November 27, 2024 • 33 mins
18 years of eCommerce Knowledge in just 33 minutes and 24 seconds. This episode aims to help anyone new to eCommerce or who has been in the game for a while and is looking for ways to improve. I covered 15 lessons that I had to learn the hard way. I hope this episode can save you money by learning from my mistakes and make your business (and life) easier.
Prefer to read? Here is the blog post version of this episode: https://www.dropshiplifestyle.com/ecommerce-tips/
Free Training Webinar + Our List of 500 Product Ideas: https://www.dropshipwebinar.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So today I'm going to do something a bit different than
what you usually see on this channel, and that is to share 18
years worth of ecommerce knowledge with you and try to do
that in as quick and as concise as possible.
Now what I did was make a bunch of notes actually last night as
I was thinking about what I wanted to share.
And what I have here are 15 highlevel points that I'll be
(00:21):
sharing with you that honestly Ihad to learn the hard way.
And the goal with this episode is to help anybody else out
there that is either new to e-commerce or has been in the
business for a while and is looking for ways to get better.
All of these 15 points that I wrote down, honestly, I had to
learn the hard way and a lot of them cost me a lot of money.
And the goal is to eliminate that risk from you and make it
(00:44):
so your life can be easier. So just so you know, this isn't
going to be some overproduced video.
There's going to be no visuals popping up on the screen.
So feel free to play this in thebackground and take away
whatever you can from it to hopefully better your e-commerce
business and make it even more profitable as we move into the
new year and beyond. So for those of you that don't
know, my name is Anton Craley. If you do know me, it's probably
(01:07):
from my company Drop Ship Lifestyle.
I've been building e-commerce stores myself since 2007 and
Drop Ship Lifestyle was formed in 2012 and since then I've
helped over 15,000 people from all around the world to build
their own e-commerce stores as well.
Like I said a couple minutes ago, I definitely learned a lot
of things the hard way and I'm still learning new things every
(01:27):
day. So don't look at me as some guru
that knows every little detail about e-commerce.
But with 10s of millions of dollars of products sold and
literally my eyes on analytics and Shopify day in and day out
again, I've definitely picked upsome things along the way.
Some of the things I'm going to share with you, you may have
heard from me before, some of them may be brand new to you.
(01:47):
But again, even if you can pull 1 little thing out of this
episode, I promise you it'll help you and cut down your costs
along your journey. So the first thing that I want
to share is to sell expensive items.
Now for us, that typically meansan average order value of $1000
or more. And you might be thinking that
sounds crazy, it sounds risky. Listen, I get that I had those
(02:09):
same hesitations when I switchedfrom low ticket e-commerce to
high ticket e-commerce. But I'll tell you, it is much
easier to run a profitable business when you are selling
more expensive items. And probably the simplest way I
can sum this up for you is that with me and my e-commerce
businesses, I am a huge fan of paid traffic.
The fact that I can give Google and Meta some money and it can
(02:32):
return back a lot more on my store is primarily made possible
because we're selling high ticket products, which means for
every sale we get, there's actually real money attached to
it. There's real profit, and some of
that profit can be invested intoads now.
Back when I first started, I wasselling cookies online for about
$10 a box. I was making about $3 in profit
(02:54):
per sale. And even though going back
almost 20 years ago ads were much cheaper, it was still, even
then, very hard to run ads profitably when you have $3 in
profit to work with. If you have $500.00 or $300 or
$200 in profit to work with, paid ads become much easier.
And building a real sustainable business is really not that
(03:14):
complicated. Now I'm making that sound like
that's all you have to do, focuson high ticket products or
expensive items if we want to call it that.
But that really is step one and just the first thing that I
wanted to share with you. Now the second thing that I made
a note on here is that tracking really is everything.
And here I'm specifically talking about tracking your
website visitors and which of those website visitors turn into
(03:37):
sales and what is turning them into customers.
Again, back when I first startedand I set up my first website, I
started running ads. I knew I was making money.
I knew the money I was making outweighed the money I was
putting into ads and all was well.
But after, it's almost sad to admit this, after a few years, I
started to actually figure out how to track website visitors
(03:58):
with analytics and find out where people were coming from
that were turning into my customers.
Because as I'm sure you can imagine, if you're getting
traffic from Google for free, from Bing, from free from
Google, from paid ads, from Facebook, from paid ads, maybe
from TikTok, maybe from Pinterest, yeah, it's great
you're getting a bunch of traffic.
But what really matters is whichtraffic sources are bringing in
(04:21):
your customers, which of your paid spend, or which of your
efforts into SEO actually equateto dollars.
And this is something you want to set up sooner rather than
later. Even if you're only getting 20
website visitors a day, you wantto know which ones of those are
turning into sales so you can know where to invest more money
into ads and so you can know which projects to double down
(04:44):
on. If this to you looks like Google
Shopping ads, put more money there.
If this to you looks like SEO, invest more into building out
your content. And the only way to know this is
to accurately track everything. It is extremely important and
something that I wish I would have focused on sooner rather
than later and something you should focus on from day one.
(05:05):
Now, I'm not going to get into the technical details of how to
do this, but just know you don'tneed any expensive third party
tools. Google Analytics for with their
Shopify integration is great. And same thing if you're using
Meta ads, connect that through your Shopify store with maximum
data sharing and you'll get all the information you need to see
where your sales are coming from.
(05:27):
So this brings us into the thirdthing that I want to share with
you, and this is that you shouldoutsource as soon as possible.
And if you're wondering like, well, when is as soon as
possible? Is it day one if I have money to
spend in outsourcing? Well, the way that I think of
this is once something gets painful to you because you
should do it yourself in the beginning, then it's time to
outsource. And for me, the first thing I
(05:49):
ever outsourced was customer service.
But just like with getting really specific and really
staying on top of tracking, I waited too long to outsource
customer service. I was doing it myself.
It was taking a bunch of my time.
And the truth is I did not want to outsource it, even though the
business could pay for it many times over.
Because I was afraid that somebody else would come into
the business, that they would beresponding to customers, that
(06:11):
they would be answering phone calls and responding to live
chats. And I was afraid they would hurt
the business. When in reality, what happened
when I finally hired somebody isI got somebody that was actually
good at customer service. People heard back from us faster
and customers were actually happier.
Also, it freed up a ton of my time, time to invest into things
that really matter, like gettingbetter with tracking, getting
(06:33):
better with advertising, pickingup new suppliers, and really
focusing on lead value optimization, which I'll also
talk about later in this episode.
But just know that once you're doing something in your business
and you understand how the process works, once it gets
painful, meaning you're investing a ton of your time
into it and you really don't want to do it anymore, that is
(06:54):
when it's time to outsource. And typically, I know from
speaking to thousands of drop ship lifestyle members, this is
something that people hold onto for too long.
So outsource sooner rather than later.
Now, the fourth thing that I want to share with you is it
doesn't seem like something you need to know if you're building
an e-commerce business, especially if you're building it
as a lifestyle entrepreneur or alifestyle business owner like
(07:16):
what we do. And that is you should learn
sales. Now, I'm not saying go sign up
for a bunch of sales courses from sales trainers online or
anything like that, but go to Amazon, go to Barnes and Nobles,
whatever, and pick up books on understanding selling psychology
and buying psychology. Because what you're going to do
here is pick up a bunch of things that you can actually
(07:37):
implement on your digital store,different things that really
move the needle. What are psychological triggers,
I should say, that turn people into customers?
These are things that you'll be able to leverage into your
copywriting and even add in to your buying funnel.
Now, I'm not saying like builds a funnel as most people think of
it now, like Russell Brunson. Russell Brunson kind of
(07:58):
introduced to the world where you have like OTO one and OTO
two. I'm not even talking about that.
But what you want to be doing here is learning what makes
people buy and what people actually want after they buy.
Now, a way that I learned this again, the hard way is the first
network of stores that I ever sold.
This was in I believe late 2011 or early 2012.
(08:19):
I sold them for more money than I ever thought I would see in my
life. And I was kind of worried like
what was going to happen when the new owner took these
businesses owner over simply because I had run them for the
lifetime of the businesses and Iknew how to run them and I knew
how much money they made and kind of the consistency of them.
But what would happen, this is in my mind, if the new owner
takes over and they just simply stop performing, right?
(08:40):
Is he going to get mad? Is he going to want to refund?
Like what happens? And what happened?
And I quickly learned after speaking to him a couple weeks
after they bought the business, was that they were making more
money than I ever did before after they bought it.
Because the person that bought it was not an e-commerce guy,
but he was a sales guy. And he basically started to
build into the order forms when people are going through
(09:02):
checkouts on the stores, ways for them to upgrade their
orders. So to purchase things like
expedited shipping, to purchase things like extended warranties.
And what I found out very quickly is that many customers
actually wanted these things. They actually increased his
conversion rate and they actually made him a lot more
money because people were spending more with their average
order value. So by hearing that, I quickly
(09:24):
asked him for a bunch of recommendations for how can I
learn these things? And I added them on to all the
stores I still had and all the stores that I built in the
future. And guess what?
I started making more money. So even though again, I totally
get it, you don't want to be a salesperson, I don't consider
myself a salesperson either. It is worth picking up some
books on it, understanding buyerbehavior and leveraging these
things on your own e-commerce business.
(09:46):
You don't need to be cold calling people.
You don't need to be calling customers, but if you add these
things onto your store, customers will be more likely to
buy and to spend more money whenthey buy from you.
So this brings us to the fifth thing that I wanted to share
today. And this kind of expands on
something I, I, I alluded to earlier, which is to sell your
customers what they already want.
(10:08):
Now I call this LVO stands for lead value optimization.
And this is something I discovered again, after 5 plus
years in business that went on to make us a lot more money.
And the way I think about this is, let's say you're doing what
I primarily do and what I teach over at Drop Ship Lifestyle and
selling high ticket items. Let's say you are building a
(10:29):
store that sells drum kits, right?
So drum sets for beginners. Now, traditionally what I would
do is build that store. I would get authorized to sell
for the best brands that make beginner drum kits.
I would advertise them, get customers, sell them their drum
kits and you know, all is well, everyone's happy.
Well, I don't even know how I stumbled upon this, but I
started thinking, what can I do to make more out of this store,
(10:51):
right? And I started just to think, and
you should do this for yourself,for your own e-commerce
business. What else would my customers
want that we simply don't offer?And in this example, I would
think, OK, it's a drum set for beginners.
They probably want to learn how to play the drums.
So why not go on Google and findthe best online drum schools and
partner with them as an affiliate where we can promote
(11:12):
their online drum lessons or their online drum courses where
where our customers already wantthat and when they buy it, we
earn a Commission. Makes sense, right?
And then what about lower ticketproducts?
Now I mentioned earlier, right, we focus on expensive items, but
what if we were selling a $500 drum kit and as the person was
checking out on the product page, they can add on
(11:32):
drumsticks? Probably going to want them,
right? Let's sell to them right there.
It's not going to have us advertising some low ticket
product, but it's going to increase our average order value
if we're selling customers what they already want.
And what I would encourage you to do, no matter what niche it
is you selling, you know, get a pen and paper, write down your
niche and then just start to like right around it, right?
(11:53):
Like, what else would my customers possibly want?
And you can add those things on.So it might be, again, some type
of company you can partner with as an affiliate where you can
promote their product or serviceto your customers.
It might be a lower ticket product that you can have
customers have the ability to add on on your product pages.
It might even be things like I mentioned earlier, like
expedited shipping or extended warranties.
(12:15):
Think of all these things, brainstorm them.
You can add them to your store and again, sell your customers
what they most likely already want or need.
Not only can this increase your average order value, but again,
it can also increase your conversion rate.
So it's a win win for you and for your customers.
Now, the next thing that I thinkis extremely important and
(12:36):
luckily I did do early on, but Isee a lot of people kind of wait
too long and this is to form a business entity.
So if you're in the states, basically your options are you
can do business as a sole proprietor, meaning you're doing
business as yourself. That's actually how I started.
But if you, you know, you don't want to start that way right
away, you don't have to. But even if you do, once you see
(12:56):
you're making sales and you knowthis is something you're serious
about, my advice is to form an LLC and elect to have it taxed
as an S corporation. So I'm not going to get into all
the specifics. Again, that's not the purpose of
this episode. But what that's going to allow
you to do is have the separationfrom yourself and your business,
which helps for basically liability purposes.
(13:17):
It also helps with taxes. And we'll save you money.
You'll be paying a lot less if you do this the right way, of
course. But if you have an LLC taxed as
an S corporation rather than just doing business as a sole
proprietor. But it's also going to, again,
if you do this correctly, keep your business expenses separate
from your personal, which is going to be extremely helpful to
you over time if you ever want to sell your business.
(13:38):
And you might be thinking, I don't want to build a business
to sell, I just want to have income that I control.
That's great. That's usually why I start
businesses too. But if you ever do want to sell
or something ever comes up, if things are separate from
yourself, it makes the whole process of selling that business
so much easier. OK, this brings us in to the
seventh thing that I wanted to cover today, and that is that
(13:59):
small dollar amount, wins and savings really compound into
massive amounts over time. So this can be related to
anything in your business, any expenses you have or might have
in the future. But I'm going to give you one
that for me is just as clear as day that I literally would have
saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on if I picked up on
this earlier. So a lot of items we sell,
(14:21):
again, they're expensive, they're large, they're heavy,
they ship via free carriers. So free shipping is a lot more
than if something was going to ship with UPS or FedEx.
Now, again, because I'm mostly drop shipping, I am not
actually, you know, warehousing these products.
But before I was even drop shipping, I was actually
importing products directly fromChina.
I was keeping them in fulfillment centers in the
(14:43):
States. And then when I sold them, I
would tell the fulfillment center, OK, ship product 123,
it's a customer ABC. And what I was doing originally,
because I was using these fulfillment centers is just
having them ship on their accounts.
They would obviously charge us for the shipping.
When the order went out, we would pay it.
You know, all is well. Well, after literally years of
this and probably spending closeto seven figures in shipping
(15:05):
again doing, you know, 8 figuresplus in revenue.
So not like any crazy amount that really like looks to me
like, oh, we're losing all this profit because we're still
making great profit margins. But I realized, you know what,
what if we don't use their in house shipping?
What if I go online and find different companies that offer
the same shipping services and see what rates I can get?
(15:26):
Well, that's what I did. I went online, I looked up
different freight brokers, whichbasically give you quotes from
many different freight shipping companies and I realized I could
save 100, sometimes 200, sometimes more than $200 for
every shipment. Then that went out the door and
again on one shipment, you know,let's say you see $100 savings,
maybe you think, well, I'm stillmaking 300, four, $100 net
(15:47):
profit. It's not that big.
For the years that I didn't do this literally, it added up to
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars
that I could have saved if I didthis earlier.
And again, this is just one example of how maybe what look
like small dollar amounts per sale can really compound
overtime and equal hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
(16:08):
dollars in savings. So it's very important as you
run your business, whether you want to do this monthly or
quarterly, you look over all your expenses and you just
think, is there any way I can get this for less?
If it's shipping, it could be going out there and getting
quotes from other companies and even sending these companies
quotes you got from another company to see if they can beat
it. If you see your cost of goods
(16:30):
sold, which most likely is goingto be your biggest cost, is
extremely high. Maybe this looks like going out
to suppliers and trying to negotiate your wholesale pricing
with them. By the way, if you're a member
of the Drop Ship blueprint over at dropshiplifestyle.com, I have
a whole lesson on how to do thisin Module 4 of the blueprints.
But all of these expenses, again, everything you can cut
from equals massive, massive savings over time.
(16:53):
Because one thing that you know,typically we look at as business
owners is the top line. And then of course, we also look
at our profit. And usually for a lot of us, if
our profit is high enough, then we're happy.
But the lower you can get your expenses, the bigger that number
is in between. And it might sound obvious, but
I'm telling you as somebody that's done this, that is kind
of in the weeds of their business, there are always
(17:14):
savings to be had. And every little savings you
could find will compound over time.
And if you build your business the right way to be around for
five years, 10 years, almost 20 years, like some of mine have
been, now those numbers will equal massive amounts that you
will have in savings over time if you do this correctly.
OK, The next thing I want to share with you, and if you're
keeping track, again, I wrote down 15 different things I want
(17:36):
to share. We're up to #8 this one is to
run monthly promotions. Now, you might be thinking like,
well, what does that even mean? Should I run promotions for an
entire month? What should those promotions be?
Again, if you're, I'm going to keep saying that's just because
I have so much. There's like 140 video lessons
in the drop ship blueprints. But what we do, and we did not
do this again for probably 5 plus years in our businesses,
(17:57):
but every single month of the year, we block out a time
between three and seven days where we're running a different
promotion. This might be a percent off,
this might be a bonus gift, thismight be free expedited
shipping. It's always going to be
different. But for that time period, for
that block, every month, we knowwhat we are promoting on our
(18:18):
stores as that offer. And we're promoting this to our
e-mail list that we built up over time.
We're promoting this to new website visitors by seeing it
featured on our stores. We're promoting it on social
media. We're promoting it as
remarketing ads. And what this does is just give
you a huge spike in sales every month that cost you almost $0.00
(18:38):
to acquire. Because again, these promotions,
the majority of people that are taking them are people that
you're re engaging, that have been on your e-mail list or that
have been following you on social media.
And it's a great way to constantly have something new
and fresh in front of people that are already aware of you to
finally turn them into customers.
And I'm telling you, like if yousit down for the year and plan
(18:58):
this out, it's actually pretty topical depending on when you
are watching this episode because we're about to close out
2024. This is something that you know,
you could plan out now for 2025.What do you want your 12
promotions to be? Get out of calendar, Literally
block them off. And then all you need to do from
there is basically write some e-mail copy, write some ad copy
and schedule them out. And again, it's basically free
(19:20):
money. And it's just consistent month
over month, like clockwork, where you're going to have a
massive spike in sales for something that does not take
long to set up. And the thing that you know,
I'll say is like before we did this again, like everything
here, it's not like you can't beprofitable, not by doing these,
but by adding these in, the profit just goes up so much
because these people that you know, kind of are stale.
(19:42):
If you want to think of it like that in your audience that
didn't have a reason to buy, you're giving them constant
reasons to buy, constant reasonsto come back, and it's just
going to make your profits skyrocket.
So next thing that I want to share, this is number 9, is that
your competitors weaknesses are your strengths.
So with our business model, the way that we do e-commerce
(20:03):
primarily again, is on the high ticket drop shipping model,
meaning that of course we have competition.
You know, whatever we're selling, most likely there's
five plus other stores selling the same products.
And a lot of people think like, well, you know, why would
somebody buy from me? Let's say you're launching a new
store over a competitor that's been around for three years or
five years or 10 years. Well, something that you can
(20:25):
become good at is identifying the weaknesses of all of your
competitors and making them strengths on your store.
So something that I do religiously is literally go
split screen on my monitor wherehalf of it I will have a product
page for a product from supplierABC.
And then on the other side of the screen, I will have that
(20:45):
same product pulled up on my future competitor stores or my
current competitor stores if it's already live.
And I'll go through those top competitor stores and look side
by side as if I was a potential customer and try to think, why
would somebody choose them over me?
Do they have better pricing, which typically isn't the case
because we sell for map suppliers.
But are they offering a bonus gift?
(21:06):
If they're not, let's throw in abonus gift.
What does their shipping policy say?
Do they tell people how long theitem will take to get delivered?
If not, we're going to put that on ours.
If the product has a warranty, are our competitors showing that
off? And if they're not, guess what?
That's going front and center onour page.
So customers see a better value proposition.
If they don't have support options right there being shown
(21:27):
off, we're going to show that. If they don't have their return
policy laid out, we're going to show that off.
If we can have a better return policy, we're going to put that
there. Basically, again, we're looking
side by side at our product pages versus theirs and thinking
what are their weaknesses that we can leverage on our stores to
become the strengths. Because better believe it when
(21:48):
people are shopping, If you have5 competitors, most of them are
going to look at your competitors stores too.
And you want to make some relatively simple tweaks to your
product pages that will make youthe clear option and get you the
lion's share of the sales for those particular products from
those particular brands. Now #10 you should be persistent
(22:10):
when asking for reviews. As you might know if you've sold
anything online. It's a lot more likely if you
never ask to get people leaving a negative review over a
positive. If somebody has a good
experience, you could probably relate to this.
How likely are you to be proactive to go out there and
leave a positive review? Probably not that likely because
you expect great service and youget it.
Most likely you're not going to leave a review.
(22:32):
On the other hand, if for some reason you have a bad
experience, I'll tell you. In general, people are most more
likely to go out and tell the world about it.
Now, what you want to do is makesure that the majority of your
customers, they're going to havegreat experiences, that you are
consistently asking them for reviews because reviews are
going to do a ton of things for your store.
And again, just like with money saved, reviews are something
(22:52):
that grow over time. You're not going to have ten
reviews your first month in business, but if you keep asking
for them over the first year or so, maybe you're going to have
100 of them over the first few years, maybe you're going to
have 1000 of them. This is going to greatly
increase your conversion rate and help you stand out as an
authority in your niche. Now, some things we do to get
these reviews First off, of course, is make sure customers
(23:13):
have great buying experiences. Make sure they get what they
were promised in terms of product and delivery time.
But once those products are delivered, we send out a series
of automated emails requesting reviews and we incentivize
customers to leave them. This could be as simple as get a
$50.00 gift card to our store orget 10% off your next order,
whatever it may be. You can get creative for your
(23:35):
own niche, but give people a reason and remind them to leave
a review because that is going to help you in a massive way
over time to have your store become an authority in your
niche. OK, the 12th thing that I want
to share with you is to set goals and stick with them.
Now I want to get a little bit more specific here because this
could mean something different to other people.
(23:56):
You might think, Oh my goal is to make $1,000,000 this year.
I don't think that's the right way to set goals.
Instead, I think the right way to do it is to get extremely
specific and focus on one thing.If you're already in business,
that mean that might mean your goal is to 2X the revenue from
the previous year, right? It might mean your goal is to
take your ads from A10 extra on ad spend to a 15 extra on ad
(24:18):
spend, whatever that is. I recommend setting what I call
a North F star goal, which is that main goal that you're
focusing on. Now what I do is set these for
each quarter. So we have quarter One North
Star goal, quarter 2 N star, quarter three, quarter four
North Stars for each of them. And then what I do is once we
have this North Star goal laid out is actually, again, pen and
(24:39):
paper, write down all the thingsthat we want to do and try to
reach that goal. So if the goal was, let's say to
take a return on AD spend from 10X to 15X, maybe the things
that I'm going to lay out to tryare to bring in an outside AD
agency to consult in an AD accounts and to do a coaching
call with them where they're reviewing all of our Ads with
(25:01):
us. Maybe the next thing that I set
out to do is go through all of our keywords that we've appeared
for for the past 12 months that have led to under A10 extra on
ad spend and cut them completely.
Maybe it's to look at all the keywords that have brought in
over a 15 extra on ad spend and invest more money into them.
Maybe it's to experiment with different type of ads for the
(25:22):
keywords that are already converting.
So if they're already convertingfor let's say Google Shopping.
Now what I'm going to do as one of my things for this quarter is
run them as search text ads and possibly display ads as well.
So you have that North Star goal, which should be one thing,
and then all the things that you're going to do to support
that goal listed out below it. And those are the things you're
(25:42):
going to be executing on throughout the quarter in order
to reach that North Star. This is a lot better than just
thinking I hope this quarter is better than last or just picking
a number like I want to do $1,000,000 and hoping that
happens. Because unless you have that
specific goal with what you're going to do laid out under it,
it's very hard to ever reach goals if not by luck.
OK, the next thing, this is extremely important.
(26:05):
Like these all are. I keep saying that because these
are all things that have been game changers for me and have
just led to, you know, so much better results over my 18 years
in this business. But the next one is to create
what I call a change log for your business.
Now, a change log is basically alist of everything that you've
done that could affect outcomes.So for example, you might want
(26:27):
to create this as a Google Sheetwhere column A is the date, so
the date of the change that was made.
Maybe column B is what the thingwas that was changed.
And column C is notes on how youthink this change will affect
the how the change you think will affect your business.
And then Column D is basically areview for how it actually did
(26:48):
affect things. Now, I recommend this for a few
reasons. And the first is, as a business
owner, most likely you're a solopreneur or have a small
team. You know, we're about 20 people
right now. I still consider that a small
team, but we're constantly trying new things and making
changes. And I want to be able to know if
sales were down last week, what could have caused that?
Or if sales were up last week, what could have caused that?
(27:10):
And when you're constantly trying all these different
things, it's very easy to make achange in the morning and
literally by the afternoon forget that change was ever
made. So some examples of things you
might put on your change log is that on Sunday the 1st you went
into Google ads, right? So that would be column B.
And the change was that you increase your CPC for X amount
(27:32):
of keywords. And the expected result was that
you were going to have less search impression share lost
because you're spending more. Well, now we have that in our
change log. So a week from now, we can go
back, check our change log and be like, Oh yeah, we made that
change. Let's look and see it how, how
it actually affected things. Another example would be you
edit one of the emails in your abandoned card automation
(27:53):
because your previous one had a low open rate.
So you change the headline, right?
So you would put the date the change was made, the platform
where it was changed. Maybe it's Shopify e-mail or
Clavio, whatever you're using. Expected results is that you're
going to increase open rate on e-mail three of your abandoned
card sequence from 35% to 50%. And then a week later you can go
(28:14):
back and actually make a note ofdid that help or did it not?
And if it didn't, you can go back and revert the change.
Extremely important. I highly encourage every
e-commerce store out there to dothis.
Make a change log for your business.
OK. Fourteenth thing that I want to
share is how important the recency and frequency of website
(28:34):
visitors is when it comes to remarketing.
Now remarketing is most likely going to have an amazing return
on ad spend for your business does for ours.
But when it comes to the recencyand frequency of when people
visited your store, people that have been to your site more
often in a shorter amount of time, in a shorter amount of
time I should say are going to be the ones that most likely
(28:55):
turn into customers. What that means is, if possible,
we want to have very segmented small remarketing campaigns that
are showing to the most recent and frequent website visitors
that found us. So it depends.
This is where it gets tricky because it depends on how much
website visitors you are gettingbecause you need to have enough
website visitors in a short amount of time to have these
(29:16):
highly segmented remarketing campaigns.
For example, if you wanted to have remarketing campaign for
people that only visited your store in the last 24 hours, you
need to have well over 100 people a day coming to your
store in order for that audienceto be big enough for these ads
to show to. So if you don't get that many
website visitors and if your audiences take longer to fill
fill up, then you need to have maybe a 30 day remarketing
(29:38):
audience or a 60 day or a 90 day.
And while those should still be very profitable for you, just
know as your traffic grows over time, my advice is to definitely
segment your remarketing campaigns.
And if possible have a 24 hour remarketing, then have a 40
hour, 48 hour remarketing that excludes the 24.
Then have a 5 day that excludes the 48 hours.
(30:00):
Then have a 10 day that excludesthe five day.
Then have a 14 day that excludesthe 10 day.
And so on and so on. But the more recent and frequent
you can get people into remarketing audience, the higher
return on ad spend you will see.That's just, you know, common
sense or logic. Think of it this way, if
somebody goes to your website today and abandoned the abandons
the cart, they're much more likely to come back and be a
(30:21):
customer then if they came to your website 30 days ago and
then saw a remarketing ad. So keep that in mind.
And again, as your traffic grows, dissect this more
whenever possible and breakdown your remarketing audiences to be
more recent and more frequent website visitors.
OK, this brings us in to the 15th thing that I wanted to
share in this episode. And this is to eliminate as much
(30:42):
risk as you can with your business.
Now, there's so many different things that you can do to
eliminate risk. But one of the biggest things
that I see a lot of people, evensuccessful people make a mistake
with is by basically putting their all their eggs in one
basket, if you want to say it that way.
And the way I see people do thisis with the suppliers they sell
for and the products that they sell.
(31:04):
Now what I do with our specific method of drop shipping high
ticket e-commerce is we try to get as many brands on board as
possible and we try to sell for every quality brand in our
niche. Now the opposite of this would
be if you found a niche you wantto sell in, you get approved or
authorized to sell for one supplier.
You scale that store to $100,000a month and let's say you have
(31:25):
50% profit margins, you are making bank, you are very happy.
Well, what happens if that one supplier says hey, next month,
you know what, our costs went upand now all our products are 40%
more expensive. Or what happens if they say hey,
you know what? And I've seen this happen
before. The owner is retiring and the
business is going to be shut down for the foreseeable future.
(31:46):
Either way, your business is notgoing to look the same because
you were reliant on one company.In this case, it could be a
supplier. In another case, it might be one
ad platform that all your sales come from.
You want to diversify this risk as much as possible.
So this will look like bringing on more suppliers, diversifying
your ad budget so it spends across multiple suppliers, and
(32:07):
so that you're making some moneyover here, some money over
there, some money over there. And if something goes bad or
goes wrong with one supplier, you're still making your money.
Or if something goes wrong with one ad account, you're still
have all these other sources that are bringing you sales.
So this is something extremely important.
Some things people often overlook when they're first
getting started because again, they might take off in their
(32:29):
business, be making all this money and think everything is
good. But you want to eliminate and
diversify your risk as much as possible so that if something
still goes wrong, you still haveplenty of opportunity to win.
So guys, that is 18 years of e-commerce advice shared in this
one episode. I do hope you got value from it.
If you did, let me know by leaving a like if you're
(32:50):
watching this on YouTube or leaving a review, if you're
listening on any podcast player.And if there was one thing that
really stood out to you, please do me a favor, leave a comment
below and share because I'd loveto hear it.
And if you're totally new to e-commerce and you want to see,
in my opinion, the best way to start, be sure to go to drop
ship webinar.com. I will link that up in the
description as well. You can get a 2 hour for free
(33:11):
training from me there, plus a list of 500 profitable product
ideas that you can sell online. So check that out.
As always, thank you. I appreciate you and I will talk
to you in the next episode here at Drop Ship Lifestyle.
All right. Thank you, everybody.
So today I'm going to do something a bit different than
what you usually see on this channel, and that is to share 18
years worth of ecommerce knowledge with you and try to do
that in as quick and as concise as possible.
Now what I did was make a bunch of notes actually last night as
I was thinking about what I wanted to share.
And what I have here are 15 highlevel points that I'll be
(00:21):
sharing with you that honestly Ihad to learn the hard way.
And the goal with this episode is to help anybody else out
there that is either new to e-commerce or has been in the
business for a while and is looking for ways to get better.
All of these 15 points that I wrote down, honestly, I had to
learn the hard way and a lot of them cost me a lot of money.
And the goal is to eliminate that risk from you and make it
(00:44):
so your life can be easier. So just so you know, this isn't
going to be some overproduced video.
There's going to be no visuals popping up on the screen.
So feel free to play this in thebackground and take away
whatever you can from it to hopefully better your e-commerce
business and make it even more profitable as we move into the
new year and beyond. So for those of you that don't
know, my name is Anton Craley. If you do know me, it's probably
(01:07):
from my company Drop Ship Lifestyle.
I've been building e-commerce stores myself since 2007 and
Drop Ship Lifestyle was formed in 2012 and since then I've
helped over 15,000 people from all around the world to build
their own e-commerce stores as well.
Like I said a couple minutes ago, I definitely learned a lot
of things the hard way and I'm still learning new things every
(01:27):
day. So don't look at me as some guru
that knows every little detail about e-commerce.
But with 10s of millions of dollars of products sold and
literally my eyes on analytics and Shopify day in and day out
again, I've definitely picked upsome things along the way.
Some of the things I'm going to share with you, you may have
heard from me before, some of them may be brand new to you.
(01:47):
But again, even if you can pull 1 little thing out of this
episode, I promise you it'll help you and cut down your costs
along your journey. So the first thing that I want
to share is to sell expensive items.
Now for us, that typically meansan average order value of $1000
or more. And you might be thinking that
sounds crazy, it sounds risky. Listen, I get that I had those
(02:09):
same hesitations when I switchedfrom low ticket e-commerce to
high ticket e-commerce. But I'll tell you, it is much
easier to run a profitable business when you are selling
more expensive items. And probably the simplest way I
can sum this up for you is that with me and my e-commerce
businesses, I am a huge fan of paid traffic.
The fact that I can give Google and Meta some money and it can
(02:32):
return back a lot more on my store is primarily made possible
because we're selling high ticket products, which means for
every sale we get, there's actually real money attached to
it. There's real profit, and some of
that profit can be invested intoads now.
Back when I first started, I wasselling cookies online for about
$10 a box. I was making about $3 in profit
(02:54):
per sale. And even though going back
almost 20 years ago ads were much cheaper, it was still, even
then, very hard to run ads profitably when you have $3 in
profit to work with. If you have $500.00 or $300 or
$200 in profit to work with, paid ads become much easier.
And building a real sustainable business is really not that
(03:14):
complicated. Now I'm making that sound like
that's all you have to do, focuson high ticket products or
expensive items if we want to call it that.
But that really is step one and just the first thing that I
wanted to share with you. Now the second thing that I made
a note on here is that tracking really is everything.
And here I'm specifically talking about tracking your
website visitors and which of those website visitors turn into
(03:37):
sales and what is turning them into customers.
Again, back when I first startedand I set up my first website, I
started running ads. I knew I was making money.
I knew the money I was making outweighed the money I was
putting into ads and all was well.
But after, it's almost sad to admit this, after a few years, I
started to actually figure out how to track website visitors
(03:58):
with analytics and find out where people were coming from
that were turning into my customers.
Because as I'm sure you can imagine, if you're getting
traffic from Google for free, from Bing, from free from
Google, from paid ads, from Facebook, from paid ads, maybe
from TikTok, maybe from Pinterest, yeah, it's great
you're getting a bunch of traffic.
But what really matters is whichtraffic sources are bringing in
(04:21):
your customers, which of your paid spend, or which of your
efforts into SEO actually equateto dollars.
And this is something you want to set up sooner rather than
later. Even if you're only getting 20
website visitors a day, you wantto know which ones of those are
turning into sales so you can know where to invest more money
into ads and so you can know which projects to double down
(04:44):
on. If this to you looks like Google
Shopping ads, put more money there.
If this to you looks like SEO, invest more into building out
your content. And the only way to know this is
to accurately track everything. It is extremely important and
something that I wish I would have focused on sooner rather
than later and something you should focus on from day one.
(05:05):
Now, I'm not going to get into the technical details of how to
do this, but just know you don'tneed any expensive third party
tools. Google Analytics for with their
Shopify integration is great. And same thing if you're using
Meta ads, connect that through your Shopify store with maximum
data sharing and you'll get all the information you need to see
where your sales are coming from.
(05:27):
So this brings us into the thirdthing that I want to share with
you, and this is that you shouldoutsource as soon as possible.
And if you're wondering like, well, when is as soon as
possible? Is it day one if I have money to
spend in outsourcing? Well, the way that I think of
this is once something gets painful to you because you
should do it yourself in the beginning, then it's time to
outsource. And for me, the first thing I
(05:49):
ever outsourced was customer service.
But just like with getting really specific and really
staying on top of tracking, I waited too long to outsource
customer service. I was doing it myself.
It was taking a bunch of my time.
And the truth is I did not want to outsource it, even though the
business could pay for it many times over.
Because I was afraid that somebody else would come into
the business, that they would beresponding to customers, that
(06:11):
they would be answering phone calls and responding to live
chats. And I was afraid they would hurt
the business. When in reality, what happened
when I finally hired somebody isI got somebody that was actually
good at customer service. People heard back from us faster
and customers were actually happier.
Also, it freed up a ton of my time, time to invest into things
that really matter, like gettingbetter with tracking, getting
(06:33):
better with advertising, pickingup new suppliers, and really
focusing on lead value optimization, which I'll also
talk about later in this episode.
But just know that once you're doing something in your business
and you understand how the process works, once it gets
painful, meaning you're investing a ton of your time
into it and you really don't want to do it anymore, that is
(06:54):
when it's time to outsource. And typically, I know from
speaking to thousands of drop ship lifestyle members, this is
something that people hold onto for too long.
So outsource sooner rather than later.
Now, the fourth thing that I want to share with you is it
doesn't seem like something you need to know if you're building
an e-commerce business, especially if you're building it
as a lifestyle entrepreneur or alifestyle business owner like
(07:16):
what we do. And that is you should learn
sales. Now, I'm not saying go sign up
for a bunch of sales courses from sales trainers online or
anything like that, but go to Amazon, go to Barnes and Nobles,
whatever, and pick up books on understanding selling psychology
and buying psychology. Because what you're going to do
here is pick up a bunch of things that you can actually
(07:37):
implement on your digital store,different things that really
move the needle. What are psychological triggers,
I should say, that turn people into customers?
These are things that you'll be able to leverage into your
copywriting and even add in to your buying funnel.
Now, I'm not saying like builds a funnel as most people think of
it now, like Russell Brunson. Russell Brunson kind of
(07:58):
introduced to the world where you have like OTO one and OTO
two. I'm not even talking about that.
But what you want to be doing here is learning what makes
people buy and what people actually want after they buy.
Now, a way that I learned this again, the hard way is the first
network of stores that I ever sold.
This was in I believe late 2011 or early 2012.
(08:19):
I sold them for more money than I ever thought I would see in my
life. And I was kind of worried like
what was going to happen when the new owner took these
businesses owner over simply because I had run them for the
lifetime of the businesses and Iknew how to run them and I knew
how much money they made and kind of the consistency of them.
But what would happen, this is in my mind, if the new owner
takes over and they just simply stop performing, right?
(08:40):
Is he going to get mad? Is he going to want to refund?
Like what happens? And what happened?
And I quickly learned after speaking to him a couple weeks
after they bought the business, was that they were making more
money than I ever did before after they bought it.
Because the person that bought it was not an e-commerce guy,
but he was a sales guy. And he basically started to
build into the order forms when people are going through
(09:02):
checkouts on the stores, ways for them to upgrade their
orders. So to purchase things like
expedited shipping, to purchase things like extended warranties.
And what I found out very quickly is that many customers
actually wanted these things. They actually increased his
conversion rate and they actually made him a lot more
money because people were spending more with their average
order value. So by hearing that, I quickly
(09:24):
asked him for a bunch of recommendations for how can I
learn these things? And I added them on to all the
stores I still had and all the stores that I built in the
future. And guess what?
I started making more money. So even though again, I totally
get it, you don't want to be a salesperson, I don't consider
myself a salesperson either. It is worth picking up some
books on it, understanding buyerbehavior and leveraging these
things on your own e-commerce business.
(09:46):
You don't need to be cold calling people.
You don't need to be calling customers, but if you add these
things onto your store, customers will be more likely to
buy and to spend more money whenthey buy from you.
So this brings us to the fifth thing that I wanted to share
today. And this kind of expands on
something I, I, I alluded to earlier, which is to sell your
customers what they already want.
(10:08):
Now I call this LVO stands for lead value optimization.
And this is something I discovered again, after 5 plus
years in business that went on to make us a lot more money.
And the way I think about this is, let's say you're doing what
I primarily do and what I teach over at Drop Ship Lifestyle and
selling high ticket items. Let's say you are building a
(10:29):
store that sells drum kits, right?
So drum sets for beginners. Now, traditionally what I would
do is build that store. I would get authorized to sell
for the best brands that make beginner drum kits.
I would advertise them, get customers, sell them their drum
kits and you know, all is well, everyone's happy.
Well, I don't even know how I stumbled upon this, but I
started thinking, what can I do to make more out of this store,
(10:51):
right? And I started just to think, and
you should do this for yourself,for your own e-commerce
business. What else would my customers
want that we simply don't offer?And in this example, I would
think, OK, it's a drum set for beginners.
They probably want to learn how to play the drums.
So why not go on Google and findthe best online drum schools and
partner with them as an affiliate where we can promote
(11:12):
their online drum lessons or their online drum courses where
where our customers already wantthat and when they buy it, we
earn a Commission. Makes sense, right?
And then what about lower ticketproducts?
Now I mentioned earlier, right, we focus on expensive items, but
what if we were selling a $500 drum kit and as the person was
checking out on the product page, they can add on
(11:32):
drumsticks? Probably going to want them,
right? Let's sell to them right there.
It's not going to have us advertising some low ticket
product, but it's going to increase our average order value
if we're selling customers what they already want.
And what I would encourage you to do, no matter what niche it
is you selling, you know, get a pen and paper, write down your
niche and then just start to like right around it, right?
(11:53):
Like, what else would my customers possibly want?
And you can add those things on.So it might be, again, some type
of company you can partner with as an affiliate where you can
promote their product or serviceto your customers.
It might be a lower ticket product that you can have
customers have the ability to add on on your product pages.
It might even be things like I mentioned earlier, like
expedited shipping or extended warranties.
(12:15):
Think of all these things, brainstorm them.
You can add them to your store and again, sell your customers
what they most likely already want or need.
Not only can this increase your average order value, but again,
it can also increase your conversion rate.
So it's a win win for you and for your customers.
Now, the next thing that I thinkis extremely important and
(12:36):
luckily I did do early on, but Isee a lot of people kind of wait
too long and this is to form a business entity.
So if you're in the states, basically your options are you
can do business as a sole proprietor, meaning you're doing
business as yourself. That's actually how I started.
But if you, you know, you don't want to start that way right
away, you don't have to. But even if you do, once you see
(12:56):
you're making sales and you knowthis is something you're serious
about, my advice is to form an LLC and elect to have it taxed
as an S corporation. So I'm not going to get into all
the specifics. Again, that's not the purpose of
this episode. But what that's going to allow
you to do is have the separationfrom yourself and your business,
which helps for basically liability purposes.
(13:17):
It also helps with taxes. And we'll save you money.
You'll be paying a lot less if you do this the right way, of
course. But if you have an LLC taxed as
an S corporation rather than just doing business as a sole
proprietor. But it's also going to, again,
if you do this correctly, keep your business expenses separate
from your personal, which is going to be extremely helpful to
you over time if you ever want to sell your business.
(13:38):
And you might be thinking, I don't want to build a business
to sell, I just want to have income that I control.
That's great. That's usually why I start
businesses too. But if you ever do want to sell
or something ever comes up, if things are separate from
yourself, it makes the whole process of selling that business
so much easier. OK, this brings us in to the
seventh thing that I wanted to cover today, and that is that
(13:59):
small dollar amount, wins and savings really compound into
massive amounts over time. So this can be related to
anything in your business, any expenses you have or might have
in the future. But I'm going to give you one
that for me is just as clear as day that I literally would have
saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on if I picked up on
this earlier. So a lot of items we sell,
(14:21):
again, they're expensive, they're large, they're heavy,
they ship via free carriers. So free shipping is a lot more
than if something was going to ship with UPS or FedEx.
Now, again, because I'm mostly drop shipping, I am not
actually, you know, warehousing these products.
But before I was even drop shipping, I was actually
importing products directly fromChina.
I was keeping them in fulfillment centers in the
(14:43):
States. And then when I sold them, I
would tell the fulfillment center, OK, ship product 123,
it's a customer ABC. And what I was doing originally,
because I was using these fulfillment centers is just
having them ship on their accounts.
They would obviously charge us for the shipping.
When the order went out, we would pay it.
You know, all is well. Well, after literally years of
this and probably spending closeto seven figures in shipping
(15:05):
again doing, you know, 8 figuresplus in revenue.
So not like any crazy amount that really like looks to me
like, oh, we're losing all this profit because we're still
making great profit margins. But I realized, you know what,
what if we don't use their in house shipping?
What if I go online and find different companies that offer
the same shipping services and see what rates I can get?
(15:26):
Well, that's what I did. I went online, I looked up
different freight brokers, whichbasically give you quotes from
many different freight shipping companies and I realized I could
save 100, sometimes 200, sometimes more than $200 for
every shipment. Then that went out the door and
again on one shipment, you know,let's say you see $100 savings,
maybe you think, well, I'm stillmaking 300, four, $100 net
(15:47):
profit. It's not that big.
For the years that I didn't do this literally, it added up to
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars
that I could have saved if I didthis earlier.
And again, this is just one example of how maybe what look
like small dollar amounts per sale can really compound
overtime and equal hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
(16:08):
dollars in savings. So it's very important as you
run your business, whether you want to do this monthly or
quarterly, you look over all your expenses and you just
think, is there any way I can get this for less?
If it's shipping, it could be going out there and getting
quotes from other companies and even sending these companies
quotes you got from another company to see if they can beat
it. If you see your cost of goods
(16:30):
sold, which most likely is goingto be your biggest cost, is
extremely high. Maybe this looks like going out
to suppliers and trying to negotiate your wholesale pricing
with them. By the way, if you're a member
of the Drop Ship blueprint over at dropshiplifestyle.com, I have
a whole lesson on how to do thisin Module 4 of the blueprints.
But all of these expenses, again, everything you can cut
from equals massive, massive savings over time.
(16:53):
Because one thing that you know,typically we look at as business
owners is the top line. And then of course, we also look
at our profit. And usually for a lot of us, if
our profit is high enough, then we're happy.
But the lower you can get your expenses, the bigger that number
is in between. And it might sound obvious, but
I'm telling you as somebody that's done this, that is kind
of in the weeds of their business, there are always
(17:14):
savings to be had. And every little savings you
could find will compound over time.
And if you build your business the right way to be around for
five years, 10 years, almost 20 years, like some of mine have
been, now those numbers will equal massive amounts that you
will have in savings over time if you do this correctly.
OK, The next thing I want to share with you, and if you're
keeping track, again, I wrote down 15 different things I want
(17:36):
to share. We're up to #8 this one is to
run monthly promotions. Now, you might be thinking like,
well, what does that even mean? Should I run promotions for an
entire month? What should those promotions be?
Again, if you're, I'm going to keep saying that's just because
I have so much. There's like 140 video lessons
in the drop ship blueprints. But what we do, and we did not
do this again for probably 5 plus years in our businesses,
(17:57):
but every single month of the year, we block out a time
between three and seven days where we're running a different
promotion. This might be a percent off,
this might be a bonus gift, thismight be free expedited
shipping. It's always going to be
different. But for that time period, for
that block, every month, we knowwhat we are promoting on our
(18:18):
stores as that offer. And we're promoting this to our
e-mail list that we built up over time.
We're promoting this to new website visitors by seeing it
featured on our stores. We're promoting it on social
media. We're promoting it as
remarketing ads. And what this does is just give
you a huge spike in sales every month that cost you almost $0.00
(18:38):
to acquire. Because again, these promotions,
the majority of people that are taking them are people that
you're re engaging, that have been on your e-mail list or that
have been following you on social media.
And it's a great way to constantly have something new
and fresh in front of people that are already aware of you to
finally turn them into customers.
And I'm telling you, like if yousit down for the year and plan
(18:58):
this out, it's actually pretty topical depending on when you
are watching this episode because we're about to close out
2024. This is something that you know,
you could plan out now for 2025.What do you want your 12
promotions to be? Get out of calendar, Literally
block them off. And then all you need to do from
there is basically write some e-mail copy, write some ad copy
and schedule them out. And again, it's basically free
(19:20):
money. And it's just consistent month
over month, like clockwork, where you're going to have a
massive spike in sales for something that does not take
long to set up. And the thing that you know,
I'll say is like before we did this again, like everything
here, it's not like you can't beprofitable, not by doing these,
but by adding these in, the profit just goes up so much
because these people that you know, kind of are stale.
(19:42):
If you want to think of it like that in your audience that
didn't have a reason to buy, you're giving them constant
reasons to buy, constant reasonsto come back, and it's just
going to make your profits skyrocket.
So next thing that I want to share, this is number 9, is that
your competitors weaknesses are your strengths.
So with our business model, the way that we do e-commerce
(20:03):
primarily again, is on the high ticket drop shipping model,
meaning that of course we have competition.
You know, whatever we're selling, most likely there's
five plus other stores selling the same products.
And a lot of people think like, well, you know, why would
somebody buy from me? Let's say you're launching a new
store over a competitor that's been around for three years or
five years or 10 years. Well, something that you can
(20:25):
become good at is identifying the weaknesses of all of your
competitors and making them strengths on your store.
So something that I do religiously is literally go
split screen on my monitor wherehalf of it I will have a product
page for a product from supplierABC.
And then on the other side of the screen, I will have that
(20:45):
same product pulled up on my future competitor stores or my
current competitor stores if it's already live.
And I'll go through those top competitor stores and look side
by side as if I was a potential customer and try to think, why
would somebody choose them over me?
Do they have better pricing, which typically isn't the case
because we sell for map suppliers.
But are they offering a bonus gift?
(21:06):
If they're not, let's throw in abonus gift.
What does their shipping policy say?
Do they tell people how long theitem will take to get delivered?
If not, we're going to put that on ours.
If the product has a warranty, are our competitors showing that
off? And if they're not, guess what?
That's going front and center onour page.
So customers see a better value proposition.
If they don't have support options right there being shown
(21:27):
off, we're going to show that. If they don't have their return
policy laid out, we're going to show that off.
If we can have a better return policy, we're going to put that
there. Basically, again, we're looking
side by side at our product pages versus theirs and thinking
what are their weaknesses that we can leverage on our stores to
become the strengths. Because better believe it when
(21:48):
people are shopping, If you have5 competitors, most of them are
going to look at your competitors stores too.
And you want to make some relatively simple tweaks to your
product pages that will make youthe clear option and get you the
lion's share of the sales for those particular products from
those particular brands. Now #10 you should be persistent
(22:10):
when asking for reviews. As you might know if you've sold
anything online. It's a lot more likely if you
never ask to get people leaving a negative review over a
positive. If somebody has a good
experience, you could probably relate to this.
How likely are you to be proactive to go out there and
leave a positive review? Probably not that likely because
you expect great service and youget it.
Most likely you're not going to leave a review.
(22:32):
On the other hand, if for some reason you have a bad
experience, I'll tell you. In general, people are most more
likely to go out and tell the world about it.
Now, what you want to do is makesure that the majority of your
customers, they're going to havegreat experiences, that you are
consistently asking them for reviews because reviews are
going to do a ton of things for your store.
And again, just like with money saved, reviews are something
(22:52):
that grow over time. You're not going to have ten
reviews your first month in business, but if you keep asking
for them over the first year or so, maybe you're going to have
100 of them over the first few years, maybe you're going to
have 1000 of them. This is going to greatly
increase your conversion rate and help you stand out as an
authority in your niche. Now, some things we do to get
these reviews First off, of course, is make sure customers
(23:13):
have great buying experiences. Make sure they get what they
were promised in terms of product and delivery time.
But once those products are delivered, we send out a series
of automated emails requesting reviews and we incentivize
customers to leave them. This could be as simple as get a
$50.00 gift card to our store orget 10% off your next order,
whatever it may be. You can get creative for your
(23:35):
own niche, but give people a reason and remind them to leave
a review because that is going to help you in a massive way
over time to have your store become an authority in your
niche. OK, the 12th thing that I want
to share with you is to set goals and stick with them.
Now I want to get a little bit more specific here because this
could mean something different to other people.
(23:56):
You might think, Oh my goal is to make $1,000,000 this year.
I don't think that's the right way to set goals.
Instead, I think the right way to do it is to get extremely
specific and focus on one thing.If you're already in business,
that mean that might mean your goal is to 2X the revenue from
the previous year, right? It might mean your goal is to
take your ads from A10 extra on ad spend to a 15 extra on ad
(24:18):
spend, whatever that is. I recommend setting what I call
a North F star goal, which is that main goal that you're
focusing on. Now what I do is set these for
each quarter. So we have quarter One North
Star goal, quarter 2 N star, quarter three, quarter four
North Stars for each of them. And then what I do is once we
have this North Star goal laid out is actually, again, pen and
(24:39):
paper, write down all the thingsthat we want to do and try to
reach that goal. So if the goal was, let's say to
take a return on AD spend from 10X to 15X, maybe the things
that I'm going to lay out to tryare to bring in an outside AD
agency to consult in an AD accounts and to do a coaching
call with them where they're reviewing all of our Ads with
(25:01):
us. Maybe the next thing that I set
out to do is go through all of our keywords that we've appeared
for for the past 12 months that have led to under A10 extra on
ad spend and cut them completely.
Maybe it's to look at all the keywords that have brought in
over a 15 extra on ad spend and invest more money into them.
Maybe it's to experiment with different type of ads for the
(25:22):
keywords that are already converting.
So if they're already convertingfor let's say Google Shopping.
Now what I'm going to do as one of my things for this quarter is
run them as search text ads and possibly display ads as well.
So you have that North Star goal, which should be one thing,
and then all the things that you're going to do to support
that goal listed out below it. And those are the things you're
(25:42):
going to be executing on throughout the quarter in order
to reach that North Star. This is a lot better than just
thinking I hope this quarter is better than last or just picking
a number like I want to do $1,000,000 and hoping that
happens. Because unless you have that
specific goal with what you're going to do laid out under it,
it's very hard to ever reach goals if not by luck.
OK, the next thing, this is extremely important.
(26:05):
Like these all are. I keep saying that because these
are all things that have been game changers for me and have
just led to, you know, so much better results over my 18 years
in this business. But the next one is to create
what I call a change log for your business.
Now, a change log is basically alist of everything that you've
done that could affect outcomes.So for example, you might want
(26:27):
to create this as a Google Sheetwhere column A is the date, so
the date of the change that was made.
Maybe column B is what the thingwas that was changed.
And column C is notes on how youthink this change will affect
the how the change you think will affect your business.
And then Column D is basically areview for how it actually did
(26:48):
affect things. Now, I recommend this for a few
reasons. And the first is, as a business
owner, most likely you're a solopreneur or have a small
team. You know, we're about 20 people
right now. I still consider that a small
team, but we're constantly trying new things and making
changes. And I want to be able to know if
sales were down last week, what could have caused that?
Or if sales were up last week, what could have caused that?
(27:10):
And when you're constantly trying all these different
things, it's very easy to make achange in the morning and
literally by the afternoon forget that change was ever
made. So some examples of things you
might put on your change log is that on Sunday the 1st you went
into Google ads, right? So that would be column B.
And the change was that you increase your CPC for X amount
(27:32):
of keywords. And the expected result was that
you were going to have less search impression share lost
because you're spending more. Well, now we have that in our
change log. So a week from now, we can go
back, check our change log and be like, Oh yeah, we made that
change. Let's look and see it how, how
it actually affected things. Another example would be you
edit one of the emails in your abandoned card automation
(27:53):
because your previous one had a low open rate.
So you change the headline, right?
So you would put the date the change was made, the platform
where it was changed. Maybe it's Shopify e-mail or
Clavio, whatever you're using. Expected results is that you're
going to increase open rate on e-mail three of your abandoned
card sequence from 35% to 50%. And then a week later you can go
(28:14):
back and actually make a note ofdid that help or did it not?
And if it didn't, you can go back and revert the change.
Extremely important. I highly encourage every
e-commerce store out there to dothis.
Make a change log for your business.
OK. Fourteenth thing that I want to
share is how important the recency and frequency of website
(28:34):
visitors is when it comes to remarketing.
Now remarketing is most likely going to have an amazing return
on ad spend for your business does for ours.
But when it comes to the recencyand frequency of when people
visited your store, people that have been to your site more
often in a shorter amount of time, in a shorter amount of
time I should say are going to be the ones that most likely
(28:55):
turn into customers. What that means is, if possible,
we want to have very segmented small remarketing campaigns that
are showing to the most recent and frequent website visitors
that found us. So it depends.
This is where it gets tricky because it depends on how much
website visitors you are gettingbecause you need to have enough
website visitors in a short amount of time to have these
(29:16):
highly segmented remarketing campaigns.
For example, if you wanted to have remarketing campaign for
people that only visited your store in the last 24 hours, you
need to have well over 100 people a day coming to your
store in order for that audienceto be big enough for these ads
to show to. So if you don't get that many
website visitors and if your audiences take longer to fill
fill up, then you need to have maybe a 30 day remarketing
(29:38):
audience or a 60 day or a 90 day.
And while those should still be very profitable for you, just
know as your traffic grows over time, my advice is to definitely
segment your remarketing campaigns.
And if possible have a 24 hour remarketing, then have a 40
hour, 48 hour remarketing that excludes the 24.
Then have a 5 day that excludes the 48 hours.
(30:00):
Then have a 10 day that excludesthe five day.
Then have a 14 day that excludesthe 10 day.
And so on and so on. But the more recent and frequent
you can get people into remarketing audience, the higher
return on ad spend you will see.That's just, you know, common
sense or logic. Think of it this way, if
somebody goes to your website today and abandoned the abandons
the cart, they're much more likely to come back and be a
(30:21):
customer then if they came to your website 30 days ago and
then saw a remarketing ad. So keep that in mind.
And again, as your traffic grows, dissect this more
whenever possible and breakdown your remarketing audiences to be
more recent and more frequent website visitors.
OK, this brings us in to the 15th thing that I wanted to
share in this episode. And this is to eliminate as much
(30:42):
risk as you can with your business.
Now, there's so many different things that you can do to
eliminate risk. But one of the biggest things
that I see a lot of people, evensuccessful people make a mistake
with is by basically putting their all their eggs in one
basket, if you want to say it that way.
And the way I see people do thisis with the suppliers they sell
for and the products that they sell.
(31:04):
Now what I do with our specific method of drop shipping high
ticket e-commerce is we try to get as many brands on board as
possible and we try to sell for every quality brand in our
niche. Now the opposite of this would
be if you found a niche you wantto sell in, you get approved or
authorized to sell for one supplier.
You scale that store to $100,000a month and let's say you have
(31:25):
50% profit margins, you are making bank, you are very happy.
Well, what happens if that one supplier says hey, next month,
you know what, our costs went upand now all our products are 40%
more expensive. Or what happens if they say hey,
you know what? And I've seen this happen
before. The owner is retiring and the
business is going to be shut down for the foreseeable future.
(31:46):
Either way, your business is notgoing to look the same because
you were reliant on one company.In this case, it could be a
supplier. In another case, it might be one
ad platform that all your sales come from.
You want to diversify this risk as much as possible.
So this will look like bringing on more suppliers, diversifying
your ad budget so it spends across multiple suppliers, and
(32:07):
so that you're making some moneyover here, some money over
there, some money over there. And if something goes bad or
goes wrong with one supplier, you're still making your money.
Or if something goes wrong with one ad account, you're still
have all these other sources that are bringing you sales.
So this is something extremely important.
Some things people often overlook when they're first
getting started because again, they might take off in their
(32:29):
business, be making all this money and think everything is
good. But you want to eliminate and
diversify your risk as much as possible so that if something
still goes wrong, you still haveplenty of opportunity to win.
So guys, that is 18 years of e-commerce advice shared in this
one episode. I do hope you got value from it.
If you did, let me know by leaving a like if you're
(32:50):
watching this on YouTube or leaving a review, if you're
listening on any podcast player.And if there was one thing that
really stood out to you, please do me a favor, leave a comment
below and share because I'd loveto hear it.
And if you're totally new to e-commerce and you want to see,
in my opinion, the best way to start, be sure to go to drop
ship webinar.com. I will link that up in the
description as well. You can get a 2 hour for free
(33:11):
training from me there, plus a list of 500 profitable product
ideas that you can sell online. So check that out.
As always, thank you. I appreciate you and I will talk
to you in the next episode here at Drop Ship Lifestyle.
All right. Thank you, everybody.
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