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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Have Job podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, Tony and I are to talk about a huge event for e-commerce sellers that is right around the corner, Black Friday Cyber Monday. So in this episode, we’re going to discuss how to maximize your sales during this period without losing money. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now.

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My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:54
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. This year has really gone quickly and we are slowly creeping up to Halloween and Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Yeah. Do you do anything promotional for Halloween? Like our industries are not really like Halloween. No. We’re not Spirit Halloween where we make all of our money in the five weeks leading up to it. Now that we actually have a printer, we are going to have a Halloween section now.

01:22
Just because people search for it and people have been buying random design hankies where we just have an image. We just kind of throw it up and it’s not any cost to us, right? To have more products. It’s almost like we’re our own print on demand company now. Yeah, it’s kind of nice. So I feel like the Halloween marketing has already begun only because I’m getting a lot of Halloween ads specific on TikTok. Well, no, I mean, if you go to the store, all the Halloween stuff is

01:51
I try not to go to the store, I do everything online. But online, I’m seeing a lot of the Halloween products. I’m sure it’s in the stores. Are you going to dress like a young person again? Nurse outfit? Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.

02:11
If you have a business where there’s any tie-in to Halloween, mean, like I would say there’s no tie-in for Hankies, but you figured it out, right? Like you figured out the connection. no, this will be the first year. This will be the first year that we’re trying. Well, right, but you’re going to test it. So I’m saying like, if you can find any connection in your business with Halloween, I would definitely add that to your promotional calendar because people are already thinking about it, talking about it. You know, I’m sure if you’re kid, you’re probably already like,

02:41
planning your costume, things like that. It’s already on people’s minds because as you know, like the second Halloween ends, Christmas decorations are up. So like, this is your time right now to be working on a Halloween, you know, call out. And if you guys are on Amazon, they like up the deadline to get your stuff into inventory to October now. Oh yeah. It’s nuts. It’s like earlier than ever. let’s, I mean, chances are most people listening here don’t have like a huge Halloween.

03:12
contingent, although I can think of one person in the class who does, but in general, everyone’s probably going to be doing something for Black Friday Cyber Monday though. I am a little, the way I’m going to do it is going to be different this year, but I’m curious how you guys traditionally do it. So I think the first question that anyone has to ask themselves is how long

03:36
are you going to run your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. I think we’ve talked about this in the past. The length continues to increase. People are starting their Black. I feel like Best Buy starts their Black Friday sale November 1st. Like next week? Yeah. It’s like Black Friday deals. Walmart’s already dropped their catalog. I think that’s the first question is, when do you as a business run your Black Friday?

04:04
campaign and then are you trying to beat people, beat people to the launch, right? Where you’re like, well, these are our prices too. Or are you like, know in the past, sometimes you’ve literally just done Black Friday. A long time ago. We typically make it like 12, 14 days at this point. The thing is, and there’s different schools of thought on this. I’ve talked with people who tease the Black Friday sale two weeks before it even happens.

04:33
I am actually not a fan of that at all. That’s like Ezra’s whole strategy. The reason why I don’t like it is because leading up to it, you’re like, I’ll just wait a couple of weeks before I buy anything major. Sure, it feels great and you can brag that you got a huge Black Friday sale, but leading up to it, I think the amount of sales is going to be much, much less. I totally agree with you.

05:01
We tried that one year where we teased it like crazy and we definitely saw an impact on the sales before the Black Friday promotion started. However, recently we’ve figured out some ways to still keep sales afloat during those. This year, I don’t know if you noticed this, but Black Friday is literally the 28th of November. It’s the very end of the month. Whereas, because you know how it’s the fourth week, but the way the weeks line up,

05:31
So it’s putting you, so you have like two and a half, three weeks before, and then you’re 10 days out. It’s like a pretty long time. So two things that we have done in the past that have worked very well, and I’ve seen other retailers do this. It’s not, we didn’t invent this, but one is doing a product launch at the beginning of the month. So we’ve launched new products the last two years, the first week of November. And that’s just a way to,

06:00
you know, get excitement about a new product. it just, part of it, I think it happened initially coincidentally, right? Like the product was in and we’re like, we better launch it. Cause we didn’t want to launch it during Black Friday and then have it get lost in the Black Friday promotional stuff. And that’s actually done fairly well. Obviously when we launched, there’s like launch pricing. And so the, you know, the pricing’s a little bit better.

06:20
And we typically make sure the launch pricing is up to par with whatever the Black Friday discount is. So they’re not gonna get a better deal on Black Friday if they wait. And we’re very clear about like that. We’re like, this launch pricing is the best pricing it is ever. You’re never gonna see it lower than this price. Sometimes we want run like a discounted shipping, you know, with the amount, the number, your purchase total. So whereas shipping’s I think normally like eight bucks, it’s five bucks, you know, things like that. So.

06:48
We found that that works really well. Something that we’re trying this year is a challenge the first week of November. Like you’re challenging them to buy? I actually don’t remember off the top of my head what the topic of this challenge is, but basically it’s like five days where we send very specific emails about a topic, encourage people to participate, go live on Facebook, things like that. And then the products that are related to that challenge would be, you know,

07:15
available to buy at a discounted price. So we’re doing that this year because we don’t have a product to launch and we’ll see how that does. I don’t think that will do well as just as well as a straight up product launch, but I do think it will encourage people to get on the site and buy because in my thinking is like the people who buy the first three weeks of November, it’s because you have to have it, right? Your refrigerator went out, you can’t wait three weeks to buy refrigerator till Black Friday.

07:44
or you have a business trip and you have to buy these pair of pants. So you can’t wait till Black Friday to make a purchase. people still are purchasing before Black Friday. It’s just a matter of like having them having a, you have to give them a reason to buy. It’s funny that you mentioned that. It’s because we’ve been saving these aprons that we’ve had made in the USA from a net that we’re gonna launch right before Black Friday and hopefully sell all of them out.

08:14
We’re also heavy loyalty program this year. That’s my strategy. So we’re going to have two bonus points day. We’re going to have half price rewards. We’re going to have just outright bonuses. I’m going to basically work the loyalty program because I’m actually not a big fan of giving out big sales. The biggest sale that we ever run in our store is 15%. And I don’t want to do the math for you guys on the pot again, but let’s just say that even a small discount like 20%,

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makes a huge difference to your bottom line. If you have 50 % margins, that means you have to sell double just to make up for that 20 % discount. Loyalty program on the other hand, it’s basically like a 1 % discount, but it feels like a lot. We did a whole loyalty program podcast, so you just go back a couple of podcasts, you can listen to that. I can’t remember if we’ve done this, but I’ve seen it done is the free with purchase.

09:14
Yes. Offer. That’s a really good. And you know, it’s funny because I see a lot of companies doing this like during Black Friday. And I get like there’s I see both sides of this part. Part of me is like, why are we doing a free with purchase during Black Friday? Because people are already going to shop. Right. Because of the deal. But then at the end of the day, you’re also competing against every other e-commerce store that’s also offering a discount. So maybe that moves the needle for you. Right. So maybe people it encourages them to shop.

09:42
from you versus someone else because of the free with purchase. And you see, think the people that do this, the most, not the most, but like big time are like makeup companies and like fragrance companies. If you see this, like I know like Clinique and some of those brands will run like you get the free kit, the makeup bag and kit. And it’s like always a bag that’s never available any other time. So if you buy, so like that will sway,

10:07
might sway you from purchasing from someone else because you’re like, oh, but I get this bag and it’s limited edition and it’s not available. So that’s another thing you can do. And I would actually say to try it before Black Friday, right? Like November 1st through 15th, run a free with purchase offer where if people, and you can do free purchase, any purchase, or you can make it a threshold, $50, $100, just depends on your price point. But I think that’s a good strategy too to avoid the discounting because even if you’re free with purchase item is

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$3, that’s going to be less than like, I mean, a 10 % discount, that’s only a $30. Like, you you’re breaking even at $30. So if the product costs you $3 to make, it’s a perceived value of $35, $40. That will move the needle for you for sure. So you stole mine. Basically, I do everything that it takes as an excuse to email somebody. Yeah. Right.

11:03
And then we have all this stuff lying around since we have so many skews that just don’t move as fast. And so we’ll give those out as free product. And we still have a bunch of stuff lying around from when we last told our supplier, Hey, what do you got that’s just lying around that you just want to get rid of for almost nothing. Right. And, usually we’ll just have them shove that into our shipment and give that out as free stuff. Actually, we’ve been giving out these free hankies for, I want to say three years now, and we still haven’t run out.

11:35
I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all and I think it’s a great way to liquidate overstock inventory, things like that. There’s not time to do it this year, but think this for 2025. If you can think of a specific product you can create for the month of November, is absolutely, and it truly is limited edition.

11:54
And the way to get the numbers right on this is like look at your sales the past three or four November’s see how many unit, know, see how many orders you have and then because what you don’t want is like, you you want this exclusive item and you order 50,000 of them, but you only are doing 10,000 orders in November, right? So, you know, order if you did 10,000 orders the last November, then order 10,000 and then you then you can run out and have the scarcity, right? Like you can market this in a bunch of different ways, but creating that like limited edition

12:24
Like the thing that comes to my mind right now is like a tote bag that’s like fall themed or even holiday themed, right? Like a Christmas themed tote bag, something like that that people would want like over the Christmas holiday. And that’s like exclusive. You can only do it now. And you can give out something like a tote bag no matter what you sell. Right. Doesn’t have to be. I mean, you guys could do tote bags. Anything like that. them. That’s actually been on my list of things to add to the portfolio.

12:53
And the only thing that you need to think about if you want to create an actual special product for this, which I think is worth doing, because we’ve seen some really great success with it, is that you want to make sure that it’s something that will flat pack in an order. So everyone knows how their orders ship, right? So what you don’t want to do is create an item. Everyone gets a Yeti mug, right? That all of a sudden increases your shipping by like $6 because your package is a different shape. You got to think about it. That’s the biggest strategic

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move you make there is that you want to make sure that whatever it is can go in your standard packaging without increasing your cost significantly. It might increase it a little bit, right? But that’s okay. But you don’t want something where it’s like, well, now we have to use 10 by whatever boxes and we have to order new boxes because it’s, you know, like you, I’ve seen people do this and it’s a nightmare, right? So just be thinking about that before you jump on that bandwagon.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in eCommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

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just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

14:29
Yeah, fortunately with linens, it’s always pretty light. I’m just curious for the product line of your client, can you turn around something really quick like in two weeks, three weeks? No, absolutely No, can’t because it’s paper, right? Yeah. Okay. The printing cost in the US versus Asia is, I mean, we’re talking landed 80 cents from Asia and $7 in the US. it’s not even, it’s like not. It’s 7X, that’s crazy.

14:58
It’s a huge difference in the quality, in the quality of the paper. You can afford a better quality of paper. You know, there’s like many factors. However, that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t, you know, order something like I was just thinking when I was talking about that for you, like a special tablecloth, right? You could give free tablecloths. Those are flat. They fold. They’re nice. Like we stopped doing tablecloths. It’s actually a huge nightmare. I’ve actually really because people get the wrong size. Well, just think about how many different

15:28
odd-sized tables there are. Yes, but I would say you just do the rectangular table. Round table people are out of luck. Well, there’s round, there’s oval, even rectangles, there’s different shapes. Yes. It has to drape evenly so that the ends come down approximately the same. What about table runner? We do sell table runners already. To me, that would be something I would do like a holiday table runner free with purchase. It’s only available like

15:56
during this time of the year. They can’t get it another time. It’s a special design. I don’t know. Better yet, like a free hanky. To dry their tears after spending the weekend with their relatives. Although your brand doesn’t quite work with this, but I would totally like send an email that’s like, need to dry your tears after a dinner with family? We’ve got what you need. See, that’s something that I would try, but I’m-

16:25
almost positive Jen would not be on board with something. I can see why Jen would. I don’t know if I would try that for your business, but I think it would be really funny. I think it’d be hilarious. But yeah, to the older demographic, maybe not so much. They’re the ones crying the hardest. We raised these people, these idiots. I’m trying to think. The other thing that we like to do, we actually treat Black Friday, Cyber Monday as really a way to get rid of a lot of stuff too. We’ll just bundle.

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things together and we’ll create these bundles that we never offer anytime. It boosts the average order value, but it feels like you’re getting a lot more stuff when in fact we’re just trying to liquidate a lot of things. I think bundling is actually a great strategy. I don’t see people doing it probably as much as they could, but I think if you have products that are easily bundleable, that should be something that I would definitely try. We’re just creating like gift packs of something where you raise the price, but it looks like you’re getting a lot of stuff.

17:24
It’s like those stockings they sell that are already filled with candy and cheap stuffed animals. They’re like, look what you’re getting for $19.99. It works. It works. There’s pre-made Easter baskets that they sell at CVS and Walgreens. The other thing you can do, especially when you were just talking about gift packs with bundles, is redo some of your photography with the holiday theme. Pictures of-

17:51
A lot of this could be done in Photoshop too. I always think if there’s actual photography, it’s a little bit better. Stuff in a stocking, stuff under the tree. If you sell table runners, the table setting is all Christmas. You’ve got the evergreen and the Christmas plates and things like that. I think about our friend Natalie at Totally Dazzled. She sells bling and she sells napkin rings and things like that.

18:18
A lot of her napkin rings are just sparkly, but I would redo my photography. I she’s probably already doing this, this is not advice for her specifically. It’s just like, you know, I would redo my stuff, like on your best sellers, on your things that you know are going to do well. I would reframe some of that in the holiday spirit, because it could be that someone was like, I don’t really need napkin rings, but like, oh, wouldn’t it be nice to have some nice napkin rings when my family comes?

18:42
when you frame it that way, people that maybe were like, I don’t need this product, were like, ooh, but that’s kind of nice. I think you could actually use AI to do this now. Probably. I haven’t tried, actually. But I’ve had uploaded one of our napkin photos to Mid Journey and had them use our napkins to set a beautiful table, for example. And I suppose it’s not a far stretch to say, hey, a beautiful Christmas themed table or something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s.

19:11
The other thing that you could do is, I think we know a of people that sell glassware and barware. I would have pictures of the glassware and barware in holiday-themed drinks. So the martini espressos and the candy cane coming out of the … And probably AI can do most of this for you as well. But just changing some of the photography, especially if you’re on your own site, I think that actually works.

19:41
really well and just gets people thinking about how that product is something that they would now want in their home. I’m just curious, and Andrea, we should have Andrea on at some point, but I’m wondering what the ad strategy is for your clients. I actually dialed down my ads because they get really expensive over the holidays. I’m just curious what you guys do. I actually have no idea. I don’t think we dial down. Now, just for people listening to this, we are going to start dialing down in September.

20:10
Right. October because the season. the election. Oh. So be thinking about this because obviously we don’t we only have these elections every four years. This is not something that isn’t it’s going to happen every single year. But in an election year, the ad costs are just so high that even on really well performing ads, you’re spending double, triple, think sometimes quadruple what you would normally spend. And it sometimes becomes not worth running. So definitely keep an eye on that. And if you’re wondering why all of a sudden your ads are like

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in the toilet are super expensive, that’s probably why. One of my ideas which got shot down like a microsecond was to do political designs on the Hankies. I think they would do really well. They would do very well. Yes, but I wouldn’t be married any longer. No, it’s a choice you need to make. You could do both sides. It’s not like you would just do one side. Yes, know, but the problem is you’re going to anger

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you’re going to anger the other side. It doesn’t matter if you saw for that. In fact, just total side note. My street is very diverse. We’ve got signs for everybody in the yards, except my house is the only house without a sign. Part of me is like, what sign could I put in my yard that just confuses everybody other than a solar panel advertisement? We had a contractor at my house yesterday giving us an estimate for something.

21:39
We were going back and forth. He’s like, I’m just impressed with your silent sign political war on the street. And I was like, right. It’s like and they keep adding signs, right? Like, so every week there’s like a new sign in someone’s yard. Like they’ve gotten a bigger flag or a bigger sign or they’ve added additional signs. So I actually think if you are willing to take that risk, my brother’s done well on some of that stuff where he’s capitalized producing products on both both sides. Right. Like not taking a side, just offering it for.

22:08
both demographics. I think if you have a brand that can withstand that, I would try it for sure. You don’t have a brand that can withstand that and you don’t have a marriage that can withstand don’t know. Yeah, exactly. We actually have a friend from ECF. runs a factory. That’s his bread and butter. He had a Trump something, Bobblehead. I can’t remember. His whole brand is funny. Yeah. Right? Funny things.

22:35
And like, think he’s made millions of dollars off that one Trump thing that he sold. So, yeah, so I think if if you are OK with it personally and you think your brand can withstand, know, you’re going to get some backlash from either side. But I feel like two people are so heated about everything right now that like the sign was hilarious to me because it’s like they’re just like they’re not. And the funny thing that cracks me about all of it is like all the neighbors are friends and hang out.

23:04
Right. But it’s like the yard is like the battleground. then like if they walk their dogs together and stuff, I think people are willing to put a sign in their yard. Right. Like I can’t remember a lot of signs in the yard when I was growing up, you know, and stuff like that. I’m a little anti-sign because of vandalism. I’m not I’m not saying to sell so so political signs, but like people are buying political paraphernalia in a way that I don’t feel like.

23:31
I see more people and part of it is I live in Florida and we have a lot of crazy people here. like I probably every day that I’m out of my house, I see at least one person wearing a t-shirt or has a bumper sticker on their car or something with a political leaning on it. Every usually more than twice it more than once a day. But for sure, once a day, I see it. To be honest with you, I rarely see any of that stuff here in California. Well, because we know how everyone votes there.

24:00
Well, know everyone boats in Florida too, right? No, we don’t. We’re usually 50. It’s usually 50-50. Is that right? It comes down to a couple hanging sheds. That’s true. But yeah, think more than ever, people want to wear the hat or the t-shirt, have a koozie with something on it. So if you’re in that space and that’s something that you feel comfortable doing, I would try it. Why not? What’s the worst thing that can happen? You lose all your friends?

24:29
Maybe I can just do this under a different domain. Politicallinens.com. could be hornetlinens.com. Yellowjacketlinens.com. Killer bee linens.

24:45
It’s Queen Bee linens. Queen Bee. And then Beyonce will come after you for the trademark. Okay, back on Black Friday. Yes. But listen, we gave people great ideas. They can now market all of their merch. One thing that we did last year during Black Friday, which I think we talked about on the podcast, but we’re trying again, is we are doing a wait list.

25:09
which I said earlier, I didn’t like doing it as much because I think it does like, you’ve got to hype up the wait list to get people on it. So then when you’re hyping up the wait list, people are like, well, wait, there’s a wait list. Am I going to make a purchase? What I found that people are still purchasing and I don’t unfortunately have data of like not doing a wait list. So I don’t know like, well, what would it be without the wait? You know what I mean? I don’t have anything to compare it.

25:37
but this year we’re giving an absolute ridiculous discount for the first day of the wait list. Really? Okay. Insane. The business has the margins to support it, so that’s one thing. Obviously, we’ve talked about this on previous episodes, but last year the wait list did so well, and we had a high discount last year. We’re actually increasing it by 5 % this year that we feel like it just is the gangbusters move.

26:06
And people still, it’s weird to me, like we’ll send a waitlist email out and the email will still make like five grand. Sure. Yeah, no, that always happens. So actually walk me through this. How early do you send out the waitlist? So I actually like to be at least three weeks pre-launch day. in the waitlist, literally it’s a one day of that pricing. You don’t get it for the rest of Black Friday, right? So I think this year we started, we’re starting Black Friday like

26:32
the Thursday before Thanksgiving, so like a week before Thanksgiving. OK. Yeah. So because I think it’s either the Wednesday or Thursday because it runs like 11. goes from like that Wednesday or Thursday to the Saturday after Thanksgiving. That’s a crazy long sale. It is. We talked about that in the beginning, like how many days? So so the first day. the waitlist is really simple. Like the very first email is, hey, Black Friday is coming. We all know this, you know, we’re going to do something we’ve never done before.

27:02
Which is true because each year we up it. So we haven’t done it before. We have a one day discount. It’s going to be insane. We don’t tell people. Right. And like I want you to be on the list because I’m going to email you at 6 a.m. on this day. Like I tell them the date that it’s going to happen. Like I give them all the details. And then, you know, this is a little difficult to set up. We do it like a click to tag. We don’t make people opt in again from email because they’re already on the email. So we do like a click to tag set up, which you can do in Klaviyo. It’s not.

27:31
simplest thing but it’s doable and that’s email number one. Email number two is excluding anyone who’s already signed up for the wait list because to me I want to just… They’re on the list, it’s fine. Once again, I give a little more information. I don’t tell them the discount but I let them know this is 24 hours, stuff will sell out, all that’s true. We have a free gift with purchase this day only.

27:58
The free gift with purchase that day only is literally something that we have to get rid of. It’s like, have 10,000 of these, we do not need them in the warehouse. That’s five to six days after that first email. Then I will resend an email to unopens, either from depending on the performance from either the first or second email. There’s just a recent basically same email, but different subject line.

28:22
testing out and then the final email goes out usually the day before the sale or like two days. It’s under 48 hours before the sale and that is a text only email that says, hey Tony, you’re not on the list. And then the email is literally two sentences, hey, tomorrow I’m giving you 35 % off. I literally tell them, tomorrow is 35 % off. You’re not on the list and you’re not gonna get the coupon. All you need to do for me to email you this coupon is click here.

28:52
Done. That email still makes money, which is crazy to me. Although part of it is probably like a residual from the next day. It’s taking credit for sales on the coupon day. Sure. That email does pretty well, as far as getting signups because it feels like a personal email. It’s addressed to them. It’s two sentences and I’m just like, hey, you’re going to miss out on this and we’re not doing it again. All things that are true. Then the next day, 6 a.m., that email goes out.

29:22
with, you know, here’s your- of people buy, I’m sure. Yes, crazy number of people buy. And what we do is like, so Black Friday starts that day and let’s just say our Black Friday discount is 20%, right? That’s the across the board discount. And these people are getting an additional 10%. So they get a coupon for 10 % off the 20, right? So the math doesn’t exactly work out to whatever, you know, the math doesn’t work out to that because of the percentages off, but-

29:51
Then that day we sent an email at 6 a.m. 2 p.m. to unopens like, just a reminder, this is your coupon. You haven’t used it yet. Obviously, it doesn’t go to people who purchased that day. Then the final, this is it. Tomorrow the price is, this coupon is not good. You haven’t used yours. What are you doing? Kind of thing. That is usually one of our highest days sales of the year. Yeah. What’s funny about all this stuff and

30:19
when people talk about Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategies, it is almost impossible to split test something like this, right? Yeah. Like you’ll never know whether one strategy that you did work better. The only thing you can look at is maybe the prior year. Yes. However, I have a little split test strategy for you. Oh yeah. Let’s hear it. So that’s your first day. You blow it out of the water.

30:44
Then the next day, are very excited that weekend. So if you start the weekend before Thanksgiving, people buy all weekend. But then you start to fade, right? And I think it’s for a couple of reasons. Your people that were gonna buy have bought, because they’re worried about inventory running out, things like that. Also, Monday is like, okay, now all the kids are out of school usually, because most kids get a full week of spring break. People are traveling, right? This is your ski vacation, this is your trip to see the family. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, before Thanksgiving,

31:13
tend to not be amazing because people are busy like, know, oh great, Aunt so-and-so’s coming, we don’t have the space, buy an air mattress. Like if they’re buying stuff, it’s like stuff on Amazon that can be delivered that day. So I was like, okay, what can we do to boost these days? So the way I split test and how I figured out what moves the needle for these people is that I sent, I have talked about this email before and I only send it like three or four times a year depending on what’s going on, but it’s basically like, hey,

31:43
you know, basically what coupon code are you gonna get? And I’m like, free shipping, 10 coupons available, $10 off your order, five coupons available, $5 off your order, 25 coupons available, buy one, get one free, any item in the store, 30 coupons available. And I’m basically like, try the coupons until they work for you. So first of all, that email gets a ton of engagement, because they’re clicking over, trying all the coupons, because the coupons actually do have a limit on them.

32:11
Oh, I see. You put you set limits and you just send out, these there’s only like, like hate. The first 10 people get free shipping. The you know, we have 25 coupons to give you five dollars off your order. You know, we’ve got 10 coupons to give you a buy one, get one free. And so we send that out and that does really, really well. And I’ve tried it with a couple groups of people. So I’ve tried it, sending it to basically everyone who hasn’t purchased yet during Black Friday.

32:39
that obviously performs the best. However, the best group of like that performs, I mean, in general, it performs best because it’s going to the most people. But if you wanna look at like segments of people that love it the most, it’s the people who have made one purchase in the past, but haven’t purchased in like six months. So it’s a good way to get people kind of off the fence for like they bought a product, they haven’t come back six months. We’re like a nine month, you know, sales cycle, but.

33:08
People tend to buy during the sales. So that performs exceptionally well with that group of people. The other group of people that it performs well with that compared to other emails sent to the same group is never purchased. So we’ve sent lots of different emails of people that have never purchased in the past, but this email gets people to move. like that one. I like that one. Where’s the split test part of it though? Like how can you…

33:35
So what I can do, and this is manual, right? This isn’t the most efficient thing to do. So within the first hour, I go in and see how many coupon codes are left, right? And I can see that like, I thought BOGO would be a huge mover, right? It’s not, people don’t use the BOGO coupon. Like the free shipping obviously works the best. And I try to limit the codes so people know like they’ve got to order that minute.

34:03
the $5 off your order tends to work better than the 10 % coupon. So what’s that showing me is basically like, okay, this discount moves people more than this discount because like if I say there’s 10 codes, there’s probably a little bit more than that. And so then I can see like what codes are still like lingering and what codes are not. And so then I know like if I just wanna send a blanket email, like, hey, so sometimes during a big sale, we’ll send an email that’s like, hey, in addition to your 20 % off,

34:33
you can do one BOGO, right? Like you get a BOGO. So, and what I, or you can do an additional $5 off or you can, you know, triple your points or, whatever it is. But so doing that email allows me to see like what people jump on the most and what is uninteresting to people. And what I found so far is that BOGO actually doesn’t move the needle at all, which to me is crazy because like our products like are way more expensive than $5. than one of the same? I mean, in your case.

35:01
Well, yeah, because curriculum, most people have multiple kids and we sell a lot of curriculum. So it’s like, yeah, the chances of you needing two pieces of curriculum because you have four kids is really high. For our store, the $5 off coupons are mainly our cheapie customers, which we don’t care about. And our bigger customers tend to use the percentage off coupons. So it’s all just kind of skewed because $5 as a percentage of a large order is much less than like a 10%. Right. You have to spend.

35:31
Yeah. So yeah. But I like the idea of having a limited, creates scarcity, scarcity. like that. Yes. And you know, I’m like watching it on the back end. And the other thing that I will do, so hopefully no customers are listening, is like the worst coupon. Like if that sells out, the 5%, because we do even like 5 % off. Like if that gets used up, I just increase it. I’m like, if someone’s trying the codes, I’ll give it another 15 or 20 codes.

35:58
I’m not increasing it to unlimited for sure. It’s always less than the amount of people that are going to buy, but we will up it a little bit. The other thing I’ll do is I’ll resend that email to people who opened, clicked, and didn’t buy and be like, more codes added. It’s very possible that they wanted the 10 % off, clicked over, couldn’t get it, and then gave up. If I send it at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday, I’ll resend it at

36:27
6 p.m. on a Wednesday to people who open clicked and didn’t make a purchase. Yeah. So one thing we do every year that works well to keep up the sales is we do flash sales every day. So we email everyone for all the way actually up until the deadline for shipping. Yeah. This year it’s probably gonna be a little different. So if it’s on the 28th, then yeah, that’ll take you all the way up to just yeah, it still works for us this year to do it that way. And now we have infinite more

36:57
bullets, so to speak, because of the loyalty program and all the other crazy things that I’m going to think up to just anytime you send an email or a text, it’s going to make money. Yeah. Is the point here. And then I usually dial down the ads. That’s why I was curious. And especially with the election year, I’m definitely dialing down Facebook ads. Google ads probably won’t be affected. Yeah. Just guessing as much since their search intent. Yeah. So another idea for a live.

37:25
or not a live for an email that you can send is to email people that you’re gonna go live. most people are like, wait, don’t want, one, I don’t wanna go live, two, like don’t have anything to talk about. All those things are false. You can go live, it’s not that hard. And also two, you do have things to talk about. If your products are super uninteresting, then I would go live from the warehouse. I would talk about the packing, the shipping, how many orders, because that does a couple things. One,

37:53
It gives, if people like don’t know anything about your company and then you’re in the warehouse and they’re seeing like actual physical packages going out, that’s sort of that social proof. Like, hey, we’re not gonna rip you off. Like we’re an actual real company that has a shipping and logistics team. If you don’t, if you have a 3PL and you don’t have your own warehouse, do like a, hey, these are like.

38:13
This is, you talk about those bundles, right? Like here, look at this bundle pack. You’re gonna get this and you’re gonna get this and you’re gonna get this. And here’s this gift basket that we made with the bundles and doesn’t this look great? And wouldn’t you love to put this under your Christmas tree? You could talk about like, I think about, you know, our friend Dana Michelle that they used to do, I don’t know if they still do the cooking ware and stuff like that, but you know, they’ve done a lot of videos where they do drink recipes and stuff like that. Like I would do a drink recipe, make sure you have your glasses in the front, right? Or your stirrer or your whatever it is, your shaker.

38:41
I know Natalie was these. Yeah, they work. Yeah. So they do two things. They do three things. One, an excuse to send an email. Two, anytime you send an email, people spend money. Three, it legitimizes your business. So for people who don’t know you, haven’t heard of you. And the other thing is, what you can do is you can actually, if you go live on Facebook, you can run ads to that live, right? Which they tend to perform fairly, they’re a little bit cheaper.

39:08
Um, so it just, cause it’s getting natural engagement right first, and then you can, uh, you know, use that video in an ad. So I think if you are willing to put yourself on camera, that, uh, that is something that I highly recommend doing. I can just imagine my customers. Oh wait. So the person who runs Bumblebee linens is an eight middle-aged Asian dude. Cause Jen’s not going live. That’s when you get on the disguise.

39:37
A little prosthetic and some wigs, you’re good. No, but I think for Bumblebee, do think, I don’t know, I feel like you need to have a person, at least the back of their head, but I would just show the embroidery machine embroidering something that’s holiday I know. You know I mean? talked about this in the past, but I think ideally you have someone just show off the products. Maybe Jackie would just… If I butter her up enough, maybe she can do this.

40:05
See, ideally, you host it on your own site so they can buy it right away. So maybe it’d be like a YouTube live or something. then again, if you have a Facebook page with a lot of people, and I think we have like maybe 15, 20,000 on there, you might be more likely to attract people. it’s, I don’t think you can embed a, can you embed a Facebook video on? I think you can do both actually. With StreamYard, I think you can do both.

40:32
That’s what I was wondering. broadcast on Facebook and then you also embed it on your site. Yeah, but totally. I love that idea. I mean, this is why TikTok works so well, right? Yeah. Because people see an actual business orders being fulfilled and and a tour of the warehouse, really. And I think the other thing you can set up is you can set up like a many chat flow, right? Where as you’re talking about it, you can get people to comment on whatever it is. comments sold or?

41:00
No, they comment like, if you want to learn more about this specific product, comment, know, hanky or whatever. Oh, yes, I see what you’re saying. Then you send them something that leads them to the listing, gives them a coupon, gives them the whatever extra points, whatever it is, right? You incorporate that as well. I would love to try this. The other issue is we’re usually so

41:28
with orders during this time too. And I’m more useless than Jen is in actual operations. yeah, yeah, but good ideas. But anyways, the moral of this episode is you guys got to start planning your Black Friday, Cyber Monday now, because everything’s getting pushed up earlier and you don’t want to be caught up.

41:55
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now giving large, costly discounts is generally not the way to go on Black Friday, so follow the strategies in this episode to make more profit. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 555. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.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. And remember, never buy a BMW.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, Tony and I are going to talk about the best way to get repeat business for your online store and give out discounts without actually giving out discounts. But before I begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death.

00:29
Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now on to the show.

00:52
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today we are gonna talk about loyalty programs. And the reason why it’s top of mind for me is because I completely rewrote the loyalty program for Bumblebee Linens this past week. And I’m really into it right now. And Tony does a lot with loyalty programs. So I think it’d be an interesting episode, especially since Black Friday is kind of around the corner now too. Yeah. First of all, I…

01:19
I feel like you’re downplaying a little bit that you just wrote this in a week. Now, obviously, you are an engineer by trade. You have written many other code for your store and for WordPress and all that stuff. This is something that you have experience in, but I think it’s impressive that you built this in just about a week’s time. I was telling you this before we started recording. ChatGPT coded like 70 % of it.

01:46
Yes, but you had to have the knowledge to get Chat Cheapie Tea to do the right thing. Yeah, the whole time I was thinking to myself, man, almost anyone can create an application like this now with as long as you can read code and maybe there’s a big asterisk next to that. Yeah, there is. I was just telling Tony this just now. The last piece, which I hadn’t implemented until the very end, was sending all the information from my loyalty program to Klaviyo.

02:14
And I was like, great, now I need to read all the Clavio docs and everything to figure out how to send this information. But I just went up to ChatGBT and said, hey, these are all the fields of my database that I need to send over Clavio per customer. Can you write the Clavio code for me? And it did. And it actually worked with very little modifications. Yeah. Which I thought was just amazing. I feel like with ChatGBT, I can literally write almost anything pretty quickly.

02:43
Yes, not to derail the topic because we are talking about loyalty programs today. But a lesson, I think, to be learned in this for anyone, even if you don’t know code, is thinking about how AI, chat GPT, whatever tool you’re using can make you more efficient and productive. Like if you wrote programs for a living, right, like you were a developer and you just worked like freelancing, right, like you were on Upwork. Think about how many more clients you could take, how much more money you could make.

03:13
using this. Same thing like for me, I write emails for people, right? I write copy. How much more can I do when chat GPT is feeding me the ideas? I never use chat GPT word for word, but if I’m like stuck and things like that, like it shaves a lot of time off the amount of work that you have to do. So think about whatever business or industry you’re in, how you can use it to make you more productive or just more efficient, right? So you have more time back. Yeah, but we’re not

03:42
going to talk about coding or AI. That’s probably a topic in another episode. Let’s just talk about loyalty programs. So most of you guys probably don’t know took you so long? What took you so long? I actually had a loyalty program for a long time. I did. It was actually implemented on many chat. Hold on. Was it a loyalty program for frequent brides or heavy criers? Which one? Divorce again? Join our loyalty That was my automated email. Hey, you still married?

04:11
Yeah, it’s not. And you plan on getting married again. Husband number seven coming along. Anyway, you had it on many chat. I did not know that. did because it was a chat bot and it was all automated and everything. And the only reason that I put it on there is because that I didn’t want to write all the code involved in a regular thing. So I just had many chats store all the loyalty points, customer profiles and everything. And it was completely automated. It was great. Yeah. But it you know,

04:41
Over the years, Facebook changes, they nerf their messenger and everything. So it’s actually been broken for the last, I don’t know, year and a half, maybe two years. So I was like, okay, I got to do this again, but this time I’m going do it right. I’m going to code it on my own site. But let’s talk about the benefits. Back when my old loyalty, this new one’s way better by the way, but back in my old one, what I liked was I could give out reward points that

05:11
felt like money to people and they would buy because of these points when in fact it didn’t cost me that much money at all. That’s the beauty of it I think. Aside from the loyalty part. Aside from getting people to come back and make a purchase. Yes. I think that’s the biggest. We talk a lot about how do you run a business where you’re not offering discounts and sales all the time. Yes. In loyalty program, loyalty program and free with purchase to me are the two

05:40
like the two number ones, right? So either finding that item that costs you 50 cents to a dollar to $2 that has a perceived value of 29, $30 or the loyalty programs. Those two things are to me the best way to drive purchases without discounting. And the thing about the rewards points is to me they feel a lot like the gift card game, right? Yes.

06:05
where how many times do people buy gift cards and lose them, forget about them, don’t use them, move, they don’t live by whatever store or restaurant that was. Same thing with rewards points. How often do people redeem them? So even though they’re trying to earn them, the redemption rate is never, you’re never getting 100 % redemption rate on the points.

06:30
That is correct. And I think a good redemption rate is something like 60 or 70 % based on what I was on my research. So yeah, there’s a lot of unused points. I think the other big benefit is it gives you an excuse to email a lot more without really discounting. So just to give some perspective, I think the typical rewards program out of the box gives 1 % of the purchase back in dollars.

07:00
Okay. I think if your margins are higher, it can be upwards of 10%, but most people fall under, I’d say, the 3 % range. Yes. Before we go any further, I just want to talk about the cost of this as a business owner, because this is one of the main reasons why you coded it yourself. What I don’t want to do is get everybody hyped up, and then they’re to go look at the app, and they’re going to be like, crap, this is expensive.

07:29
Just on the net, we’ll just get the negatives out of the way. OK, sure. If you’re on Shopify, BigCommerce, you’re going to have to use a plugin to do this unless you have the ability to code something. So chances are 95 % of you guys are going to need to use a plugin. The most popular one, I think, out there is smile.io. We’re not affiliated with them or in any way.

07:51
Obviously, Steve built his own. Yeah, I’m not. When Steve launches his, we will definitely be offering you guys a nice discount code for the first month. But anyway, the base plan of Smile.O is $49 a month. Now, I will tell you, as someone who uses Smile.io has used it for a long time, it worth every penny of that $49 a month. We make so much more than that, you know, from just the loyalty program, getting people to buy. The next level is

08:21
$200 a month. So that’s expensive, right? If you’re just getting started, $200 a month is a lot of money if you’re not generating a ton of revenue. And then they have the plus plan, which is $1,000 a month. And I would say, cause we all, also know that a lot of people’s personalities is like they go all in right with the plus plan. They’re like, I want every feature because with each level too, you get more features and the features are cool, right? Like let’s, let’s, let’s admit that like the stuff that you can do it, that’s pretty cool.

08:48
So that thousand dollar a month plan, while very, very expensive, has a lot of cool things that you can do with it. Please don’t start with that plan, right? If you’re just getting started, because in order to like maximize the worth of that thousand dollars, you have to be really focused on getting people excited about your program and talking to them and emailing them on a regular basis. So just so you guys know like the price points of what we’re talking about, you know, 50 to $200 a month is probably where you’re gonna be starting.

09:17
to get this implemented in your business. So what’s ironic about all this is I was actually willing to pay $50 a month. Yeah, because $50 a month seems okay to me. That would have stopped me from coding this up myself. Yeah. But then they kind of nickel and dime you with the features. Yes. And all the cool stuff is minimum 200 bucks, I would say. Yeah, 200 bucks is where you start. The really cool stuff is 1,000. I was like, well, that’s where I draw the line. I’m doing this.

09:46
Well, $1,000 a month, you have to be making $200,000 $300,000 a month in your business to me to accept that price point, which there are a lot of people out there making that. We can talk about attribution and the metrics you look at, but I actually spent a lot of time coding up all these graphs and everything just to make sure that this is worth my time, ironically. You spent time coding to make sure it was worth coding.

10:14
I love it. But well, let’s just talk about the benefits first. Yeah. That you see. I think the primary benefit obviously is making more money and making sure that people continue to shop. But just digging deeper into that, I think that the biggest reason for me to do it is for me to be able to make more money off of my Klaviyo. Yes. It just gives a lot more lifetime value from your email subscribers because it just gives you more excuses to email.

10:45
Yeah, I totally agree. we we email our people a lot, like in general, but we also talk to them all the time about their rewards because we want them, obviously, to take all those actions to, you know, shop again at the store. Yeah. So let’s just give the audience an idea of some of the things that you run on your emails to get people to redeem loyalty points or accrue loyalty points.

11:15
Yeah, before we do that, can we real quick, I’ll talk about how people get points. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Because yeah. So and and you when you sign up with any of the programs, but like I’ll just use smile because that’s what we’re using. You know, you set up what you want to award people for what they do. So for us, and this is obviously just this one business. So you have to do what works in financially works for your business. So you get three points for every one dollar you spent. So that’s our that’s our point award.

11:42
If you write a product review, you get 250 points, because we want product reviews. So we had to make that really, really valuable. If you share a product or anything on Facebook, that’s 50 points. When it’s your birthday, so we want you to give us your birthday, obviously, so we have more information about you, which we will use an email, right? So all of this is also tied to email, right? Celebrate a birthday, 500 points. So give us your birthday, we’ll give you 500 points. Just for signing up, we give you 200 points off the bat.

12:11
and then obviously Instagram, like on Facebook. So we award points based on the actions people take. And then once we get them in, so once they sign up, the nice thing about these programs is the points are added automatically. So you don’t have to do anything as the business owner to add points to people’s account. So if they make a purchase, the program does that automatically, they share, program does it automatically. And what’s really great is if you’re on Klaviyo,

12:40
all of this integrates with Clavio. So there’s actually basically a code you drop into your emails that will show people how many points they have. This is a huge motivator. The one thing that I do though, and this is just a little email tip for you guys, is that I separate people from having points and not having points. Because if they don’t have points, it actually shows up kind of funny. It’s like you have null or you know. Yeah.

13:08
And it’s like, that’s not really encouraging for people. So those people actually get a different worded email where there’s a little paragraph about how they can get points. And usually these are people who have never shopped before, right? They’re just on the list, but they’re not customers. Cause once you shop, you have points basically. Or they haven’t signed up for the program. So just when you’re sending emails out and you’ve implemented this, remember that there are people that are on your list that don’t have points and you can create a segment of those people.

13:33
But anyone that does have points, wanna make sure at the top, we usually put it at the very top of the email right under the header of the brand is yippee, congratulations, woohoo, you have X amount of points in your account. So those go in a lot of emails just about, not about the points program at all, right? Because when you think about it as a shopper, right, and you get an email from a brand and they’re having their Black Friday sale or they’re offering a new product or something like that and you’re like, oh wait, I’ve got enough points to get this like,

14:02
for $5 off or something like that. So a really nice feature, I think all of the main tools do this for you, but basically you can integrate this in any email that you send where you show them their point total. Highly recommend doing that.

14:17
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

14:46
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

14:57
So one of my other motivators for writing my own was because we’re going to be doing a lot of short form video for Bumblebee. And I have a lack of user generated content right now. So I specifically made hooks in my program to allow people to upload video for an insane number of points or just upload a photo of them holding the product for a lot of points and just testimonials in general.

15:22
Product reviews, I don’t feel like I need to incentivize them. We get product reviews like every day on their own. Maybe I’ll change my mind on that and incentivize them for that. But in general, just for user-generated content, which is I think very important these days for any branded e-commerce store, you can use your loyalty program for that as well. It’s actually a great idea. We don’t use the loyalty program for user-generated content. We actually run like a giveaway every month.

15:52
but I actually really like the idea of, I might see if we can change that for us because I like the idea of just getting points no matter what. It’s not like a crap shoot if you win or not. For our customers, once you become a customer, you’re going to get in that post-purchase flow, which I’m sure most of you guys have already set up. About two to three weeks into the flow, because they’re getting confirmation orders shipped, orders delivered.

16:19
We send some order specific, like if you ordered certain products, because we sell curriculum, so like how to use the curriculum type stuff. We let people know about the joy, we call it joy points. We let people know about the rewards program. So, you know, I think it’s probably about a two week period. So they, at this point, they’ve already received the product. Hopefully they’re thrilled. And then we’re like, hey, you probably didn’t know this, but you can earn rewards on your purchases. And we basically outline the entire program to them.

16:47
Now, if they’re already a member, if they’re already a previous customer, they’re going to get a slightly different email reminding them that they’ve earned the points, right? So new customers are getting the, you might not know, but you can just share us on Facebook. And look, you’re going to get this point. We don’t have your birthday yet. Give us your information. so that’s the first time people are introduced to the, unless they find it on the website, that’s the first time they’re introduced to it via email. Yeah.

17:16
Then for ours, which hasn’t officially launched yet, we’re to collect anniversaries because we’re in the wedding industry to provide some amount of points because the second anniversary item just happens to be a cotton anniversary. Oh, is it? The two-year anniversary is cotton? Yes, happens to be cotton. It works out. What’s the polyester anniversary? Is that six months? We don’t sell anything polyester.

17:45
Darn it, darn it. That’s the first time and that just gets the nice thing about most of this is that it’s literally in your flows. You’re going to write that email one time and then you’re never going to, honestly, you’re probably never going to touch that. I think I wrote that email three years ago. I’m trying to see if I can see when I wrote it. I don’t think I’ve touched that emails in three years. It probably needs an update actually now that I’m saying this. Just in case you guys are a little skeptical on

18:15
just loyalty programs in general, which I was, admittedly. Until my wife pointed out to me, hey, do you realize that we only stay in Marriott hotels? Do you realize that we only fly certain airlines? And do you realize that you only go to Starbird, which is this chicken place right down the street, because they have a loyalty program? And I was like, yeah, you’re right. Even for stupid stuff like food, I’m much more tempted to go someplace because I gather points and I can get something for it.

18:44
I just looked, I’m literally getting 1 % back at this chicken place. Yes, it’s not a financial game changer for you. It’s not a financial game changer, but psychologically for some reason I’m drawn to it. Even in our courses that we run, we give out points for just making progress and people really want those points. I get emails at least once a week about, for some reason I didn’t get my points updated in the last office hours, can you update them?

19:14
Yeah. And it’s crazy. Yeah. So I just I’m pulling the stats right now so you guys can see. When we send that email out about two weeks post purchase, you know, people are are most likely not going to buy right then from us. Right. So this is not like a huge money making email. However, the open rate’s 50 percent. The click rate’s almost four percent. And it does generate a very small amount of revenue.

19:41
For the people that are new and don’t even know about, that’s for the people that have used the program before. For the people that have not used the program and they’re getting introduced to it, the click rate is almost 10%. So for deliverability and just email health overall, these emails are great for just getting people. And think about it, these are people that are like now two weeks post-purchased, right? They have the product, they’re probably using it, they’ve forgotten about you at this point.

20:09
So like just that little nudge, that little reminder, staying in their inbox and not their promotion box, right? Like all those things matter. So if you don’t have this in your post purchase, I would definitely set it up because it is a very engaging email. And obviously you want to separate it by zero points and plus one, you know, and that way you’re sending a different message to people. So I spent some time writing this report for me, but I’m just curious if Smile has it already.

20:39
Does it tell you what your conversion rate, how it increased over time? Or the revenue per recipient? I know it tells you the total value of the loyalty redemptions. But I’m curious what metrics they use to get you really excited to make sure it’s worth $1,000 or $200 or whatever you’re paying them. I’m pulling it up right now. I don’t ever spend any time in the Smile Dashboard.

21:08
That might take me a minute to navigate it around. That’s okay. But the other thing that’s great is, and the only reason why I brought Black Friday up is because Black Friday is coming around and most people tend to discount insane amounts. in an episode that I recorded a long time ago, I think with you actually, where we talked about the true value of a discount is much more than you think it is. And usually for just something,

21:35
Even that’s like something that’s like a 20 % discount means you have to make double the sales just to even break even in a lot of cases. So instead of running a killer sale, it might make more sense to run a killer points promotion. Yes. Okay. I think I have a little bit of data for you. Okay, cool. And we just ran a killer points promotion so I can talk about that in a second. Okay. So last 30 days, the points earned for the, and this is a seven figure store. So just so you guys have some reference.

22:05
Um, previous 30 days, the points earned 2.7 million points earned. Um, yeah. Redemption rate is 7.3%. Wow. That’s really low. Yes, really low. But if you also think about the fact that they earned a lot of points last month, let me look for a further month. Cause like that was a lot of points. So, you know, could be that if you go further back, you know, people aren’t going to buy right, right again, if they earn those same points.

22:32
So it looks like the average is about 9.5 % redemption rate. So our redemption rate is for every 100 points, you get a dollar. Every 100 points you get a dollar, okay, right. Yeah, so that’s the redemption. So 500 points, $5. And how Smile does is basically like a gift card. So one more email to put in a flow, and this is actually a separate flow.

22:59
that we have running, it’s just the rewards flow. It’s like what we’ve named it is that, and I stole this from Chubby, so I cannot take any credit for this. The swimwear, the short, the men’s brand. When people hit 500 points because that’s $5, right? Like to me, that’s a significant amount of money for our customers, like $5 coupon. They get an email. So automatically triggered. So you set up in Klaviyo a trigger when someone’s points balance equals 500, trigger this flow.

23:28
So the flow is basically like, it’s literally like fireworks and like confetti and streamers. And it’s like, wow, you’ve earned, you’re at 500 points. Like you’ve climbed Mount Everest basically is what we’re the vibe we’re going for. Um, and so that, and then we’re like, what can you buy? know, um, it’s like Chuck E cheese. What, what, what pin from China that doesn’t work? Will you buy?

23:53
But we know that $5 is like a threshold that moves people and that people earn, you know, there’s a significant enough amount of people who have 500 points to where like we’re not sending the email to one person a month.

24:06
But that is, and it’s funny, cause when I got that email from Chubby’s, what did I do? I immediately went to Chubby’s and I bought a bathing suit for one of my kids or something. don’t remember, but like I immediately spent my points, right? It’s like when you’re on the Chick-fil-A app, I know you guys don’t have as many Chick-fil-As as we do, but you’re like, I get a free chicken sandwich. Like we’re going to Chick-fil-A today. I’m also going to spend $57 on food for everybody else, but I got a free sandwich.

24:32
But yeah, so set up that flow too, because that is one, once again, automated. And then we send, think two more, if they don’t make a purchase, we send, I think two more, I’m gonna check right now, two more emails that basically remind people to make a purchase. I think in general, you want people redeeming stuff. And I think you’re supposed to email any time that they’ve made any sort of reward. And I think five bucks just happens to be your lowest one, right? Yeah, yeah. On your thing.

25:02
The other thing that I was that I’m implementing with mine is VIP tiers So I know that just statistics say that if you can get someone to buy something twice Make it purchase twice then they’re probably gonna be a long-term customer or the chances are really I can’t remember the exact percentages so I was actually gonna create a Tier where they just make two purchases and they instantly get 2x the reward points and then to get the height to the next tier It’s it’s a lot more

25:31
Based on the data, I have to still mine the data to set this up. But that prevents people from just creating arbitrary new accounts and getting points right away as well. Yeah. So I just pulled up the flow. So the first one is that celebratory, you know, good for you. Once again, 70 % open rate, 11 % click through rate. So 0.6 % order rate. Right. So we’re not terrible. Right. People are converting on that. Then we give them seven days.

26:01
And we remind them that we do that. We do a promotion where it’s like you, if you share it, you get, you share a coup, if you share it with your friend, they get a $5 coupon and you get a $5 coupon. That one, that one makes more money, like per person, but like doesn’t have as great of an engagement. Still 55 % open rate and almost a 2 % click through rate. So it’s not, it’s not doing poorly by any stretch. And then if people still haven’t taken action, but they have like,

26:30
over those 500 point, so they’re still at that 500 plus balance. The title of the email is, have you checked your balance lately? I think that’s a great title, right? Like not to pat myself on the back, but I think it’s really good. Once again, 60 % open rate, 10 % click through rate, right? So that’s that sequence when people plus the 500 of reminding them. Cause you do want people to redeem their rewards because that means they’re making it. I mean, the reality is not everyone does.

26:58
but you do want to get them in for that second purchase. Because chances are like if they’ve spent 500, if they have 500 points, they’ve probably ordered more than once. So actually just talking through this out loud, we should probably lower it to like, we should probably have some sort of flow when they’ve hit like a hundred points because that means they’ve made probably just one purchase, right? As opposed to 500. Because 500, you’ve probably had two purchases. Unless you like signed up and shared with a friend, then you could hit 500 pretty quickly.

27:27
So on mine, my minimum is 100 points for $1. And I think I’m not going to allow people to redeem that until their second order. I haven’t decided yet. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do. But the idea You have to let them redeem it on their second order, though. No, no, Redeem it on their second OK. OK, yeah. Not their first order. Gotcha. Because I’m giving $200 off the bat, and that’s worth $2. Maybe I would let them. I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. I don’t have any data. That’s the problem. And you have data.

27:56
Do you have an idea of what people redeem? I don’t think I can, probably I don’t know where to find it. So. And right now you’re judging like the. Oh, I do. I do have it. So you do have it. OK. Yeah. Yeah. So the top way customers redeem is five dollar off. Then it’s ten dollars off is the next one. And those are actually fairly close together. So looks like people are a lot of people are waiting to get that ten dollar.

28:24
And then the next one, which is a third of the other two, is we give you a free Bible study, which is what they sell. that’s the next redemption. then we, I guess, we allow people to redeem at $2. So the $2 off is the, that’s the lowest and that’s like one tenth of the rest of it. So the $5 coupon is most popular, $10 second. Interesting. Okay.

28:49
I think the key here for everyone to realize is you can only use one reward at a time. Yes. Yeah. They don’t stack. So it’s to your benefit to get the higher reward. Yeah. If you’re trying to maximize it. OK, so let’s talk real quick about as I don’t want to run out of time. Let’s talk about when we did the triple points. Yes. So I’m curious because I actually tried something new and I thought it flopped. But then upon further research, I’ve actually once again can pat myself on the back.

29:19
I’m just kidding. So we do this probably, oh my goodness, we don’t do it a lot, two to three times a year. We do like a point blowout basically. So last month we did a triple point redemption or not triple point redemption, triple point earn where you basically earned three times the points on your purchase over

29:49
over a 24 hour period. So it only lasted for 24 hours. Now, one thing about Smile is I actually don’t think you can timer it. ours actually lasted longer because we were like not getting up at midnight to change the thing. just so you guys are like, wait a second, what? Just make it, started at 8 p.m. No one’s gonna be mad at you for getting more points. So I will tell you, let me pull up the email. So I wanna give you guys the actual like.

30:16
metrics on this to see how well it performed. What we do know is this always performs fairly well. Like this definitely gets people to get off their butts and make a purchase. of course, now I had it in front of me and then I got off of it to get the flow and now I can’t find it. Talk for me. Okay. I was going to just say earlier when you were talking about performance of the redemptions on the post purchase, I don’t think it’s a fair assumption to assume that those emails are going to generate money. Right?

30:45
right off the bat, because it’s kind of like a long-term play in a way. Like people have to gather points and then they have to be in the shopping mood. So just the fact that the open rate and the click through rate are so high means that there’s interest. Yes, for sure. So we sent out and actually this is interesting. we ran our biggest sale of the year is in the summer. It’s a back to school sale. And this was actually run during the back to school sale.

31:13
So typically we don’t overlap these with sales, but this sale I actually tested every idea I’ve ever had for email during this sale to see what worked and what didn’t. So we were trying basically everything. So this was actually run during a sale, just so you guys have all full disclosure in this. I only sent it to people who already had points. So these were people that I knew were like interested in the point system. I did not do this to like get people on or get people that hadn’t purchased to make a

31:43
So this went straight just to people who already have points. And we basically tripled their points for 24 hours. I will say the email performed, it only went to like, I’m gonna say it only, it didn’t go to a ton of people, maybe under 20,000. But once again, like decent engagement, especially during the sale when we’re, that’s the other thing, during a sale when you’re sending an email every day, this is a way to get an email opened, right? Because people are like, I know same sale, whatever. But then it’s like, wait, I can get,

32:12
even a better sale, right? Because they’re tripling their points. So the email overall performed probably better per person than most of the other emails we sent. So the email itself didn’t make more money than a lot of other emails, but we sent it to significantly less people. So once again, great engagement, great interest in it. But what I did, which I think this was the like winning idea that I was initially very disappointed, is the day after the sale. So

32:42
Anyone who made a purchase during that day that the points were tripled, they got put in a bucket and I sent an email the next day. So 24 hours later, the point promo has ended. They’ve made a purchase. I’m like, hey, you just made a purchase and earned all these points. Why don’t you spend it while things are still on sale?

33:00
Right? Like, why don’t you redeem it? Right? Because these people already had points. So at this point, they definitely have that 500 points. They have a $5 coupon that you could redeem during the sale because the sale was like automatic discounting, like through a plugin. So it wasn’t like a discount code. So you could actually stack, which is rare. We don’t ever stack. So it only went out to about six, 500 people. No, it up to 500 people. Right? So it was all the people that bought the day before.

33:28
So when I see the email numbers come in, the email made $481 and I was like, boo hoo. I mean, because most emails during the sale make thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. So I was like, well, that was a dumb idea, right? But I was like, well, not really. It only went to 500 people. So it’s not like we wasted an opportunity. But then when I started digging into the numbers, I was like, but wait a second, know, went to 500 people, seven people made a purchase. So it did convert people.

33:57
But the open rate on that email was 71 % and the click through rate was 20%. Wow. So even though it didn’t drive tons of revenue, which it didn’t really need to, right? Like we’re already making money from every other email during the sale. What it did do was lift my email, like, cause I’m sending two emails a day for 10 days, right? So all of a sudden my emails that are getting like up

34:24
1 % click through rate, .9 % click through rate. I’ve got one with a 20 % click through rate. I’ve got 70, so all of a sudden I’m sending all these great signals again that like, our emails are important, people are engaged, blah, blah, blah. So to me, the email was a huge win because its deliverability was so great, the click through rate was so great, and the engagement was there. So 100 % will do this again. Even though I don’t anticipate it making money, it boosts my engagement, which overall helps my account.

34:54
So definitely something it was an experiment. First, I thought it failed revenue wise, but I’m like, you know what? I don’t really need these people to spend their money today anyway. I’d rather them spend it when things aren’t on sale. You know, but so something to try if you guys are doing this, like it would it’s definitely worth doing because it definitely helps your overall email. So one of the emails, since I’m on that list that you write one email that I particularly liked.

35:22
was one where you stacked three things all at once. that was the email. Oh, was that the one? OK. Yes. Triple loyalty points plus a discount on something. Yes. Plus and a free with purchase. Free something. Yes. And that’s yeah, that was very effective. Like, obviously, I’m not. You almost bought a Bible study. It so close. You almost bought the math curriculum. You were so close to getting it. No, and that’s and that’s one of the things that I like to do with

35:52
points people. So people that already have points, you know they’re shoppers, right? And it’s like, I’ll use myself for as an example, like I am a loyal White House black market shopper. Like that is if I’m going to buy clothes instead of renting them, that’s usually where I start looking. So if White House black market sends me an email and they tell me that like all the summer stuff is on clearance, plus I can get free shipping, plus I have rewards,

36:19
the chances of me making a purchase goes up by about 100%, right? Whereas, and so that, I know that’s an effective psychological technique with customers that, because it doesn’t just work for me, it works for everybody. But it’s like, and a lot of times they’re like, oh, I know it’s your back to school sale, but do you know how good of a deal this is for you? And people need to be told what to do. And during a big sale, during like,

36:46
It’s like Black Friday. It’s like all those studies, because I used to work in like grocery and CPG stuff, right? And all the studies that showed if you give people too many choices, they don’t choose anything. Right. But when you spell things out for people like buy your peanut butter, buy your jelly, buy your bread, that is why they are all in the same aisle. Right. Because you don’t want people to have to make a decision. It’s like, you know, this is you just get it all right here. You don’t have to walk around the store. You don’t to think about things. So when you can send emails like that.

37:15
Once again, the free with purchase on this deal is an item that we cannot sell. It’s literally taking up so much space in the warehouse that we’re, you we did a free with purchase offer in July for it. We basically ran out of the price. So yay, one liquidated product that we couldn’t sell. People loved it. And then, you know, we do the back to school. So every year that’s just going to happen. So we’re already doing that. And then just reminding people like, oh, and by the way, triple your points.

37:45
Huge. Let me see if I can pull up the data on that. But yeah, you have to do that for people. While you’re pulling up the tiers, I just want to say that just having VIP tiers is a huge deal. And I’m just thinking about how we kill ourselves to make Marriott status. Yes. Oh, yeah. And you can remind people like, you you need one more to achieve this status or one more purchase or X amount of points or whatnot. this is about to expire. Do you guys do expiring points?

38:14
We don’t expire points. Okay, so they’re around forever, Yeah, that’s good idea. And a lot of companies do the expiring points. The other thing that I use terminology in these emails is I call it a VIP exclusive. Right. And tell me that doesn’t get you when you get the Marriott email and they’re like, you know, Platinum Elite exclusive or whatever it is. This is how crazy we are with loyalty, though. So FinCon is a conference that you and I both

38:43
have gone to for many years and it’s at a Hyatt this year. PT, what’s your problem? Guess what’s located right next to the Hyatt? Oh, it’s a Marriott. Guess who booked a room at the Marriott? I’m not staying at the Hyatt where I get no benefits.

39:03
four nights away from the next level, right? But yeah, like it works. works. It works. Think about in your own life, like how many things that you, how many apps were you willing to download? How many texts were you willing to sign up for to be able to get your free queso, your free chicken sandwich, your, you know, free shipping, whatever it is. These programs really work. And the best thing that you can do if you’re spending the money per month on implementing them is to email people obsessively.

39:32
about their points, how they use them, how they earn them. Like we spell it out so clearly for people. It’s like, click here, do this, stop what you’re doing because people are busy. They’ve got a lot going on. I mean, it’s like when your kids are little and they’re trying to talk to you and you’re like on the phone and you’re also doing like two other things and it’s it’s like, wow, wow, wow. You don’t hear them. So giving this is explicit as possible to people. Like you just have to really put it out there and

40:00
It were they work. You get you get repeat customers, which I think is the biggest thing, right? Getting people to make that second purchase. And then also just making people feel like like think about you and I, like we’re both Marriott people, right? We’ll tell everybody to join Marriott over World of Hyatt, World of Hyatt. Who wants to join that dumb program? Right. Like like we talk about the Marriott program to other people. We’re their best salespeople. Yeah. You know, it’s like I remember I went somewhere with someone. It was to Chick-fil-A. They didn’t have the app. And I was like,

40:30
How are you even eating here? Like it was to me, it was like a crime that they weren’t willing to like get the points. So like you can turn your customers into like your number one advertisers by having a really well done program and letting people know all the benefits that go along with it. Yeah. So the way that I wouldn’t sign up with the program unless you have an email marketing. Yes. It just they both amplify each other. Yeah. They have you have to have them hand in hand. Yes, that’s correct.

40:59
And so many people focus so much on getting new customers that they neglect their existing customers. And it’s the existing customers that going to be making you the money. 36 % of our revenue is from existing customers. Yeah, we’re at about 50. Wow, 50. Your niche makes sense, Yeah, curriculum, obviously, people come back. For mine, it makes less sense because weddings, unless that joke we had in the beginning. It works. It works. But it does work.

41:31
When would you sign up for one, actually? How much money do think you should be making to make it worth your while? Assuming it’s like 50 bucks a month, let’s just Yes, the bottom tier. Yes. Oh, this is always so tough. It’s tough, right? I would say six figures, right? I don’t know. Six figures. Maybe sooner. I’m trying to do the math on my head. I would do it sooner. I would have at least 1,000 orders a month.

41:59
a thousand orders a month. I would do it more on orders than monetary because orders is more like if you have thousand orders, you have about a thousand customers a month or you have 800 customers a month, especially if you’re new. Most of your customers are going to be new. I would also say if you’re paying for customers, if you’re paying for ads, if your primary way of getting customers is ads, then I would probably and you see that picking up.

42:27
You have 400 customers and 500 orders, then 600 orders, right? And you’re seeing that. I would probably really start digging into like when’s a good time to do that. Because you want to be able to like you’re paying for these people. So now keeping them becomes so much more important, right? If you’re spending 10 bucks to get the person, you would love for them to come back or like do the other things that we reward for, right? Sharing it, giving the $5 coupon to a friend. So I think it’s also a little bit dependent on how you’re getting your traffic.

42:56
to your site. I think if paid acquisition is your main channel, then I think you should get it. Just if paid acquisition is your main channel, you’re probably spending thousands of dollars a month anyway. It’s 50 bucks a month. It’s a drop in the bucket. You should definitely do it. Yeah, it’ll improve your ROI. Yeah. But before you do it, just like Steve said, I cannot hammer this enough. Have your emails in place. Have your plan in place. Because what I hate for people to do is spend the money and then like let it languish. It’s kind of like the same thing with affiliate programs, right? Like you don’t want to be you don’t want to get that.

43:25
that accounting at the end of the year, right? And you’re like, spent $600 on a loyalty program that I never told anybody about, right? So make sure that before you sign, that would be that Mike, the other caveat before you sign up, have your email templates ready, have your strategy, you know, just be ready to go with it because right off the bat, you want to be getting your money’s

43:50
Hope you enjoyed this episode. One thing that I always like to emphasize is that repeat customers are the lifeblood of any business. For more information and resources, go over to mywipecluderjob.com slash episode 554. And if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywipecluderjob.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.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online businesses. And today, I’m going to talk about the crapification of all big tech companies, how it’s affecting your business and what you can do about it. Enjoy the episode. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s on Amazon right now at 38 % off. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom.

00:26
by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:53
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Now this episode’s gonna be a little bit different than some of the other ones on the show because I’m gonna go on a little rant, but I promise you that there will be a good lesson at the very end. Now is it just me or is every big tech company going to crap? Amazon sucks right now, eBay sucks, Etsy sucks, Facebook sucks, Shopify sucks. Every company continues to get worse and charge higher fees as they nickel and dime you to death. And they all follow the same exact pattern.

01:24
When any these companies first start out, their only chance of succeeding is to go above and beyond for their users by solving a key problem. And as a result, their service is amazing in the beginning. But then as it becomes more more successful, their service slowly gets worse and more expensive. Let’s pick on Amazon, since I’ve been selling on Amazon for over a decade now. When Amazon first started the Amazon FBA program over a decade ago, I remember thinking to myself, this is a great thing.

01:51
Most e-commerce sellers don’t want to deal with inventory and customer service, and Amazon was willing to store and ship your inventory at a very reasonable price. In fact, back then it was a no-brainer to use FBA. You simply have your goods sent to an Amazon fulfillment center, you focus on marketing and optimizing your product listings, and Amazon does the rest. Now back in 2010, the Amazon FBA fees were a very small percentage of your revenue, and you could ship in as many or as few products as you wanted to.

02:20
without any additional fees. Amazon had tons of warehouse space and they were literally begging people to try out the Amazon FBA program. Soon after, it’s not surprising how many people flocked to selling on Amazon FBA. You got free prime shipping for your customers, Amazon offered crazy low UPS shipping rates to their warehouse, and everyone was making money hand over fist. In fact, within just a couple of years of Amazon FBA becoming popular, everyone and their mother started offering Amazon FBA courses

02:49
because selling at Amazon was like having a private ATM machine. All you had to do was go on Alibaba, import some products, send it to Amazon, and make instant cash without having to deal with any inventory. Amazon became the everything store and the de facto place to shop, and sellers were making lots of money. It was a win-win all around. But then things changed. As soon as Amazon had a foothold on the buyers completely locked into shopping on their platform, they switched their focus to acquiring more sellers.

03:19
And because of Amazon’s generous return policy and low prices, they knew shoppers weren’t going anywhere. And if Amazon could manage to control both the sellers and the buyers, they would own the entire e-commerce market. The buyers would stay because of the vast selection, low prices, and a generous return policy, and the sellers would stay because that’s where the customers were shopping. And that’s when they decided to start recruiting Chinese sellers heavily in 2016.

03:45
Amazon invested tons of resources into programs like the Dragon Boat program, which allowed Chinese sellers a fast track directly into Amazon’s fulfillment centers in the United States. All of a sudden, a factory in China could, with Amazon’s help, sell directly on amazon.com in the US and bypass the Minimal Man directly. And within about three years, Chinese sellers flooded the platform with dirt cheap products that very few US sellers could match in price. They started knocking off existing sellers

04:13
blatantly copying their IP, gaming the reviews, the rankings, everything. And Amazon just sat there and basically did nothing for many years. Now from Amazon’s point of view, as long as buyers were happy, it didn’t matter if legitimate hardworking sellers went out of business because there would instantly be another seller to take their place. Amazon made money no matter what. But it didn’t stop there. After they knew they had the buyers and the sellers, after they knew they were by far the most convenient way to shop online,

04:42
and after they knew they had the best prices from suppliers in China, they added a third stage to their master plan. And this is the point where Amazon and every other big tech company in their position takes all the profit for themselves because A, they can, but also B, by the time a company reaches this stage, more than likely they’re a public company, which means that the decisions aren’t being made by one passionate founder any longer, but by many different shareholders instead.

05:10
And because shareholders aren’t as invested in the long-term health of the business, they just want the business to earn quick money so that their shares of stock are more valuable. Their objectives often boil down to how much can we squeeze the sellers to pay for fees up until the absolute limit of what they’re willing to, but not just past it? And then how do we get the buyer to continue buying while slowly deteriorating the quality of service? And this, my friends, is when the company goes to crap.

05:36
By the way, if you’re enjoying this episode so far, make sure you sign up for my free six day e-commerce mini course on how to start your own online store and stop depending on Amazon, which can be found either in the show notes or going to mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now let’s look at the Amazon search results just as an example. Back in the good old days, you could get lots of free traffic on Amazon by ranking in Amazon search. But today, you’ll notice that the entire front page is flooded with ads.

06:03
and you actually have to scroll down to see the first organic search result. Today, if you perform just about any product search on Amazon, you’ll notice that the search results are about 50 % ads. Amazon charges sellers a fee to make their listing visible, and then they charge hefty fees when a sale is completed. For example, today, Amazon charges a 15 % referral fee, about a 10 to 15 % fee for Amazon FBA, and another 20 to 30 % for advertising, if you are lucky.

06:32
This year alone, Amazon started charging a brand new receiving fee in addition to other FBA fees. So basically, you now have to pay a fee between 21 cents to $6 per unit for Amazon to accept standard and large bulky products into their warehouse. And this fee is supposed to reflect the cost of distributing inventory to multiple fulfillment centers, but whatever. Amazon also introduced a low inventory surcharge. This fee applies if you consistently carry low levels of inventory of your products

07:01
relative to your unit sales. Now it’s one thing to get charged if you have too much inventory in Amazon’s warehouse, but now you get charged if you have too little inventory at Amazon as well. And here’s how the fee works. Let’s say you typically sell 1,000 units per month and you let your inventory levels slip to 500 units in stock. Well, this means that you’ll get charged a fee for those 500 units because Amazon wants you to have 1,000 units in stock. Now Amazon has tried to justify this fee because they need to place your inventory closer to customers across their network

07:30
but Amazon sellers are legitimately furious. Now let’s talk about how buying from Amazon has gone to crap next. I don’t know about you, but I rarely get my products within the Amazon Prime shipping window anymore, especially during the holiday season. This past Christmas, I don’t think I received more than 25 % of my packages within Amazon’s promised delivery window. Here’s another thing that I’ve noticed recently as well. Amazon sometimes has a minimum order quantity to get free Prime delivery, even though I’m a Prime member.

08:00
and they often pre-select the slower delivery option as default. Think about it, you’re paying a monthly subscription for unlimited Prime delivery, but then by default, you get the slower delivery method because you forgot to check the fast delivery radio button. I’ve actually accidentally gotten slower delivery by accident this way, and they also raised the price of Amazon Prime to $139 a year. Now to add insult to injury,

08:26
Most of the products on Amazon are now just cheap repackaged products from Alibaba, and you can’t really trust what you are buying. For example, one YouTuber who fixes electronics for a living purchased a bunch of different sets of five amp fuses from Amazon and found that none of them actually blew out at five amps. The product quality on Amazon has been deteriorating for years and Amazon doesn’t seem to care. 50 % of the top sellers on Amazon are from China and they violate trademark and copyright laws with impunity

08:55
and constantly game the system. This is what the crapification of a company looks like. Sellers are getting squeezed on fees and barely making any profit. Meanwhile, buyers are getting lower quality products from China with longer shipping times. Amazon makes money no matter what. Now here’s an interesting statistic. If you look at Amazon’s income report for 2023, Amazon’s Q4 earnings for third party seller revenue was $43.4 billion, which was up 20 % year over year.

09:24
But while Amazon’s Q4 earnings for third party seller revenue was up 20%, their online store revenue was only up 9%. This means that most of their profit was due to increased fees passed on to the sellers. Despite the increased fees, customer service for sellers is horrific. Back in the day when I first started selling on Amazon, you could actually get ahold of a human on the phone, but today it’s impossible. If you do manage to get a response from customer service, it’s always a canned response.

09:54
Anyway, I don’t want to just pick on Amazon. Facebook was equally as guilty of crapification. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been burned by Facebook in the past two decades. Back when Facebook pages were delivering tons of traffic to websites, I invested an enormous amount of time to build up my fan page. But then overnight, Facebook nerfed the reach of all fan pages and forced people to pay for traffic. Shortly after that, Facebook groups became all the rage and once again,

10:22
I spent a lot of effort building up a private Facebook group of 20k users before Facebook pulled the plug on Facebook group reach in order to fill more advertising inventory. Now you’d think I would have learned after getting burned twice, but I fell for it yet again when Facebook released Facebook Messenger Marketing. The ability to send direct messages to users for free was extremely effective and I spent a lot of effort building up my Messenger subscriber list before Facebook decided to shut it down and charge people for messaging.

10:50
Here’s the number one lesson I’ve learned over the years. Every service starts out great and then goes to crap as soon as it gets big. It’s just a fact of life. And the million dollar question is, what can you do about it? Well, the secret to long-term success for your business is to ride the wave as it comes and then jump on newer waves as they appear. Running a business is never a stagnant affair and services and companies come and go. When Facebook started charging for Facebook Messenger, I moved on to SMS.

11:19
When Facebook nerfed their organic reach, I doubled down on email. And today, the focus of all my businesses is on owned marketing platforms. Now what is owned marketing? Basically, it’s a marketing channel or asset that you control entirely. For example, when you have a customer’s email address, you can email them as much as you want and no company can really stop you. The same goes with SMS. Now Amazon continues to squeeze all their sellers every year by increasing fees and introducing new ones. So guess what?

11:48
You should focus more of your efforts on your own website that you physically own. Right now, TikTok Shop and TikTok Organic Marketing is still the wild wild west. So you should try to catch the wave now before the platform turns to crap. As long as you expect the company to go to crap, that will keep you on your toes to find the next wave to jump on. Nothing lasts forever and you have to continue to evolve in order to stay in business. Hope you enjoyed this episode.

12:16
There are a lot of things changing this year and it’s been a little exhilarating for me. more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 549. And if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.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.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Could Her Job podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online businesses. And today, I’m gonna talk about something that Amazon just announced that’s gonna have a rippling effect across the entire e-commerce industry and also cover what you must do right now to prepare. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom.

00:28
by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:55
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Now Amazon just announced they’re going to compete directly against Tmoo with a brand new low cost option of unbranded goods shipped direct from China and Amazon FBA sellers are going to be screwed. Basically, Amazon is going to offer the exact same service that Tmoo does, selling cheap, generic Chinese products that take about seven to 11 days to be delivered to the U.S. directly from China. So in this episode, I’m going to give you my take on exactly what is going on.

01:24
the implications on the third party Amazon seller community and what you must do right now to prepare yourself as an e-commerce seller. But I’m just going to say this upfront right now, it is not looking good. But first off, what exactly is happening and what are the details of what’s going on? Well, for the past two decades, Amazon has focused on the speed of delivery. By selling cheap stuff that arrives quickly, Amazon has built the most expansive and optimized fulfillment network the United States has ever seen.

01:53
capable of delivering almost any product imaginable to consumers within two days. There are roughly 180 million Americans who are Amazon Prime subscribers, which is at an all-time high as of this year. But recession is looming, and right now, Americans care more about saving money than the speed of delivery, and that’s where sites like Tmoo and Shien have been destroying Amazon’s market share. Now, in a prior video I posted on my YouTube channel, I reported that Amazon’s revenue from apparel is down 30 % year over year.

02:23
and tens of millions of Americans have started shopping on Shien and Tmoo instead. If you’re not familiar with these two platforms, Tmoo and Shien are Chinese-owned e-commerce platforms that ship products directly from China with no middlemen. The shipping takes longer, but the prices are lower. For example, there’s this floor mat that, for example, there’s this floor mat on Tmoo that’s $1.06, but an identical floor mat on Amazon is being sold for $40.

02:51
Now is getting a product in two days versus 11 days worth paying 40x for the product? Well, Americans are speaking with their wallets and saying no. They are willing to wait a week to get their stuff if they can save money. Now, Tmoo’s core strengths are household items and electronics, whereas Shien specializes in women’s clothing and accessories. And together, these two Chinese companies are decimating Amazon’s sales. But last week, Amazon declared war on these two Chinese platforms

03:20
by opening a new online store for low-cost products shipped directly from China. And according to their announcement, the rollout is going to occur in stages. To start, Amazon’s going to first focus on unbranded clothing and household items priced less than $20 and weighing less than a pound. And as we speak, Amazon is rounding up and encouraging Chinese factories to sign up for this program where Amazon will ship the orders from China directly and arrive in 9 to 11 days.

03:49
And compared to one to two day prime shipping, nine to 11 days feels like forever. But like I said already, Americans are speaking with their wallets and care less about the delivery speed. And according to Satista, Timo was the most downloaded e-commerce app in 2023, surpassing Amazon with over 120 million downloads. Meanwhile, according to GWS Magnify, Timo had 82.4 million active shoppers on its app in September of 2023.

04:17
up from only 4.6 million the prior year. And by comparison, eBay drew only 40 million online shoppers that month, which is about half of Tmoo, while Tmoo ran neck and neck with Walmart, which had 85.5 million online users. And while Amazon was still number one, with 142 million monthly users in September, Tmoo already has more than half of Amazon’s traffic after just two years. But here’s where the story gets worse. Once Amazon starts selling cheap,

04:46
unbranded stuff direct from Chinese sellers, it’s going to be hard for third-party sellers in the United States to compete. As of right now, Chinese sellers do not have to pay import duties or taxes on the products they sell direct from China due to the de minimis rule. This rule states that products can be imported into the US without paying taxes or tariffs as long as the package is worth less than $800. Second, selling direct allows Chinese factories to bypass the middleman altogether

05:13
and shipped directly to consumers in the United States. When Tmoo first launched in 2022, only a handful of the same Chinese suppliers on Tmoo were selling on Amazon. However, as of this past December, there was roughly a 10 % overlap between Tmoo sellers and Amazon sellers. And thanks to this new Amazon program, it’s gonna be 50 % or more. Heck, Chinese sellers already make up over 50 % of the top sellers on Amazon, and who knows, it could reach 75 % or more.

05:42
once all of them start shipping direct from China and not have to pay taxes. Right now, if you search for the same product on both Amazon and Tmoo, you’ll find that many of them are exactly the same, except Tmoo is many times cheaper. Now I already talked about the foam floor mat earlier, which was 40X cheaper. And recently I did a search for neck fans and I found a neck fan, two identical neck fans, that was $23 on Amazon, but only $6.95 on Tmoo.

06:10
The products being sold on both platforms are the same. Why are Amazon’s prices higher? Well, it’s because all FBA sellers on Amazon have to pay referral fees, import fees, duties, tariffs, and Amazon’s hefty FBA fees. And just this year alone, Amazon introduced a slew of new fees and increased the rates of FBA. For example, Amazon now forces all sellers to pay an inbound placement fee. Basically, you must pay a fee between 21 cents to $6 per unit

06:38
for Amazon to accept standard and large bulky products into their warehouse. Now this fee is supposed to reflect the cost of distributing inventory to multiple fulfillment centers, but whatever. In addition, they announced a low inventory fee. In the past, you only had to worry about having too much inventory in stock, but now you have to pay hefty fees if you have too little inventory as well. Now how do you avoid these fees? Well, you can pay for Amazon’s warehousing and logistics.

07:05
This service allows you to waive your placement fees by holding your products in Amazon’s third party warehouse where they are drop shipped on demand directly to a fulfillment center. So basically, Amazon is forcing everyone to use their end to end logistics services now and the fees all add up to a lot of money. Now compared to a Chinese seller paying a couple bucks to have a product shipped direct from China with no taxes or fees, a third party Amazon seller importing from China and then selling on Amazon

07:34
has no chance of matching pricing. And then finally, there’s the Amazon factor. Timo and Shien are hurting Amazon right now, so Amazon will be incentivized to show off these brand new cheap products to fight back. Can you imagine paying money to advertise your Amazon listing only for Amazon to display cheap unbranded Chinese products under your own product for one third the cost? This has already happened in the past with Amazon’s own branded products. Now the price difference is gonna be much more dramatic. Sure.

08:03
Amazon has said that the new El Chippo mall will appear in its own section on the Amazon website. But do you really think that Amazon’s going to hide this section from regular Amazon buyer traffic? No way. Remember, Amazon makes money no matter what, whether the sale is coming from you or a Chinese seller shipping direct from China. Do you really think that these cheap Chinese products are not going to show up in regular Amazon search? Not a chance. So here’s what’s going to happen. A customer will do a search for your product.

08:31
and find ridiculously cheap alternatives right next to your higher price listing. It is next to impossible to start a brand on Amazon, so your brand will be pretty much meaningless in the eyes of the consumer. And I hate to say it, but US-based Amazon FBA sellers are in trouble. On one hand, Amazon is charging three-piece sellers placement fees, referral fees, inventory fees, pick and pack fees, and here comes a Chinese seller who doesn’t have to pay for any of that stuff, and they have the pricing advantage.

08:59
I really don’t see how this can possibly end well. The real question is, how can you fight back? Well, for many Amazon sellers, they’re going to have to rethink their entire product portfolio. If you’re selling generic stuff on Amazon right now, you’re in big trouble. Someone from China will undercut you in price and you will not be able to compete. Instead, you need to think about products that cannot be easily sold from a seller in China. For example, I have a student in my class that sells skincare products.

09:27
Well, would you ever buy skincare products from a no-name company in China at one-tenth the cost? Skincare consumers will be less price conscious because who knows what chemicals are in the Chinese formulation. Now from my store over at Bulmabilindus.com, we’ve doubled down on personalization. Sure, Chinese sellers can copy every single product that I sell, but what they can’t do is easily personalize a custom product for the consumer in a timely manner. We provide custom embroidery, custom printing, custom pretty much everything.

09:57
And admittedly, it is a pain in the butt. But what’s a pain in the butt for you is a moat for your business. Another thing to consider is that Amazon is only doing this for low end products for now. And I’ve said this time and time again on many of my podcast episodes. If you sell online, you want to target the high end customer. You want your products to be premium so you can make more money per sale, which makes everything else easier. You make more money, customer service is easier, and advertising is more profitable.

10:26
I purchased handkerchiefs from many competing sellers on Tmoo and their quality is atrocious. So am I worried that someone will buy these cheap hankies for a wedding? Highly unlikely and they don’t provide monogramming either. Finally, in order to succeed, you’re going to have to learn how to build a brand. Now technically, the definition of brand is just a name that identifies your goods or services. But slapping your brand on a product is meaningless. You have to create content to build an audience around your brand and unfortunately,

10:54
That’s not something you can really do on Amazon. You need to have your own website. The best way to build a brand is by triggering the emotions of your customers. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from selling online for the past 18 years, it’s that people buy based on feelings and not logic. Price isn’t everything. Emotions are everything. Let’s take Dr. Squatch. This company sells soap for men, which is a commodity product. And on Tmoo, you can actually buy 50 bars of soap for 79 cents.

11:22
But Dr. Squatch charges eight bucks for a single bar of soap. And how is this possible? Well, it’s because Dr. Squatch has mastered the art of emotional marketing. If you look at a short clip of any of their commercials, Dr. Squatch doesn’t sell soap. They’re really selling sexual companionship. Another one of my favorite brands is True Classic Tees. This company literally sells plain colored t-shirts for 30 bucks a piece. And on Tmoo, you can literally buy eight shirts for $13.49.

11:51
But if you watch any true classic tees commercial, you’ll immediately understand why they are a nine figure company today. As a guy, I want to look buff and hide my Buddha belly, so I’ll happily shot 30 bucks for what I perceive is a higher end shirt. The key to succeeding in e-commerce is marketing and branding. And guess what? These are by far the worst attributes of selling on Amazon. You can’t really build a brand on Amazon. You can’t really market effectively on Amazon, so your options on Amazon are limited.

12:19
On Amazon, it’s all about price, and with these new Chinese sellers selling direct on Amazon, you’re just not going to be price competitive. The only real way to succeed in e-commerce today is to own your own web presence and create content to build your brand. Your goal should also be to sell in as many different marketplaces as possible to diversify your sales. Well, now that you understand what’s going on with Amazon, I filmed a number of videos on my YouTube channel that outline exactly what I would do today if I were to start all over again.

12:47
and you can find those in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now I didn’t mean to come across as so negative, but this can’t be good for Amazon FBA sellers. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 548. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course out away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I cover the latest strategies to grow an online business. And today, Tony and I discussed the right way to run an email sale campaign based on one of her largest clients. I learned a lot from this episode and I’m positive you will too. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur Yet, it’s on sale on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death.

00:29
Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:52
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today, what we’re going to do is we’re going to break down an email campaign for the largest sale of the year from one of Tony’s clients, kind of like an inside look at how an e-commerce company is run. That’s right. And we talk a lot about how we don’t like to promote sales and discounts. And that’s usually our crux, right? Like, don’t discount, don’t put stuff on sale. And we teach a lot of strategies about

01:21
how to do that, how to convince people to buy without sales. But sometimes you’re gonna run a sale, right? Whether it’s Black Friday, the holiday time, you you’re in the linen business, so your sale time might be, you know, spring for weddings, things like that. There’s gonna be times of the year where people do have sales and discounts, so I thought it’d be fun today to walk through the email strategy for my clients, basically her biggest sale of the year. When you say biggest sale, like what percentages are we talking about here?

01:49
Uh, so it’s not, okay. So biggest sale meaning discount it’s 25 % off the whole store. So no exclusions. And it’s also her highest generating like revenue wise. So this will be her July is always her biggest month of the year. She sells curriculum. So obviously people are purchasing curriculum before the school year. So this is the biggest sale as far as discounting. has, she, every once in a we run a little bit better discount, like overall site-wide, this is definitely the best.

02:17
And it’s also long. It’s like an 11 day sale. Wow. That’s a lot of emails. I can’t wait to hear about it. That is a lot of emails. I’m afraid to is no joke. That’s a pretty big discount. It is. And I think it’s hard right now, right? Because I’ve been on TikTok a lot. As you can see from my background, I’m staying in an Airbnb. And when there’s no Copa on, I’m on TikTok a lot more often at night.

02:46
And like everything, seems like it’s discounted on TikTok, right? Like everything’s like 40 % off, like these crazy levels of discounts. So it’s almost like 25 % doesn’t seem that great anymore, but it really is a powerful discount, especially if you’re not discounting throughout the year. I think you guys only ever do like 10 or 15, right? We only do 10, at most 15. Actually, I just wanna talk about this real quick. So that implies that this store’s margins are really good.

03:14
Right? Because most stores can’t pull off a 25 % sale unless they sell like triple the merchandise or something like that. Correct. Yes. Margins are very high. Paper products tend to have really good margins in general, I think. So yeah, it definitely can, it’s affordable and still profitable at that discount. And that’s actually a good point that you brought up. You should never run a sale.

03:37
especially an 11 day sale that you’re not going to be profitable with, right? Like you, it’s one thing to run a one or two day promo to get like new customers or things like that, but you can’t do something like this unless you know your margins can sustain that kind of a discount. Yeah. The only reason I bring this up is, uh, there was one time, uh, one of my acquaintances ran a, one of those lightning sales on Amazon and gave out discounts, but I mean, his margins were only like 30 something 33, 35.

04:07
So it felt good, like he got a lot of revenue, but at the end of the day, what was he netting? Three to 5%, something like that. Yeah. And also the only benefit to doing that on Amazon, so this is fully a Shopify store. There’s no Amazon component. But the one thing on Amazon that it might make sense for is that if it does allow you to climb up those bestseller ranks and gets you a ranking. I mean, I had to do that years ago on Amazon.

04:32
where I had to drop my price to get the buy box back. And what it ended up doing is shooting me into the best seller category, which then, you know, I could update the pricing and still, and you know, did really well, but that’s definitely not, you can’t use that as like a business strategy overall. It’s a lucky break or a one time sort of thing. So for the Shopify store though, it really is just a pure revenue play, right? There’s no, I mean, it won’t affect rankings or anything like that. Pure revenue play and also,

05:01
play to gain new customers through advertising. Now, obviously, I don’t work on the advertising side, but the ad spend is pretty high during the sale, getting close to five figures a day. Okay. Okay. Cool. So we’re going to talk about email. And obviously, email and ads work together, right? Because if we do get someone through a sale, through an ad, basically cold, right? They’ve never heard of the store. They don’t know anything about us.

05:26
you know, this email sequence after they make the purchase or if they abandon their cart, those are obviously very important as well. And so when you’re doing something like this, if you’re doing your big one-time sale, you know, blowout, you want to make sure that those emails that are set to capture those lost customers or the new customers are really tweaked, right? Go through and make sure the images are updated. Make sure your links are still working. You know, every once in a while when I go through this, I always find like that link, that page doesn’t exist anymore, right?

05:53
So when you’re gonna do something big, especially like thinking even now to Black Friday, right? We’re not too far away from prepping for that sale for most people are. I know as I’m saying it, I’m like, wait, hold on a minute. It’s 110 degrees outside. How are we talking about this? But yeah, going through and making sure some of those email flows that you have set up, because you know what happens, right? You set those up and you forget about them and they earn you money and it’s great, but.

06:18
every, was just doing this yesterday, just updating images. Like we redesigned products and I still had old product images and emails. So things like that, you want to make sure you do that well before the sale kicks off. Okay. So we’ve already established the sale is pretty big. It’s 11 days. How many emails are you going to be sending? So the key, so the key to this for me personally, like when I’m setting this up for somebody, or if I were set it up for myself is segmenting.

06:49
the sends. So we’re not sending emails to every single person on the list all the time, but we are flooding people’s inboxes. And I would rather flood people’s inboxes and just get an unsubscribe as long as we’re staying within healthy margins for this, right? We don’t want our spam rate or unsubscribe rate to go through the roof. So you obviously want to monitor that. I would rather over send than undersend because as I say all the time, every email you send will make you money. So if you can

07:17
just send as much as you possibly can. We will probably send 30 some emails during these 11 days, different emails, right? To different groups of people. And honestly, I wish I could come up with more ideas. So just curious, what is the unsubscribe rate where it gets out of control for you? The unsubscribe rate gets out of control. Our unsubscribe rate is so low. Definitely like we’re usually like 0.1%.

07:45
Right? So for anything, if it fluctuates, you know, a little bit more than that, then I’m going to start paying attention. But we don’t what we have is a lower open rate was what usually happens. So our unsubscribe rate stays the same. spam rate is basically zero. And I the open rate goes from around 45 to 50 to 40, 35 to 40. OK. I am also curious why 11 days. Seems like a lot.

08:13
It does seem like a long time. That I actually don’t know. They’ve been doing this sale before I ever came on board. that’s they’ve, I think one year they decided to shorten it to nine days and they got to day nine or day eight and they realized they were really, uh, like they were missing out on thousands and thousands of dollars. And they’re like, we’re making this sale longer, right? It’s kind of like, that’s hard too, because you’re thinking to yourself, well, if 11 days works, might as well keep it at 11 days because. Well, why not 15 days?

08:41
Well, some point I get tired of writing emails, you know. Yeah, I’m not sure what the 11 days comes from, probably because it only… So her email over the weekend is always lower because people are busy, families, things like that, church. So we only want to overlap one weekend during the sale and maximize the weekdays. So like this year, the sale starts on a Monday and then ends on the following Friday. Okay.

09:10
Before you get into the guts, can we just talk about the segments? Yes. So the biggest segments that I have for this sale, and we do lots of little segments like purchased this type of product, because she has like two or three product categories. So purchased this type of product, but didn’t purchase a different type of product, right? So you purchased a Bible study, but not curriculum, or you purchased a

09:33
cards, but not a Bible study. So we divide people up like that. But the biggest thing that I like to divide people up is they’ve made a purchase or they haven’t made a purchase. So that’s the first two buckets, right? Because that’s obviously important. We have a lot of people on the list who’ve never made a purchase. They’ve come in through a lead magnet or maybe an abandoned cart, and we just haven’t gotten them to convert. So that’s number one. Then we have, haven’t made a purchase in X amount of days.

10:00
Yep. So if they haven’t made a purchase in like 90 days or 180 days, because it’s curriculum, you’re not going to be buying it. You know, it’s not a replenishable every four weeks type of item, but we do see people coming back about 270 days is like the repeat customer rate. And so if we know someone bought last year around this time, they’re probably going to buy again, right? Because they either need a new curriculum product or they’ve used up what they purchased because almost everything we do sell is consumable. just has a longer life. Okay.

10:29
Let’s just talk about those two segments, purchase versus non-purchase. It seems like the people who have purchased already, you wouldn’t need to give them a 25 % discount, right? You would think. But I’m curious how the messaging is different in those emails that you send to both. So yes, so the messaging is actually, and then this is the one more segment that I actually think is really important, is then I divide up the purchasers between, so we have a rewards program.

10:57
So people that have over 500 rewards points get talked differently than people who have under 500 rewards points. And 500 is sort of the cutoff, not the cutoff, but like that’s the tipping point for like, okay, you’re a bigger spender and you’re also probably hoarding your points for something, right? Like you wanna.

11:15
you’re kind of holding, because there’s people like, I’m like that type of person. I don’t know if you shop at like Sam’s or Costco, but Sam’s does like the cash back or whatever. So like every time I’m in Sam’s club, the next time I’m always there like, do you want to apply this to your purchase? I’m like, yes, I do. You know, even if it’s like $3 and 24 cents, I’m pushing that to my next purchase. So, you know, there’s people that like get the rewards points and you can cash them in as soon as they can. And then there’s people that hold on to them and want the sale, right? They’re waiting for that sale.

11:42
to spend and cash in their points. Because they’re probably placing like a hundred dollar order or something like that. So those are the people that I actually talk very differently to because they’re most likely to spend money and spend more money because they cash in their points. So it’s like free money to them, right? So it’s like they get $10 in credit, but they’re gonna now spend 75 instead of 50 because they get that feeling of free. Right. Okay.

12:11
You know what’s really funny about this is whenever I emailed to people who have not purchased, I actually usually give them a larger coupon code than the people who’ve already bought. Just because I always feel like they’re already in the bag. the discount is the same for both. Yes, it’s just yes. Well, that will get there. OK, it doesn’t always stay the same. So 25 percent is the flat rate. And the very first day of the sale, we email I email people in three groups. So it’s

12:41
people who have over 500 rewards points, people who have under 500 but have some points and then never purchased. So the over 500, you can do this all dynamically, right? If your rewards program most likely connects to your email service provider. So you can be like, hey, you have this many points, this is the time to use them. I point out the value of their points, right? So it’s like, if they weren’t thinking about the fact that, oh, cause lot of people forget that they have credit.

13:09
Right. So I make a really big deal. It’s at the top of the email, like before even the greeting, you have X points in your account. You know, it’s in the middle. It’s talking about how you can use those points. I go into more detail because these people have already shopped, right? I don’t have to really convince them about the product. I just have to convince them to spend. So those emails get the points. Those emails, the points emails get the most like, here’s how you effectively use your points. The, you know, lower tier of points.

13:38
It’s more of a focus on this is a really good deal. Like, you have some points, but hey, you’ve shopped with us before, now you can get more of what you like at a really great price. So I focus more on the value side of it. And then for the non-shoppers, I use the same value language with a lot of social proof. So we create a lot of graphics that have pictures of the products with reviews.

14:06
And, you know, it looks very, I don’t want to say professional because everything we do looks professional, but it doesn’t, you know, it just feels like a very professional looking product with the five stars and the, know, and we try to pick the absolute most compelling reviews. Like I’ll comb through 50 reviews to find what I feel like is the most like heart string tugging, you know, review that we can use for a product. And I try to use in those, in those emails to the non-shoppers.

14:35
I try to only focus on our best sellers because that’s what’s most likely to bring people in, right? So I’m not gonna talk about some obscure product that, you know, we sell a hundred of a month. I’m gonna talk about the product that we sell 5,000 of a month because that’s probably how they found us to begin with, whether it was an ad or abandoned cart or something like that. And so I focus on those types of products with the social proof added to it.

15:00
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

15:30
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

15:41
Actually, that was my next question. Just to the landing pages are different for all three segments. The landing pages are the same. They’re the same. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Um, cause I don’t actually have any control over that, but that actually is a really good idea to do. But you were just talking about you, you, say you’re only talking about the best products when they click on it, it doesn’t take them to that product or it does take them. Yes. So sometimes I direct them, sometimes I take them directly to the product. Sometimes I take them directly to the sale page. It just depends on what we’re talking about.

16:11
Okay. Okay. But in the case of people who haven’t purchased and you’re talking about your best sellers, those links go directly to the best seller. they haven’t clicked on it. Yeah. I want them to go. So another tip is, uh, like we’re doing 25 % off. People cannot do math. People can’t like, you know, you’re the only one that knows how to do math in this world. I think so.

16:34
One of the things, there’s an app on Shopify, actually don’t know the name off the top of my head, but it basically shows the price and then cross out in the sale price. You can’t just say 25 % off and not show people the pricing. That’s what we to just change the pricing, right? So if it was $10 and it would be 750 and we would just put 750 on there.

16:54
Well, that doesn’t mean anything to people because they didn’t know it was $10, right? They would just do the price change. Now it’s like $10 scratched out, saved 25%, 750 or whatever. that’s actually- it the page itself or the email? Yes, no, on the page. that’s actually- All the products are slashed? Yes. And that actually increased our sales by 30 % the first time we ever did that and has stayed at that level. So that is a huge tip. If you’re not doing that,

17:23
especially if you’re like doing a percentage off, people don’t know what 25 % is. They’re sitting there trying to do the math. They get frustrated. They’re not sure. Or then they get, they did the math wrong and they’re either frustrated or more excited when they get to the cart. Um, and also we don’t do a coupon code. It’s all automatic discounts. So the disc, you know, the, because you just, get people falling off, not trying, not using the coupon code correctly. We’ve tried it both ways, not having the code and just having the discount be automatically deducted is the best option.

17:52
So regular people who come into the store do not see the slash, the slash. They everybody sees the slash. Oh, everybody sees the slash part. Everybody sees it and everybody gets the discount. There’s no code to enter. And this is especially effective with ads, right? Because then people aren’t trying to remember like some obscure eight digit thing or is that an O or a zero and all that stuff. and it also is helps with some other strategies that I’ll talk about in a minute, but that has been.

18:21
one of the biggest game changers as far as during a sale is having that price slashed out with the other price. Huge. can totally, especially something as large as 25%. That would be huge. Yeah. I remember my wife and I talked about this and we only wanted to give the sale to people on the actual list. And you are absolutely correct. A lot of people don’t type in the coupon codes. So we just made it automatically applied. But the problem with the way we do it is they don’t actually see the discount until they make checkout.

18:51
Whereas in your case, they see it right away and I can totally see how that could lead to more conversions. Yeah. So, and we’ve, we’ve tried it all the different ways with codes and check out all that thing. Um, and it just, it’s just more effective this way. Obviously, if you only want to give a specific discount to certain people, you would do a code in an email, which we actually do as well. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. Okay. So, so that’s a day one. Um, and day one is just, you know,

19:20
This is a great sale. It comes once a year. You need to buy really like a general call out, you know, not, not anything more specific to products. Now, what I, what I also do, and this is something that like, you obviously either need someone who does your email like full time, or you just need to be on it during a sale like this. But when it’s your biggest sale of the year, I feel like you should dedicate like resources to something like this. But what I do day one of the sale is I start looking at.

19:49
Like what are the best sellers right now in the sale? is causing people to convert on the site? So I’m watching the dashboard on Shopify and I noticed that we have, they have a Bible study that has some typos in it. And so they have clearance this Bible study to $2, right? Because they have to reprint it, but they don’t want to just throw them away because it’s like three typos, but like three types is a big deal, you know?

20:14
When you sell curriculum, you can’t have typos in curriculum. So, and it’s very clear on the listing that there are typos and they spell out exactly what they are and things like that. But they have thousands of these Bible studies that they’re trying to liquidate. So they’ve been at $2 for like, I don’t know, four or five months, but there’s a Christmas Bible study. So people are not really thinking about buying a Christmas Bible study right now. Well, what I noticed was on Monday, the start of the sale, people were really interested in that study because of the price point, right? $2.

20:43
So I was like, you know what, I’m going to throw together an email and send it out Monday night, like first day of the sale that night, and just say, this study is $1.50 with the discount. And I like had a graphic, big cross out 15, big red X, know, $2 plus blah, blah, blah. Because here’s what I know about people. One, well, one, we need to liquidate this. don’t really, mean, at this point we’re giving it away, right? Right. Two,

21:10
If I can get people to add something to their cart, I can get them to add more stuff to their cart. Right? Like this is just the gateway. The gateway drug is the Christmas Bible study. Sounds terrible. Um, so I created that email. I, created that and I, and I created a text only email with a, um, like, Hey, I don’t know if you saw this, but you know, Oh, this wasn’t text only. This was a big graphic with the big X and it was like, Hey, I don’t know if you saw this, but literally it’s a dollar 50. Like you’ve got to get it. We’re selling out.

21:40
blah, blah. Within three to four hours, that email had done like six grand on a $2 Bible study, right? So either you’re selling a lot of $2 studies or people are coming in and buying other things. And that’s sort of that whole like loss leader at the grocery store thing. Like why can they sell grapes for a dollar a pound? Or why do they want people to put wine in their cart? Because they know when people put wine in their cart, they put another $50 worth of random cheese and bread in their cart. So like I knew if I could get them over to the site with the $1.50,

22:09
that they would add to their cart and they did. So that email is now done, you know, getting close to $10,000 on the one email. And so that’s the one thing I like, I think people don’t also do is that like when your sale is starting, see what your best sellers are. Are their best sellers the same as they always are or is there something that’s like hot and trending and then you need to call that out and like quickly throw together an email and promote that because there’s something, whether it’s the seasonality or the ad is taking off, right? Like there’s something about it.

22:39
that is working. So you want to capitalize that on that on all fronts. I love it. It’s hard to believe like $2 to $1.50 actually does not sound like a big deal. but when it’s $15 product, right, and it’s a $1.50, it’s like the target dollar spot, right? Like people walk to the target dollar spot, they put stuff in their cart. So that’s another trick that, you know, I don’t want to say trick because we’re not tricking anybody. They’re getting a great deal and the study is very usable. So it’s not

23:07
You know, and we’re very transparent about the errors. Day two, let’s move. I’ll try to get through this quickly. Day two. Day two, we have never before allowed the discount to be used on clearance prices. So the discount, and so we had a conversation last week and I said, hey, I can’t remember. Are we doing discount on clearance? And they were like, we never discount on clearance. I was like, so we want to keep all this stuff? aren’t we clearancing stuff because we, we’ve revived it like. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

23:37
It’s like, I’m like, do we want to still have this in the warehouse or not? Like, because if you let me, if you let me discount 25%, it’s already $5. Like you’re not giving that huge of a discount. Right. Um, so day two is like, Hey, have you seen these clearance prices? Once again, same strategy as the night before, like getting people in on the $4 item. And I literally call out like this product is this. And then I’m like, supplies low quantities limited because they are right. They, that’s one of the reasons why they’re clearance. They don’t have all the age levels and things like that.

24:06
that email always performs well because it gets people and people don’t necessarily buy the clearance items, right? It just gets them over to the page where then they buy whatever they’re interested in. So throughout the the 11 days, the other strategy that we do is send out product specific emails. So I think I’ve talked about this before. We have a whole bank of emails that talk about every product in depth. So each product gets its own email.

24:34
So I was like, why aren’t we sending these out and just highlighting products to certain people, right? So these are going to a much smaller segment of people, maybe 10 to 15 to 20 % of the list based on they bought this study before or they looked at this, like a lot of like they looked at it within the last 90 or 180 days, didn’t buy it. So we’re basically sending those product highlights out all throughout the sale.

24:58
and emphasizing that they’re 25 % off. Because normally we send them out with no, there’s no price discount, right? It’s just all just letting you know that we have this. And then I have upsells scheduled, because actually this is really a cool feature in OneClick Upsell that they added a while back. You can actually schedule your upsells. So like every time one of these emails goes out, a scheduled upsell will start based on that specific product to another very specific product that I know people buy together. So.

25:26
That’s just more ways to increase your average order value as well as like focusing on like in the upsells only last for like 12 hours, 24 hours, because then another upsell will start with more relevant to the pages that we’re driving people to. So some people are getting two, even three emails on day two. Most people get two emails a day. Two emails a day. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

25:52
Um, next strategy is we focus on our best sellers. How do you space those out? the, the, the big one, guess, goes out in the morning and maybe the upsell later or repeat that. Sorry. You broke up. Yeah. So in terms of scheduling, do you send out that first email in the morning and then another one in the afternoon? Like what’s the spacing on them? That’s 12 hours apart. So 6 AM, 6 PM. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Um, so like last night we sent out.

26:19
one featuring a newer Bible study that’s not super popular, but it’s a great study. And so there was an upsell attached to that that started at 6 PM and I think it expired at 6 AM because the next email went out. And we have some general upsells that work really well. So I don’t like those to not be going, I don’t want them to be forefront. Cause if you know one click upsell, like the upsells have priority. So whatever is at the top of the upsell is if that’s in the cart, that’s what’s shown versus upsells below it.

26:49
So then the next email that went out actually today was focusing on our best sellers and the discounted pricing. So basically our three top sellers with short blurbs about the products and then calling out the price difference between regular price and sale. These always do well because it’s basically the stuff that always sells already and we’re just letting people know like, you can get a discount on it. And that’s a pretty, like we.

27:16
We re and this is other thing we reuse a lot of the same emails year after year. just sure, you know change up. I like your method. So there’s really no lull during those 11 days or no and that’s because if you have a sale this long. You you get lulls right like day seven and eight are terrible right? You’re like you’re you’re having $50,000 days and then you’re having like an $18,000 day and you’re angry.

27:39
Which is silly, right? You should be really excited about an $18,000 day, but you’re not when you’re riding the high of a 60 or $70,000 day. So, you know, throughout the sale, we’re doing those product call-outs featuring the discount. We’re also doing a lot of products that I feel like, it’s hard to explain, but everyone would know this for their own business. Like people view it and then don’t buy it. And it’s like, why didn’t they buy it? Right? So we send a lot of like viewed over the last six months.

28:06
And we do a much deeper, social proof, breaking down the product a little better, things like that. And those are going out as well throughout. And unfortunately, that’s not something you can really automate because it doesn’t work for every product, but we have some products that like, I know just need a little more explanation for people. So then the next thing that we do is we give people triple rewards points one day. I love it. And that’s kind of, that’s kind of in the lull.

28:32
Right? Like, so you’re on day like five or six, they’ve already been hit with a lot of stuff and now you’re like, surprise, triple your points 24 hours. Right. And so they can triple their points. I don’t send it to people who’ve bought in like the last 48 hours because I don’t want them to be like, I literally purchased seven minutes ago and now you’re tripping my Yeah. So I exclude about 48 to 72 hours. It just depends. Um, and so that one is, it goes out on like day five.

28:59
And then one thing that I’ve never done before, but we’re trying this year is then literally at the 24 hour mark, anyone who bought in that 24 hours gets an email. It’s like, Hey, you want to cash in your points while you can still get a deal. Right. So we’re literally like, Hey, you just, you just tripled your points. Cause I was like, how long does it take for the points to adjust in the account? Cause I was like, I want to make sure this email gets sent at the correct time. And they’re like, no, it’s immediate. was like, okay, great. So like 24 hours after they’re like, Hey, you just tripled your points. Here’s your point total big.

29:29
you know, here are some things that are great deals right now and just like continually like reminding people like how they can save. And it’s funny because like once you get people on the save train, they just spend. Yep. What is the what are the points for? Are they for cash or are they for merchandise? So it’s for credit. like, OK, yeah, like 100 points is a dollar credit. OK, got it. And yeah, I think every three. I don’t know exactly what the point I don’t know how they figured out, but.

29:58
Yeah, there’s some. is it’s credit. It’s like cash, essentially. gives a gift card. I it’s like a gift card. Yeah. I mean, you can’t ever get money, but you know, but here’s the thing, like most of the cheapest products in the store are like nine and $12, right? So it feels like you can almost get something for free if you’re strategic with your points, but then they’re going to put more in their cart, obviously. Yep. So then we do a lot of like the testimonials throughout. Once again, these are going more to people who have not purchased.

30:28
So you’re trying to like just, hey, here’s another product, here’s another testimonial, let me call out. And we’re focusing a lot because they sell Bible studies and homeschool curriculum, focus a lot on the homeschool curriculum. Because that’s what people are really thinking about buying. The next email that we send to everybody is the low stock alert. And this one’s always a killer. And here’s the thing, because my client is very much like, she’s very ethical, right?

30:58
It’s it’s very hard for me to get away with anything. I want to do all these like slimy marketing tactics. And she’s like, absolutely not. You know. And so I was like, well, if we do a low stock alert, can it just be the lowest stock items in the store? Right. So if we we if we just sort and Shopify by stock levels, can I just pick the low ones? Like, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we only have five. It just means they’re low. And she was like, mean, I don’t think she loves it. But I’m like, you’ll love it when the check comes, you know.

31:28
No, but like I want to it’s true, right? It is the low stock in the store. It’s not necessarily, you know, we only have 16 left, but it is stuff that’s lower. That always does well using the, you know, I hate some of this. I don’t like, it’s like, hurry shop now. It’s going soon. And instead of on the buttons on the, when you pull them like in Klaviyo, you can pull products instead of it always says buy now or shop now. That’s like their default. I always put quantities limited, almost gone. Like I change, you can change all that.

31:57
verbiage and the buttons. And so I always change it to more that urgency, right? Getting people to like realize, and some of them are legitimately like low, like usually if there’s six items there, four of them are legitimately really, really low and they sell out. So that’s a good one. And then Sunday is a hard day for us, right? Because it’s a Christian company, people are at church, they’re not on their computers on Sunday. like, but we always send an email out at two o’clock on Sunday, that’s an educational email.

32:25
So during the sale, it’s a little bit of a dilemma, because it’s like, I can’t really send this like, buy, buy, buy, you know, on a Sunday, because it just doesn’t align with the brand’s values. So what I did was I took our most popular bundle. So we sell bundles of Bible studies too. And I took the most popular bundle and basically wrote up, once again, like a product, little product briefing, as well as got a little more promotional than I would normally do on a Sunday, but like over 6,000 sets sold.

32:55
you know, customer test, know, testimonies, things like that. And that’s what’s going to go out on Sunday because it feels less like get this today, right? The second, you know, it’s more of, know, Hey, this is a really great study. A lot of families are using it. Um, and it’s a little bit more educational than all the other sale emails, most of the sale emails, unless they’re talking about specifically the product, this is definitely on that line. Uh, but I was like, you know what? I really want to blow Sunday out of the water. So.

33:22
That’s the two o’clock email at 6 PM this year. We’ve never done this before sending out an email that’s free shipping for the night from six to 12 free shipping. Um, so like, here’s the thing that email will not get seen by a lot of people till Monday. So they’ll miss it. Right. But then it’s going to get them to like check the rest of the sale because who knows what other surprises are coming out. Right. But also it’s going to take people that are on the fence and they’re going to purchase on Sunday night, which is going to lift the Sunday sale numbers.

33:52
Is Sunday day seven or eight? Does the sale start on Monday? Sunday is what day seven? Day six or seven. Okay, right. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully that’ll boost our Sunday sales. Once again, just trying that one. And I only am sending it to people who I’m sending it I’m excluding people who bought that week, but didn’t hit the free shipping threshold threshold.

34:20
So I don’t want to anger people that bought days one through six and didn’t get free shipping. So those people will not get that email. This will go to people that have either already gotten the free shipping, so they’ve spent over $100 or they haven’t bought at all. So hopefully it tips them. Next idea that we had. So we have some products that we’re trying to get rid of. They just did not perform what we expect them to. We’re not going to restock them. So the next day, it’s basically you make a purchase, you can buy these cards.

34:49
for five bucks, they’re normally 19. So huge discount, $19 down to five. So with any purchase, you can get a set of cards for $5. I almost thought about giving them away for free. The only problem is they’re bulky to ship. So I don’t like doing free things that could add to the shipping cost. So $5 kind of covers whatever shipping edition would possibly be.

35:14
Haven’t done it before with something that’s this high value. We’ve done it with like stickers and lanyards and things like that that have been, you know, between five and $10 products. So this is a $19 product. So we’ll see how it does. I think it’ll probably perform fairly well. And then the next thing we’re doing is sending one of our real popular like journals.

35:37
We’re just focusing on that, but it’s only going to people who haven’t opened in 48 hours. So if they haven’t opened an email in 48 hours, they’re going to get this because the, I don’t know what the subject line is in this one because I don’t have it in front of me, but it’s really click baity. So hopefully getting people to like open up. And this is where the sale like really starts to lull. And so I have to pull out like all of the

36:03
Like what are, what are my, in my bag of tricks? what can I? Do you resend to non-opens in any of these cases? Um, so I used to do it all the time and it just like those people stink. Yeah. Like I don’t, you know, I’d rather send something different and just reuse an old email, you know, like reuse something from another sale or another promotion and just change it a little bit. Because usually when I resend and just change up like the subject line, it doesn’t perform terribly well because those people.

36:33
It didn’t resonate with them. So then we get to like, this is where we’re really going to segment into like their purchase behavior. So first of all, we have the people who are purchasers, but have not purchased during the sale, which is kind of weird, right? Because like most people will purchase during the sale because you know, the discounts really good. So we send out this and I actually completely stole this from our friend, Laurie at Passionate Penny Pinscher, where you send out these like,

37:03
codes that are either timed or limited by the amount of codes that are available. So we send out an email and these are the people that we like want to make that purchase, right? Cause we’re like, Hey, what happened to you? So we have free shipping. So 10 free shipping codes. And these are all coupon codes that you have to add, right? Because they have, you have to add them to get the discount. And then we have an additional $5 off your order once again. And we have 15 codes of those.

37:30
Then we have my BOGO, right? So buy one, get one free. We do five codes of that because it’s off of anything. Like obviously a higher price item you pay for. Then we do additional 5 % off your order, 25 codes, additional 10 % off your order, 10 codes available. This email blows Whenever we do stuff like that, we get a lot of people complaining. Like I didn’t get it. Did you get that too? Okay, so I’m going to get fired.

37:59
I just track to see what I can only do certain amount of free shipping, right? Cause that’s actually a really high cost to the business, right? The shipping so expensive, all the other codes are actually really inexpensive on our end, right? So I just monitor that day and whatever codes are like hitting, I just increase the number of codes. see. Okay. So people always actually get them, right? Not always. Like I like to like have one or two expire. Cause then it’s like, like you better act like

38:27
And the 5 % is obviously not the biggest needle mover. So that one always has plenty of codes usually. That is very effective. I think last year that email did like 20K or something. It’s only going to purchasers, right? So this is one that I think is like it’s effective to get people like off the fence. The next one that I haven’t tried before, so this is a new one for this year, is for people who have purchased during the sale.

38:55
So these are like the best people, right? They’ve already purchased. So I created a text only email. Looks like it’s coming directly from the owner of the store, thanking them for purchase during the sale. But you know how it is, like you didn’t get something and now you regret it, but you’re like, oh, but I already bought it and paid for shipping, but here’s a code for free shipping for you today. So you can get that other item. And I made the code like XPL17. So it looks like it’s only for them. It’s obviously a generic code, but like it’s like, hey, this code is just for you.

39:24
Right? Don’t share it, please. It’s only your code. Because you can obviously do dynamic codes in Klaviyo. It’s much harder to do in the text-based emails in Klaviyo. So I feel like there’s too many. There’s a huge margin for error. So I’m like, I’ll just make the code in Shopify. Haven’t tried it before. I think it’ll be very effective. Because I know like for purchasing behavior, most of the time when you buy something, you always regret that you didn’t buy the other thing. Yeah. So I’m going to try to capture those people that way. I think it’ll do well. We’ll see. And then.

39:53
The last one that we send is the, haven’t bought at all. So you’ve never bought from us, not during the sale, not before the sale. And this one is very graphic driven. It’s like colorful background. It’s very obnoxious. Like the owner hates this. She’s like, that’s the ugliest email I’ve ever seen. I was like, yeah, but people open it because it’s bright and annoying. And it’s like a big thumbs up emoji and a big thumbs down emoji. Have you shopped the sale? Click which one, right? Well,

40:21
guess what, both of them go to the sale page, big shocker, right? And then, hey, you know what, you can save 35 % during the back to school sale. No. Right? 35 % to non-purchasers, right? Because these are the people that like, because once we get a purchaser, we know we can keep them, right? We know the value of Yeah, this is what I was alluding to earlier when we were talking. So, but this year I used a caveat, and this might bite me in the butt. I put a $50 minimum, you have to spend $50 to save

40:51
the 35%. So last year, I don’t is for people who have never purchased ever, right? Never purchased at all, right. But here’s the thing, if you’re buying a Bible study, they’re 15 bucks, right? On the sale, they’re 11.50. So usually you have two to three kids. So you have to buy three Bible studies plus the parent guide. You’re pretty much at $50, right? Like you’re getting, like the average order value is about 60. So getting people to 50 isn’t super hard. So this year I put the $50 minimum just because

41:21
I really want people that are invested. Like I don’t want to give this away so people can buy a $10 pack of cards, right? I want people that will probably be committed to becoming customers. So that’s why I put the $50 on there. We’ll see how it does. And then I put our top homeschool curriculum right below it, which is all basically $50 before discount. So anyway, that one we’ll see. Last year it performed okay. I think we got 200 new customers from it.

41:51
Which I mean, that’s 200 more than we had before. yeah, so that’s the, that’s one that I’m trying this year that’s new with the, with the like threshold on it. And then two days before the sale ends, I go hard with the text only emails. And these are the ones that I’ve said before, you can’t use them all the time because you know, you want to get the effect that like someone’s getting a personal email. And so this one is once again,

42:20
three groups of people, hey, I noticed you haven’t shopped the back to school sale yet. Have you heard about it? You know, kind of thing. Or, hey, you might not know this, but we’re having a back to school sale. I know you love shopping with us. Here’s how you save 25%. Right, so just changing the verbiage a little bit based on people’s past purchasing behavior. And so that one always does really, really well because it feels like a personal email from the owner of the company.

42:47
I mean, as long as you don’t use them all the time, I highly, highly recommend. And I’m guessing like the last day always does amazingly well. It does. So then the day before the last day, I do all social proof because I feel like these are the people that are like on the fence. They’ve now seen 25 emails, right? Like if they haven’t.

43:14
They haven’t converted at this point, like what’s going on? So these are two, they get one in the morning, one at night, you know, like, hey, have you seen this? Social proof. I also this year am offering, so with some of these like call out emails, I’m offering an additional discount, right? So only on that product for that day. So if I send out an email specifically, like we have a brand new math curriculum, it’s really amazing.

43:38
That one I probably won’t discount because we additional discount because we have limited stock. But like normally I would take that product and go and here’s an additional 5 % off, right? Just on this product. So throughout the sale, these product emails are getting specific discounts only to that product email. And then the last day is your standard countdown timer. I mean, there’s really nothing I don’t think, I mean, if someone has a good idea, I’m all ears to hear like a better last day of the sale.

44:06
No, no, that works really well. it’s like if it’s not broke, we’re sticking with it. I’ve tried countdown time or placement. I’ve tried. Now, one thing we do do is in the images, if it’s a global sale image, so we’re just talking about all the products, not a specific product, it’s always a GIF, always. It’s never a static image. And always I ask for price call-outs because people can’t do the math.

44:35
If the Bible studies $15, it’s now $11.50. If it was $20, it’s whatever. So the GIFs flash and it’s like math curriculum, regularly $15, now $39 or whatever the pricing is. And it shows that on the screen. And I make sure that there’s a lot of the price call-outs on those graphics because that performs wildly better than just static images or images without pricing. I can see that.

45:03
Quick question, do you guys run this sale every year around the same time? two years ago, we tried running it in June and it was an absolute disaster. I think sales were down 20%. I it felt like we were, I felt like we were at the Salvation Army asking for money. Like that’s how bad it was. But yeah, we tried it once in June and we realized that people in the homeschool world, like in June, you probably do not want to think about starting school again because you just finished school.

45:32
Right? So mid July is kind of the, we’ve found the sweet spot for people to purchase. That’s really interesting. This is like our slowest time of year. Yeah. mean, like, yeah. And for us, like, even though Black Friday is obviously big, it’s not as big as this because people are buying. And now this is the first year we have multiple, we have much more homeschool curriculum this year. So we have far more options for people to.

45:58
purchase and that is one thing that like we call out very specifically like when those product call outs come out, it’s like we are talking mostly about the curriculum because that’s what people are wanting to spend money on. And this isn’t a group of people like the customer base. They’re not big spenders, right? Like they’re very frugal families, right? Usually there’s a stay at home parent. So they’re on a budget. And so we want to make sure that they are like,

46:22
this product is going to be great for your family. This product will be effective. You will be able to use it throughout the school year. Like, you know, the quality is good. In fact, one of the, because a lot of the complaints, and this is a good idea for anybody, but like, you know, look at your competitors complaints, right? On the reviews or on Amazon, whatever. And we always, I try to pull reviews that address that. So one of the things that we have compared to some of the competitors is our paper quality is really good. And when you have kids that are writing on things, right? With pen and marker, paper quality actually matters a whole lot. And so one of the,

46:51
you know, product call outs, we focus on paper quality because it’s like this actually is a big deal. You can’t have bleed, right? If you’re using markers or things like that. you know, focusing on those sorts of things, focusing on the real really hitting that value proposition of your products is really key to getting people in. So for the most part, it seems like everyone throughout the sale is getting about two emails per day. Usually, yes. Now, if you’ve

47:18
And you’re hitting I exclude people who purchase like so if you purchase in 24 hours, your chances are you’re not getting the next email, right? You’re getting skipped for like a day unless it’s like one of those like, hey, here’s your free shipping or something like that. But like for most of the generic type emails, you’re not getting those except for the last day. Everyone gets everything right. Right. OK. But when you skip upon people who purchased. It’s a short period, right? They’ll get. Seller minors throughout the 24 hours, OK?

47:50
Cool. Well, hey, Tony, thanks for the inside look on how to run a sale. Obviously, this is pretty labor intensive. I guess once you have it set up, you can just duplicate emails from a prior year. But for someone brand new listening to this. It’s worth it though. Would you? Yeah. I mean, I don’t like it’s probably not worth it for everybody to have an 11 day sale. Like you got to put the sale within your parameters. It’s worth investing the time in putting this together because every year. So I’ve been doing this sale. This is my fourth year doing the sale.

48:19
and writing emails for the sale. And every year we find that one just absolute winner of an email that we then reuse every single year. I mean, we also have emails that do really, really, like there’s always like stuff we reuse every year. So this year I would say the bigger time that I spent was not on writing the emails, it was finding the segments of people that I wanted to use. Like, hey, I know that like we need to move this product. So let’s find people that are most likely to buy this or

48:48
I know people who buy this want to buy that, right? Or focusing more on the upsells, right? Like what products really work with this product for upsells. And I think that’s where you can get to, it’s just like setting up your flows, right? If you invest that time in the beginning, all you’re going in is tweaking them after that. You’re not now spending hours and hours and hours. And well, yeah, you’re probably gonna spend 25 to 35 hours setting these emails up initially and getting good graphics and things like that. Once it’s going, like this year, I just,

49:16
basically duplicated all of last year and then went in and like obviously changed a lot of things, but it wasn’t that same level of effort as it was like year one where you’re basically starting from scratch.

49:33
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now this is one of those episodes that you’ll have to listen to again and again to pick up all the nuances and all the ideas. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 547. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.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.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I cover the latest strategies to grow an online business. And today, Tony and I cover the latest news from TikTok, Wix, and the most recent thing that Google has done to piss sellers off. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death.

00:26
Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:50
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about a lot of the new developments in TikTok, some things that Google’s doing, Wix, a whole bunch of things are changing, lightning fast, and we’re gonna try our best to cover them all today. In 40 minutes? In 40 minutes. How is that possible? Just the news. I mean, we’ll obviously go into more detail later, but the first thing that happened, I just wanted to just say this out loud, like Google has been pissing me off. This is the latest thing that they did.

01:19
They are no longer accepting credit cards for ad payments. Wait, what? Yes, they’re forcing you to do either ACH, wire transfer, or they even accept paper checks. Shut up. How do you send Google a paper check? I don’t know. It was in there, but I doubt anyone’s going to do that. The point is they’re trying to save on the credit card fees. I understand that. A lot of people, in fact,

01:45
I’m selling my house right now and I’ve had to pay a lot of inspections and things like that and everybody gives you a discount for not paying with a credit card I’ve noticed. Yes, the difference is Google is forcing everyone to do this. I think they’re hurting, When you try to eke out that last 1. whatever percent, something’s wrong.

02:06
And traditionally, I do not like giving any company access to my account because that means they can just withdraw money whenever they feel like it. And that’s the ACH option, correct? Correct. That’s the ACH option. So let’s talk about this just for a second because we had this come up earlier this month with something else. But a lot of companies do offer that. And with the ACH, once you send them your bank information, they can withdraw money basically any time they feel like it. You’ve basically given them

02:36
open access. I don’t even know what your recourse is if there’s a dispute when it comes to ACH. I’m sure there’s a way to dispute it, but the point is that you got to watch it like a hawk. It’s not like a credit card where it’s really easy to dispute. I’m sure it’s a little bit more involved with an ACH transfer. Plus, with a credit card, the money’s not technically out of your account.

02:59
But with an ACH, when the money gets transferred, it’s no longer in your bank account. Usually with a credit card, it’s like you have that 30 day grace period on the card. And then if you dispute it, it goes into pending status. So you actually aren’t, you know, if you pay your credit card off every month, which you should, that money doesn’t come out of your account yet because it’s a pending dispute. So I actually just switched plans for my Verizon and they’re doing the same thing. They offer you a $10 a month discount if you do ACH. Ooh.

03:28
or if you use a Verizon credit card. So I think this way they automatically make money no matter what, right? Yeah, I don’t even know what a Verizon credit card is. I don’t either. I’m not going to apply. I’m not going to do ACH. I ended up just paying the extra money. But the point is, I think this has broader implications for what Google is doing. If Google does this, and it’s already getting tons of backlash, Facebook might do it next.

03:57
TikTok might do it next, and then pretty soon, you can’t pay for any ads via credit card anymore. A lot of people that we know were making out on paying for their ads with a credit card because they were getting credit cards with certain points or bonuses. yes. We got millions of points because of that. They’re flying first class all over the world thanks to advertising dollars on their credit card. Now, my question is this, a company as big as Google or Facebook,

04:27
Why not just come up with your own payment processor? I mean, they have it, Google Payments, right? You mean like their own credit card? They should. They should have. Yes. Why not just come up with your own way to do this? To me, it’s like I can understand why the guy that did my roof inspection is not having their own payment option, but a company as big as Google or Facebook, this kind of seems like a no-brainer. Yes. mean, if they have their own credit card, I guess that would solve the problem. I guess that would force everyone to get the stupid Google credit card. Yes.

04:56
But yeah, very annoying. topic, there’s this credit card named BILT. I don’t know if you’ve heard this. I’ve just heard of it the other day, actually. Yeah, so it’s a credit card basically that gives you whole bunch of perks if you pay your rent using it. And for most people, rent is like the largest portion of Europe. But apparently, it’s losing money hand over fist right now. And I think Wells Fargo is like renegotiating the agreement because the idea was they were going to make money by getting people in the door with that rent payment. then

05:25
The anticipation was that they would use it just as a regular credit card. But it turns out that people are signing up just for the rent and that’s why they’re losing money hand over fist. Well, and if you think about just, mean, not to get so off topic, but like the entire strategy of that, like what do most people have to pay every month no matter what? Rent. Yeah. Like they’ll put their food on a credit card, they’ll put their clothes on a credit card, they’ll put other, you know, or they’ll go without, but most people have to have a house, you know, or roof over their head. So,

05:55
that like the entire premise of it is probably a bad idea because the chances of people paying that off every month are probably significantly higher than people paying off their, you know, Olive Garden dinner. Yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to devote the whole episode of this. I just wanted to rant because Google literally pisses me off once every single week right now and they’re going down. Well, they want to keep be consistent. It’s a weekly. It’s a weekly anger. Yeah. And I know internally, because I still have a bunch of friends at work there. There’s like turmoil internally also.

06:24
So, stuff’s going on in there. And they’re doing all this stuff to make money, because their cash cow is going down. Speaking of just all the things that have angered you about Google, I saw something about Reddit, actually I think it was this morning, because as we know Reddit, although I’ve noticed Reddit is not coming up as high in the search results as frequently for me. Is it? Okay, for me it’s not. Maybe I’ve trained my algorithm by never clicking on it.

06:50
But basically Reddit just introduced those in content ads. Did you see that? Oh no, I didn’t. Yeah, so they just announced that they are now gonna be running ads inside the threads and content. Oh God. Which, doesn’t that play into this whole thing though, right? Reddit now comes up number one in search very frequently. People are clicking because they don’t understand what they’re seeing and so they click through and then immediately being served an ad as they’re reading through the threads. Because I think before it used to be kind of like,

07:19
the typical ad sidebar above the header type. Reddit’s always had advertising, if I remember correctly, but it’s never been in smack dab in the content in your face. So just another twist to the Google saga. Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s switch gears and talk about TikTok because I feel like out of all the companies, TikTok is innovating the most. Yes. So as of just a couple of days ago and

07:47
By the time you guys are hearing this, it’ll probably be a week old. But they just introduced avatars. So if you don’t want to be on video, they have a bunch of stock avatars that you can use where you plug in your voice or another voice. And it works really well. I mean, I haven’t tried it yet, but I just watched the demos. It really looks like a human. And so these stock avatars are licensable, or you can create your own based on your own likeness.

08:16
But the point is, we always talk about this, right? The number one hurdle for people making video these days is they don’t want their face to be on there. They just want their content out there. And this opens up a whole new world of fake people influencers. Or you know, not fake, I shouldn’t say fake, virtual influencers. So this, we had this conversation on the podcast a couple weeks ago because it came up in my cellar somewhere at Mastermind where we were talking about the AI generated

08:45
content, know, it looks like the person, but it’s actually not them going live for hours and hours on TikTok. So, and it was already available in Asia. So it sounds like now it’s moving forward and everyone will have access to that or something very similar. Yes. And there’s already a whole bunch of people doing these intricate flows using like Make or IntegraMAT. Okay. Where you plug in a script, it feeds it in

09:12
to 11 labs which generates the audio and then you feed that audio into this and it generates the custom video that’s more or less publishable. You don’t have to record anymore. You’re basically just pretty near to the scripts. The scripts get turned into audio that sounds like you and then an avatar is just basically you. The reality is you probably don’t even have to make a script because you can just have ChatGPT write your script. You can, but if you want it to sound like you, very closely.

09:42
The point is that these videos that we’re going to be seeing might look like you, but it’s not you, which makes content creation much easier. Okay, but what if someone steals you? Yes, I think you have to indicate to TikTok that it is an AI representation of you. I don’t know, I’m sure this is like the Wild Wild West, right? I’m sure there will be some protections.

10:10
Worst case scenario though, what if someone clones you and starts making content as you and then driving them to their crappy course that they probably also stole from you for $29.99? That’s already happened when my buddy Andrew Udarian comes to my voice and made me say some things that I would never say in my life. Made you say some nice kind words that you would normally never say.

10:39
Yeah, something’s gonna happen to police this Here’s another piece of news that’s kind of related to this but not really the the Spotify CEO tweeted that with content creation costs going to zero You know blah blah blah, which infuriated a lot of content creators because there’s a lot of people especially musicians that spent a lot of time creating their content right and it’s just causing this huge divide between

11:08
the artists and the people who are using AI to generate content. I mean, are the costs really zero though? I mean, don’t they have to pay for tools and things like that? He said approaching zero, which is kind of true. And especially with AI, mean, heck, we have a couple of students in our class that are that AI for lot of stuff.

11:32
So the question is with all of this AI stuff, and we talked about this a long time ago, actually, probably last year.

11:41
AI can’t generate something from nothing yet, correct? Yes. There has to be an original source. Yes. The original source is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift wrote the song, wrote the music, performed it. AI steals, let’s just say, from Taylor Swift. At one point, do the actual creators and the creatives just shut down? Is there any way to just shut down access to

12:11
your creative or your knowledge. I think that’ll have to happen. And some of these sites that are using training data, you’ll have to give consent or maybe even sell your stuff. Yeah. Right. Actually, did you hear about the Adobe scandal that happened a couple of weeks ago? No, tell me more. Adobe’s Terms of Service stated that they own whatever you create.

12:35
using their tools, which it wasn’t exactly word that way. I don’t remember the exact words, but people read the terms of service apparently. Who are these people? It was implied that if you use Adobe, they’re going to use your data to train its AI as well as they get a license to do whatever they want with your content that you create using their tools. Interesting. Huge backlash.

13:01
people, I guess, don’t trust Adobe into this huge backlash. Just recently, they retracted it and revised their terms of service. Yes, because how many people use Adobe? Was it Premiere? Everyone uses Photoshop, Premiere, all those tools. All your creative content is available. You who’s actually experiencing this right now is Tiffany Ivanovsky, our friend from Emmaloo’s Boutique. She’s having her content cloned and stolen on TikTok.

13:30
Really? Yes. Her face too? Her face and everything. Then sent to a different store that’s selling not the same product. Wow. What can you do about that? I’m not sure. I think this has happened one other time, but she just brought it up two days ago. I think they’re still in the reporting phase of the process. The problem is that when that happens and they buy from you, they think they’re buying from MLU’s. Right.

14:00
but they’re not, they think they’re getting a Judy Blue gene, they’re not, right? And then they file the complaint against M.L.U.S.E., not against Bob’s Denim World or whatever. So it has huge implications, especially once the AI gets better and better to steal the person’s likeness, voice, everything. I think it could be headed a little bit for disaster if they don’t put some precautions up.

14:31
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

15:00
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

15:11
Well, these custom avatars is going to make that much worse. Yes, exactly. That’s exactly. I don’t know if I’ve been getting knocked off a lot recently. I don’t know. have. I’ve knocked off four or five Instagram profiles and four Facebook pages. They’ve literally cloned all of my posts and they’ve cloned all my photos, everything. Yes. They have a lot more followers than I do too. That’s annoying. They have 400K followers. It’s like, hey, can we?

15:40
Exchange pages. Yeah, can you clone them? But it’s a pain in butt you would think that Someone suggested that I pay for the blue checkmark. Mm-hmm. It doesn’t happen. I Don’t want to pay money for something they can solve. You know, this is like a money grab It just pisses me off if I have to pay yeah, so that they’ll prevent cloning of my profile Yeah, see you’ve made a mistake. Have a life so chaotic

16:07
Everyone’s afraid to try to clone me because they don’t want any of this. They want to stay as far away as possible from anything that happens in my life. You made it too easy for them. Here’s the only benefit of this happening. What they do is they clone your profile and then they just DM everybody. Yes. I’ve had friends that I haven’t talked to for 20 years reach out. We’ve gotten back in touch. We’ve gotten back in touch. It’s the silver lining.

16:37
It’s true though. I’ve gotten back in touch with at least a dozen people because of that. They’re like, I just got this. Is it fake? I’m like, oh, hey, what’s going on? We got back in touch. Yes, it is fake, but what’s up?

16:51
Yeah. So the other thing that’s going on TikTok is they have all these new AI features, uh, which are actually quite useful for content creation. I can’t really wait to dig deep into this, but for example, you can ask it, show me what’s trending on TikTok, or I want to create a video on TikTok. Teach me the best practices. Uh, show me how performing TikTok ads for what I’m trying to do. Give me ideas. Like if you run an e-commerce brand, you can say,

17:19
Give me an idea for Bumblebee Linens promoting handkerchiefs. And it’ll just give you these ideas. And there’s actually even this new video generation tool where if you just pass it a URL of a product page, it will create a video for you. And if you want it to say stuff, it’ll take one of the stock avatars and put words in its mouth about your products. this pretty scary, right? Yeah, this reminds me. Do you remember when the Memoji came out?

17:49
You could get the cartoon character to go when you texted somebody and it would be like whatever you… You could make it say whatever you wanted. Everyone thought that was so cool. You’re like, wow, we’ve come a long way in five years. We thought a cartoon with our voice was funny. Now it’s like you can actually clone your entire likeness. I know. You can ask it, write me a TikTok script for…

18:18
Linens bumblebee linens targeting women over the age of 45 and Then here are the benefits Mm-hmm, and then it’ll come up with something that you can refine. Yeah It’s just you know what I envision Everything that I see is gonna be fake. Yeah And I know anecdotally from some of the people who run Facebook ads They’ve been telling me that the user generated content ads are not performing as well anymore

18:47
as just image ads in a lot of different cases. yeah, because if you notice, and I think I told this at seller summit during my roundtable, people are asking me, you know, how do you get UGC content? Like, what’s the easiest way? And one person at the table was like, well, you can always just include a survey and pay them to pick up their phone and just say something about your product. And that sounds great. In in, you know, in theory.

19:15
But in practice people suck on camera They don’t know how to film themselves and you end up paying for a bunch of garbage where it’s maybe like one in ten is using Yeah, right and you’ll notice that all the UGC content that you see in ads. It looks perfect, right? The people are very eloquent. They’re attractive. Yes The camera angle is correct the the lighting it’s because there’s whole industries where you pay these people to do these things. Yeah

19:42
It’s all fake. You tell them what to say. You give them the product, you tell them what to say, and then they put it out. I think the world is starting to realize that it’s all fake. Yes, they’re not swayed by it anymore. Yes. You shop a lot more than I do. Oh, stop. You do. You bought from TikTok before. still have I have bought from TikTok, yes. What convinces you to do it? Do you trust those? Do you trust them when someone comes up and says, oh, I just love this?

20:11
I don’t know what you buy, eyeliner. You just said stop talking. What convinces me to buy? I’ve bought two things on TikTok shops, so that’s probably not the best example. Okay. What convinces me typically when I buy online is a video of the product in use, which is much harder to fake.

20:33
than someone just talking about the product. I admit I’ve made a couple late night TikTok purchases and there’s no logic behind that. That’s the QVC angle, right? It’s late, you’re tired, you’re like, I need that and immediately it arrives at your house three days later. especially for, mean, a lot of the things I buy online are like home products, right? Things that are either like home renovation, stuff like that. And so I wanna see the product in use. I wanna see someone

21:03
putting it together, using it, cleaning it, whatever the product is. So that’s usually what convinces me. So that’s why I think TikTok does do a good job is they do a lot of demonstrations of product use. I saw one the other day, actually I get this one ad all the time because I looked for a sink online, right, kitchen sink. And now every ad I get is for this one specific kitchen sink, which is like…

21:29
you don’t have to move your countertop to install it. So that’s a big thing, right? Cause most of the when you get a sink, you’ve got to like uninstall your countertops. If they’re a stone, you have to get someone to do it for you. This one just drops in. So there’s no installation issues. And then it has like a thing that washes like the bars where they put the glass on top and push it up and down. So it’s got that. It’s got…

21:51
A dispenser, it’s got these sliding things and it’s basically someone from the very beginning. It’s a lady. So it’s obviously appealing to me, right? Like I don’t even need to get a man to help me with this, right? I dropped the sink in, I can clean glasses, I can cut vegetables. I have this little cutting thing. I have this strainer thing all comes with the sink. I’ve seen this ad probably 30 times in the past week. It’s very convincing. And if I liked a lot of like cluttery stuff on my kitchen counter, I probably would have bought the sink already. So

22:21
Those are the types of things that I think still work and will continue to work and are much harder to create with AI. Right. So someone just saying that they love the product because of X, Y, and Z, that’s not enough to convince you. You need to see a demo. I need to see a demo unless I know, like, and trust the person. I see. So if Tiffany Ivanovsky comes on and tells me how much she likes this ring that she has or this necklace or these jeans,

22:47
that’s gonna be enough for me to buy it, right? But if it’s just some random person that’s in my feed talking about a pair of jeans, probably not gonna buy it. What if it’s an avatar with like a bajillion followers that looks human? No. Okay. Cause I don’t know this, it’s kind of like, this is something that I always think is interesting. And I still do this myself, even though I think it’s really a bad idea. You go to a restaurant, I did this the other day and I was looking at the French dip or the chicken salad sandwich.

23:15
and I asked my server what she recommended. I know nothing about this person. They might be a vegetarian. I have no idea. They might not eat red meat. And I was like, which one do you like? Why do I care what she likes? I wanna know what I want, right? So it’s like, what do I care what some influencer likes or recommends? I don’t know anything about them. I can’t relate to them. But if my friend Andrea says, oh my gosh, this place has the best chicken salad. You’ll love it, because they do slivered almonds. Then I’m like, oh yeah, totally getting the chicken salad, right?

23:44
So I feel like moving forward and for most consumers, like they have to have, you know, that know, like, and trust factor to make that decision. So the AI generated person, unless it’s, you know, you’re going to capture the late night purchases, you’re going to capture the impulse buyers, you’re going to capture the shopaholics for sure. But as a general like rule, I don’t think that’s going to be super effective in convincing people to make a purchase, convincing them to follow you, you know, maybe watch your content. Sure.

24:13
but to actually go from like consuming the content to creating that purchase decision, really tough. What if the avatar said, I have a PhD in makeup or whatever it is.

24:29
So what I do think is effective is all of the doctors and surgeons on TikTok, right? Or the, like, and the other thing that I always get in the algorithm is the auto repair guys. And it’s like, this is my dad, Bernie. He’s owned an auto repair shop for 30 years. It has the name of the shop. He’s clearly an auto repair guy, right? He’s in the shop. And they’re like, dad, give me the top five cars that you would never purchase because of how many times they’re repaired. And he’s like, let me pull up our spreadsheet. And he pulls up and he’s like, never buy an Audi, right?

24:58
Never buy a Volvo, all of our fun cars that we’ve had. But those types of things, yes, right? Because I’m like, well, this guy’s worked on cars for 30 years. He’s seen every car under the sun. He has detailed spreadsheets of what cars come in and out of his shop. That’s going to influence me. So you don’t think these custom avatars are going to be a big deal? I think they’re going to be a huge deal. And I think they’re going to get a lot of followers. But I think what we see with influencers today,

25:25
We had our friend in ECF who had Kim Kardashian mention his product and he got four sales. Right? Really? I missed that. What was the thread? I want to say it was like a baby blanket or something like that, but she was talking about how much she liked it and she had purchased it. It wasn’t like he had reached out to her or anything like she had purchased it organically, was using it and talked about it in one of her Instagram posts.

25:49
and he was like, someone’s emailed him or sent it to him immediately and was like, oh my God, Kim Kardashian, you know all this stuff, right? And they were like bracing for his avalanche of sales and basically nothing. Huh, that doesn’t sound right. But if it was like, hi, I’m Dr. Sharon Williams, board certified pediatrician. I found that this blanket helps your baby sleep.

26:13
five times longer when you wrap with this way. Like immediately like, oh, this is a pediatrician. They see babies all the time. They have millions of babies to compare things to, right? Like you just, it’s a different level. That’s interesting. Cause I’ve always had the impression that Kim can move like millions of dollars with the product, with the post. I think Kim can move probably makeup, right? Kim can move shapewear. Right. Right. She can move what she’s

26:41
what she’s known for, but she can’t move anything outside of that. I guess that makes sense.

26:49
You know, I’m just worried that everything, it’s gonna be really hard to figure out what’s fake and what’s not. Yes. I mean, it’s already kind of hard with testimonials. Whenever I see an ad now that just looks too well lit or too eloquent, I instantly think it’s a fake now. And I’m not a shopper, that’s the problem. I wish I was a shopper actually. I’m not a shopper, but I’m an ad consumer. I love watching ads. Right, but what would convince me to buy something? Yeah. The threshold is much higher. You wanna see it work.

27:20
Yes. You want to see it work. And that’s why I think that those types of content where you’re actually showing the product in a successful situation is going to be so much more valuable because you’re really just teaching people, hey, this is an awesome product. does exactly what it says it does. And then obviously there’s going to be the price point factor as well, right? Like depending on how it’s priced in the market. Speaking of which, I think over in China, like

27:49
They’re not that far behind in terms of AI. There was a demo that I just watched. They have this AI video generator and all the examples for some reason were kind of e-commerce related. Like it was this, it generated this guy eating ramen, another kid like enjoying something. It looked really good. Like I couldn’t tell it apart from like real video. And it really looked like they were enjoying whatever they’re eating. The examples I saw were just food.

28:18
But imagine having, you know, AI generate this video of something that looks delicious and then just posting a link to that product. You don’t have to do any work. You don’t have to hire any models. You don’t even really have to script that much. Just the visual of someone really enjoying what they’re eating is good enough for me to buy food usually. But it’s all fake. Yeah. mean, I definitely think this is going to

28:45
this is gonna change things significantly. But I also think the people that do a good job of explaining, and let’s just talk e-commerce, right? The people that do a good job of explaining their value prop for their product, like why you need this, like what pain point are you solving, how it works, why it will change your life, how if you don’t have it, you’re missing out. The people that do that the best will continue to have success because

29:12
AI can do all those things, but not as well as the person who created it or the person that has intimate knowledge with the product. And we were talking about, we’ve mentioned him too many times in the podcast in the last month, we’re talking about Jim Wang, Andrew and I this morning, and we were talking about why his videos are so successful, because he’s crushing it on TikTok right now. And as we were talking through some of the stuff, he has a very catchy intro line, so he has a great hook, but then,

29:42
It was Andrew and I were talking about this. was literally taking out my garbage cans and we had this like moment. The reason why I think Jim is so successful is one, he’s talking about personal finance, a super saturated market. But what is one thing about Jim’s videos? Have you noticed the one thing that he does in all of his videos? He says, I’ll help you sound smarter. Yes, that’s not it. No, no, that’s not it. He’s never, he’s not talking at you. He never is looking directly at the camera.

30:10
He’s always walking and it’s almost like a side profile shot of him, right? That’s correct, yes. Okay, so think about this. When you’re learning something and do you want to like talk to your friend, like just talking about the chicken salad sandwich, right? I want someone to come alongside me and like, oh my gosh, I got that chicken salad last week. It was so good, right? This casual conversation. They’re not staring at me going, order the chicken salad, right?

30:35
When Jim makes his videos, he’s coming alongside the person that he’s teaching. He’s not in their face. It’s not a lecture. It’s like, hey, we’re on a walk and you asked me a question about my bank account and I’m going to give you the answer. And it feels so casual, so non-threatening. And by the end of it, you’re like, oh, that was really great. I learned a lot, you know, and you don’t feel like you just sat through a personal finance lecture.

31:00
I think that’s one of the keys to his success is that he’s not talking at people, he’s talking with people. Interesting. I always thought he has something he’s reading, he’s got this- No, he’s not. He’s not reading anything. If you think about those types of things, and I actually read this in a parenting book a million years ago.

31:24
And it talked about, and everything with parenting is all marketing and advertising anyway, because you basically have to teach your kids to like you, because they don’t like you basically from the beginning, because you’re the annoying parent. But it said never try to have a conversation with your boys while you’re face to face, because they don’t like making eye contact. They’d feel uncomfortable. It feels like they’re in trouble, even if you’re just having a regular conversation. The best way to have a conversation with your sons is to be doing something else. Making Legos, watching a show on TV.

31:54
cooking dinner, grilling something, right? Because then the conversation doesn’t feel intimidating, it feels natural because you’re not giving direct eye contact staring face to face. So I started trying this with my boys maybe 15 years ago. Game changer. Like absolute game changer. Because I didn’t know how to talk to my boys. They were like, know, nine and 11 and 13, they were gross and you know, very, very much boy, right? And I was like, we don’t have anything to talk about. I don’t want to grab a lizard. I don’t want a frog in my pocket. Like, you know, all these things.

32:24
but I started only having conversations with them while we were doing other things and they talked my ears off, right? Because I took away that like intimidation factor. And so I think when you’re talking to your audience, right? When you’re talking to your potential customer, like not standing there and being like, you need to do X, Y, Z. It’s like, go to a furniture store, buy a couch. Do you want a furniture salesman to stand there and give you the five…

32:49
points of their stain free fabric or do you want them to sit on the couch with you and be like, oh my God, can you imagine sitting back here during the Superbowl and you’ve got these integrated cup holders and wifi and whatever, you know what I mean? It just creates a better experience. And I think that’s much harder for AI to replicate. I think regarding the gym thing, I think it just depends. He’s got a, like even if he was looking at you, just the way he talks.

33:15
in a very casual tone, I think that’s what does it. He could look at the camera and still get the same results. I don’t think so. I think not looking at the camera, I think it makes a difference. Next thing you know, you’ll see my videos. I’ll be walking outside. I’ll be like, you don’t really have a good profile. I never noticed. Just try it. Try it sometime. I’ll try it. I’m willing to try a whole bunch of things. The problem is I can’t read off the teleprompter while I’m not looking at it. I’m fairly certain you know the material well enough.

33:44
I do, but I don’t want to edit. Yeah, I’d have to stop every sentence, I guess, like Jim does. But yeah, I’ll try it. We’ll see. But I think those types of things, because I think people listen to our podcast lately and are like, the sky is falling, right? Like everything is terrible. We haven’t had anything positive in like months. Well, no, I mean, this is a kind of like the latest. Yeah. Yeah. But I think there’s still opportunities and there’s still ways to.

34:11
create content and not be sucked into the, like use AI as a tool. There’s a lot of really cool things that you can do with it. And there’s a lot of ways it can help you with your business, lessen some of your costs, things like that. However, I don’t think you have to be replaced by an AI bot. Yeah, I was just thinking about the implications of just mass content. Yeah. Right? If you don’t have to do the filming, all you have to do is like the scripting. Yeah.

34:39
I can script up like 20 TikToks in like 40 minutes or 30 minutes, right? Yeah. So I could pump out, like if I don’t have to worry about filming or editing or anything like that, I can pump out endless content. Yeah. Right. Let’s talk about the final thing. Yes. Which I thought was pretty huge. TikTok now gives you search metrics. Oh, yes. I did see that. So Google used to do this. They took that away from you. So you had no idea.

35:07
Yes. What’s searching for what to get on your, except for search console. But anyway, TikTok’s giving you all these metrics. And I think TikTok search is going to be the next search. You mentioned this in previous episodes. Yeah, we’ve talked about this, how my kids use TikTok to search for things. Yeah. And instead of getting like 10 blue links, which already sucks because AI does a lot better job. Yeah. Imagine getting a video. But you know, this is how we find restaurants these days. Did I tell you this? No. Jen.

35:35
looks at like Bay Area restaurants on TikTok. And then she sees one that looks good, we actually go there. Interesting. So if you just do a search for like Bay Area restaurants or something like that, you’ll get a whole bunch of people just reviewing the food. They show you the food, they show you them eating it, like pictures of the menu, everything. But think about it, what are you getting in that search result? The experience.

35:57
You’re not getting someone going, I went to McDonald’s and had a cheeseburger. It was awesome. It only cost me $14 because I’m in San Francisco. You’re getting pictures of the food, pictures of the menu, pictures of the atmosphere so you can look at that restaurant and go, ooh, I’m not taking my kids there, right? Or you’re getting all that information in the video. Way better than a couple of blue links. Way better than even text actually. Yeah.

36:25
So maybe TikTok is gonna take over. There’s so much pressure on Google right now. Like every tool has their own search. Yes. Right? Every tool has their own AI built in now. Yeah. Oh, here’s a funny story. Okay, so you know, my mom moved in our area. I was showing her a chat GBT because she had not used it yet. Really? Yeah, she had not used it yet. My mom’s not, she’s kind of technically literate.

36:53
And she’s like, wait, she cured a disease. Let’s just put that out there. Yes, she cured a disease. And she’s like, well, why would I want to use AI? I mean, I just Google everything, right? Yeah. And so I was like, OK, give me something. She’s like, OK, I want to know the stock price of such and such. I’m like, that’s too easy of a question. OK. And I was like, OK, how about how do you cure that? Like, you know, the disease that she cured. So I was like, OK, how do you cure GSD1? That’s her name was her.

37:22
her disease, glycogen storage disease. We entered that into Google, whole bunch of garbage came out. Yeah. And then I entered it into chat GPT because I have a widget on there now on my phone. And she was like, Oh my god, this is incredible. And then I asked it, who’s the foremost expert, you know, on this subject, and then her name popped up. Along with a link to her, you know, NIH profile and everything. Yeah. And she’s like, Oh my god, this is incredible. Yeah.

37:50
And she’s like, how do I use this, you know, whatever. And just like that, she’s a believer. No, I will say that is one area that I feel like chat GPT really excels in. have a family member that’s had some like pretty complicated medical stuff happening and they have been like threading their doctor’s reports and all this information into chat GPT and getting a lot of really great summaries about it and being able to really like.

38:17
take that what is an overwhelming amount of information and making it really, cause they’re basically giving prompts like, break this information down into, know, four manageable point, you know, things like that, like in an informational style, you know, all those different things. And it’s actually, and it’s really helpful for like the rest of us who are like, oh, well that makes a little more sense to us. It’s supposed to having to read a 15 page medical report. There was a story a long, long time ago where,

38:46
Some guy fed in his like radiology scans or doctors. And they found something that the doctors missed basically. I haven’t heard a story like that in a while, but. Doctors are up in their game. then the final thing I wanted to mention because people still ask me about Wix shopping. just addressed it. They just announced a new AI website generation tool. Okay. Tell her what you want to sell.

39:16
you know, how you want the website to look and it just kind of automatically generates an e-commerce type for you. Wow. Okay. Uh, the examples, I actually haven’t seen a live site. I just saw Wix’s examples when I went to go research this. And so people are always asking me, well, why wouldn’t I use Wix because of this? And no tool still supports Wix really. Right. I think even to get Klaviyo using it, I think you have to jump through some hoops.

39:43
Yeah, yeah. Anything where you have to use like a third party to integrate is a really bad idea. I’m having some issues with a client in Klaviyo right now because they have some third party integrations and Klaviyo’s retired APIs and you know, yeah, it seems easy initially, but then you end up in a big dumpster fire of problems down the road when you have this huge site created with all this content on it. Correct. Which is why I still will never recommend Wix unless

40:10
they have a much larger third party developer ecosystem, or if they convince all the big name tools to support it. Wix is just like a dead end platform. You’ll get a basic store up and it might look good based on AI, but really, designing the website is not the hardest part. Designing the website is arguably the easiest part of the whole process. You say that people are dying right now. Well, I mean, plus you only have to do it once. Yeah, for sure.

40:37
Yeah. The hardest part is getting people to come to your website. Exactly. You thought building the website was hard. Just wait till you don’t have any customers. Yeah. So that’s just happened. That’s what’s happened in just like one week. Yeah. Pretty crazy. Pretty crazy.

40:55
Hope you enjoyed this episode. I feel like 2024 is the year of change and everything’s happening all at once and many companies are getting disrupted and nothing is safe. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 546. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywebcoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and are staying in the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quote, or Job podcast, the place where I cover the latest strategies to grow an online business. And today, we’re gonna talk about Etsy and how a critical decision made this year by the CEO will have a huge rippling effect on all sellers in the United States. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death.

00:29
Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:52
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Drop podcast. In this episode, we’re gonna talk about what’s going on with Etsy right now and my predictions for where the platform is going and it is not looking promising. Now imagine a marketplace filled with counterfeit goods and mass produced products where the sheer number of impossibly cheap listings explodes overnight. Well, this isn’t a hypothetical scenario, it’s actually happening right now as Etsy sellers and China makes its grand re-entrance onto the platform.

01:21
And right now we’re at the beginning of a transformation that will change the Etsy platform forever. So in this episode, I’m going to explain the implications of China’s return to Etsy, decode what it means for you and teach you how to navigate this new landscape. But first off, what is going on exactly and why are Etsy sellers so pissed off? Well, basically it’s because Chinese sellers are coming back to Etsy because Etsy is under severe financial pressure from their investors.

01:49
Now these past three years were not good for Etsy stock and their gross sales have been decreasing year over year. So I’m looking at a graph right now in 2021. I think they had 13.49 billion in sales and two years later they’re at 13.16 billion dollars in sales. So it’s decreasing which is not good. Now ask yourself what is the easiest way to boost profits on a stagnant marketplace and that’s to bring China back on the platform.

02:19
Now, why did I use the words coming back? Well, it’s because Chinese sellers used to be on Etsy up until 2021, where they were silently removed due to worries about protecting the integrity of the handmade marketplace. But recently, they added China back onto the Etsy payments approved country list, which is essentially like rolling out the red carpet for Chinese sellers. Now, from Etsy’s perspective, this is going to be great for earnings.

02:46
as it opens up the market to 1.4 billion new people. But from an Etsy seller’s perspective, things could go very wrong. And here’s what I predict will happen, and this isn’t really guesswork. When Amazon started encouraging Chinese sellers onto their platform back in 2016, it made life difficult for all sellers. Etsy is just a couple of steps behind Amazon, and I guarantee you, history will repeat itself. So mark my words, here’s what’s gonna happen. First off,

03:15
Etsy is going to be instantly flooded with new Chinese sellers peddling copyrighted products and violating legitimate sellers’ trademarks left and right. Now back in the day, prior to 2021, thousands of Chinese sellers were stealing images from other sellers and swarming the marketplace with knockoff products from Chinese factories. Now this is going to happen again. Etsy is going to have a huge onboarding problem and they aren’t going to be prepared for it. And I say this because Amazon had the exact same problem back in 2016.

03:44
Now back in 2016, it was pretty easy to get an Amazon account and you could sell on the platform with very little verification. But once they opened the door to China, they were immediately overwhelmed by new Chinese sellers accounts. Now it took many years for Amazon to adjust, but you now have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to get an account on Amazon today. So for example, today to sell on Amazon, you got to go through a 10 minute interview, show legal identification and utility bills to show your real address.

04:12
and basically prove that you are who you really are. It’s actually quite an ordeal to get an account today, and it took a lot of time and manpower for Amazon to implement these stringent procedures. Now the same thing is going to happen to Etsy, and Etsy will have to deal with this correctly, otherwise the platform is going to be overwhelmed with new applications. Second of all, China has incredibly low wages, so they can mass produce products far cheaper and more efficiently than any individual seller on Etsy. And if you look at Etsy’s terms of service,

04:42
They technically allow production partners as long as all handmade items are made or designed by you and mass produced items have been on Etsy for quite a long time now. But you haven’t seen anything yet. Once Chinese factories start selling direct on the platform, it is going to flood the marketplace with cheap mass produced products. Now I got to be a little bit careful what I say here, but let’s just say that sellers in China have a penchant for breaking the law. The culture is just different over there and they’re going to do whatever it takes to maximize their sales.

05:12
Now I’ve interacted with many Chinese sellers in the past and I’ve seen rampant piracy on Amazon, eBay and other marketplaces. And let’s just say that it’s going to happen. Etsy already has a copyright problem with the tiny amount of sellers it has now. But as of now, the floodgates are completely open. You’re to see fake Taylor Swift stuff, fake name brands, the whole gamut. And Etsy is going to need to have some strict onboarding procedures in place to fight it. Now if Amazon’s past was any indication, I am skeptical that Etsy is going to be able to handle it.

05:43
Banning Chinese sellers right now on Amazon is like playing whack-a-mole. Because they’re so far away, it’s easy for a Chinese seller to have a ton of different accounts. If one account gets banned, they have another ready to go. And trust me, even though Etsy implemented a new $15 account setup fee, it’s not going to change anything. As of right now, Etsy is not doing video interviews or any really stringent checks that Amazon performs for new accounts, so waves and waves of Chinese sellers are going to get onto Etsy breaking copyright and trademark law.

06:13
Now don’t get me wrong, Etsy’s going to do their best to police these accounts, but there will be and already be collateral damage through algorithmic account flagging. If you look in the forums and Etsy groups, many Etsy sellers have been banned for seemingly no reason as of late. One YouTuber named Matira Made Jewelry recently had her account banned after three years of being a seller on Etsy and having hundreds of sales and great reviews. There are countless stories like this in the Etsy community. All you got to do is perform a simple Google search.

06:42
Now the next thing that’s going to happen is that the sheer number of Chinese sellers is going to dilute the entire marketplace, making it harder to gain visibility with your products. And today, over 50 % of the top sellers on Amazon are Chinese sellers, and mark my words, this exact same thing is going to happen to Etsy. Both legal and illegal products will be sold on Etsy from China for impossibly low prices and pull buyers away from existing sellers who have similar legal products that are actually handmade.

07:10
It’s the illegal products that will likely hurt sellers the most. Even though Etsy will do their best to ban illegal sellers and products, the illegal Etsy listings will generate sales for months before they are taken down. And regardless of these bans, new Chinese sellers are going to pop up immediately, selling the same illegal products, and it’s going to get out of control. And as we all know, the Etsy algorithm is based on a quality score which is determined by your sales. Chinese sellers will compete very aggressively based on price,

07:36
which will leach away quality scores and sales from existing sellers. Now don’t get me wrong, I hope I’m wrong and that Etsy will have all this under control, but this is still a huge problem on Amazon even after many years and Amazon has far more resources than Etsy to fight it. Now the next point that I want to bring up is that Chinese sellers have huge advantages over existing sellers in terms of prices, taxes, customs duties, basically everything. So first off, Chinese sellers can ship their products directly from China

08:05
without having to pay sales tax or customs duties due to the de minimis rule. The de minimis rule states that a seller does not have to pay import duties if the product being sold is under 800 bucks. And since most Etsy products fall way under this amount, Chinese sellers on Etsy won’t have to pay any import taxes. Now in contrast, most existing Etsy sellers are getting the raw materials from companies in the US where all the taxes and duties are already baked in. And for the existing Etsy sellers importing from China,

08:34
they’re likely importing containers of goods and paying taxes and tariffs on their products. Now, the other huge advantage that Chinese sellers have are low labor costs. And with the floodgates open, Chinese factories will start selling direct on the Etsy platform at rock bottom prices that no Etsy seller is going to be able to match. Just imagine a mom and pop shop selling handmade mittens competing against a factory in China paying their workers one-tenth of the wages in the U.S. Just not going to be a fair fight. Now, you might think that shipping from China will be slow and expensive,

09:04
But that’s actually not the case either. Right now, Tmoo is killing it in the US, and they are able to offer free or cheap shipping to the US with delivery times of four to 15 days. Now, in case you’ve never heard of Tmoo, Tmoo is a relatively new online marketplace that sells mass-produced merchandise direct from China at dirt cheap prices. Now, because of the current state of the economy, low-cost shopping sites like Tmoo are rapidly gaining market share. In fact, in just one short year,

09:31
Tmoo is already getting one third the shopping traffic of Amazon. And even though packages take a little longer to arrive, it hasn’t affected Tmoo’s sales and the same Chinese sellers on Tmoo will eventually come onto the Etsy platform. Now the final nail in the coffin is that the sheer number of sellers will greatly reduce the visibility of existing products. Right now there are about 10 million sellers on Amazon and about 6.3 million are Chinese sellers. And right now there are about 7.5 million sellers on Etsy.

10:01
Now if those 6.3 million sellers come to Etsy, the seller pool will essentially double. And that’s not even counting the number of product listings, which is going to grow exponentially. Because Chinese sellers will be far more aggressive than the average Etsy seller, the listing pool could be diluted by 10x or more. Now having battled against Chinese sellers in the past on Amazon, I can definitely say that Chinese sellers are willing to take lower margins, they have a cost advantage, and they have an advantage in shipping costs as well.

10:29
Anyway, I don’t want to depress you guys, but that’s my two cents on the Etsy situation. But before we jump to any conclusions, let’s just review the facts. Etsy has added China to Etsy payments. They’ve not made a formal announcement yet, and it hasn’t been 100 % confirmed that Chinese sellers are going to be able to sell on the platform. But let’s just be realistic here. Abysmal earnings for the past three years means that Etsy needs to do something to boost shareholder value. And when a country is added to Etsy payments, the country is going to be selling on the platform.

11:00
And for a country the size of China and how aggressive they are at selling on Amazon, new Chinese sellers will exponentially increase the seller base and listing base on Etsy. More sellers on Etsy means less visibility and exponentially more competition. Now, if past performance on Amazon is any indication, there’s going to be rampant piracy, trademark and copyright infringement on the platform that Etsy is going to have to fight algorithmically. Etsy is going to do their best to fight the bad actors and many innocent sellers are going to get banned.

11:29
In order for all this stuff to work out in the long run, Etsy will have to do many things right with a pool of resources that is far less than Amazon. And right now, the rules for selling on Etsy are that all handmade items must be either made or designed by you. Etsy store owners are permitted to sell produced goods under certain conditions. Well, with Chinese factories in the mix, the lines between handmade products and factory mass produced products are about to get even more blurred. The Chinese have a cost advantage.

11:59
They have a shipping advantage, have a production advantage, and it’s easier for them to break the laws with impunity. Now, overall, I’m not saying that it’s game over for Etsy, but it’s going to get a lot harder. Meanwhile, on the periphery, sites like Tmoo are flooding the market with cheap Chinese goods, which puts further pressure on Etsy sellers. Now I want to hear what you all have to say about this. So get in the comments. Let me know how you feel about China’s likely return to Etsy’s marketplace. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Let me know what you think.

12:28
Hope you enjoyed this episode and I want to know what you think. Are Chinese sellers going to ruin the platform? Let me know in the comments or send me an email at steve at mywifequitterjob.com. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 544. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head over to mywifequitterjob.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.

00:00
You’re listening to the MyWifeQuarterJob podcast, the place where I cover the latest strategies to grow an online business. Now for some reason, I’ve gotten more more questions from people wanting to start a print-on-demand business lately. Plus, there seems to be an uptick in the number of spammy videos on YouTube that have been advertising this business model, along with using AI-generated images. So I thought that I would set the record straight today and provide you with a realistic view of what it takes to succeed with this business model.

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But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

00:53
So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

01:04
Welcome to the My Wife QuitterDrop podcast. In this episode, I’ll answer all the most commonly asked questions about print-on-demand drop shipping, including the questions that most people will not give you a straight answer on. Now, print-on-demand has a reputation for being a get-rich-quick scheme because it sounds too easy. You don’t need to store inventory, you don’t need to ship or fulfill orders, and you don’t need much money to get started. All you have to do is create designs, and the print-on-demand company does the rest. Now, while all these statements are technically true,

01:34
A common misconception is that running a successful print-on-demand business is easy. But in reality, success with print-on-demand has many pros and cons and isn’t as straightforward as you are led to believe. So in this episode, I’ll answer all the in-depth questions related to print-on-demand to provide you with a complete view of what it takes to run a profitable online store. Now, when it comes to print-on-demand, all the gurus out there tend to focus on the positive aspects of print-on-demand

02:02
such as how easy it is and how cheap it is to start. But what they don’t tell you is that the margins are pretty horrific. Sure, you got full control over pricing, but there’s only so much money you can charge for a t-shirt or a hoodie before no one’s gonna buy from you. For example, if you were to go to Printful, a pretty decent quality shirt costs around $16.25, which includes printing on one side of the garment. Now, shipping for this garment is $4.69,

02:31
which makes your cost a total of $20.94. Now to make a profit of just five bucks a shirt, you need to sell it for $26. If you want to make a paltry 10 bucks, you have to price your shirt at $31. Now realistically, most people aren’t going to be willing to pay $26 or $31 for a t-shirt unless you’re a celebrity or an influencer. Heck, the most I’ve ever paid for a t-shirt was 40 bucks at a concert, but that was a special occasion.

02:59
I generally would never pay that amount for the exact same t-shirt at a store. Now sure, there are cheaper t-shirts to sell from Printful, but if you want to sell a high quality product, then $15 to $16 is what you’re going to have to pay. Now it’s because of the extremely low margins of print-on-demand that I decided to buy my own printer and print my own handkerchiefs and linens in-house. And for all of you who don’t normally follow me,

03:24
I launched a line of custom printed linens at my store during the holiday season last year, mainly because I was fed up with the margins of print on demand. So I said, screw it. I’m going to buy a printer and keep most of the profit. So I ended up buying the Sublistar DTF Star 4 printer last year with the plan of launching a line of custom printed linens. And I’ll give you a completely transparent rundown of the numbers compared to print on demand. Okay. So using my previous example, a printed t-shirt from Printful costs around $16 and 25 cents.

03:54
But when you print the exact same shirt yourself with a printer, it’s way cheaper. Now, first off, you can buy an apples to apples identical blank t-shirt for $4 or less in the United States. And if you source t-shirts in bulk from China, you can literally get them for a dollar or less per shirt. Now I’ve owned my printer for almost a year now. And the cost of ink and materials for a t-shirt is about a dollar for a pretty complicated design with lots of solid colors.

04:23
But for most simpler designs, like when we print our handkerchiefs, it’s easily less than a dollar, probably like 25 to 30 cents, since our designs don’t require that much ink. So let’s go back to t-shirts again. So basically your cost of goods for a shirt is only about five bucks as opposed to $16.25. And all of a sudden, you can list your shirt for only 15 bucks and still make a 3X profit. And at 15 bucks, far more people are likely to buy from you.

04:51
And let’s just throw some warm numbers in the mix. Let’s say you get your shirts from China for about a buck. That’s basically $2 a shirt, which means that your profit margins are about 7 to X greater than with print on demand. Now, the beauty of printing yourself is that lower prices leads to more sales and the lower cost of goods always leads to more profit. Higher margins also allows you to pay for advertising and still come out ahead and it is exponential. So overall, it’s very hard to make a living selling print on demand t-shirts.

05:21
In order to make a decent wage, you gotta sell a ton of shirts. For example, let’s say your goal is to make $100,000 a year and you profit $5 a shirt. Well, you gotta sell 20,000 shirts per year or 55 shirts per day. It can be done, but selling shirts at 26 bucks a pop each is gonna be a tough sell. Now, in one of my YouTube videos, I’m not sure if you guys follow me on YouTube, some of you guys asked about my printer, so I’ll just give you a little preview here.

05:49
I got the Sublistar Star 4 DTF printer back in 2023. And the printer is around six to $10,000, depending on what you get. Now, occasionally this company will have a killer sale. So if you sign up for their newsletter, sometimes they have deals, like they had a really killer deal for like $3,000, I think last year. Anyway, the way the technology works is that you first print your design onto a special film.

06:14
Then you apply special DTF powder and then bake the film in an oven for 60 seconds. And finally, you take your garment, place the film on top, and then using a heat press, you press the design onto the fabric. Now for all of you who are wondering, this is the exact same technology that many print-on-demand providers use, and the quality is excellent. The design is dark and crisp and will survive many washings. Now I’m looking at my numbers right now, and we pretty much made up the cost of the printer in profit within three months of owning the printer.

06:44
And now because the printer is paid off, everything I print here on out is gravy in terms of profit. Now that being said, maintaining the printer is a bit more involved than your average desktop inkjet printer. For example, the machine’s much messier than a normal printer, and you’ll find yourself cleaning it at least once per week. Also, you got to run the cleaning cycle periodically, or else the print head will clog up over time. I’ve actually ruined a couple print heads already, but I think I know what I’m doing now. But basically,

07:12
This is not the type of printer that you occasionally use. You have to continue using it regularly or else the head will clog up basically. Now the other drawback is you have to be familiar with Adobe Photoshop or any other image editing software. So for example, we get many orders per day for our printed merchandise and to be efficient, you have to create a single file with all of your designs packed tightly so you don’t waste film. So since I’m a former engineer, I wrote an Adobe Photoshop script

07:40
that pulls all the orders off of my website, aligns them efficiently, packs the designs, and then sends them to the printer automatically. And as with everything in life, there’s a learning curve, but the profits are worth it. Now, the other aspect of print-on-demand that no guru will tell you about is the limited range of products and design options that print-on-demand companies offer. For example, let’s say you want to print on a very specific item and sell it in your shop.

08:07
No print-on-demand company is going to be willing to print on merchandise that is not their own. One time, we had a customer who wanted to print on a very specific branded towel that no print-on-demand company carries. But we were actually able to fulfill her order at a significant upcharge because with this printer, we can basically print on anything. Now, in some cases, a print-on-demand company may even limit where you can print a design on the garment itself. For example, custom cap,

08:34
which is actually the print-on-demand company that my kids use for their store, will not let you print a design on the sleeve of your garment. And again, with your own printer, you can print anywhere, even on a pair of canvas shoes. The other downside to print-on-demand is that the quality of the products in the print can vary depending on the print-on-demand company. For example, if you decide to use Printify as your print-on-demand provider, Printify is actually made up of many different print-on-demand contractors with different equipment and different practices.

09:03
If you were to place an identical order across two different providers on Printavai, you would probably get different results. One time, we used the print-on-demand company to print 50 t-shirts for my daughter’s school team, and the print quality was poor on about 20 % of the merchandise. Now, even though the print-on-demand company refunded us for the faulty shirts, we did not have enough time to place another order because the processing time was so long, which leads me to the next downside of print-on-demand.

09:32
Shipping can be more expensive and take longer to process than when you do it yourself. And according to Printful’s website, 97 % of the orders are shipped within five business days and about half are shipped within three days. If a customer needs their order rushed, which happens a lot, believe it or not, during the holidays, you are out of luck. Now these next aspects of print on demand are a little nitpicky, but they are annoying nonetheless.

09:57
Now my kids launched their own print on demand t-shirt store when they were nine and 11 years old over at kidincharge.com. And the store has been running now for about four years. And in those four years, I cannot tell you how many products have been discontinued. And whenever a product is discontinued, you got to go back onto the print on demand company’s website and recreate the entire product all over again. Now granted the process only takes about five minutes, but imagine updating 50 or a hundred or even a thousand products at a time.

10:26
It gets tedious real quick. The other thing that’s annoying about selling print-on-demand products is that your provider may be out of stock of certain sizes of your merchandise. And you’re not going to find out unless a customer has placed an order on your website. One holiday season, our print-on-demand provider just happened to run out of medium-sized t-shirts, which is the most common size that people buy. So we had to scramble and shift the product to a completely different t-shirt brand without testing the print quality or the shirt quality.

10:55
Stuff like this happens all the time, and you have to stay on top of it. Print-on-demand is not truly set it and forget it. Also, if you’re going to start a print-on-demand dropshipping business, you definitely want to build a brand. After all, selling printed merchandise is a very competitive industry because there are very few barriers to entry. But the problem is that with most print-on-demand companies is that your packaging and branding options are limited.

11:20
Now many print-on-demand companies do not allow you to include product inserts or other branding elements that make your brand stand out. And if they do allow you to include inserts or branding on the packaging, it’s going to cost you extra. Now the price of the product is already expensive, but adding custom branding elements will make it even more expensive for the customer. But the main concern that you should all have with print-on-demand is the rise of companies like Tmoo and Shein. If you aren’t familiar with Tmoo,

11:47
It is a marketplace where consumers can buy products directly from China at rock bottom prices. And just to give you an example, a fully printed t-shirt from Tmoo costs about $7 or less, including shipping from China, which takes seven to 15 days. And at that low price, it’s hard to compete with Tmoo selling your own $26 shirt that is more or less the same thing. Here’s the other thing about Chinese companies. There is rampant piracy everywhere. If you were to design a popular t-shirt that generates a lot of sales,

12:16
I’m willing to bet that it will be copied on Tima within a week. And at $7 versus $26 with Print On Demand, you can’t really compete with them unless you are printing your shirts yourself. In any case, I hope I didn’t poo poo Print On Demand too much here. I just want to make sure that you guys have all the facts before you jump in. But bottom line though, Print On Demand is a great way to dip your toes in the e-commerce waters without much upfront investment. But you’ll probably never make life-changing money with this business model.

12:46
until you start doing more of it yourself.

12:51
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now if you want to learn more about Print On A Man or more about the printers that I own, I will put them in the show notes. I actually just bought a new and different printer that had just arrived last week, so I haven’t had a chance to review it yet, but I will keep you posted. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 542. If you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.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.