466: Outdated Ecommerce Tips You Should NOT Be Doing In 2023 – Family First Friday

Podcast: Download (Duration: 14:41 — 17.1MB)

The eight outdated ecommerce strategies you should stop doing in 2023 are: relying on a single platform for all your sales, AliExpress dropshipping, paying for Amazon Automation services, running Amazon giveaways or soliciting reviews, using public rebate sites, over-spending on customer acquisition while ignoring existing customers, going all-in on paid ads instead of content, and picking whatever product is easy instead of what has a real moat.

In this Family First Friday episode of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, I go through each of these dead or dying tactics and explain why they no longer work, using real examples from my own store at Bumblebee Linens and from friends who lived through the pain. If you are just starting out and consuming ecommerce advice on YouTube, Google, or TikTok, most of what you are reading was written when these tactics still worked and never got updated.

Below is the full list, with what to do instead of each dead tactic.

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Key takeaways

• Stop relying on Amazon, eBay, or Etsy as your only sales channel. Diversify, and always own your own website.
• Stop dropshipping from AliExpress. Shipping is measured in weeks, margins are thin, and it violates most marketplace terms of service.
• Stop paying for Amazon Automation services. Almost every case has scam signals, and most Amazon aggregators went bankrupt in the last downturn.
• Stop soliciting or incentivizing Amazon reviews. Amazon banned RebateKey and warns any account that touches paid review services.
• Stop spending your marketing budget on acquisition only. Selling to existing customers is 66% cheaper.
• Stop leaning entirely on paid ads. Content compounds. My YouTube channel makes over $300K on ads alone, and my blog earns seven figures a year on affiliate and course sales.
• Stop asking what is easy. Ask what is hard, because hard is what has fewer competitors and a real moat.

Stop relying on Amazon, eBay, or Etsy for all your sales

Relying on a single marketplace for all your sales is the fastest way to lose your business overnight because Amazon, eBay, and Etsy can change their policies or algorithms without warning and tank your revenue instantly. Amazon in particular does not care about you. There are thousands of malicious sellers who game the system to sabotage other sellers, and Amazon rarely helps until you spend years in litigation.

My friend Kevin Williams runs Brush Hero, a cleaning-brush company. A Chinese knockoff seller copied his entire product line, including the packaging with his photo on it, and sold a crappier version on his own listing at half the price.

Kevin sent Amazon his patents and copyrights. Amazon did nothing. It took him two years and multiple million-dollar lawsuits to get action, and by then the damage to his brand was done.

My friend John Rampton lost a multi-million dollar container business the day Amazon banned his account for life.

At Bumblebee Linens, every holiday season we get sellers who buy out our inventory to block us from selling, then return everything in January after the season. Marketplaces are useful, but they are rented land. The only real property you own is your own website.

Stop dropshipping from AliExpress

AliExpress dropshipping is dead as a long-term ecommerce model because shipping times run weeks to months, product quality is inconsistent, margins are thin, counterfeit risk is on you, and every major marketplace bans it in their terms of service. Amazon, eBay, and Etsy will all suspend you the moment they catch it.

Faster shipping options exist, but they usually cost more than the product itself, which kills margin. Most AliExpress sellers do not enforce quality control, so you end up shipping junk to your customers under your own brand. If any item turns out to be counterfeit, you are liable, not AliExpress.

The bigger structural problem is competition. Thousands of dropshippers list the same AliExpress products at the same time, prices race to the bottom, and you end up jumping from one fad product to the next with no repeat customers. Dropshipping in general is not a great long-term model, and AliExpress is the worst version of it.

Stop paying for Amazon Automation services

Amazon Automation services are the outsourced-store scams that flooded YouTube ads a few years back, where a company builds an Amazon store for you in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars up front plus a profit split. Almost every one of them has scam written on it, and even the legitimate ones failed when the aggregator bubble burst.

The tell is simple. If a company can actually pick a winning product and build a profitable Amazon store from scratch, why would they hand you half the profit instead of just running the store themselves? The answer, in most cases, is that they cannot, and their revenue model is the upfront fee, not the store.

Even the legitimate aggregators, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars during the 2020 to 2021 boom to buy and operate Amazon FBA brands, mostly went bankrupt when interest rates rose and organic ranking got harder. If a service sounds like it should not work, it usually does not.

Stop soliciting Amazon reviews or running giveaways

Soliciting Amazon reviews or running giveaways to inflate rank is a dead strategy because Amazon has cracked down on both hard and will suspend the account or the listing if it catches you. The only allowed play now is Amazon’s own “Request a Review” button in Seller Central, which sends a single canned email asking for an unbiased review.

Giveaway spam used to work. Sellers would launch a product, blast free units through third-party giveaway sites to spike sales velocity, and ride the ranking bump. That loophole is closed, and the accounts that still try it get penalized.

Amazon’s newer terms make the boundary explicit: “Manipulating sales rank, such as by accepting fake orders or orders that you have paid for, or making claims about sales rank in product titles or descriptions is against terms of service.” Anything that even smells like paid-for velocity is risk-on.

Stop using public Amazon rebate sites

Public Amazon rebate sites are done because Amazon banned the largest one, RebateKey, and sent warning letters to every seller account that had used a paid rebate service. Rebates used to be a legal grey-area workaround: a buyer paid full price, kept the review moving, and got refunded via PayPal, giving the seller a real full-price sale that boosted rankings.

Amazon now treats that entire pattern as sales rank manipulation, and the specific line in the terms is worded broadly enough to catch any variant. A few sellers still run private, off-platform rebate arrangements, but nothing that looks like a public rebate marketplace is worth the account risk.

If your listing needs a velocity push, get it from real advertising and real content, not from paid buyers. The math on a suspended account is always worse than the math on organic launch.

Stop spending everything on customer acquisition and ignore existing customers

Spending everything on customer acquisition while ignoring existing customers is one of the most expensive mistakes in ecommerce because selling to a repeat customer is 66% less expensive than acquiring a new one. They already know your brand, they already trust you, they already opened their wallet, and reaching them costs a single email or SMS.

Repeat customers also spend more per order over time, refer more friends, and become the loudest word-of-mouth channel you own. On average a happy customer tells at least nine people about their experience with your brand.

The other underrated benefit is customer intelligence. Once I actually started calling existing customers at Bumblebee Linens, I discovered that many of them were event and wedding planners buying in bulk. Special treatment for that segment converts one-time buyers into lifetime whales.

Stop leaning entirely on paid ads and invest in content

Paid ads are still useful, but you cannot build a durable ecommerce business on them alone because CPMs on Google and Facebook rise every year, iOS 14 gutted Facebook attribution, and traffic stops the moment your ad spend stops. Content, by contrast, compounds for years.

Three years ago I started a YouTube channel. Today it earns over $300,000 a year on YouTube ads alone. My blog at mywifequitherjob.com earns seven figures a year on affiliate marketing and course sales, and the specific blog posts driving that revenue were written 10 years ago and are still ranking today.

The mechanism is trust. A shopper who watches one of my videos or reads one of my posts arrives already convinced that I know what I am talking about, which raises conversion when I recommend a product. Pick a medium (YouTube, blogging, or a specific social platform) and post consistently.

Stop underusing email and SMS to convert visitors

If you are creating content but not capturing email and SMS from your visitors, you are wasting the traffic because the average ecommerce conversion rate is only about 2%, which means 98% of visitors leave without buying. A lead magnet like a first-order coupon or free shipping in exchange for an email address is the highest-leverage move you can make on your store today.

The math is that most visitors are not ready to buy on the first visit. Consistent, valuable email and SMS follow-up keeps you top of mind, and when they eventually do want to buy, you are the store they open first.

Email and SMS also let you promote products, run flash discounts, deliver useful content, and re-engage lapsed buyers. These are customers you own, and no marketplace, ad platform, or algorithm change can take them away.

Stop chasing what is easy in ecommerce

The single worst question a new ecommerce founder can ask is “what is easy,” because easy is exactly what has zero barrier to entry and infinite competition. Ask instead “what is hard, expensive, or painful that I am willing to do anyway,” because that is where the moat lives.

Dropshipping is easy. Anyone can list the same AliExpress product on Shopify tomorrow. When 10 stores sell the same product, the shopper picks the cheapest, so prices race to the bottom until nobody makes money.

At Bumblebee Linens we run custom embroidery in-house. We own five embroidery machines that cost over $10,000 each, they need constant recalibration, threads snap all the time, and the machines chew up expensive product on bad runs.

It is a pain in the butt to operate. That is exactly why almost no competitor will bother copying it, and Chinese sellers cannot offer it from 20,000 miles away.

Stop throwing up random products without a value proposition

Throwing random unbranded products onto Amazon and hoping to catch a wave is a dead strategy in 2023 because product research tools like Jungle Scout have made every hot niche discoverable, and any product that works gets copied inside months. Unless you have a unique value proposition (UVP) and a brand, the copies will eat you alive.

A UVP does not have to mean “better.” It just has to mean “different in a way a specific buyer cares about.” At Bumblebee Linens, my UVP is the largest handkerchief selection on the internet, because nobody else specializes in hankies at that depth.

My friend Dave at Saddleback Leather sells bags, which is a total commodity category. His UVP is that his bags outlive you. His actual slogan is “they’ll fight over it when you’re dead.” That single positioning line has built the entire brand.

Frequently asked questions

Is AliExpress dropshipping still a viable ecommerce business model?

No. AliExpress dropshipping is not a viable long-term ecommerce model because shipping takes weeks, quality control is poor, margins are thin, counterfeit liability sits on you, and dropshipping from AliExpress violates the terms of service on Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.

Should I still sell on Amazon in 2023?

Yes, you should still sell on Amazon, but never as your only channel. Sell on Amazon and eBay and Etsy and your own website, because Amazon can suspend accounts, hide customer data, and change fee structures at any time, and diversification is the only insurance you can buy.

Is Amazon Automation a scam?

Most Amazon Automation services are scams or come close, because the business model of “we build and run your Amazon store for a large upfront fee plus profit share” makes no sense for the operator if they could actually pick a winning product themselves. Most of the legitimate aggregators from the 2020 to 2021 boom have also gone bankrupt.

Can I still buy Amazon reviews or use rebate sites to rank?

No. Amazon banned the largest public rebate site, RebateKey, updated its terms to prohibit “manipulating sales rank” through paid or fake orders, and warned every account that had used a paid rebate service. The account risk is not worth it.

Is selling to existing customers really cheaper than acquiring new ones?

Yes. Selling to an existing customer is roughly 66% cheaper than acquiring a new one because they already know and trust your brand, so a single email or SMS is often enough to trigger a repeat purchase. They also spend more per order over time and drive word-of-mouth referrals.

Should I focus on content or paid ads for my ecommerce store?

Both, with content as the long-term core. Paid ads are expensive and stop working the moment you stop paying, while content compounds for years. My YouTube channel earns over $300,000 a year on ads alone and my blog earns seven figures on affiliate and course sales from posts written years ago.

What is a unique value proposition (UVP) in ecommerce?

A unique value proposition is the specific reason a shopper picks your product over an identical-looking competitor. It does not have to mean “better.” It has to mean “different in a way a specific buyer cares about,” like Bumblebee Linens having the largest handkerchief selection online or Saddleback Leather selling bags with a lifetime slogan.

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