 So we're going to talk about selling online Anybody in the room excited about selling things online. Yeah, okay So this is titled so you want to sell online or a brief treatise on the complexities pitfalls processes patterns thoughts and dreams of Modern e-tailer and some tech too Yes, that's the whole title So who am I other You know what, okay, everybody. That's my business partner in the back of the room So I'm Zach Steppick. I'm a partner development and strategy at mind size I've been spending the last nearly 20 years building the web 10 years of teaching that to others. I'm a full-stack developer and designer I'm an e-commerce consultant and a serial entrepreneur and for those of you who don't know that term It really just means that instead of killing other people I kill myself So mind-size what we do is we help brands sell online with beautifully designed performance tuned e-commerce websites What does that mean? I mean, it's some great marketing speak, right? We want things to be fast. We want them to be efficient and we want them to look good That's our core on everything we work on We've done some sites here Oscar Mike Clinton electronics unwashed which is a dry shampoo and conditioner great company I'm wearing an Oscar Mike shirt today because mom you have to rep your clients But the more important question is who are you? So is there anybody in the audience today that is a store owner a Store owner a store owner Okay, anybody who wants to be a store owner who wants to Sell things online. Yes Okay Anybody who wants to build stores for other people Okay, I had a feeling that was gonna be a big part of the room here So our job when we're consulting with these clients on on building a store is to have guide them through All of these pitfalls and complexities that we're going to talk about today And if you're you know selling your own thing There are a few questions we'll go over in this presentation that talk about How to determine what you want to sell? so we're gonna start off just talking about selling online and You know selling online is a very large topic. There are a lot of pieces that go into selling even just one simple product online This is the dream that everybody has right. I'm gonna start selling things online I'm going to live on the beach for all but one hour a day And I'm gonna have somebody else do all the work, you know I'm gonna have Amazon ship everything and I'll never have to worry about any of it, right? This is the reality Welcome to home So, you know, you've got your products and bags and poly bags and boxes Shipping station and a giant warehouse and maybe a few other people This is how most e-commerce businesses start. In fact, most of them don't have a shipping station that looks this nice when they start So but this is the reality of running an e-commerce business. So The platform does matter We as a company work with both WooCommerce And easy digital downloads as well as Shopify You really need to target the platform that you're working on to the project, right? WooCommerce isn't gonna be the right fit for everybody Easy digital downloads isn't going to be the right fit for everybody and Shopify isn't either So that's why we support all three You know, it's important to fit the platform to the project at hand But what are you looking for in a platform? Well, as a store owner, you're looking for ease of use. You're looking for something that makes the daily tasks you have to do easier and Your daily tasks are managing products inventory and orders and Then shipping those orders, right? So those are your daily tasks those are what you have to do in order to keep your business running but You know, I say the platform matters It doesn't really matter There have been people that have been very successful that are still running Really really old shopping cart software There are people who are doing millions of dollars on Top of seven-year-old OS commerce installs it happens and So the platform matters, but it doesn't Matter as much as you would think There are a couple other considerations for those of us in this room that we have to make as designers and developers which platform makes it easier for us to do our job and That's part of what brought us to new commerce in the first place and to easy digital downloads because they do things the word press way it's it's a way that we're used to working and They have near infinite customers a custom ability customized ability. Yes customized ability The big thing with a platform like Shopify or any other software as a service platform is You're kind of limited by what the platform allows you to do or what somebody else is already written for the platform or Learning how to do something specific to that platform and it's completely different Than everything we do in the wordpress world. So We do some custom stuff in Shopify, but we highly prefer working within wordpress So I said we were gonna talk a little bit about finding a product This is really the first step in starting an e-commerce business, right? You have to determine what exactly it is you're going to sell and There are a few questions you can ask to try and narrow this down and actually find Something that you're going to enjoy selling or make money selling And that's where this passion or profit question comes in Do you want to sell something that you can be incredibly passionate about? Or do you just want to sell something that can turn you a profit? And there are business owners who have chosen both of these routes, right? Personally, and I think Scott back there the heckler would agree that passion is The important thing to us We want to be passionate about what we do So if we were to start an e-commerce business, we would have to find a product that we could be passionate about Because that's where we're going to invest the time Some people don't need the passion to be able to invest the time So they find something that they think they can make a great profit in I belong to a forum where I'm the WooCommerce expert not that that really matters, but it's called e-commerce fuel it's a whole bunch of six and seven figure e-commerce store owners and they share all of these stories about How their businesses are going what they're they're trying the things that they're experimenting with to improve their businesses and I'd say it's about a 33 to 67% split We're only 33% of them are really passionate about the product that they're selling And about 67% of them just went after products. They knew they could make money That's probably pretty standard across the board I don't know of a ton of eBay Sellers who were really passionate about going and finding things other than Some of my my friends and my girlfriend in the back there. She was passionate about what she sold But it's hard to be passionate about other people's products, too, so That's the first question though, do you want to sell something you have a passion for or something just for profit? The second question is are you selling a physical product or a digital product? so E-commerce isn't just relegated to what you can physically get in the mail, right? Amazon has made a killing with digital sales, especially e-books over the last multiple years now They started selling music now So there's really no limitation of delivering a physical product and that might be easier if you are Someone who doesn't want to have to staff warehouse or who doesn't want to have to Deal with UPS FedEx USPS possibly DHL Maybe less than truckload freight and all of these other things that you have to worry about if you're running a physical product business so Now that's another consideration to make physical or digital. I would encourage everybody in here You know something about something right? You're here. You're learning more about something today You know something Try to sell that knowledge Go out and write an e-book And that's starting the e-commerce business right there. That's all it takes So here's the other interesting question to me Do you want to sell your own original product or something that's already existing? So we see this in a number of different formats Original physical products original digital products or existing physical or digital products If you're selling existing products You just have to be better than the next guy that's selling the same product. That's really the trick You can make more money than somebody else who has the exact same product you do if you're just better at it If you have better customer service if you have a better-looking website if you have You know higher converting website because you've spent time on conversion rate optimization all of these things factor into whether or not somebody chooses you over the competition So that's another question original or existing products Another question if you're creating an original product is how are you going to source the product? Where is it going to come from? so I'm going to take a break from lecturing everybody here and just say I have a short story about a company that I'm wearing right now They made some very interesting decisions about sourcing that most people don't make anymore Oscar Mike is a veteran owned American made apparel company and because of that because they're veteran owned they wouldn't source from anywhere but the US and I think that's a very valiant thing to do. It's something that Really ties their brand directly to the people they're trying to serve because the other part of Oscar Mike is a foundation that helps injured veterans participate in adaptive sporting events so it's an awesome company and an awesome cause and So their sourcing had to fit their cause, right? So we all know that buying products in China manufactured in China's Cheaper than having them made here, right? So there's a premium you pay for an American made product today And that's okay People are willing to pay that premium if there's a reason for it So How do you source? Make that part of your story if you're sourcing your product a hundred percent American made tell everyone Make it a part of your brand if you're not Don't make it a thing at all. You know if you if you're helping a village in in Africa to Make a living wage by having all of your manufacturing done there That's a story. I've heard from multiple brands. So this is kind of an important one You can have the greatest ideas in the world But if there's no market, you're not gonna sell it, right? So how do you determine? whether or not you have a market for your product and There are a couple of ways that you can do that Probably the best way is to go and test it Find the people you think are going to buy it and try and sell it to them Build a small site Throw something up on the web with WooCommerce and storefront and no customizations other than throwing a logo up there and try it Verify and validate that your market exists and then put the time and the money into building out a bigger site And here's an important one fulfillment. So You're sitting in your your brand-new warehouse and You get your first order in and Now you have to ship it to somebody Anybody here know how to navigate the complexities of all three major shipping companies USPS UPS FedEx No, trust me. It's not fun But it's something you have to know right so you have to know how you're going to fulfill your products now We use tools to help our customers do these things there are tools like or Doro or ship station that will help you to Get the product into the hands of the person who ordered it They do that through allowing you to compare shipping rates Through all three of the shipping providers at once That sounds useful, right? Let me tell you the way that this used to be done and How awesome it is now So when I first started working with Oscar Mike back before mine size existed My friend Noah the the founder of Oscar Mike had called me in and he had had a big issue with The site going down over Thanksgiving Day, and that's another story that I'd be happy to tell any of you later, but They also had a problem where it took them over a half an hour from the time They got an order to the time they were able to put it in a shipping bin and have it ready to be picked up and The reason for that is the way that the post office and UPS had come in and set up their shipping They were running four separate pieces of software that were all tied to QuickBooks and So when an order came in on the website the website wasn't talking to QuickBooks So they had to manually enter the order into QuickBooks in order to get it to show up in the shipping software That then talked to the three other pieces of shipping software to get the comparative rates back But you had to go in and manually choose the rate from each one And then go back to the one and choose which one you actually wanted based on what was cheapest That process took them a long time. It took them about 25 minutes every order to get that entered So we got rid of all of that and we gave them Ordo and Ordo at the time was Incredibly fast for them We recently had to switch to ship station for them and that's because they started selling on a new channel they started selling through GovEx, which is a It's a website that sells directly to veterans and active duty military and They provide discounts for veterans and active duty military through that website So because they're on GovEx we had to have a solution that GovEx could talk to and ship station ended up being that solution But both do pretty much the same thing. They make that 25 minute process take about 15 to 20 seconds They click on the order They type in the dimensions of the box They just put it all in or the poly bag they just put it all in because most of what they sell is t-shirts so you can fit three or four in a poly bag and It gives them prices from all of their shipping providers. So really really cool stuff Here's another consideration that not a lot of people think about So There's a metric that's tied to subscriptions called monthly recurring revenue or MRR How many of you would like to have monthly recurring revenue without having to keep selling over and over and over again? If anybody doesn't put their hand up I'm going to call you out of line We all want this right so subscriptions give you monthly recurring revenue They give you a chance to sell the product for a period of time rather than just one time so in the WooCommerce world WooCommerce subscriptions Supports a new plugin that they developed recently That's called subscribe all the things which is a very apt name and Subscribe all the things lets you turn any product in your WooCommerce store into a product that can be subscribed to And you just choose which ones can be subscribed to and the order happens every month or every three months or every six months However, you can figure the subscriptions to happen So something to definitely consider offering to your customers or offering to your Clients if you're building a site pricing Pricing is a deep subject one that we're not going to be able to cover in depth or even anywhere close to in depth But I can Dilute this down to a very simple Mantra that we work by The best price for your product is the price a customer is willing to pay If you want to experiment with pricing Raise your price a little bit see if your orders go down or if they go up Lower your price a little bit see if your orders go up or if they go down There are other things you can do around pricing like free shipping Free shipping may increase your orders. It does by the way In almost every case offering free shipping will increase the number of orders you have so These are all things that You can look at a lot of companies in order to create a lead funnel Will offer something as a free plus shipping item and they're charging 8 12 $15 for shipping and handling on an item that costs 8 12 or $15 and People take it because free is attached to it, right? They're willing to pay $15 worth of shipping and handling get an item that may be cost $3 to make if you're lucky and So the best price in that case is free plus shipping, right? So That's great. How do we find customers, right? None of us can afford these Large ad agencies to do gigantic ad campaigns anymore, right? I Love this picture. I think it's great So Traditional marketing has worked and it still works, but it's a lot harder There's a lot more noise And it's really hard to be heard through that noise There's also email marketing How many of you get too many email subscription newsletters? Yep Uh That's one option if you did subscribe and you still want to get it There is a great website called unroll that will give you a digest every day of all the subscriptions You don't want to see pile up in your inbox That doesn't hurt them because unsubscribes actually can hurt a seller's Rating with their email service. So keep that in mind Also something to know if you're setting up email newsletters and marketing for your customers Um, so email marketing is great as A customer buys you capture their email address during the purchase process anyway And so you can send them a receipt ask them at that time if you can send them a newsletter or offers or Information about new products whatever however you want to word it get them to opt in to allowing you to continue to communicate with them and Email marketing Can get you new customers that haven't converted before so Another Tactic for getting new customers is search engine optimization. How many of you were in Ryan Irwin's session about SEO? He's great. I'm not going to try and repeat any of the things he did because he's much better at it than I am but Search engine optimization is part of your lead funnel. It's how you get people To your site to convert If they don't know about you, but they know what type of product they want and they search for your product type You better be near the top of that list pay-per-click How many were around during the time that pay-per-click was cheap and very very effective? Yeah, me too. I was there It used to be that pay-per-click was really an effective mechanism and it still can be If you are incredibly highly targeted to exactly the customers you want Okay, but it's very important that you are highly targeted Otherwise you're just throwing money away because the bids for these are higher than they've ever been So that's all doom and gloom right that's let's let's get away from that social media marketing though not quite over that wall where it's too expensive yet The targeting is better than it's ever been. It's better than any of the pay-per-click providers. So Advertising on Facebook is an excellent option for getting people to purchase a product and the greatest thing about Facebook is That the Facebook pixel will track from when they go to the ad through your site to the point of conversion and You can retarget those people and we'll talk more about retargeting later, but you can retarget those people Based on how far into your sales funnel they got It's pretty cool There is a man who knows way more about Facebook marketing than I could ever dream to know His name is Ezra Firestone and Ezra runs a blog called smart marketer It's an excellent resource For anybody who wants to learn social media marketing So I'd highly encourage you to check his his blog out And he's got so much energy like a ridiculous amount of energy Ezra Firestone and It's smart marketer.com So one of the things you'll learn from Ezra and that I learned from Ezra is that video is powerful Especially in social media Video is incredibly powerful if you lead with a video ad at the top of your funnel You will convert more frequently The other tip that I'll give you that it took listening to him a few times for me to really understand is That you should optimize your Facebook ads if you're if you're creating the Facebook ad for e-commerce Optimize it for conversions on your website All of the other stuff doesn't matter what you want is you want them to come to your website and buy something So Facebook is really smart about how they optimize ads as they run the longer they run the more optimized They become until they fizzle out because you've hit the whole audience, right? so if You're optimizing for conversions Facebook starts to look at the kind of customer that comes to the site and then converts and They optimize to get more of that same type of person to see your ad So that they convert so that they get paid more Because if they convert more You're they're getting paid more So and if they convert more you're getting paid more too, which is awesome, right? That's what you want One other thing that I'll talk about here Is creating a branded experience? How many of you have purchased an Apple product I know all I have to do is look out in the room, right? That unboxing experience is just something Completely different from anything else, isn't it? you know you you take the Cellophane off the outside of that box and you start to open it up and the care that's been taken with every single detail in How that product is packaged? It's amazing. It really is They put almost as much thought into the design of the packaging as they do into the look of the product Other companies do a really good job of branding we Are huge geeks at home. We even run a blog about geeky things called geek battery my girlfriend back there Rachel Leads that team and We get things like loot crate and geek fuel which are monthly subscription boxes that have geeky things in them from Funko figures to Random reprinted comic books occasionally that we get just fun things that we collect and you know have sitting everywhere in our house It's really great, but the branded experience that you get with loot crate for example That's a black box that comes with loot crate on it and you open it up And there was care in how the things were placed into the package and the way it's wrapped and all of the other things that they've you know included and It just gives you a good feeling to get that box and know You know you're gonna get some pretty awesome stuff and you don't know what's coming before it comes generally So that's kind of the you know the mystery subscription box model, right? But that branded experience keeps us as subscribers So in all of these things what we need to do is you know calculate another metric as we are looking at this called cost of acquisition What is the cost of getting a customer to the site? What is the cost of getting them to convert once they're there? How many times do they have to be retargeted? What is you know how much how many times are you actually paying for an ad to be shown on Facebook? And then them to leave the site without converting then shown another ad You know different ad hopefully if you've set up a good funnel the way azerest tells people to and What is that total cost of acquisition for that customer versus what their customer lifetime value is? We'll talk about customer lifetime value in a second So once you found your customers, then you have to keep on it, right? And customer lifetime value is what the total lifetime value of that customer is to your brand So over the lifetime that they are buying from you how much are they buying? So customer lifetime value is really important Cost of acquisition is one metric and there is a cost to acquiring a new customer who's never seen your brand before So if you have a repeat customer You're avoiding the cost of acquisition on those repeat sales most of the time Especially if they're coming directly back to the website and buying Remarketing however is a way to get them back if they don't just come back directly So using those same targeting tools we were talking about with social media We're using email marketing to get them back to the site after they've purchased These are huge If you don't remark it to the customers who have purchased you're going to lose potential sales Getting people to come back How many of you are familiar with Zappos? The Amazon shoe brand, right? Would anybody in this room Disagree with the fact that Zappos provides a superior customer experience How long do they let you return a pair of shoes for it's ridiculous, right? You can have worn it, you know worn them multiple times Return them. That's fine as long as they can be cleaned up a little bit. They're fine with it Even sometimes if they can't be reworn they don't care. It's pretty amazing Providing a superior customer experience sets your brand apart and gets your customers to keep coming back You only get one chance to make the first impression as any business, right? But with an e-commerce business because there is no physical touch point with the customer That first experience matters more than ever Because you don't have your personality to fall back on or you know the fact that Maybe they liked the way you dressed or something like that These are all things. I actually have heard from back when I worked in retail Well, I had to come back and see you. You were just so sharply dressed That was very a very weird thing to have somebody tell me But a superior customer experience Will make the difference between whether or not they choose you or a competitor the next time around and I don't know if you've seen the big behemoth in the industry But Amazon is trying to take over every corner of e-commerce, right? Amazon Basics is their line of products that they are replicating other people's products and selling them They're doing that to the their own vendors who sell through Amazon they're just Deciding they want to make it and make it cheaper and generally in China So providing a superior customer experience will make you stand apart Even on top of a Gigantic brand like Amazon if you have a better customer experience People will shop with you Even if the price is more than with the competitor Just because they like your brand How you fix things matters too So if something goes wrong The reaction you have to a customer letting you know what's gone wrong Will determine whether or not they come back to you in the future if they got the wrong size shirt for example and They call up or email in and your response is well I looked at the order and you ordered the wrong size. Sorry idiot. You're not gonna get anything Do you think they're ever gonna shop with you again? No so Well, they might if they're fans of ed to bevix in Chicago, but that's another story entirely So They're not gonna come back How you fix an issue Makes a gigantic impression on your customers, so we've talked a lot about All of these things that go into deciding how to start an e-commerce business, right? We've talked some about tools We've talked some about Now How you find a good product fit for you? We've talked Quite a bit about How you get how you gain customers how you retain customers There is no excuse Not to start To quote this crazy man on the green screen here If this is something you want to do with your life Don't let your dreams be dreams, right? Just do it. Just go out there and start something What's the worst that could happen? You could lose some money Okay You could lose some money by not doing it, too Yeah So just go out there and try If any of you have any questions about e-commerce about WooCommerce about Shopify about Anything that I talked about I plan on staying here until they throw me out so Just Look me up. And if you want to find me on Twitter, I'm at Zestepic. It's our company mindsize.me We have live chat. Please blow it up. We love it Thank you very much Yes, how long did it take them to get 2.0 out? It's a good platform still but It's not as developer friendly as say WooCommerce. It's definitely not as easy to use for You know a store owner as WooCommerce or Shopify are And there is still even in 2.0 a lot of legacy code that just it's not as fast It's faster than it was but it's really a matter of choice There are people who are on that e-commerce fuel forum that I mentioned before That are making millions of dollars on magento. So why not magento? I Don't know. I don't like it It's not my favorite platform by any means it would be like telling me I need to build a marketing site in Drupal but You know, it's to each their own, right? No problem any other questions Yes So generally we choose clients that we know are going to be not just clients but partners So we look at long-term partnerships with everybody that we work with That being said, that's not always a good fit, right? Both WooCommerce and Shopify Can be run by somebody who's trained properly Without any involvement from us We just find that most of our customers value their time more than Their money in that regard they would much rather just have us do it all When that doesn't happen we wish them the best and let them know We're here if they need us and what our rush fee is for when an issue comes up You know, that's just the reality of how things work, right? You're not gonna end up with a retainer for every client that comes through we try to Because we feel that we have a lot more to offer than just building a site and letting it go You know, and I don't know I kind of feel like every site I build is you know, one of my babies, right? I don't like letting them go. So if we can build that deeper relationship, you know, I'm all for it Any other questions That went down over Thanksgiving weekend Sure, I can tell that story So I've told the story a couple of other word camps. It's it's really sad and enlightening all at once So Noah called me on Thanksgiving and he let me know that the Chicago Bears had interviewed him in their You know locker room set and aired it before the Bears Packers game three years ago on Chicago local television Is it four years now? Wow time flies But they had aired it on television and The site had gone down After about 11 orders now at that time I wasn't involved with the site at all So I get this call out of the blue from my friends saying help My site is down, right? on Thanksgiving Luckily, I had my laptop with me So at my parents house where they have satellite internet if you've ever dealt with that that's fun I'm sitting there trying to debug a VPS, I've never touched at some random hosting company in Chicago. I've never heard of and All of their staff is gone because it's Thanksgiving. So nobody knows how to do anything for me So I have to figure out one Noah. Do you know where your VPS password is? No, I'm not sure so four hours later We finally figured out where the VPS password had been and we got the server back up by rebooting it Okay, but the more important story Behind this is why it went down How many of you have run a VPS in the past that has the website and the database server and the mail server and All the things all on one VPS Come on. We've all done this at some point and and The 12 simultaneous orders that came through Were enough to crash the email queue on The mail server which then took down Apache which took down the whole site 12 emails 12 So we are very adamant with all of our clients that they use a transactional email service Something like a send grid or a postmark or you know any of the Mailgun any of the services that are out there that are not SMTB based and are not on your server at all I Would rather fire off an API call to somebody else let them handle it and let my server keep running So that is the lesson learned from the Thanksgiving debacle because we don't know how many orders they would have gotten this was the biggest thing they had ever had happened for PR and The saddest part of the whole thing is given what their mission is and the fact that all the profit from all their sales goes into the front the foundation that they run That meant they weren't helping as many people so We fixed that really quickly and we made sure that was never going to happen again, but that's the story of what happened on Thanksgiving You're welcome Okay, any other questions Thank you guys so much. I'll be around if you have anything you want to talk to me about