 Hi, everyone. I'm Patrick Rawlins, and we're talking about e-commerce. I'm the product manager for e-commerce. So that means that I like to talk to store owners all day long, making sure that we build the best software so people can have an online store and succeed. So after talking to people for, after having a lot of conversations with customers this past year, I'm going to talk about the technology people use, how e-commerce has done today, and then how to succeed moving into 2016. So I want to start with the technology we use, and by that I mean the platforms that we have available to us. So this data I collected about a month ago, so it's going to be a little bit off now, but there are just under three million sites, e-commerce sites. And if you take a look at these, WooCommerce is a WordPress e-commerce platform that I work on, and that's 30% of all e-commerce sites, which is pretty crazy. The other big ones are Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, and there's a whole bunch of other WordPress ones that go into the other category. There's WPE Commerce, Edd, WPE Store, Shop, Jiggo Shop, and iThemes Exchange. All told, all told there are just over a million WordPress sites, which is 33% of all e-commerce stores are powered by WordPress, which is pretty awesome, I think. I wish WooCommerce could take all the credit, but we're building on top of an incredible platform. We're building on top of a platform that has all the blogging taking care of. We don't have to build the login page. We don't have to build the MailChimp newsletter sign-up. All of that stuff is done for us in WordPress. So when we build our e-commerce software, we just focus on that, and so it's really, really powerful. So I want to talk about some of the devices and how we use technology today, and something that happened actually back in 2014. And in 2014, people started using their mobile devices more than they used their computers, more than they used their desktops. And that brings us to something called the buyer's journey. So back in the early 2000s, you didn't need to have a lot of stuff on your e-commerce site. You just needed to have a buy button, and people would buy from you, because there were only a handful of sites. Nowadays, when people have a problem, they go, hmm, my head hurts. Why does my head hurt? And they'll research it. They'll Google it, they'll find out they have a headache. Was there a medication that I can find that helps me alleviate this headache? And then they compare costs and features and all that stuff, and then they make a decision. And so in 2015, what's become really important now that people are always on their mobile devices, they're always on social, they're talking to their friends, they're getting all of this data before they press that buy button? It's something called omni-channel retailing. I like to call it omni-channel marketing. And that basically just means that you need to be aware of where your customer is at all points, wherever they are in their life site, what they're doing. You need to be there for them. So if people are Googling, why does my head hurt? And you sell headache medication, you should have a blog post or an answer or a social media question. Or talk to people about that and reach out to them so that they know where you are and what you sell. You don't need to be everywhere. Omni-channel kind of makes me think you need to have everything, you need to be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. You don't need to be everywhere, you just need to be where your customers are. So moving into next year, if you guys want to start a store, I have some tips for you. And I want to start with, I want to start with in early 2000s, I want to start with how you can beat the other three million stores and how you can beat Amazon. And starting in the early 2000s, you just needed to have a store, right? I watched a presentation by the guy who made CDbaby.com. It was like the first website to start selling CDs. And he didn't do anything new other than put a traditional CD store online. He called up the record store next to him and said, hey, if I sold you guys my CD, or if I let you guys sell my CD for me, how much money would you give me? Oh, we'd sell it for 10 and we'd give you $5. Great, he put that exact business model online and made a ton of money because he just copied a brick and mortar store. You just had to be online and you would succeed. Nowadays we have amazon.com. And while everyone thinks of Amazon as this like be all and end all of e-commerce, and I say it's the Walgreens because it's very good at certain things, but it's not perfect. It is not the only way to sell things. It's Walgreens because it's quick and easy. You can always find it and it has 95% of everything you'd want, but it doesn't have everything and it's not the best for all markets. So if you want to beat Amazon and you want to be, you want to distinguish yourself from the three million other e-commerce sites out there today, you need to have something called a unique selling proposition. This is one of those fancy marketing terms that I don't really like, but it just means you need to have something unique about your store. So there's two sites I'm gonna share with you that kind of have something unique about them. Come on, GIF. Okay, that is a GIF. It is not giffing. Um. Um. But so that is the Roost stand. It's like a laptop stand and if the GIF worked you would see you can like fold it up and it folds up into like a little neat little package and you can like put it in your computer bag and it's like one inch thick. It's pretty cool. Go Google it later because I failed at GIF. But this guy, the guy who made this, he's actually in Denver with me and he made this product from scratch. He put it up on Kickstarter. It raised like $80,000 in his first Kickstarter and he did it a second one a couple years later. But he made this product so unique. It's not something you can find on Amazon and people talk about it and so he doesn't have to do any traditional marketing. He doesn't have to write blog posts. He doesn't have to do social media. He doesn't have to do Google ads. People just talk about this and it's a remarkable product. If you're a fan of Seth Godin it's that purple cow. The second brand that I wanna talk to you about is Beardbrand and they do awesome content marketing. I've tried for years to grow a beard and have failed but if I could grow a beard this is where I'd buy from because they have dozens of blog posts on how to maintain this, how to groom this. Here's how you use oil for this. Here's how you grow the cool fancy facial hair that I can't grow. But they have a lot of content out there and they are a very trustworthy source and people buy from them. All they're selling is fancy oil that you put in your hair. People could copy that but their branding is so strong that people continue to buy from them. They're a huge success in the e-commerce world. And there's one more thing. I don't have a good example of this but you can compete on price with Amazon. So everyone thinks that Amazon has the lowest prices and I said Walgreens in the beginning because it doesn't always have the lowest prices. Amazon is a place that says, hey, you make a cool product. I'm gonna put that in my warehouse and I'm gonna ship it. That means they're not vertically integrated. That means that if you know how to manufacture products you can easily beat them on price. I shouldn't say easily. You can beat them on price, it's doable. So if you ever want to build and manufacture your own products you can beat them there. And you can beat other retailers as well. So I went fast. But I just wanted to convey these key points here. WordPress e-commerce platforms are really popular. They're growing, e-commerce as a whole is growing. There's lots of power behind WordPress because there's all that stuff built into it. I really want you to understand the buyer's journey. Just knowing that people are searching for problems and if you can let people know about your brand before they hit that buy button then you have a good chance of getting them to buy your product. And you need to have something unique. So that could be content marketing. You could have a unique product that people just talk about. You could compete on price. You can have awesome, something that Amazon doesn't do well as like if you're selling ties have like long vertical photos. You can do, there's a lot of ways you can be unique and be different and set yourself apart from everyone else. So I'm the product manager for WooCommerce at Automatic. That's my programming blog. I have like a hundred posts on WooCommerce. So I got a lot of stuff on there. Hit me up on BF Trick on Twitter. That's what I got.