The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Jason: there are different kinds of customers they demonstrate very different behavior towards the product owner or maker or business that they’re interacting with. Some are very confrontational and never trusting. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re barely gonna get any respect or trust at all
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[00:01:24] Michael: Do you have old products that have seen better days? Maybe it’s time to breathe new life into them and market them in a new and creative ways. As eCommerce sellers, sometimes we look for green pastures, when in truth our field of favor is tried and true and is waiting for us to replant and regrow for new generation of customers.
[00:01:42] Jason, the topic you’ve obviously been thinking about lately, I like the sneaky gardening metaphor in there. . So tell us more about this topic, .
[00:01:49] Jason: Yeah, this is a fun one. I think all of us as entrepreneurs that have been around for a while, struggle with this question of, do we reinvest and relaunch, re create an existing product, or do we come up with a new one?
[00:02:04] It’s a hard set of questions and I thought it was worthy of a podcast conversation with you. I know you’ll have some great insights into this. It’s one that I struggle with personally. As I was preparing the show notes, I was thinking about one little story I’ll mention. I think it peaks people’s interest maybe to hear it.
[00:02:18] I know, e-commerce operator that was in business for something like almost 30 years, like 28 or 29 years, maybe 30 years, I can’t remember, but a long time. And she was, at the end of her career and ready to. Ready to, try and figure out how to sell her business. And, her business for many years, as I understand it, had been in the kind of 500,000 to $750,000 range of, revenue.
[00:02:42] But, in the pursuit of trying to figure out how to sell the business, she came up with some new angles and ideas and tried to figure out, how to boost revenue and ended up tripling her business to over 2 million a year of income, after, call it 30 years of doing the same old thing.
[00:03:00] And it, it’s an inspirational story to me cuz it just reminds me that, we can really get plateaued in our businesses where we basically get to a level of success. It’s never been easier really to do six or even seven figures of, online revenue. But we can easily get stuck into a business process and a model that requires our time and energy to just maintain.
[00:03:22] That level and that can really serve to distract us from the creative energies to do something new. So we’re stuck in this situation where we’ve got products that are working, but they’re getting a little long on the tooth. And, and we’ve plateaued, potentially revenue. And so the question is, what do you do?
[00:03:40] Go find something new, shiny object, try to come up with a new, product for your customers, or do you, reinvest to recreate, refresh, renew the tried and truth thing that you’ve used in the past. So Michael, I don’t know if this resonates with you, on a personal level or with your mastermind, members there in London that you meet with regularly, but I thought it was, I don’t think it’s just me that sort of has these questions in my mind.
[00:04:06] Hopefully it’s not just me, it’s think we need to unpack it together. Yeah,
[00:04:10] Michael: that’s a good question. What I tend to find, it, one of the questions that would come up is how stable is the sort of success of the product and how you’re defining tried and true. So for somebody who sells on Amazon, there are bigger challenges in terms of keeping revenue is often available, but keeping, profit is hard.
[00:04:26] And I think that the, what can happen with products very quickly in that context is that they will keep selling, but their profit starts to diminish quite rapidly, really. So you maybe got six months till you get competition coming on board if you put something reasonably different out there and then maybe you got 18 months before it really drops off.
[00:04:42] And yeah. So I think, it, it’s an interesting question because it implies, What is a product? And it sounds like an abstract question, how do you find this is a new product versus a new version of an old product? And I think on Amazon, one of the sweetest spots is to find a version of a product that works well and then innovate, but only really tweaking it.
[00:05:00] Version one, version 1.5. Exactly the same ways that you get with software. I’ve, I download my phone. Updates. It’s version 15.1 or whatever. And then you get a more radical update every so often. But it’s really grades and it’s implement, it’s tweaking something that’s proven to work.
[00:05:14] And I think, yeah, that’s a wiser course to start with. As long as, and this is where the new nuance comes in, it’s never straightforward as long as you really haven’t, as long as you’re not deluding yourself. , this is probably the key cuz a lot of the time I. And I suspect this isn’t quite the question you are looking at or your more advanced clients or this lady you mentioned.
[00:05:33] I do see a lot of people that try to do the opposite, which is they’re flogging a dead horse. Really. It’s the market is spoken and it’s not really ever been that great. And the small margin and small differentiation put you had has been eroded by everyone else. You don’t really have a real competitive edge.
[00:05:46] You don’t really have a vision for this product and for this market. And in that case then it can be time to let go. So it’s a nuanced thing, but there you go. It’s, my main thought on it is it’s often not either or, but it’s a tweak
[00:05:57] Jason: in the middle. That’s the hard, that’s the hard, set of questions, isn’t it?
[00:06:00] Are you beating a dead horse? Yeah. Or is this, your iPhone, three and you’re ready for the whole world ready for an iPhone four, yeah. And it’s interesting, isn’t it? Cause you think about Apple for example, and if they would’ve stuck with iPhone three and just tried to keep selling that sucker.
[00:06:16] They would’ve, the world would’ve passed them by. It would’ve been, just a year or two or three, and whoever else would’ve come up with something that really, made it seem obsolete. But they didn’t do that. They reinvested, to your point, incremental improvement and what are they on 14 now, or whatever,
[00:06:32] Michael: yes. Yeah. It is 14. I think the thing is also, I would just say, that’s an excellent example because it’s very famous and because Apple has an incredibly strong brand. Arguably they used to be incredible on product as a big Apple user. I’m using a Mac right now and my phone’s sitting over here as many people have.
[00:06:48] They used to be incredible on product and branding. I think they’re now just good at branding. The product is not as good as it was, but it’s still very differentiated from the PC experience last time I even tried. So if you could get incredible brand loyalty, then. And this is obviously something you mentioned like every five minutes, quite rightly Bababa brand as you say.
[00:07:05] Then if you have got that kind of thing, then I think it’s really worth digging into protecting that product differentiation. If you don’t, then I think it’s good to not delete yourself and then think, is this a vehicle for building that brand? And if it isn’t, maybe you need to just go, meh, it’s a mere product.
[00:07:20] Let’s be honest about that. Yeah. And move on. So I think it, the iPhone three was, obviously, I had an iPhone three. I remember. It was, I think, more visibly based revolutionary iPad. It was revolutionary, and they really had something that people loved and they had a hardcore fan base and then a ever spreading circle of somewhat less engaged, but still engaged. People would pay the price they wanted, and so they had something really worth protecting. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. That’s the thing,
[00:07:44] Jason: Yeah. It leads us to come with a framework or sort of a rationale for this decision making. And I, so I would say there’s probably three or four things that we could put on that list really quickly.
[00:07:53] The first one was, was there consumer sentiment that was really positive originally? Yeah. Did you have a hit? And if it was never a hit, then you’re really in a different set of, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t iterate, it’s a different set of questions. If it was a clear hit and people were like, we love this is great.
[00:08:09] Five star review. I, if on Amazon in particular, you can get a sense for people’s sense of, enthusiasm for the products. And if, if you’ve got something that was a hit of yester year, but grass has grown, under your feet and you’ve allowed for it to be, time to gone by without an update or whatever, then I think that’s a big question.
[00:08:28] The second question I would put on the list Is there signs in the, in a niche or industry that a renewed version would be a winner? And I, what I mean by this is like, is the niche or industry going in a positive, in incremental growth direction or are you trying to innovate, like my fidget spinner number six is not gonna nearly do as well cuz you know, it’s fidgets spinners or, my, I pick a lot of examples lately.
[00:08:55] My, my NFT marketplace isn’t doing well. Because you’re just, you’re not gonna be leaning into an industry that has really positive signals for you in terms of sales velocity and customer demand. So the demand in general that was there previously, there’s a big question, is it still there?
[00:09:12] And their customer’s still waiting for a good product in this space. And I would put a third thing on the list and then love your feedback on these. Maybe you’ve got other ideas, but the third thing on the list would be, Is this something you want to lean into? There are times when we’ve done things that are like one offs, products or projects in the past or whatever, and we’re like, yeah, that was cool, but I realized I didn’t really wanna be in that space, or I didn’t wanna be in that industry or work with those customers, or, like whatever the negative sentiment was that you extracted out of the experience.
[00:09:42] But there are other times we were like, man, this was so good. I don’t know why I haven’t redone this. This was my best thing ever. And I still know customers want it and I still, there’s still a great, opportunity for demand in that space that I could fulfill. And you know that, that’s the third question is your heart into it?
[00:09:58] Or could your heart be into it? And that kind of leads to a whole different line of thinking I think we should talk about, which is, if all the signals are, yes, this’ll work, but your heart’s not in it, I think there’s there’s reasons why that we should unpack. So anyway, what are your thoughts on just a decision making criteria?
[00:10:14] To start the conversation.
[00:10:17] Michael: Yeah, I like this. So did I have customer support? It’s a really important question. As you said, you gotta be honest with yourself about whether you had a hit and actually honest means two things. It doesn’t just mean the disappointing version, which is no, actually we made sales, but I never really cared about it.
[00:10:31] Now, did anyone else versus that lady? You mentioned you had something for 30 years and actually when you bothered to look in her case, maybe she hadn’t looked at any sort of customer evaluations or hadn’t interacted with customer support for a while. And then when you do, you realize actually people really like this.
[00:10:44] So that, that’s really wise and, both sides can, you can dilute yourself on both sides. You can actually underrate what you’ve done. I would say, Yes. The question of whether you want to do it is really important. I know you’re gonna address that in detail next, but I think sometimes if your energy isn’t there for it, you’re not gonna have the heart for the fight.
[00:10:59] Cause you know, as Mike Tyson said, everyone’s getting a good plan until they get hit. If you go out there with a refreshed product and you put a load of money into it and effort and time, first of all, it may not work, which is really disappointing, and you’ve gotta be able to push through that. And then the second thing is, if you raise your head above a parapet, the competition starts noticing and starts to respond, and then you’re in a fight.
[00:11:17] Which brings me to the other little thought that the market conditions you’ve mentioned, that is the growth, is the demand. So that’s on the consuming side, demand side. I think you’ve also gotta look particularly somewhere like Amazon, but just generally in e-commerce at how, how much hyper trophy, how much incredible ridiculous growth there has been in competition.
[00:11:34] In some markets, sometimes you’re in a market where you had a good product, but then the competition got to that level or beyond. And if you wanted to innovate to beat the market, it would be almost like starting from scratch. And then that’s. Higher barrier to, to cross, isn’t it? And then you’d have to have really strong consumer love for your brand and stuff.
[00:11:51] Jason: I think, yeah, I think that’s a huge consideration is what is the state of competition. Yeah. And how do you honestly compete? In, and maybe the answer is, man, I, if I had the following three things, I could really compete well, but I just don’t have those, to be honest. It’s a, you don’t wanna be on a fool’s errand, waste time and energy and effort and money to do something that’s not realistic.
[00:12:13] So that is a huge criteria of, consideration is, am I the person who can take this from version, my version one to version two in a winning with a winning offer, or have other competitors gone to their version 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10? Yeah. And really, I’m not in a position now, I’ll just make one nuance, comment there though.
[00:12:36] If you’re a marketplace seller, one of the baked in advantages, and this is true I guess in Google, I as well just for search engine results, is that the internet rewards winners with, long tail, I guess you could call it traffic and institutional approval. And that’s really interesting to think about, if you’ve got, for example, I’ll just give one example.
[00:12:59] It’s on Amazon. That’s probably not what most people consider an Amazon e-commerce use case. But, I I have a book that, has think 250 reviews on it, and it was published in 2013. So I’m coming up on the 10 year anniversary. You don’t get 250 reviews on a book, and it’s, they’re, really highly rated.
[00:13:17] You don’t get that number of reviews unless you’ve had quite a number of, sales. It’s not easy to get that many reviews, that book’s just still sitting there. . And so I’m thinking to myself, should I invest the time and energy and effort into doing a 10 year anniversary refresh cover refreshed, audible edition, Kindle edition, and rewrite the content for, a decade later?
[00:13:40] Because if I do that, all those 250 reviews are still there, and that’s really an interesting, I guess what you could say, marketplace authority position that old products end up with. And it’s true on Google too. There’s some horrible, ugly old websites that were just started in 1994 and they got the key phrases and sorted it out, right?
[00:14:02] And there they still are sitting there, number one search engine result on Google. And so that kind of institutional blessing, I guess you could. From the internet is something to consider as you ponder these things, and that’s not to say that you’ll win against a competition, but it is an unfair advantage a lot of times for the older, successful
[00:14:22] Michael: products.
[00:14:24] I think you make an extremely important point, which is, it a lot of the time in the most primitive play that say an aggregator would be looking at a business, okay, what are they buying? They’re buying cash. But it’s gotta be defensible. How is it defensible? In a lot of cases, frankly, the brand’s not on that great.
[00:14:38] It’s getting more difficult, but it’s changed now, but until early 2022. But the reason it had any sensibility was exactly that thing. You basically had ranking and reviews on Amazon, which is to put it in its most primitive. The same thing applies within the Google Universe, but that’s a bit more sophisticated and yes, to that point. If you have a product that works and you can do version eight, but you don’t really call it version eight on Amazon, you simply update the specs and specifications and the pictures and every, the details and the packaging, but you just keep it the same listing. You would create so many reviews that it’s hard to compete with.
[00:15:10] And if you keep that ranking, then yes, that’s how you really get the long term play out of eight quotes product. And I think there’s a great mis misunderstanding amongst people you sell on Amazon, that you create the product and then that’s it, you’re done. Or you just create a product, you let it go through a life cycle and then you give up on it if you innovate, Regularly, you put a new version out once every six months, maybe if you’re ordering for China where every two orders really constantly tweaking in response to customer demand, then you can actually then get the life of a product for a very long time to your iPhone point.
[00:15:39] My my friend Jason Franza, has got a weightlifting belt of all things, but he had a PhD physiotherapist involved, in creating it. And so they’ve differentiated their obsessive CrossFitters. And so they keep innovating to get ahead of the competition. So the competition copies their version one, but they’re on version four.
[00:15:56] Yeah. But they’re doing exactly the same thing you’re doing. They’re keeping such as life,
[00:15:59] Jason: right? Such as the way of the competitive field of marketing. Yeah,
[00:16:04] Michael: I think just one tiny point on that, which I see a lot, so I’m bringing it up because I hear it a lot as well in the language and the mentality of sync of sells is, we used to do X on this product last year, or R version one.
[00:16:15] And I think that’s terribly dangerous to get self-referential because your customers are already, your shoppers that may become, your customers don’t look that way. They don’t care about what happened last week, nevermind two years ago. They don’t know the history of your product. What they know is what’s available now and how your product now stacks up once the other products now.
[00:16:32] . And I think it’s really incredibly important to take a very fresh, rather brutal look at the market as a whole from the consumer’s point of view. So it’s an empathy exercise in a sense, not in a touchy-feely way, but what does it look like from the user’s perspective? From the shopper’s perspective.
[00:16:45] It’s a simple thing, but people fall into it.
[00:16:48] Jason: Yeah. Anyway. This is interesting. So the, the questions that, follow on. If the answer is yes, I should pursue this, yes, this is a, a good line of, effort and work to relaunch the product. There’s still the inner game, the mental game that you’ve got to work through.
[00:17:03] And I think that’s a real part of the decision making criteria is are you. Able to get yourself psyched up for the battle, as you mentioned earlier, can you get there mentally, emotionally? And I think there are reasons why we don’t get there mentally, emotionally, when we probably should.
[00:17:19] As solo entrepreneurs or kitchen table entrepreneurs, we’re in a different situation. And I’ll just compare and contrast this for a moment. Let’s say you’re in a 10 million or a, 30 million, a hundred million dollar, business, and you are the product manager and, you’ve got a director or VP above you and they.
[00:17:36] Hey, you’re responsible for this product. The first thing they would ask you to do is create a product roadmap and to say, what’s your iteration plan for customer happiness and for evolution of the product. And as kitchen table entrepreneurs, no one requires us to do that work. We only do that work if we get ourselves psyched.
[00:17:55] But if you were, a rank and file, middle manager, somebody would say, the big meeting with the big bosses is, on the 20th of January, this is where we’re gonna show our next big, product improvement milestones. And, and you that’s your job.
[00:18:07] and you realize that’s your job. So you spend time and energy and it’s not so much an emotional decision, it’s just the accountability and you know that’s why you were hired. All of those things are true. As kitchen table entrepreneur, you hired yourself to be the product manager for a set of products.
[00:18:21] And, your supervisory self should, sufficiently motivate your manager self. And the reason that gets weird is because of our psychology and we encounter boredom with the product itself, with the photography associated with the copywriting work, associated with the marketing efforts associated with social media.
[00:18:42] Efforts associated with the, the product and that boredom can lead us to, of course what happens is shiny object syndrome. We’re like, yes this works, but sure would be great if we started making, electric vehicles, wouldn’t it? Like some random thing we currently sell garden snips, but electric vehicle sounds really awesome.
[00:19:03] Michael: That’s almost the exact conversation I like, it’s very funny that you should say that cuz it’s almost the exact conversation. I don’t want to reference him in a way that he’ll understand it cuz he does listen to show. But he came to me with, I do always do an interview, which is what fascinating to understand the, should I let this person into the Mastermind?
[00:19:18] Cause I’m quite protective also. What do they have to offer? Wouldn’t otherwise get noticed and would be missed. And he would say, yeah, we’ve been in this field for four generations, I think we need to do something else. And, then of course under Covid, tripled revenue or something. So it turns out there is life in the odd dog yet.
[00:19:33] So to your point, and like a bit like that lady who’d had the business for 30 years, yes, it’s, it’s very tempting to think the solution is out there and it can be. But if you’ve got existing revenue and people are buying stuff for a reason, you’ve got especially very established brand, which is the hardest thing to do.
[00:19:49] And the hardest thing, your best way of competing on Amazon anyway, with the Me Too have products. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think here’s what I would say about the whole trying to manage yourself. It’s incredibly hard to manage yourself. It’s easy to manage other people to be managed. I would just say that’s a good reason to have.
[00:20:06] To employ somebody, even if they’re not amazing, as early as you can afford to do some product development work. And then you got somebody, I dunno how to put this without saying really negative, like a bad manager, but I’ll just be honest. So to shout and so to shout to you that sounds like not the most functional relationship, but like in real life and work, there is a certain expectation that if you go beyond a certain level, acceptable professional behavior, people will actually just shout at you or fire you. And if you really go above and beyond, there might, if you’re in Britain, there might grunt in America there. Awesome, amazing dude.
[00:20:33] But whatever level of praise or punishment you get, they’re highly motivating human behaviors. To try and do that to yourself is a bit like literally trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps to use that phrase, I think it’s really hard. I would just suggest that you literally hire somebody to manage products for you, and then they turn out to be mediocre.
[00:20:51] You really pushing hard now to make that person work. You are so invested now. Maybe you find ’em and do it yourself. Guess what? Now you’re invested because you’ve been trying to get somebody else to do something. So there’s, it’s weird, it’s a human dynamic and I think that we should just use it rather than try and become a magically self disciplined person, so it’s really hard to do.
[00:21:10] Jason: Yeah, I I think you’re totally right. Completely agree. I think there’s only one category in the kind of mindset, component of this that really is a reason to probably say no. This. The direction I want to go in. And that’s, if you in the past experiences marketing the product or, serving the customers, you come to the realization that although the product might be workable, may might be, revenue producing even, profitable.
[00:21:35] You don’t like the niche itself or the customer base. And we all have this. We all have people that we click with and people we don’t click with. We all have, communities that we resonate with and are not comfortable around, and communities, we just doesn’t feel like we’re working with the right people.
[00:21:53] We’re in the right part of the, world, socially. And I think if you encounter that type of mental hesitation, I know I can get the product revamped and relaunched and all that, but I’m just not up for the mental and emotional anguish of having to. In essence, serve that customer base.
[00:22:12] If that’s the reason why, you’re not interested in revamping and relaunching, then I would say that’s certainly a reason to do something different. And here’s what I would suggest you do. I would sell that product, I would get out of that business and I would move on to something where you could say, you know what, that was great.
[00:22:30] I had a great time. I learned a ton. And now Johnny is, successfully serving those customers, or Becky or whoever, you sell it to a different company or sell it off as a standalone thing. If it’s a core part of your business, then you know you got a problem and maybe you do hire somebody to your point, and you just have a, a team that manages the customer engagement and all that.
[00:22:51] But, if you’re a one man show or one woman show and you’re thinking to yourself, I just don’t want the drama, then, I think that’s real. And you do wanna think through that because what I’ve learned over the years, Of doing consulting and working with people in different niches and industries is, there are different kinds of customers that are very, they demonstrate very different behavior towards the product owner or maker or business that they’re interacting with.
[00:23:19] Some are very confrontational and never trusting. It’s it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re barely gonna get any respect or trust at all others. It’s just it’s a cult. And people love, adore, admire, and just appreciate and thank you. And it’s this like, all like fun and, and many things are in the middle somewhere, where it’s customers are okay as long as you don’t do anything too stupid.
[00:23:40] But if you do, you’re gonna hear back and and that’s typical. But that’s an important consideration, is this whole sentiment of the emotional element of working with the customers,
[00:23:48] Wrapup: Should I stay or should I go to quote the Clash? That’s what we’ve been talking about today on the eCommerce leader. Should you be reviving your old eCommerce products or just leaving them fallow, or even selling them off, or selling off a part of the business? in Critical question and one that’s often neglected because we’re chasing the shiny objects out there and neglect the existing things we have.
[00:24:10] Some of which may actually have huge potential if we put that work in. So the questions really we covered today, mostly Jason’s list here, should you reinvest in the product? Did it have customer support? Is it an niche you actually want to serve? Really important. And are there market conditions that suggest it would work again if it refreshed, in other words, Have you got demand for this kind of category of product?
[00:24:33] Keyword based demand or demographic based demand? Basically keyword based if you are trying to get traffic through SEO on Amazon or Google, for example. And the other thing, of course, have you got manageable competition? Has it become really ridiculous since you last really launched a product in this area?
[00:24:49] Important questions. And then of course, you’ve got to deal with your own psychology. Are you bored with your own successful product? Are you chasing shiny objects when actually you are neglecting what’s working for you? Have you got a desire for new ventures, shiny object stuff? And are you, again, not really interested in supporting your customer?
[00:25:07] Again, it comes down to do you care about this market, so hopefully some really important preliminary questions to answer the questions, should you actually innovate or not? If you think you do have a product that needs innovation, guess what? In our next episode, we are going to address how to do that.
[00:25:23] We’ve got multiple ways, I think about 12 ways to do that and lots of little NES as well on top. So do listen out for that. It’s a perennial problem for the e-commerce operators I work with. So go and look at your product catalog as my challenge to you. And see if you actually have got something in there that could with some work, really bring in a new stream of revenue and profits and be part of a growing successful business.
[00:25:48] Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Spotify, apple, and everywhere else near you, and we hope you will be the better eCommerce leader for listening to today’s podcast. Thanks for listen.
[00:26:00] TEL Outro: That was the E-Commerce Leader podcast with Michael Viy in London, England, and Jason Miles in Seattle, Washington. If you liked this content, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on your podcast app for free resources, including PDFs and videos on topics like traffic products and sales channels. Just go to www dot the e-commerce leader.com.
[00:26:25] No hyphens, just as it sounded. Thanks so much for listening.