I start my idea today (eCommerce + POD)

[door123]

I agree on software

I love physical products too, but you need something truly remarkable now to do anything with ads. Everyday there are thousands of junks getting displayed, for me the only way I see eCommerce work now for a new company is to have something amazing that can support organic growth and have a "sharing coefficient > 1"

Example: You sell to someone, he talk about your product to someone and generates one sale. If one on ten people do that, you have a 1.1 coef)

This is the only case I'd think about scaling ads now tbh. If it's 1, you're basically solely relying on marketing to generate sales. The day Zuckerberg is angry, your whole company is f*cked.

Still, I think Ads > SEO, since they have the same "getting f*cked up by algo change" level, but ads are way more scalable.

I would also add, it's much easier to afford ad costs with a recurring physical product, say specific soap or tooth paste and what not. I buy toothpaste that 3x more expensive that colgate bc of hydroxyapatite ingredients. I will continue buying it until I lose my teeth, I'm 26 now.

I currently have a recurring product on AMZ, have 20 active subscriptions and a few daily on off sales. Launched the product late last year, have done nothing to the product since Jan 2022, just refilling inventory.

My point is that recurring products can be hard to get the ball rolling, but easier to sustain the momentum.

 

[Jeannen]

02/03/2022

One of my employee had to resign to take care of her family, and the new employee I hired to replace her cancelled last minute right before I opened the pre-orders, meaning I now have to manage all customer service & social media myself in addition to the rest. Anyway, that's just how it is, whining about it isn't gonna change anything, so, keep grinding.

Spend the last 2 days building my funnel, should be decent. Ads, emails and pages are ready and will be launched tomorrow. I'm doing pre-orders so I can know what quantities are needed and avoid paying the inventory upfront.
If everything goes well (which won't happen for sure), customers will get the product in early May.

I also got a call with a potential client for my agency. They have a very interesting project, so I'll try to make them a really good offer, that will allow me to get some $ in.

I wanted to take a day out tomorrow and let ads work, but seems like I'm not close to taking days off again. part of the process

 

[Jeannen]

03/04/2022

My ads started at 12:00, and I just made my first sale at 14:00. Probably a fluke, but that's still good news.

 

[Jeannen]

Doesn't Amazon have a free POD service where you can input your design and if it sells you get a percentage? Maybe sell on your own platforms and link to your Amazon design store or fullfill through their POD if possible .

Every design will be different, so I'll hire a designer (that's why the entry barrier is higher than classical POD)
Amazon POD won't be really the best here, since Tshirts and apparels probably won't be my main offer

 

[Jeannen]

Bonjour
Implémente ce projet! le plus tôt sera le mieux, nous avons tous hâte de voir les premiers challenges auxquels tu vas te confronter !
Keep going Bro! and leave us feedbacks .

Merci !

 

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[Kid]

Interesting approach. And nice read.

 

[Chapas]

Any updates?

Following this thread with interest.

 

[Chapas]

Sounds interesting. Hopefully that can help you get that perfect persona's you really want. Looking forward to the updates!

 

[Jeannen]

Update 08/05/2020

So, I tried a tons of different ads variation and reworked the sales page but the ads had more than 150k impression, and 0 sales

That smells really bad

To be honest, there are tons of things to try, but knowing that on 150k impression, not even a single person made a purchase makes me feel like it's pointless to try to force the market, and that I should move to something else

I made a few sales in FB groups, that shouldn't be that difficult

That sucks

 

[Vadim26]

Update 08/05/2020

So, I tried a tons of different ads variation and reworked the sales page but the ads had more than 150k impression, and 0 sales

That smells really bad

To be honest, there are tons of things to try, but knowing that on 150k impression, not even a single person made a purchase makes me feel like it's pointless to try to force the market, and that I should move to something else

I made a few sales in FB groups, that shouldn't be that difficult

That sucks

150k impressions. Okay.

How many clicks have you got out of it? And were you optimizing for purchase?

 

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[Jeannen]

150k impressions. Okay.

How many clicks have you got out of it? And were you optimizing for purchase?

1200 clics, and 7 add to cart. I split tested optimisation for purchase, add to cart & content view

CTR are pretty low (1.2% average), but even this way it should have generated some sales

The perceived value of my offer isn't matching the price, that's the problem. I tried to rework the sales page, but even after it didn't changed

 

[Jeannen]

So, this project MIGHT be viable in the US (where is is) but not in my local market in my opinion. Peoples buy way less, and wants cheaper things.

There is probably a way to make this works out, but considering the low margins, I just feel like I'd rather spend my energy on something else.

 

[Jeannen]

Sorry to hear buddy. At least you took action and tried, and learned along the way. Which 99 % of people do not do.

Sometimes it is better just to acknowledge that it was not meant to be and swallow the pride, instead of spending more time and money on something that might not work (been there, done that!).

I am sure that you soon will find something you will succeed in if you keep taking action like you did for this project.

Have a great week and stay hustling!

Yup, I'm happy to have tested
The clients who ordered were sooo happy of the product, and I learned a ton of the dev side because I had to create my own addons for the store to make it looks good !
I learned to modify Shopify themes directly to add my own options, well worth it !

I'm writting another post right now, I'm going into a course / coaching, I'll make a following if it's a scam or not !

 

[Overlander]

This post has been inspiring. Keep going man. Good to see you were finally able to turn a profit! Thanks for sharing your progress.

 

[100ToOne]

31/05/2020

Just past the $1k day yesterday !!!!!

Congratulations man!

Very inspiring to read this topic. Keep going!

 

[OverByte]

Nice progress! I saw the strategy you laid out about add to cart retargeting, I was curious for your retargeting campaigns do you use conversion objective or traffic?

 

[aliosa]

31/05/2020

Just past the $1k day yesterday !!!!!

Hey, any updates?

 

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[OverByte]

Thanks for sharing your progress in this thread, it's very interesting to follow and congrats on the success!

Would you mind sharing a bit more about your ad strategy?

I also run an e-commerce store and have alot of trouble with consistency and scaling. Some days will do $500 in sales, the next $100 and trying to push more budget usually results in higher CPR. Sounds like you've got quite a bit of experience in facebook ads and I think hearing more about your strategy and could be really useful for myself and others.

Sounds like you are using LLAs, are you also using interest targeting? Are you using purchase conversion goal for these ads?

Do you run all your ad sets in one CBO campaign that has all the budget or do you have budgets set at ad level?

If at ad set level what % of budget is associated with LLAs / interests / retargeting?

Did you say you are spending around $200/day or did you just increase your spend by $200?

Looking forward to seeing more posts on continued sales and success! Cheers.

 

[francevalue]

Excellent! What's your profit margin?

 

[Boychamp]

Congratulations on your success! I won't comment on everything but I was reading and you were talking about struggling with being profitable on the front end. Here's something people forget SO often: Don't forget to target your PAST customers in a separate campaign after X days of purchase (depending on your product buying cycle or your up-sells/cross-sells) encouraging them to buy your other products.
What I mean: Consumer A bought product A but not product B,C, or D. So run an ad encouraging them to buy your other products. Yes, this is done through your email list but is also extremely effective to do via ads on low budgets. Just make sure to pay attention to your exclusion audiences and time delay to not be TOO omni-present in your customers lives.
Great way to encourage repeat customers and up your LTV.

 

[napapey]

Good job on your results. I'm from France too and doing approx the same numbers as you are doing. Keep going, it is worth it.
Also keep in mind that when you reach 82k, you'll have to pay the TVA for every € over 82k. I believe you're in "franchise de TVA" for now but once its gone, you lose 20% profit

 

[xy2_]

any news @Jeannen ?

 

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[Altitude]

What works on Facebook and Instagram for apparel (I assume that's what you mean by POD) depends entirely on the image. The copy is much less important. Does it look good, and will it look good on ME? That's what people are thinking there.

Complicated marketing strategies for something like this are generally doomed to fail. BUT remember the long game...

What's the long game?

To build customer lifetime value. To get customers that you can consistently sell to. That's the way to win with this: launching lots of SKUs, testing the ones that get buyers, and continuously selling your products to your customer base.

I'll give you a real example of what a client I worked with did in the UK. She launched a fashion line targeted at girls 18-25, primarily sold on Instagram. Her profit generally came from the customer base she already had that was willing to continue buying clothes from her. The customer growth came from Facebook. Generating sales growth for her was simple: test a bunch of those SKUs and see which ones worked the best. To retargeting, we used dynamic ads. Simple stuff.

The problem with her business model was that her products that she was producing depended highly on time based campaigns (Valentines day etc) so the rest of the year she wasn't selling much. She's expanding into more evergreen clothing now but it's proving to be much more difficult, as the key is in matching the DESIGN to the audience.

Hope that helps.

Amazing insights @The-J.

I'm following @Jeannen post with great interest as I too am in the process of launching a print on demand business. Thank you Jeannen for creating this thread.

I think what you said The-J makes a lot of sense since it might be a bit hard to be profitable with paid ads on the first sale. But I can see where the magic can happen where we can continue building a relationship with the customer over time and keep offering them new products.

My vision for my business is to eventually build in a subscription model with recurring revenue.

So in essence once the customer is acquired with paid ads even with low profit or at worse break even, the same customer can continue buying more products which in theory has a unlimited life time value.

 

[Altitude]

Just finished reading this thread from start to the last post. This has been very inspiring to read @Jeannen. Thank you once again.

With your current store, are you still doing print on demand or have you now transitioned into a different model?

I think the experienced you developed while building those first 13 or so stores you mentioned over the last few years really helped you to get the success with this current store.

You mentioned, you are now building a brand with this store. How would you define a brand versus those other stores you built before?

 

[OverByte]

It's impressive you have 20k subs on your list. Is there a particular offer or strategy you are using to build the list or are these just people trickling in after viewing your ads?

 

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[Jeannen]

Any updates? Looking forward to hearing how you're doing with this now.

Made more than $200k SALES, but profit has gone to shit. I'm not working a lot on it, to be honest, I've become a lazy potato, and I spend most of my time doing stupid stuff like playing video games, I have 0 motivation haha

Pretty sure I could have done much more if I worked on it tho

 

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[Stefan_durina]

Hehe, thanks !

I wrote that on my vision plan approx 1 year ago (same time as starting this post). Vision is really important. I picture myself being here almost everyday back then. Of course, it's my work that managed to "send" me here, but without the vision, I'll likely not be where I am today (even if it's not really that much to be honest)

Are you interested in an e-commerce meetup in Canggu Bali?

 

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[Jeannen]

Are you interested in an e-commerce meetup in Canggu Bali?

Hey !
Haven't seen the reply, but yeah could be fun !

 

[Jeannen]

24/06/2021

Those last weeks have been intense. I worked around 100h/week for more than a month now without any result. I'm starting to get exhausted, to be honest.

I really want to reach the next step in my journey. I tested lots of products, without much success tho.
I'm trying a different strategy this time, but I'm not sure it will work either.

If it doesn't, I'll probably take a small break. On the other hand, taking a break will waste even more time.

 

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[Jeannen]

05/07/2021


I'm going to try totally new products now, with way better margin, to see how it goes.
I have samples coming (really hard since I'm in Indonesia, and #1 reason I'll move out soon) and I'm contacting 3PL to see if I can get better shipping rates. I was kinda always afraid of buying inventory, but it's not THAT expensive.

Apparently, shorter shipping time can increase conversion rate by 20-40% according to a study.

So, all my focus right now is in setting up a proper testing strategy and find something that works, then try to make a brand out of it asap by creating cool content.

I started testing some of the F+S products at full price ($20) and got pretty good results on FB for some of them, so, that's a good sign !

I'm slowly trying to switch my promotions toward full-priced offers. If I can manage that, that would allows me to get 3PL logistics with way faster shipping time for those products, thus increasing the conversion rate.