E-Commerce Master Class

Before you can sell, you need a product. Once you have some ideas for your product, you need to know if those products will sell. These guides will help you figure out some product ideas and how to evaluate them.

Now that you have a product idea and you know it will sell, you need to figure out how to source it. Do you want to make it yourself, pay artists locally to make it for you, or source it overseas.

There are dozens of shopping carts you can choose from. But in the interest of saving you time, I’m narrowing this down to my top 4. There are obviously bigger, more expensive carts - but if you’re reading this, you likely aren’t looking for the most expensive way to make your dream come true.

At the top of your funnel is Traffic. Sure, you could go one step backward to “interest/awareness”, but I like to keep things simple. The interest really only matters when it’s traffic to your website. As such, I see 4 main levers that you can pull to increase sales in e-commerce. 1 - Traffic. 2 - Conversion Rate. 3 - Average Order Value. 4 - Repeat Purchases. Let’s dig into each of these a bit more. The remaining sections will assist you in the categories written above.

Simply put - this is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There’s a LOT to learn about SEO, but don’t stress out about this too much early on. You will never have it “perfect” because the algorithm is always changing. The focus here is to make sure your site is set up properly, make sure you’re using the words that real people use to describe things, make sure your website is designed to engage human users, and make sure other websites are linking to you and building up the network.

Content means something different to everyone. You have on-site content (your product descriptions, your blog, etc), and off-site content (YouTube Videos, Social Media Posts, Guest Posts, etc). Start with what you’re good at. A blog can be a huge driver of top-of-funnel traffic, but not everyone is a good writer. Maybe you’re much better at video. Start there instead. And you need product descriptions that connect with your customers. No one wants to read a description written by a scientist (generally speaking), they want the product to have emotion. Write for people - not search engines.

Using influencers isn’t new at all. That’s why Wheaties had your favorite athlete on the cover of their box. Those athletes were influencers. The difference is that social media has opened up the door to many smaller, more niche, influencers. This allows you to be more targeted in who you try to reach with your budget. Don’t just look at the number of followers, look at their engagement as well. Are the people commenting in a way that seems organic and genuine, or do they sound forced and fake? If the comments don’t sound like they’re coming from your ideal audience, the sales likely won’t come either.

I’m a bit biased here. I love using advertising to grow eCommerce stores. I run an eCommerce marketing agency called, Elumynt, and my team and I have managed over $100 million in ad spend. That means we’ve seen a lot of businesses grow from ads, and usually much faster than they would have without using ads. The other tactics above are mostly all about hustle. Work hard, then work harder. But if you have a budget, and/or you’re limited on time, advertising will probably be your best friend. With ads, you can get very targeted with your audience, you can control the message a bit more, and you can quickly change things up if something isn’t working. And when it is working, you can often scale quickly by simply increasing your ad budget. There are many different platforms that you can advertise on. The key here, is to figure out which platform you want to invest in first. I recommend keeping it to 1-2 channels at the beginning so you can focus your time and budget to see what works. Then scale that. Then move on to new platforms. The platforms below are the ones that I use the most frequently, but it’s certainly not an exhaustive list. You can also look into Yahoo Gemini, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and many many others.

Do you remember when we talked about the 4 basic levers you can pull to grow your ecommerce store? Here they are again: 5. Traffic 6. Conversion Rate 7.Average Order Value 8. Repeat Purchases. So far, we’ve focused almost entirely on Traffic. If you get more traffic, you get more sales. And for many stores, that’s the first thing the need to focus on - getting more awareness and traffic. But once you’ve got a steady stream of sales coming in, it’s time to think about the next lever - Conversion Rate. If you keep traffic the same, but you increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you’ve essentially doubled your sales. That’s powerful. You can do this by A/B testing different elements on your site or by conducting user testing to see what’s intuitive and what’s not intuitive.

Do you want fries with that? Would you like a car wash? Fast food restaurants and gas stations ask those questions because it helps them increase their average order value. Retail stores put small items at the checkout because they can increase their average order value. You can do the same thing on your ecommerce store. You’ve probably seen something in your cart that recommends other purchases that are related to what you have in your cart. Sometimes it can be as simple as adding on a set of back-up batteries for an electronic you just ordered. If you keep traffic the same, and you keep your conversion rate the same, but you increase your Average Order Value by $10, that can be a big increase in revenue.

The last of the four basic levers is Repeat Purchase Rate. If you paid money to acquire someone (and you did, via email, or a discount, or ads, or influencer marketing, etc), and they only purchase one time from you - you likely didn’t make much profit off of that sale. But if they purchase from you a second time, you likely didn’t pay much to get them to come back (perhaps an email, or a bit of retargeting), so that means more money in your pocket from that sale. If they buy from you a third, or fourth, or fifth time - ideally each of those purchases cost you less than it does for you to acquire a new customer, so this can be a very powerful part of your growth.

Once you get customers, and they love you - it’s time to get them to promote your store for you. Instead of one marketing person on your salary, you end up with 100,000 people working for you. This can grow your store faster than anything else.

After you get your first channel up and running, it’s a good time to think about expanding to more channels. You already have the inventory, product feed, fulfillment, and many other pieces of the puzzle in place - so expanding to a new channel can rapidly add more sales. The first thing you will need to think about is how you will handle your inventory and listings when you go multi-channel. There are many tools out there, but the one that I recommend is Sellbrite (and yes, I’m biased - I run their marketing). But this isn’t just my opinion. Ebay also chose Sellbrite as their preferred provider for new merchants. * There are also many other places you can expand to such at Jet.com, Wish.com, Rakuten.com, NewEgg.com and many more - so research which ones you think will make the most sense for you and your store.

How do you know what to scale if you don’t know what’s working - or not working? Figuring out your store analytics is a critical component of success.