The E-commerce Leader

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[00:00:00] JM: if you’ve got the ability, for example, to profitably, uh, use Facebook advertising and, and Google advertising, you’re gonna have a huge, just, just massive orders of magnitude powerful, uh, you know, advantage over your competitor.
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[00:01:47] JM: anyway, okay, let’s keep moving.
[00:01:48] Cuz I think that one’s pretty self-evident, but
[00:01:50] MV: it is really. Yeah. Um, so number six. Uh, this one’s interesting, a second order process. Yes. Tell me about that. What is that
[00:01:57] JM: he who has a second order, process wins? So, um, Amazon pioneered, I think pretty much they pioneered most things. They pioneered subscribe and save.
[00:02:07] And that idea of, uh, a recurring subscription to any product. Now the, um, process is made simple and straightforward, and Shopify, you sell that way. But, um, the, the real question of it is, is do you have a system by which it makes sense for the customer to buy the same thing a second time, third time, fourth time?
[00:02:27] And this gets to the core attribute of your product. So sometimes a product like a mattress, Uh, you know, you, they might, might spend money on a mattress every, I don’t know, five, 10 years, whatever it is. I don’t even know. But, um, you know, a toothbrush, same thing. How often do you buy a toothbrush? I don’t know.
[00:02:47] Maybe every year. Six months. I don’t, three months. I don’t know. But toothpaste you’re buying all the time, right? And so it kind of gets to the nature of your business, but the idea you want to think through is, how do I get this set up so that it’s an easy, natural, and helpful way, you know, process for the customer to buy this a second time.
[00:03:07] The next time they need it. And, um, Amazon does that for you in a way, and on Shopify you can do it as well. But I think it’s a really powerful, important thing to ask. And it’s not a, it’s not second items or, uh, additional products. We’ll talk about that in a moment. This is the buying the exact same thing over, um, and, you know, all things being equal.
[00:03:29] Uh, you want to have products that a customer uses every day and needs to buy frequently. And, you know, well, the velocity of reordering is, uh, is a key attribute of the quality of the product in terms of business, you know,
[00:03:44] MV: financial. And it’s very interesting that you say this because sometimes we talk about the same product and there’s nothing more generic than a, a, a man’s razor or something.
[00:03:52] So lemme just get my camera back and I’ll talk about it again. There’s nothing more generic than a, a man’s raised. And they’ve been around for very many years, and yet of course, the Dollar Shave Club and other people like them have taken the simple, um, product. They’ve built a business that’s more robust because the business model’s all about subscription revenue, which is more reliable.
[00:04:12] Mm-hmm. You can pass on savings, uh, to your customers. You can have more predictability and therefore you can order in bulk and then you can get, you know, wins and supply chain. So there’s a lot of things that go into that. So I think it’s worth diving deeply into it. If you are Amazon focused, you have a less control over that.
[00:04:29] But I think, um, If you can take the exact same product and create a subscription business out of it, then things like the Dollar Shave Club and other things like that would imply that that in itself can be a win. So
[00:04:38] JM: worth deep dive. Yeah, totally agree. Yep. Yep.
[00:04:41] MV: Cool. Okay, so you mentioned that this wasn’t about selling a different product, so what was the next one then?
[00:04:46] Just presumably more of different products than this? Yeah,
[00:04:49] JM: so that’s number seven, right? So he who has better upsells and cross sells wins, and so yeah, if you have a competitor selling the exact same thing as you, Ideally you’ll have a more complete provider strategy where they might have one item that you, you know, are selling, but you’ll have the four or five or six things that the customer also.
[00:05:10] Would want. And those 4, 5, 6 things, uh, you know, are built into the process in one of many different ways. You can do this on Amazon just by being a bundler, you know, have a bundled product where you sell the, the same exact item that your competitor has. But if you stick in three or four things that you know the customer’s gonna want with it, and you sell it all for $69 or whatever, then really you have a completely different product because you’ve commingled it with the other things that make it.
[00:05:39] In totality, unique so that, you know, that’s one way, uh, to, you know, offer different items. But you know, obviously in a Shopify site, you can build it in so that you have literally like a one click up sell, uh, where you, you know, are offering the customer something unique or different that would also make logical sense for them.
[00:06:00] And sometimes it’s, those are obvious things like with the razors and the blades. The toothpaste and the, and the toothbrush. Sometimes it’s not nearly as obvious. And you have to be creative, figure out, okay, what is this customer coming to me for and what will they also believe that I could sell them efficiently or, you know, and you have to test your way into it, but that’s fine.
[00:06:20] Um, figure out how to test your way into it and then you’ll be way stronger for that work because against your competitor. Because ultimately what you want to do is come up with a suite of products. Where you’ve got some entry level products and you’ve got some higher end, more expensive products, so that in totality you’ve got a blend of, um, a margin against each one of the products and, uh, streams of revenue inside the business from different, uh, you know, SKUs and you build a much stronger business, uh, because you’ve put it together in such a way that you’ve got, you know, these other alternate products coming in and all, um, complimenting each other.
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[00:07:02] MV: a couple of thoughts for the Amazon sellers out there cuz it’s, it’s hard to cross song Amazon. Yeah. Um, one as you say, apart from bundling your own products, you can have variations on your own listing. And the same, first I was talking about earlier, has got in one of his brands, um, very cheap almost.
[00:07:16] Lost leader variations. And when people click on the listings, cuz they sell a lot, so they tend to rank in the search results, you can then upsell, upsell, upsell to, you know, a multi packs of those. And that works very, very well because that’s sort of within Amazon’s terms of service and it’s within the structures that are already made.
[00:07:31] Mm-hmm. Harder things to do but worth doing. You can actually appetize in your own listings on Amazon. And I think. That’s really worthwhile if you have quite a big catalog, uh, that have complimentary products. And if you’re wise, then you have a big catalog of complimentary products cuz they work with each other.
[00:07:46] And you can also, of course, advertise on competitor products to listings, to, to try and minimize this sort of leakage if you like. Uh, the other thing you need to be doing is to try and do the things that a Shopify store owner a. Or direct to consumer store and it wouldn’t actually want to do, which is build email lists and you can build lists off Amazon on your own blog, for example, and then sell stuff on on Amazon.
[00:08:07] But you have the ability to, in more limited degree, but you can still send emails that follow up and say, Hey, you bought some toothpaste, Jason, I wonder if you’d like to buy a toothbrush and that sort of thing. And it does work. It’s not as effective as the one pick up sell that you can get. Mm-hmm. In the Shopify.
[00:08:22] Cart, which is another sort of thing that pushes us towards direct to consumer in the medium term, but you can find ways around it. Okay. So next one then. Number eight, loyalty programs.
[00:08:35] JM: Yeah. Uh, he, who has, yeah, he who has a better loyalty program and the ability to stay sticky, uh, wins. So, you know, if you’ve got the opportunity to.
[00:08:47] Stay in relationship with the customer because they signed up for your loyalty program or your, uh, service guarantee or warranty. You know, if you sell something on Amazon and you have in the packaging, Hey, uh, we guarantee this product for 10 years, just sign up for our, uh, you know, warranty process here.
[00:09:03] Is that against terms of service? I don’t think so. Do you want to guarantee the product for 10 years? I don’t know, but would it [00:09:10] be worth doing it to get that person’s email address? Probably. So, you know, you, you wanna figure out how to stay connected, um, is the idea, and do it not in violations of Amazon’s terms of service, but yeah, uh, you get the idea.
[00:09:25] If you can have a loyalty program where people get 5% off or 10% off, um, you know, you’re, you’re really smart to do it. Yes. So
[00:09:35] MV: do you, I guess you guys do quite a bit of stuff with loyalty programs and, and, um mm-hmm. Pixie fair. Right. Tell me a bit about what you do there. I know you’re pretty busy with that.
[00:09:44] JM: Yeah. There’s a lot of loyalty strategies that are really, really cool to nerd out over when you’re, you know, like Shopify sellers when they get together, can just brainstorm this to death. Uh, there’s a, a few levels that are obvious just having a built-in loyalty program in your site through a tool like we, like s Loyalty is the app.
[00:10:02] Simple and straightforward. You have an imputed discount basically, that you’re giving back to customers as the rate of redemption is. There’s math involved in the backend, so it’s not uncommon for the loyalty program to spit out rewards points or you know, redemption points that are something like a imputed 15% discount or 10% in that range, maybe 20%.
[00:10:27] That’s just straightforward. And, but that triggers the customer creating an account, which is a healthy, good step, uh, and, you know, being opted into your marketing and all of that. Um, and it also allows you to do creative, uh, campaigning to them later because you can always. Throw in a new thing on your rewards and loyalty system.
[00:10:47] Like, so for example, you could say, Hey, flash loyalty, rewards, redemption item. You know, for the next three days we’re gonna give you a, uh, free shipping international for just 10,000 loyalty points, if that’s a, you know, whatever that means to your customers. Um, and you can do that kind of stuff. It’s just like a novel campaign.
[00:11:08] Um, the other thing I wanna mention is you can also actually. Completely and totally copy the, um, you know, the, the price club, uh, and, and uh, Costco, Sam’s Club model of membership. So you literally make people, make them or invite them to pay you cash upfront for the right to shop with a discount in the future.
[00:11:35] And we have clients that have, we’ve set those systems up for people and it, it’s like Costco. You can’t shop there unless you have a membership. But if you have a membership, you know you’re gonna scream and deal on, you know, great products and a big quantity count, you know, 50 gallon tub of mayonnaise or whatever you wanna buy.
[00:11:54] And, um, you can set those up on Shopify and that kind of paid, you know, pay to play loyalty system or reward system. It’s really powerful because you get the cash from the membership upfront. And I believe that, I remember hearing Costco’s business, literally the profit is the membership monies that are paid to them, not the profit on the cost of goods.
[00:12:18] Um, and so you can do all that in, in Shopify. Um, but you want to think that through, you know, how, how do you create a really powerful loyalty program that is a win-win, you know, for both, you know, you and the customer.
[00:12:31] MV: And Amazon, of course, is not slow on, on following all these models. I mean, I think that one of the profit centers of Amazon is the prime membership thing.
[00:12:38] I, I pretty much the law that every American household has to have a prime membership. It’s not quite, but the, the, the, the penetration of the market is incredibly high. It’s crazy. So that produces a lot of money for them. And, and once you’ve got the penetration and you offering Amazon Prime video, which I offer and, and prime music, which I use sometimes, Then you’re locked into an ecosystem and they have put the price up quite substantially recently.
[00:13:01] It’s, uh, still feels like a win. Um, so on Amazon versions are now talking about third party celebrations. Again, it strikes me that an awful lot of the things you’re offering. Via Shopify. You can’t create a Costco like membership. That’s too cool that you haven’t got the control there. But you can, um, create a list and offer them similar deals, um, and discounts because you can definitely do that quite straightforward through the Amazon system.
[00:13:22] You just need an email list, really. And so again, it, it shows the power of having off Amazon. Marketing strategies to sell on Amazon. You can have some of the best of both wells. You don’t have the control and systemization that you would have in Shopify, but you can take quite a lot of that on board and, and use it.
[00:13:38] I think if you’re building an email list and for sure you can use, um, warranties and guarantees and you can offer, you know, discounts that’s not technically in terms of service. A lot of people do it via a QR code and see to get away with it sometimes. Inserts, you can certainly drive people to sign up for email list that way.
[00:13:55] So I’ve, I’ve done the guarantee and the warranty thing. I think that’s reasonably safe as well. Mm-hmm. So definitely worth doing. Good. Okay. Uh, last, last few hits. Number nine. Yeah, let’s push number nine
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[00:14:52] JM: is he who has better technical marketing skills wins. And by that I mean if you know how to run, uh, the advertising platform on Amazon or the advertising platform on Facebook or Google AdWords.
[00:15:06] And your competitors are not as good as those things as you are, you will win. Uh, the reality of it is, you know, a m s, they used to call it advertising, uh, Amazon Marketing Services, or I guess it’s just called advertising.amazon.com now, but who, who, he, who knows how to run that system profitably and get to the point of a positive return on ad spend is gonna win over somebody who doesn’t understand it.
[00:15:33] Um, just, just straight Amazon selling. But beyond that, of course, if you’ve got the ability, for example, to profitably, uh, use Facebook advertising and, and Google advertising, you’re gonna have a huge, just, just massive orders of magnitude powerful, uh, you know, advantage over your competitor. Uh, this one can’t be understated and a lot of people aren’t technical marketers and know that they’re not.
[00:16:01] And they spend a ton of money trying to, you know, hire agencies and get people to do this work, and rightly so. And sometimes they fail and they ba find bad agencies. But the pursuit of that to find somebody who can do this work, if you can’t, uh, is something to really obsess over. And you know, that’s why you wanna be in a mastermind or have a good coach or mentor who can point you in the right direction to high quality operators who can help you get technical marketing sorted.
[00:16:30] MV: I’d agree with that. A couple of, uh, thoughts on that. First of all, you’re right. Funding a good our agency is hard because I had to add so much value to cover the cost of their own service that it’s hard to do even if they’re moderately good. Um, and. A really dedicated VA who’s been trained in this can be a good mid, mid-level thing if they have the right kind of mentality, if they’re good at analytical thinking, and you don’t happen to be that person.
[00:16:53] Um, the other thing, uh, talking about the cost structure is if you have a cost structure such that you. Have a generous ability to advertise a lot, then that is a different business to when you’ve got super thin margins. Like one of our clients who’s done, you know, doing very well, got a profitable big business, very established, but doesn’t have enough margin to advertise, in which case that’s fine, but do, do not try and combine a thin margin product with an advertising strategy cuz you will lose all the money to the ad platform.
[00:17:19] And I’ve seen that. So that’s just, you’ve just gotta match those two things up. The cost of good sold structure. And the use of ads. Um, one thing that’s getting very popular now is TikTok for Amazon ads, Amazon sellers, cuz the cost of clicks are so low. Mm-hmm. Uh, relative to Facebook and Google. Um, that’s gonna depend on your demographic, but even then you’ve gotta reign it in.
[00:17:38] And the same things I’ve just said applied there as well. Yeah. Yeah. So don’t spend all your money on ads otherwise, you know you’re making somebody rich, but it’s not you.
[00:17:45] JM: And that leads to 10th idea. Yeah. That leads to the 10th idea. Exactly. Right. So which is he who has better traffic strategies? Wins.
[00:17:54] And that means you’re thinking how to acquire customers, not just sell the product. It means how you’re, uh, acquiring customers in mass inside a business that you ultimately wanna sell. Um, and you know, you, you want to think through how do you get, uh, customers and leads and prospects at scale. I mean, just, just the idea, for example, of being an Amazon seller.
[00:18:15] And if your competitor doesn’t have a list of 10,000 names on an email [00:18:20] list and you do, you win. You know, I mean, so getting, getting good at traffic is the obvious X factor in head-to-head competition. Um, and so, you know, that, that, that is so obvious that I think most, most Amazon sellers who have good margin are just focused on keeping the, feeding the beast and keeping it at all running.
[00:18:41] Don’t spend a lot of time on thinking about traffic, but then when they hit the skids, And they final fall into crisis or have a competitor that they can’t figure out how to beat, um, or they want to, you know, morph into a full e-commerce stack on Shopify and other platforms, their minds immediately go to traffic.
[00:19:01] And so I think this is a, a vital one.
[00:19:04] MV: Yeah, I agree with that. Just wanna say also the ability to use an email list. I know a few big Amazon seller built up lists of several tens of thousands of people, but I dunno what to do with them and that’s, yeah. That could be a good use of an agency. And I’ll tell you why.
[00:19:17] Because the return on, uh, investment for an email, if you get some good emails written that makes sense for your brand is very, very high. And it’s kind of a one-off cost. I mean, depending on how often you wanna redo the emails and update it, but the basic structure is one-off as opposed with ads where you’re paying for it every single time.
[00:19:32] So I would say if you do have a list of 10,000 names and you dunno what to do with it, go hire an email writing agency or, or some individual copywriter because. There’s gonna be money on down there hills and you’ve better go, yeah, use that. Okay, good.
[00:19:47] JM: Next one. Yeah. So the next one is he who has a better coach or mentor wins.
[00:19:52] And this is self-serving of course, cuz we do e-commerce consulting and coaching. Uh, but the, the mastermind group that you’re a part of or the coach that you have is incredibly important for your success. You want to find somebody who’s a veteran operator that has a higher level. Sophistication in terms of their skillsets and understanding and can coach you up and teach you and train you and hold you accountable to work that’s a little outside your comfort zone that you can stretch to and get better at.
[00:20:22] You know, uh, if you have a coach that’s not challenging you to do something that you don’t know how to do, if they’re just sort of pacifying you and encouraging you with, like hanging their stuff, uh, it’s not good enough. You need to find somebody who can really challenge you. Um, and sometimes that’s painful.
[00:20:38] Um, you know, I’ve had coaching relationships go bad because I was challenging somebody to do something that they didn’t want to do. And I told them, if, you know, this is like, this is like, this is like vital to do, or, or I’m not sure why I’m your coach. You know. So sometimes I say stuff like that, I’m like, uhoh, I’m in big trouble.
[00:20:58] But, uh, you know, you have to have somebody who’s willing to put it all in the line with you and say, look, you’ve gotta get to a level that’s. Professional and uh, we wanna help you get there, but we’re not, you know, we’re not messing around. Neither should you. So anyway, so coach your mentor, um, yeah. And then lemme just touch up winning couple.
[00:21:13] Yeah, I was just gonna say, lemme just touch on the last couple real quick and then we pop up. Uh, we’ve got a hard stop here, but, um, the, the 12th one is he who takes better calculated risks, wins. Um, and uh, I think that one is, Self-evident in a way. If you take a 30,000 foot view of your e-commerce operation, um, this is a risk, reward, repeat, uh, format or framework we’re operating in.
[00:21:39] And it is a lot of risks over time that ideally won’t, none of ’em will kill you. None of ’em are huge. But you have to learn to take risks and find optimal rewards, and you learn to do that better than your competition. Um, in one of little, you know, one of many ways, one step at a time and you’ll win. Um, and then the 13th one, as we already talked about, was, uh, pricing management, which we’ve kind of already covered.
[00:22:02] So what are your thoughts in the last couple.
[00:22:05] MV: Yeah, I was just gonna say with the, the coach, I think you have to find somebody who’s willing to get themselves fired for being unpopular. And, uh, I’m definitely one of those people, and I guess I could be a bit too blunt sometimes. Um, but I think it’s important to have somebody who’s willing to, to, to risk the relationship for the sake of your business, not for their own ego.
[00:22:24] But because they think, they think they’re right. They may be wrong, of course, but at least they’re trying to help you. And so I think that’s really important. And I think also calculated risk. I really like that a lot because the mentality, I think is right. It it, the mentality matches with the reality you’re in.
[00:22:38] If you are very risk averse, then you shouldn’t probably be an be an entrepreneur. But certainly some people are very, um, blind to risk, at least the first time out they do something. Mm-hmm. And I think some of the, the coaching and teaching out there, Assumes zero risk or very low risk. And I think that’s just very un business-like thinking.
[00:22:56] And I just think you need to be able to weigh up risk reward. That’s like the master skill actually. I, so I’m completely with you on that.
[00:23:03] JM: Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I love this exercise, man. This is a fun list. I know that the listeners could probably brainstorm another five or 10 or 20 on their own if they just sat down and thought it through.
[00:23:11] So I hope this is helpful to your, uh, mastermind member who is in think so, a group. To listen to the fun, fun times, man. Fun.
[00:23:19] MV: Yeah, fun stuff. Good stuff. Great. Good, good. We got, so we’ve got the brains trust going there. Nameless person whose name I know. Well this is your list. Go do Likewise. Um, Jason, it’s been fun.
[00:23:30] I know you’ve gotta help off, so thank you so much for your time. It’s been there. A another fun one. Thanks man.
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