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Highlights in this podcast:
02:59 – What is Ecommerce is?
03:26 – Why should you be interested in it?
05:06 – How do you start doing ecommerce?
07:32 – Minimum and maximum ticket price and the safe margin
09:39 – How Drop Shipping works
10:54 – Importance of modifying product descriptions
12:32 – Owning the Racecourse
14:10 – The Fragmented Market Test
15:44 – Applying the “Buy Local Rule” in ecommerce
16:30 – The seasonal aspect of a business and Ezra’s fave tool
18:11 – What is an SKU and how many should you have?
19:35 – Onsite conversion tips
23:51 – You absolutely need to “Chunk!”
24:57 – Where can we find out more about Ezra and ecommerce?
25:31 – He’s coming to FastWebFormula 4!
26:15 – Questions that people should have asked
28:34 – Ezra’s new ecommerce course is coming out soon
Get access to my Mentoring Program
Trancription:
James: James Schramko here. This podcast episode is all about ecommerce, and the reason I wanted to cover this topic is because I think that it is a hot topic. The big retailers are struggling. A lot of them are going broke in real, actual stores, which opens up the question: why are they going broke? It’s because people are buying online.
Let’s face it, the Internet is here to stay, it’s not just a fad, and who’s making the money? It’s people who set up online stores and sell things online. And so what I thought would be good is go and talk to someone who actually does this for a living and does it pretty well, and it just so happens that one of my very best friends and co-host on our other podcast, ThinkActGet.com, Ezra Firestone, is an ecommerce specialist. Good day, mate, how are you?
Ezra: I’m so good, thanks for having me. And it’s so true, you know, 10 percent of retail sales are done online. Total retails sales. 10 percent. And that’s growing each year. 15 percent, year over year, in US and Canada, as we are crossing the chasm and as the technology adaption curve is becoming lower. They say the Internet is in its infancy. Well I like to say, and I actually heard this on Terry Lynn’s podcast, ecommerce is a baby. Like we’re so young in ecommerce, and now really is the time to be getting into ecommerce. It’s not a played-out market at all. It’s actually a really, really good time to be thinking about retailing physical products online.
James: Right. So, just to give us some context, tell us just a bit about the Ezra Firestone ecommerce empire. What makes you qualified to even talk about this on a show like SuperFastBusiness.com?
The Ezra Firestone ecommerce empire
Ezra: Well, I’ve been very successful with it, and I’ve had my attention on it for a very long time. And there’s different business models, with ecommerce. There’s drop shipping, there’s wholesaling, there’s manufacturing, and my preferred business model is the drop ship business model, and I had a store that I just sold, that was the number one retailer of a specific line of Halloween products in America, and we’ve done really well, and I’ve done a lot, a lot, a lot of testing to platform testing.
I’ve had stores on ShopSite, on X-Cart, on Yahoo, and Magento, and BigCommerce – I’m actually just building on BigCommerce now – but I’ve tested platforms, I’ve tested different traffic sources, I’ve tested layouts, I’ve just really had a lot of attention on this for the past couple of years, and I’ve done really, really well. And I’m happy to share what’s worked for me with your group of people.
James: Alright, well we are going to ask you what’s worked. I think that’s the whole point. We’re going to get to the good bits. I’m going to say, listen, Ezra, if you only had twenty minutes or so to quickly educate someone about ecommerce, let’s just make sure we’ve covered the “What is ecommerce?” That is a store that is online. Is that how you would describe it?
What is ecommerce?
Ezra: Yeah. I’d describe it as the – you know, everything is ecommerce, right? Electronic commerce. But the way the nomenclature, the parlance of our time, to use a quote from The Big Lebowski, ecommerce is commonly referred to as the retailing of physical products online. So a store that actually sells something that when someone buys it it’s shipped to them in a box.
James: Okay. Now, why should we be interested in ecommerce? Well, it’s got a high barrier to entry, so smart guys like you and all the smart traffic conversions specialists look at an ecommerce store and they think, “Oh, you know, I have to set up a relationship with the supplier. And I have to…” you know, people perceive it as having a high barrier to entry, so not a lot of people get into it, which makes it a lot better for the folks of us who are doing it. Most of the work is done upfront.
You pick your market, you build up your platform, you get everything set, and all that stuff happens upfront and after that, all you have to worry about is generating traffic and doing conversion testing. So all your work’s upfront.
And the other cool thing about ecommerce is you get first visit transactions. Between 80 and 95 percent of the transactions that happen across my ecommerce stores and my clients’ ecommerce stores happen on the first day. And the other thing is, you have a really high value per visit in an ecommerce store. It’s not uncommon to see one dollar, two dollar, and three dollar values per visit. That means every visitor that comes to your site is worth a dollar.
And the other beautiful thing about ecommerce – and you know, just to give you some context, an average blog might have a value per visit of five cents, whose doing advertising as a revenue model. The other thing is, and this requires testing, I knew we’d talk about this, so I got some conversion best practices here, is conversion rates.
I’ve got one of my stores right now that’s converting at five and a half percent, that means that five and a half out of every hundred people who visit the site buy something. People are coming, looking for whatever it is you have to offer already. You don’t need to persuade them, you don’t need to convince them. You just need a good picture and an Add to Cart button. So it’s a lot easier to make sales on an ecommerce store.
James: And that’s first time transactions?
Ezra: Well, 5 percent conversion rate across the store, 80 to 90 percent of the people who visit buy on the first day.
James: Nice. Okay, so how do we actually do it?
How to do it
Ezra: Well, the first thing that you need to do is pick a market, and you know a lot of people really, really struggle with this, but it’s not very hard to pick a market. The best markets out there, in my opinion, are the niches of other niches. And what that means is like you have dog supplies, and you have dog beds. Well, dog beds would be a subcategory of the greater dog supplying niche, and if you look on Amazon and eBay, you can see they have all the big categories listed and you can go in there and you can look for the smaller categories within those categories.
Another pretty sneaky way to find really good markets is to have a look at the different shopping cart platforms. We’ve got about 30 shopping cart platforms out there right now that are usable you know – Shopsite, Magento, Yahoo, Volusion, X-cart. All these different platforms whatever they are – 3dcart, Zen-cart – they all have designers and developers and these designers and developers like to feature their case studies on their websites.
So if you go and you look at the top designers for each platform and all you have to do is Google the platform name designer or developer and whoever is paying for advertising is doing well at that space so they wouldn’t be buying ads. And they will show you that the websites that have had redesigns. Now, if someone can afford to have a redesign done by the top designer in their platform, well they probably got a pretty hot market. Their market’s probably working out for them. So it’s a really good way to do it.
A good buddy of mine who is in a group with me said another way to find market is “hobbies”. People who are interested in hobbies, they’re passionate buyers. People who are into golf, people who are into model trains, people into yoga, whatever it is. People who are hobbyists are really passionate.
And then the other good market idea before I give you a resource are weird and embarrassing markets, so stuff that people don’t want to look someone in the eye while they’re buying like their pubic hair grooming kits or their toe nail fungus cream or whatever it is. The stuff that’s a bit embarrassing to buy, that you don’t want to look someone in the face when you’re purchasing is really good stuff to sell online.
And there’s a great resource out there for anyone who’s interested in eCommerce, I absolutely recommend that you pick this up. It’s called “The Top 500 Guide”. And it’s put by a company called internetretailer.com and it’s the North American guide for eCommerce and it tells you all the markets that are on the rise, all the markets that are on the decline. It tells you all the stores that are really doing well. It’s just a great place to get ideas for eCommerce and find out what’s going on the eCommerce world.
James: Nice. Now I watched your presentation at traffic and conversion summit and I took some notes, so I’m going to dig straight into the gold here. What’s your favorite ticket price minimum?
Setting the price minimum
Ezra: Minimum ticket price is $75. Maximum ticket price is $300 and here is why. With the drop of eCommerce store where most people is going to have to start with because it’s the lowest barrier of entry to get into eCommerce, you’re doing 20-30% margins. You really can’t make money these days in my experience if you’re not making at least $25 profit per order and in order to make $25 profit per order, you got to have a $75 average order value. Now that’s not average cost of the product because you could be selling a product that costs $50 and has accessories, right?
So, you definitely want to sell something that’s over $75 and I find the sweet spot to be under 300 because I’ve got a buddy who sells trampolines and pool tables an a bunch of other stuff and I actually have a store where I sell bar stools and people who buy those higher end products, those tickets that are $500 and $600 and $700, call you. They want customer support. They are just not going to pull out their card and buy that.
So when you stay under $300 you’re still in that sort of space where people don’t require as much support and they’ll just pull out their card and they’ll buy that right on your site. So it’s kind of a nice little range that you want to look for as far as higher order value.
James: Right. I have a friend who sells expensive heavy things online, so there’s two no-nos. And they have heavy phone support but they’re doing it on such a scale like the super category and I guess if you want to take that into the market, you’ll have different complexities. And for memory they won’t care about drop shipping because they lose control of the ability to deliver things properly and to get the best freight management and to be able to control timing and quality. Is that where you integrate if you want to make a more mature, deeper eCommerce store?
Start with drop shipping
Ezra: What happens is you start with drop shipping because with drop shipping you don’t pay until you get paid, you only buy the product once someone ordered it for you. But as you grow your drop shipp business, what you do is you take your best sellers and your warehouse those. You manufacture those and you import those so that you’re as highly leveraged as you as you can be. Your risk is as highly leverage as possible meaning, yes you’re taking risk but you’re only taking that risk of warehousing and purchasing that product upfront, on the products that you know from experience that you’re going to retail a whole bunch of.
James: Right. So you better explain what drop ship is.
What is drop ship?
Ezra: So drop ship is where you go to- you have a line of products, right? Let’s take the dog supplies line and you’ve got all these brands, manufacturers rather, and it used to be that the manufacturers would only give their products to wholesalers who then supply those products to stores and online stores. But nowadays, all theses manufacturers are looking for more avenues to retail their products and so they’re willing to let you or give you a disc that has all their product images on it and a CSV spreadsheet that has the prices that they’re going to charge you.
Let’s say, they’re going to charge you $50 for a dog bed. They give you the image, they give you the description for that dog bed and they give you their price. You take that dog bed. You put it on your website and you charge a hundred dollars. And you do the work. You’re like Target.
Target doesn’t make its products. It just does the work to get the customers in there and it sells other brands’ products. So you do the work to get the customers to your store by doing traffic like Pay Per Click or Facebook or SEO or however you generate traffic to your store and when you make a sale, someone pays you a hundred dollars and then once you get paid on your hundred dollars, you go to the manufacturer and say here’s he $50 and here’s the address of this person. Please send it to them. And so they ship it for you. So you don’t handle inventory. You don’t have to worry about stocking, you don’t have to worry about anything but generating the sale.
James: Now, I’ll go the last question here. How important would it be to modify those descriptions if you can?
Modifying product descriptions
Ezra: It is absolutely 100% crucial to modify those product descriptions because everyone else on the internet has those same product descriptions.
James: That’s what I was thinking.
Ezra: If you want your pages to rank, you need unique content on there. It can’t be the same content as everyone else. And you know we could do a whole podcast just on how to write product descriptions. But it’s not really difficult to modify your product descriptions. And one of the big things about eCommerce- what I call eCommerce 3.0 – what’s changing about eCommerce right now is the day and age of the store, of the faceless eCommerce store is dying. The eCommerce that just puts up products and list manufacture descriptions is dying.
What’s working now is adding value to your market, writing your product descriptions, ordering your products that are selling best and shooting videos about them, creating buyer’s guides like keep bundling products together that people want, figuring out ways that you can serve your community and creating a face and a brand and owning the race course within your eCommerce store. So creating a weekly video that has content that is relevant to the community of people who buy your products at your store. It’s really what’s changing abut eCommerce right now.
One of the cool things is most people who do drop shipping don’t rewrite their product descriptions. What you do is when you take the manufacturer’s product description and you feed them out to all the comparison engines like PriceGrabber, Thefind and whereever else and you keep the unique descriptions for your store.
James: No wonder they describe your presentation as the firehouse of content. I loved this. Now people who normally speed this up they’re probably just playing this on half speed. I love it. We’re going to keep going with this. Now Own The Racecourse. You just gently drop that in there. You’ve been applying Own The Racecourse to your eCommerce store. Does it work?
OTR theme for ecommerce stores
Ezra: Ah it’s working so well. It’s the absolute, most genius thing that we’ve done. Our skin care company Boom by Cindy Joseph were starting the video blog and we are taking this video more obviously doing all Own The Racecourse strategies with it, transcribing it and uploading it and syndicating it and pinning it and all that good stuff. But what’s really cool about it is we’re building this community of people who are- it’s fortifying us from channels.
The thing that you are afraid of us in eCommerce store is that one of your channels goes away or you lose your Adwords account or you lose your SEO rankings in a Panda or Penguin update or your Facebook Ad account or page gets banned or your Google product shopping listings are no longer free which just happens in August 2012.
So what happens is these channels come and go but if you build a brand and a community around your store, what happens with Boom right now is 50% of the traffic we get from that store is coming from people typing either our brand name right into the search engine or our URL right into the the URL bar at the top of the page. So we’re building this brand for our company and what that does is when we sell this company we now have an asset that’s going to get us a one or two higher multiple because we have a brand around it.
We got a community of people engaged with us, who communicate with us on a weekly basis and I think it is the absolute most important thing you can do for any business right now is build a community. And I think Own The Racecourse strategy is the best way to do it as I’ve seen.
James: It’s great if you’re sitting on stock as well, you have to make sure you’ve got that traffic machine. Now tell us about the fragmented market test that you’ve mentioned to look for opportunities.
Fragmented Market Test
Ezra: Sure. So, one of the things that I think- and this is a purely search engine optimization perspective- is that you know you want to be able to do SEO for your store and it’s not really hard to do. But if you take your top 20 keywords in your market and you google them and it’s the same 10 players every single time, that’s a market that’s not fragmented. It has got a really strong stock of players. The same people advertising on those keywords. You just want to make sure that there’s space.
The market’s fragmented, that there’s not the same 10 folks and the cool thing is that most markets are. I’ve only run in the 3 or 4 that are really just kind of taken, that are really sort of solid, that are hard to get into in these niche eCommerce stores.
So I think that the fragmented market test for me is – are there ten-pound gorillas in this niche who are competing for every single one of my keywords. And the answer to that question is usually absolutely not. And the other thing is – are the people in the market, if you’re doing a drop-ship store is, are they drop-shipping?
Well if they’re not drop-shipping they’ve got better margins than you and you’re not going to be able to compete with them in pay-per clicks, so one of the ways to figure that out is to give them a call and say “Hey I’m considering ordering this product. Do you ship it out or do you ship it from the manufacturer?” and the customer service personnel often tell you where it’s being shipped from and you can find out if those people are drop-shipping or not if they’re stocking and manufacturing.
So if you’re going to be doing a drop-ship market you’re going to want to be sure that the other folks in that market are also drop-shipping those products or at least there are some people who are drop-shipping those products because that way you’ll be able to compete from the pay-per click perspective as you’ll have the same margins.
James: Nice, okay now what about the bi-local rule?
The bi-local rule
Ezra: Well the bi-local rule is absolutely key for eCommerce. Don’t sell a commoditized product. Don’t sell something that someone can walk down the street and buy. Why you’re able to sell so many of those dang Halloween things is because if you don’t live in New York City, if you don’t live in San Francisco, you’re not going to be able to find one of those right? If someone lives in Tuscaloosa Alabama, can they find this kind of thing down the street from them?
Now you might think – let’s take fire pits as an example – Walmart has fire pits but does Walmart have the selection of fire pits that you can have on an eCommerce store? No, they’ve got 1 fire pit so just because you find something locally doesn’t mean that it’s not a great market online but if something is readily available and it’s been commoditized, it’s a horrible, horrible idea to sell it online because you’re going to have a hard time competing with those local stores.
James: Okay now tell us about the seasonal business trends that you mentioned.
Seasonal business trends
Ezra: Oh God! I love me some seasonal business, man. You know every business has its own seasonal aspect to it and I think one of the best examples of a seasonal business is gift baskets right? Because you get to take advantage of every single season right? You’ve got Valentine’s Day gift baskets and Thanksgiving day gift baskets and Halloween gift baskets and Christmas day gift baskets. I really like seasonal businesses and one of the cool things about seasonal businesses, I know people who are in eCommerce seasonal markets, one of the markets I played in are seasonal and what happens is most of your sales come in a 1 to 2 to 3 month period.
For example I got a client right now that sells wooden toys, these wooden, Waldorf education type natural toys and 50% of her revenue comes over the course of December and the same thing for me, 50% of my revenue in the Halloween business came in October. But even in the seasonal business you always end up doing about half your revenue in the off months but something about this crazy rush, this rabid frenzy that people are in when it’s associated with a season they’re just willing to buy those Halloween products for their kids.
They’re going to buy that gift basket for their friends. It just creates a level of enthusiasm for your products, the seasonality around it and it’s really important to make sure that you know what your product’s high season is and promote it in that season and I really love the soul-y seasonal eCommerce markets.
James: Okay now what’s the favourite tool that you have that shows you the seasonality of different products?
Ezra: Google trends, baby. Google insights. It’s really simple and you just throw your keyword in there, you have a look at when it’s the highest search volume. That’s the one that I use to look for what the seasons are for my markets and it’s pretty right on.
What is SKU?
James: And how many SKU should you have and what is an SKU?
Ezra: An SKU is an individual item. How many items should you sell? Well you should absolutely have more than 70 items, if you possibly can. Now that sounds weird because here I am with a product in the skin care line that only has 5 items but that’s not a drop-ship store. That’s a store that’s built around a brand that where we’re warehousing that stuff is a different business model.
When you’re drop-shipping you want as many fish nets out there that you can possibly get and I know folks with 70 item stores that are doing $1Million, $2Million or so. 70 is kind of the minimum that you want to give you enough diversity to have enough products to advertise on and have enough products to rank in Google and give you just enough of a diverse range of products for the consumer of that market.
James: And how much should things weigh? You mentioned something about going for lighter products.
Ezra: I particularly love the lighter products because it allows you to offer free shipping without much trouble. I think over 10 lbs you’re running into that shipping problem where shipping gets really expensive and you got to deal with it. It’s harder to offer free shipping in those markets and so I like to, if possible, to sell items that are quite light because it allows me to offer free shipping and not have to pay a lot for the shipping when I’m doing that. Free shipping is a big one.
A lot of people won’t buy if you don’t have free shipping so sometimes what I recommend people to do and test on their stores is raise their prices by $5 or $10 and add free shipping and see if that doesn’t equal out to more profit in the end and about 60% of the time or 70% of the time it does.
James: Nice. Okay now tell me about on-site conversion stuff. Things like spokesmen or live chat, are you using any of that stuff?
On-site conversion stuff
Ezra: Oh we could go on, I mean onsite conversion is…
James: I’m just extracting your brain bit by bit. Are you impressed with my note taking?
Ezra: I’m really impressed, it’s good. It’s awesome. It’s my presentation here, and I appreciate it, man. Let’s talk about something for all you pages real quick. Your header is huge for your conversion. You want your search bar really big and prominent in your header. If you look at Amazon if you look at Zappos you’ll see that they got really giant search bars and I actually noticed this before I noticed that they had that. We had a store that had 2% of the people that were visiting that store we’re searching and 10% of our revenue was coming from those 2%.
So I took that search bar and I put it really big right across the top of the site and that bumped us up to 5% of the people who were searching and it turned out to be 23% of our revenue was coming from those people who were searching. It’s the good old fashion Bob Chalbini commitment and consistency principle. If you can get people to search, they’re more likely to buy. And what we’re testing now is having a fixed search bar that will scroll with you as you’re on the page.
We really want to get people to search so put that search bar nice and big on top of your page. It’ll give you a nice little boost. You want to have guarantee, a contact, a security symbol, an offer of some kind, a discount or free shipping, your “More information” buttons, your floating cart, your live chat, and an opt-in all in your header. Go inside Zappos, they do one of the best examples of an eCommerce store header out there and you’ll notice that each individual thing in their header is in its own little box, in its own little spot on the header.
It’s called the foveal view and it’s because your eye can only focus on one step at a time and if you got a really crowded header it’s not good. You want to have space in between things in your header. Also for all pages you want randomly displayed testimonials, if you can possibly have them. You want your best sellers and you absolutely need to have live chat.
There are two companies out there, one that I like and it’s the easiest one to implement is Olark.com. Olark is fantastic, they go right to your iPhone they go right to your G-chat they integrate with everything and you can set up a little away message but you can do these things where it pops up after a certain amount of page views, a certain amount of time on the site it pops up a chat invitation. It gives you a nice little 8% boost on average in your conversion rate by having live chat.
You want incentivised time constraints. There’s a company called ExclusiveConcepts, that’s a fantastic conversion optimization company for eCommerce. They have a little piece of software called the TimeToBuy and what that does is you can set it after 30 seconds or after 3 page views or whatever, it pops-up this little thing that says – Hey! Check-out within 10 minutes and get this percentage off – and it’s crazy how many people are incentivised to buy by that time constraint right then and there so it’s a really good thing to have on your site across all pages. Have you got the option to go to home page and section pages and all that stuff?
James: Well no I was going to ask you about FAQ videos and like if you could only develop a few feature pages on your eCommerce or where’s the quick fruit?
What’s the quick fruit on ecommerce?
Ezra: The quick fruit on your eCommerce store is most definitely your Frequently Asked Questions page, your Contact Us page, and your Why Buy From Us page and your Shipping Information page and here’s why – because everyone who comes to your store looks at those pages.
They look at your About Us, they look at your Contact Us, they look at the Why Buy From Us which is what you should have, and if you can create videos that explain all these different stuff – Hey here’s who we are and how you can contact us – just by making your Contact Us page and your About Us pages and your Shipping Information pages richer, you get such a boost in conversion because you’re developing a relationship with the customers who come to your store. They’re looking you in the eye.
And the other thing is you take those videos and you put them in tabs right on your product page. So right in your product page there’s a little tab that answers the question of, what are your shipping policies? Which everyone wants to know, what are you return policies? Which everyone wants to know. What are the frequently asked questions about this product line? Which everyone wants to know. They watch those videos.
It cuts your customer support in half and boosts your conversion rate because those videos are useful in other places on your site as well. The richer your site is, the better you’re going to do. The more engaging you are with the people who are coming, the more value you are adding to them. The more you’re putting your face in front of them, the better your site is going to convert.
James: Did you mention the favicon?
Ezra: Yeah, we should have one of those. I mean look you’re not going have a huge boost with favicon but it’s just nice for branding.
James: And what about chunking?
Ezra: Alright chunking. You absolutely need to chunk on your product descriptions. I think bullets are the key to good product descriptions. You have three little bullets. Now, you want features and benefits. Most people make the mistake of just putting features – our product has a 32” zoom lens, all this stuff – who cares? What they want to know is what it’s going to do for them.
Yes you need the features but above the features put the benefits – Man this camera’s going to make you look like a stud or whatever, these tires makes it so you don’t crash, whatever the benefit to the end user is, you make those benefits more prominent on the product description, on the product page you will have a boost in conversions over having features being prominent.
And what James means by chunking is don’t have these giant lists of content on your section pages. You don’t want content on your section page or on your product page, have little individual bite-sized consumable pieces of content for people to look at so they can really get an idea in one glance of what’s going on, on that page.
James: Nice. Alright Ezra, you’ve been so generous with us on this eCommerce stuff. I hope we’ve given a whole heap of ideas. Firstly, where can people find out more about Ezra and eCommerce?
Find out more about ecommerce
Ezra: Well you can visit my website SmartMarketer.com and I will be putting out videos. I’m getting so much positive feedback on this eCommerce stuff. On my blog I will be putting out eCommerce videos. I’m actually opening up an eCommerce services division where I’ll be building out platforms and store for people managing advertising campaigns, all that kind of stuff so if you’re interested in analytics integration or anything like that you could e-mail meor have a look on my website SmartMarketer. It should be up in the next week or two.
James: You’re going to come out to FastWebformula 4 live and talk to us about stuff there?
Learn more at FastWebFormula live event
Ezra: Yes, I’m going to come to FastWebFormula4 live in Sydney June 13th and 14th. I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone there and I will have a whole presentation. I’ll go in depth on all this eCommerce stuff, I’ll show you screen shots. I’ll show you behind the scenes of my business. I will create tutorial videos on how to implement the analytics and goal setting, and all the different stuff I talk about that people want to know. All for you guys on the live event and I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to me talk about all this stuff, and I hope it’s been useful and helpful.
James: I think it’s fascinating. I’ve asked you questions based off my own notes from watching you speak last time. I’ve condensed it down into the things that resonated with me. You did quite a few interviews about eCommerce lately. What question should people have been asking you that they didn’t think to ask?
Ezra: One of the things that people aren’t really concerned with is – what’s the best traffic channel for an eCommerce store? What is your absolute best source of traffic? And I think that’s a really important thing with eCommerce businesses and with any business. It’s like the, if the “you build it and they will come” strategy does not work you’ve got to have a plan for how you’re going to get visibility for your products right? Conversion is the easy part.
Creating visibility is much harder than taking people who are interested in your stuff and getting them to buy that stuff from you so creating visibility is the most important part of any business in my opinion. Now of course you’ve got conversion and then repeat sales but I think that by far and away the absolute best source of traffic for an eCommerce store – still to this day – is Google AdWords and specifically Google merchant centre and the product listings.
Product listing ads cost 40% less than any other type of advertising on Google AdWords search network. And the cool thing is if you use my strategy of matching every one of your 70 items in your store to a long tail keyword and optimising that page for a long tail keyword. For example you have a gift basket that you’re selling that has a smoked salmon in it and the manufacturer might not call it a smoke salmon gift basket but you can call it a smoked salmon gift basket because the gift basket has smoked salmon in it. And no one else is going to have a smoked salmon gift basket.
So when people search “smoked salmon gift basket”, you’re going to show up in those product listings, you’re going to show up in your standard result, you’re going to show up in the AdWords results that run ads there but most importantly in the product listings you can take advantage of these product listings and get clicks for like 3 and 5 cents because no one else has a product that’s relevant to that particular query because no one else is matching their products in these long tail keywords.
James: Nice. Alright Ezra that is awesome. Thank you so much and I’m just thinking about all of those things you’ve said. Anyone who is interested in eCommerce has probably got a few little bits and pieces to go away and play with. I hope we get you back on the show. We’ll be able to answer to questions below this post on SuperFastBusiness.com.
Ezra: Absolutely, post on SuperFast underneath this with any eCommerce questions, I’m happy to answer them, e-mail me. I’m really happy to talk about this stuff so anything that you’d like to know about eCommerce or anything I can help you with please feel free to ask me and have a look out for my course that’s coming out in a month or two here all about this kind of stuff.
James: What’s the course going to be called?
Ezra: It’s going to be called BrownBoxFormula and I’ll post about it on my blog and I’ll probably convince you to post about it on SuperFast underneath this or I’ll post here under this post.
James: Alright, thanks Ezra it’s great to catch up again.
Ezra: Thanks man, I really appreciate it. Talk to you soon.
James: Wasn’t Ezra cool? Alright, now if you like the sound of Ezra and you think you want to find out more about him you should go and check out our other podcast.
Ezra and I do a different podcast called ThinkActGet.com where we talk about mind set and all sorts of other weird stuff including how many vegetarian meals you can cram into one sitting, and why you should never fart at dinner. So there you go. (Both men laughing) We’ll catch up with you soon. See you buddy.
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Feel free to leave your questions and comments below.
Hey Ezra,
Thanks for the great podcast.
What eCommerce platforms are your favourite?
What is your view on Magento?
Thanks,
Ben
Hey Ben!
They all have their ups & downs mate. BigCommerce for ease of use & setup. Magento if you’re looking for an enterprise solution. There are SO many out of the box options these days (magento, volusion, bigcommerce, shopify, xcart, yahoo, zencart, 3dcart, shopsite, etc etc.)
Take your pick. They all work, they all sell products. Some are easier and more intuitive than others – some have wider developer networks and more ongoing updates (yahoo, shopify, BC, magento) but they all have their ups & downs.
If you are just getting started out I’d recommend BC. If you want to fill me in a little bit more about your product line and type / size of business I can give you more specifics.
Hope that helps.
Hi Ezra,
I’ve been doing a small amount of fb ads trying to get likes and engagement and brand recognition (with minimal sales results) but am interested in going after traffic in google. I’m working some organic seo techniques but am interested in paid as well.
You mention the merchant center and product listing ads. Do you have a recommendation on where to start learning those platforms and how I could put something up in a day or two and see results? I’ve never done traditional google ads but have a small amount of knowledge about ads through fb ppc and targeting.
Any thoughts?
Great stuff as usual. Next up I’m listening to the Traffic Jam interview.
Thanks!
Thanks Jeremy!
PPC for eCommerce is a BIG topic. You’re going to have to be willing to invest more than a day or two to start seeing results.
I’d start with http://www.ppchero.com/ as a first resource for getting to know the adwords platform.
James also has a course in fastwebformula.com that covers adwords basics.
Lol nothing comes easy. Thanks Ezra.
Ezra,
Is building a list with an ecommerce business just as critical as with other internet businesses?
Thanks,
Brent
Hey Brent!
Building a list with eComm is not near as critical as it is for an information or serviced based business. For our stores the lists are generally built up of past buyers (with maybe about 20% prospects).
When done right email marketing can account for 15-20% of gross for your store.
Hey thats really interesting to hear.
I’ve been spending 2 years following internet marketers podcast’s where the old saying is “The money is in the list” and other similar things.
So I’ve always wondered what the difference could be between IM and e-commerce/brand building.
Glad to hear these conversations coming up from you and Terry Lin. Both you have been a big help as I’ve recently launched a brand.
I have dropshippers approaching me now so that has been an interesting relationship I am engaged in as well.
Very cool, Jeremy! What kind of products are you manufacturing?
Thanks for checking back.
My fiance and I launched a womens clothing company the first week of February 2013 after almost a year of developement and few months of local SF production. It’s my first business so things are exciting, new, and challenging. We are selling women’s shirts and jackets currently.
I’ve been obsessed with your Buildmyonlinestore interview since it aired and am looking for ways to implement a lot of them. I dl’d the T&C slides you had available a while ago, I have been studying those too. Great stuff.
I included my site link (click my name I think) in case you would like to check out what I’m up to.
Thanks again!
Lot’s of good information here, but where are the links to find manufacturers or suppliers… is there some website?
Maybe I missed it. (-_-)
Jonathan the full transcription of this call is coming. Beyond anything we discuss you will need to do your own legwork.
Ezra mate, what do you think of niche ecommerce sites? You mentioned selling 70 or so products in a market, but what if these 70 products were on different urls? So websites that sell 1 product (or just a few) … this is something I am considering as I have had success in the niche site strategy outside of ecommerce.
Hey John!
That is just a different business model than what most people consider traditional eCommerce. If you look at my company http://www.BoomByCindyJoseph.com – that is more akin to the model you are speaking of. That’s more about building a brand and educating consumers why your specific product is the best fit for their problem.
What we were talking about on the podcast was the more classic eComm model with multiple product categories within a niche. For that model you want at least 70 sku’s .. Otherwise you don’t really have enough of a footprint or “hooks in the sea”.
They are both good models, just different.
Hope that answers your question.
also 70 mini sites within 1 niche is overkill if thats what you are asking. I would recommend the strategy of having 1-3 mother sites (sites with all products and categories within the niche) then having 2-4 niche sites that focus specifically on your top sections.
So 1-3 fire pit sites that have all types of fire pits and then 2-4 sites that carry just one category that performs well
glass fire pits
stone fire pits
outdoor fire pits
etc
Ezra – If 70 products is the minimum, is there a maximum that you recommend? I would think at some point, too many products would not be a good thing. Also, what is the reasoning behind separate sites for your top selling categories?
Hi Ezra and James,
Thanks for sharing. When I think of ecommerce I think of big giants target, walmart, bestbuy. You mentioned that on their store they have a small selection but if you notice on their website they have a larger selection. I am thinking the best way to squeeze into these markets is to go for smaller, less competitive niches, kind of what I do with affiliate marketing. Am I right?
Hi Farhat!
My favorite eCommerce niches are those that are subcategories of larger categories.
Dog Supplies ==> Dog Beds
Costumes ==> Belly Dance Costumes
Skin Care ==> Organic All Natural Skin Care
etc etc
I find that you have to niche down to a certain degree … be careful though because if you go too niche you will not have enough of a market to play with.
Ezra-
Great information in the podcast! Quick question. Another person I’ve read about who has built up quite a lot of niche sites using dropshipping talked about after you identify a niche, having to do the hard work of calling up companies and seeing if they’ll dropship, pricing, stock status, shipping or dropship fees, Returns/damages, Volume discounts, etc. However, one thing he kept harping on was that it was best if you already had a website up to lend credibility so the manufacturer would actually consider working with you.
First, is this true, and if so, isn’t this a bit of a the chicken and the egg problem when you’re first starting out? When you’re first starting your niche site and trying to find dropshippers, how do you prove credibility?
Second (unrelated), do you ever do blind (white label) dropshipping? Do you recommend?
Thanks!
Thanks Steve!
1) You don’t need a website up to lend credibility. You do need a domain name. (“This is joe from MyDomain.com and I am the buyer for my company. We’d love to add your product line to our new store”)
Some dropshippers will give you a hard time about inexperience – if you have no track record in ecommerce etc. – but for the most part in my experience, they just want to sell more product and are willing to give you a go.
You can prove credibility by siting pass successes in other businesses etc. and if you have none then you can let them know how serious this is to you – how much money and time you are investing etc. they just want to know you are not jerking them around and that you are going to take this business seriously and actually retail some products for them.
2) White labeling is a great business model. We do it in one of our businesses – it’s a different model, more capital up front, stocking / warehousing issues / importing packaging etc. but its a good model if you have the capital to support it.
wow! ezra’s like a rocket here…;)
thx!sig
Thanks, Siggi! We had limited time so I had to get it in where I could. Perhaps we’ll do part 2 …
Hi Ezra,
What are your 3 favorite Ecommerce stores that you think are cutting edge and leading the market?
Thanks for the great info
Nathan
Hey Nathan!
There are SO MANY! and it’s vertical specific.
If you wanted to go overall then I think we could pull out these 3
http://www.CrateAndBarrel.com
http://www.BuyCostumes.com
http://www.zappos.com
Hi Ezra – Thanks for this podcast. I’ve listened 3 times so far, but this time I’m taking notes. I’m going to try to implement everything you said about the header and conversions.
I have a quick question. I have a product that is available in 4 different types, and up to 5 different sizes depending on the type, so the number of SKUs is approx 18. Several other products are similar (around 100 SKUs total). I have kept them as separate pages as they all have different prices etc, but is it better to offer them as variants to consolidate on one page? Give me a shout if you want to see.
Cheers
Will
Awesome, Will! Glad you are digging it.
If it’s the same exact product and the only thing that changes are the sizes/colors then I would list them all on one product page just from a usability standpoint.
I’d have to see the site to be sure but that’s most likely my advice.
I love the Ezra and James duo. So dynamic and always bringing great information laced with personality.
One thing I’d like to mention is volume of the product you want to ship too. Moving something huge around, even if it is light weight, incurs extra charge as well with most freight companies.
Any ideas around this?
Thank you An Ly
Thanks An Ly!
What specific product line are you talking about? (What would be huge and light weight? Giant Car Ribbons for one … good market believe it or not ;]
So shipping is just a part of the game. It gets 3 out of 5 on my market criteria checklist – it’s important but it’s not a factor that should decide whether or not you get into a market.
You just have to know that you are going to deal with some hassles ahead of time. I sell furniture of multiple kinds – not light, not easy to ship, but worth the hassle because the market is good.
Shipping big things (heavy or light) is not an obstacle that should stop you from entering a market – you just need VERY clear return / refund polices that are communicated to the customer at every step of the process. You need to make sure you know whether or not the supplier will take them back and if not how the returns are handled. You don’t want to be stuck with 15 kitchen stools or an extra sofa and have nothing to do with them.
Hey Ezra,
Awesome information, I could barely keep up with the nuggets of e-commerce gold you were delivering. A quick question I have is what do you think about limiting yourself to one geographic market? I have been operating a dropship model that has pretty much exclusively sold Australian-based products to Australian customers (95%). This has been a great learning curve but it feels like I’m missing out on 99% of the market globally – but to stock and sell to a global audience might be a tougher gig in terms of convincing US brands to get on board as I’m an Australian company. Love to hear any tips you have on how to overcome this challenge.
Cheers,
Luke
Hey, Luke!
Thanks mate – glad you enjoyed it.
Okay so:
– Yes if the market is going well in Australia and your KW research, etc. points to it being a US viable market as well then you are probably missing out on a ton of sales here in the states.
– I suppose the real question is can you find dropshippers here in the states? The fact that you are an australian company won’t hold you back from selling in the US. Most dropshippers don’t care if you are an international company. If you can buy and sell their products, they are usually game. There are a few hoops to jump through but it’s do-able. If you want to get deeper into it, email me at: Ezra [@] SmartMarketer [dot] com
Thanks and hope that helps.
E
Hi Ezra!
You mention for the fragmented market test to use the top 20 keywords of your market. Do you have any tips on how to determine what those top 20 keywords might be? Thanks so much!
Brent
Hey Brent,
These would be your top volume KW’s. The ones with the most searches. So your home page KW’s and your main section pages.
Hey James,
hope you are doing well
2 questions ,
1) are mini sites still worth the investment to drive traffic
2) I am developing a catalog for my online store, do u feel it is essential to put product prices in the catalog or just use the catalog to drive the people back to the site to check out the offering
Regards
Demo
Hi Demo, I think the best strategy is to build a powerful blog like SuperFastBusiness and I teach it free at http://www.OwnTheRacecourse.com. 2) I need Ezra to chime in with that answer ;)
Hi Demo!
I’ve never run this test on a print catalog (prices vs no prices) but based on the catalogs I receive, you definitely want to list your prices in there. If not listing the prices was good for conversions, we’d be seeing it in the catalogs we receive. Also I think it’s the nice thing to do … another thing is that catalogs produce a lot of phone ordres – 30-50% on average – the whole point is that you are reaching people offline so you want them to be able to see the product (and price) pick up the phone and order. Again I have never run this test so I have no hard data here but my opinion is that listing the prices is going to result in a better customer experience and higher conversions.
Hi guys, love the podcasts, entertaining and informative ! They makes those long qld commutes of mine pass quickly.
A question about geo targteting for either James or Ezra.
I have a boutique baby product website in Australia which really is only useful to Aussies. However half the traffic is coming from USA as we rank equally in .com as we do in .com.au.
I am considering using geo targetting and sending usa traffic to an amazon affiliate store . Is there a right or wrong way to do this, eg if I set it up so the user from US is automatically taken to the amazon store via a wp geo redirection plugin and therefore not able to see aussie side of the website – would it effect seo somehow? Hope this makes sense. Keep up the good work
Chris