 We are here for 10 things I learned about launching my first e-commerce store. Do one of you want to fix that? Yeah, how do I do that? So while they're doing that, I will tell you about our two lovely speakers. The first is Shada. We're not on the internet right now. Okay, do you need to be on the internet? Here. Sorry, we're dealing with technical difficulties all day. Presentation. Hey everybody, just a reminder about Wi-Fi today. If you can please refrain from joining either Wi-Fi on your mobile device and just use your laptop, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. I think this is it. All right, so Shada has been called one of the most influential women in WordPress. She's currently the co-founder of Restart CBD, a THC free CBD wellness company. She's formerly held positions at WP Engine and WebDev Studios. Additionally, she runs a popular travel and lifestyle blog called With Shada, which has afforded her the opportunity to work with brands ranging from SoulCycle to the Westin. Shada has spoken at over a dozen WordPress related events and has been to over 30 plus word camps globally. When she's not busy traveling, which sounds like a lot, you can find her at her hometown of Austin, Texas, pursuing her passions for fitness, wellness, and self-care. Our other speaker behind me is Patrick Rawlin. He is an e-commerce educator and entrepreneur. He has written books, created video courses for LinkedIn Learning, and has helped to run WooComp all three years, and is the co-founder of WooSesh, which if you don't know that, it's an online event. He's obsessed with e-commerce and entrepreneurship. He wants to help you succeed, and he is launching his own physical product, Fry Thief, in early 2019. Here you go. Thanks so much. This microphone is on. It is. Okay, perfect. You guys can hear me. Awesome. Okay, well, hello. Like AJ said, I'm Shada. This is Patrick. This is a little bit of introduction about who we are. So I'll start. I founded Restart CBD. It is a CBD wellness brand. It's kind of the foundation for what I learned, launching my first e-commerce site, hence the name of the title. Previous to that, I was at WP Engine for a handful of years. Most recently, I was at Web Dev Studios, a very popular WordPress agency in this space, and then I've just been a WordPress consumer and user for the past decade. And my most recent personal project is my travel and lifestyle blog called With Shada. And I wrote my sweet dear friend Patrick into this presentation with me because he's so knowledgeable when it comes to e-commerce. So I think I've done everything when it comes to e-commerce. If there's something I haven't done, let me know. I built sites for clients. I was on the WooTheme support team. I was on the WooCommerce development team. I product managed WooCommerce, meaning I plan the features that go into it. I now write books, create courses, and I recently launched my own product. So if there's something you can do regarding selling online that I haven't done, let me know. I think I got it. So this is the thing I just launched just a couple weeks ago. If you see the little dot on the far left side, that's my goal. And then in one day, I doubled my goal. And it's been a really, really good experience using, I guess, using all the theoretical knowledge I've acquired and then applying it to an actual product. And I'll talk more about this. And for me, this is our website. Like I mentioned, I've been working in the WordPress space professionally and personally for the past 10 years. This is my first time actually ever launching a site where I was taking people's money, which is a whole other hurdle that brings about a lot of different challenges that I was not ready to really deal with. And I think what makes my e-commerce story a little bit more, I guess, tantalizing is in the cannabis space. And so it's one thing to kind of be doing e-commerce. But when it comes to cannabis or other high risk types of industries, there's a whole barrel of other types of challenges that we don't necessarily talk about. So hopefully today we're going to get into some of those challenges for you guys. So most of my background is in theoretical stuff. Like I have the principles. I read all the blog posts. I watch all the videos. I'm going to be telling you how everything should look. So whenever there's a guy who's like, oh, you just installed this plugin and it'll all work perfectly. That is me. Shada is going to give us the reality. Yes, the reality. The hard cold truth of it's not always as easy as downloading a plugin and integrating it into your site and then hopefully launching and accepting people's money. So this is a brief little kind of table of contents, if you will. This is what we're covering today. So payment gateways, POS systems, testing, a little bit of marketing, figuring out who your audience is, fulfillment, developers, and hiring a developer. Now what point do you do that? And then for those of you who may be dabbling in brick and mortar in addition to e-commerce, we'll touch on that at the end as well. So the first one, payment is easy, right? So when you first get into e-commerce, there's literally hundreds of payment gateways out there. And years ago it was really, really complicated, which one you pick and how much you pay them and all the features. Luckily in the last, I'd say five, six, seven years, Stripe has just sort of exploded. It is one of the best default choices you can make. They free developer accounts, standardized rates, and no commitments, no long-term contracts. These other payment gateways over here are also great. I personally like PayPal as a backup gateway. So if someone has a weird issue with their credit card, it's nice to have PayPal as a backup to your, just something else other than credit cards. Both of them are free for WooCommerce. You can install them through the Welcome Wizard. Super easy to set up and nothing ever goes wrong. Except until it does. In industries, we took the cues from the patricks of the world and I said, I'm gonna play with PayPal, right? PayPal is easy. It integrates with WordPress, integrates with WooCommerce. Wrong. So reading the terms of service for PayPal, depending on what type of e-commerce business you are operating, it might not actually fall into their terms of service. So PayPal was one. Actually, all of them on the previous screens are ones that I, as a business owner, launching a e-commerce site cannot play with. Essentially, what I've been hearing is PayPal will not only not let me work with them, but if I do it under the table, which is a little bit of what I had been doing in the early days, they could essentially, if they found me, take all the money that I had made on PayPal and confiscate it, essentially. And so when you're building a business, you want all that money for yourself to reinvest back in your business. What you realize was the easy way is not necessarily the right way depending on what industry you're in. And so if you're in one of those different industries, making sure that you're doing your due diligence, a lot of times these brands, these, you know, integrators aren't even going to say, we don't work with this industry. So making sure you're actually reading their terms of service, doing your research, talking to, you know, the right people to make sure that you're setting yourself up for success from the foundation, which is commerce, you want to take people's money. So the next one is accepting payment in store like a boss. So if you've been in a coffee shop in the last 10 years, you've probably seen those little square terminals. Square has, again, taken the world, the POS point of sale system, hurled by storm. They have all the little buttons, they accept the credit cards, and it all works perfectly. And when I was product manager for WooCommerce, I helped build the square integration for WooCommerce. So it'll sync inventory, it'll sync reports, it'll also do all of your payment, or it also can do all of your payment processing for you. There's a lot of really, really cool features that sort of integrate these beautiful point of sale systems in store with your online store with WooCommerce. So it should all work perfectly. I'll push the button. So the reality is, is anybody seeing this meme, that I want money meme? She wants her money. That was me. I was like, I want my money. I want to be able to take it. I want to take it online. I want to take it in store. And so while I'm not going to get into the specifics of what in particular technology that I was using to integrate this, I had to do my due diligence and do my research because the systems that were existing out of the box, the traditional ones that WooCommerce was promoting that most of my developer friends were promoting were actually not things that I could fully take advantage of. And so I had to not only make sure that I could accept people's money, but I had to make sure that it tied in with WooCommerce so it could pull from my inventory because what good is processing $75 if I don't know who bought it and what type of product they bought from me. And so I had to spend, I guess, what I did to talk about was I launched this e-commerce business six months ago. So this is a completely new endeavor for me and I've spent the last six months basically learning by trial and error because the industry is so new that there's not a lot of actual things on the shelves that I can just go pull from and buy from and integrate into my system. And so again, depending on what type of industry you're in, depending on what you're trying to sell, making sure that you're doing the research to make sure that your payment merchant speaks to your POS system, which speaks to your e-commerce system. And so yeah, we want to make sure they're all speaking so we can get paid. This is a good one. Test everything. So if you're like me, maybe you go to a lot of WordCamps, you read a lot of blog posts, you watch a lot of videos, you talk to people, and when you do all these things, you might be able to predict like 95% of the problems that a website could have. And that's great because once you know the list of things that could go wrong, you can build automated systems and a lot of managed WordPress hosts will take a daily backup. There's systems that you can put in place to help you and there's processes you can put in place to help you. So I have a launch list and an update list for WooCommerce. So when you launch your WooCommerce site, do these 10 or these 20 things. And when you update your WooCommerce site, move it to the test site, turn your payment gateway into test mode, do a transaction, move it back to the live site, turn it from test mode back to live mode. I have a whole process in place that you don't mess anything up. And then I want to talk about one tool specifically. This is Robot Ninja. So there's a lot of really good tools out there. This is one of my favorite ones for WooCommerce because it'll test all of this stuff over here on the right. So it'll test, does the shop page load? Does a product page load? Can a guest check out? Can a customer check their login page? All that stuff. There's a lot of really, really cool software and tests out there for you. And once you have all the tests in place, transactions where it's using money, there is a paid tier, and it offers a certain number of tests that you can take advantage of. So there's different tiers for different things. The reality, who has an eCommerce site today? Raise your hand. How many of you test your site, let's say once a month? Okay. I saw it. Y'all should have turned around. Out of the hands that were raised, maybe one or two was actually raised. I saw someone who comes from the industry who now owns her own eCommerce site. I don't test as nearly as often as I should, and it put me in some really uncomfortable positions, basically leaving money on the table. So we launched subscriptions. Yay, we're occurring revenue, basically. So a customer could come to my site buy a CBD oil that would be shipped to them once a month, and I thought that I would buy the subscription plugin from WooCommerce and I would activate it on my site and it would work. It would take people's money and it would set them up for a subscription service. Wrong. So basically there was a period of time, let's say, maybe a week, it might have been longer, that I was not realizing that my site was actually not processing subscriptions in particular. And it took a customer who happened to be a friend of mine, so you can imagine how many people have hit my site who have not said, hey, Shada, I can't actually buy from you. I see this customer coming into my store because I have a brick and mortar in addition to running e-commerce and he's a friend and he said, hey, your subscriptions aren't working. Oh my God, I just about blew a cask and I'm like, what do you mean my subscriptions aren't working? How do I test my subscriptions working? Is this something I'm not doing, something I should be doing? And obviously the answer is testing. And so testing is a very unique thing to your site, a unique thing to the products that you are selling. So I'm not going to give you a prescription to say but figuring out maybe let's say anytime you're launching a new feature or a new service or a new solution so when I launch subscriptions that should have been an indicator for me as a business owner to test everything right then and there. And so now, thanks to friends like Patrick, I've adopted Incorporating Robot Ninja who for a premium fee will actually process payments. So I, because that was a barrier to entry for me, I was like every time I launch a new product I have to swipe my credit card and see where it works. It just seems like a really messy kind of way to go testing. So Robot Ninja is a great solution that will handle it all on their back end to make sure that you're actually able to accept people's money because what is e-commerce if you don't have commerce, right? No money. So this is a personal one for me just with a marketing background. Use all the social medias to market, right? Everybody's using all of them, every single one of them, correct? So the expectation is just be on all of them. Do all the marketing, use SEO, buzzword, buzzword, hashtag, hashtag. This is a little screen grab of my company's Instagram feed because my background is marketing. To me, social media is easy and so I can understand as a store owner you're just supposed to be online, right? You have any commerce site, you sign up for Twitter. I will say caveat if you don't own your name on all the social media platforms even if you're not on them and you are doing yourself a disservice. So for example, I'm not on Twitter really as a business. My customers are not on Twitter. That's not a place for me to do business but I have a Twitter for my business name just as a check the box type of situation. But so for me, the expectation is marketing is really easy. So I'm going to talk about a few things. I think this is one of the hardest things for a brand new store owner to do is acquisition, getting people to your site. And Tracy talked about this in the last talk. Particularly on Facebook ads. So you can see in the last month leading up to my launch I was getting 92 cent leads, which is pretty good. So for 92 cents I'm getting an email address. They're going into an email sequence. There's seven emails, they learn all about my product and they're on the email list. I can send them an email when it launches. That was great. However, one of the things I didn't consider is that at the end of November and through December of virtually the same campaign was getting $11.52 leads and for a $15 product that's pretty terrible. So I didn't realize, oh, every other e-commerce company is also running Facebook ads after Black Friday all the way through December. So I basically had to turn off my marketing for a month, over a month, because I didn't predict this. And that's kind of brutal. I probably could have had another 300, 500 people on my email list if I had planned for this. But I didn't know this would happen and I only figured it out by doing it. So I just want to talk about Tracy talked about this in her talk as well. There's a great blog post here that just talks sort of about how ads have evolved and you can see before 2014 things were expensive because there wasn't good targeting. Facebook really improved their targeting 2015, 2016 and ad prices were rock bottom. That's when you saw a million webinars about Facebook ads, how efficient they are. I'm getting five cent leads. I'm getting eight cent leads. And then 2017 starts picking up in 2018 and you have to be a good marketer now to use some of these platforms. You cannot just put a picture up, put a title up and the ads work. So this is a changing landscape and that was hard for me to learn. Something that actually I came across early in my marketing days and this is really meant to just shock you and slap you in the face a little bit. These are a handful of marketing technologies that you could use at any point depending on the size or scale of your business. And so I understand when we say marketing is easy, social media is easy it really isn't. And so the reality is lean into what you're good at. Tell your story and learn to tell your story so well. Again, you don't necessarily need to be on every single platform that exists. We're going to talk a little bit about finding your customer and marketing to your customer. Like I said, my customers from my acknowledgement are not on Twitter. And so I don't need to spend time being on Twitter because that's not where they are. My industry cannot take ads out on Google or Facebook or Instagram because cannabis is still in the gray area. So I have to use alternative measures to get my marketing done. And so I've adopted things like influencer marketing by being able to go work with different individuals who can activate in marketing and get my brand out there. And so basically don't feel like you need to do all of it but find what makes sense to you your brand, your customers and then lean into that. So if you build it, Patrick, they will come, right? Totally. So I'm going to pretend that this is me, the guy dancing. I want all the money. I want my customers just to be buying products, buying products. I launched my new business. I put it online, shout out what's up. And people are going to show up to my site, right? They're going to find me because I launched. It's kind of the same analogy of like if a tree falls in the forest, did anybody really hear it? And so it's super easy to stick out with unique branding, a slick product, a quality site. Those are checking all the boxes, right? So people are just going to show up and spend their money with me. So I thought I launched my Kickstarter project very well. But when I looked through the tabletop games category, and just the way Kickstarter does this, this is tabletop games and related categories. I'm competing against 18,000 other projects right now, which is a lot. I fund in 40 minutes and I'm only on the fourth page of popular projects. So you cannot just launch something and have... Just assume you launch a website, launch them in Kickstarter, launch something wherever, and that people will find you. So I just want to talk about this for a little bit. So if you see the pie chart, the green segment is what Kickstarter sent me. People from the Kickstarter platform backed my campaigns, which is about 47%. But that only ever happens if Kickstarter knows they can make money off you. So my campaign funded in 40 minutes at which point Kickstarter knows they'll make all this money. And then they started recommending me to other people. I had to, if you see it down at the bottom, I brought in the 48% of external refers and the little 4% at the bottom of customer refers, which is like friends and specific people. I brought in all of that, which brought in this initial chunk of money, and then the platform recommended me to other people. You cannot just launch something and get money. So just to get into the nitty-gritty here, if you look at these top five rows, so the first one is Facebook. I posted there. The next one is direct traffic. That's all my emails that I sent to people. The third one is search, which means people are searching for my brand name on Kickstarter. So that's also kind of me. The fourth is... I can't quite see that. But I think Twitter and then Facebook ads. So I have the top five traffic sources. That is all me. And then Kickstarter recommends me in, like, the tabletop games categories, in advanced discovery or through my profile. So there's a couple places where they recommend me, the top five traffic sources. 10 on the Internet. So in the right-hand side, I included a piece of editorial content that I was able to secure on my own by someone seeing me telling my story authentically and not through paid advertising, but really through just social media. And they asked us to be featured in this article by Culture Mab, it's a local Texas distributed kind of online magazine. But so basically to me, the point is to take advantage of organic media. So yes, there is a pay-to-play opportunity. Absolutely. If your industry allows for you to be paying for ads, take advantage of it. But get creative. Figure out who the target people are that you're trying to get your product in front of. For me, again, with a marketing hat on, part of how I secured this was I wrote a press release for my business, what I was launching, and I sent it to the right people who were potentially writing about these topics, who were interested in these topics or who could help tell my story. The first transaction happening at all, it just took me taking the time to sit down and construct something that, to me, was the way that I was going to reach my target audience. And so again, I knew that social was important, but I also knew the power of traditional media. And so being able to rely on yourself to go and secure things for you is really powerful. And so I say that to paint a picture of, you don't have to have all the money to spend on ads. You don't have to be the biggest, brightest, best brand on the market. But have a story, have a unique point of view, and get really good at telling that story to as many people who will listen to you. Like this. This is a very good example of me taking an opportunity to get in front of you guys and tell our story. So hopefully it drives traffic to my site. Settle marketing trick right there. But it certainly pays off, and so absolutely I probably have sent over, let's say, 100 emails to different press contacts. One person is going to respond. You know how much traffic my retail store gets from this article alone? I would say at least like 40% of the people who come through the door and I ask, how did you hear about us? And they'll say, culture map. That's all you want people. You want these things to happen so that you can make money. So I know exactly who my customer is. So this is a personal one. As you can tell, I'm a very bubbly personable gal who takes CBD personally. The quick story is I broke my pelvis three years ago and I personally found relief with CBD as a way to heal my body that wasn't pain medication and it wasn't steroid injections and it wasn't surgery. So when I was launching this company, I thought, hey, here's an opportunity for me to go tell this story really uniquely. But I think I'm going to market to me's the 20 to 30 something, maybe millennial men and women who, you know, they react to nice branding or to fun, quippy type of things. And so when I launched my business, I was like, get everybody else. I want to sell to 30 something so as you can see in some of our marketing, we do partnerships with local juice shops and we have a secret Facebook group and we're kind of sarcastic about it. It's a secret, not secret. And so for me, wow, this is still pretty much true to who I'm marketing to. When I first launched, I was really just marketing to one and that was me. Versus. So I think both of us made I don't want to say mistakes, but I think both of us learned a lot here. So in the board game world, most of the people who buy stuff are men. So in my card game, the top reward is you can add yourself to the game. You just draw a little character of yourself. I figured, okay, most people who buy board games are guys. So most of the people who buy this are going to be guys. So ahead of time drew more women into my game assuming that more guys would back this later. As it turns out, of the 11 people who bought this, five of them are women. So I was totally wrong about who my customer was. I accidentally found a theme that resonates well with men but I didn't know that until I launched. Which part of sometimes you're not going to know who your target customer is until you're actually launching and getting your product in your customer's hands and that's okay. And so I think the reality is it's okay if you think that you want to market to yourself. I say that to myself out loud. It's okay what I was doing. The reality is I was leaving essentially money on the table by not broadening who my potential customer could be. And so again in the scheme of all the things there's so many different avenues that you could be taking with your business. There's so many different people you could be marketing to. But if you have the blinders up and you're just one track you're going to sell to this type of person you could potentially lose money and leave it on the table. So for us again I'm trying to market to picture multiple me's. CBD is actually being used to treat a lot of things ranging from anxiety to pain management to tremors specifically with children who have epilepsy. And so a group discovered us actually a local meetup group by their people who have scleroderma and if you don't know what scleroderma is that's fine because I didn't know what it was either. Essentially it's where your body just becomes inflamed and a lot of these people get diagnosed in their mid 30s and they have throughout the rest of their lives it's not necessarily fatal but it causes them a lot of pain and inflammation. They came to us they said hey we hear CBD oil is really good for this. Would you like to come speak at our local meetup and talk to our people. We said sure we can talk about pain management and inflammation and for us it was just kind of an eye-opening opportunity of realizing there's this whole other market of people who see an application with my product that I wasn't even speaking to and so since this meetup we've now been asked to speak at more of their meetups. We've seen their customers come or the people from the meetup who come in as customers they're bringing their friends and so that's just a whole other track of business that I wasn't even considering because I wasn't even looking at those people as my customers and so being able to be fluid with who's buying your product it doesn't mean I have to go shift on my marketing and make it very medical focused and just speak to that industry but it does mean how do I be considerate of all the different types of people who are interacting with my product buying my product and ultimately spending their money with me. I think just be open to who your target customer is. Yeah absolutely. So the unexpected cost of fulfillment quick question how many of you are selling physical products on your store? Okay and how many of you are selling like more services or like digital downloads? Okay so obviously this is more for if you actually have a physical product you're having to put it in the mail and ship it to someone. So I'm a developer background I like having a perfect project clients come to me and say I've researched this e-commerce website for three years I know exactly who I'm shipping with how much it's going to cost here the boxes I'm going to use set it up that doesn't happen now the good news is shipping is easy to set up so USPS can be set up through the WooCommerce welcome wizard you just click a couple buttons they can get live rates WooCommerce can let you print shipping labels in the back end there's lots of really cool stuff and I guess the one thing I just want to add here is like I try to be efficient right like it's really efficient for me to set up all your shipping information up front when I first build your site for you but that's not always the case oh yes this is a mistake I made so I really like my game and like I wanted to stand out on the shelves so I made it a little bit bigger I guess thicker so when you stand it up on the shelf it looks nicer but guess what that no longer fits in the box that I had planned so that is a small flat rate box from USPS which costs about $5 to ship but because it's too big it now costs like $11 to ship through the medium flat rate box I only discovered this by the way when I sent my game to 20 influencers who are going to review the game and then talk about it when it goes on Kickstarter so it was a $200 mistake which in the small in the grand scale of things isn't too much because I can still fix this before I go into manufacturing but this was a this was like oh I don't have everything planned out and I'm guessing most store owners don't have all the stuff planned out they don't know what boxes they're going to use how to ship it or any of that so the reality of Patrick's point when you launch with e-commerce e-commerce rather it sets you up really easily to go into USPS so as a business owner we were like okay check we're going to use USPS seems to be the most reasonable y'all we were buying boxes on Amazon we were printing things at my store we were driving to USPS printing the labels from USPS and then we were putting them physically into the mail or at the post office it was working for the time being that's the point of like do what you need to do when you're launching but as our business scaled as my packages turned from five packages a day to a dozen packages a day carrying all those packages standing in line that's time that you could be better spent investing in your business so we learned my sister who's my co-founder and I learned the power of taking advantage of some of these tools that are integrated into e-commerce so we actually use the ship station tool it integrates with e-commerce it actually gives me a discount on USPS so that's awesome because I'm saving money which is what we all want to do is keep money in our pockets and I learned that USPS comes to my office if I schedule them to come pick up so I don't have to go to the post office anymore and I'm saving money and it's awesome but to Patrick's point I didn't get there that wasn't like I woke up one day and was like I'm launching a business I'm going to have boxes that fit everything and I'm just going to ship them no easy peasy deal no I had to do by trial and error so it's okay this kind of challenging period of growing your e-commerce business but yeah learn where you can and make pivots where you can and so yeah save money how long did that take I'm just curious like how many weeks or months you've been in business for six months and I would say we implemented that a month ago so this is a five month process to figure out exactly what you needed yeah and I think you wear all the hats so it's not like I'm the marketer so I'm just going to do marketing and website someone else will deal with it I'm doing the website I'm doing accounting I'm doing the marketing I'm doing all the things oh and I have a retail store so I'm the crazy girl who's like sitting there working on her website trying to package boxes and then some customer comes to the door and I have to say stop everything else I was working on let me sell to you that takes up time and I absolutely want to invest in my business by having that retail component but you're wearing so many hats and so inevitably some things fell by the wayside so to my story point I did what worked because that was all the capacity that I had at the time when I had a moment to examine and pivot I took that step so don't feel like you got to do all of it but yeah learn from your mistakes um oh this is a fun one I did a class on WordPress in college I'm a developer right so I I do have a developer background um so I love WordPress it's open source there's a thousand plugins out there there's a rating system there's comments there's a million tutorials videos books etc and I kind of think of WordPress and plugins and other SaaS services like little Lego bricks and you just stack them up until you have the perfect Lego castle you know recreate the cake thing that the person made just like a professional pastry chef so you heard my story I've worked in WordPress personally for over a decade professionally for the last seven years I wouldn't say I went to college and took a developer course but I've gone to a lot of word camps so I know some stuff so I did that I'm not saying it's wrong for you to start your business on your own so I built my website thank you very much I still can claim that I build the whole website I think it works and functions but I hit a point I would say three months into the business where I was at my wit's end because unfortunately because of my industry a lot of those earlier things we were talking about the payment merchant and the POS systems don't integrate and I had to admit I can't fix this with a plugin or some custom CSS that I found on some blog website which has happened I did do that to my site and I knew better and so I found myself in a situation where I was putting a bandaid on something instead of actually sealing the whole up and we're talking about my site as like a ship right you want your site to make money so you wanted to be online running bounce rate is low all the things and so I hit a point where I had to go hire a developer and so I think when we were brainstorming what we were going to talk about on this particular slide something that we wanted to highlight because I came up against this as someone again who comes from the community and I look out in the crowd and I see so many amazing developers who I call my friends so what did I do when I needed a developer I said hey so and so you're a friend you do WooCom or stuff let's do it wrong it was a little bit different story than that so I ended up hiring someone who does WooCom or Swark part time they're very good at it but they do it part time versus hiring someone who could be doing it full time and so I just found myself in a situation where the things I needed to get done we're taking a little bit longer to get done instead of getting solved quicker and I think Patrick has a really good story to further expand on that point because realities neither is right or wrong but just know what you're getting into when you're going and hiring someone to do work on your site that is ultimately again going to make you money yeah just to quickly here so I actually recently had this with the board game so there are people who hire full time illustrators and I know someone who hired one for like 8,000 euros which is like a reasonable rate they did a lot of work for them I hired someone for like one to two thousand dollars because I hired someone who's part time and he basically works on the weekend he's terrible communication I have to text him to get updates but it was like way way way cheaper and I knew that immediately after meeting him like this guy's gonna be a lot of work but he does excellent results it'll probably take a couple more months to get all the illustrations I want done but that's worth it to me but if I for someone like running a website then you want to email them and get a response back that day and so you need to just be aware of like is this someone that is someone that's going to be doing this full time or part time so I've been a consultant for a while people will say hey Patrick we want to know what we do for marketing for e-commerce sites I will look over all their analytics I'll look over their order stats I will look over everything I will compile a 20 page PDF I will send it to them and then they don't do anything with it and I find this very frustrating and I don't think I understood what was happening until I launched my own Kickstarter where I have 10,000 things in my to-do list do I have another slide yes I do have another slide so yeah I really didn't learn this until I started running my own Kickstarter I asked a lot of friends from feedback hey is this video good is this image good is this good and people would give me very they'd give me an unlimited amount of feedback and they wouldn't offer me any solutions anything to actually do it so they'd be like hey Patrick this emoji doesn't work on a browser from three years ago I that's like at the bottom of the list of 10,000 things to do sure I'll get to it specifically but that's not helpful to me what I wish I did in retrospect was I wish I asked specific people for specific feedback so if you're not a graphic designer I don't really want to hear your opinion on the graphics graphic designers can give me that input I had people give me all sorts of feedback on the video that wasn't helpful because they're not video people and then I wish people offered solutions so I going back to me as a consultant instead of saying here's your 20 page PDF go ahead and do these things I should have said here's a 20 page PDF and for an extra five grand I will solve these problems for you so if you're building sites for other people I didn't understand that I had 10,000 things in my to-do list until I was a store owner please offer them solutions instead of problems I think the other thing all at slide it is okay to say no and I'm granting all of you your welcome permission to say no to whoever you want to okay I realize running a business what do you think I'm going to say my priority is to make money if somebody comes to me and tells me something is wrong that is not going to impact how my business is run to speed it up to optimize it you know what unfortunately thank you so much no thank you I'm not going to be a person who grows in scales like I'm blessed to be in a position of I get hit up every single day hey do you want to come to this why don't we partner together with this project why don't you use my payment merchant you know what it's great you should keep all of those in your inbox you should go through them when you can and filter them as you need to but if it does not ultimately impact what are the top three things that you are trying to work on your e-commerce site to move the needle forward to make more money I love saying yes to things and so I can understand how uncomfortable it can be to become comfortable with the word no but you have permission to say it so brick and mortar versus e-commerce who wins next question does anybody happen to have a brick and mortar associated to their e-commerce store one guy over there we're buddies another person this last section is for you I thought that this was me when I launched my e-commerce site so I because of my background like a good steward of the digital world was like I'm going to become a business owner I would like to do it online and I would like to live on an island and never have to talk to people directly right wrong so because of my industry well we'll get to the reality but as you can see the expectation it's not as pretty pictures as it could be the reality is for me in my industry cannabis people have questions there's a lack of education in the market I learned very quickly on by accident actually we did a pop up in a small retail space that we had advantage to and this is actually the small retail space we did it for the holidays my retail space as of now does more transactions I make more money from that than my online store you know swap things around so I can get back to my island life but for me in my brand I realized that I needed to have a physical space because I was going to accelerate the accessibility of my product into more people's hands so you don't necessarily need to go out and find a brick and mortar space your product might or may not actually benefit from a brick and mortar space but I wanted to highlight a few brands that Patrick actually highlighted for me the term mattresses or all bird's shoes or the away luggage or Warby Parker they all were first e-commerce brands who then saw an opportunity to move into the brick and mortar space they all have physical stores that they pay rent on every month and they have inventory and they have to manage those people who are working at their stores those are obviously all overhead costs but I think a really good opportunity that you could take advantage of are doing what we kind of did to adapt for a couple months maybe during a holiday season are there farmers markets are there in Austin, Texas we have this group called Craft Her and they do craft markets by women makers whether it's jewelry or wellness goods or things like that so maybe it doesn't make sense to go like I said make a brick and mortar happen you know 24-7-365 but where are opportunities that you can bring your product into the physical world so you can get in front of more customers for the holidays so for board games I can just go to board game conventions and bring 20 games with me meets people and they're like oh you're the fry guy yes I'm the fry guy I made the game about fries do you want to copy it's 15 bucks you don't have to rent a physical thing and commit to a thousand dollars a month on day one you can start small he's a drop ship so when somebody buys something sends him an email saying that he got a certain amount of money on PayPal so he can just manually send an email to his drop shipper to send the product to the person is there a way in WooCommerce to set it up to where it automatically sends both so yeah the question first basically if you're working with drop shippers someone pays you money you pay the drop shipper money they send it to the customer is there a way to sort of automate that a little bit more rather than manually emailing them yes there's a couple payment gateways in WooCommerce there's one of the PayPal gateways does this there's Stripe Stripe Connect but you have to have your merchant your drop shipper use those specific gateways too so they would have to use your Stripe Connect account or they'd have to accept PayPal payments from this service so there are ways of doing it but it is not going to be like click a button and it works unfortunately I solved my payment gateway problem I had to do a lot of phone calls so I basically talked to some people who are in this room Liquid Web is really great they're actually getting into the cannabis space if I can publicly say that and they had a lot of great resources that were able to point me in the right direction to find a merchant who would actually accept our business essentially so trial and error can you do digital downloads with WooCommerce absolutely there's one in Denver that I know of literally all they sell is marketing material for pharmaceutical companies they sell these PDFs for like 10 grand it's awesome I wish I could sell a PDF for 10 grand yes totally works so can you have post purchase upsells yes there are some third party ones I think one of them is just called one click upsell I forgot who made it but he's pretty well known in the WooCommerce world I'm totally forgetting his name right now let's just look up WooCommerce one click upsell and you should be able to find it so can you send someone to a different page based on the product they purchased like after the checkout like showing them other products they might like sure so you want to send them to a specific page for further instructions so there is advanced notes so just on the order page it'll say hey you bought this product click this link and go to this page it'll say advanced description or something it's in the product metadata box for WooCommerce or I would probably just send them like an email hey you bought this product there's email triggers send them this specific email with all the notes that they need that might be the way I do it and you built a plugin? liquid web? awesome was there one more? perfect so further recording post purchase upsells are great but you need the right payment processor so let's talk afterwards