But before we begin I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and I depend on them for over thirty percent of my revenues. Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who shopped in your store in exactly what they bought so let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who’s purchased a Red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake and there’s full Revenue tracking on every single email sent now Klaviyo is most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free over at mywifequitherjob.com/Klaviyo. Once again, That’s my mywifequitherjob.com/Klaviyo.

I also want to thank Privy who’s also a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now, what does privy do? Well Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all my email capture forms and I use Privy hand-in-hand with my email marketing provider. Now, there are a bunch of companies out there that are managing email capture forms, but I like privy because they specialize in e-commerce. And right now I’m using preview display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this when it implemented this form email signups increased by a 131%. Now, I’m also using their new cart saver pop up feature to recover a Abandoned carts as well. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free and if you decide to need some more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for 15% off. Once again, that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today we’re doing a special episode because I’m in lockdown at home with my entire family and I’ve got nothing else on my schedule for today and my partner in crime. Toni Anderson also happened to have today free. So, I decided to bring her back on the show today to talk about life business the event industry basically everything and if you don’t remember Toni, this is actually her sixth appearance on the podcast and we run the seller Summit together, which is our annual Ecommerce Conference and we also launched a Blog and course over at profitable online blog.com late last year. So, how you doing today? Toni? Thanks for taking the time to come back on.

Toni: Thanks for everything. Do I have the record of the most appearances?

Steve: That’s a good question. I think you do actually.

Toni: I think I do. I hope I do. I mean Jen might have me beat but that’s okay.

Steve: No, she’s only been on twice.

Toni: Okay. Yes. I hope I have the record. This would be cool.

Steve: I thing you have it by far by like double.

Toni: Okay. Awesome. I feel special. I feel special. Thanks for making my day.

Steve: Hehe. Well, let’s first start by talking about the Seller Summit. I mean for me personally; I cannot remember the last time that I was this stressed out about a business.

Toni: Yeah. I can’t either this has been an absolutely crazy like two weeks for us personally, you know you and I with the with them Seller Summit stuff.

Steve: I mean I must have spoken to you every day for like a month about it. That’s stressful in itself. Haha.

Toni: Haha. I feel like not only have we spoken, we’ve texted, we’ve messaged, we’ve exchanged emails. I feel like the level of communication. Is it like a def con six or something?

Steve: Yeah. And I remember at the beginning of March was specifically stressful like events left and right. We’re canceling or postponing shows like ours like Prosper decide to postpone, South by Southwest shut down that was pretty major.

Toni: One traffic and conversion. They actually kept saying they were going to keep going and then I think at the last minute realize that they just couldn’t, couldn’t do it.

Steve: It yeah, totally. I mean, I think, I think what most people don’t realize is that event insurance that you buy actually does not cover infectious disease and a lot of the…

Toni: Who would have known.

Steve: Yeah. I know who would have known that this never happens, right? And a lot of the upfront costs involved with running an event are prepaid. And once you’ve paid obviously it’s hard to get a refund for.

Toni: Absolutely and you and I get a lot of questions about running events and I think my advice and your advice is, it’s a very risky endeavor financially. They’re great and they’re fun and I love them. And you know, I’ve been doing this for 11 years now, but financially this is not a this is not a way that I would recommend people build a business in any way.

Steve: Yeah. It’s not a profit center. It’s not a huge profit center for the amount of work involved. Yeah. I actually read that South By may never come back as a result of this. I think I saw an article the other day.

Toni: Wow.

Steve: So, my heart goes out to all the event planners out there and I mean this is just a hard time.

Toni: Absolutely and I think it’s really a hard time. I mean for us it became pretty clear cut that we could not have an in-person event in May because of just the current situation. It was absolutely irresponsible and unsafe to do so, even if we could legally do it, which I don’t think we can’t right now because there’s a ban in Florida about groups getting together, but I think even before that happened you and I just felt like it would be super irresponsible for us to even ask people to try to travel and just create it creates such a risk. It’s really hard for these people that have conferences that are like in this end of summer because there’s just so much uncertainty right now. What are they going to do? Right? So, it’s like everybody who has an event basically in 2020 is in sort of this limbo.

Steve: Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, I know like I was super stressed leading up to the point where we decided to postpone and what’s funny is that you are unfazed. I felt by everything until the NBA got canceled then all of a sudden it got real.

Toni: It did, it did, stuff got real right about then. How am I going to spend? Well, you know, I mean, how am I going to spend my iBook my summer vacation based around the NBA Playoffs so that I have every night free to watch them. So, what you know, what’s going to happen now?

Steve: I think you may have even shed a tear over the over the NBA.

Toni: It might happen.

Steve: Yeah kind of. And for all you guys who know Toni she never cries. She never cries. Yeah haha.

Toni: But when news broke of the cancellation or the postponement of the 2020 NBA season.

Steve: Oh man, you were crushed. I remember you texted me. You’re like, “Oh my God, forget the seller some of the NBA’s done.”

Toni: Hahaha that’s right! Yeah. Well, of course I saw meme the other day that said if you told everybody in the South that the 2020 college football season could be saved by social distancing. No one would come out of their house for two months.

Steve: Hahaha.

Toni: We like our basketball and we like our college football. So yeah, it’s crazy.

Steve: Yeah. So, what I want to do today actually was. I wanted to talk about like the right way and the wrong way to handle a crisis. And by right or wrong, of course, this is our interpretation of it. There’s in reality no actual right or wrong answer but I just kind of want to talk about our philosophy and how we handled Seller Summit in a way and you know a bunch of my friends actually had tickets to South By and guess what? They decided not to give any refunds at all and instead. They’re allowing people to go again in 2021. If they’re in fact, is in fact, if they don’t go bankrupt and another friend of mine Derek. Derek Halpern. He actually paid for a sponsorship to a council event and they refused to give him a refund if you wouldn’t believe that.

Toni: Yeah, it’s ughh man, it’s tough.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, so it’s unclear as of yet how some of the other business’ conferences are going to be handling things. But at least in my mind, refusing to give refunds in the case of a worldwide pandemic just seems a little wrong to me.

Toni: I agree absolutely and I think right. I mean I think at this is such a weird situation, right? Because things are tough for basically everybody. This isn’t something that’s just hitting one industry or another. I think everybody’s being impacted by this. I mean the news of Amazon. I don’t I don’t know the exact term but they shut down the shipments right? For non..

Steve: Yeah, you can’t. Basically, add anything to your Warehouse. So, if you go out of stock, your out of stock. Basically.

Toni: So you think about this, you know, I’m sure the global, you know, the general public does not understand the impact that this would have on many of our friends and colleagues because a lot of people are not only do they support their own families. They have employees or contractors that work in these businesses. And you know, if you have stock, you’re okay for now, but at this point this could dramatically impact a huge amount of FBA Sellers.
Steve: Absolutely. I actually have an acquaintance who just opened a restaurant last weekend and he’s basically screwed. I think I mean she’s importunate. Yeah.

Toni: Yeah.. Well in regards to the refunds I think for you and I it was almost a no-brainer to refund people’s money and I think you and I we had we had several very long conversations about our own personal financial hit for this because we’re on the line for money to the hotel and things like that and I think for us it was never a question of not offering people their money back because it just I don’t know anything else to me just.. I hate you know, you know, I’m pretty logical person but it felt wrong, right?

Steve: Yeah. I mean Here’s My Philosophy. I mean, I feel like you have to play the long game here. Like there’s a lot of money on the line and you can actually take people’s money in the short term, but it’s going to actually destroy your business in the long run.

Toni: Exactly.

Steve: Like if I bought a ticket to a conference and they refuse to give me a refund. Or if I bought a sponsorship not only am I not going back to that event, but I’m going to probably bad mouth them for the rest of eternity. Haha

Toni: Haha. You’re going to write a post, you’re going to rank number one, and it’s all, it’s all over for them.

Steve: I mean..

Toni: I agree though, I think for us, I think everything that you and I do together as a team and I feel like we both feel this way individually with our own businesses is we’re not in this for quick money or quick, you know, anything. Quick recognition, quick success. This is a long-term plan for both of us and our families and our businesses and doing the right thing today means long-term benefits. And if nothing else just like be a good person, right?

So even though for us it I don’t think we even like questioned whether we would give people refunds. I think that was just a I don’t think we even had that conversation. It was just understood but I think people that are, maybe not thinking that way, are just focusing on right now and I get the financial impact is huge on people. I totally understand that but I feel like you’ve got to look like five years from now. We are not going to be dealing with this but we are probably going to be dealing with some of these same customers and people that we interact with and our decisions today are going to impact that.

Steve: Absolutely! And just to be upfront about the Seller Summit like the event’s not huge but there are still hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line and you know, there’s money considerations, there’s long-term consequences and as you mentioned before that, it’s also what’s doing, it’s also about doing what feels right?

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: So, I guess for the past month, I would say we, we racked our brains and we came up with a plan. It’s not an ideal plan, but I feel like what we did was a good compromise and a pretty good solution in terms of turning lemons into lemonade.

Toni: And you know, what’s funny is I think aside from the whole like Financial aspect of it, I was just super bummed about not having the… not having the event. I mean, these people are like friends of ours now some of these people have been coming for four years. I look forward to seeing them. I look forward to hearing how their business is doing. I look forward to hear about their family. I look forward to seeing their spouses, right? I mean, this has become so much more than just like a business endeavor. A lot of these people started out as acquaintances and have become friends of ours over the years.

Steve: Absolutely. I mean, we’re not doing… We don’t do Seller Summit for the money. There’s, there’s a lot of easier ways to make money. I do it for the community and the social aspects of it. At least that’s my reason for it. And I think you have similar reasons as well. Right?

Toni: Absolutely and definitely at a time like this feeling like, hey people need… I mean a lot of our sessions this year were focused on, are still focused on because it’s we’re still having the virtual event. We’re focused on growing your brand creating that brand off the Amazon your own store how to drive advertising how to drive organic traffic. We had an SEO session, which we haven’t had an SEO session in what 3 years? 4 years? So, we have these, we had a lot. We have a lot of sessions that are based on creating sort of that sustainable product that’s going to whether what’s going on right now. And so that was to me, like I feel like it’s so important that we still get that out there because I think I think people really need that in their businesses, especially today.

Steve: And you mentioned earlier like Amazon made a policy that they’re not allowing non-essential items into their warehouse. and of course, if you have your own brand, in your own website, you are you wouldn’t be affected by that. So, it’s like more important than ever to have your own strong brand.

Toni: Absolutely.

Steve: So, you want to talk about what we did? So first off, we offered all sponsors and attendees the option for a full refund, but then we actually offered these additional options.

Toni: Right. So, the first thing we decided to do was, even though we be together in person. We felt like these sessions and this information was so important that we wanted to still get it out. So basically, we’re still holding the Seller Summit May 6 through 8, but it’s a virtual event live. So, you log on to your computer basically like a webinar and you’ll get to log on our speakers will be teaching live. You’ll have the up… there’s opportunities for live QA.

Typically, before when we offered the virtual version of the Seller Summit. It was edited recordings of the sessions that were delivered two to three weeks after the event because it’s just too glitchy to kind of, stream live from an event. So, the people that have just the virtual path, would get the information afterwards. But they didn’t have that ability to ask questions or interact with speakers or attendees, online. This year since we’re not meeting in person were able to do all of that online and give people the opportunity to ask questions during the, during the talks or after the speaker’s done you can ask questions at the speaker and we’re giving some more extended QA time as well.

Steve: Yeah. I mean one thing that’s really unique about our event is our Masterminds. And I know for a fact that I was really bummed that the in-person Mastermind couldn’t happen because we can get together and so, you know. Toni now we talked about this and what we’re doing now is we’re having a virtual Mastermind and it’s going to be groups of 6 to 8 people and we’re just going to run it just like the real thing except it’s going to be over, you know Zoom or Hangouts however we decide to do it. But we’ll get a chance to have everyone their hot seat, where we can actually help other people with their business. And we decided to extend both the virtual Paths as well as the virtual Mastermind, you know free of charge to all ticket holders with the Mastermind pass, which I thought was pretty cool.

Toni: Yeah, because I think that’s a lot of the reason why people come to Seller Summit is for that, that first day if you have a Mastermind ticket, it’s the Mastermind session and that is just such a valuable component in building and growing your business. I know both you Steve and myself we’ve been part of Masterminds in the past and for me, it’s actually when I started an E-Commerce, I joined up with three or four other people that were also starting in E-Commerce, and we met at least once a month. We even met in person once just to kind of help each other get going and answer questions. So, I think this was something that we didn’t want to lose out on just because we couldn’t meet in person.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely and you know along the lines of just kind of value add, we’re basically doing this essentially for free. If you have a ticket you get the virtual pass. We’re going to have another event with all new content and a whole new live Mastermind as well. And we thought it’d be a good idea to just keep the spirit of the event alive and just anyone. Has purchased a ticket already gets access to these things.

Toni: Absolutely.

Steve: If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wiegler and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com. Now back to the show.

So, I wanted to kind of switch gears a little bit and just talk about business in general. Like I personally have been getting a ton of emails and messages from small business owners and new entrepreneurs. They may ask me questions. Like, you know, “Is this like a terrible time to store my business?” or “Is Ecommerce dead?” or “Is importing from China no longer an option?” and you know, it’s funny me and you… You have a couple years on me I think but we basically both started our blogs during the last recession. Right?

Toni: Yeah. Sure started my blog as a business because I was blogging in 2006, but I kind of turned into the business blog in 2008, which I think was sort of the I don’t follow the economy as well as you do but is it wasn’t that when it sort of sort of bottomed out.

Steve: Yeah, it was 2008. So I started the end of 2008, but I tell people that I started in the beginning of 2009 because that’s when the so – we officially launched and come to think of it my e-commerce store started in 2007, but we kind of weathered that that first down turn back in the day also.

Toni: Yeah and for me. We, I mean we have very two very different blogs, right you’re teaching people about business. I’m teaching people about saving money. So, for me recessions are awesome because everyone…

Steve: Hahaha.

Toni: Everyone wants I we were talking yesterday. So, my traffic stops 40% because everyone wants to know how to save money right now and I do a lot of home school information on my site. So those posts are just going crazy right now. So, for me recessions are awesome as far as the happy housewife blog for you. I know it’s a little bit different because if you’re trying to start a business, you know, there’s could be capital involved and I don’t know people are willing to spend. What is your impression of all that right now?

Steve: Well, you know, all I can say is I just went back and through all the archives at mywifequitherjob.com, around this time. Like they’re not published anymore because it SEO reasons but actually went back and looked over some of the older posts and the reason why I started mywifequitherjob.com was because I was one of the reasons was I was worried about losing my job and I told myself screw it. I’m just going to go out on my own I don’t want to have to have this worry anymore. And that’s actually one of the reasons why My Wife Quit Her Job was born. Do you remember why you started to Happy Housewife or you mentioned that you turn into a business and in 2008, right?

Toni: Yeah. So my husband had was dealing with some injuries from a deployment and it looked like he might be discharged from the military without like six months shy of a retirement date so he wouldn’t get any of the military benefits and I was thinking well, you know, I’ve got all these little kids at home daycare is going to eat up a paycheck. So, what can I do from my living room and that’s when I went, you know full in on the blogging because I thought well, maybe it maybe I can make this into you know least pay our rent right least get our rent paid. But yeah, that’s basically the same reason I started because I thought well, you know, my last real job was bartending, hahaha you know, I didn’t really want to go back to that. So, I thought hey let’s try this blogging thing. See what happens.

Steve: So, it’s that’s amazing. I actually didn’t know that so we both kind of started it because we were worried about like I was worried about losing my job at you were worried about your husband losing his job, right?

Toni: Yeah. Because he had put basically been like our primary… I had always been doing, like I sold on eBay. I did all these like odd jobs, but it wasn’t anything consistent right? That could, I could count on like okay every month we’re going to make x amount of dollars and I felt like, you know, I got to step up right now and figure this out, but you know, I think and this is just I mean, you know of your listeners should probably know me well enough to know how I think yeah at this point.

Steve: Yeah. It’s your sixth time.

Toni: Most people have to work from home except for our and I will tell you like our First Responders and people that are like, I mean y’all you’re doing amazing. Like I actually messaged one of our mutual friends Chris and said hey, hang in there. Like we really appreciate you but a lot of people that work at standard, you know, nine to five job are working from home right now and there’s other people that maybe got furloughed right? We know some people that got furloughed or you know, their hours are cut drastically because they work in like a service industry where there’s not a demand right now. This is like the golden opportunity, right?

Steve: I totally agree.

Toni: You don’t have to commute, you work at home, you know, you don’t have to sort of sneak at your lunch break to you on your computer at work to watch a webinar or to get something started. You have and you can’t go anywhere and do anything right now. So, take this extra time and start building your business. I mean, this is just like to me this is like golden opportunity for people.

Steve: And people are asking me whether E-Commerce is dead. Well, guess what? When everyone’s stuck at home, like we’ve been doing more online shopping than ever.

Toni: Yes. Yeah!

Steve: And then I know there’s some statistics in China where like the amount of eyeballs glued to their devices increased 20% and that’s going to happen here in the US as well. No doubt about it.

Toni: Absolutely.

Steve: And someone asked about importing from China. They’re pretty much they have it under control all the Apple stores in China are open and we actually are getting a shipment this week, as we speak. So, all of our factors are online, are your factors online too? Toni? For your E-Commerce?

Toni: Uhm yes, and we actually had a Surplus anyway, so we were good. This, we were able to weather this pretty easily. But yeah everything that I’ve heard from other people everything. I mean we have another friend that’s importing like paper goods like books and journals and she’s totally online hasn’t been an issue. So, I think things are very much back to normal on the China side of things.

Steve: I mean, I’m personally really bullish about e-commerce. I mean, especially in the face of this downturn more and more people going to be ordering online and this is going to happen for a long time. I don’t see this as a short-term thing. Yeah, I agree. So anyways, if you guys are a little bit disheartened about what to do. I mean you basically have two options. A lot of people want to give up at this point and because of that it’s actually a period of a huge opportunity here. So, you can move forward, you can press on, you can rally the troops, you can make lemons out of lemonade, you can double your ad spend while it’s cheap, you can acquire new leads or you can you know, sit back and play the victim curl up, watch Netflix. Lay off your stash cutouts, sat there scared.

Toni: Well, that sounds like a great opportunity right there.

Steve: You got to make you got to make a decision, right? I mean, do you want to just sit back or do you want to do something about it? I mean as you mentioned earlier.

Toni: Yeah, and I think I don’t I mean, I don’t know exactly for you. But I know one of the reasons why I was able to see such success with my blog early on is because I started in a time of opportunity and I really just went like, I mean an I had little kids at home and we still had a regular life. I mean there was no quarantine Nor self-shelter-in-place whatever they’re calling it and you know, I would get up early, I would stay up late but I was determined to make it into something because I felt like there was such an opportunity at that point. Like people were afraid people were looking for ways to save money. I felt like I had that information to share and I wanted to get it out as quickly and has been the best way that I knew how back then and so I think if you know, it makes me think of our friend that we talked to last week Kevin who had a business idea. We gave him some feedback and he had us an outline and a business plan by Monday, right?

Steve: I hmm yeah. The next day basically. Yeah.

Toni: So, take this there’s just to me that’s like it’s just screams opportunity for so many people even people that maybe weren’t thinking about it to begin with. As we talked about in our blog course. Everyone has a talent or something about them that people want to learn more about that you can share and eventually make money from online. And so, this is the time when you probably have more free time than you’ll ever have again for the rest of your life. This is the time to take advantage of it.

Steve: And what’s nice about blog, my blog actually is I have like an archive of all these posts that I wrote during the recession during the downturn and here’s a couple things like I’m just want to share a couple of these posts. One was how we increased our profit 147% with our online business and that year, year-over-year profits increased 147% revenue growth was 94%, our margins increased by 6% traffic increased by 200% and here’s the thing instead of sitting back and I’m kind of like patting myself on the back right now from 2009. So, we actually ended up maxing out AdWords, we actually ended up increasing our ad spend, we ended up buying in larger bulk and we actually improve the packaging of our goods and then so I do, I do to income or I used to do 2 income reports every single year and then the mid-year for the downturn the year over year profits were up 75% revenues were up 72% and traffic increased by 91% in the mid-year. And then once again, I’m patting myself on the back here again, but apparently, we did a complete site redesign during the downturn. We optimize their ads and we increased a lot of the automation for our store.

Toni: And let’s remember that you did all this while working a full-time job. You were not laid off or anything like that. You still had your 9 to 5.

Steve: That’s correct, and I’m actually surprised because you know, it’s fun to look back, even though the writing was terrible for these posts, but it’s interesting that we… It’s almost like we double down on the business during the downturn because everyone else was scared.

Toni: Hmm when I think people tend to give up, right? And so you can take that as another opportunity.

Steve: Here’s one thing I just noticed, you know during right now, when everything is everyone is scared my ad spend or my ad cost, I should say have been reduced dramatically. I think a lot of companies right now are cutting back on their Ad spend and so our ads which were still running are getting really cheap.

Toni: You’re just, so you’re just a best-case, best case, best case, best case.

Steve: Well, I’m just telling you like it how it is. This is what I’m saying. I know I think everyone’s cut especially the big companies, the big box stores of cutting back, big time. And so yeah for the little guy, you know, we don’t have any overhead. So yeah, we actually had the advantage actually it back in 2009, our overhead was like $80 a month to keep our store running and I think the blog was like five bucks a month or six bucks a month. And just for hosting I’m sure yours was the same right?

Toni: Oh, yeah. I mean I oh, absolutely. I was trying to think of what I actually paid for back in 2008 and I would say my once-a-year domain renewal at what 1497 or whatever it was and the hosting which I don’t even I mean it was under $10 a month for sure and now is back for all the hosting companies had deals, you know, I don’t I don’t even know who is hosting my sight back then.

Steve: Yeah, and I know you pretty well. You’re pretty cheap. I’m almost positive. that you kept the expenses to the utmost minimum.

Toni: Yes. Well, we didn’t have any money back then when I started blogging like we didn’t I didn’t have any money to start a business. I mean, I was totally relying on just putting content out there.

Steve: Yeah. No, that’s true. I mean we had some money since I was an engineer and that sort of thing, but you know me I’m pretty cheap. I keep expenses to a minimum anyways.

Toni: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we were a one income military family living in base housing. Well, I can assure you we did not have a lot of extra money back in the day. Haha.

Steve: Well, there you go. I mean, that’s why Blogging is great. Right doesn’t cost any money.

Toni: Absolutely. You just need an internet. A decent internet connection. Which and now I feel like there’s a lot of companies out there like currently offering discounts on services. Like I just got an email from my hosting. I use Liquid web now and I got an email saying they were doing no overage charges if you have like ‘cause my traffic spiking, you know, and they said we’re not charging you for any extra usage all that’s just going to be included for the next, you know, 60 days. So, a lot of these companies even virtual companies are offering some really sweet deals and discounts to people.

Steve: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean things are slowing down and everyone’s going to be offering deals. So, it’s actually a really good time to get started.

Toni: Yeah for sure!

Steve: So, Toni, what are you doing right now during this downturn with your business?

Toni: Other than trying to make a virtual Summit out…

Steve: Well besides… I was more talking about Happy Housewives. But yeah, the Summit we already talked about. So yeah.

Toni: So I am, I actually posted this today in our in our blog Facebook group that I am focusing on I have a ton of content geared towards that Frugal Living saving money, you know how to bake things from scratch and so I’m making sure that those posts are clean, updated because some of those posts I wrote in 2009, 2010. and you know making sure that they are getting pushed the top. I’m going live on Facebook almost every day. I actually think this is really valuable. I was watching a friend of ours Leslie Samuel go live this morning and I thought you know what, in a time like this people actually love that. I mean, I’d go Facebook live occasionally anyway, but people love that interaction people love seeing another human at this point because I’m people aren’t leaving their house. So, going live reminding people of the content on my site republishing things if I need to, I wrote two blog posts this week, which is two more than I’ve written in a month…

Steve: Oh, is that right? You’re not putting up content?

Toni: I put out. Oh, I refresh old content. So, I go through and completely revamp old posts and just republish so the contents different but it’s the same, you know, core titled things like that. But I put actually to totally new posts up this week one with a load of resources for people that are home with their kids everything from like, you know, all these places that are offering like virtual museum tours and things like that to like educator published, public, publishing companies that are offering freebies for parents as well.

So got that up there and then got a like hey, this is how you can homeschool your kids if they’re home with you for the next month. So, I got that up there and just trying to get that content that on my side. I still have over 3,000 post. So, trying to get that content that I’ve legs really relevant back out in front of people using social media.

Steve: I should be reading that. So, what’s funny is our kids at least my son they basically just threw him a work packet and said do it.

Toni: Yeah. Yeah

Steve: Yeah and I don’t think I think the schools here are really prepared for a virtual classroom. So, I could I’m probably gonna end up reading that post on the homeschooling.

Toni: Well, yeah, and I think parents just it… Like if you have not homeschooled before had your kids home with you on a regular basis, it is definitely a very different lifestyle. As you know, I mean, I know you work at home and I know your kids are home now with you, but I think there’s a lot of things that you can learn from home school parent just like how to get your day so that you can… Because if we think about this for so many years homeschooled my kids and worked from home almost full time. It’s definitely possible to do but you have to sort of restructure how you think about your day and I think it’s definitely do-able for people but it’s just going to be different.

Steve: I know for you, it’s Child’s Play. For me, like you actually have to keep them on a schedule. Otherwise they’re just gonna goof off the entire time.

Toni: Yes, yes, although this week was my kids’ spring break anyway, so this was sort of a weird week for us because they were on spring break already. So, I didn’t want to you know, throw… Become a schedule crazy person right away.

Steve: I had my kids were so disappointed that they canceled Russian math.

Toni: Oh, I’m sure your tears, tears of sadness

Steve: I mean, I broke it to my daughter says like, “Oh my god, what am I gonna do?”

Toni: She cried, cried all day.

Steve: So, for my businesses as I mentioned, I’m still running my ads full force and you know a couple of people asked me whether I was going to start drawing them down because business is a little slower now. Mainly because you know weddings aren’t happening, right? Or they’re getting postponed. They’re not getting cancelled. Although if they hang out enough. Maybe they will cancel. But you know, so Google Ads for example, those are cost per click so you don’t actually pay until someone clicks and the Facebook Ads are significantly cheaper. Now the conversion rate is lower, but it kind of offsets each other. So, when you take that into account, it’s actually not a huge deal. And on the blog side, I’m actually creating content like crazy. So, I launched my YouTube channel month ago and now like I have all day to just film stuff. So, I’m getting really ahead on the curve. I might even consider upping the amount of videos. I upload per week.

Toni: Yeah, I think that’s what the people don’t take anything else away from all of this. I think they need to take away the fact that you are that, you have more time than you’ll ever have. And so, this is your opportunity like this is your chance to start creating stuff and as I mean, like even with YouTube you don’t need to really any money to start a YouTube channel.

Steve: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, this is the best time ever to be creating content and I think with all the deals and everyone being scared. This is actually the best time ever to be getting to E-Commerce as well. People aren’t going to be shopping at Brick and Mortar. They’re all going to be buying everything online for a while now.

Toni: Yeah, for sure.

Steve: And for blogging I mean if you’re it doesn’t really depend on what medium right? If you’d like to write start a blog, if you like to talk into a microphone start a podcast, if you’re good on camera, you know start a YouTube channel.

Toni: Yeah

Steve: And Not only that, you can even repurpose your content, right? So, what I’m doing right now actually is I’ll write a blog post and I’ll turn that into a video and I’ll turn that into a podcast and I know you’re doing something similar as well.

Toni: Yep. Yep. I’m doing a lot of… I’m basically turning my blog posting to Facebook lives just because that’s where my people are. But yeah, you can whatever wherever your people are is where you should be, you know repurposing that content for sure.

Steve: Everyone is scared. So just don’t be one of those scared ones and start doing something with all this extra free time that you have.

Toni: Absolutely and there’s no risk. There is zero risk.

Steve: There’s no risk. We’re still running the Seller Summit May 6th to the 8th if you guys are into E-Commerce join us virtually. It’s going to be one big hangout. I think we’re even doing like an opening party, right? A virtual opening?

Toni: We are, virtually opening party haven’t figured out how that’s going to look yet, but it’s going to be awesome.

Steve: And if you want to hang out with people other than your family and like a Mastermind environment consider joining our Mastermind as well. If you want to learn about e-commerce my free mini course. Course is over at mywifequitherjob.com/free. And if you want to learn about blogging, we also have a free mini course there too over at profitableonlineblog.com/free as well.

Toni: Just a plug for the blog course since you know, that is our business together, you know, you get to see videos of me not just Steve. So right there get the free course.

Steve: Which I’m here is like a huge attraction to the course.

Toni: Hahahaha.
Steve: So, we both know that Toni is a lot better than I am at building community and being social in general like I’m an engineer. You know my I’m used to being in a cave where someone’s just checking me pizzas every now and then but I mean that’s one of the reasons why we work so well together, I think.

Toni: Absolutely I know how to order pizza and you know how to…

Steve: Right. You just check the P… You don’t even ask me what toppings I want anymore. You just check it in.

Toni: Just start throwing them in.

Steve: All right. Well, I mean, that’s basically all I had to say Toni you got anything else to add before we get off here.

Toni: No, I mean I just I can’t say it enough guys use this opportunity. This is your chance. So, do something amazing.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode now running a business is not always easy. But now that everyone is terrified right now. This is the perfect time to plan ahead or get started with your own business while everyone else is panicking more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode2 97.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout-out to Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Code Black Friday is right around the corner and for my e-commerce store email marketing is a heavy part of my holiday sales strategy. And in fact last year, it was close to 50% of My overall sales. And of course as you all know klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I use for Bumblebee Linens now Klaviyo is the growth marketing platform chosen by over 20,000 Brands generating more than three point seven billion dollars in Revenue in just the last year and with the holiday season right around the corner klaviyo has created the ultimate planning guide for crushing those holiday Revenue targets for marketing creative to segmentation strategy. These are proven tactics for more personalized marketing, especially in time for the holiday season. To get ahold of this guide, visit Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, Klaviyo.com/mywife. Now on to the show.

I also want to give a shout out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m happy to have Luke Carthy on the show. Now, Luke was introduced to me by Dan Shure who was a previous guest on the podcast and he came highly recommended. Anyway, Luke is an e-commerce growth consultant specializing in strategy, search and conversion and he’s been helping e-commerce Brands grow for over 12 plus years now and he’s spoken at a variety of events including the last Mos Con in 2019. Now today we’re going to discuss his strategies for growing an e-commerce brand. And with that, Welcome to show Luke. How you doing today? Man?

Luke: I’m really good. I’m really good sleep. Thank you so much for having a nice intro song. Appreciate it.

Steve: So Luke for everyone who doesn’t know who you are. What is your background? And how did you get into e commerce?

Luke: Sure, so my background is absolutely digital. It kind of all started back in my first sales job. So there’s a retailer here called Curry’s which for you guys over in the US Is a ultimately Best Buy and I was there show my age a little bit here, but always there when we were selling the old school CRT TVs and just kind of coming through with the plasma and LCD era. So HDMI cables were a thing there were notoriously expensive around the 50 pound mark and I thought, you know what? There’s got to be a way to get these things cheaper. So I did some research looked at AliBaba and the usual kind of Chinese resellers as post or manufacturers.

Bought a load and I realized when I sold the first, the first few cables I was like, wow, do you know what? I love this, this is awesome. So my kind of appetite and love of e-commerce started from basically the back of my first job about 13 years ago, something like that.

Steve: And do you sell anything today on your own?

Luke: You know what? No, I am, I left that game way behind before I had children. So it’s something I absolutely look at again in the future. But you know what It’s like? Can’t do everything and just trying to work out your priorities, but I do love that kind of, you know, never gets old of seeing like a notification when you sold something. So yeah e-commerce is a is not gone. He’s just not right now.

Steve: So how did you get into the other areas of your expertise like SEO and and conversion rate optimization?

Luke: Yeah. So almost kind of trickled back from the same sort of thing. So eBay guess as If you think about it, ultimately has a search engine lemon to it. So I started to optimize my listings started to use a piece of software called Terapeak, which is Ultimate. Like a ahrefs. I guess if you like for the SEO well, but an eBay but yeah, and it just it just got born from there. So I started to look at I landed my first ever job not long after having my success on eBay and kind of got thrown into the deep end so started the research, started some experimentation, started looking at HTML and all sorts of cool stuff. And it just spiraled quite literally from there. So call it like a hobby / career and then it’s just turn into a complete career altogether either.

Steve: Cool, so Dan who I trust very much. He introduced you to me as an SEO expert and consultant but in our discussions prior to hitting record, I know you do a lot more than that. So what I was hoping to do in this interview today, perhaps is to pretend to be one of your clients maybe and have you kind of walk through what questions you should be asking yourself on how to improve sales for your e-commerce business. Maybe, the best way to start would be what are some of the typical mistakes shop owners make or what do they neglect? That should be that should get more attention.

Luke: Yeah, for sure. So this this one is is a big one. It doesn’t really matter the size of the retailer. I’ve seen sort of global national, National brands do it and I’ve seen small independent econ plays. But ultimately your internal search engine on your site search for another term. It’s it’s painful how many times I see people neglect this gold mine really, so I guess you know from a View of just optimizing for what people are looking for perfect example, I’ve literally just put out a blog post that we about to couple of hours ago. There’s a major retailer here in the UK called home base and Black Friday is around the corner when you search for Black Friday, you get no results fanpage and obviously with as we get in closer more people search for this, you know to see no results found.

It doesn’t look great. But this is this is one of many examples, you know, misspellings spaces in the wrong areas all this sort of stuff which is really really important. So it’s One of the biggest quick wins you can do with virtually no cost is just to optimize and tweak your internal search engine to make sure the customers can find what they’re looking for.

Steve: So, let me ask you this, so by default like the shopping carts like Shopify and Bigcommerce. I think I’m pretty sure it’s like an exact match keyword search for your products and descriptions. What do you recommend to account for all these misspellings? And you mentioned people search for Black Friday, but it turns out a big doughnut like, how do you actually fix that?

Luke: Yeah. So Google analytics is almost a really cool place to start if you can configure it right out of the box so site search reports. I think it’s under the behavior tab, but it’s a gold mine of understanding what people searching what volume so as much as it’s important to understand, you know to fix Search terms that got broken makes more sense to find out which of those Search terms are driving the highest amount of frequencies. So, you know, you might have one person a month searching for something but you could have 50 people a week searching for something else.

So to try and get first get to the idea of How many such is do you have that are broken and so identify the ones that are broken the way I like to go about this is custom extraction. So

Steve: So before we get into that custom extraction, I just want to tell the listeners here in Google analytics. You can actually tell it to look for what is called like a search string in your URL and then Google will track all the searches that are performed on your on-site search and with that information. I guess it leads into what you’re going to be talking about Luke, which is custom extraction. Would you mind defining what that is for the people who are listening by the way?

Luke: Yeah, sure, so customer extraction. So in essence what will custom extraction allows you to do is extract anything you like. We were within reason from the HTML of a website to use an SEO crawler like so deep crawl or screaming frog or whatever your flavor of call that you prefer. So following on from that example, you know that that Google analytics piece. We just spoke about a finding out what your Search terms are. Every website of course has a URL structure for a particular search term. So for example, you know example.com/Search/key word.

So we just build a list of those search, search terms throw them into a crawler and extract the HTML that’s returned from it in layman’s terms. So what that allows me to do is to very quickly understand what the top. Let’s say 10 results are for any one particular search query if I don’t have any results for that query then I know that there’s a problem or I know that there’s a there’s a search term here that needs to be refined or looked at again and improved.

Steve: Just for the people who are listening because Luke’s very Advanced. I’m just going to kind of Define some of the things that he’s talking about here. Essentially what Luke is doing is he’s creating a web crawler like Google essentially and he’s using that to cross sites to figure out what sites are returning for a particular search query. Correct me if I’m wrong, Luke sorry.

Luke: No, that’s absolutely spot on. Yeah.

Steve: Okay. Okay.

Luke: So what once you’ve kind of got that information you can very quickly at scale identify what particular Search terms are causing your problems. So I’ll give you a couple of of Industry examples. These may or may not have been rectified since I found these but let’s look at say Best Buy for example, so there’s a lot of people on a monthly basis that are searching for the keyword online account. Now, of course, you know with that sort of context you can be pretty sure that no one’s really looking for a product. They’re mainly looking to find where they should log in to go and look at their existing purchase history or you know, maybe give customer services call or whatever. So to have no results found on that is like a gold mine because if you can fix that you improving the experience.

And as we know if you improve the experience then customers are more likely to buy from you or from your eCommerce store, but equally sometimes there can be a lot more profound than that. So we have of what with a client before for example where you search for inch, but with the quotes rather than the word inch and the search engine didn’t understand that but a lot of people were searching for inches with the quotation mark. So by rectifying that that was like a massive win almost like an overnight fix if you like, especially this particular client was in the DIY sector. So everything’s in measurements and you know this size that size.

Steve: So what you just specified in that example has nothing to do with custom extraction, right? That’s probably just results that you saw from your analytics is that accurate or?

Luke: no. I say because the the search term was found in Google analytics. So the amount of people searching if you like so a common with the exact keyword, but let’s say for example, it’s like other than that 10 inch less like a 10 inch shelf, for example.

Steve: Okay, Yep.

Luke: Now in Google analytics we would know because we’ve set up a report. That’s a Say 50 people a week search for that particular keyword.

Steve: Right

Luke: So what we want to do is validate, validate, sorry. Via customer extraction that whether that’s search term works or doesn’t work. So I guess to to distill it down, Google analytics will give you the amount of people that are searching for a particular term. But what he won’t do is tell you what the quality of the results are like.

Steve: so I guess my question is for that term why not just type it in..

Luke: into?

Steve: why not manually just type it into search or is the idea you’re compiling all these terms on mass. And just throwing into this custom extraction tool.

Luke: That’s it. Exactly.

Steve: Okay

Luke: We’re talking like hundreds if not thousands of..

Steve: okay. I understand. Sorry Luke, I keep interrupting you man, but I just want to make it clear for the people listening out there.

Luke: All right It’s cool. No problem, no problem.

Steve: All right so–okay so you have all these keywords and you’re throwing into this custom extraction tool. First off, My first question is are there tools out there that allow you to do this really easily?

Luke: Yeah, absolutely. Well easily depends on what you are but there’s absolutely tools that will allow you to do this and there’s loads of resources online. That can help you to get to get on there.

Steve: What’s your favorite one?

Luke: For me? It’s absolutely screaming frog.

Steve: Screaming frog. Okay.

Luke: I think the reason why I choose that one is because the barrier for entry is low, you know, it’s only a small cost license of under 200 pounds, you know, once you’ve got it set up and once you’ve kind of play with it and got it working. It can be really powerful. But I guess to very quickly break into another benefit of the tool and customer extraction is empty categories. So I guess for the for the smaller sites, maybe it’s not so much of an issue, but if you think of a website where you’ve got hundreds if not thousands of categories. How do you identify which categories have no products in, again is another wing you can use customer extraction for to find this sort of fact.

Steve: you know, it’s funny. I have used screaming frog in the past but mainly for an SEO audit so you’re telling me that I can just upload a series of keywords for example and have a screaming frog crawl a particular site based on whatever URLs I define?

Luke: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can do that.

Steve: presumably you’re gonna get all this data out right and then does it just come out in a spreadsheet form?

Luke: It does, it does, yeah.

Steve: So for example in your previous example with the inches, like what are you looking for to determine that it’s a bad result presumable. Is it like a 404 page or what do you looking for?

Luke: So it’s yeah. It’s not a 404 and that’s the reason why customer extraction is so powerful because when you think about internal search results, you know a lot of them returned in 200 error, I’m sorry, a 200 status code which of course is not broken. So that’s where customer extraction comes in because you’re not looking at the data, you’re looking at the sorry, not looking at the response code you’re looking at the data that’s returned. So to your point earlier, you’re looking at, you know, a spreadsheet you can see a URL and you can see the data that’s returned for that given URL and that helps you to then really narrow it down.

Steve: So are you specifically looking for something on that page that indicates that it was a bad search? So, for example, on my site it says Sorry, your search returned No results. Am I just specifically looking for that in the results?

Luke: Exactly.

Steve: Okay

Luke: Yeah, that’s that’s yeah, so that h1 or whatever strip of text it is when you see that in the custom extraction data, you know that there’s no results returned for that particular search query.

Steve: Okay

Luke: I guess just, you know, just to make it clear when you think about all these enterprise-level search engines like say SLI or fact-finder. They’re great at giving you reports of all the Search terms that aren’t working. But for small businesses where you kind of have woo commerce or Shopify setups this data is not available to you. It’s really important. It can really make a difference. So this is where it really comes to play.

Steve: So just to summarize I am uploading all my keywords to this tool. It’s crawling my site and then it’s outputting a list of terms that return not an error I guess but in this case of search results that don’t return anything based on a custom stream that I defined.

Luke: That’s right. You got it.

Steve: Cool. All right, let’s move on then. So categories, So you mentioned before I rudely interrupted you again. That sometimes Search terms return categories with empty products. Does that happen or?

Luke: yes that does absolutely happen that does actually happen. So again, I did a for a presentation. I did a while ago. I looked at Best Buy. I looked at Home Depot and I found loads of categories that had no products in and I think it’s really important to look at what these are how much traffic they get in and really maintaining and call these categories because again empty categories bad experiences, right?

Steve: So, what do you suggest that you do when you see an empty category you just eliminate that category altogether or?

Luke: yeah, I mean it could be a case of the category needs product adding to it or it could simply be a case of as you said the category no longer needs to be there. So it should be redirected to the next best match if you like or something to that effect

Steve: what about categories with like a single product? I mean, I know I’ve been guilty of that in the past with my store. What do you do with this data after you have it I guess is what I’m trying to get at.

Luke: Yeah. So this is a normally when you’ve Got this customer extraction data you can make this data as rich or as contact for as you like. So adding the amount of traffic adding the amount of conversions for that given landing page. You can really go into it. But the point I guess I want to make here is you know, you’ve hit the nail on the head with thin and empty categories these things just need taken care of and then you wonder from a merchandising or a category management point of view whether you should even have that category one or two products in or roll it into a another category that might be better suited but it just allows you to have if you like a bird’s eye view of your Ecommerce store and everything that’s going on at that particular time.

Steve: And in terms of actually fixing the search engine. I’m not sure I don’t know what shopping carts that you work with, but are there plugins that allow you to easily fix your on-site search without actually having to code anything in? I’m not sure if that’s a question that you can answer or that you’re used to.

Luke: Yeah. Well plugins not so much. I mean if you think about like woo commerce and the default the default search engine there then typically no, but what You can do is play around with redirects. Right? So, you know, if you find a particular search term that doesn’t work very well or has no results found then maybe have a rule that when this URL fires or when they search term fires actually redirect it to this search term instead.

Steve: Ah Okay.

Luke: And that can then, you know that can be a way of getting that done without having like the you know, the beautiful dashboards that you get with some of the more Enterprise Solutions.

Steve: Right. Right. So I know from my cart which is like this homegrown cart. I actually wrote this there’s this file. That just defines how search works and in there you can do all these special cases for keywords. I was just kind of curious with the tool like Shopify or Bigcommerce, whether you can do that easily perhaps that’s a question for my Shopify and Bigcommerce rep.

Luke: Yeah, I would say so woo Commerce when I last had a look at it about a year ago the answer to that was no but hey, everything moves all the time. They might be a plug-in or maybe come oysters that out the box.

Steve: Okay. So on site search, so you mentioned, empty categories, Search terms that go nowhere, misspellings. What are some other things to look out for?

Luke: Search wise definitely non products driven Search terms. So, you know at the example I used earlier was online account, but there’s loads of them is customer services. There’s returns policy. There’s all these sort of queries that that people can fire in to a search engine expecting data and then, you know nothing or I guess maybe even slightly worse is getting something that really doesn’t make any sense. So, you know, if you’re a let’s say you sell software online and someone searches for, I don’t know, returns policy. You might have some software that includes the keyword return and then you get like three results that you didn’t really want.

So I think it’s paying attention to those queries where you’ve got to try and play it smart with the customers not necessarily looking to buy something there looking for help to point them in the right direction, but then I guess to take it a step further you’ve got to think if people are searching for these things is your user experience easy because technically they could find what they were looking for. They wouldn’t need to use the search for these sort of terms. So, you know, you can look at it. Either sort of where maybe depends on frequency and how often these sort of Search terms happens.

Steve: Do you find that more people use the search function on a mobile site as supposed to a desktop site and you kind of distinguish the two when you’re doing when you’re analyzing these results?

Luke: You know what that that is a really good question. And from what I’ve seen so far, I’d actually say no more people use search on desktop than they do on mobile.

Steve: Huh, interesting. Okay

Luke: And by pure hypothesis. I don’t have any data to support this but I think people’s attention spans on mobile is typically lower. Because you’ve got more distractions. You’ve got slow data loading if you’re on the train Etc. and if people search for something and can’t find it the first or second time on a mobile. They just think you know what, I can’t you know. On to the next one. Desktop, they’ve got a little bit more patience maybe things are faster, less distractions, maybe but you know, when I’ve looked at that data before there’s definitely a higher search volume on desktop to compare t mobile.

Steve: interesting because I know that I’ve been trained from shopping on Amazon to just jump straight to the search bar now like whenever I go on a even like a boutique say I don’t browse the categories. I just jump straight to the search bar.

Luke: You know what? Yes. I am. I’m with you on that. But I think a lot of people know where the way in which I’d like to think of e-commerce is that every page should really be a landing page.

Steve: Right

Luke: So whether you’re searching on Amazon or whether you’re searching on Google you should be able, you know, if you’re searching for sort of red t-shirts or something like that. Ideally you want to be able to when they come to your site to take me to the red t-shirts category page rather than a completely random landing page. So I hear you. I absolutely hear you, but it’d be perfect if when they’re searching for Google they didn’t actually need to then search because there are in the right place. The first time.

Steve: that makes sense actually. Yeah, so Google’s acting like the search engine like the Amazon search engine. So to speak in this case, so.

Luke: yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Steve: What are some of the common mistakes just to kind of look out for with your on-site search? So you mentioned like Black Friday, that’s actually something that returns empty on my site right now. I’m going to actually go and Implement a landing page for that after this.

Luke: Yeah, Fix that.

Steve: You got misspellings. What are some other common things that most people make a mistake on?

Luke: Part codes. If you’re in, if you’re in a business where you resell other manufacturers equipment, especially with Brands like Sony and Samsung where they’ve got ridiculously long part codes with slashes here and all kinds of weird characters that can get really messy, especially with slash because typically slash denotes in most cases and you like a subfolder. I guess if you like.

Steve: Sure

Luke: but in this case a slash is going break the search all together. So maybe even looking at how you’ll search handles those characters slashes and dashes and things like that, but that only really comes into play as I say if you kind of sell products with part codes in but actually you just made me think. We ran into this problem before when we ran a global looked at a global e-commerce site and different languages, you know, e with accent versus a standard e and how that behaves and how that works.

Steve: Okay

Luke: all those nuances there but to be fair, Sometimes and this is why it’s really important to have this data via Google analytics first because you could end up fixing problems that weren’t really a problem. You know, you’re thinking about let’s fix this. Let’s fix that how many people are searching for it? Because if it’s less than say, I don’t know to a month but you’ve got 50 other searches at a high volume that don’t work then you know, are you chasing the right things?

Steve: What is your threshold?

Luke: Oh good question. Good question. The threshold typically depends on how many search terms over a problem so, you know, I could say more than 10 and then I’ve got fifteen thousand results

Steve: right yeah

Luke: or I could say, you know five and it’s you know, it’s difficult but I would say as a number in the air, 10 a month, but you know 10 a month for one site and 10 a month for another site could be two very different things all together. Maybe we should have percentages?

Steve: Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. Yeah

Luke: in like 1% of total queries. If it’s more than that pay attention if it’s less than that, maybe maybe review it manually

Steve: Okay, so they’re just so then MOS you just analyzing a hundred hundred keywords, I guess then?

Luke: yeah, I mean if you’ve got that many keywords to play with great, you know most cases you probably should have but you know, maybe not

Steve: I know the last time I looked at my on site search reports. I don’t actually look at it that often but it was like pages and pages and pages of stuff, right? because there’s so many different permutations of everything. I guess. That’s where the customer extraction tool comes in handy, but I guess in analytics what you would do I guess is sort based on the Frequency of that search term and then pump that into screaming frog

Luke: Exactly but you you mentioned permutations and I’m not sure what that

Steve: oh, I’ll give you an example. So we sell handkerchiefs. So there’d be handkerchief and then handkerchiefs plural. That was one thing that I have fixed my own search engine. I just automatically pluralize everything now or I think I add the plural. I can’t remember what I do.

Luke: but it works?

Steve: Well, yes stuff like that, you know.

Luke: yeah absolutely

Steve: and each one of those is a separate entry in analytics, right? because when someone performs a search.

Luke: yes. I’m GI, I guess just for people that are listening as well is purely case sensitive. So if you had handkerchiefs with an uppercase and at the search term with a lower case all the way through that’s going to come up with two separate rows of data. So that’s an important thing to look at as well.

Steve: Is there anything you can do after the fact with the analytics data to ignore the case?

Luke: You know what? I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. I’m sure that probably is a way to do it. You might even be able to build something in the website that the basically just makes everything lower case, everything lower case. But we normally just you know, when I’ve looked at it. It doesn’t really come into it with, yeah we don’t when we worry about it.

Steve: If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com. Now back to the show.

Steve: So I think we’ve thoroughly covered on site search. What are some other conversion rate or even sco optimizations that people typically make mistakes on?

Luke: Okay, so there’s a couple of glitch in my head full of ideas.

Steve: Okay.

Luke: One of the big ones is faceted navigation or filters. This can be a big problem sometimes and it can be a problem that a lot of people may or may not think about depends on how your site’s built. But you know, if we think about again technology where you if we said TVs and got sizes and Brands and all sorts of different filters, maybe color, technology. There’s a lot of different permutations of filters there. That’s a lot of crawling. That’s a Of URLs as a lot of duplication and there’s a there’s a whole I guess approach if you like as to how to manage the SEO implications of all of these different parameters, but

Steve: actually, How do you do it is it just canonical tags? I mean ultimately you’re still on the same page, right?

Luke: Yeah. So this is where it gets really interesting because there is it’s that horrible. It depends cliché SEO answer but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here because what I have found is if you turn off, you know, if you kind of canonical all permutations are filters back to their let’s say parameter free versions. You’re okay making it easier potentially for search engines to crawl those URLs, but you’re also missing out on huge long tail keyword opportunities as well. So it’s finding the bones. So let’s say going back to that t-shirts example, you’re in the men’s t-shirt category, but you haven’t got a category by color.

Because that’s a filter option. So when someone searching on Google for you know, red men’s t-shirts, you’re not going to be there if you’ve excluded every single filter option. So sometimes there’s I guess a middle ground between which filters you allowed to be crawlable and which filters you don’t want them to be crawled.

Steve: Let me ask you this, Luke. So if I find that a lot of people are searching a red t-shirts when I just want to plop down a landing page for that?

Luke: What you might do, but that’s that’s assuming you’ve got the resources and time to go away and build a land or reduced because if you think about you might have a landing page for t-shirts or even men’s t-shirt, but you probably not going to have a landing page for red t-shirts. Unless you’re using some really cool sophisticated, you know money table something like that, but you know back so I guess the real world is you are going to struggle to to do that and the only way you can really leverage that is to power, you know leverage some of these filters. But you know, You don’t have to have to choose and be careful which one’s of these you choose.

So colors probably a good one. But let’s say Brands probably another good one, but maybe size isn’t because a lot of people might not search for

Steve: well, unless you sell like abnormal size clothing like for a really tall people or you know, or what? Right?

Luke: Yeah exactly.

Steve: What are some keys to like ranking a category page?

Luke: Okay. Ranking a category page absolutely internal link structure is huge here. So You know, if you’ve got a category page that’s three or four categories deep you’re going to struggle to get that to rank just on its own. So again these in this t-shirt example is completely off the Dome. I’m hoping it works. But if we said we had a clothing department and then inside clothing, you’ve got men’s and then inside men’s you’ve got t-shirts and then inside t-shirts you’ve got designer. For example. That Designer /t-shirt category is going to struggle to rank because it’s so deep, you know so many levels down. But through internal linking structure, if you’re linking to the designer category, even the men’s category from the home page, then you are basically building the right structure to help those smaller categories to wrap.

Bread crumbs again are really important these help pass Equity up and down the entire funnel of of categories, but it’s really just been in a situation where you properly understand how you can leverage your link structure across the site. So to give a perfect example of where this really works. Is you mentioned landing pages earlier? We spoke about it a few times. Landing pages can be great ways to build those links because you know you land on a let’s say a Black Friday deals page you can link to all sorts of categories that are relevant there that might be three four five levels deep, but because your link into a Black Friday page, which is normally a pretty top level page.

That page, is going to therefore help the smaller categories to rank better and it’s just it’s been creative and thinking of about that.

Steve: So if you’re so it has a lot of categories, Should you just pick your best-selling ones and link to only those on your homepage or is it better just to kind of make sure that everything is navigable?

Luke: Yeah, you kind of a bit of bit of both if you like. But I would say your homepage and absolutely feature your main departments if you like so you google top of categories with you know, you kind of best sellers on your featured seasonal ones that might be more relevant. So, you know, for example, there’s no, well at least in UK at the moment. There’s no point link into to summer clothing because it’s freezing cold out here. So you probably don’t want to link to sort of like your winter warmers and you winter sales and that sort of thing but by doing that you you know, you’re playing to do Seasonality so one perfect example we have here is turkey.

I guess near Thanksgiving is a very different set of results in Google compared to Turkey in like August or something, which is obviously going to be about summer holidays and things like that. So you’ve got to think about and how you can play along and I guess be part of that that changes well that called you there.

Steve: So just for the better for the listeners out there. The reason why I asked that question is typically your home page has the most amount of inbound links coming in and Luke’s been talking about massaging your link Juice is what I like to call it, to your more internal pages from your from your stronger pages. So that’s why I asked that question.

Luke: Cool.

Steve: Okay, so Luke, I did want to talk a little bit about structured markup because we did chat about that a little bit prior to the podcast recording. How crucial is structured markup today? And can you define it first for the listeners?

Luke: Yes, I structured markup pays is basically if you like additional metal information that you passed a search engines to give them more of an idea about what your product or category or whatever it Is. But I guess to be clear, with structured data, at least at the moment, things has change. Has little to no impact on ranking as such but it does improve click-through rate. So, you know, if you’ve got your products structured data basically built correctly, you’re going to be passing information like price, like Brands, like stock information to Google and Bing and all the other search engines.

Which means when someone’s searching for a product that you sell this information could be presented to them before that even got to your page. As a result, They’re more informed. As a result their the result if you like, looks better to them and you’re more likely to get the click and someone who is not using structured data. So it’s one of those things that that really helps add context really helps make customers aware before they click through to your site and as a result would absolutely recommend it.

Steve: So outside of like the review Stars, where have you seen structured markup actually making a difference for Click through rate of a listing with structured markup?

Luke: Stock.

Steve: Stock, Okay.

Luke: Yeah, because you know, if you’re Googling something again that a lot of people stock so, keep your matters, TVs. Because I’m working on something like that at the moment. But you know, if you’re searching for a particular model of a TV and the first page is full of results that are selling this, if you have the price and stock status in the serp, you know in this in the Google page before anyone gets to your site. It reduces abandonment. And gives customers information that they need or one before they’ve even got to your website. So if you’ve got the best price or you’ve got a good price, you’ve got the click equally if you’re the only one or one a few people on the first page that I’ve got it in stock then hey, you know, you’re looking good there as well.

Steve: since I don’t look at this all the time has Google gone a lot better about just you know, just extracting that information from a site?

Luke: Yeah. It’s got clever because as usual in the world of SEO it gets abused, right and then obviously they have to be Stringent with it. So there’s no guarantees here. You could have the most perfect structured data across the site. It’s all valid. It’s all good, but it still doesn’t show. There’s no guarantees with this stuff. But the good news is for the guys that are at least using woocommerce. I’m not a hundred percent sure on Shopify, but I would imagine there’s something similar. There’s plugins that can manage this stuff for you automatically. You just tick some options you pick metadata rate through it and you know good to go.

Steve: all the major shopping carts do have plugins that do this. But sometimes you have to populate the information accordingly outside of just your regular pie descriptions and stuff.

Luke: Cool, cool, cool.

Steve: Okay, so structured markup. What about on like content pages?

Luke: Okay, content Pages. Yes. I love talking about this, when it comes to e-commerce because I think a lot of people will typically go to you know, when you think about content you think product pages and don’t be wrong, you know product page content is really important, but the content that I find is more important and more powerful is the content that mitigates that anxiety that the kind of confirms to a customer why they should buy from you versus somebody else. So this is your reviews page, if you like. This is your returns policy. This is giving customers the reason that you’re a proper, you know, e-commerce store front and not just a couple of guys working out of a shady bedroom, for example.

Steve: Haha okay

Luke: you know, I mean nothing wrong. e-commerce stores, I do very well that do that but the point is the customer wants to be in the understanding that one, they’re going to get their products and see if there’s an issue. You’re going to be, they’re going to get the help that they need. So this content is really powerful and we all do it as consumers will you know go for the purchase funnel potentially if it’s not necessarily, an Impulse buy. We research the product we want, we find a product we want and then we find a retailer that sells it and normally during that that process will go to a retailer X reviews. We tell a wire reviews. So all this sort of stuff that really kind of reinforces why they should buy from you is the content I find when you can move the needle.

Steve: I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2020 Seller Summit are on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now what is seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that is specifically targeting e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online and unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS. Mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate every year we cut off ticket sales at just a couple hundred people. So tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or 1 million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From May 6 to May 8. And right now, we are almost sold out of Mastermind tickets already and I will be raising the ticket price regularly starting the day after Cyber Monday for more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s SELLERSUMMIT.COM or just Google it. Now back to the show.

And so what can be done from an SEO perspective to make sure people find this content or is it just navigation?

Luke: navigation does help but also making sure the content is useful, you know, there’s no point kind of having a meticulous font size, 8 terms conditions page that no one can really read, you know, if it’s if it’s terms and conditions. That is clear. You’ve got H2. I’ve got it broken up. It’s responsive. If your returns policies nice and simple and explains and answers the questions that people asking. For example, you know, if you write in a returns page you want to want to write as if, write it in an FAQ style. So how long have I got to return something or during the Christmas break for example, can I return this in the new year or what if your returns child is will I get my money back? If I’m right.

You know all these sorts of questions are the things that people want to see. So when they’re Googling it, when they’re Googling these up questions, they come to your site equally they have all the information they need when they’re looking for that returns policy or whatever it is that they’re looking for.

Steve: So this is just kind of a page structure as opposed to structured data, right? So you’re trying to allow Google to easily crawl this page and then extract out the elements of your of your terms shipping and returns policy.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s I think you know be the designer page that you’d want to see, yourself in your customers shoes. If you’re going to see a page that’s just a wall of text or has they’re relating information on it’s going to make you slightly anxious. If they’re answering your questions. If there are you know, making it feel as if they could that they want you to see that content it helps it relieves anxiety and makes them want to choose you over somebody else.

Steve: Are there any other tips that you can provide for just getting like an e-commerce whether it be a category page or a product page. So even where I can search because typically there’s not a whole lot of content there and you know link building is often more difficult as well.

Luke: Yeah, so I would say in fact, you know, what department pages are really cool and a gesture to add context is what I mean by Department page. I guess using the an example. So if you had a clothing e-commerce store, for example, men’s or women’s would be like a department and then the categories inside there will be the types of clothes that you sell. But Department Pages can be really powerful because they can be the most link to pages on the site because of course men’s is got to be a lot visited a lot more than say men’s t-shirts, typically speaking. So by using those pages though, Attracts a lot of equity whether it’s internally via internal links you put in sight or backlinks or whatever it is you’re doing on social.

And you can then pass the equity where you want to from these sorts of powerful Department Pages if you like. I think in terms of SEO specifically in getting links for stuff like this, one page type that really helps and I’ve seen this been quite successful in the past is hosting your own discount code pages. So we’ve all done it. We will go to the checkout on a Retail store or an e-commerce store and you see a check out or sorry, say, coupon code box or add something like that and you think, you know what I mean. Just go to Google real quick. Let me just fire in retailer X discount code or blah blah blah and you may find one you may not but

Steve: I guess you’ll find a fake one, which is really annoying actually.

Luke: Yeah, and then they get the affiliate commission and everyone’s left this point, but you know the way in which you can really get to get links here is if you have your own coupon code page hosted on your website. When someone searches for retailer X discount code you’re going to rank their people are going to link to that page because they’re like, hey, I know something you don’t this is cool, we can get 5% off free delivery for use this and that can really attract some really cool links. And it also satisfies that desire for customers to find a discount code. It doesn’t really matter what that this kind of gives them. It could be free shipping which you do anyway could be five percent off which is like potentially not that big of a deal for you but it reduces abandonment. it attract links and improved conversion. So, It’s normally something that works really well

Steve: So from this coupon page do you then link to whatever category page or whatever you’re trying to rank for?

Luke: Yeah, you can absolutely do that. You know, you can say this coupon is valid in these specific departments if it’s a site-wide one, then you kind of you know, you’re doing well because you can lead to everything but it just allows you to kind of pass some of the equity if you like that he would have captured two other places

Steve: Interesting. yeah, that’s actually something that I did last year not specifically for the reason you just specified but because there are so many fake coupon codes out there. That, so I track all that stuff on my site and I get emailed every time someone enters in a bogus coupon code and I remember there was this one period I think last year during the holidays where I just kept getting these emails like it’s hammering on the site and I was like, where are these people gain their codes from and I just did a search for you know coupon codes for my site and it turns out all these fake coupon sites was just making up codes.

Luke: Wow. Okay.

Steve: Yeah, and so I just I just created my own page and it said real coupon codes for Bumblebee Linens and then I got that to rank in the top and that problem has been mitigated. We’ll see. The holiday season is right around the corner. We’ll see if it helps.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah, I guess actually a one last thing to be throwing for you or them on discount codes and coupon codes is you see so many retailers who make these things case-sensitive and its really irritating. So I’ll show you, a lot of money, right? If you’ve sent like a an email out or spend a lot of money. A Black Friday or something like that and you’ll say use code XYZ to get this off and it doesn’t work. It’s you practically lost the sale mainly because someone’s put it in uppercase or mixed case or whatever. So just make these things case insensitive.

Steve: I’ve found that people like even if it’s a code that doesn’t have that problem people just type in everything wrong. So my experience and you’re right if they typed it in wrong and they have this coupon code. They’re just not going to check out unless

Luke: Yeah

Steve: so I would recommend picking things that are very Easy to spell, like ridiculously easy like at an elementary school level. So people are going to redeem the coupons or just do a click and have it automatically apply the coupon code. That’s even better.

Luke: Yeah, even better.

Steve: So Luke, I really appreciate your time, man. Where can people find you if they need Consulting help or whatnot on search or conversion rate optimization.

Luke: Yeah, you can find me from anywhere. I kind of dominate the first page at the moment unless another leak off is going to come up and steal that from me. But, you can find me at lukecarthy.com. You can find me on Twitter and @mrlukecarthy. And yeah, you can normally get a hold of me. If you need to. You need to find me you’ll find a place you can get to me.

Steve: Yeah, so just to be clear. It’s lukecarthy.com.

Luke: That’s right. You got it. You got it

Steve: All right. Hey, thanks a lot Luke.

Luke: Thank you very much, Cheers, Steve.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, I’m really happy to have spoken with Luke because I was actually guilty of not doing a number of the things that he suggested and it just goes to show that everything can be improved. For more information about this episode go to mywifeqyitherjob.com/episode291.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

But before I begin I want to give a quick shout-out Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve.

I also want to give a quick shout-out Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Code Black Friday is right around the corner and for my e-commerce store email marketing is a heavy part of my holiday sales strategy. And in fact last year, it was close to 50% of My overall sales. And of course as you all know klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I use for Bumblebee Linens now Klaviyo is the growth marketing platform chosen by over 20,000 Brands generating more than three point seven billion dollars in Revenue in just the last year and with the holiday season right around the corner klaviyo has created the ultimate planning guide for crushing those holiday Revenue targets for marketing creative to segmentation strategy. These are proven tactics for more personalized marketing, especially in time for the holiday season. To get ahold of this guide, visit Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, Klaviyo.com/mywife. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m really happy to have Erich Hellstrom on the show. Now, Eric is a digital marketing strategist for Chubbie’s one of my favorite Brands when it comes to their marketing and I recently had the chance to see this guy speak at klaviyo Boston. It was a very interesting talk. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Chubbie’s they are immense short shorts brand with a huge cult following and even though Chubbie’s clothing isn’t really my style. I’m still on their email list because it is hilarious and they do a fantastic job of Building a loyal brand. In any case, Erich is in charge of crafting the copy for chubby social email product and events.

And what we are going to do today is dissect their email marketing strategy and hopefully learn how to apply these same techniques to our own e-commerce businesses. And with that welcome to show Erich. How you doing today, man?

Erich: I’m doing great. How are you?

Steve: Hi, I’m good.

Erich: Awesome. Thanks for that intro as great.

Steve: Actually, There’s a lot of stuff I could find about you online that I didn’t include the intro. But..

Erich: Yeah, I know. I’ve got an interesting Google search my name there’s not there’s nobody else with a name spelled like mine that I found so.

Steve: Exactly. So actually speaking of which Erich what is your background? How’d you end up at Chubbies?

Erich: Yeah. So I’ve got an interesting history as far as my professional career as a political science major in college and I left and did a summer in Yellowstone National Park where I was like doing outdoor recreation stuff leading hikes running like employee gyms in the park and then pretty much Went straight from that and to Americorps for a year, which is like working for government. Nonprofit did a little bit more nonprofit work after that and kind of bounced around from Montana to Portland, Oregon and then moved closer where I’m from South Carolina going back to Atlanta, Georgia and found myself working for a tech education company called general assembly. And at the time I was there Chubbies was opening up a pop-up shop in the same building.

So it was like right around the corner from where General Assembly was and I actually knew the guy who was opening it. We worked together as bike taxi drivers in college.

Steve: That’s random.

Erich: Yeah so random, but it was the first store that we really opened up outside of like a flagship one in San Francisco and I walked in and then I offered to help out. I only picked up three shifts and then it kind of snowballed and I was working a lot of shifts and then they were looking for a manager signing a lease and I became like our first store manager and then from there retails grown to like 14 different stores across the Country and I kind of worked my way up from store manager to helping out on the marketing team to doing like retail training building training manuals going to store openings and training teams while working on the email team marketing and then earlier 2019. I went full time on marketing team. So Yeah

Steve: Cool. is everyone on the marketing team a stand-up comedian?

Erich: I think everybody has the potential to be.

Steve: Okay.

Erich: Joey Avery is a very very Very good accomplished stand-up in San Francisco, the marketing team.

Steve: Nice.

Erich: I do a bit of improv. I don’t really do stand up. But I do a lot of shows around Austin now that I’m here I don’t but it’s more improv comedy.

Steve: So selling clothing is probably one of the hardest e-commerce businesses that you can run. So just kind of at a high level. Why would you say Chubbies is so successful before we kind of dig deeper into the details.

Erich: Yeah. I mean the resounding thing for me and a meet a lot of people Talk to a lot of customers especially since I was in retail for so long before marketing and it’s what we put out there is that like you shouldn’t take herself too seriously and like things are supposed to be fun and light-hearted and it’s really good to laugh. So that’s kind of what our brand is always been positioned around like we started just making funny short shorter shorts kind of like the 70s and 80s because the co-founders loved wearing them and they couldn’t find them and they felt like when they went out on the weekends And they wore the shorts.

They’re having the best time I’ve ever had and that’s kind of been like a resounding theme and under current through Chubbie’s which is great and an easy thing to get behind and it’s about having fun. So I think that is kind of that’s the big sticking point for me what people like us

Steve: I know for me like the reason why I love you guys is for the email copy. So

Erich: Yeah

Steve: So I want to talk about that actually. so a couple of things with your email marketing strategy. Can I ask you what percentage of your revenue is just a tribute email for you guys?

Erich: I don’t know off the top of my head. It’s a it’s a decent chunk. I mean, it’s not like 50% I would say it’s probably somewhere around 18 or 20, maybe?

Steve: 18 or 20 percent. Okay, and now adding retail, it’s just kind of online sales

Erich: Yeah.

Steve: Okay cool.

Erich: And that’s.. Now, we have wholesale as well now too so we have a lot of channels.

Steve: Oh Okay.

Erich: But emails pretty important for us

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And I love like how the emails are irreverent and hilarious but I’ve always been curious. How will they convert and what the overall strategy is? Cuz some of the emails that I’ve received like are just completely random. You know what I mean?

Erich: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: And I want to kind of flush this out but I guess to start out with. Well, let’s talk about which what the type of emails you send out first.

Erich: Yes. We do a mixture of we call them, product emails which are going to be either new products restocked products like a re messaging of a product or a sale. And so we do those we do about three of those a week and then we do a Friday we call it the Weekender. So it’s we send out Friday morning. Not really product focused a lot of the time it’s generally about getting ready for the weekend or about something that we’re excited about like, today, We feature a few of the veterans who work for a company and we ask him a few questions and had their responses on there and then posted pictures of them and it’s just a good way like going into a weekend where it’s a three-day weekend for a lot of people with Veterans Day the great opportunity for us to kind of use the platform we have of email to focus people’s attention on Veterans, which is cool.

But yeah, the weekender is interesting. Can be really funny stuff. Like we’ve done like bear themes just like products. We have that are bear stuff but also just like dumb facts about bears that we’ve made up like as we had a list of bear facts. And the first bear fact was I like them. So we do do stuff like that. We do versions of the weekender too that are just like Recaps of the week. We’ll find funny do sometimes and then just highlight different things going on. We’ll pick somebody to tag us on social media and feature them in there as well.

Steve: So let’s break down. So let’s start with the product emails, I guess. so so three emails a week on just products how do you select which products to feature and what are some of the goals of those emails in terms of like open rates click-through rates and sales kind of, just do an email. Yeah.

Erich: Yeah, it kind of depends. So for for messaging strategy like with the clothing industry, it’s tough because you’re designing stuff a year out and so a lot of the reason we master so much is because we’re constantly coming out with products. So that kind of dictates a lot of It also what’s in season, but like what the design team and the inventory planning team had like chosen for the season starts to dictate it and then as a marketing and merchandising team we all we had a lot of figure out what’s coming in when we can message it and kind of angles we want to take so that is as far as like decisions on that. We’re trying to get better about like doing two months out as far as planning. It used to be more on the fly like we’re getting of the week like, alright, What are we going to message? Like we knew we had a rough idea but now we’re getting more and more organized as we are hiring more people which is great.

And then as far as goals, we set kind of product email and a weekend or email which is our newsletter a little different you definitely looking for like decent conversion. It depends on the product. You have a higher price like how to wear product that’s $100 plus your conversions definitely going to be less than if you do a sale with $30 shorts. So like when it’s like that will up Wanting to convert at a higher level and conversions can be a little weird because the data we look at you have last click Revenue. Then you have these looker so you can look at 24-hour open Revenue, which is one of my favorites but it is people it sets a timer if somebody opens an email it clocks their email and then if they purchase within 24 hours, so they don’t even have to click anything in the email to get attributed to it.

But it’s more of a sign of like how our marketing efforts as a whole or doing. So like you’re normally going to see more On that the conversion is going to be higher and a lot more money will be attributed to it and like a Google analytics last click Revenue number.

Steve: think that’s a default for klaviyo, isn’t it of you?

Erich: Yeah, I think it is 20. Yeah, I don’t do a lot of reporting through Klaviyo. So I don’t I don’t line up the number. It seems to be more like a 24-hour open for sure.

Steve: Okay. I remember you talking about in your talk that think your open rates are on the order of like 9% Was that accurate?

Erich: no, that’s just for a non opener. So So that campaign that we’re presenting on is called best of non openers and every week we target people who have unopened.

Steve: I see okay.

Erich: So I think for right now, I think my product email Kpi is 17% open rate.

Steve: Okay.

Erich: yeah, which we can hit for really on top of it. But for the targeted ones where it specifically people who don’t open. We’re average 9 on the year.

Steve Okay, that’s actually really good. So this is this on the resend you mean? On Email? Okay

Erich: Yeah. That’s the resend. I think as an over, as a company overall we have a Like in all the emails we’ve sent with klaviyo, We have a 16 percent open rate.

Steve: Okay.

Erich: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, that’s really good because I was I remember talking with someone at Klaviyo who said that as soon as it starts dropping below 15 or 20 then the deliverability starts to suffer.

Erich: Yeah.

Steve: So for your product emails, are you shooting for just anything over 15 in general?

Erich: Yeah. We definitely want to hit 15, 18 is a good one. If we get we had a great one for our trucker jackets. It said it’s like the trucker Jack. Jacket was to the sender was and then it just said 480 horsepower as the subject line and the preview text was like 5.7 liter turbocharged and that thing opened probably like 23 or 24 percent, which is awesome. Yeah. We have a we have a pretty Hardy list. So any time we can get over 20 is great, big fans.

Steve: So, how do you how do you segment your customers? I imagine you don’t just like blast your entire list each time with these product emails, right?

Erich: Yeah no. There’s so many people who just don’t Open I mean I’m guilty of it on my personal accounts to where it, you know companies will send me emails and I should never open them.

Steve: Yeah

Erich: so so we Define active and I believe klaviyo helped us with this originally, but right now. It’s people who have been active either by ordering or opening emails within 90 days. Yeah

Steve: So those are the people that you are sending three times a week for?

Erich: yeah.

Steve: Okay, and then what about the people that kind of there are outside of that range? Let’s say they have an open between 90 maybe a hundred eighty days or something like that.

Erich: Yeah, there is, we have a segment for that that we can send if we think we have really good messages. So cool thing about data is like we can look at a message. If It’s doing really well at a time where like oh, this is the perfect time for this message. This is the perfect message, so we would send that out to him like we do a big campaign around Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Will definitely be using people who are in that and also people who are a little more inactive than even those people granted like your open rates can be pretty abysmal on those. Just because like, you know people I don’t know how many email addresses you have. Probably have like four or five and I don’t check a lot of them ever. I think I still have a college email too.

Steve: You got your colleagues’ scalp account. That’s for sure.

Erich: Yeah, I know. Everything’s linked somehow but yes some email marketers out there pulling out his hair, like why is this guy not opening these emails? They haven’t checked in eight years. So yeah, we’ll send those people on these bigger campaigns for sure.

Steve: and I imagine you don’t you don’t send them heavily because that could affect your deliverability, right?

Erich: Yeah, especially if we were to send to everybody who’s not suppress. I mean our open rates would be it would be tough to get to 10%

Steve: So those people who just kind of fall into the past 90 day category. I guess you’ll send to them. It sounds like periodically like once a month maybe or?

Erich: yeah, you don’t have a full Cadence. Now if we think a message is really good send out so like this is a pretty slow times. As far as us and I think I would say retail as a whole because it is like November going into black Friday people aren’t as active as Shoppers as they are like, you know, everybody’s kind of gearing up. So we’re going to try and send a less right now. And then because we’re going to be sending a lot two weeks going through the Christmas holiday.

Steve: when you send email as much as you do, do you find that you’re getting a lot of churn like unsubscribes?

Erich: Yeah. We do get a good amount to something that like We for sure need to like invest time in Fortunately, with size of our team. We haven’t really dug like super deep into that. I know there’s a certain like Cliff after people have been on the list for a while. If you’re not that into our emails, like if you’re not a fan people tend to unsubscribe.

Steve: Yeah.

Erich: after like, you know, it could be around 90 days. I forget what the cliff is. So there’s some ideas that I have for next year and I think we’ll probably re-evaluate in January. January is a huge unSubscribe month, but also they’re like looking at the data on when people tend to unsubscribe after they join the list and then creating sort of a flow to try and figure out like maybe take over the first two weeks. Somebody’s not really opening put them into a segment and only send to them once every two weeks, once every week test that out because it is a lot to get three emails. Three product emails.

Steve: I mean if yeah, if you’re sending that many emails presumably you’re getting a ton of emails in I’m just kind of curious how you gather emails also.

Erich: yeah ways to do it. I mean the best way is when people come and they’re new customers to the site. So like all our marketing efforts kind of feed into email in that regard. We use pop-ups. I think it’s pretty industry standard now to have a pop-up. especially the klaviyo since it’s integrated with Shopify. You can set a pop-up for somebody who you don’t have their email and offer them a coupon sign up for the list and for their first purchase, which is like a slam dunk. I would say if you’re not doing that I would hop on it fast, right because there’s like somebody on your website right now, you know what their email and you could have it. That’s the big way we do bigger campaigns as well like this year and it’s a third time doing it.

We do a man model Campaign which is like, you know sign up to be our next man model and it’s literally people sourced from around the country regular Joe’s who like taking pictures of weird clothes and sending us weird videos and we give them like a professional modeling contract which really is just like flights out to photo shoots and like free Chubbies for 10 years, which is great and like people get really excited about it. We do voting for it, which is awesome. And it’s a great way to get people engage with the brand and people coming into the website. So you can that will feed into like, you know, if you have pop-ups or if you like require and vote we didn’t require emails to vote this year, but it’s an option. Yeah.

Steve: And if you work there you’re a model also, right?

Erich: Yeah. I’ve been in a few photo shoots, which is great. It’s kind of fun. I’m not a head, or our photographer, we were doing like a studio shoot for something and I was open out. It was like a Monday morning and just started to drink coffee and he’s like do some model poses. And I was like I don’t know what that is. And so we literally Google image model poses and I started doing whatever those were.

Steve: So how did those images do in the email campaigns? Just curious

Erich: That was for our, we do July Fiber which is cyber Monday, just in June getting ready for July 4th. And I would say that they’re the best images we’ve ever taken. They did All right, I mean for it was for a free gift. So I think people look past the fact that you know, I’m subpar model.

Steve: So anyway, yeah, I want to talk about like your process for crafting an email. It’s not just like one person sits down and just writes an email and sends it out because I remember you had a really pretty complex process of checks and balances. So

Erich: yeah, it’s weird how much time you put into it. But I mean if you’re bringing in a lot of revenue from it more time you put in the more you going to get out I kind of so, it depends on the week, there are times where you know myself or Ashley have to sit there and be like we don’t have copy or we switched a message up. It will sit there on the spot and write and design an email and like pull images. But if in a perfect world, we do a brainstorm like maybe two weeks in advance and we can get the whole marketing team in there if they’re there but generally it’s myself and Joey hopefully and Ashley and we just like right ideas down for headlines.

Steve: Is this for the product or the weekender email?

Erich: Product.

Steve: Oh okay.

Erich: Yeah it’s really Weekender, the Weekender I just sat down and wrote the other like two days ago and then pieced it together and I talked to some of the Vets who worked with us and kind of interview them. But that one’s a little, the weekend is a lot more loose right now.

Steve: Okay

Erich: it comes off that way, which is great. That’s what it’s supposed to be for us.

Steve: Yeah, the Weekender isn’t for a conversions per se. It’s more brand building, right?

Erich: Yeah and like yeah, Mickey you to go into the weekend with something real like nice ready. But yeah, so we’ll do brainstorming will pull copy from that. Ideally we have central theme good ideas for headlines or links out of that.

Steve: We talk about the headlines because for the people who actually aren’t familiar with your brand. Can you give an idea of how that headline process works because they are really attention-grabbing.

Erich: Yeah. We design. Them in Photoshop. I did that my expertise right there. I’m really good at Photoshop, but just at building headlines and links. So yeah, we write really weird. We tried to I’m a big fan of wordplay kind of always have them. So that’s something big we do but it’s how we use huge headlines. Like you’re if you’re opening it you’re going to know what’s going on instantly.

Steve: Can you get some examples of your best performing ones?

Erich: Oh man off the top of my head. I don’t know, I don’t know if I have any funny once. we’re writing a Star Wars one for next week. And it’s going to be hotter than being in a tan tan or something along those lines. Yeah, we don’t get sometimes it’s like so recently we did one. That’s just like back by popular demand stuff like that stuff that is attention-grabbing. We wrote the Khakinator is backInator recently. We have a short called Khakinator. That’s just some some classic rhyming right there

Steve: So do those work in Terms of conversions. I’m just kind of curious. So I guess the first step is to get someone to open the email, right?

Erich: Yeah. That’s..

Steve: Yeah, that’s where the headline comes in. And then once they’ve opened the email what are some things that you do to actually get the sale?

Erich: Yeah. We test a lot would normally test two to four different versions of an email for a few hours and look at shopping data and click through is really the way to like get the most out of it and then just send to the rest of your email list and you feel confident that you have the best version

Steve: Can you walk us through that process? So you said for a couple of hours. So what? Surgery list are you sending for a couple hours?

Erich: Generally, is going to be 25%

Steve: 25% Okay and wait a couple hours. And then what specific metrics are you looking for?

Erich: Yeah. Our favorite one is we look at we use specific Google UTM links we go into Google analytics and we can look at how each variation of shopping and we’ll look at the amount of sessions which is important just to make sure you got enough data and if you have enough sessions you look at the amount of people who came to the site and visited a product page so that people percentage and then you look at the percentage of people who visited a product page and added the cart. Those are the key ones that I’m most interested in. and then you can also look at you know, you can look at past that but once somebody’s viewed and added the cart that’s a good sign that you’re doing your good message and then retroactively will look at click-through rate. Make sure like, you know, it’s not an abysmal click-through rate. And those are..

Steve: In terms of, looking at the metrics for add to cart. Does that mean like if it’s low does that mean like maybe you’re not displaying the right product or is it? Okay

Erich: Yeah, well, it could just be that somebody was interested enough to go look at the product but not interested enough to think about buying it. It could be the you know, what the pictures that you have on the product page. If you’re not converting in that regard, you know, it’s not great. But it shows definite shopping interest. If you’re seeing a recurring theme of people adding the cart.

Steve: Okay.

Erich: Yeah, and so it’s kind of streamlined everything kind of its kind of a holistic view thing to so you kind of just have to trust the data on that one.

Steve: and in terms of variations, you said two to four variations for?

Erich: Yeah, so we’ll test different copy and different assets. And by I said something like photos new graphics versus photos lifestyle versus lay down will test gifts out or gifs depending on your persuasion. So yeah, and we’ll look at those to see what’s getting people to click and then what is displaying the product in the best way to get them to go to the product page.

Steve: So you mentioned 25% is that 25 percent across all variations? Or 25% of

Erich: We take 25% of the active list that we send to

Steve: okay. Got it. Yeah and divide that among four

Erich: and divide that by four yeah

Steve: Got it and then whatever wins you just send out to the remaining 75%

Erich: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: okay

Erich: and then we take the best subject line too so we’ll test different subject line. So then you’re like you’re you’re getting the most amount of opens to the best version of your email that you found, which is great for us. It’s been kind of a key to doing well and making relevant emails that people you know, like.

Steve: And I know doing your Klaviyo presentation, you mentioned that you actually create random user names to get people to open also like open this email at Chubbies.com. Has that been like a has that had like a really positive effect on the open rate?

Erich: Yeah. Definitely changes it up what my takeaway from the funny world of subject lines and preview lines. Is that like they’re all kind of boring and you it’s not that enticing normally to open one. So So anything we can do and we don’t get spam complaints up for that, which is great. People kind of expect it out of us, which is a nice like it’s a good part of working for Chubbies’ because you can do goofy stuff.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Erich: That’s just Chubbies being Chubbies but yeah, it’s cool. It’s really funny. The one in the one of my favorites from the year was from the abominable snowman at Chubbies.com. And it just said I’m real. Yeah, which is you know, funny and people get the joke so quickly, too. It’s timely because it was cold. It was also a message about shorts with the Eddie’s on them toes like a win-win.

Steve: If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com. Now back to the show.

Let me ask you this like if you were to work so I run a handkerchiefs store. and everyone’s pretty straight-laced like would be some of the ideas for like subject lines that would get To open like just off top your head?

Erich: For a handkerchief.

Steve: Yeah.

Erich: Okay your pocket at whatever the company is and then the subject line could be “got a sec?” or like “put me in your pocket”.

Steve: Okay

Erich: I’m a big fan now of doing a one word subject line. So if you’re doing it that way be like handkerchief at blank.com. Like hey as the subject line the preview “put me in your pocket”.

Steve: cool. I like it.

Erich: I know like, “Got pocket?”

Steve: ha ha ha.

Erich: Yeah I would say like blowing your nose are using the word blow can be a little sensitive. Yeah, it has double meanings but there’s something there you can find the right purpose but not make it sound bad. maybe just blow as the subject line and then your nose on me.

Steve: You know, I’m gonna try that and I’ll report back on the results for the listeners here.

Erich: Yeah, and it’s good. Yeah one word is enticing when you see it.

Steve: So you write tons of copy like every single week. Have you noticed any Trends about what kind of works and what In terms of both the subject line the user and just kind of the in body copy for an email.

Erich: Yeah for subject lines. There’s so many thing repetitiveness works well. sometimes Pop Pop Culture references. We made it Law and Order reference yesterday in a subject line and it annihilated which was great. It was a it said law and email and then it was like they always start off long order with like these are the stories of..

Steve: yeah

Erich: whatever and we did it like that and people loved it. Like it’s a people reach out. There were like a lot of subject line, which is great.

Steve: I’m just wondering how many people who don’t watch Law & Order are just you know, it isn’t nor that e-mail though, you know?

Erich: Yeah, probably a lot of but I think there’s more Law and Order fans out there than not apparently.

Steve: Okay.

Erich: But yeah, so that was great pop culture references there certain things that people really like that like if you can figure it out and a lot of times it’s just by rainstorm are talking for subject lines will figure out for body copy and us like we definitely don’t want to be Like a super serious like talking to so much about like this is what the material is made out of and like the construction like if we get to Scientific with it is boring. So we always take an angle like one of my favorite ones is I always have the sale copy that I try not to go back to but it’s really fun. It’s like I just right like I was walking around the office the other day and I found this big red button that said sale my boss told me not to press it. So.

So I pressed it because I’m a rebel not everything on the side is 20% off stuff like that where the key point is what we’re trying to get is that we have a sale, right and so finding a funny work around way normally three sentences if I can three sentences for me is like a perfect amount for like a paragraph a lot of people read on mobile. So if you’re doing, if you’re writing a book, it’s really hard to read on mobile. people are standing anyway, you know, we’ve used other software that have shown us how long people stay on our emails and there’s a large amount of people in spend less than three seconds on an email.

And so you have to figure out a way to not end in data with words, but also for the people who are reading you wanted to be like relevant and funny and goofy. It’s an interesting line to walk but the more you do it. I mean I’ve written so much copy now and so many emails that it’s kind of like a muscle that’s worked out. But yeah sure that’s sweet..

Steve: How about the image versus text.

Erich: Yeah, I mean our products are like you gotta seem to believe them like they’re so many interesting and cool fabrics and like fun Prints, but it’s also a way for us to for you to show your brand and imagery so like, you know, it’s more about what the person’s doing or like what the person like somebody looks like. They’re having fun. They’re laughing. They’re doing something mischievous. Like that’s a very interesting asset to me. But also I think to the brand it like looks a little different we always want something and not look like you know, if we’re doing underwear. We don’t want it to look like Hanes email. We want to look like a Chubbies one. So, you know, like somebody cooking a bunch of Pancakes or something.

Steve: What about the use of gifs?

Erich: Yeah. I like gifs. It hasn’t I haven’t seen resounding data that gifs are better than static images, which is funny actually talked to some smaller Brands sometimes to about you know, marketing just because like if you’re dipping your toe in it’s a big vast. World and you’re like, what is this? But there’s definitely something of value to making it email that looks like a standard email that doesn’t have too many bells and whistles. That’s why we use you know, white backgrounds black text even though will spice it up a little bit with like big headlines. I can still the Bare Bones of it looks like it could be an office email with pictures in it, which is you know, interesting. It’s kind of something we’ve curated.

We don’t want to change it because people are used to it but also Like if you get a little bit too out there with it a super hands who do full graphic emails with like crazy backgrounds which are beautiful. But the question to me is always did people click it or did people just like looking at it.

Steve: Yeah

Erich: and for us the key is like assets are great in the email, but you don’t want your email to be an asset, you know your assets to be, you know, a part of the email

Steve: you know, one thing I have also noticed in the emails you guys use surveys a lot and so I was just kind of wondering what the strategy is for. That and what do you do with that data?

Erich: Yeah, the surveys tend to be for a merchandising team. We come up with so many prints that with the design team will give them product ideas for next year. And then they kind of have to taper it down. So people are on our email list or like, you know, loyal customers loyal readers normally and so we’ll send them every quarter probably send about a hundred thousand people surveys which is kind of wild but that data comes back in and gives us like an opportunity to like Make product that we know our customers are interested in

Steve: and presumably these are your best customers also, so you’re probably going to listen to them.

Erich: Yeah are most active email openers to but yeah, our biggest customers are such and email fans like we’re doing a sample sale in Austin right now and like yes, we did the main way we got a lot of people that was sending an email that was geo-targeted through Klaviyo to be like, hey coming out to the sample sale and and the people who came like, yeah, I love to emails which is great. But yeah, those are the people well that we want to be like getting their opinion on product. You know.

Steve: I’m just kind of curious like I’ll tell you for my store 10% of our best customers represent well over 50 percent of our revenues. I’m just kind of curious what the split is for Chubbies do you happen to know if top of your head?

Erich: Well, I don’t that’s more of a data question for a data Gap. But yeah

Steve: I would imagine like you guys your fanatical customers probably make up most of your revenue or a big portion of your revenues, right?

Erich: Yeah. I don’t know we bring a lot of new customers surprisingly. I mean our social ads are like Pretty effective and interesting in the same way. Our email is like different than everybody else. We try to make our ads different than everybody else. And so we have we have good channels for bringing in new people and like the amount of products we do. I mean swim is huge for us and everybody buys it swimsuit before summer to Crazy market. So we bring in a lot of new people every year but there are fanatical fans who will buy who have everything.

Steve: Yeah. I bet

Erich: Yeah. I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s probably pretty high

Steve: How do you create those loyal fanatics?

Erich: Yeah, you know it’s why we’ve always liked we have a saying in Chubbies it’s customer over company over self, which is like kind of cheesy but it’s the we think about it a lot. We always were like what’s best for the customer and people like respond to that really Well. all our customer service is based on a Missoula Montana. So if you email in or you chat in or call in like you’re getting somebody From Montana who’s taking care of you? And we like since we started a such a small company with literally four guys in an apartment the way that we interact with people. It’s still I mean, we’re much bigger now than we were then but we still treat people the same sort of way like, you know weeks we assume that they aren’t trying to get one over on us at all and really trying to do the best thing we can for them..

So just from a customer service perspective that’s kind of thing. But also like, you know, we are always trying to do things that make us laugh and are interesting like I’m wouldn’t really send out an email if I didn’t think it was interesting and they’re definitely something that like content that you would engage with to me is like, you know Above All Else what you want to be putting out there and people tend to respond well to that which is good.

Steve: I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2020 Seller Summit are on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now what is seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that is specifically targeting e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online and unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS. Mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate every year we cut off ticket sales at just a couple hundred people. So tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or 1 million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From May 6 to May 8. And right now, we are almost sold out of Mastermind tickets already and I will be raising the ticket price regularly starting the day after Cyber Monday for more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s SELLERSUMMIT.COM or just Google it. Now back to the show.

I’ve read that you guys actually go out and call your customers kind of cold calls that you guys still do that or?

Erich: I did it for a, wedid a store opening in Scottsdale this year and that cold call some of our customers. I don’t know how how often it’s still happening. And know our CEO. I remember calling somebody this year. It’s a great, you know, you can get on the phone and be like, hey, this is blank and Chubbies and they like are you serious? Like it’s a great way to just connect with Us maybe we have people’s phone numbers too. Oh, yeah, we have other rounds of talking too people now to like, you know, now that we have retail stores and biting them out. Thank you them is easier than just calling.

Steve: Yeah, let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about like Chubbies’ social strategy. You guys make a lot of sales off of like Facebook and Instagram.

Erich: Mmm, as far as organic know they’re great ads platform. So that’s kind of where the key is now most people who work and social tell you now, I like Facebook used to be a great organic engine for like content like we would put content on there. It just crazy views like multi-million dollar multi-million view videos and then it just cut off like.

Steve: yeah

Erich: Facebook changed the way that they interact with Publishers which like, you know, they weren’t getting paid for these views and now they’re getting paid for you know views but it kind of changes some of the strategy when a platform does that so you focus a little bit more on ads which is, you know, it’s a great platform and puts you in people’s pocket and people’s hand and gives you the opportunity to kind of for us do something different make a They had to do yeah funny video with the product, you know.

Steve: Okay, can we talked about your top of funnel ads. So like what has been like your best performing ad?

Erich: Oh best performing ad kind of chain. I mean, we dropped so much product. There’s certain ad you can do that show people like recent things they viewed and then you just kind of put placeholder copy. So we have some place over copy like that’s going to look good that’s going to look real good. But it’s like the reels really spelled out and that is just like a simple thing. Yeah, my favorite copy and copy that tends to do well for ads that I write is fairly simple when I see people write three sentences ads. I get a little nervous just because it’s too much to read.

Steve: Hmm interesting. Okay.

Erich: It’s a lot of letters. Yeah. I like to keep it very simple, especially with on the way the way Facebook operates. It’s like your ad is shown with copy at the top of whatever image you put in there or whatever kind of videos in there. So people Most likely going to read that or skim it first and like there’s something about social media that makes too many words, very boring. People are just going to you know Cruise right by it

Steve: That’s interesting because I’ve heard from people like sometimes long-form copy works really well, but I guess it just depends on what you’re selling. I would imagine for perils the image. That’s that

Erich: Yeah, and we’re not getting it like, you know, there’s certain things that are like you need to know about like maybe fruit. I don’t know. Yeah, I definitely I think brevity and social media is something that I hold in high regard, but a recent one that did well was a trucker jacket and it just said the official jacket saying “All right. All right. All right” that’s all us and it performed well, you know.

Steve: yeah

Erich: but people yeah, it’s a joke, and it’s interesting and different all at once, you know.

Steve: okay.

Erich: Yeah.

Steve: so it’s interesting. So for your just organic stuff then, what is I guess, the golden organic wise if you’re just mainly making money off of the ads.

Erich: Yeah, it’s changed a bit. I mean same thing with content that we want to engage with. So ideally were making funny things. Instagram has kind of been our main platform as of late.

Steve: Okay

Erich: a lot of user-generated photos that we can put top captions on them that are kind of funny ideally and we do sketch videos. We’ve done way to less as of late, but funny things kind of making fun of office life for everyday life because we’re definitely about having fun and enjoying the weekend and like the workweek tends to be the anti weekend. So a big part of what we do is make fun of office culture and

Steve: okay.

Erich: Yeah. She a lot of videos for that which is great.

Steve: So it’s all branding pretty much and just getting to know the the brand really and the company and the people behind it.

Erich: Yeah, exactly. It’s like a look inside but also a laugh

Steve: right right

Erich: The idea. Yeah, we want to make people laugh for the most part especially on social like that. For us people aren’t going to like it. If they don’t think it’s funny.

Steve: What about YouTube?

Erich: YouTube? We’re not, we started posting stuff to YouTube again this year, but we originally did and then we stopped and now YouTube is I’m a proponent of YouTube especially for longer form stuff just because like the way their algorithms are set up now are great for organic content because yeah, push their own ads and they want people to keep viewing, so like if somebody is to get involved with or engage with your YouTube channel, they’re going to keep seeing the videos pop up and if you’re doing it, right they’re going to continue to watch.

You just see other like people on YouTube are getting crazy views, which is great at something that you know, it’s definitely on the roadmap. It’s a small marketing team. So..

Steve: right

Erich: right now we’re going to we’re experimenting with Tick-Tock. That would be a big

Steve: Yeah, I was gonna mention Tick-Tock.

Erich: Yeah. I made my first personal Tick-Tock video today and let’s see how many views I’m at. I think I’m at 10

Steve: ha ha ha

Erich: Not bad.Tick-Tock such an interesting it speaking of brevity. I mean the joke has to be there so fast. Yeah to really resonate with people.

Steve: So what did what would you say is like your main marketing channel, then at this point that’s working the best would you say it’s like email?

Erich: Um, I mean, I would probably say that because I’m interacting with it the most I don’t know. I mean we have such a wide reach on social which is great and a lot of times, you know, people will follow us on Instagram and then be pushing ads and then end up going to the site and then they See this like new customer sign up they sign up for it. Then they’re on the email and then they’re converted. So it’s hard to say what I think is the best platform for us because I’d take more of a holistic view that like

Steve: sure.

Erich: Yeah anytime we’re getting an attribution from something. It’s probably getting fed into by another part of our Marketing

Steve: that was my next question actually because it’s many touch points. So, how do you how do you handle your attribution on ads and all that sort of thing too?

Erich: Yeah, it’s tough if it’s a New product that we’re doing ads for we won’t send out the email until we get at least decent data on the ads were getting.

Steve: Okay.

Erich: So that’s one way to help the attribution on the ads front outside of that a lot of times. It’s Blended, you know, the way that you look at attribution. So like for our rev like the 24-hour number like there’s people who are opening an email and then getting an ad or seeing it posted on social or just like thinking about it for 25 minutes and then coming back so, you know, you kind of get it. Take everything with a grain of salt. But the yeah, you see you see recurrent themes is kind of what we look for

Steve: you guys doing anything with messenger push or SMS.

Erich: Do we have an app? So we do push notifications every week through that if people opt-in

Steve: okay

Erich: SMS is a new one that probably won’t look into until January super interesting. There’s a great opportunity. I get so many text message nowadays. It’s like the new email which is funny. Like it’s like the perfect time for companies to be so getting an SMS. So yeah, we’ll se what happens.

Steve: You do any chat Bots or Facebook Messenger marketing?

Erich: No not right now. We’ll be doing Facebook groups soon. And so just getting more involved Facebook has done a great job of like adjusting their algorithms to prioritize conversations and groups with anybody’s joined a group. They notice it like they just pops up on your timeline, like instantly it kind of flows to the top. So finding a way to do meaningful things in groups, whether it’s creating groups, you’re getting involved in groups and like, you know cutting jokes, but also like, you know, I don’t know exactly what our strategy is going to be there. It’s one of the things I’m kind of task with

Steve: right

Erich: and its interests exciting like any chance to engage with with people who don’t know about us or people who do know about us and like lighten their day a little bit is great. It seems like Facebook groups is going to be the new stomping ground for that.

Steve: All right, sweet. Yeah, that’d be hilarious. I would definitely join that group

Erich: Yeah. Yeah weekly updates From Chubbies the group. Yeah. So yeah, we’re getting funky with that. The cool thing is with our company like like creativity and being boldly entrepreneurial is like high. we hold in high regard. So like if I was to be like yeah, I think you know going in and like randomly liking somebody’s first picture on Facebook is a good idea from the Chubbies profile that you like. Alright, let’s test it and see what happens granted that might not be the best example, but you know doing Nothing different than another company wouldn’t do right because it’s funny because we like it is something that we’re always down to test.

So when we’re looking when I’m thinking about, you know strategy for that. There’s yeah, there’s a world of opportunity that other people aren’t doing that. I’m excited for.

Steve: Cool, Erich. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. But if anyone wants to get a hold of you or find Chubbies clothing or read your copy, where can they find you?

Erich: Yeah. Chubbies.com is the best but if you’re on our email list and you go there. You’re probably get prompted. You can also find me on Tick Tock now.

Steve: Tick-Tock. What’s your handle?

Erich: It is Duncan_Smothers. But yeah, that is a name that I said as a joke a few years ago and somebody’s like you say Duncan Smothers. And so I use it on social sometimes. Yeah, follow me on Tick Tock and give me views please. You know, I got two follow hours and they both work for Chubbies

Steve: ha ha and how can we recognize your email copy? If we see it. Is there any way to do that?

Erich: Yeah. It’s the one that gives you the stomach pains from hurling over laughing. It’s gonna be that one. That’ll be the first time that it’s from me. Anything that doesn’t make you laugh as for sure contributed by somebody else.

Steve: Sweet. Well Erich. Thanks a lot for coming the show man. Really appreciate your time.

Erich: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Steve: Alright man. Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now as I mentioned before if you want to see email marketing done right in a fun way. Go sign up for the Chubbies email list. For more information about this episode. Go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode290.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

I also want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

But before we begin I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Code Black Friday is right around the corner and for my e-commerce store email marketing is a heavy part of my holiday sales strategy. And in fact last year, it was close to 50% of My overall sales. And of course as you all know klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I use for Bumblebee Linens now Klaviyo is the growth marketing platform chosen by over 20,000 Brands generating more than three point seven billion dollars in Revenue in just the last year and with the holiday season right around the corner klaviyo has created the ultimate planning guide for crushing those holiday Revenue targets for marketing creative to segmentation strategy. These are proven tactics for more personalized marketing, especially in time for the holiday season. To get ahold of this guide, visit Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, Klaviyo.com/mywife.

I also want to give a shout-out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the my wife quit her job podcast today. I’m thrilled to have Nate Lipton on the show. Now Nate as someone who I was introduced to by my buddy Andrew Youderien and the reason I want an 8 on the show is because he runs numerous e-commerce businesses in the Cannabis space. So for example Growers house is an eight-figure e-commerce store selling growing supplies, and recently. He launched a line of CBD products over at truepotency.com. In any case I have many students and readers who have been asking me questions on how to break into this exact Space so I figured I’d have Nate answer these questions for you directly and with that welcome to show Nate. How you doing today man?

Nate: doing great. You know, it’s Friday morning. I’m feeling pretty fresh ready to get some work done and then head off for the weekend.

Steve: Are we in the same time zone? I can’t remember.

Nate: Yeah, we are. I’m on I’m on Arizona, which is a funky time zone that never changes. Okay. Whereas you’re in California, which does so but yeah. We’re on PST right now.

Steve: so Nate, how did you get into this space? And what is your backstory?

Nate: Yeah, well, I guess the back story goes where I was going to school at the University of Oregon and around you know, when I was doing school there. I was double majoring in more like economics and finance thought I was going to get into the finance industry, but I was always interested in entrepreneurship and the Cannabis industry in particular kind of thrilled me just because I saw a really long Horizon of growth, you know, and that was around 2010 I graduated so I tried out, you know, the finance industry for a little bit jumped into an And shipping Morgan Stanley and really didn’t like it.

So after about three months I decided I would go after kind of plan B and do more of a kind of a passion project. That was a little bit a little bit riskier, you know as an industry, especially back in 2010 where not a lot of the paths have been paved at that’s that’s..

Steve: everything was illegal back then right?

Nate: you know, it’s not like everything was a hundred percent illegal, but there were really what it was is there were just a few States that had medical cannabis. Okay, and the Laws for the state. Everyone was fighting about the difference between state law and federal law and which Trump’s what so the legality was a huge grey area. So, you know people getting into the Cannabis industry back then if you kind of had to be a little bit of a cowboy. you know, you have to really understand the risks and then like be okay with them. So I started looking into the industry ended up working for as a manager at a dispensary in San Francisco, and then worked for a growing Supply Equipment Company. An e-commerce one all in the Bay area for a couple of years after I graduated and you know, I was interested in opening a dispensary at that point in time.

I was interested in business did some growing, you know back in Oregon and you know, when I looked at applying for a dispensary license, the paperwork was huge. I found that even when you get a license, sometimes the police would like to raid dispensaries and deal with the legality of it in court rather than prior to them rating a dispensary. It just depends on that local county or city and whether the district attorney was anti cannabis or Pro cannabis and it’s not a place that really wanted to be in so I kind of settled more on to the growing equipment side, which is you know, growing is a passion of mine. So I said, you know what I could sell the equipment to, you know, these people jumping into the Cannabis industry and still give myself level of Separation where I’m not touching the plant or opening myself to that kind of risk.

Steve: I’m just kind of curious as you’re talking. so that equipment that you On Growershouse.com. Are they your own Unique Designs. Are you drop shipping? Are you carrying inventory? How does that work?

Nate: Yeah, so man, we do everything and honestly, it’s a little complex but we have in the back end of our system we have about 16,000 skews about yeah, it’s a lot and we have like probably 300 vendors that we work with too and but probably about 6,000 of those are actually up on our website as it enabled and we do about e percent of our Revenue, you know via shipping out of our warehouse here in Tucson, Arizona and the other 50% I revenue is probably drop shipped and we probably have 300 skews that we have that are kind of OEM private label items or items that we’ve created that were usually purchasing from direct from manufacturer whether it’s like domestically or overseas China things like that.

Steve: I’m just curious to manage all those skews. We’re just kind of curious what platform you’re on right now.

Nate: Yeah. So the front end of the site is just Magento it’s a 1.9. So we’re probably be switching over to something else soon, like a molten or Bigcommerce or Magento 2 and then on the back end. We have a pretty holistic system called brightpearl and that is basically all accounting order processing Inventory management things of that sort.

Speaker 2: I see okay. I’ve never heard of those. I had never heard of brightpearl before is that generally used for larger e-commerce operations?

Nate: you know brightpearl is I would say actually it even works with small. Lower to Mid stage, I would say once you get to the point. Like I don’t I don’t really know what their entry level is. I think they were at work with very small stores though two people even that have one or two, you know employees just starting out when we ended up switching to them. We were already doing a fair amount on a business, you know, we had probably 20 30 employees. So I haven’t used on the smaller side, but we switched off of Stonehedge

Steve: Yes. Yes. Stonehenge. I know those guys. Yeah. So when you first started out, how many skews did you have and how did you kind of drive your own early traffic.

Nate: Yeah, so driving the early traffic. So I did work for another Hydroponics e-commerce store in California for a bit to get my chops. And then we move down to Tucson Arizona to start Growershouse.com and starting out. We did have a small retail store. But we were in like the worst location you can possibly be in we are like because when you set up with certain Distributors, they give you basically a radius that you can operate within and if there are stores already You know that have a location in a radius. You can’t be within you know kind of their area. So I wanted to open up in tuscon the only place I could open up is like on the south side right next to the airport like no one hangs out down there in Tucson. So we open this tiny little thousand square foot retail store.

And then we open the online store the online store, you know, like most online stores took a while to get going like I would say the first three months were a little like, you know, almost like crickets..

Steve: sure.

Nate: And do that the retail store kind of helped us through that because we did some local advertising which I find is a little bit easier to do just with targeted keywords for your city things like that

Steve: while we’re talking about advertising. I do know that it’s challenging to advertise, right? Because the Facebook’s and the Google’s the world won’t let you advertise anything related to cannabis. Is that correct?

Nate: That is correct. So anneal if you go to Growershouse.com, you’ll notice that we do sell equipment to people who grow plants. You won’t notice that it says. Cannabis or marijuana on their it just so happens that so many people that use the equipment that we sell are doing that and that industry is booming. The thing is, I mean we sell to like USDA, NASA, you know many universities including Universe Arizona Cornell, you know, Loyola Marymount, there’s a lot of big institutions that buy from us and we have kind of a diverse customer group.

Steve: So does that imply that the word cannabis, CBD Is is not mentioned at all anywhere on the Growers House website?

Steve: Yeah for the most part unless it’s like part of a product title, but we do not really try and put the word into our site just two of our own volition. you know, we like to keep a separation because it’s top it’s like advertising on Google is something that you know is highly sought after for e-commerce stores. You can help you when you need to bridge the gap between, you know, I guess getting orders and finding out what your what your voice is and how you can not use Advertising to drive traffic which is ideal, you know.

Steve: so does that imply then that you are running Google AdWords Facebook ads and Google shopping?

Nate: Yes. So we are for Growers house.com. and you know doing multiple properties and some I cannot do but I think will probably jump into those.

Steve: Yeah, we’ll get into that later on the interview.

Nate: Yeah. Alright. Okay, so your early sales then it sounds like you built up the retail shop first and that kind of got you over the hump what happened after three months that allow you to get more sales.

Nate: Yes. Yeah, so at that point in time, we’re talking probably 2012. I was really noticing that led lights were really popular for hobbyist Growers. So I thought to myself, you know at this point in time. I was not an expert in e-commerce not an expert in SEO none of these things, but I do have a fair amount of grit and like if I want to do something then I will just figure it out. That’s kind of my personality type. So I was like, okay, I’m going to learn everything I can about LED lights. So I can be basically an expert in this room spoke to tons of Manufacturers. Everyone was you know claiming that they’re LED was the best and what I said is you know, what I there’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace. How do I reduce the confusion? And what I ended up doing was taking all the products that claim they were the best and I bought what’s called a par meter parse is an acronym for photosynthetically active radiation.

So really what I did is just imagine you just measure how powerful light is over the space that it’s intended to light and I ended up measuring all these, you know fixtures and then post graphs of how they all did and then made a video about a short YouTube video and I ended up publishing that and it took off because no one else was doing that and I was just providing the consumers with basically a way for them to to Wade through all the noise so that they can make an informed purchasing decision.

Steve: So and video that took took off for their links back to your site or was it just purely informational?

Nate: No absolutely links back to the site saying like here are the four products. We tested This Is How They did here are links. If you would like, you know, are you if you’re interested in purchasing one of these products that content ended up getting shared quite a bit and we kept going down that that kind of that strategy for growth. We ended up doing more and more videos more comparisons. I will say when you’re doing comparisons of products that you sell, you know some vendors are ot very keen when they’re not professional.. That’s number one.

Steve: That actually my next question.

Nate: Actually, you know, yeah, so dealing with that is I guess part of the process and what I could recommend anyone is trying to be as objective as possible. Tell people your vendors prior to doing the test that you’re doing the test and ask, you know, I even said when I first started out I didn’t really ask anyone but I learned this I was at okay, I want to do this test. Would you like to be included, you know, I’m going to just put objective information out there. I’m going to have your expectation prior to me even doing it and I promise I’ll share it with you. And once I did that I really did not get any Flack from suppliers. So that’s what I’d recommend that people do. I think Honesty is kind of the best policy even though you know, they may not be you know, extremely happy with the outcome.

What I found is me doing testing often Galvanize them to iterate their next product interests focus on the best features that you should so it’s almost like in a way your..

Steve: Helping them

Nate: to see the industry forward. Yeah, you know,

Steve: so on these videos then naturally people would just buy the best one, right? So would you stop carrying the other ones or did it matter?

Nate: No, I mean I would still carry them and sometimes there isn’t just a best one. Sometimes there’s you know, this one’s the best price performer maybe in this one is The All Out best in terms of performance. Okay, and sometimes this one’s better for smaller growing operation may be more compact in design or form factor, you know..

Steve: will you advertising there in the first three months or was it just kind of ramping up your YouTube efforts?

Nate: Yeah. So man, we started then even have Google shopping like product listing ads.

Steve: It had Frugal. It was free.

Nate: Oh my God, that was those are the heydays. I was literally thinking about that this morning when I was driving into work and I was like man remember when Google shopping was free for like a year and a half

Steve: Oh man, it was awesome.

Nate: I was like, yeah that honestly, I think that probably helped us just the Serendipity of having We’ll give you free advertising for a year-and-a-half to try out their new product. That was great. But you know, we just started out with AdWords like you know that showed up at the top of keywords. This is before product listing ads and it worked okay, but I found that you know, putting out high quality content is the end-all be-all, you know, it adds this certain amount of authority to you and your brand and people do recognize that you’re actually doing this testing the no one else is so why not? Sometimes they would call us to ask us about the testing and then by a light and then that kind of knowledge seeps into our brand and they trust us from any of the other products.

Steve: Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about your YouTube strategy outside of just putting out great content. Are there any little things that you do to the videos to promote them to become viral?

Nate: You know, I would say first off the most important thing is are you going to put information out there that no one else has put out before that. What I would say is priority Number one, once you do that make sure you’re doing it for things that people are already searching for so if people are searching for let’s call it the you know, the best compact LED grow light do a test on the best compact LED grow lights, right? You definitely don’t want to try and create demand where there is none. And then thirdly you know, another thing I did is I would take our videos and publish them on our site and then I would write the transcript on our site and you know.

Who’s going to read the transcript of a video not too many people but it does put the content of your video back on your site and you can hyperlink that back to your products and that process although people are like, you know, why would I do that? It’s just a whole bunch of written content Google Google really likes that content usually in the videos. I also Say things that I already pre defined as keywords that I would like in that written conten.

Steve: That’s interesting because I just wondering if that content ends up ranking because I know for my podcast I provide a transcript and I think Google is smart enough to know that it’s a podcast I guess now and those podcast post never rank, even though there’s a really long transcript in there.

Nate: Yeah, that’s interesting. Definitely haven’t tried it from that side. I wonder if there’s a difference or whether over time because we’ve gotten into we’re kind of talking about Phase 1 and video content for us right now, which is a lot of product comparisons and then we Scaled up and made girls Network and then some of our bigger Series so I’d really have to look back at our content to see if Google’s treating it differently today versus four years ago.

Steve: Well, let’s talk about what you’re doing today. What is the publishing schedule look like what sorts of content are you putting out?

Nate: Yeah. So here’s the big conundrum in cannabis. There’s what we call Whiteside companies and then there’s Dark Side companies. So I kind of like to think about it like Star Wars.

Steve: Okay, you know, you might need to explain those two terms for For the listeners

Nate: definitely so Whiteside usually means I’m a company that sells to the Cannabis industry, but I don’t really acknowledge that very overtly if at all and that’s because you want to keep certain banking relationships, maybe public perception credit card processing. You know, Google advertising groomershouse is a Whiteside company now, we’re jumping into some of our other companies which are dark side companies. So a dark side company would be like my other company growersNetwork.org and our video series can of Crips those are explicitly about cannabis and you know, it’s much tougher to get things like credit card processing banking. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with being a dark side company that makes it a lot harder and you really have to figure out what your company’s strategy is because it’s really nice to be a dark side company where you can Target your customer directly.

You know saying things like cannabis or marijuana or anything. Related to those terms that they’re searching and lightside Company. I can’t really do that because I want to keep a lot of those a lot of those tools like advertising. So this was a really big conundrum for me, you know, and I was like man, there’s all these companies that are doing this but I would lose, you know, all of my banking and credit card processing. So I thought why not create a separate entity on the dark side and really try and be able to communicate with our customer base, but actually Being tongue-in-cheek, you know, we have a shirt that we have that you may have seen and it’s really popular these days called legalized Tomatoes. It just says that on a shirt and people are like, why does it say legalized tomatoes on your shirt? And you know, I told them like when we first opened our store you actually could not talk like someone called girl’s house and they say Hey, you know, I would like to grow this cannabis plan my closet and we say, oh, you know what we can’t teach you how to grow cannabis, but if you were going to NATO’s, this is what I would I do..

Steve:.Okay.

Nate: so it’s a little bit. Yeah, that’s kind of like a way that we kind of straddle that line. Maybe that’s yeah the gray side but you know, I really wanted to be able to talk to those customers. So that’s when we created Growers Network, which is a forum and really a I would say a media company. We started creating some video content. That was our first thing that we came out with is called can of cribs kind of just think of it like MTV Cribs, but it focuses on Like the largest and most technologically, you know developed cannabis growing operations in the country and we walk through them and show you exactly how people are growing the Cannabis that people, you know smoke every day in these recreational States and the added a tremendous. Like that’s that became a video series in itself that just took off a lot of people really like the content High Times TV picked us up as their first cannabis Centric video.

Steve: I See that strategy working really well

Nate: Yeah and like we just had Are you know one of our episodes pass a million views? It was really just showing something. Like I said earlier content that no one else has really done before and you know, what people are doing now, a lot of cannabis companies are using our can of cribs series as part of their training when people come into the Cannabis industry so that they understand the products the terminology how people operate so it’s just taken a life of its own and a sense

Steve: So let’s say I mean you do have a dark side company, I guess that’s true potency is considered dark side

Nate: Yeah, so true potency, which I didn’t mention is trupotency.com. That’s TR you not there’s no e on it trooper and z.com is at its really a retailer for CBD based products and those products. Well, yeah, that is dark side. CBD is also dark side right now, but I would say which a lot of people say. It’s federally legal, you know, after the Hem bill was signed, but the thing is the FDA hasn’t really ruled on what they’re going to do is CBD. So the banking issues are still there. The credit card issues are still there. Still it’s still a tough Market to be in you got to be creative to really get started.

Steve: You mentioned a couple things earlier like the difficulty getting credit card processing Banking and that sort of thing. How do you overcome those? If you’re a dark side company?

Nate: you know, I would say there are these are things you have to do. I mean we had even though we’re in Arizona Corporation. We had to apply and become what’s called an I think it’s an alien Corporation in Washington state that Term might be off alien corporate entity. But basically we had to reincorporate in Washington as well. And then we had to use one of the Washington Credit Unions since Washington’s a recreational State Arizona only a medical State and there’s no banks really here that can Bank you so we had to go and do that and then open a bank account because those credit unions in those States will only Bank two entities that are from that state. So sting. Okay. Yeah, that was kind of a tough one credit card processing

Steve: Do you use Stripe or PayPal or?

Nate: no. Yeah, no definitely don’t use PayPal because you’ll start collecting money. They’ll find out what you’re doing. Those are show you down and keep your money for six months. not good. I mean I will tell you this I’ve had think it could counts shutdown probably a half dozen times credit cards shut down probably a half dozen times at this point. It happens and I just it’s almost comical to me but it’s happening much of much less often. This was like the first four years. It happened

Steve: To growershouse too?

Nate: even to Growershouse..

Steve: huh? Okay

Nate: people would it really didn’t happen too often, but even the girl’s house sometimes a banquet just say, you know, what were we understand that you’re not touching cannabis. They’re doing anything with it, but you’re too close to the industry. We think so. We’re making a business decision to that. We think you should not be banked by us anymore. Very unfortunate..

Steve: but you get your money still though, right?

Nate: Yeah, but I did have one Bank hold six figures for over six months.

Steve: Oh my gosh. Okay.

Nate: Yeah. So definitely be careful. I would say at this point. It’s there’s plenty of bit like you don’t have to go through what I went through, you know, four years ago today, you can find a credit union in another state. Tell them exactly what you’re doing, you know, try to be above board with your bank and your credit card processor. And there are if you look hard enough, you will find them.

Steve: If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com now back to the show.

So there’s no way to like, I guess Amazon payments is out too I mean are there any like real easy ways to pee outside of a credit card?

Nate: So let’s talk about the CBD industry. Each. Each industry is a little bit different and that’s the one that I feel like maybe the most people are getting into you right now. So on the CBD side, there are a few companies and there’s one that I use called T1 payments that was like an international processor. They’re widely used in the CBD industry, but you have to set up like a UK address, you know, so And establish your company in the in Europe as well. So same thing like we did in Washington. So that’s an option. You know, everyone’s going to charge you they’ll try and charge you somewhere between four and seven percent depending on my goodness. Yeah, so cost of doing business in a recent industry.

I guess you could say but there’s also some companies domestically that will do some CBD processing, you know, let me see who are some of the big ones. I think

Steve: what are you guys using for to trupotency?

Nate: Trupotency for? True potency and we basically have T1 payments that one in the UK and then we also are applying with two other companies right now to open us up more domestically and those are in process at the moment. And one of them is pay Kings. The other ones ale pay.

Steve: Does that imply that you just have these multiple payment processors just kind of lined up in case one goes down.

Nate: No redundancy is is necessary if you yeah, if you do not have redundancy and I would say both bank accounts and And credit card processing then you’re going to have a bad time because I you know, hopefully it’s not you but I would say to people just assume it’s not if but when you’ll have an issue, but it just depends how open you are with your processor. There’s some people they would even processing on you know, there’s a big avalon if you guys have ever heard of them. There are giant Bank on the backend of payment processing and they were about to bank a whole bunch of CBD companies and then they pulled out at the last minute.

So even when you know, everyone tells you it’s a sure thing it can get pulled the rug in your pulled out from under you will it be this way in 24 months? Probably not. It’ll probably be you know much more like just applying for a normal company. But if you want to get in early, then you’re definitely going to have to do a lot of work and be creative.

Steve: I mean realistically what was this lot was the last time it happened to you?

Nate: man. We first started shoot potency. Yeah about two weeks after we launched we got one shot down and we lost about three weeks ago

Steve: right. Okay

Nate: two weeks week.

Steve: All right, so it’s still a problem. Definitely. Okay.

Nate: Yeah, that was more of a processor that wasn’t really CBD friendly. So but they were just a processor that I’ve done business with for a long time. And I said hey can I connected here this it sure but then the backend Bank was like, nope, not cool. So we ended up moving over to that UK option which was our plan B.

Steve: Let me ask you this. So let’s say you didn’t have girls house and you didn’t have that forum for Growers and you just launched true potency. How would you Market that business?

Nate: Here’s the thing with with our CBD company. There’s so much. There’s also so much noise in the CBD industry. Like I heard a statistic, you know can verify it but it sounds correct just from being in the industry that 1200 brands of launched so far in 2019

Steve: It’s ridiculous, okay.

Nate: sort of and it’s okay. So that means a lot of competition that means a lot of people going after, you know, probably the top keywords things of that nature. I would say find a point of differentiation. I mean really for these 1200 Brands, there’s probably Ten formulators who are making all the products. So a lot of them are very similar. So, how do you how do you really differentiate yourself from the market and focus on pushing that point of differentiation and make that point of differentiation something that you know that people already desire like I would be going on something like ahrefs look up what people are looking for CBD for and say, how do I become the best at doing CBD for that and that could be CBD It was sleep or CBD Associated or let me see small breed pets, you know choose a niche. You can always expand from an itch. But if you’re going after the top keywords and 1,200 people are too I mean it’s it’s going to be a tough road to the top. So I would say try and find a smaller Niche to jump into and do that extremely well and really focus on pushing that point of differentiation. I mean for our site true potency we rock we actually did not even create a brand. Like a branded product the consumer packaged good right just a retailer.

So I buy wholesale sell retail. That’s what I do. But my point of differentiation is there’s so much crap in the market like so many CBD products out There are either mislabeled or formulated poorly or even have basically harmful things inside of them that you would not be wanting to take. So to me that’s a problem in the industry and like the FDA is not really regulating it because they haven’t figured anything out. There are no standards. so

Steve: actually I was going to ask you about that. Are there can anyone just off the street start creating the stuff? There’s no legality issues. No certifications.

Nate: Exactly.

Steve: Okay crazy.

Nate: Yeah. All right crazy so wild wild west. Yeah again more Cowboys. So I’m trying to Wrangle these people in and you know, what we did is said, you know, what we’ve gotten a lot of products from manufacturers and we read this study that University of Pennsylvania put out that 70% of the products that they tested. We’re not what they were. Basically, they were mislabeled. They had a whole bunch of things in them that they should not so we decided you know, even though a lot of these products have what’s called coas certificates of analysis. They tell you their products Okay, we would take their products send it to a laboratory where they would do hplc testing, which is high pressure liquid chromatography. There’s a few other ways of testing depending on what you’re looking for, but it would tell you the basically all the constituents of that product and we found out that when we did the lab test another guy so certified lab it look different than the lab result that they gave us.

So even these companies that say that their science fact tend to be what we found is misleading Their audience a little bit. Okay, so we started doing our own testing for all the products and we’re just going to say

Steve: okay.

Nate: Okay. Our point of differentiation is where high and say we’re hiring a science Advisory Board basically have like MDS and phds to help guide us on what products actually work in the first place since a lot of people I think are Making up, you know things that’s TBD can actually do and then secondly, we want to test these products with a certain amount of rigor that you know, we would be comfortable giving it to a loved one. Right? I’m especially someone who might be under medical care. You don’t want to be giving them something that has residual metal solvents in it for heavy metals. I mean residual solvents molds, you know, things like that and you know, if it says 500 milligrams of CBD, I actually want 500 milligrams. A lot of these products will say five Hundred and they’ll have 50, you know, and at that point it’s very misleading if not stealing in a sense because they’ll charge you for 500.

So we do our lab testing we take all those lab tests and we actually upload them to each product page. So everyone can review them, but they’re a little complicated. So we also tried to move a neuroscientist who’s our director of science here and he developed an algorithm based on basically all the scientific data that’s been Published about cannabinoids which are the main constituents within cannabis that you know, THC people are familiar with that’s the one that’s psychoactive that gets you high CBD not psychoactive or debatably psychoactive at a very very low level and works for things. You know, that people are discovering like epilepsy pain anxiety and there’s a whole bunch of others over a hundred other ones.

So we put cannabinoid profile in a graph along with the graph terpene profile terpenes are Kind of like cannabinoids but there are more General there. You’ll find them in fruits, you know, basically all I would say natural products and these cannabinoids and terpenoids interact with each other in this way that could make something more sedative or could make you maybe have a little bit more clarity of mind, you know, these certain things build building an algorithm and says, you know, this product is most likely better for x or y can really help people make a decision on what they should be buying

Steve: I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2020 Seller Summit are on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now what is seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that is specifically targeting e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online and unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS. Mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate every year we cut off ticket sales at just a couple hundred people. So tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or 1 million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From May 6 to May 8. And right now, we are almost sold out of Mastermind tickets already and I will be raising the ticket price regularly starting the day after Cyber Monday for more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s SELLERSUMMIT.COM or just Google it. Now back to the show.

Steve: Did you intentionally not private label your own CBD products? And so that these studies could come across as more impartial?

Nate: Exactly. Yep. I could come out my own product. But then it’s like how could you trust me from another person who sends says that are signs backed. I need to be objective. You know right now. I mean, I will tell you this we brought like 700 products in right now. We launched and one of our biggest problems is we have like 60 products on our site. Can’t we wanted a lot more we want in 100 and 200 but so many products have failed our..

Steve: So the testing of our product is 10% of the products have passed your testing?

Nate: you know, the ones that have gone through the lab we brought 700 in about I think right now we’ve had about 400 approximately go through test the lab testing and yeah out of that we’re at about 60 live products on the site.

Steve: that sounds like really scary to me.

Nate: Yeah. Yeah, so Basically, it’s hovering. It depends on the week. But yeah, usually hovers around 20% of the products. We test actually passed and sometimes you know passing can be as you know, as simple as you know, what we say if it has when you test scientifically I mean, we do have a threshold or margin of error. So like if it says 500 milligrams, it has to be plus or minus 10% for it to pass

Steve: right

Nate: But then also has to not have residual solvents, you know, it has two basic. Not have any molds or pesticides that ends up showing up in our lab testing and you know, I can’t have anything else that they say it does have and it ends up not having

Steve: that makes sense.

Nate: So if it passed all those tests for us, then it ends up going on the site. But yeah, like 80% of the products have not passed which for us now we’re like, maybe we should create products because we can barely find enough that are actually viable. But that that probably wouldn’t be for years probably

Steve: How are these people manufacturer. They just like doing in their home kitchens or something or

Nate: you know, you know what it is. I think everyone’s moving so quickly and since there are no standards for quality control. It’s it’s just a smash-and-grab market right now, you know people I think are focusing on, it’s tough. There are people out there that are very focused on quality of their product and then there are some people that are focusing on you know, what there’s an opportunity in CBD right. Now I’m going to be as aggressive as possible. And sometimes QA is not the top priority quality assurance is what I mean by that which is unfortunate and like that’s why a lot of people are pushing put a lot of pressure on the FDA to like say something about these products, you know, let’s come up with you know, some way to State standardized testing.

I mean, it’s even we’ve been brought up in our office like maybe we should come up with our own stamp of approval certification you mean yeah run, sir. Advocate it’s not like that’s not our core focus of our company, but maybe the industry needs it. And if no one’s doing it, like maybe we should jump into it. By the way, if anyone wants to help me do that. They know how to please reach out. I’m very busy and I don’t know if I could take on another core competency for a business.

Steve: So true potency though. So just back on marketing and if you didn’t have anything you mentioned, you know, obviously putting together a unique value proposition. Would you be going the YouTube route or the Blogging route or podcasting like what do you think would be like the best medium to use at this point?

Nate: for us podcast like this being able to tell people what’s going on in the industry. It’s it’s such a long form process like it’s tough for me to tell people how many things are wrong with the industry and how we’re trying to disrupt it in a minute sure, you know.

Steve:Yeah,

Nate: so we did upload a video only one video so far like, like I said, we just launched one video on Youtube kind of explaining our philosophy. So people can comprehend that and now that I’m you know, when I started Growers house, I was a 22 year old young whippersnapper. I’m 31 now and I’m you know, I have a successful business that’s giving me cash flow. So I’m we ended up bringing in co-ceo Angela cat who is her background was like, you know, she helped launch all of that stale otter on Estee Lauder Companies on onto the web and e-commerce. So things like clinic.com and she was a big executive over there and she came on board as a co co and we’re kind of going the more traditional like PR route hiring a you know, people that focus on PR and talking to news outlets about you know, the industry what’s going on in the industry

Steve: right

Nate: But there there is some Legacy content that we’re probably going to create that I’m more used to which is how do we help tell people about the problems in the industry and help them? You know find the products that’s actually going to be good for them effective pure safe. You know, a lot of people are just I don’t know I think right now everyone’s heard about CBD yet. They know nothing yet they know nothing

Steve: right this this is going to be a hard question for you to answer but it sounds like the way you’ve approached true potencies is very high budget, right

Nate: definitely higher budget. It’s funny. I started Growershouse with Okay saying it like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and we were bootstrapped. You know, yeah, whereas..

stve: yeah, potency you have these scientists that you have on board. You have the PR Company. I’d imagine your startup costs are higher, right?

Nate: Absolutely. Yeah even just to get going before before we really get going. It’s probably going to cost us, you know closer to somewhere closer to the 500 came are you know, and then after that, you know, we’ll see how things are going and at that point we might look for some outside investors. Something like that,

Steve: so where I was going with that was someone small-time going to the Cannabis retail space since there’s so many people jumping in right now. Do you feel like you kind of need a larger budget these days just to get started.

Nate: You know, it depends what sector the Cannabis industry if you’re starting a let’s say you wanted to open a dispensary you it’s almost impossible to open a dispensary and establish market like Arizona unless you have a lot of money and I mean like I would say at least a few million dollars.

Steve: Wow. Okay.

Nate: It’s not north of 5 million. There’s markets that are opening up like Oklahoma just opened up medical and it’s the market was booming if you get in early and the licenses are inexpensive and they have an unlimited amount of licenses. Then you can get it in a lot less expensively. We’re talking you know it get it depends if you want to do a growing operation or a dispensary, but you can be in the lower six figures range. And if you wonder the e-commerce route, you know, that’s probably the least expensive route and the one that I’m more, you know, Familiar with and you don’t have to spend a ton of money to get into the CBD the sector really I would say I’m just looking for more accelerated growth and getting out there sure a little bit faster.

But you know how I started Growershouse’ kind of more slow and steady and there’s definitely something to be said for that in terms of you know, how many years of life you probably have because

Steve: You know, I want to start a CBD company e-commerce store, let’s say is there anything special I need to do? Certifications or or anything legal legalize that I need to worry about

Nate:. Yeah, I think it depends on the state really but I would touch base and I think really if you’re manufacturing or holding products that people going to ingest each just want to make sure you touch base with the health department consider, you know, Most states have some hemp laws or usually a department for him. So I would just reach out to them and say Hey, I want to start a hemp Farm or a hemp CBD company and I’m gonna hold inventory on On hand and they’ll tell you what to do. And usually it’s it’s very easy kind of benign process.

Steve: Okay. And then are you selling on Amazon right now

Nate: Growers house is on the equipment side, but we’re not with any CBD products and you have to actually be really careful the Amazon. So it’s also very misleading platform in the when it comes to CBD because on Amazon basically, they don’t allow CBD products, but if you get on Amazon, there are some Products that are up there being advertised almost as if there were CBD products and what they are is they’ll say hemp oil, you know, something like something related to him boil really but a lot of them tend to be hemp seed oil which actually doesn’t have any cannabinoids or CBD in it. and what we’re buying this expecting it to be CBD usually because it’s inexpensive, which it is much less expensive than CBD products right now, but the thing is you’re not really getting what you’re looking for and Actually want hemp seed oil. So if you actually receive CBD avoid Amazon, once the FDA comes out some rules, maybe Amazon will allow it. But I think right now it’s just too great for them to allow it.

Steve: have you run into any problems on Amazon with Growershouse stuff?

Nate: No never and you know, we just focus on selling equipment. We do not touch base on anything related to cannabis or marijuana, and I think you know, I don’t think that you can really on Amazon, although I can’t hundred. And confirm that but I’m pretty sure it since it’s still federally illegal big organizations like Amazon do not like to wait into that territory.

Steve: Okay, and in terms of grower house products, then it just seems weird. I guess that Google and Facebook’s seem to be cracking down more than Amazon right in this department

Nate: Well, not really I would say they’re all kind of on the same Keel for the most part. Okay, like you’ll find actually think I saw Google allowing some CBD products on product listing ads. So I think Google of anything is opening up a little bit more than potentially the other ones

Steve: and the word hemp is fair game. I don’t know anything about this industry, but I always consider hemp kind of synonymous. So that term is legal.

Nate: Yes hemp is legal because you can have a hemp. Like I said a hemp seed oil product hemp fiber all these things are legal. It’s CBD and other cannabinoids that are regulated, right?

Steve: Okay.

Nate: Well, they’re not really regulated right now, but there they have a distinction. That’s Ray so people are not allowing that terminology is better way to put it but hemp you’ll see there are a lot of CBD companies that everyone’s watching for the what the FDA is going to say and there have been some CBD companies that have had their hand slapped because they’ve said this CBD product cures cancer or something like that which you know, like no tests have been done to prove that. Yeah in a way that the FDA has given it the stamp of approval. I think there are a lot of people that are You know doing tests on CBD from you know, a multitude of reasons, but FDA doesn’t want people saying that because to their standards that hasn’t been proven and then you’re really just fooling or trying to deceive the public in a way as the weather looking at it. So they really want to manage that and write you know, rightly so they probably should

Steve: yeah that totally makes sense. Hey Nate, I’ve actually learned a lot about the Cannabis industry just from talking to you. But if anyone out there who is listening to this podcast is interested in Gaming industry or they want to learn more about you or your products. Where can they find you?

Nate: Yeah, we have a few websites in our portfolio, you know Growershouse.com, Growersnetwork.org and trupotency.com that’s TRU, you know, we we just check out our YouTube series can cribs. You know, I’m on Instagram. That might be a good way to reach out to me. It’s just nate.j.lipton on Instagram. That’s probably the only social media platform. I had a chat with people on okay, but yeah Reach Out How do you know shoot me an email? I mean, I might regret this Nate at gowershouse.com, you know, if you wanna give you the entry

Steve: before you go like you mentioned a whole bunch of sites out there. What do each one do again. So Growershouse.com is your Ecommerce store that sells growing equipment, right? Yeah, which one is your community?

Nate: So growers network.org? Okay. It is a forum and content site.

Steve: Is that paid or can anyone join?

Nate: Yeah anyone can jon. Yeah. So the public forum in a private Forum. The private forum is more for cannabis Industry professionals and then we have a lot of like Growers University there. So you can learn how to grow things of that sort great Community for anyone who’s learning how to grow or just wants to do it as a hobby or a profession and then you know Candy cribs is that that YouTube series I was telling you about largest operations.

Steve: That’s what you tore cannabis operations.

Nate: Yeah. Exactly. I don’t true

Steve: Trupotency is your newest operation, which is actually testing and selling your favorite CBD products?

Nate: Exactly. Yep.

Steve: Awesome. Well Nate, I really appreciate you coming on the show and teaching us or giving me a lesson at least on this industry, and I’m sure the listeners will get a lot of value out of it too.

Nate: Awesome. Thank you for having me Steve.

Steve: Hi. Thanks a lot, Nate. Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now. The CBD cannabis industry is like the Wild Wild West right now, but it is quickly getting saturated with new competition. Now for more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode289.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode like myself Michelle and I have been blogging for a very long time and there are a whole bunch of different ways to monetize your blog. For more information about this episode. Go to mywifequitherjobs.com/episode282.

Once again, I want to thank to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

And I also want to thank Kaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Kaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

But before we begin, I want to give quick shout out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve.

I also want to give a shout out to Klaviyo who’s also a sponsor of the show whether you are just getting your business off the ground or looking for new ways to scale Klaviyo offers fast simple and repeatable ways to grow now with Klaviyo you can personalize your marketing build your customer relationships and automate your online sales and it is now easier than ever to create amazing email and advertising experiences so want to talk about Klaviyo’s new entrepreneurial growth guide packed with must read blog post case studies and getting started content this guide will help you prioritize what to do next for maximum revenue growth that moving to a new marking problem can be intimidating but Klaviyo helps you get up and going fast with proven technology and countless support researches they can actually check out this free content now over at Klaviyo.com/mywife once again that is Klaviyo.com/mywife now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I am thrilled to have Kevin Stecko back on the show. Now, I had Kevin way back in episode 139 which was maybe two and a half years ago in many many things have changed with his business since then and in case you don’t remember Kevin runs the awesome site called 80tees.com where he sells T-shirts from the 80s. Now the t-shirt business was already super competitive, but in the past several years, it’s gotten even more intense. So Kevin made some fundamental changes to his his strategy and its really paid off both in terms of profit and lifestyle. And today we’re going to delve deeply into that and with that welcome to show, Kevin how you doing today, man?

Kevin: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

Steve: So Kevin. I’m very curious. Why the heck did you go in Andrew youderien’s podcast first?

Kevin: Oh, wow. Well, he finally asked me, you know, I’ve known him for a while, but in a forum since 2013 the e-commerce feel for my should say and he finally asked and I was like, wow, I finally been blessed by the Great Andrew Youderian.

Steve: Ha ha ha, so I’m hurt. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to have to make this episode even better and make Youderian look bad. Unfortunately. I mean that’s not very nice of you but we’re just going to have to do it.

Kevin: I’ll do my best to make him look terrible.

Steve: So fill us in, the audience hasn’t heard from you in two and a half years what has happened in the past several years since the last time I had you on?

Kevin: Sure. Yeah. So the big thing that happened to my business was gradual decline. So 2000 and I’ve been around since 2000 I guess in 2008 was the high-water mark in terms of Revenue 2000 through 2011 because we’re going still really well. They weren’t really growing but I mean, we’re at a pretty pretty high Revenue number. I don’t know the exact numbers, but we’re still in the five to seven million dollar range through those years. The thing started just gradually slowing down and the problem was I had built up so many expenses over the years to handle the volume that we were doing that my profitability was just gone. and some losses were adding up and I didn’t really I didn’t really know how to stop that Trend because I had all these fixed expenses that were not going to be something I can just get rid of I had buildings or I should say our building ahead lots of it.

Steve: 22,000 square foot building if I recall

Kevin: it was actually 45 thousand..

Steve: Oh my God..

Kevin : really using like half of it because when I bought the building was think when things were going up into the right, so I did not want to have to move again. So I actually overbought luckily the running the building in terms of Utilities wasn’t super expensive but it obviously the cost of the building was more because it was so big. So yeah

Steve: I think 45,000 feels like but yeah go on, sorry.

Kevin: Yeah, 45,000 probably not quite a Walmart store. But you know, so maybe like three quarters will Walmart depending on how big, you know, like a regular crazy. It is crazy. Yeah, so, you know, I was like, how can I get myself out of these things? Because obviously getting out of a building that I purchased was not going to be a simple thing the software that were using, cost me like $5,000 a month minimum to run.

Steve: What? Wow. Okay.

Kevin: Well, yeah and you know, you got to remember too that I came from the early 2000s where things were expensive, you know to launch a website was no small feat at the time. So, I guess when I signed on for that 5,000 seems somewhat reasonable there, you know, you couldn’t just sign up for whatever shipstation and make it happen for 50 bucks a month or whatever people do now. Yeah, so, you know all my orders flowed through there, so there wasn’t Really any way to get out of that without actually going through the process of having a true replacement and that took me a long time to get all the functionality that I needed. So in 2016 is whenever I decided okay, here’s the path. It’s that I’m going to take to get rid of all these expenses which was basically Outsource the storage of inventory to the point where most of my things are now Dropship for my suppliers and their even made printed on demand.

So they really not even stored for the Most part so I you know, that was a huge deal there because for one thing it bought me time. So I had a lot of inventory that I could sell down slowly and not have to replace which just look great for cash flow..

Steve: Do you have any inventory today?

Kevin: I have like 50 thousand dollars of inventory.

Steve: Okay, so not much at all.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s all things that I can’t drop ship. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t just got rid of that because you know paying for the Storage everything just doesn’t really make sense at this point.

Steve: Are you fulfilling those yourself or using a 3PL for that.

Kevin: I move those to 3PL.

Steve: Okay, it’s been great. So literally you’re not carrying any inventory. There’s no need for a warehouse anymore. Right?

Steve: Right. And so yeah so fast forward. I did actually get a tenant for that thing as long as they exhaust they can pay their rent and they’re becoming viable company. The building will end up being a pretty good investment for me. So yeah, but it took me about three years to get to get to the point where I could get out of building I get rid of that software and just cut cut cut expenses everywhere I could you know Outsource as many things as possible, you know, I may have done the story a little bit disservice but it was a super hard super hard, painful in terms of letting employees go painful in terms of how do I how do I get from point A to point B.

And you know dropshipping adding that on wasn’t exactly a simple task because now I have to figure out why do I handle my shipping costs? So that gradually led me to raise prices to incorporate shipping into the price of the goods. And that’s whenever I learned wow, people will pay a lot more money than I’m charging.

Kevin: Let’s back up a bit so back when you were running your business before you were still charging for shipping weren’t you?

Kevin: I was yes, so everyone out together. So it was relatively simple thing to calculate the shipping rate. It was just whatever the weight of their cart was. We calculate the shipping based on that.

Steve: How does it work now?

Kevin: now well now we offer free shipping on everything over $50. So essentially if you order more than one product, you’re going to get free shipping what we do is we do we build in the price of shipping into every item based on how much it weighs. So I actually have a tool that sits on top of my, so I have a price that’s listed in our product database and then we have toilet sits on top of that and just places and adder in there before it hits the Shopify store.

Steve: Okay, so you okay. So you’re on Shopify last time we talked to I think, right?

Kevin: Yes. I’ve been on Shopify since 2013.

Steve: then can you just give me an idea of how much you cut your SAS bill down by by going to drop shipping?

Kevin: Yeah, the only thing that we still pay for now is Shopify actually so we now I’ve paid developers and I pay a lot more than most people would spend on on SAS to get to use have those developers. Give me the things that I need, but once there once I once I have that functionality, I don’t pay for it again.

Steve: Okay, so all your shipping stuff all that suffer related to all that $5,000 disappeared.

Kevin: Basically it disappeared as of April this year.

Steve: Yes, and then you’re no longer paying for the warehouse because you’re kind of leasing it out. Out to somebody else. What cutbacks did you have in terms of just employees?

Kevin: So obviously anyone fulfillment related is is pretty much going on now. I do have have an employee that actually works at home and she receives my returns and I’m actually considering maybe even going away from returns in general. I know some companies just you know, they don’t even ask for the products back. So I need to do some math to see if that would make sense.

Steve: Actually. We’re one of those companies. We usually don’t ask for the product back.

Kevin: How do you feel about does that encourage people to they learn the trick and then decide they want to refund and then you don’t ask for it back. So they know they get it for free.

Steve: No, I don’t think anyone’s really abused it and we don’t publish it obviously on the website. Well, obviously take a return if it’s like a huge like $2,000 order whatnot. But if it’s like onesie, twosie stuff, you know, we usually just let him keep it because it’s not really worth it.

Kevin: Yeah. I’m coming around to that point of view.

Steve: Yeah and plus your profit. Margin. Well, we’ll get to this in a little bit but your profit margin should be able to eat that. And just fine I would imagine.

Kevin: yes.

Steve: Yeah. Okay, so you cut all of your fulfillment employees. So like how lean are you guys now?

Kevin: Probably a little less lean than you would think mainly because I have some people on staff that probably like myself, my wife, my mother.

Steve: you gotta cut your wife man. That’s..

Kevin: yeah. my wife doesn’t do that much and my mother doesn’t do a whole lot that absolutely needs to be done. She lists like our products on Pinterest and she does some fraud review stuff which which does need to be done. But I mean I can you know, I can do those two payrolls because I could probably handle either not doing some of the things and just handle it myself.

Steve: Uh-huh.

Kevin: I don’t pay my wife. That’s essentially not paying myself.

Steve: Yeah. I actually don’t count those two people. I’m just like How lean is it like less than 10 people now?

Kevin: Oh, yeah lesson 10, okay. And we have two to software developers that that we do really cool stuff with them as a lot of it on the back back end,.

Steve: That’s interesting. Why do you still need software developers on like retainer?

Kevin: I don’t really need I mean I wouldn’t need them for day-to-day but I’m still have designs on on growth very smart intelligent growth at least but I still have designs that we can do more with the resources that we have in the tools that we’ve built. So, you know, hopefully one of those things would be launching some additional websites because once were dropped and we are Drop Shipping. So once we have the connections with the supplier, if there are products that they they offer that don’t fit into a 80tees.com You know, it’s relatively simple thing to launch a new website with a new Focus.

Steve: So I’m just kind of curious here. So you move to drop shipping. How much did your costs go up like if you saw the t-shirt before for 10 bucks, how much did it cost to Dropship?

Kevin: So so my well there’s your thoughts..

Steve: So let’s say yeah, let’s say the shirt cost you $10 and I know that’s really high but let’s say it cost you $10. How much would it cost if you by moving to drop shipping?

Kevin: Right. Yeah, it’s well, there’s there’s typically a Pick and Pack fee which probably gets gets wiped out by the savings that I would have had to handling the inventory myself, but I’d say in general probably about 20 to 30 percent higher to to not to buy one at a time via direct grammar print as opposed to Bringing them in bulk. But when I did the math, you know, once you pay for inbound Freight and once you have employees touch the product they touch it on her on receiving it they touch it to put it away onto a shelf. They touch it to pick it they touch it to pack it and then you’re sitting on it. So you’ve got time value of money.

You’ve got shrinkage because things happen in the warehouse sometimes whether that’s sun damage or they get dropped on the floor and run over by the cart, whatever it is, so you’ve totally all of that shrinkage and I my feeling is that I should say I believe this now that I my costs are probably actually less. It’s pretty hard to measure that

Steve: how do you measure like the mental aspects too right? You don’t have to deal with the Fulfillment employees and and just tracking everyone and tracking inventory and all that stuff too.

Kevin: Absolutely that I mean, you don’t even know how hard it can be to try to keep a lot of sizes in stock of a product. You know, you’re still a lot of your best-selling size and then the reason that It’s cheaper to buy the product and store it is because you’re buying in bulk. So now you’ve got a decision to make well, my best-selling size is out of stock, but I have enough of all these other sizes based on past sales. So do I you know, do I give up on this product in the best selling size or do I bring in more than I actually want. I mean those decisions used to kill me. I would literally write up a PO and then sit on it and try and wait two more weeks to see if I had more information before I send it through. Through just not even having to make those types of projections and really educated guesses is a big burden.

Steve: But I mean, you’ve kind of just shifted the problem over to someone else right what happens if you run out of a certain size now and your drop shipper?

Kevin: well the the some of them that we do that we drop shit through to actually store inventory. So they do have those problems like you mentioned and that that kind of stinks for them and it stinks for us too because you know, we end up with products that are listed on the site that don’t have some sizes but the vast majority of our products are actually print on demand. So as long as they keep like a lack of length t-shirt and stock. It doesn’t really matter. They have the ability to make that product right now.

Steve: Do you have ties to their inventory system? I just launched a t-shirt company with my kids and right now there’s no tie to the inventory system. So if someone orders a size that’s not available. I got to tell them that you know, it’s not available and they got to order something else.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s rough. Why aren’t you doing print on demand?

Steve: It is print on demand. But you know the product on demand people run out of certain sizes as well. Right? and so is your inventory tied to their system?

Kevin: yeah So we have so many suppliers that yes, we tie in if they offer an API, that’s the best because just once we build it just sinks automatically. But a lot of them send us a file so you can Excel file and upload it to the, we built we that was part of why I have the developers they built tools that take everyone’s file in whatever format they want to give it to us and then it updates our website.

Steve: I see, So this file is given to you every single day or?

Kevin: most of them do. Yes..

Steve: okay, but is it real time or is it like I once a day thing?

Kevin: Yeah for them. It’s definitely not real time that those actually make up only probably like ten percent of our our volume the vast majority of the products that we sell are pretty much always in stock because our supplier, so that’s what confuses me. I mean if you’re using a good print on demand company, they really shouldn’t be out of stock.

Steve: Yeah. I mean it’s happened to us a couple of times already. Maybe it’s just like some obscure t-shirt color and maybe it was an obscured color and size. But yeah.

Kevin: yeah, it could be we’d only time we run into problems will be like hoodies which for some reason there are the the mills in the United States have a really hard time keeping hoodies in stock.

Steve: All right, so you moved over to drop shipping. Let’s talk about the numbers a little bit. So you mentioned earlier that you had to raise prices dramatically because I know I paid almost 30 bucks for man t shirt I bought over you, great t-shirt great t-shirt, but so has that affected your business and what was kind of like the decision making process like?

Kevin: yeah, so well, like I said, when we incorporate shipping into the price that was pretty much it had it had to cop even if I didn’t want to but like you mentioned before with our with our suppliers actually charging us more to do the Drop Shipping, you know, obviously the maintain margins we had to raise prices as well there. So we That’s how I started out was everything we were dropshipping. I raised the prices on to account for those two factors. And you know, I was kind of amazed that we were selling them at first..

Steve: did the sales go down at all when you did that?

Kevin: Well at first sales went up because we had been through a long period where I was afraid to like like how I talked about before where I was always, you know, trying to decide should I send this PO in so my inventory levels were actually going down so our sales went up once we Drop Shipping. We have a lot of new products to offer in stock.

Steve: Okay.

Kevin: so it’s you know, unfortunately it didn’t exist in a vacuum for me our sales went down because of higher prices. They actually look like they went up and then as things shifted from us owning them to to drop shipping those prices would be raised as well and sales are definitely when I say sales I should say orders are definitely down average order volume or average order value. I should say is is way is way way up it used to Be like 40 bucks and we’ll have days now where it’s 65 to 70 dollars.

Steve: Can you give me an idea of how much higher you raise your prices? Was it like on the rear of 25% 30% 50%

Kevin: Yeah. Well, I can just give you a real number. So a lot of products that we used to charge $20 for now start about $36.25.

Steve: How much is that? He man shirt I buy? I can’t even remember

Kevin: you got a good deal. It’s definitely moved up. Let me see.

Steve: So, okay. So let’s say I’m buying a T-shirt and normally it’s 20 bucks and all of a sudden you raise it to $36. Man, I would probably think twice so how do you kind of..

Kevin: lots of customers have that’s that’s a common thing that’s happened to us is we’ve definitely let a lot of customers go by the wayside, but that’s where understanding that math of price increase become so valuable.

Steve: So before we get into the math, and I definitely want to get into that. From the mentality of a person like why wouldn’t I just get this t-shirt somewhere else. Do you still have exclusive deals with some of the print designs that you have?

Kevin: We do, Yes, okay. we designed that Christmas party shirt. So that is an exclusive for us or our supplier. Lets us have that as exclusive and and you know the fighting about that shirt. I’m sure you remember this, but that was right after we switch to having dropshipping availed right if we switched and your order did have some problems.

Steve: Yes, I remember.

Kevin: I think about those problems, but that yeah, I felt really bad. I’m like jeez, you know this here’s here’s a friend of mine that placed an order didn’t ask for a discount anything like that. Now he’s having problems. I felt felt really terrible.

Steve: well, I got it in time for my party. So it’s all good there. But okay. So do you think you could have pulled this off if you didn’t have exclusive rights?

Kevin: Yeah, we still sell quite a quite a few like quite a high percentage of our products sales are not exclusive to us

Steve: and you could just go to some other store and get it for cheaper.

Kevin : Yeah

Steve: really? Okay. All right. Let’s do the math now then that’s

Kevin: righ. I guess I should say about the higher price thing. So there are overall selection is something that is hard to find so we do I believe we still have a lot of people that that just browse our site because We it’s well organized and then they will go somewhere else and buy but then there’s some people that their time is more valuable than that. So even though they might know they could get a cheaper. They’re just like whatever. I’ll pay the higher prices.

Steve: Okay. So would you say that you have a larger selection than most stores that you’ll find on the internet.

Kevin: Yeah, definitely. larger selection and better organized.

Steve: Okay. Yeah, I can see that right if I see a shirt that I like. Am I really going to scour the internet looking for that exact same shirt. I mean College me might have done it, but..

Kevin: some people definitely will but not

Steve: Okay, All right. And so but this is a substantial price increase right? We’re talking over 50% price increase. So, can you just give me an idea of how much unit volume dropped when you did that?

Kevin: Yes, so we used to average well over a hundred orders a day. And now I might have I might have a bad day at 40 orders a good day. Like a really good profitable day can be 70 to 80 orders. That’s not on P like

Steve: so 30 to 60 percent drop in orders. Yes. Wow crazy. Okay. So but meanwhile you are charging, you know fifty to sixty percent more now, so We talked about this before we started recording that the math people don’t even think about when it comes to to average order value. So yeah, let’s go through that right now.

Kevin: Yeah. Sure. So the thing you have to remember is all of your fixed expenses apply to every order regardless of what your price is. So I think a lot of people don’t understand that and it’s really important to understand your perv per order contribution origin, which contribution origin is essentially after you’ve sold sold this shirt How much money is there unless a shirt after you’ve sold your order how much money is left to pay other things than the actual cost of this order? So when I say the cost of the order like you’re going to take out any sort of shipping expenses any sort of directly attributable labor fees any transactional fees, obviously your cost of goods get all that out of there. And then what’s left is what you can actually spend on employees profit, rent, your Shopify Bill all that stuff.

So it that’s that’s a hugely important number and it’s you know, it’s not hard to calculate for most people but they don’t I think very few people actually take the time. So that’s we have a dashboard that shows me every order in real time and it gives me a pretty good estimate of what my contribution margin is.

Steve: Can you just kind of talk about what the components of your contribution margin are like You calculating it.

Kevin: Absolutely. Yeah, so you’ve got your merchandise costs. That’s what my supplier charges me and then we’ve got we’ve got the Fulfillment cost which that varies based on if I like say I had an order that head three shirts on it and I went to three different suppliers. I’m going to have each of them with their Pick and Pack fees. So I’ve got to calculate what those fulfillment fees are. I’ve got my Shopify fees because I don’t use a don’t you shall fly payments so

Steve: really okay.

Kevin: Yeah, so I’ve got I’ve got That which is pretty minor cost but like on a $42 order it’s like six cents or something like that.

Steve: Why are you using Shopify payments

Kevin: because in my back and I have the ability to recharge somebody so if someone calls me and says hey, I want to add a product to an order or I want to do a I want to do a new order and they just want to do it over the phone. I don’t actually have to put the order through Shopify to recharge them. I don’t need their credit card number

Steve: I see

Kevin: so we did a back-end tokenization.

Steve: Got it. Got it. Are you using striper something?

Kevin: We use Braintree actually

Steve: Braintree. Okay, all right and interesting and that’s worth it to pay the extra transaction fees that Shopify charges

Kevin: I think so. Yeah, it works out less than $300 a month. There’s

Steve: okay. So, all right, so it’s not much at all.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s not much at all. so then you’ve got your so I talked about your labor and then your got your transaction fees which your payment card processor which you know, those those are sneakily high so, you know, to Those people are probably paying like a quarter to 35, 45 cents per transaction plus some percentage usually around like 2.2% We do the thing where they do the like the actual Cost Plus with our with our merchant account. But it I just I average it out and I come up with like it’s like 25 cents per order plus two point two percent. We just say, okay, that’s probably about what this cost even though it might fluctuate up or down a little bit and If I if I can get I can give you like a recent order here, so So I charged 36 dollars and 35 cents for the item. And this is an item that we actually design so I don’t have any royalty fees on this and I’m I’m just paying for the printing and the shirt itself and my cost there $6.75.

I’ve got Pick and Pack fees of $2 Shopify fees as six cents a transaction fees a dollar twenty-five. So after after all that said and done in this customer pay for shipping because they actually Didn’t hit my free shipping threshold. So after all that said and done, I actually have a kind of way with $26 and 29-cent contribution Margin. I should say some people like to try to figure out what they’re advertising cost is and take that out of their contribution Margin. That’s that’s pretty difficult though

Steve: That was my next question. Actually. Yeah.

Kevin: Okay it’s really difficult because you’d have to take pick some period of time whether it’s a day or a week or a month in and say okay. I got this many Facebook orders and then try and match it up to

Steve: Well, I was thinking you just take your monthly fee that you pay on advertising and just divide it by the number of well, yeah, I don’t know. Okay, so it’s not it’s not a part of the number. Okay.

Kevin: Yeah, and the reason I don’t do that is because organic is a pretty large portion of yeah or so. It’s it’s a really tough call as to what’s the best way to handle that

Steve: If you saw an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com now back to the show. Now back to the show.

All right, so that’s crazy. So you’re making $26 in margin off of a t-shirt. Whereas at least in my store. I might make like seven to ten dollars at most, sounds pretty crazy.

Kevin: It is crazy and and so but that tells you now what my number of orders and revenue how much less it can be where I end up just as well off.

Steve: So before before you raise the prices, you said your t-shirts were at 20 bucks, right?

Kevin: Yes

Steve: so that means you were making ten dollars in profit per shirt before about

Kevin: yeah, I guess that works.

Steve: right out to 10 verses 26. So 2.6 x what you were making before

Kevin: right.

Steve: All right, which is crazy. Meanwhile, you’ve have to your Demand right? So you still come out ahead by 30%

Kevin: Yeah, definitely as far as profit goes

Steve: All right, man. It’s crazy.

Kevin: Now your ego takes a hit. Yeah, there’s some there’s some definite things about it that are not fun. So, you know everyone talks about Revenue. So your revenue is lower. So your ego takes it their customers do complain. You know, I get customers all the time asking me why isn’t I paid twenty dollars in 2016? Why why is this same shirt $36 and and it’s funny because whenever I Whenever I tell them all the reasons and I go through all the expenses and everything. I think to myself boy. I’m that’s crazy that I was ever charging $20 because the only reason that worked for me back then was that such a high percentage of my worst came from organic sales. or search engine sales.

Steve: Hmm and they still do right. I mean, I just kind of checked your SEO just before this interview. You’re still ranking ridiculously high for very popular terms.

Kevin: Yeah. We do get a lot of volume from those and and some of that, I mean a still a large portion of it comes through, you know, like the brand term to so it’s not even even though we rank for Star Wars t-shirts because and that’s a great that’s a great term for us to rank for the highest by far component of our organic is just people searching our brand so

Steve: okay

Kevin: a lot of that’s built out by the paid advertising.

Steve: So when we were talking before we hit record on this I wanted to address the factor of During discounts on your site and like the real calculations that kind of come in that people don’t really think about when you’re let’s say giving yourself a 20% discount to a customer

Kevin: right. So that’s yeah, that’s I kind of call that the how much did your promotional really make? Yeah, and and so it’s easier maybe if we do like some real numbers. people understand. So basically, let’s assume you have a site with an average order value like like $150.

Steve: Well, it’s a big round numbers like and all right. Yeah hundred dollars

Kevin: Okay makes a change here. I got the spreadsheet out.

Steve: I love it. Okay.

Kevin: All right. So let’s say that what non-discounted average margin do you want to use?

Steve: non – lets just use 50%

Kevin: and okay. So we’re going to say we’ve got an average order value 100 dollars and you’re averaging 50 percent Margin. All right. So now there are a couple things that we need to take into account. So we need to know what kind of discount we’re going to offer. Let’s start. Twenty percent. So that’s that’s a pretty calm. Alright, and let’s say that you have fixed cost to fill the fill the order of like five bucks in order and that you’re you’re doing a hundred orders a day. And now let’s let’s think about this though. Let’s say you have a site-wide discount of 20% Okay, some percent of your customers actually would have ordered regardless of that discount, right?

Steve: Yes.

Kevin: So when we’re going to make this calculation we need to kind of penalize ourselves. So for that for that percent and it’s hard to know what that percent is, but you can sort of use your daily average Volume 2 back into some number and then some percent of those customers would have actually bought next month maybe at full price, but you pulled them forward. So, you know, if you were..

Steve: How do you come up with an estimate for that, I mean,

Kevin: I think the best way to do that would be let’s let’s say you’re averaging to you to use round numbers. Let’s say your average a hundred orders on a typical day and then you run your 20 percent Statewide is You really promoted heavily on email and everything and now you did a hundred 50 orders. So that would be okay case where you’re going to say. Okay. Well, I can probably assume that 33% of my customers of that day would not have ordered had I not done this.

Steve: Okay. I see what you’re saying. Whatever the increase in the average daily order volume is what you’re going to use for that number.

Kevin: Yeah, and you can be conservative with it to you. Don’t you don’t want to penalize the pro surely much? Okay. So anyway using those numbers $100 average order value. 50 percent margins with our cost of $5 per order. We’re coming up with a let’s see contribution margin per order with the discounts. I’m sorry without the discount would be 40 bucks because I have a variable cost percentage of five percent

Steve: sure that makes it easier to to calculate in your head. So 40 bucks is your contribution margin and so a hundred orders a day, right?

Kevin: Right So well, so 40 bucks would be your per order without the discount. You took 20% off though. So Now, what is your contribution Margin?

Steve: right, 30 actually no going. Yeah you have the spreadsheet.

Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. So so now you’re talking you just have by offering 20% off. You just actually have your contribution margin per order which is you know, 20% seems like not that big a deal but what matters to you what you can run your business with is that contribution so you’ve literally just cut it in half.

Steve: have you so okay. So 20 percent means that the order value is now 80 bucks, right? 50% Margin is 40 bucks. And then what was the contribution margin then after the discount?

Kevin: after this kind of goes down to $20

Steve: $20. Where is

Kevin: that’s a straight cut off the top.

Steve: Right? Right. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay I hope people can keep up with this. Yeah.

Kevin: It’s a little that thing to remember is and probably the easiest thing if all these numbers don’t make sense. If someone the easiest thing to remember is that when you give someone a discount that comes strictly from your bottom line strictly from your profit Because it can’t come from anywhere else like your unless your suppliers are offering a discount or something like that. But that’s the only place that it can come from because all your none of your costs have changed the exception of the like percentage of merchant fees that you charged because you don’t you’re not paying on that $20 they gave to your customer. But other than that everything else stays the same

Steve: so the key takeaway for the people listening here is before we were making forty dollars per order and with a 20% discount. you would think that you would be making $32 per order but it turns out to be $20 per order because you’re taking that 20% off of your overall revenue and it doesn’t affect your costs all that cost are fixed.

Kevin: Exactly.

Steve: And so the key Point here is that that 20% discount that you’re giving is really like a 50% to your profit.

Kevin: Right. And and it’s if you would have had you know 50 of those. Customers pay full price you actually lost fifty times twenty. You know what I mean? You just lost $1,000 that you gave away to those customers that would have given you a thousand dollars extra which means that your your promotion better drive. It has to drive a thousand dollars extra just to break even

Steve: in the example that you just used. We got a hundred fifty orders instead of a hundred. So it we broke even on that promotion then

Kevin: yeah. Yeah, you’re Basically, even Steven. but you just did a lot more work.

Steve: I guess the only thing that I can think of where this this whole model kind of breaks down is like if you’re getting 50 new customers. That you can sell to going forward. It might still be worth it. Right?

Kevin: right. So that’s that was something I haven’t mentioned yet. But whenever we made the switch to the higher prices, we essentially ended up with exclusively only our best customers.

Steve: Okay.

Speaker 2: So there’s a lot of value there that it’s super impossible to quantify, but when you think about someone that is willing to pay full price They’re generally happier because they’re they’re not trying to I guess get one over on someone else. They’re just out there and they see a product a think it’s cool and they buy it or as the people that are trying to save every last penny there. It’s some of them it’s a game to them where it’s like how much can I get from you? So there there that’s really not a great customer to have I always kind of like Apple, Android, you know, the quality of the Apple customer versus the quality of the Android customer is is Has been proven over and over again ask any e-commerce site owner.

You know who they’re better customers. Are are they coming from iPhone? Are they coming from Android? pretty sure the results would be overwhelmingly iPhone unless they sell Android gear, but..

Steve: I’m an Android phone user and I didn’t complain about my He-Man shirt.

Kevin: I’m that. You know, I’m speaking in general that anyone specifically can bet that could not be the case, but I’m speaking in definitely.

Steve: Here’s some stats from my store that I think he’d find interesting. So 50% of the people who shop at my store approximately spend less than half of our average order value. Whereas only I think 12% spend double my average order value. However, that 12% makes up almost 50% of my Revenue. Whereas those cheap customers. They only make up like 10% of my revenues.

Kevin: Wow

Steve: but the volume is a lot higher of those cheap eats right?

Kevin: So do you need that volume for to achieve any scale?

Steve: Well, so there’s ego involved mainly because I run a course also, but like if I focus on my best customers which in this case are event planners and wedding planners, we could make this business a hell of a lot easier we of course take a huge Revenue hit but those people they’re consistent they order in bulk and it would just be a lot easier to just deal with just those customers.

Kevin: Right. Yeah, and and would you be able to I mean, I don’t really know the ins and outs of your operation, but would your number of employees plummet?

Steve: Probably. Well, I mean, we don’t have that many employees to begin with so maybe not actually I don’t know.

Kevin: So for me, there’s just so many advantages to being smaller. Yeah less returns less employees less problems. And in the thing about scale that I always I always try to remember is we’re no matter what I do with my business. I’m not going to be able to scale up to compete with Amazon. You know, I mean, let’s think about let’s say I made my business to point where I had to have 50 employees. Now, I’m going to need managers. I’m going to need human resources people but Amazon will always be competing with me and they they can spread the cost of that manager of those Human Resources people over so many more employees than I ever could see like scale could never be something that I go into battle against Amazon and I think that’s the same for literally every Maybe Target and Walmart there the scale doesn’t work in their favor

Probably it does for those guys but you’re talking like a smaller business less than even a hundred million you really are going to compete with scale in any way so skill is not is not a tool to use in your disposal.

Steve: Yeah. I think the other thing that you have to think about is, you know, we’re both family men. And why do we get into business the first place? It’s not to make our lives more miserable. It’s to be able to tie. I’m shift our time spend more time with family and just kind of do the things that we want to do, right?

Kevin: Exactly and I will say this like my new customers are much more happy like we get a lot less complaints.

Steve: I believe it. You probably didn’t hear from them?

Kevin: for the most part. You don’t yeah, it’s funny how that works. And I don’t exactly know why I probably get some stupid reason if I even tried to conjecture but it’s I can just tell you that the people that pay more are happier.

Steve: Can I ask you also what higher prices? As affected your advertising like you have a lot more to play with now, right?

Kevin: So we do yes, but it also made them less effective because

Steve: Interesting. How so?

Kevin: well because now I’m putting as I travel a lot of people that tell us where you know crazy for how much.

Steve: I see okay, I can actually for the most part I can average like a 3 return ad spend and my cost per getting that single order could be like 25 to 30 dollars.

Steve: Exactly, which is crazy right for t-shirt business.

Kevin: I don’t know that this applies to every company because I did have a head start. I do have the searched search engine optimization going for me. So I don’t know if you could start a business like this, but I know that there are certainly a lot of companies out there that could definitely benefit just from thinking about why am I pursuing this scale? A lot of times I hear people talk about scaling up on Facebook and and you know as everyone has ever advertise on Suppose you’re going to have periods where you think it’s grown great and you’re gonna be like what the heck happened? Facebook’s not working for me like you used to, and but you know, I’ve talked to people and they’ll say well I could spend like a thousand dollars a day and get really good return on ad spend or I could spend $5,000 a day and it’s not even half as much or maybe it is half as much.

So let me ask you this. Would you rather spend $1000 a day at like a 5 to 1 return on ad spend or $5,000 a day a tattoo? A half or 2.4 ad spend.

Steve: well. I mean I would just do both but I’m sorry two and a half? It depends on what my average order value is in the lifetime value, but I would just run both probably but it just depends if I was limited on resources than obviously. Yes. I would I would pay to advertise on the more lucrative Channel.

Kevin: No, I’m sorry. I just meant your choice would be to stop spending on Facebook at $1,000. So you’re not chasing the less quality option ordered to ramp up to spend the extra 4000 dollas.

Steve: So I see we’re saying if I have a limited budget. Yeah, I mean, I’ll tell you this Kev our Facebook customers are those cheap customers

Kevin: really?

Steve: Yeah, it just so happens that we’re talking like this and my Google ad customers are much much higher average order value. And so I’ve actually cut back on my top of funnel stuff for Facebook.

Kevin: awesome. So can I ask I mean you seem to know a lot of good information about your business. Are you doing a dashboard or some kind of you just dinging this stuff on a regular basis?

Steve: You know, it’s funny. I just kind of just talked about this in the last episode over at klaviyo. I generally ask my wife like I have my own little dashboard that I created on my shopping cart that I use but anything more in depth, I have to ask my wife for, obviously all the ad platforms. I have the dashboards for all that stuff Klaviyo is recently announced that all the steps going to be available inside of the tool now. So depending on how it looks I might transition over to that entirely.

Kevin: nice.

Steve: But right now it’s not like yours you have like a unified dashboard for everything right? Sounds like.

Kevin: I mean really it’s that contribution Margin. I don’t have some crazy good dashboard. Like like when you said about your over your average order value coming from 12% your customers versus 50%

Steve: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have to ask my wife for that information.

Kevin: I mean, that’s great stuff to know.

Steve: Yeah, why? I did it for a talk that I was giving. That was the main reason. I pulled that numbers and when I pulled them I was like hey. I started looking at analytics then and Google analytics and just seeing you know, where the cheap customers were coming from and most of them are coming from Facebook

Kevin : That’s fantastic now, I wonder if especially since obviously you’ve got your word to markets. You got your end user and then you’ve got your event planner. I wonder if that might be why Facebook is

Steve: yeah, and I think that’s definitely what it is. Most of the event planners find us through Google.

Kevin: Interesting. So let’s let’s assume that that wasn’t the case in you talking like a normal consumer business where Facebook customers are worse just a just and kind of tell you where I was going with the spend $1000 day or 5,000 if you spent $1,000 a day at five to one return on ad spend and you had a margin of 75% your your gross profit on on that $1000 spend which is five thousand sales would be $2,750 if you spent spent 5,000 at a 2.4 return on ad spend then your gross profit is $4,000. So basically you’re doing a ton of extra work for like thirteen hundred dollars extra in gross profit. And you know, but but now your inventory is moving faster, you know, all the all the things that all the good things that can happen with with scale. I feel like are probably outnumbered by the bad things that can happen scale.

Steve: I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2020 Seller Summit are on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now what is seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that is specifically targeting e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online and unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS. Mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate every year we cut off ticket sales at just a couple hundred people. So tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or 1 million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From May 6 to May 8. And right now, we are almost sold out of Mastermind tickets already and I will be raising the ticket price regularly starting the day after Cyber Monday for more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s SELLERSUMMIT.COM or just Google it. Now back to the show.

Can we just kind of end this interview by just talking about how your lifestyle has changed?

Kevin: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry if this if this was like a boring

Steve: no, no, it’s not boring. It’s just the numbers are probably hard for people to follow. So like I get your point, right? I mean is it worth that amount of money incremental amount of money for the amount of mental anguish. This is kind of why I want to transition over to how this has changed for you mentally.

Kevin: Yeah, so I’m essentially semi-retired I’ve gone from having to You know 10 to 14 hour days just to keep the wheels on on the thing keep it rolling to the point where if I if I really didn’t feel like it today. I don’t have to actually do anything to keep the business running. I’ve got everything is going to be flowing smoothly my employees would let me know if the some disaster occurred but so that’s that’s really good. And honestly, I did need a break because we spend nearly 20 years of your of your life just doing something head down and and pursuing growth without any real reason which is definitely what I was doing

Steve: everyone falls into that Trap man. I fell into that trap three years ago before I had to talk to my wife about it. So

Kevin: let’s go that you did have that talk.

Steve: Yeah.

Kevin: So so I feel like right now I’m sort of in this like semi not super motivated phase where I’m enjoying the time with my kids doing a lot of working out. So my life is really good. I’ve got no complaints a little bit of sometimes I actually feel a little guilty because I used to feel guilty if I spent like an hour goofing off and now I’m spending potentially six hours a day kind of like working on myself in one form or another so so I have a little I still have a little bit of that. I’m trying to get over that. But yeah, my lifestyle is great though. I’m in better shape than I have been in a long time. Like I used to go to the chiropractor and get massages all the time because I was sitting in front of a desk.

You know stumped or slumped over and just my my posture all day long was killing me. So so now I don’t I don’t do that. I get up all the time. I’ll work in different positions. Like I literally I’ll take my phone out and answer emails and the sun whenever it’s nice because I’m nothing really like urgent anymore and spent a lot of time and stuff kids. So yeah that if if you’re at the point, I’d say to anyone if you’re at the point where like you can scale down and you could have a really Nice lifestyle

Steve: and I mean your profits have increased right?

Kevin: Yeah. Well I was losing money for years because I was you know pumping in money into to the building’s off or any of the employees and the only thing that was allowing allowing that to work was the fact that I had built up a large inventory value that that was actually as I wasn’t reordering products whether it was just because I was shrinking the inventory on a site or as I switch Dropship doing having that pure Cash flow coming in is what allowed me the time to actually turn it around.

Steve: You know what, I just thought it was just now it’d be really interesting to see all the people who are reporting Revenue numbers actually report profit numbers to be very interesting if it just all of a sudden shifted

Kevin: and love it and you know, I’m in the form and I know there’s some guys that are doing some heavy revenue and two of them. I’ve actually talked to a different times and you know, they weren’t profitable for periods of time and and you know, you’re doing over 20 Million Dollars and you’re losing money then that’s that’s super risky that you know the stress that they’re under at that point has got to be intense.

Steve: So yeah, but that’s a lot of credit card points right there

Kevin: if they weren’t so miserable. They be taking some amazing vacation.

Steve: Well, Kevin man. Hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show and sharing your story. If anyone wants a he-man t shirt, where can they find you?

Kevin: Yeah, they go to 80tees.com and if you want to hear me and spouse on numbers and maybe Kind of like my anti-growth posture. I do have the Kevinstecko.com just

Steve: Kevinstecko.com. Yeah, you know what’s funny is, you know, kev, whenever we kind of meet up we do have some really good conversations and Kev is actually quite a good counselor too. if you find yourself being burnt out about the business or whatever. He’ll give you a realistically a realistic and blunt perspective on what to take

Kevin: try not to hold any punches because I would hope someone would do that for me also.

Steve: absolutely. All right, Kevinstecko.com if you want to check it out. Thanks for coming on Kev.

Kevin: Thanks, Steve. Take care.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode and next time you start handing out discount coupons left and right. I want you to sit down do the math and figure out how many more widgets you have to sell to make up for it because the numbers are quite astounding. For more information about this episode. Go to mywifequither.com/episode288.

And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

I also want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today, I have one of my early e-commerce mentors on the show Linda Bustos and Linda’s posts on the get elastic blog were instrumental in helping my online store get off its feet way back in the day. So I’m excited to finally meet her and have her on the podcast.

But before I begin I want to give a quick shout-out Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show

I also want to give a quick shout-out Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Code Black Friday is right around the corner and for my e-commerce store email marketing is a heavy part of my holiday sales strategy. And in fact last year, it was close to 50% of My overall sales. And of course as you all know klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I use for Bumblebee Linens now Klaviyo is the growth marketing platform chosen by over 20,000 Brands generating more than three point seven billion dollars in Revenue in just the last year and with the holiday season right around the corner klaviyo has created the ultimate planning guide for crushing those holiday Revenue targets for marketing creative to segmentation strategy. These are proven tactics for more personalized marketing, especially in time for the holiday season. To get ahold of this guide, visit Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, Klaviyo.com/mywife.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I have an extra special guest on the show, Linda Bustos. Now. Linda has been an e-commerce for as long as I can remember and when I first got started in e-commerce way back in 2007. Linda’s articles were what got me through the dark periods of my business and her post were they were like the Bible to me and during her earlier years. She wrote in managed to GetElastic e-commerce blog growing it from 200 to over 20,000 daily readers with recognition from the Wall Street Journal as one of the 15 entrepreneur blogs worth reading and a top 50 spot on the adage power 150 and she’s also provided consulting on conversion optimization, web experience, content marketing strategies and more. To some of the world’s largest and most exciting online companies and after getelastic. She started her own firm called EdgeAscent where she now helps e-commerce companies with strategy and growth and with that welcome to the show Linda. How are you doing today?

Linda: Well Steve. Thanks for having me on.

Steve: Yeah. So Linda, you know for everyone who doesn’t Not know that you are a legend in e-commerce. Tell us about how you got into the field and kind of what you’re up to now.

Linda: So I feel like I kind of bustled my way into to this. I’ve always been interested in internet marketing like ever since College, you know, and I found that my college education was way outdated Because the Internet moves a lot faster than textbooks can be written. So kind of when I was released into the wild after school, you know, I had to do quite a bit of my own research on SEO and paid search and got my hands dirty quite early on, you know working as an SEO and internet marketer for a web design company and working with clients right away and and but what I really really loved to do was write, write about strategies right in online forums. And that kind of thing. I started a Blog called the smoger the Social Media blog.

Steve: I didn’t know about that blog. Okay

Linda: Yeah, it was like blogger.com like one of those create free and there was this meme going around that a friend of mine added me on to is called the Zedd list or the Z list. Sorry I’m Canadian, so we say Zedd, but it was useless and it kind of went all all around the internet and I got reposted on like Seth Godin blog and all this kind of stuff. It was a meme of all these blogs and so I got a readership kind of by accident off of that and I got Twitter followers by accident through this thing that went around and then I just really, you know, just really double down on blogging, I loved it. I loved I loved just finding examples and compiling them and putting them together. It was just kind of I enjoyed that a lot more than doing actually.

Steve: Okay.

Linda: S o I got into that and then and then one of the founders of elastic path, which ran the get elastic block at the time was also a friend of mine here in Vancouver and and you know brought me onboard full time to run that blog because I really found e-commerce to be the most exciting pocket of the web. Right? And there’s so much to talk about e-commerce and and I’m also an avid online Shopper so to blend to blend my own consumerism with work is great.

Steve: Yeah. No, I mean I used to read getelastic blog religiously. Actually, I read it religiously until you left and then I was happy to see that your articles are popping up again on that blog. So that made me very happy.

Linda: Yeah that Blog has undergone a complete reinvention since I’ve left the blog now has wow, probably over 50 guest contributors now and Coast daily. So yeah, it’s a different animal. Than when I left but there’s a lot of different voices and a lot of different perspectives on e-commerce. So yeah, I’m happy to be part of that project again and excited for some of the new new types of content. We’re gonna..

Steve: yeah, I know definitely start reading it again after a what is it like a four-year Hiatus. So

Linda: 4 years on the nose. Yeah

Steve: Yeah. So Linda I know that you’re always up to date with all facets of e-commerce. I was hoping you could just talk a little bit about Trends and what you’re kind of seeing and how how new companies are. To the adjusted landscape with Amazon and other competitors.

Linda: Yeah, so this year I think a couple breakouts have kind of come to know, number one being chatbots and the ability to use chat Bots kind of as an alternative list to your email. So there’s a couple different types of chatbots. You can have you can have one that’s just basically a virtual assistant on your site and you can program it with pre-built dialogues to handle, you know live person. For example, they’ve been a long time Live help service and they run numbers and on e-commerce inquiries and they say that 70% of Life help questions could easily be handled instantly by a chatbot and what that can do is if you can automate the first initial contact and then once the chat bot runs out of answers hand them off to a live person that just helps first of all speed never have to wait for a life help agent to get back from their other conversations again. And also, you know 24/7 accessibility and also, you know just reduce the load on your your life people as well.

So that’s just a basic, you know, question-and-answer bot and some of them are allowing you to do some merchandising in there to like show actual product recommendations and that kind of thing. But then there’s another arm of chatbots which can actually especially when they’re integrated with like Facebook Messenger or some of these other apps like kick or telegram, Skype they’re able to tap that Into that users phone in the messaging service and do follow-ups and remarketing and opt-in email and cart recovery, campaigns and all that kind of stuff, which is you remember back in the day like those recommendations that get that email in the first step check out right so that you can actually talk to these folks again. And now you can do it based on just cookies and remarketing through these through these platforms. So so that’s a great opportunity.

Steve: So what you are saying is completely accurate so we have a live chat bot actually on our e-commerce store and about 70% of the questions before were you know, how long is it going to take to get delivered? And what is the status of my order? And those have been completely automated away along with shipping times and and that sort of thing. So it’s been a huge help for our customer service team like we get a lot less phone calls now.

Linda: Yeah. Yeah, and I mean that really we live in an age where people don’t tolerate waiting for anything right so you can do something and silly, especially during the holidays, right?

Steve: What software is popular to implement some of the things that you were just talking about like remarketing Landing card and that sort of thing. What are some popular e-commerce software that are implementing these things?

Linda: Well, there are so many plugins that will do the remarketing. So there it’s it’s fairly easy to find some and then that that’s a double-edged sword right? Because there’s a lot of low cost free, you know, no friction tools that you can use but the more choice that you have can be a lot of legwork just making the right choice. So do you mean for chatbots?

Steve: Let’s talk about chatbots. Actually.

Linda: Yeah, I also like a short list ones I thought were the top ones for e-commerce and they kind of spend two categories. So there’s a there’s platforms like software-as-a-service chatbots that you can use where it’s hosted by the tool provider and you can just go in and basically build your dialogue flows. And that’s where the legwork comes in right? Because some of these providers have templates that you can kind of customize for basic inquiries and that kind of stuff but really, I mean that’s where the bulk of your work and bulk of you’re planning as a merchandiser as a retailer as an operations manager as a customer service department is to actually build those dialogues and decide what type of personality your Bot is going to have. Do you want it to have kind of more slang and talk like your Market or do you want it to be more professional?

You know, is there a branding team that needs to be involved in that? So that’s where the big work is but these builders make the actual building of the Bots and testing of these Bots quite easy. Also, like if you if you see chat Bots as more of an integrated conversational Commerce strategy, right? You can integrate a lot of these tools or build your own using the AI machine learning languages. So there’s like Microsoft has their Louis programming language and Google has one has a framework

Steve: That sounds really involve..

Linda: Dialogue flow.

Steve: Yeah. Does that involve coding? Like I think I’ve dabbled with the dialogue flow and it but you need to know how to code in order to implement it?

Linda: Yes, you need to know how to code so that’s kind of the platforms and software as a service ones are kind of more marketer friendly. Some are a little bit hybrid, you know, so your marketing can do their work and you know, get a little bit of extra feature with with they’ll integrate with dialogue flow and they’ll integrate with some of these other Frameworks, even though there are a builder? Technically. And then you have the pure builds and you know, if you’re just dipping your toe in and you want to get something up really quickly before the holidays, are you want to have a minimum viable? Product and kind of gather some data and then start investing in a bigger, you know more tech-heavy project a wise person once told me we many years ago get good at free right?

Steve: Yeah

Linda: get good at easy and then build from there.

Steve: So what are some creative uses for these chatbots that you’ve seen companies use?

Linda: Well, I guess customer service is kind of the entry level line, but for merchandising being able to kind of take a guided selling approach, especially on mobile because a couple things if you’ve ever tried to fiddle with a hamburger menu and the more categories and subcategories that you have, you know that slider many you can have three or four different, you know, layers deep of navigation also with site search on a mobile phone. First of all, you’ve got the phone often times tryna autocorrect what you’re trying to henpeck with your fingers and for product names and brand names, they don’t always exist in the dictionary. So you’ve got weird auto corrections and failed searches and the the keyboard pops up and takes up half of your Mobile screen and then the auto suggestions Papa.

Steve: Yes, yeah..

Linda : Yes? right. So being able to use your voice and just I mean voice recognition software has gotten pretty good so far and being able to use chat bot or just have it spit options to you. So if it says hey, what are you looking for? And it gives you three or four different pre-baked options and you just do one tap and then that dialogue breaks down from there and that bot can guide you towards a department or a set of products or gift recommendations or hone in on something that I think that’s the future right? You’re going to be talking and interacting and bypassing navigation menus and bypassing clunky search processes on mobile and just do everything fluidly with your voice or through one tap responses.

Steve: interesting. So instead of just using the hamburger menu, you’re suggesting just I guess replicating that in a chatbot to guide people to all your products that you sell.

Linda: Yeah. I think it’s an alternative to I mean, there’s always going to be people who want to browse in the traditional way and that serves them. But if you really want to give if you want to replicate that store experience, right you walk in and you talk to a sales person and they know everything they know all of of the inventory in the store and their job is to you know, ask you probing questions and to upsell you and to you know, give you details and attributes about the product and give their opinions and experiences like some of these chat Bots are integrated with like the yacht pose and the other site review application so that they can spit out product reviews in the future.

I think in the next two or three iterations of this you’ll be able to say show me the top rated, you know boots for boots for toddlers 3 Five, you know in the color green or whatever and you’ll be able to get that refined set of results provided that here’s the other caveat, you know, we need to get really a lot better with product data and consistency with product data to be able to actually feed that because even when we know with site search now you can type in like all of Green gum boots and you’re going to be missing a few because they didn’t have specifically Olive or you know, they use an alternative keyword.

Steve: What is is your take on voice search? I’ve been hearing that buzz word around like all a lot of shopping is going to be occurring via like Alexa and some of these other devices. Have you seen any of that take place yet?

Linda: Yeah the data that I’m seeing or the number that I keep seeing spit out is that it’s like two percent of Alexa users have you know made a purchase more than one purchase by voice? I think the initial purchase might be a little bit higher because I’m going by memory here, but It’s a very low adoption like through Alexa, but I do think that you know, the chat bots on individual retailers. And as people get more comfortable with actually talking through their phone. This is going to change.

Steve: How does that work? Exactly. I’ve actually never purchased anything via voice and I could imagine like when I’m just doing a search on Google like a whole bunch of things pop up, right? And I usually pick one with voice. It seems like you’re only given one choice.

Linda: Yeah, kind of what it’s doing is its speech-to-text right on the back end. So we’ll take your speech turn it into a text based query pull up the results and then maybe pick one based on Card results or or whatever is the top hit and then text to speech that back to you. You know, I think I think kind of like I hear a lot of fun from my friend people, you know when we’re just casually talking about AI or relax. Anything like that that I think there’s this perception that it is an actual fully baked artificial cognitive Computing that’s understanding exactly what you’re saying. But right now it’s very still programmatic. It’s very rules-based and it’s basically a voice version of search.

Steve: Okay. Does that imply then that you need to be like number one in the results then in order to get that sale?

Linda: Well, if we’re talking about like Google Voice optimization, so so Google has made a move towards cards based results for a while now and you’ll see that right away. If you type in a question and you’ll see kind of these top this top box of results almost like you don’t have to go to the website anymore to get your answer.

Steve: Yeah,

Linda: which is not so good for Publishers, but it’s kind of the way that Google wants to move to surveying and I think Amazon is going to be the next one to use that card spaced if they’re not already through Alexa. However, the challenge with that is exactly that you know, how do you optimize for that? If you’re product how do you get into search results and right now mostly it’s not for actual product results. It’s more about you know information about the product. So, you know, if you want to create a lot of QA content and attach it to your product page. I mean that’s a lot of legwork to get to answer a question that the customer is not even going to click through to your site anyway. Like I wouldn’t recommend it but other ways that are potentially that you can get there is number one.

You have to have really good mobile site speed because that’s part of like it’s a mobile first index now, so if you don’t have great mobile performance and mobile optimized site, you’re not even going to get in the main results.

Steve: What’s considered good right now or what is considered like passable.

Linda: Google has actually a tool the mobile check tool think it’s through Google analytics.

Steve: Yeah pagespeed insights right?

Linda: pagespeed insights. And so that’ll tell you those basic things. But yeah, you want to have a really fast loading speed. You don’t want to have too many. Also that pop up, you know, like pop-ups that my interrupt the users experience and yeah image image load size page load size that kind of thing, right? And yeah, and so there’s that but then also getting your like semantic markup and that kind of thing into Google as well. So having your prices having your stock availability having your local product data, I think the next iteration that Google will roll out will be for local results. Right? like show me the Sony, you know Sony headphones in and steel gray, you know closest to me and they’ll be able to tell you the retailer. So Google will have to pull in that feed data,

Steve: right I guess most shops who are using Google shopping already have that markup. I think if not in the feed but in structured markup on their site, so I would imagine Google will just take that data, right?

Linda: Hmm. Now if ever if most sites are doing that then it becomes like wow

Steve: Yeah I doubt that yeah. let’s do it have but quick question. So we were just talking about chatbots earlier where you can get them as a subscriber and then send them broadcast messages via messenger, just curious with the companies that you’ve been dealing with. Right now, I know with my store that the engagement on the messenger channel is 5 to 10 x better than email. So I was just wondering if you have been seeing that same thing. And if so have the priorities changed in terms of getting an email versus a chat subscriber.

Linda: Well, I think we’re kind of like now is a nice window to start doing it because it hasn’t really hit full saturation yet. Once it does I think the numbers will change because it will become just like email, right? Your essay, your Facebook Facebook Messenger is going to be become a Spam feed, you know, right because a lot of these retargeting campaigns don’t actually need an opt and right? it just needs you to engage on the site on your mobile while you have the Facebook pixel running. I was kind of caught off guard the first cart abandonment messenger thing that I got right because I didn’t even know it was a thing at that time.

I was like what the heck and and it felt very spammy to me and I opted out right away and it kind of gave me a negative impression of the brand. That was my experience. But but I think that, you know, kind of when something gets popular it kind of spoils it for everyone so get it get in on it now, but I think Smart marketers that are doing it now are going to be doing that testing to see like what’s the right timing? What’s the right Cadence who’s the right segment of visitor to remarket to under what conditions right? So it’s much better to send a cart abandonment message then just send a random offer that wasn’t asked for for example. The language that you use do you augment it with an offer right? Hey come back at 10% off make it worth your while versus just hey, we’re just tapping you on the shoulder because cuz we want your business back or you know, self-serving kind of remarketing.

So there’s a lot of ways that individual companies can get in there now and do that testing and figure out what works for them and really have that Insight at the time when it starts getting more difficult to to Market to people because everybody else has joined the party.

Steve: It’s interesting that you said the abandoned cart messenger message turned you off. Do you know what the general opinion is now, I guess this happened earlier on right or a while ago or?

Linda: yeah, it happened a while ago and then I’ve seen it a handful of times since but and now I just collect them because of course I want to blog about them and compare them and say who’s doing it, right and who’s doing it wrong, for me? It turned off because full disclosure. I wasn’t actually really interested in purchasing the item either. I mean I add stuff to cart to test checkouts all the time and that was the case with this one. So, so maybe my opinion would be different if I really wanted the Item and appreciated the reminder and I also don’t feel like I’m exactly the same.

Steve: way to advance of a shopper.

Linda: Yeah. I just know the back end a little bit too much in the marketing side of things to kind of experience things as a consumer. Okay, but you know, the numbers are speaking for itself like your experience you’re saying I’ve heard that up to 90 percent open rate on mobile marketing messages. And again, I believe that is just because it hasn’t become.

Steve: It’s not saturated, Yeah?

Linda: but I mean, yeah, this is a text-based culture right? Like I keep trying to convince my mom. She’s like I got I got a call your I got to call your knees. I got to call your nephew and my mom they don’t they don’t pick up the phone it was like..

Steve: Hahaha

Linda: Right?and like it’s like 69 percent or 70 percent of online Shoppers today would rather interact through a messenger or through instant message instant, instead texting or something then pick up the phone or even deal with email. So there’s there’s a lot of support for it. That way.

Steve: what is your take on push notifications? Any times?

Linda:: Yeah, I think they’re great if they’re opt-in. I mean that’s a great opportunity for you as a merchant take advantage of it, right? It’s just another opt-in. It’s one that kind of just gets a little bit more attention a little bit more engagement rate or a lot more than email. So it’s a great great great opportunity and SMS email list. If you’re not doing that now got to get doing that, you know, everybody’s using those pop-up. Here’s ten percent off your first order use Enter your e-mail, right and and I think is a big missed opportunity. If you don’t have an SMS option there.

Steve: interesting. So how are people using SI? So I’m actually not using SMS with my store yet. So you’re getting a cell phone number and then you’re sending text messages to the customer?

Linda: That’s right. Yeah.

Steve: Okay, is that intrusive? How is that working?

Linda: Well, because it’s opt in right. So that user has already given you permission and then again as a campaign manager, it’s up to you to test and watch your unSubscribe rates or your stop your text back when they stop and and and measure that back to what tactics you were using like how frequently were you doing? What was the offer? You know, what is the segmentation of that user that you can discern right you can kind of do a little bit of break down by like the users area code or stuff like that. If they’ve also opt-in by e-mail or you can use device detection to mount them back to what they actually do on the site. What categories theyclick into how frequently they visit and segment then that way I mean you wouldn’t want to be sending a weekly push to someone who visits your site once every three months or you might, right? So you have to encourage more visits. I mean, it’s very context dependent.

Steve: Yeah, that’s what software are people using for that.

Linda: Well there there are opt-in providers that will give you like your your opt-in lightbox your modal window or whatever. There’s a lot of different providers to do that so some have an SMS option some have Professional Services that could build it for you. Like if they don’t have it in their product yet or if you’re using your own. I mean, it depends on your platform too, it might need to be a plug-in or if you have kind of a developer friendly platform. We might be able to you know, build something that integrates with your own.

Steve: If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com now back to the show.

SMS sounds really intrusive like more so than messenger. Like I only SMS is my friends that can imagine getting marketing messages on there. So yeah, I’m just kind of curious I realized I actually haven’t encountered a site that I’ve shopped at debt takes my SMS yet, but I’ll be on the lookout for now for sure.

Linda: Yeah, I can offline I can dig up some that. I’ve encountered see how you doing it.

Steve: Yeah, what are you seeing in terms of Amazon and some of the Retailers you’ve been working with just kind of reconciling whether to go all in on Amazon versus focus on their site and that sort of thing.

Linda: It’s tough. I mean, I think it you’re at a really good Advantage. If you’re a digitally native vertical brand that you know, you have your Shopify site or you’ve got your your main site and then you yourself have put your products on Amazon versus others kind of getting their hands on your product and putting it in the marketplace if you know what I mean or Amazon itself. If Amazon itself is stalking your product like your own branded product. I’m not talking about if you sell another folks products that’s a I’ll get to that in a moment. But yeah, I think those are those are the brands and the and the merchants that have the most Advantage because you’re controlling the distribution and you’re controlling your merchant account in in Amazon. It gets a bit trickier when especially late let’s say you’ve been you have three or four local stores and then you have a website and you’ve got a good following in in your local let Let’s say you’re a surf shop right and you carry a lot of the national Brands just like, you know million other channel partners for those Brands.

So that’s where it gets tricky because that’s where customers are going to come in and use your retail shop as a showroom for Amazon or for, you know, other other sites with massive discounts or whatever, right? I think that’s where it’s the biggest threat and then and then if you’re a brand that has Amazon somehow getting Hands, like either through a third party distributor, for example, a lot of retailers and Brands can’t help that Amazon is getting their hands on stuff and then they undercut the minimum advertised price. They control the buy box and their stocking itself. They’re not going to show you as a as another by box option until they run out of their inventory. I mean this this is where it gets tricky.

Steve: How do you fight that so if you are an online store that sells other people’s products that are also listed on Amazon. I mean, how do you what are some things that you can do to stand out?

Linda: So that’s where you know using these Facebook remarketing using SMS messaging. One advantage that you have as a retailer with your own site is the ability to merchandize a lot better than Amazon does because Amazon is a haystack right? And it doesn’t always do the best job in supporting guided selling or building a bundle. I mean, they have the customers who bought this also bought but that’s purely based on you know billions and billions of skus of data and that kind of thing. So if you’re let’s go back to the online skater shop or snowboard shop. Then you will a you’re able to have build a relationship with a customer or with a visitor, you know, if you’re using the right cooking and device tracking and and remarketing that kind of thing.

But the way that you merchandiser site it can be easier to navigate with a tighter set of Skus. You can build bundles or the way. That you merchandize and decorate your pages the way that you handle look books and the way that you organize your site the coupons and the and the promotion’s that you send by email can can stand out from Amazon because again Amazon’s kind of like you go there you have to know what you’re going to buy. It’s not a browse friendly site not a project discovery engine. It’s really a spear fishing engine.

Steve: but the ship so how much of a factor is the shipping like two day shipping Prime shipping?

Linda: Oh, it’s huge. Yeah the customer today. A kind of expects it by Divine right? but there’s there’s some things that you can do on your website to actually improve the uptake of free shipping, right? So we did some testing on free shipping thresholds with a with a retailer. I was working with you know, 50 $50 free shipping or $75 free shipping or $100 free shipping and actually doing those tests. So to find what is that sweet spot of both revenue and conversion rate at different free shipping thresholds, and it’s Current for different retailers you’d be surprised in different markets and you know Finding ways to actually put those those free shipping incentives actually on the product page as well, you know being able to say like this this order qualifies for free shipping for this product qualifies for free shipping because it’s already over the $50 interesting is ready.

Steve: ahh Interesting.

Linda: Yeah, and and in the cart page saying congratulations you’ve qualified for free shipping instead. Just the generic free shipping over a hundred you just telling them and giving that feedback that yes, you’ve added this to cart and you’ve already qualified just reinforcing your

Steve: actually that I have on my site. I have like dollars to free shipping and when they achieve it, it turns a different color and it says you have any okay, it’s good.

Linda: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: Do you think Drop Shipping is kind of dying?

Linda: I think it’s getting harder to do mainly because you know, the margins are so small, right? Yeah, and if your Drop Shipping from overseas and you can’t really control the shipping time, I mean if you’re competing with Amazon Prime right that that becomes a lot more difficult and also the cost to acquire a customer so you have to make sure that you’re advertising costs in your acquisition costs aren’t inflating so much that you’re actually losing money.

Steve: Yeah, I mean what I’ve noticed is that the margins are pretty small right? For dropshipping but then you can find the same item on Amazon and oftentimes it’s actually the manufacturer who is selling on Amazon right? at a lower price. So it seems like it’s just really hard to compete if you’re selling other people’s products.

Linda: Yeah, I think if you have a good way to convert if you have a good conversion rate and if there’s a sort of blindness for the customer that there are other options right? like I’d be surprised if I mean I sell I sell in the Etsy Marketplace.

Steve: Okay

Linda: so that site kind of has a even though you can find similar stuff for a lot cheaper, right? It tends to attract the type of customer that wants to stay within that market place?

Steve: right

Linda: and Look elsewhere. So if you have a Drop Shipping site that maybe has a lot of content or a lot of you know, authoritative, authoritative brand and where the content really that sells the, sells the guidance on what to buy and you’ve got a guide and then, you know, you’ve got three or four products in a carousel that they can purchase directly from your site then that’s kind of more of a closed system than you know, somebody who’s typed in. You know washing machine and you clicked on you and then they’re going to click back out and click, you know, five other Google shopping results. It is kind of depends on that too.

Steve: I guess the advantage with that c is everything there is unique, right? I think of smaller, you know retailers and manufacturers selling their own handmade products. So yeah can’t just hop on Amazon and buy that.

Linda: Yeah, I mean Amazon did launch its own handmade Marketplace as well. And I’m not exactly sure how that affected because I know a lot of sellers sell on both platforms and you know get into the prime, but the other thing too where I think as a drop shipper you can do well as if you acquire a customer through things like Instagram and Pinterest right? like they discovered you not through a search engine not through a comparison shopping mindset they discovered you by serendipity and I think in those situations you can still do really well with Drop Shipping.

Steve: Have you seen any do you have any data regarding websites that use Amazon pay? Or you know, you can essentially do a one-click checkout.

Linda: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t have any data but in the context of mobile wallets, right which will be another Trend. So you’re asking about Trends might as well talk about that one. So certain mobile wallets do. Do better so if you think about Apple pay there’s some friction in actually using Apple pay especially if you’re on a more newer device where you have to use face ID, you know and you have to set up all your stuff within Apple pay and it’s it’s a different experience, right? Because the pay sheets the Apple pay sheet that you have to inject into checkout is kind of limited. You can’t ask for things like you can insert your own fields for You know it is this a gift or do you want to split shipment? Do you want to pick up and start like you can’t do that kind of thing.

But things with Apple pay or Amazon pay and PayPal. Yeah. I mean Amazon has what over a hundred million or maybe 200 million now Prime members, so just being able to use that as a wallet and check out quickly. I think there’s a perception that Amazon pay also means it’s Amazon Prime.

Steve: ohhh

Linda: do you might If it a little bit from that kind of halo effect

Steve: well unless they’re disappointed when there is no Prime shipping.

Linda: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t actually I haven’t had any direct experience with Amazon pay like with with anyone. I’ve been working with or have any data or numbers around

Steve: Apple and Google Play.

Linda: Yeah, Apple and Google pay, it’s funny because it’s very very hyped up. Right? but the conversion rates. Are you have to consider it as first of all you have a smaller segments that’s actually using the iPhone right?

Steve: Sure.

Linda: then then a portion of that has Apple pay enabled then a portion of that prefers to use Apple pay. So I’ve seen a lot of data come out of apple itself, you know, or their pilot that two or three pilot retailers that have done it and I all you know hundred and fifty percent higher Revenue per visitor and all these kind of things and then you go to that website and go. Okay cool. I want to check out I want I want to test out this This Apple pay implementation in the checkout and then it’s gone right? I’m not going to call anyone out. But I’m like, okay, that’s interesting. They were the poster child case study and now they’re not even using Apple pay anymore and their digital check out. So what does that mean?

Steve: I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2020 Seller Summit are on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now what is seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that is specifically targeting e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online and unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS. Mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate every year we cut off ticket sales at just a couple hundred people. So tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or 1 million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From May 6 to May 8. And right now, we are almost sold out of Mastermind tickets already and I will be raising the ticket price regularly starting the day after Cyber Monday for more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s SELLERSUMMIT.COM or just Google it. Now back to the show.

Interesting. So I guess in my experience the more payment options kind of confuses customers. So right now for us, I think PayPal’s are number one, I guess because a mobile like PayPal one touch and then we just offer credit cards and just wondering is there a Harmon throwing up Apple pay GPA and Amazon pay I mean, what would you advise just kind of limiting the options?

Linda: Well Paradox of choice right that that’s the thing and if you go to apple pays kind of guidelines or style guide, you know how to implement. They’re always saying will put Apple pay first time top of your check out by the way. Yeah, and when you’re on a mobile screen and you’ve got like one window that you’re scrolling through and Apple pay is like the first and it’s a black styled button that spans a rectangle that spans the size the width of your Mobile screen like that. That is dangerous right? to put it first or even put it second because these buttons kind of stack on top of each other. So yeah, it can be confusing. It’s always good to test stuff. It’s a Sometimes it works for a retailer. You know, you’re in a certain Market where yeah, you’ve got that demographic that wants to pay with Samsung pay or Android pay digital downloads, you know.

Steve: Yeah

Linda: video games that kind of thing. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, we’ve opted not to put those on just mainly because I think PayPal is much more ubiquitous. But

Linda: yeah and trusted and understood.

Steve: Yeah. So we’re talking at a time when the holiday season is right around the corner. So what Some things that clients are prepping for, you know coming up as we roll into Prime shopping season

Linda: Yeah, usually around this time. There’s not a lot of new future delivery. Not a lot of work on on the website you want to have that code lock down and even the promotions and the promotional calendar or done well, well well in advance and one thing that I’ve been an advocate for is being a little bit more Nimble and more like real-time merchandising and responsive merchandising and what I mean by that is allowing yourself some flexibility to to adjust your merchandising and promotion strategy while the in play, right? And so oftentimes these promotions and these emails and and the merchandising is fixed so far in advance your kind of, you know, licking your finger and putting it in the in the sky and just testing where the wind is right now.

Last year’s data isn’t super predictive of what’s going to happen this year. So I always like to leave some leeway be able to run some tests really quickly early on you don’t want to be applying test results or even running A/B tests now and letting them extend into into the holiday season you want to stop all of that. And then have a plan of saying like Okay, we want to we want to test let’s say in the first week that there’s a there’s a trick to that too. Right? Because Behavior changes rapidly through the you know from from the Cyber weekend to the next weekend to the next weekend people are in a different mindset to there’s more urgency. There’s there’s some times less stock availability Right Stuff start selling out.

There are retailers start getting more aggressive with their holiday plans. They start promoting even earlier. So you never know what your competition is going to do. There’s there’s so many things. So if you can have a testing plan of like, okay, these are our hypotheses. These are our options and take advantage of that extra traffic spikes so that you can get test results earlier and keep those test results and applications of them within the context of the holiday. That’s one way to kind of prepare yourself now for optimizing in real-time during the holiday Spike. And then you know do things like make sure that your ad spend like communicate with your ad agencies and all those kind of things because because click rates go up, impression share, you know can go down as your competitors get more aggressive and stuff.

Make sure that you’re not bidding on stuff that’s not seasonal so that you can spend more of your available budget to the things that you know are seasonal and you sell, so like you have yeah, just non-holiday non, non seasonal products turn them off. Make sure you have a system that turns off ads when products go out of stock.

Steve: right

Linda: or have a back-up plan for when things go out of stock so that your product recommendations will show similar items not customers who bought this also bought that because those can sometimes be from different departments. So you might want to adjust your product recommendation engine for certain categories to Show similar products that kind of thing.

Steve: Okay, cool, Linda. We’ve been.

Linda: And get a chat bot

Steve: And get a chat bot. But actually I that’s what I want to get out of you. What are some sass providers for chatbots that your clients have been using?

Linda: Well, you can look into Mobile monkey as one that focuses on their Facebook. Yeah. Yeah, and there’s Optimum Unk and there’s WeChat

Steve: Are there any that specialize in e-commerce that you know, that’s really popular?

Linda: But I don’t think Any that specialize purely in e-commerce? I think chat Bots are mostly used on B2B SAS, you know or like those kind of like lead gen kind of sites and e-commerce is kind of a second branch that I think has a lot of room to grow.

Steve: Okay.

Linda: Hmm.

Steve: Well Linda, I really appreciate your time and coming on and it is a great honor for me because as I mentioned earlier in this interview, that getelastic blog is what got me through the early years of e-commerce. And I am really excited that you are writing for them again and just because of that. I’m going to start following the blog again. So

Linda: loved it. Thank you.

Steve: Yeah and everything

Linda: and thanks for having me on the podcast.

Steve: Yeah everyone out there go check out the getelastic blog. I mean Linda’s articles are always here’s what I like about it. Here’s just a quick plug. I always liked that you pull in like statistics and examples to support all of the facts that you give in article and so it’s just very convincing and it just inspires you to want to give that a try. So..

Linda: and in my Hiatus from getelastic. I wrote a Blog called e-commerce Illustrated, which if you don’t mind me plugging it,

Steve: no, go for it

Linda: it’s very very in-depth guides from home page to check out so you can hone in on like if you want to look at I want to have some ideas for best practices for category Pages or A/B Testing category Pages. Like there’s a 24 to 40 page chapter on that that that you can go check out and that’s kind of like my little labor of love.

Steve: Nice, I wasn’t aware of that site. Is that something you’re still maintaining?

Linda:: You know, I did the home page to check out. I have a couple more. I have like check out order, order summary and mobile checkout left to post. So the project is almost done but most of its they’re just as static.

Steve: Cool. Awesome. Yeah, I’m gonna go check it out now. Thanks a lot Linda.

Linda: Yeah. Thanks Steve.

Steve: Really appreciate you coming on.

Linda: Yes. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now as I mentioned earlier Linda is one of my early e-commerce Heroes. So you should definitely check out her writing over on the GetElastic Blog. For more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode285.

And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

I also want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com