Ask me anything about eCommerce (2012)

[biophase]

I still need to catch up on SEO but most of what I read up to now said "put keywords in your domain name".

That is somewhat old news now. Choose a good brand name. You will thank me in 2 years.

 

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[biophase]

Bio,

Is learning SEO the same these days with the Panda/Penguin changes? Do you still recommend learning it for ecommerce? Things change so damn fast these days!

I don't do SEO anymore. I use PPC and brand building. It's tough to stay with SEO because all your investment in it can get wiped out in a single update.

 

[biophase]

Therefore, when I sell a product on my website, I would like to "lock" or to "hold" the payement done by the purchaser until the end of the selling period (which varies according to the product - let's say 2 or 3 days in average). It's not allowed to debit the credit car unless the purchaser has won the products, hence the need to hold the payement until we know if the purchaser has won or not.

You can do this by setting your payment processor to authorize a transaction instead of a capturing a sale.

Basically it's a what a rental company would do for your deposit. They charge $1000 on your card so that amount is put aside on your card and when you return whatever you rented they can either cancel the charge (it never shows up on your card) or send the charge through (if you damage what you rented).

To do this you need a real credit card payment processor, not paypal or google checkout, etc...

 

[biophase]

Hey Bio,

Great thread and great blog! Thanks for all the insight so far!

Where do you start when researching a new niche. There will most likely already be a store out there selling it, so do you just look for those stores and then contact the mnfg's that they are selling and then just outperform them on customer service and ease of use, and marketing?

Pretty much. You can put them a better store with more choices or better choices. Don't make the exact same store as them.

Also, if you were to look into buying an existing ecommerce site off of Flippa, for example, what are you going to look for in your due dilligence?
Competition?
Site layout?
quality of backlinks?
Ways to improve SEO and increase sales?
Price that competitors are selling it for? this one is big for me, I have written off a lot of businesses bc i see it is avaialble for cheaper, yet the site is still doing decent sales.

On Flippa, It depends on the price range of the store. If it's a cheap store under $10k, I would just look at traffic and sales. I would most likely overhaul it as soon as I got it anyway so the software doesn't matter.

If the store is more expensive then I'd look at financials a little more.

I would buy knowing that I can improve its numbers by alot.

I never compete on price. I don't look at what competitors are selling for because you will never be the lowest price.

 

[biophase]

I have a question about shipping and customs.

I've got a prototype of a product being shipped to me from China. I've asked for the first real order container sizes and how far they will handle shipping assuming I need to take over once it hits my designated port. They've responded with a cost of $159 by sea and $1859 by air from them to New York for an example. This is for 9 total cartons at about 2'x2'x3' each with a combined total weight of 350kg.

My question is; once it's here, what other costs and logistics are neccessary to move it? I've heard of needing a customs broker and paying duties and taxes and all kinds of things but haven't found much solid info.

Thanks for this thread, it is very inspiring and crazy informative.

You will have to get a forwarder to handle customs and shipping. So let's say you pay $159 to get it to New York. Then you need to pay the following:

duties/taxes depending on what you are importing
some fees that they charge at the dock, like unloading, storage, paperwork, etc...
transport from New York to your city
delivering from your city to your home or business

A forwarding company should be able to just give you a quote for the whole thing. They make all the payments and then you pay them.

The $159 price seems too cheap. Are you sure that the $159 is not the price for them to get it from the mainland city to a port city in China?

If so, then you will also have to pay the ocean freight to get the containers to New York.

I think your most likely scenario is to pay:
mainland city to port city in China
Ocean Freight to LA
Duties and Taxes
Warehouse and Port Fees
LA to New York truck transport
New York warehouse to home delivery

 

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[biophase]

Is it wise to try and mimic those designs or do certain niches convert better with different designs?

I would always mimic the designs of the large ecom stores. My thought is that they must have many people and spend tons of money on research on what converts. So you can use their results as a baseline and change your template from there.

I personally like clean, white templates.

 

[theag]

Hi Kenric,

great stuff in this and Vigilantes thread.
I try to find out if my niche makes sense, financially.

I am researching with google adwords
and found 1300 global searches a month.

I calculated the following hypothetical profit:

40% CTR (assuming #1 on google) are 520 searches.
Conversion rate 1,5% from 520 is 7,8.

I make a profit per product of 110$.
That would equal to 858$ profit.
That is just for my main keyword.


The competition is high. So assuming a 7% CTR
would equal to 150,15$ profit.

My fear is, the niche is to small and the competition
to high, that I can rank on #4 or #5 in a reasonable
time.

Would you go for it anyway, because this is just one keyword,
or scrap it altogether?

You should always look at local searches, not global. Also, you will get 90%+ of your traffic from longtail keywords, so you have to examine how "deep" your niche is. IMO, 1300 global searches for your main keyword is on the low end for a good niche.

I recommend you take a look at the ebook from ecommercefuel.com, its really good! He explains the process very thoroughly.

 

[biophase]

Bio, thanks a ton for the knowledge bomb!

One quick question... Further back in the thread you said learning SEO is crucial in Ecommerce, and just recently you said you don't do it anymore.

For someone just starting in ecommerce would you still recommend they learn SEO or do you think PPC/FB Ads/brand building is a better way to go?

Google is changing algorythms fairly regularly now that certain SEO techniques can get wiped out on a change, so I concentrate on PPC ads more now. I still do generate content, before it's more for content sake vs SEO. You should still understand SEO because the white hat SEO stuff is generally good for business. For example, keeping the site content fresh and writing good content is good for your site in general as it is for SEO.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Kenric, how about some photos of your operation and warehouse? I think it furthers evidences that you are actually out there, living it, and doing it - not talking about it. Thanks for this thread.

 

[biophase]

Thanks for all the great advice!

Can you give a breakdown of your marketing spend as you progressed?

Example)
Monthly Revenue 500: adwords 50, seo 100
Monthly Revenue 1000: adwords 250, seo 100
Monthly Revenue 5000: adwords 500, seo 1000
Monthly Revenue 10000: adwords 500, seo 5000

I'm unsure if your marketing spend is mainly adwords and seo - thank again!

I hate to admit this but I don't really even know. I have my adwords account set for $15/day and I don't look at it too often. I can remember that when I launched a new store back in 2008, I spent $50/day to kick start the store. In that month I spent around $700 in clicks and broke even with the store even though the store had alot of orders. To this day, I think that spending right off the bat has helped me with low click prices and high quality scores.

I don't spend nearly enough as I should on any marketing. This is a weak point in my process. In fact, I've instituted a thing called SEO Sundays where me and another member on here get on Skype for an hour every Sunday night and force ourselves to do SEO and marketing during that hour. This is because SEO and marketing need to be consistent and spread out. Doing SEO for 8 hours on one day per month is not as good as doing it 2 hours once a week.

With some stores I have done $0 in PPC and all SEO. I only did this because my adwords account in them got banned and I never resigned up for another one.

BTW, I have one account for each store. I don't have one big account with all the stores in them. I did this because I figured I could transfer my adwords account with each store as I sold which would make it more valuable.

 

[biophase]

I would just like to comment, it's funny how I didn't realize until recently "ecommerce" is basically just affiliate marketing if you are only doing dropshipping.

Actually it isn't. With affiliate marketing the customer is not buying from you, they are buying from someone else. You are not building any presence or brand with affiliate marketing. If someone goes from you website to amazon and buys a product, guess what, they aren't coming back to your site when they need the same product. They go directly to amazon.

With a real ecommerce store, they are buying from you. They don't know you are dropshipping.

 

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[BeingChewsie]

Any advise on where to start?

I am by no means an expert and have just started to learn SEO, but I have found this very helpful: SEO: The Free Beginner?s Guide From SEOmoz

I am about as green on SEO as one can be and it feels very "hand-holdy" and easy to understand to me.

Hope it is helpful for you.

Sue

 

[biophase]

or you can open 33 online stores and get the odds back in your favor..

If you open 33 online stores and don't do a thing afterwards I can guarantee that you will have a 100% failure rate.

If you open 33 online stores and SEO and work on them all, I would be that you would make six figures easily within a year.

 

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[biophase]

I picked an adult niche because of what Vigilante said in his thread, (big margin and no brand dominance). At first, I ran into issues with most major web hosting services not allowing adult content. KWerner pointed me towards host gator who allows it, still haven't decided on a CMS though. I'm curious about what you said along the lines of, "It takes roughly $1000 to start your first site and $200 for each subsequent one. Could you shed some light on that? I've only spent about a quarter of that so far. Although, I still haven't set up a payment processor/purchased product/seo/adwords/ppc etc. Is that where the rest of that $1000 is going to go?

Also, which of these purchases are transferable between all my domains and which are isolated to one. For instance, after purchasing the web hosting, I learned that I could use it for all my domains. What about things like the payment processer or SSL or any of the other steps. I guess I'm just asking which purchases am I going to have to make for each domain, because if that's the case, I'll be a lot more selective with those items as far as which domains I build upon first.

I've been looking at products on alibaba. I'm a little confused because I keep hearing how manufacturers are reluctant to do small orders, yet in this niche, it seems like everyone has minimum order of maybe 20-100. Do you think its just the nature of the niche or are there a ton of scammers on there?

I'm really starting to wonder if I've gotten ahead of myself. After reading this thread, I thought the website was first and foremost after picking a niche. But then I read vigilante's thread and it makes me think I should order the products first and try them on eBay or Amazon to see if they even sell. I know I will have failures but I would hate to waste money if its avoidable. I'm not sure man I just know I'm hungry as hell and am taking action everyday.

Once I get the sites up and figured out, I'll post the domains for you to critique and for everyone else to check out. Thanks again for everything you've done thus far and continue to do.

Hi James,

You will probably pay for your SSL, $50-$100. Your shopping cart will be about $300. And your payment processor will charge you about $100 to start (probably more since you are in the adult niche). The rest of the money can go to LLC creation, adwords, logos or whatever business expenses you have.

You can transfer over SSL's, cart licenses and your processor could be also depending on if you switch niches or not. Most of the things you buy can be transferred.

Not sure about the minimum orders. You will need to dig down to see who is legit.

I think you may have a tough time selling adult stuff on ebay and amazon. Adult stuff seems to play by a different set of rules.

 

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[biophase]

Hello Biophase! Thank you for doing this!

How do you suggest is the best way to handle customer calls if you still maintain a 9 to 5? If the phones are not answered by a live person, I think it will reveal the size of my company. Is there low cost or free solution for this problem?

Enjoy your vacation!

The calls go to voicemail and if they leave a message I'll call them back. You'd be suprised these days how many people would rather buy from a small company that will call them back. They welcome the regular leave a message announcement versus hitting a bunch of buttons and then getting put on hold.

 

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[biophase]

Debating live phone support to back up my eCommerce retail sites.

Higher conversion rates and more credibility vs. increased costs of human interaction.

I just took a call from a customer (we don't make it EASY to find us) but obviously closed her. We could probably close every customer we speak with. However, our items are low average ticket. Spending 10 minutes on the phone with a customer to close a $15 transaction seems to be a losing ROI.

Your opinion?

You should definitely have a phone number prevalent on your site.

What I would do is...
Point them to a FAQ with answers to questions during your announcement
Give them your email address in the announcement
Make the announcement really long so they don't wait for the beep

Trying chat as someone else mentioned could work, but then you'd need someone sitting in front of the computer all day. But they can service multiple people at the same time.

To minimize phone calls, put all the information your customer would ever need on the site. Many will reading everything and never call. The ones that call, never read anything anyway.

We don't get that many calls a day. But we probably close 90% of the ones we get and the ones in which we return the calls.

 

[BeingChewsie]

I have been looking for business opp

Before I offer anymore advice, have you read MJs book?

How about this thread? https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/ge...-have-successful-entrepreneurial-premise.html

I think the above thread should be mandatory reading before anyone even looks for a business opportunity, because if you start from the wrong premise to begin with, you'll have nothing but trouble.

Sue

 

[biophase]

Hey guys, just checking in for a quick second. I am currently in Zanzibar and have not had internet for the past 4 days and probably won't for the next week. So I won't be on this forum until later in the month when I get back to the states.

Interesting things for you guys to ponder while I'm here in Africa...
Most people make $150 a month, $500 a month is a great salary
Interest rates are 25% on home loans
Most people pay cash for land, then buy materials as they save money. It could take them 10 years to build a house, but they have no loans on them

 

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[biophase]

So much misinformation about SEO in this thread it is ridiculous. Keyword domains and exact match domains will always work. Why? Because google cannot determine if you are searching for a domain name or or a keyword.

Dan,

I'm not saying that keyword match domains won't work. I guess for strictly SEO purposes getting an EMD or keywords in the domain may be better in the short term. But as a business, you are better off not choosing your business name just for the short term SEO benefits.

If you have a successful shop in 2 years, with repeat customers, email list, facebook page, newsletter, etc... will you with that instead of Dishwatersoap.com you have Bluesuds.com?

 

[biophase]

What is "social e-commerce" ?

Here you go, Patrick.

Let me google that for you

 

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[nzerinto]

When you guys say "try to rank your site", is there a tool you use or you simply type in the keyword in google and look for your site in the results? I know of the google keyword search tool but am unsure if you guys are using a tool to find what sites rank the best, including your sites, or if you're simply typing the keyword into the search engine and looking for your site.

Thanks,
Matt

There are a bunch of tools out there that do "rank tracking", some free, most paid. Here are the names of some of the most common, check them out, because some offer free trial periods:

Advanced Web Ranking
Microsite Masters
SE Scout
Authority Labs

They all specifically offer services to track ranking in the search engines. Additionally there are a few "all in one toolsets" that *include* basic rank tracking:

SEOmoz
Raventools

Bear in mind if you check ranks yourself (in a browser search), you'll likely see different results to if I did the same search.
Google personalizes results based on search history, location, platform (PC or mobile) etc, so at the end of the day, rank tracking is actually a pretty flawed metric, only good to get an "overall" view of how your site is doing compared to the competitors.

 

[biophase]

I researched extensively, I wouldn't get more than $40, $45 would be pushing it.

FYI, the $20 is priced CIF, so that's priced to my door...I believe duties are covered by the shipper as well with CIF, correct? What are your thoughts?

You still have duty fees to pay. It's alot of risk for a low payoff. You are sending out $2000 to make $2000. You bank account is going to slowly drain. Let's say you decide this is the product you want to sell and you are making $10k profit a month.

Your first order is for $10,000 of stuff on January 1st, you get it on Feb 1st and start selling. You move it all by March 1st. In order to do this, you need to order another $10,000 worth on Feb 1st, so you have stock on March 1st.

So you have $20,000 out of pocket before your first dollar comes in.

On March 1st, you have sold your Jan 1st shipment, so you have $20,000 in the bank. You use $10,000 to place your March 1st inventory order. You put the other $10,000 in the bank. So now you are moving along, making $10,000 a month and have a steady inventory monthly supply.

This is all great if everything moves like this. In reality your shipments can take 1-2 months maybe. You won't sell everything out every month. Sometimes you will be short, sometimes you will have too much inventory.

All I'm saying is that you will find yourself cash poor with this margin just because of the manufacturing and shipping times. Contrast this to dropshipping at this margin. You get an order for $40, send $20 to dropshipper, profit $20 immediately. You never run out of cash this way.

When importing you will have tons of money spent before the first dollar comes in. So you need to make alot more on each dollar spent.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Marked Gold.

 

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[Dan Da Man]

What do you think is the best form paid traffic/where should we go for paid traffic?

We had to deindex our site while we build up a similar one with more ranking potential, so we need to focus on paid traffic until the other site is underway.

Dude, every niche & every product is different. There is no "best" place to buy traffic. The best place is the place you test the shit out of, that makes you money.

What is right for me, might not be right for you. For myself, Adwords is working great. People are actively searching for a problem & my ecommerce site offers a solution.

My industry is competitive & it took us months of testing until we started making money. But from then on, we are almost able to double our revenue from month to month because when you buy traffic, essentially you are buying data.

Start testing. You are going to need cash. If you don't have some, then paid traffic isn't going to work. Even if you test one traffic source, you have to drill it down to different keywords, different locations, different landing pages, different times of days etc..

Start testing today so you can be profitable tomorrow.

 

[biophase]

So basically invent a new product

Well no. Make yours better. I'm responding to the poster who had a store in a small niche. Let's say his niche is desk lamps. Maybe he sells a bunch of silver or black swing arm desk lamps. But none of his suppliers make a red or blue one. So he makes those. Now he sells something his competitors don't.

 

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[biophase]

Thanks. Would you advise me to do that directly with my bank or with a particular payment processor on the internet?

You need to sign up for a merchant account and get a payment processor. I use Chase paymentech with authorize.net. But there are tons out there like First data, group ISO. All of them should be able to authorize and not capture a sale.

 

[biophase]

Kenric,

When running multiple ecommerce sites, what types of systems do you have in place to help keep track of sales, emails from customers, etc? So that it's less overwhelming and easy to maintain...

Thanks for starting this thread,

Cory

The backend of most stores can keep track of everything for you. I recently started using Webgility to manage sales, shipments and quickbooks stuff.

All the phone calls come to a single line. I'm just using Gmail and its labels to organize everything. I was going to go to a help desk ticketing system but it wasn't user friendly enough. I could see me going there in the future.

 

[biophase]

So far from your blog and post ive picked up:
- PPC or Adwords Early
- Buying, Storing, and Shipping products from home.
- Minimum atleast 6 months to break even
- SEO from the beginning
- Directing customers who call to your contact us or FAQ page
- Choose the right cart for growth and your overall goal
- Learn SEO and be proactive in SEO weekly (blog, strategic blockers, KW research, etc)
- Stock up on best sellers for holiday season
- Most of your revenue comes from the holiday months.
- USPS will come to your house/warehouse to pick up packages
- Amazon and ebay are great as a loss leader for customer acquisition (from the forum)

What are some shortcuts to breaking even earlier that you have learned over the years??

Thanks,
Rich

You have covered it pretty much except the 6 month breakeven. I don't know exactly where you got that. But some stores made money within a month, some took longer. I think it depends on the market you enter.

You can breakeven earlier if you don't spend money on PPC or SEO, but that's because you spent less and you make less to breakeven. My first store made money with its first month. If you PPC is low, you can make money very fast. Choose the right keywords that cost a few cents.

 

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[biophase]

For some reason I cannot PM the original poster.

I have a ecommerce site that has been up for one month, but with no sales. I've been running an adwords campaign and am getting traffic. I am a professional copywriter and know my adwords ad has no problems qualifying and getting the kind of traffic I want, but I still have no sales. Can anyone help me out by taking a look at my site?

I turned off PMs. I don't want to answer specific questions for people. If you want to post your store on this thread I can take a look at it. That way, everyone else can also learn.

The first thing I would do is look at your analytics and find out what the people are doing once they get to your site. Install some video capture to see where their mouse is going. Then look at your funnels to see if anyone is adding to cart and how far they are getting in the checkout process.

So let me ask you:
Are they landing on the product page that they searched for?
What does a visitor do once they get to your site? Do they bounce? What is their next page?

 

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[biophase]

Hi Biophase,

I have 3 e-commerce websites and found myself with problems I could not solve, ie Order Processing and Customer Service.
Right now I am doing both order processing and customer service myself; take up most of my time. A lot of 15-hour days. Not how I want to live my life.

I will be outlining the problems I face every day and what I want to accomplish but do not know how.

The problems:

1. Customer calls me before placing an order. A handful will place their orders on the websites. The websites are not very user friendly right now because of the incompetent web developers from India.
2. Usually after a 10 minute chat, I would send the customer a PayPal invoice to pay us using their PayPal accounts or Credit Cards. Some would ask for our bank account details, which I am happy to provide to avoid the PayPal fees.
3. After payment is made, I would go through the order details and create a set of instructions which I will pass down to my manager who will then pass the work down to other employees.
4. Other employees will send completed work to the manager and the manager will send it to me and I will show our customers what have been done.
5. Unhappy customers will contact me and I will then pass the details of the complaints to the manager who will then take appropriate actions.

I am stuck and will appreciate your advice. Thank you.

First thing I would do is try to get most orders done on the website. If your site is not easy to use, that is your problem and not the customers'. Why can't you resolve this issue?

There should be no need for a chat and then an invoice sent out if you fix the first issue.

Why do you have to create instructions, are the orders not clear to your employees? Why can't your manager do this part?

Why doesn't your manager send work directly to the customer?

Sounds like your manager is not really doing anything. Does he have people skills? LOL

Tom Smykowski's interview with Bobs — llakomy.com