBA
Michael has been running the Podcast, Blog and Facebook Group since September 2015. The podcast has just passed 275 podcast episodes published, with over 100 expert interviews.
Michael started Amazon Mentoring in April 2016, and masterminds in Sept 2016.
In Sept. 2017, Michael founded the 10K Collective, a London-based mastermind of men and women doing over $25,000 a month on Amazon. With collective revenues of over $10 million a year, they meet once a month in central London to discuss and implement advanced strategy and tactics.
In August-Sept. 2018, Michael is finalizing the PLP course, an online course which captures his philosophy of iterative business development; and which focusses as much on the mindset and skillset of the entrepreneur as it does on developing a business.
Links
Amazing FBA: https://amazingfba.com Amazing FBA Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Amazingpodcast Amazing FBA YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AmazingFba
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Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Jamie Davidson Amazon Insiders
Show Notes
Started 2011 warehouse in ATL - 2500 SQ FT 2 Brands Join venture with 1 factory Cell phone case brands:
Supcase i-Blason
2.5x inventory cost Product Research - Jungle Scout Be sure you can trademark the brand name Book Recommendation - Russell Branson
Expert Secrets DotCom Secrets
Podcast recommendations;
Social Media Marketing
Links
Amazon Insiders Amazon Insiders Facebook Amazon Insiders YouTube Amazon Insiders LinkedIn Jamie Davison Facebook
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Show Notes
Find a specific group of people you would like to target
Ex. Boat owner, cyclist, yogi Hopefully a group you know something about
Target a specific product category that works for this group
Ex. electric motors for boat owners Ex. cycle computers for cyclist Ex. yoga mats for yogis
Find existing manufacturers that carry these products
Go deep into that category Episode 19: Find existing domestic manufacturers: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-19-finding-domestic-dropship-suppliers-business/id1320676721?i=1000408497090&mt=2
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Born and raised in San Diego, CA, Adam Sobieski is an entrepreneur, Director of Sales, a passionate traveler, and thrill-seeker. Adam has been buying real estate in San Diego, CA since the Great Recession of 2008-09. He owns a company called Sharp Retention that will generate around $3 million in revenue this year. Additionally, Adam is also Director of Sales for Best Day of My Life LLC.
While sales and business ownership play a central role in his success, Adam also recognizes the value in traveling and experiencing the world up-close. He lived in a tent in Kenya for a month with the Maasai tribe. Shortly thereafter, Adam summited Mt. Kilimanjaro in the middle of a blizzard at an elevation of almost 20,000 feet. Adam lived in Peru where he surfed the longest ocean wave on the planet every day for 30 days straight, the wave breaks for up to a mile long here. Adam has heli-boarded in the backcountry terrain of Canada.. twice. Adam's next adventure will be at the end of this year when he will be traveling with his wife to New Zealand where they will rent a motorhome for 2 weeks and take on the world's largest bungee jump. In short, Adam believes taking risks is the most practical way to be risk averse nowadays.
Interview with
Adam Sobieski Best Day of My Life
Links from the show
https://www.bestdayofmylife.com/ https://www.instagram.com/BestDayOfMyLife/
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Trent Dyrsmid is a serial entrepreneur, husband, and father. His 3 private companies generate millions a year in revenue. Profit Magazine named Trent’s first company as one of Canada’s PROFIT 100 fastest growing companies for two years in a row before he sold it for 7 figures in 2008. If you want to discover how to create business systems that will allow you to rapidly scale your eCommerce company, Trent is the guy to follow.
Interview with
Trent Dyrsmid Bright Ideas Podcast
Links from the show
http://brightideas.co https://www.facebook.com/brightideasco
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Taz Ahsan is the host of the popular Amazon seller podcast The Amazon Entrepreneur.
He started his Amazon journey in January 2017 using the Retail Arbitrage business model for a few months and then went into Wholesaling for a short period.
It was then in July 2017 when Taz started his Private Label journey and decided to create the Amazon Entrepreneur podcast. In his podcast, he not only shares his journey with others so that they could learn from his mistakes but also interviews some of the most influential sellers/services in the space and the multi-million dollar mistakes they made!
Outside of Amazon, Taz is a health and fitness nut and is an avid bio-hacker always looking at ways to improved productivity, health, and life! He needs this as he is still holding down a full-time job at a large tech company in Boston.
Interview with
Taz Ahsan The host of The Amazon Entrepreneur Podcast
Links from the show
https://www.tazahsan.com/ The Amazon Entrepreneur Podcast (iTunes) The Amazon Entrepreneur Podcast (Stitcher)
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Sally Bunkham is the founder of mumsback.com, a company that provides luxury gift hampers for mums, focussing on the yummy stuff they had to abstain from in pregnancy. Sally’s mission is also to raise as much awareness of perinatal mental health issues as possible and has featured in many places like BBC TV, The Metro, The Independent, and The Guardian. £1 from every hamper sold goes to PANDAS Foundation to support their mission helping families going through mental health issues. Mum’s Back is also a partner with NOTHS.
Interview with
Sally Bunkham Founder of MumsBack
Links from the show
https://mumsback.com/ https://www.instagram.com/mumsback/ https://www.facebook.com/MumsBack/ https://twitter.com/MumsBack
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Joe Valley & Mark Daoust Founders of Quiet Light Brokerage
Links from the show
http://www.quietlightbrokerage.com https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/about/joe-valley https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/about/mark-daoust https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-valley-833ba48/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdaoust/
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Chief Everything Officer and footwear designer Darin Hager couldn’t find the sneaker style he craved at retail and his forward-thinking designs were hindered by the corporate footwear brands he designed for day in and day out for over 10 years. In 2008 he set out on his own to do what few other footwear designers had achieved; create his own sneaker brand, on his terms and by himself. Today, Heyday Footwear is the design-driven and independent sneaker brand for the freshest in fitness worldwide.
Heyday Footwear designs, produces, and sells directly to consumer, design-driven performance high top gym sneakers for the freshest in fitness. Our customers are at the pinnacle of bodybuilding and fitness in all its forms or aspire to be. We combine flat soles needed by athletes and outstanding comfort that will enhance your gains with innovative designs and premium materials. We boost our customer's confidence by knowing they have the freshest kicks in the gym.
Heyday is available only at HeydayFootwear.com. We cut out the middleman (the stores), so we (the brand) can bring our amazing, premium fitness sneakers directly to you (the customer) at an amazing (not premium) price. People want what nobody else has, and with production limited to just a few hundred pairs per style, you're guaranteed to be part an exclusive family. As the owner, I guarantee to provide you with the most outstanding customer service you've ever experienced.
It's not hype, it's Heyday.
Interview with
Darin Hager Founder of Heyday Footwear
Links from the show
Heyday Footwear Heyday Footwear LinkedIn Heyday Footwear Instagram Heyday Footwear Facebook
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Ryan Berman is the founder of Courageous: a consultancy that builds and leads Courage Brands™. Berman has developed meaningful stories for major brands in every corner of the country including Caesars Entertainment, Hilton, Major League Baseball, New Era, PUMA, Subway, and UNICEF. Berman believes that courage is any business, being or brands ultimate competitive advantage. Many people want to be courageous; they just don’t know how. His soon-to-be-released book ‘Return on Courage’ addresses this head on. He is also using the methodology unveiled in the book to launch his own Courage Brand in "Sock Problems": a charitable sock company that’s out to sock different problems in the world.
Interview with
Ryan Berman Founder of Courage Brands
Links from the show
Sock Problems Courage Brands Courage Brands Linkedin Ryan Berman Facebook Ryan Berman Instagram
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Mike Sill Co-founder of Sunday Scaries
Links from the show
Sunday Scaries Sunday Scaries Instagram Sunday Scaries Facebook
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Rob Kessler Founder of Million Dollar Collar
Listen:
iTunes Google Play Sticher
Links from the show
Million Dollar Collar Million Dollar Collar Facebook Million Dollar Collar Instagram
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Jack Paxton Customer Acquisition Specialist
Links from the show
VYPER VYPER Growth Twitter VYPER Growth Facebook VYPER Grown Hacking YouTube VYPER Growth Hacks Blog
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Kurt Elster Shopify Expert
Links from the show
KurtElster.com The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Ethercycle Kurt Elster Twitter Kurt Elster Linkedin
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Interview with
Mariko Briley Co-Founder of Yoobly
Links from the show
http://www.yoobly.com/ https://twitter.com/Yoobly https://twitter.com/MarikoBriley https://www.youtube.com/user/Yoobly https://www.facebook.com/Yoobly/
Listen
iTunes Google Play
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Links from the show:
https://www.ecommercechris.com/membership/ https://www.ecommercechris.com/contact/ https://www.meetup.com/Boston-Amazon-Sellers-Meetup/events/249192894/
Questions from the show
Why are Amazon Seller accounts suspended? What are the best practices to not have your account suspended in the first place? What the first step on you receive a suspension notice? What is the process to get an Amazon Seller Account reinstated? How does the Amazon Appeal Escalation process work?
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Listen:
iTunes Google Play
Links from the show
Katelyn Berk MealPal
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - Dropshipping Automation
Listen
iTunes Google Play
eCommerce Tools
FullStory
IBM Bluemix
Centiment
Addressy
imgix
Recapture
Links from the Show
Branden Moskwa [Twitter] Branden Moskwa [Linkedin] Nadimo
Sponsored By
Spark Shipping
Links from the show
Recapture.io Dave Rodenbaugh
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Questions
What's the average profit margin on eCommerce products? How do you go about finding suppliers? How do you go about finding suppliers? How important is it go have a site setup before approaching suppliers?
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Links from the Show
Drop Ship Lifestyle
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Links from the Show
TaxCoach Financial Gravity
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Links from the Show
Trellis How To Make B2B eCommerce Work With Your Sales Reps Isaiah Bollinger
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Transcript Charles: In this episode of The Business of eCommerce, I talk with Isaiah Bollinger the founder of Trellis. This is The Business of eCommerce, Episode 17.
Welcome to The Business of eCommerce, the Podcast that helps eCommerce entrepreneurs start, launch, and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host Charles Palleschi. I'm here today with Isaiah Bollinger, one of the founders of Trellis. Trellis is one of the top full-service eCommerce development agencies right here in Boston.
I recently saw a post by Isaiah, or on the Trellis blog actually, that was about the rapid growth of B2B eCommerce. That's one of those topics that you don't see many folks talking about B2B eCommerce, so I wanted to bring Isaiah on the show here today and chat a little more about it. So, hey Isaiah, how are you doing?
Isaiah: Good, good, thank you for inviting me to the show. You know, we've been connected for a while now, so it's great to be on the show and talk about eCommerce. Something that we've both been doing for a while now.
Charles: Yeah, it's great to have you, it's unusual actually to have someone from here in Boston, someone I've actually met in real life.
Isaiah: Yeah, it's funny how you mentioned we're one of the top eCommerce, we just actually got rated as the top eCommerce agency in Boston by a firm called Clutch. They organize agencies and help people find the top agencies locally for different things. Boston, surprisingly, it's not as robust for lots of eCommerce firms, compared to New York. Locally, most of our competitors are mostly in New York. There's so many of them there, but Boston's not quite as many here.
Charles: I feel like it's a big eCommerce city though. There's a lot of start ups in a small ... on the software side. A few different products went out of the city.
Isaiah: I think New York is just also an agency hub.
Charles: Yeah.
Isaiah: It's a hub for agencies and funny enough, one of our bigger eCommerce competitors moved their headquarters now to New York, and then one of the other ones, their headquarters is now in California, and they both just disappeared from Boston, so it's good for us.
Charles: That's a good thing.
Isaiah: Yeah.
Charles: Awesome, so, we were talking about the blog post on B2B eCommerce, and the rapid growth and it's not something that a lot of folks talk about so I figured you guys have, it sounds like, some significant experience with that. So, wanted to chat a little bit more you know, what is it, what are people doing, and what you kind of see now.
Isaiah: Yeah, absolutely. We started doing B2B eCommerce back when the company started in 2012. We kind of fell into it. Started with a mid-sized distributor, and it was a Magento project, and I think we quickly realized hey, there's some potential here for not only the customers but also the agency size so it felt like a good synergy of an area for us to focus. We've just kind of grown up from there.
B2B eCommerce has been a pretty large industry for a while. It's just not talked about a lot because I don't think it's very sexy in the sense that it's a lot of behind the scenes. A lot of the sites are actually password protected sites, or you need to log in to see pricing, or you basically have to be a customer to get the true experience. From that sense you might not even know about these sites, or be able to get to these sites that are doing millions and millions or even billions of dollars online. I think that's kind of a big reason for why B2B eCommerce is so kind of behind the scenes even though it's actually more than double B2C eCommerce in terms of total sales volume.
Links from the Show
Foster Commerce Craft Commerce Stephen Callender
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Chris Parker
Website: https://www.cgparker.com Twitter: @chrispcritters Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chrisgeorgeparker/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophergparker/
What Is My IP Address?
Website: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ Twitter: @wimia Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whatismyipaddress Google+: https://plus.google.com/+whatismyipaddress Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whatismyipaddress/ Pinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/whatismyipaddress/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18200088/
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
Links from Show
SalenaKnight.com Bringing Business to Retail Podcast Facebook Instagram
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation
I talk with Ty Crandall, CEO of Credit Suite, about how to use debt to fund your eCommerce business Links from the show:
Ty Crandall Credit Suite Credit Suite LinkedIn
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - Automation for eCommerce
Transcription Charles: In this episode of the Business of eCommerce, I talk with Ty Crandall about using business lines of credit to grow eCommerce business. This is the Business of eCommerce, episode 13.
Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the podcast that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch, and grow their business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. I'm here today with Ty Crandall. Ty is a business credit expert. With over 16 years of financial experience, Ty's recognized as an authority in business credit building, business credit scoring, business credit repair.
So, Ty, I wanted to bring you on the show today to talk to you a little bit about using lines of credit in eCommerce. How you doing today?
Ty Crandall: Yeah. Good man. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Charles: Yeah, great to have you. Wanted to kinda jump right in and see kind of ... Talk about some ways on first, what is business credit, and second, how we can kinda use it to help grow and finance a growing eCommerce business.
Ty Crandall: Sure, absolutely. There's a couple things. When I talk about getting financing, or I refer to it as capital, basically any kind of money you can get as a business. There's a couple different avenues you really wanna focus on. You know, one is the business credit, the corporate credit side, which really has to do with credit cards. Visa cards, Master cards, American Express, Dell, Apple, etc.
A lot of these credit cards don't require manual reviews, or manual underwriting, it's just one of those, 'if you meet the requirements,' you get automated approvals for 20, 30, 40, 50 thousand dollar plus individual credit cards and lines.
Then I look at the other side of it as the business financing. Every thing that's left. These are loans and these are credit lines that are through alternative lenders and SPA, etc. There's a couple different avenues you can go. The problem is that loans, and lines, and those, a lot of people know the difficulties, especially eCommerce of getting approved with a lot of those because a lot of the industries that we're in with eCommerce, even where I am, financial services, is considered to be high risk.
We face more scrutiny, we have more difficulty accessing capital, etc. the first thing to know, is being a business credit, you don't have that scrutiny. There's not industry restrictions. You're not going to not be able to get approved because you're an eCommerce business. It's the same as we're not getting approved because we're in financial services.
Anybody can get this, even if you're just starting the business, even if you're just gonna be starting the business after you listen to the show tomorrow. You still can get involved and access capital, you don't have to provide tax returns and bank statements so it's no doc. You don't collateral that's required for SPA loans.
You don't need to have good credit that's required for a lot of term loans, etc., that's out there. With business credit, as long as you have a business, you can start obtaining credit pretty quickly and then you can use a lot of that credit to fuel and fund the business and get quite a bit of it within even the matter of a few months.
Charles: Okay, so when you say business credit, you're talking about specifically not assigning your particular social to it, to put it under the businesses name and to make it a business ...
Ty Crandall: Yeah. Charles, you hit the nail on the head. You're familiar with consumer credit, right. You have a social security number, you give somebody your social, they pull your credit.
Want to learn tips on how to stay on time and budget for your next eCommerce project? Check out our interview with Jacquelyn Laufer of Rebuild Girl.
Links from the show:
Jacquelyn Laufer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquelynlaufer Rebuild Girl: https://www.rebuildgirl.com/
Sponsored by
Spark Shipping - Automation for eCommerce
Show Notes
A/B testing Starter Guide [eBook] Disruptive Advertising Chris Dayley [LinkedIn] Chris Dayley [Twitter]
Show Notes
Paleo Treats: https://www.paleotreats.com/ Paleo Treats Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paleotreats/ Paleo Treats Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paleotreatsfan/ Paleo Treats Twitter: https://twitter.com/paleotreats LiveChat app: https://lc.chat/67i7x (affiliate link) (Non-affiliate link: https://www.livechatinc.com/) Frank.ai: https://frank.ai/ Seth Godin: Start Small to Go Big
Show Notes:
SoCalInternetLawyer.com DMCAAgentService.com LinkedIn: Richard Chapo
Also see:
DMCA GDPR
Episode Transcript:
In this episode of The Business of eCommerce, I talk about how to source products. This is The Business of eCommerce, episode seven. Welcome to The Business of eCommerce, the podcast that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. I'm here to share some strategies to help you grow eCommerce business. So first, some housekeeping about this week. So just some updates on what's been going on on a personal note, my wife actually just gave birth to our second child, a little girl so we're very excited about that. Last week, I had produced the episode earlier so kind of getting back into it now and just very excited to be back. It's great to spend some time family and now it's great being back in the office. So just excited for that.
On a professional update, as you probably know, I'm the founder of Spark Shipping. We tried an update last week. What we're trying to do is we've had a free trial, seven-day trial. We've always gone back and forth on is it something that made sense of our customers, for the business? This week, we made the decision to remove the free trial. We're going to be trying that for a while, see how that goes. What we found there is that a lot of folks, they are most successful when we help them initially, when they talk to us, when we are in the process of onboarding them, that sort of thing. The issue with the free trial is when users are doing that, they tend to sign up, try to get it set up themselves, but if they run into any roadblocks, they may or may not reach out. If they don't reach out and if we don't talk to them, they tend to have some issues and usually just kind of cancel within the first seven days.
So we've originally started without the trial. We went through a trial. We switched back and forth over time. Right now, this week, we're trying to do without the trial. Let's see how that goes. We'll provide a lot more personal onboarding so we're excited to see that and try that. Also an update about the podcast, we are in the process right now of booking some guests. No formal announcements yet but we have several folks that we're talking to about doing some shows in the upcoming weeks, different eCommerce experts that can share some of their experiences. Also, other eCommerce retailers, I think that would be super helpful to have some folks, just to hear from other retailers who have done similar things, have grown their business, scaled their business and kind of see what's worked for them. I think it would be helpful for some retailers listening just to hear some other folks kind of in their circle. So super excited to get some guests on here and start talking to some subject matter experts.
So if you also have any recommendations, anyone you would like, any topics like that, feel free to reach out. I'm always very available. I'm just very open to hearing any feedback, anything like that. So definitely feel free to share that with me. So jumping right into this week's topic. I'd like to talk about how to source products. So this is something that we get a lot when folks are just starting off. They may want to start an eCommerce business. They start looking at what products, what should they sell and how to actually get in touch with the right people to actually be able to provide those products and to sell those products in retail. So it's something that at the beginning it's very confusing and it's not very obvious.
There's a lot of companies out there who kind of show themselves as ways of getting products. Some of these companies you have to actually pay them a subscription to have access to their products. That is not something I'd really recommend. Maybe it's okay to start but it's just in the longterm, you want to work with proper manufacturers, distributors, that sort of thing. So how to do this? First step is you have to get started by picking a niche,
Episode Transcript
Hello, welcome to The Business of eCommerce. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. This is Episode 6. On today's episode, we're going to talk about how to handle chargebacks.
With chargebacks, it's a bit more of an advanced concept, but it's something that if you've been in business for a while running your own eCommerce site, you're almost guaranteed to have got a chargeback. No one likes it. It's awful when it happens. And if you're in business, it either has already happened and it happened many times to you or it's a matter of time before it does happen. So it's something that everyone should be aware of and kind of know some methods of dealing with.
So first off, what is a chargeback? A chargeback is when you as a eCommerce retailer, or any retailer, are selling, charging a credit card, the end user then once they get that bill, they go back and they dispute that charge. Nothing comes back to you as the retailer. A bank puts a hold on the money that has been exchanged already and you then, are then ... the onus is on you as the retailer to basically say either "Yes, this is valid" or fight it and try to get that money back. But at that point, the money's already essentially gone.
So, simple example. Someone comes on your site. Pays with their credit card, a $100 charge. They, let's just say they don't get the product for whatever reason, and instead of contacting you, or, you know, if there are any normal channels, that sort of thing, they just call up their credit card company and say I have not yet got my product. I want to do a chargeback. I want to dispute this charge. The credit card company then takes that $100, immediately gives it back to the consumer, then they contact ... I believe it's Merchant Gateway, it kind of goes through the system. Then essentially you get a letter, usually a written letter saying: There has been a chargeback on so and so charge. There has been a $100 hold put on your account plus an additional chargeback fee. Do you want to provide evidence to the contrary, basically saying do you want to dispute this chargeback now and then go back and forth with them?
So, unfortunately, you as the retailer, I don't have exact statistic, but more often than not no matter what you provide, there's a good chance you could lose that battle. They very, very, very often side with the end consumer. And the retailer basically just has to, you know, eat the loss essentially ... Which is really rough when you're a retailer and you've actually shipped them the product. So not only are you out the refund charge, the actual amount, but you're also out the product though. So you lose both.
So it's something if there's anyway to avoid this, it is very advantageous for you as a retailer to try not to get chargebacks or to get as few as possible. The first tip, and real easy ... everyone should be doing it anyway is just have a really clear refund policy. It's something that even in your terms of service you should have it on every page right in the footer. The very first thing should be a Refund Policy. I would maybe even say put a separate refund policy link with just a refund policy every single page.
Also provide it at Checkout. Just make it very clear what's gonna happen, how, how many days. Don't have any sort of gray areas, any sort of thing that could lead the buyer not to understand exactly what's gonna happen and how. You know, it should be right there in the face. Just make it very clear if you want to say: All refunds in 7 days. No refunds. It's up to you. But you have to make it very clear just so the buyer knows: Hey, if I buy this, this is exactly the terms that I'm buying this under.
That right there alone drastically does reduce the amount of chargebacks due to some sort of dispute where maybe they had it for 90 days and they try to return the product, and then you come back and say, "Sorry you can't." It helps out.
Links
The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping The Stair Step Approach to Launching Products
Episode Transcript:
Hello. Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. I'm your host Charles Palleschi. This is episode five. On today's episode, we're going to cover steer stepping vendors. What this is is, on today's episode, steer stepping vendors is going from more beginner level type vendors, intermediate, to advanced. This episode is targeted more towards retailers who are apparent to you as just starting off, or intermediate, and looking for extra vendors, looking at how to add some more products that are a little more unique to that store. This is really targeted more towards you, if you're that sort of retailer.
When we steer stepping vendors, what this is is there are vendors out there who it's very broad in the range. They go from they are vendors who are willing to accept brand new retailers. You apply, show them basic, some sort of proof that you're in business, maybe you don't even need a site, but eventually they'll start selling you products. They want with very little hoops to jump through. Very easy to get started with these guys, and they're great for starting off. Then, all the way on the other side of the scale, there are some vendors who it's much different. Working with them, you have to fill out credit applications, you need to show them your site, proof that you're in business X number of years. They all require something different.
The deal when choosing a vendor is when you're just starting off, you can only really work with the vendors who basically are allowing newer retailers. It's a lot how to get your foot in the door with these vendors, the bigger ones. The benefit of working with the bigger ones is they have products that tend not to be found online as much, just because they don't let every new retailer in the door. You're not competing with tons, and tons, and tons of folks, you're competing with a much smaller subset of retailers. The goal, in a lot of cases, is to find vendors that are more exclusive because they typically are better doing business with. Better products, better experience they usually offer credit terms.
There's all sorts of different things, but usually, when you're just starting off, it's hard to get your foot in the door with these vendors. What I've done and what I recommend other retailers do is when you first are starting off, always begin with these intro vendors, beginner vendors, ones that basically just let you get your foot in the door, as long as they have the type of products that are in your niche. Let's say you decide you're going to sell a particular type of product in the sports good niche. You then find vendors in that niche that have some sort of products in that category, something you're interested in selling. Maybe it's not exactly the products you want, but it's at least in your niche, it's in your field, it's things that fit with what you're looking to do.
Get started with those vendors, get your site up and running, get some products on your site. It doesn't have to be perfect from day one, but at least now you have some products, you're in business, you can start going out there, you're going to make some ad words, getting some traffic on the site, some orders, some interest. Start building news letter, Facebook audience, things like that. Basically, start promoting the site and getting business. Once you do that, other vendors in that industry, it's a lot easier, then, approaching the next vendor. Maybe day one that's someone that wouldn't talk to you, but now that you have that, it's a lot easier to approach the next vendor and say, "Hey look, I have this site, XYZ. Here's the URL, check it out. Here's the type of products we sell. We're interested in bringing on these products, these also sporting good products from you. I'd like to get started."
It's a much easier sell showing them you've already been in business, you have the site running,
Episode Notes
Automated fraud checking services
Signifyd - https://www.signifyd.com/ Riskified - https://www.riskified.com/
Episode Transcript
Hello. Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and this is episode four. On today's episode, I'd like to talk a bit about ways to prevent fraudulent charges.
If you've been around for a while in eCommerce if you run your own eCommerce sight, not so much if you're selling on Amazon or Ebay but if you actually run your own independent site everyone falls victim at some point to fraudulent charges. This is where somebody has made a purchase on your site using a credit card, which is not theirs. They've received product or maybe not received product, but they've made a purchase on your site and you've charged their credit card. And then at some point months down the road you may have got a chargeback and that showed this charge was fraud, it actually was a chargeback from somebody else, it was not the card, the names didn't match and essentially what happens in that case is you as the retailer you basically lose. And you have to give the money back. You lose the product. You also get hit with a chargeback fee. It ends up costing you not just the amount for the order but also then a chargeback fee on top of that. It also isn't good for your merchant account. This is definitely something you don't want to happen.
If you've been around for a while it's happened to all of us. And when it happens it's not good, but there are some ways to prevent it and I'd kind of like to run through those real quick. Just some things I've personally found that work, that help, and that might help you. The first thing is just some basic, basic, basic human monitoring on the orders that come in. If you're around for a little bit you've seen orders come in, you start to know my average order price is x, let's just say $200 is an average order. And you're able to then say, "Any order above five times that," let's say a $1,000 or even $500, just put a number on there. If it's above x you know there's some risk involved. This is a bit different it's outside our norm, doesn't mean its fraud it just means it's just outside the average order.
What I personally have done is come up with a couple criteria and then had somebody ... in my case it was a virtual assistant monitor every order, every day if they meet two out of the three criteria, bring these orders to my attention immediately. And they came in every day at a certain time, I think it was 4pm Eastern, before orders were getting shipped, that sort of thing. It was kind of just like this check of saying, "Let's just have some human's eyes on this and see if this order makes sense. And if it doesn't raise it to my attention." And then I did a little more forensics and ... I'll get into that. First average order volume, that's something I always have them check. If it was above an excepted number ... and these are all numbers you kind of play with after a while, then that's one strike in the column.
Second on the list was the billing and shipped address to do not match. Again, it happens all the time but if they don't match on a $10 order it's very different then if they don't match on a $1,000 order. THat's just something you want to keep in mind. And if you have an order that's both high value and the shipping addresses don't match now you start to get into some sort of territory where this order just looks different, and it's something you want to then start really looking a little more into.
Next is ... let's say these don't match. Usually sending a quick email to the email address you'll see that it bounces back. It could literally be a customer service email, just something very basic of checking that email to even see if it's valid. That right there, great indicator is this an order that is a good order? You don't do this on every order but you know if it's a high price order,...
Episode Transcript:
Hello, welcome to The Business of eCommerce. I'm your host Charles Palleschi. This is episode three, and today I'd like to talk a little bit about what I call hybrid dropshipping. First, what exactly is hybrid dropshipping? Then we'll go into is it used, who uses it, why it's useful, that sort of thing.
First, what is it? This isn't a term that we commonly see around. A lot folks are using it but nobody really has put a great label on it. I've personally called it hybrid dropshipping. I've seen other folks have a different kind of name for it, but that's just something I've come up with.
What it actually is, is, if we rewind a few years ago everyone was taking physical inventory, that was the big thing. That's how everyone did retail. Along came dropshipping. It became popular. At that point, people started going all in the other direction, all dropshipping, no taking physical possession of merchandise anymore. So then everyone was just using the manufacturers essentially as their warehouse, distributors, that was their warehouse at that point. Nobody ran their own internal warehouse.
Past few years, what I've seen become more popular is this approach called hybrid dropshipping. Where retailers are taking physical possession of some inventory but not all. Where it's been used a lot is when there's a lot of SKUs, a lot of parts, a lot of that sort of thing. Where it makes sense to have let's say a catalog of 100,000 SKUs, you might not be able to have all those in stock but the top 100, the top 10, the top X number of SKUs. That might make sense to have some in-house.
It's not something you're going to do with all SKUs, all products, that sort of thing. It's something that you're going to cherry-pick and have some on-hand, and then for the bulk of them still you'll go back to manufacturers or distributors. When I say in-house, it's either actual in-house, like your own inventory physically at your location, or something, a 3PL, third party logistics company, where it's your inventory you've purchased, it lives in their warehouse but it's your inventory and only you have it.
The other option is some retailers, not all vendors offer this, but some retailers prepay for inventory at the vendor. So ahead of time it's your inventory, it's paid for, but you haven't actually ever left the manufacturer. It's still sitting at the manufacturer's warehouse. So this is your inventory, you know no one else is going to be touching this. Those are three places when I say your inventory, either prepaid at the manufacturer, at a 3PL or your warehouse.
The dropship inventory is distributors, or the bulk of the manufacturing inventory, where it's in that pool of dropship inventory at that point, where other retailers also have access to it. Which is used a lot in let's say auto parts, a lot of parts type of thing let's say, where you might have your top 10 SKUs, top 50, top 100, but also 500,000 SKUs back at the manufacturer.
What this allows you to do is a few different things. First because you have your popular SKUs in stock you are able to first ship them a lot faster in some cases than the manufacturer. Second, there's a lot of folks out there that are dropshipping, some people that's all their business. So if you just pick these SKUs, these 20 SKUs you're going to go after, those then, once they go out of stock with the distributors you might be one of the few people left with those SKUs in stock. So that allows you to essentially make the market and be the only game in town for those particular products for a short time. This even goes for, they could be selling on a marketplace, they could be selling on Amazon, that sort of thing, and they do go out of stock from time to time. If you are the only one left with product on hand, all those sales, 100% of them, will start going to you.
This doesn't make sense for all products but it's up to you as a retailer to pick and choose and merchandise t...
On this episode we review methods to help eCommerce retailers to add more value to their customers experience. This helps to differentiate you from your competition and standout in the crowded world of ecommerce. On this episode you’ll learn:
How to better organize categories Use specialized products that can not be found anywhere else Use custom products/POD products Add detailed reviews, descriptions and videos to help your eCommerce store to stand out
Episode Transcript Welcome to episode two of The Business of eCommerce Podcast. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. In today's show we'd like to cover a topic that we get very often. Usually folks starting off want to know how to add value to their customers. We find this very common in things like drop shipping. Different sorts of sites where they're usually just starting off. Where they're using a lot of products that are very similar to other folks. Maybe you work with one of the big vendors out there, big manufacturers, and you get their products and you're not really sure how to actually differentiate yourself in the market. You want to be special. You want to do something a little different.
But it's really tough sometimes when everybody's selling the same products in the same places. What you don't want to do, to get started there is, you don't want to basically just take the products from a vendor and dump them on your site. Dump them on Amazon. Have the same descriptions right from the vendor. The vendors usually give very basic descriptions. They also give very basic images. Really no details. Their categories are very either simplistic, or relevant to them, not really relevant to your site.
For example, they would be very general, the categories. The manufacturer might be selling different product lines to different industries. But you, your site might be much more targeted to a certain type of people. Let's say the vendor just sells outdoors products in general. You might be selling products specifically to folks that hunt deer outdoors. Something like that. Deer hunting. The categories you'll get from the vendors aren't very tailored to your specific audience. They're just general, broad. We want to jump in with some ways we can actually make your site much more individual and stand out from the crowd, so that it's not just taking products from vendors. Taking their images. Taking their titles. Taking their descriptions. Dumping it into Shopify. Dumping it onto Amazon, and just try to compete on price. Because I think we all kind of know by now, that's not really the way to go. You're not going to beat the big players like an Amazon price, so you have to add something else of value.
Just some general housekeeping before I get into that. This is episode two. Kind of the goal here is to have some information that's more for experienced eCommerce retailers. Some things for folks just starting off, and kind of go back and forth. I'd like to cover in different episodes some different topics. Maybe this one's right for you. Maybe you're beyond this. It really depends on where you're at, but we're hoping to kind of do both with this, and see what people like. It might be kind of choose your own adventure on some episodes are right for you. Others, honestly you might just skip over. Because maybe you've already seen this. It really is just up to you, but we're hoping to add value to a lot of different people in different places in getting started.
I've outlined four different general categories here of how to add value to different eCommerce retailers. To get started, and I was kind of implying this, is the categories topic. Over here, let's see. Kind of what I was implying is, when the vendor is setting categories, they might be relevant to them and their entire catalog of products. They might have 500,000 SKUs. They're sending you all 500,000 SKUs. The categories might be outdoors. This. Sports. That.
Episode Transcript Hello. My name is Charles Palleschi and welcome to The Business of eCommerce podcast. I'd like to kick off this first episode by talking about a little bit about myself, what I'd like to do with this podcast, a couple of show ideas, and give an idea of where we kind of see things going here.
So to get started, my name is Charles. I'm the founder of Spark Shipping. What Spark Shipping is software for eCommerce retailers to help them automate the connections with their vendors. A vendor is a manufacturer, a wholesaler, a drop shipper or a warehouse.
How I got started in this business is in 2010, I went off on my own. I used to work a corporate job and said, "I want to do freelance consulting." I started doing some app development and some software development for various businesses.
Somewhere along that road, I ended up purchasing a small eCommerce site. I ran that for some time. I built that up, worked with maybe about five different vendors. Orders went out each day to the different vendors and I said, "There has to be some sort of way to automate this." So, I ended up building what's now called Spark Shipping.
Fast forward to 2014, and the actual name and the product Spark Shipping was launched. Uh, later on that year, I ended up focusing solely on Spark Shipping, make that- making that my core business. Uh, and now, ever since, me and my team have run Spark Shipping.
So why I decided to start this podcast is because, on a daily basis, I am able to talk to many eCommerce retailers, different vendors. Uh, I do a lot of the sales here at Spark Shipping. So, I talk to a lot of different folks everyday. I hear a lot of what's working, what's not working, uh, different questions, different issues people run into, different ways people have solved those issues. A lot of different things.
The benefit of Spark Shipping i- Spark Shipping is we work with lots of different clients, lots of different types of businesses, so it gives me a pretty good idea of a different, uh ... a view of the landscape and what works and what's not working. And I'm hoping to be able to share that with everyone out there, and hopefully some of you find that useful.
The next coming weeks, I'm thinking we'll try to do an episode each week, maybe 10 to 15 minutes. Uh, we'll have different topics each week, hopefully one topic per episode. Some episodes will be me just talking to the camera like this, talking directly to you, answering, talking about that one particular topic.
Other ones, maybe we'll do some sort of interviews. I have a few guests that I want to bring on, uh, with some different subject matter. So, we could do that as well. Let me know what you like, what you don't like, what works, what doesn't. If you have some topics in particular you'd like to hear, I'd love to, talk about that.
You can reach, reach me directly on Twitter @charlespal, that's Charles P-A-L, on Twitter, or always by email. It's just charles@businessofecommerce.com. I'll be on the lookout for like topics, similar things that'll interest folks, and I'd love to get your feedback. So, hopefully talk to you soon. See you, see you very soon in the following episodes and we'll chat more. Thanks. Have a good one.