Ask me anything about eCommerce (2012)

[biophase]

Hi Biophase - Thanks for taking the time to answer questions.

Question:
What did you do to initially bring your website to market?
Did you post on forums? SEO? Paid advertising?

Which venues did you have the best ROI and customer retention?

Did you use Google Analytics to track traffic or other platforms?

Please elaborate!

Edit:

I see some answers throughout the posts - just want to clarify strategies are still SEO and Paid advertising to start off.

Jason, remember that my website was created in 2007. The things that I did 8 years ago mean nothing to the current landscape today. I will still answer you, but you will see how implementing any of these things today would not work.

1) I did SEO, got my site to #2 on google using link building, articles, link pyramids, link wheels, etc...
2) I posted on forums and used my sig link to build more links
3) I used PPC and was paying $.03 a click

I don't know what venue had the best ROI, I just did them all. I looked at Google analytics maybe once every 2 months.

If you did the same today, you will not get the same, or probably any results. The strategies today are... Amazon first, ecommerce store second.

 

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[biophase]

thanks.

1) Would you recommend using Magento for a 1 man shop? Magento was a giant pain when we rolled it out, across a team. Now that I am on my own, starting stores, I am wondering if its too much for a small operation like mine. I would initially build the store and back end, with occasional help. Most good Magento guys I know charge $90/hr, not cheap. From my experience Magento is a giant undertaking, not sure if its good for small operations.

2) Whats your POV on Wordpress ecommerce stores? Worth it? Again, I am a small operation, building a lot on my own.

3) At what point in an ecommerce company lifecycle do you introduce marketing(SEM, FB ads, Display ads, etc)? From my experience we were live and grew quickly for two years before we spent any money on marketing. We were in a high growth niche with lots of exposure from sponsorships and events. Now its our largest expense.

4) What do you do to identify new trends in retail? Example, in the next few years, wireless electrical charging is going to be huge. It will be in the iphone, and I imagine a cottage retail industry to be created. Do you have any voodoo to spot these quiet potential retail opportunities?

1) I'm not sure what the hang up is. Magento is pretty powerful. Being a one person shop doesn't mean you would need less features in a cart. I don't use free software because it is normally a pain so I just pay for commercial software and then you get their support.

2) I think WP carts are getting pretty good. Professional software is so cheap these days, I always wonder why people starting stores are too cheap to shell out their money. If you don't have enough confidence in yourself to make back the $300 or the $30 a month, you should not be starting a business.

Now, with that said, if you don't have the money, then go with a free cart until you can afford a paid one. I did that for 6 months. I should have done it from the start. You will probably think the same thing once you start free and go to paid.

3) I instantly start SEO and PPC from day one. Even when I rank #1 on google, I still spend on PPC. It's marketing, people constantly see your ad and your website name every time they search.

4) I don't do much of that now. I'm not looking to expand with more stores or niches. I'm changing gears a little this year.

 

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[biophase]

I was wondering how much would having my SEO done for me would cost? I looked online and I found hundreds of different services, with some offering monthly subscription services for 500 a month, although Im not sure why SEO is a subscription service lol. Are there any SEO sites you could recommend that are cheap enough for a 16 year old to buy?

I think the first thing is that if you don't understand why SEO is a subscription service then maybe you don't understand SEO that clearly. $500 is probably the average going rate with lower end SEO companies. I can't answer your question about cost, but you will probably find a huge range from $300-$5000 a month for SEO.

I suggest that you (and everyone else) learn SEO yourself. It is probably the best investment you can make in yourself if you are going to go the Ecommerce route.

 

[biophase]

Ill chime in since I have experience.. Start doing. That is the best way. You can't read what works because there is all here say garbage out there. You need to test yourself. Create a few sites for testing purposes. Start throwing mud at the wall and see if it sticks. Also, start reading www.BlackHatWorld.com if you are really serious about it. I know people give me crap for saying this, but those who do say that, no nothing about SEO.

Dan

I went to a few Advanced SEO classes. They will all teach blackhat and you will never hear about it online or anywhere else because real blackhatters will not give away their good secrets. You have to pay for that knowledge.

Here is their philosophy...

If you blackhat your way to #1 and it lasts for 6 months before you get banned and you make $100k, that's better than whitehatting up to #7 and making $25k in the same time period. You just blackhat another site back to #1 in the next 6 months and make another $100k, vs. your whitehat site moving to #5 and making anothet $50k.

 

[biophase]

I'm guessing. I don't want to use the default Big Commerce skins, and I can design the site myself. However, as I only know HTML/CSS, I can't integrate my design into Big Commerce. There a several companies that specialize in designing/coding Big Commerce projects. There are also some SEO tweaks that Big Commerce needs out of the box.

Unless I'm missing something. If I can integrate my own design into Big Commerce, I wouldn't need much money to start at all.

Biophase: I'd be happy to discuss the niche with you in private, if you'd like.

Edit: And the end goal is to use profits to develop a full blown Magento site at some point (probably a $10-20k project, but that's later on down the road).

See, now I think you are getting ahead of yourself. Just yesterday you were talking about jumping in or doing something else. Now you are talking about a store with a custom skin, seo tweaks and moving to Magento later.

You don't even know if your niche will work yet.

Why not, open up a BC store. Change the template, header and some colors, get the store up with some products and then try to sell them? You can blame the store colors and cart on why you don't get any sales, but I know that any of those standard BC templates will get sales.

 

[biophase]

I don't know if I can make it big in the niche. I'm trying to do my due diligence and be reasonably sure that I can make it.

You can research this all you want but you won't know until you do it. What exactly are you researching??

What if you open your store and you find out...
Your dropshipper is unreliable and never has anything in stock or takes days to ship?
Your PPC costs are alot higher than you thought?
SEO is tougher than you thought.
or SEO is easier than you thought, then you get hit with a google update
shipping costs more than you thought?

It feels like you are afraid to take a risk or put in work. You are stuck in what the real estate people would call analysis paralysis. If you are wrong it will only cost you a few bucks and some time, but you will be much farther along than if you keep researching and waiting for that perfect niche.

I didn't even know what to research when I started my store. Heck I didn't even know SEO. I think I got 50,000 links to my site in the 1st month and it got kicked by google for 12 months.

 

[biophase]

Great thread!

Have you considered opening brick & mortar store locations? Why did you decide against it?

If/when you decide to sell, how would you go about finding a buyer? Pay a firm to list it for you?

Do you typically do standard 50% margins, or do you price under established retail?

Do you offer free shipping?

And finally, how long do you think it would take a newbie in a good niche to get up to $100k/yr in revenue?

I would never go B&M. I can't think of any reasons to do it. The overhead, employees, the time it takes to make a sale. It's much easier to be 100% online.

I would probably list it with a broker or call some people up in the industry.

You don't get 50% margins online. You are competing with other stores that if you price MSRP you will be way too high to compete.

I used to offer free shipping, now I charge for it. I've found it converts better.

I think that if you work hard, you can be at $100k within a year with the bulk of your income coming in November and December.

 

[biophase]

Well, I have an idea for an ecommerce/trade platform, but I'm pretty unfamiliar with the process of setting everything up. What process did you, in a nutshell, go through to set up your ecommerce site? Is it something as simple as just creating the platform (i.e. forums to sell your items, storefront, etc.), optimizing your search ranking, and the rest pretty much takes care of itself (within the bigger framework of the idea you're basing your site on) or is there a lot of finer details that need to be taken into account? Thanks for the info.

What do you mean by a platform? When you say the rest pretty much takes care of itself, what do you mean by the rest??

The process is basically:
buy a domain
get hosting
set up a storefront
get merchant account/payment processor
get traffic (PPC, SEO, Ads, etc...)
process orders

 

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[biophase]

I remember reading 97 percent of eCommerce sites make 0 dollars in their first 3 years. I am assuming after 3 years they go out of business. If you guys are doing this you will need to bust your ballz to make money.. just a reality check

I don't know if it would be 97%. But considering that opening a store is an event and it literally takes 15 minutes to OPEN a store, I can see where 97% would not make money. However, I don't consider that meaning that 97% fail. It means that most people don't put any effort into them.

For example, I probably have had 15 ecommerce stores total. The ones that I don't pay attention to never make any sales.

I paid $3k for one a few months ago and have not done a thing with it. Guess what! ZERO sales to date. It's not the store's fault, or the niche's fault or the ecom industry. It's 100% mine fault.

Sadly, most people who start ecommerces stores don't do anything with them once they are up and running. They just sit back and wait.

 

[BeingChewsie]

What ways are there to drive traffic to your site, besides adwords and SEO?

Display Ads
Social Media
Webinars
Seminars
Podcasting
Retargeting
infographics-like Pinterest
Videos
Content Marketing
Email/Newsletters
Press releases
Affiliates
White papers
Presentations in the local community or at national organizations that represent your niche or on slideshare etc
Forums
Q&A sites like Livestrong as an example
Referrals
Discussions/comments
Development of apps-web and mobile
Blogging
Philanthropy
Authorship of books
Free classes

I am sure that there are a million other ways that I have not come across, yet.

Sue

 

[5holiday]

hi Biophase

I wanted to add my thanks to this thread. I read all 33 pages, got some ideas and tried on my own.

In summary - it wasn't a blow-away success but I can swear hand-on-heart I learned 300% more by actually trying to put this thread into action. But thanks to your answers I got a fairly decent idea and I was able to start trying on my own.

I thought 'catnip' for cats would be a good starting niche as it had 6,600 broad search in my country (Australia) p/month for the phrase 'where to find catnip'. Unfortunately i didn't catch on about broad and exact phrase searches.

I found that I could buy the products at ~$5 landed and resell at $15. I planned to put in products in the store as out of stock and test the amount of traffic and see if it was worthwhile ordering stock.

I registered catnip information and supply Australia for $10 AUD and used OpenCart. I found out afterwards that Google doesn't rank Exact Match Domains very well anymore if they have a low page rank (or some other unknown metric).

I ended up using $60 of Google's AdWords credit and wasted $50 of it because I had no idea what I was doing. I learned very quickly how to write half-decent ads and I ended up with 44 unique visitors of which 4 unique visitors tried to check out with products in their shopping carts.

Moving on from this attempt (which only cost me $10), I realised that I could at least design a website that could get buying customers for $15 per paying customer.

I am now trying to:

1. learn more about AdWords
2. find a better product (higher margin to give me a decent profit ($20-$100?) after product and customer acquisition costs),
3. improve SEO and website design too.

Thanks again.

 

[biophase]

Hi Kenric,

I have a few questions;

1 - What photography set up do you recommend and use as the bare minimum for high quality photos of your products?
2 - Do you individually shrinkwrap (if applicable) and prepare the shipping and boxes yourself for each individual product sold and shipped out? I'm assuming you get massive quantities from your factory so your products don't arrive to you single packages and ready to be shipped out the way you received it from the factory. Where do you recommend purchasing shipping material and boxes for a relatively cheap price?
3 - What machines, equipment and software programs do you recommend for shipping labels and UPC label makers and machines?

Thanks!

First, let me say that Fotofuze is awesome and you just need an iphone to get good pics.

Bare minimum, assuming you have small products. You basically need a white background and white lighting.

For the background, you can use just plain printer paper. Tape it to the wall with the bottom curved so there's no bottom corner.

Get 1-2 good quality lights with a white bulb.

Get something to diffuse the lights, like a white photo umbrella, or white cloth.

Use any decent camera, iphone, point and shoot.

Put it into Fotofuze to remove the background.

 

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[Genester]

You want to avoid reading the 30 pages of valuable quality info in this thread? And just want to know what sites bio is currently running?

First off, why would he ever share his sites with anyone? He's worked his a$$ off to get them to where they are today.

Secondly, don't be lazy and actually read the stuff bio has posted. It's FREE!!

 

[biophase]

Great thread and great idea.

I have often thought of how nice it would be to have drop shippers but it seems Kenric started that way but not buys his stuff upfront and then ships it out.

Question Kenric, Was it tough to build up the money to buy, warehouse and ship out all the items you sell on your websites as opposed to having companies drop ship for you?

Dropshipping is nice. But it limits your stores. Imagine you sell shoes and Nike and Reebok tells you that they don't dropship. Only Addidas and Puma dropship. Now you have a store that is limited to 2 brands. At some point you need to decide if you are happy selling only 50% of the possible products in your store. If you are, that's fine. But how do you grow that way?

So you then decide that you sell enough Addidas and Pumas that you can afford to buy a truckload of Nikes. Bring them to your house and BAM now you got 3 of the 4 brands. Sales increase, and you bring in Reebok. It's a natural progression.

The shipping out part is easy. No real skill involved with that. I just got a Fedex account, bought boxes and started shipping. In many ways, this is much better than dropshipping because you know what you have in stock. You don't have to call your dropshipper every time somebody asks a question.

 

[PatrickP]

Bio, have you ever thought of manufacturing your own products?

That is what I do in the health care industry and the markup is nice. You also don't have to worry about selling direct if you do not want to, as you sell to a couple distributors and a couple large online stores, and let them take care of customer service etc.

I have a fulfillment company which sends out the orders which is why I started selling direct again. So no need for a warehouse, forklift etc. They warehouse for free and charge 1% of the order to send it our plus actual shipping which I collect from the distributor.

You are right about not needing a lot of employees nor an office. I work from anywhere I can get an internet connection

If I pay $7 for an item to be made I sell it to a distributor for $22. Overhead is a commission only sales person and 1 full time employee. I work approx 5 hours a week. BUT the first 4 years I worked countless hours sometimes working 25 or 26 hours straight on my feet filling orders.

BUT I never felt put upon or upset I REALLY enjoyed the physical work because instead of doing it for someone else as I had for years in factories I was doing it for my own business.

 

[biophase]

There is a saying, "hope is not a strategy". While I would agree that SEO is a tool to use, its not the only thing you need to know in order to get traffic. There are several stories on the web about how Googles indexing changes greatly effected businesses who rely solely/mostly on SEO. I would caution against relying heavily on SEO for your traffic. You of course need to learn SEO, but also know that its not a guarantee. Whether its paid traffic, or dominance in a niche through other means of marketing and PR, you would be better off having a safety net in case your SEO pipeline shuts off one day.

This is a good place to start;
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

You need to understand SEO and that will help you understand all the other aspects of traffic. Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, twitter, etc... all need to be used, but if you outsource SEO you probably will outsource your social media also. If you understand how these all work, you can either do it yourself or understand it enough to hire people.

Most people on here who want to start a store cannot afford to pay $500/mo for SEO, so they should start off doing it themselves. And if they can pay $500/mo, they should understand what they are getting for that money.

IMO, if you know SEO, you can make money on the web in any field. Also, you can be hired by others in any field. And you can get a job at an SEO company. It's a good talent to have these days.

 

[biophase]

what software do you use to determine the viability of niches

I don't use any software to do that. I use google keyword tool to find search volume and then I look and see what the websites selling the stuff look like.

 

[snowbank]

I remember reading 97 percent of eCommerce sites make 0 dollars in their first 3 years. I am assuming after 3 years they go out of business. If you guys are doing this you will need to bust your ballz to make money.. just a reality check

97% of people failing is only a reality check for people who plan on being horrible at business.

 

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[biophase]

Jump head first = take action now

Well that doesn't mean much.

He asked "I'm not sure if I should jump head first or continue to do more research on it. Several manufacturers ONLY sell to pro shops (similar to high end golf shops), and all of the "widgets" need to be set up/tuned for the customer."

Taking action now could mean, "I'm going to call a manufacturer" or "it could mean I'm going to order a bunch of stuff from China".

I just don't know why you would even ask this question at all. You are implying that one should either go 100% or do nothing. Why don't you just walk up to the edge and stick your toe in and see if the water is freezing or warm?

So my answer would be, why not just start the business slowly and take it from there.

 

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[biophase]

Not sure if this has been asked already..

Biophase (or anyone else with a good amount of experience), how do you go about your Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions, if you're just starting out and don't have the money to spend on a professional for advice? Do you eyeball someone else's and tweak it a bit?

I just grabbed one from some other site and modified it a little.

 

[JAJT]

I had more time than I did money.

I need to seriously overhaul my time usage per day. I need to REALLY spend it in front of the correct activities.

Right now I spend 6am - 7pm at "work" (shower, transit, work, transit, home...). That's 13 hours of indentured time every single day. Too bad I only get paid for the 8 hours I'm at work during those times for a loss of 5 hours of "worth" per day. Add 6-8 hours of sleep and I'm up to 19-21 hours of 'F*cking the dog' a day.

That gives me 3-5 hours of "me time" assuming that preparing and eating dinner takes up no time, no errands need to be ran and my wife doesn't mind being married to a ghost. On the plus side I get 2 days off a week to remind my kids what their father looks like!

What a waste of life!

Sorry for the rant. For some reason this thread got me thinking about the math of my day and I was not happy with the results...

 

[AllenCrawley]

What would you recommend for a newbie with no knowledge and experience with ecommerce? Or someone who doesn't know how or where to start? Thank You

1. Start by reading this entire thread.

2. Read it again and take detailed notes.

3. Then, if necessary, ask more specific questions.

 

[Viralweb]

such an awesome thread. Thanks to biophase and all the people who pitched in here, heres my success in the last month:

Found my first suppliers, Build my first bigcommerce site in a weekend. Uploaded 40 products and dropped 25 bucks adwords, and used a coupon for 100 bucks. im still on the free trial with 3 days to go and it has bought in around $1000 profit, so i'm stoked!

looking forward to taking this to the next level with a better design, seo and bigger product range.

Thanks again guys!

 

[biophase]

I thought that this may interest you guys. I took Roy's advanced SEO class about 4 years ago and it helped me alot. He is offering a free online ecommerce class in a few weeks.

http://www.seotrainingsw.com/2013/12/how-to-build-an-ecommerce-store-online-coaching/

 

[biophase]

If you don't mind me asking, how much under MSRP do you typically sell at?

This is about what I figured. Thanks!

I don't even know what the MSRP of my products are. I just set a price based on a profit that I can live with to start. If I sell alot of them, I move the price up a dollar until sales decline and then I drop the price. Eventually, they all settle on a price.

 

[biophase]

Thanks for your response.

Secondly, what are your "must-haves" when setting up a new store in regards to design and features?

• Credit Card Logos in clear view
• Phone number
• Trust Logos
• Store opening hours?

Is there any key things you view as a must-have?

I am setting up a Fashion store this weekend using Magento and will include all of the above. Something key for me is an EASY checkout process. I want the option to check-out without signing up. Yes, I will lose collecting details for my database, but I think it will get extra sales. Or do you disagree? I personally hate signing up for websites, especially if I only plan to make 1 purchase from that store.

I think that you must have:

toll free number (or a phone number)
SSL seal (maybe)
clean looking site

Customers hate signing up, but what they don't realize is that with any checkout you are actually signing up. They still enter every single piece of info required in a sign up. The only thing they don't enter is a password. You don't lose collecting anything. When you opt to not sign up, the only difference is that you can't log in to see your order. However, from our store backend, everything looks the same. It's not like we say, "wait this guy didn't make an account, let's delete all his information after we ship out the order."

Alot of times they won't type in their phone number, but they don't understand that it's in their best interest to do so. The phone number is used by us if they screw up their order or address. It's also used by Fedex drivers if they can't find their house.

 

[biophase]

I'm curious to know what made you get into e-commerce and how did you start?

Also what's the best option to learn SEO. I have a friend who does it as a job but was telling me it would cost like 500 a month if I searched for a company to coach me.

I wanted a business that I could run from anywhere. Ecommerce seemed like the simplest way so I tried to buy a store and ended up starting my own.

The best way to learn SEO is to start a website (any one page site will do), target a keyword, read about SEO and then try to rank your website.

 

[BeingChewsie]

I just don't know why you would even ask this question at all. You are implying that one should either go 100% or do nothing. Why don't you just walk up to the edge and stick your toe in and see if the water is freezing or warm?

So my answer would be, why not just start the business slowly and take it from there.

Agreed. I see this all or nothing issue a lot. It seems to also manifest in the "have to launch in a week and it has to be HUGE!" mentality too...I don't know if much of this is fear driven or not. I think it may be a fear that if you don't get in to whatever you want into "now" and make money "now", all of the opportunity vaporizes or something. This is of course not true, and more importantly, the more steps required, the more time it takes, the harder to replicate, the greater the barrier to entry. Most of us mere mortals have to start slow, we lack either the capital or knowledge or both to proceed any faster. I also think that "all or nothing can't start slow" is a symptom of chasing money, not an attempt to just solve a problem or fill a need for other people. Most of the time success comes from doing that which feels counter-intuitive to the nature of selfish humans, you have to be significantly less selfish, you have to put the needs of others before your own needs. It is all tied together, the main things people need to solve are their fear and their selfishness, those are the main drags on their success.

Sue

 

[andviv]

Can you recommend a book?

Really?

There is a book here... read this thread again, taking notes. That should be enough, no?

Or send me $500 and I will summarize this for you and send you step-by-step instructions. Deal?

 

[AllenCrawley]

Really?

There is a book here... read this thread again, taking notes. That should be enough, no?

Or send me $500 and I will summarize this for you and send you step-by-step instructions. Deal?

Exactly. I had zero experience in ecommerce and this thread helped us to start our first online store.

 

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