00:24
But before we begin, want to you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are almost sold out over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods

00:53
and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th May 16th.

01:22
And right now, this is the last chance to get your tickets. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % 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.

01:51
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.

02:03
Welcome back to another episode of the My Wife Put Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the Pet Summit. I have no idea what that is, but I just know Tony spoke four times at this event and there’s a lot of influencers and e-commerce folks at this conference. Yes, it was a, you know, I went in there not knowing what to expect at all. We got connected through our friend, Kristin Levine, who is in, I think both the courses doing content and e-commerce with us, but she connected

02:34
myself and Liz with the Pet Summit folks and yeah, we ended up, I ended up filling in for someone at the last minute that got COVID. So my three talks quickly went to four the week of the event. So it was very interesting. I learned a ton about the pet industry, which I will say, you probably teach the opposite of this in profitable online store, but I think there’s still a big opportunity to get into the pet product world after being at this event.

03:02
I don’t, what do mean I teach the opposite? There’s so many students selling pet stuff. It’s super competitive, right? Like there’s, think there’s a lot of sellers. However, after being there and I listened to like state of the pet industry, I don’t know. State of the union for pets. It was given by this guy who’s, you know, on the board, but he’s former like CEO of PetSmart and stuff like that. But he said that the industry this year is projected to do $154 billion.

03:32
And what is that up from the previous year? They’re up 8%, I think. Year over year. And what’s interesting is their whole marketing strategy is to get people to own more pets. That makes sense. Yeah. Which I’m like, Bob Barker had his day. No more spay and neuter. Like, now we want to fill the earth with dogs and cats. But anyway, yeah, so that was.

03:59
the first eye-opening takeaway that I had was listening to that keynote and realizing that in my mind, the pet space was just really saturated, but. I’ve never considered the pet industry saturated, actually. I there’s a lot of sellers, there’s a lot of innovate. Like, there’s a lot of things you can do with it. Yes. So anyway, that was my first thought was like, let’s sell some pet products. Just because the amount and then the amount of money that people spend on their, especially dogs and cats.

04:29
Obviously, the pet industry is much bigger than that with all the reptiles and fish and the little rodent type pets, but the amount of money that people are spending in pet products is ridiculous. And the one area that had like, I think a decent amount of growth was pet food toppings.

04:49
No way. Yes. like I met. So and the thing is, it was at the convention center in Orlando. So like when you have an event at the convention center, when you eat at the restaurants around the convention center, it’s filled with people at the convention. Right. So you’re even if you’re off site, you’re still usually sitting next to someone who’s going to the same event, kind of like the Canton Fair. Right. There’s tons of people in that area at that period of time. And so I met multiple people and I was like, and usually they were on the manufacturer or, you know, product side. And

05:19
One guy was like, I sell gravy. Like their whole industry is like gravy that you put on dog food. Interesting. Yeah. OK. Anyway. Yeah. So I don’t and that’s not even like supplement stuff, right? That’s just like, oh, they can’t just have regular pet food. They have to have pet food enhanced by like when they said pet toppings. All I could think of was like an ice cream sundae.

05:43
We can’t just give our pet regular dog food anymore. In the refrigerated pet food space is also a crazy, where you can get your food custom made for your pet and all that. Anyway, nuts. I have never owned a dog before, but if my dog would not eat food without a topping, I would just starve him for a little bit. You’re going to get hate. Anyway, but it got me thinking about the whole

06:11
It’s not just about the one thing, right? How do you create that additional value add to something to sell, whether it be physical product or digital, but you know, it wasn’t good enough that we just sold pet food, right? Now we sell pet food plus pet food enhancers. Right. So I know. So pets are basically becoming humans. Yes. And I think their goal, I think they said that they wanted, I think right now it’s like 60 % of households own a pet.

06:38
and they wanna try to push it to about 70 because if they can get it to 70, the numbers tip as far as revenue like pretty significantly. I went into this keynote just wanting the lunch, I’m gonna be honest. I was like, oh, free lunch, sign me up. And I actually was just completely captivated by the amount of data revolving, just kind of like, holy cow, this is a huge industry. And I clearly don’t spend any money on my pets. I was like, I feel like a very bad pet parent.

07:08
There’s someone at ECF who sells iguana equipment or something like that. Yes, the cage people. Cage people, yes. In terraniums, yes, yes. And they’re killing it. Yeah, oh yeah. Not surprising after being at that. So the Pet Summit itself was basically attached to the Global Pet Expo, which that I would say is the Canton Fair for pets, for pet products. okay. So everything from like the…

07:36
You would have appreciated it because it was everything from the very expensive display setups for the big dog food brands and the big cat food brands to the Asian vendors, right, that it looks just like they picked up their booth from the Canton Fair and put it in Orlando to people that had invented pet products. So lot of people that had, there were a lot of inventors there. So the shark tank style stuff to,

08:04
And then like crazy stuff like you can buy hiking pants for your dog. I know, I know, it was crazy. So there were 1,100 vendors at the Global Pet Expo and then the Pet Summit was for pet influencers and pet businesses on the marketing side. So basically two events kind of held simultaneously working together. One was more about walking the floor, making the connections, talking about

08:32
you know, products, what’s coming to the industry. And then the sessions were definitely more business and then the whole influencer track. And it was interesting because the influencer track was all topics geared towards bloggers, right? Or content creators, not really bloggers. But then the bloggers wanted to be on the floor walking the expo to get the free product. You know what I mean? It was just like old school blogging conference. How are the prices? Did you talk to any of the vendors?

09:01
for like the pricing of their products. It’s probably wholesale. We didn’t talk to any, we didn’t talk to anybody. Now, probably wholesale for some of the stuff and you could see they have these little like cubes where they would be in there with like their calculator and their order sheets and stuff. So I think like big companies were actually placing orders. Some people that we met offsite were talking about how they were there. One guy was in London, he’s trying to break into the US as far as bringing his products over here. A lot of people on Amazon.

09:30
So a lot of pet people that typically would sell direct to like a store, like you’re selling at Chewy or PetSmart also are now on Amazon where they weren’t in the past. And I will tell you, most of the pet brands do not know how to do Amazon. That was a big takeaway that I got. So on the expo floor, it wasn’t factories, right? It was more like people’s products.

09:55
Yes, although I think there were definitely a couple of like there was some Canton Fair looking stuff there for sure. OK, yeah. But but it was such a I mean, 1100 vendors. That’s a pretty large expo floor. I don’t think we got I don’t think we walked the entire thing. So these Amazon sellers, if they don’t know what they’re doing, how are they being successful? mean, Amazon these days pretty much requires that you know what you’re doing. Yes. So here’s what they’ve all done. So anyone who’s out there and has like an Amazon business hit these people up.

10:25
They’re like, oh, we have a guy that does our Amazon. Like when we would talk to them about it specifically, it’s like, oh, we have three guys. And I was like, but if you look at your listing, you can see that this is all wrong. We were having like helpful conversations. We weren’t just walking up to brands and going, hey, have you checked your Amazon listing lately? But usually the people at the booth had no idea what was happening on Amazon. I think they feel like, like one people that we, a group that we talked to for a while, they actually sell hay.

10:55
on Amazon. Oh, okay. And so we actually talked to the owner, the owner’s son. We ended up just having a conversation about it. And he’s like, well, I, you know, we’re talking to the youngest son and he said, well, you know, my dad told me that I was in charge of Amazon and we needed to get our products on Amazon. So we pulled up his listing because we were looking at it from the UGC, you talking to him about working with influencers. And so we’re looking at this and Liz has said, you know,

11:23
do you know how much money you’re losing on every sale? And he’s like, what do you mean losing? She’s like, what’s your price point with Amazon fees? They’re in the size of the pack. Like there’s no possible way that you’re making money on these products. And he’s like, yeah, well, there’s some of our best sellers in the store. So we needed them on Amazon. So they just don’t really have a great strategy. And I think a lot of them don’t understand. It’s kind of like they got told to go on Amazon, but then no one has any Amazon experience. Bail ahead has got to be really heavy.

11:52
Yes, this is like chicken hay. So it’s not as big, the package was like a small bag of dog food. So they’re selling this for 10.99 on Amazon. Oh, OK. You’re not making money on that, right? But they did have one product. Well, he’s like, we have one product that’s our hero product on Amazon. And that one did make sense financially.

12:15
So anyway, but a lot of the companies are I think are in that squeeze of you know, we’re going to PetSmart, we’re going to Chewy, we’re in the little tractor supply, whatever. But you know, Amazon is another channel that we’re not utilizing. So they hire someone’s brother to get the listings up. I am curious, you spoke four times. Yes. You want to just tell the audience what your topics were? Yeah. So the first talk that Liz and I gave together was on the Amazon Influencer program.

12:45
and this was specifically to the influencers. And this was an interesting group of influencers because most of them actually had no website. They were strictly Instagram or TikTok or both, which to me is, it made my heart hurt because, I mean, and these people like just dwarf us, right? They’ve got a million followers on Instagram. Their dogs are famous. People are asking for photos, like legit internet famous people. However,

13:14
As I’m talking to them, I’m like, so how do you get people on your email list? Are you putting this stuff on YouTube? Most people weren’t even doing YouTube. And everybody that when I talked to them, and Liz and I had a lot of conversations, it was, I know I need to be doing YouTube. That was the… We get that a lot. mean, it’s kind of a hurdle to get started. It is, but these people are already creating videos every single day, sometimes five and 10 videos a day. That’s true. So that was…

13:42
That was like, okay, you’ve already done all the hard part. So the interesting thing is there was the one bucket of people that, know, just Instagram or TikTok. And then there was this other bucket of people that I feel like have such a leg up because not only are they on Instagram and TikTok, they have a website, they had courses, they were selling physical products. One of them, one guy that we met, he sells, oh my gosh, what was the name of it? Like puppy aid, it’s like Gatorade for dogs. Oh my God.

14:11
But he knew it, he’s like, yeah, I’ve got 100,000 Instagram people, but I need to make money from them. So he does virtual dog training courses, he’s got a physical product, he’s got brand. So there were some people that clearly understood the benefit of diversifying that revenue. So we went and told him about the Amazon Influencer program, because these people are already making videos about products on Amazon.

14:37
and they have no problem getting accepted to the program. In fact, many of them were already in the program, but were like, I didn’t really know what it was about. So that was a fun talk because everybody in the room was like, oh, I can do this right this minute. Like I can upload videos today. So that was exciting, because it’s always nice when you give a talk and people are like, oh, this is doable. And then what was interesting is there were some brands that came to the talk who immediately came up to us afterwards and were like, how do we work with the influence?

15:06
It’s like, how do we get these on our listings? Which was funny because we’re like, come to the talk at four o’clock or we’ll teach you how to work with influencers and get the content on your listings. So then the next talk we gave was basically the brand side of it. So what is that UGC on Amazon? How does it work? Most brands are very confused because they think it’s people posting on their TikTok or Instagram and driving traffic to Amazon. And that’s not what the Amazon Influencer program is. It’s where the, you know, the UGC from the content creators live on the listings.

15:35
And the big thing for brands, which most people don’t get is in order to be eligible for this, you have to put your own branded video on the listing first. And once the brand uploads their own video, you’ve unlocked that for influencers to then create the content. And so most of these brands had video content that they weren’t utilizing to get that unlocked. So anyway, so that was an interesting talk because the brands had no clue what we were talking about.

16:03
had never even heard of this, didn’t really understand. And then when we started going through people’s listings and they’re like, wait, how could they already, they had a video so they had unlocked that upper carousel video slot. But they’re like, wait, I didn’t tell this person to make a video. And we’re like, well, if you have a top selling product in pets, which is really crazy, and especially for the influencers, pets are really high commission rate. That’s 4 % on Amazon. So if a product is categorized correctly on Amazon, this is

16:32
like one of the sweet spots to make revenue with videos. And the brands are like, but wait, we didn’t tell that person to make a video. What is this? And we’re like, well, this is what happens. And when you have a hot product, influencers are gonna find it and make that content.

16:49
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.

17:18
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.

17:30
So I’m curious, those influencers that you talked to that didn’t have a website or an audience, how are they making money? Brand deals, all brand deals. Wow. Yeah. Okay. That’s like my least favorite way to make money. I know, brand deals and then some of that is also through like TikTok affiliates. So TikTok affiliates is really big. So any, and I don’t know if we’re even, are we talking about this? We are talking about it at Seller Summit. I think Tiffany’s gonna talk about it. Yeah.

18:00
But TikTok affiliates is actually really lucrative for the affiliates because I didn’t know this. They make 20 % of the sales.

18:10
So yeah, at ECF there was a talk where this woman had very few followers on TikTok, made $80,000 in the span of like a month promoting one product. Cause her TikTok went viral. Yep. And when I was talking, I was actually having this conversation this week about how much affiliates get. I said, so you make 20 % if you promote it on TikTok shop, right? As an affiliate. But if you promote something on Amazon, you get 2%. Yeah. So

18:39
It’s a huge difference. Shoot. Should I be hawking products on TikTok? Yes, you should. Start talking about the hair straightener. So yeah, most of the influencers are making money from brand deals and then some affiliate and then TikTok shop. Although I covered. So then the next talk I did was my fill in talk. And I don’t remember what the lady was supposed to talk about, I just did the diversifying your income talk.

19:09
And I had, basically pulled one of our webinar slides for it. And what Liz and I did was just switch out a lot of the graphics for pet type products, just doesn’t make more sense. And then after the first day, so the first day neither of us spoke, but we met all these people and we came back to the room and literally read it all of our slides because we realized who we were talking to. You know, it was like eye-opening. And what I realized with this group was that

19:36
None of them had that foundational property. None of them had the website. None of them had the e-bills list. Not none. Large percentage of people had no way to capture the customer. And there was a girl who talked the day before who talked about the Google update. Did that go over everyone’s heads? No, she did. gave a great talk on explaining basically why it was so bad.

20:02
But the point of her thing was basically like it decimated her site over the past like three updates. And she positioned it in this, and she blogs about like Docsens, right? So she has a very niche audience. And she basically was like, I had finally reached that six figure, which is sort of the pinnacle of blogging, right? Like content creator making six figures a year.

20:29
That’s when you kind of know like, okay, this isn’t a hobby anymore. This is a real job. And then she got hit with like three Google updates and basically just, her site just crap. Like she doesn’t have hardly any traffic anymore. And she can’t get it back. it’s, you I know of her. you know, I know she’s not doing shady stuff. Like she just got caught, right? Like in the updates and there was probably nothing she could have done. You know, she was doing all the things right when it was right. And then,

20:59
It wasn’t right anymore. I’m curious for all those people who have TikTok accounts in the event that TikTok gets banned in six months. What are they? Did that come up? Yes, people talked about it a lot and nobody really has an answer other than I don’t think it’s going to get banned. I am a little skeptical, too, that it’s going to get banned. think something’s going to happen. I agree, although they just banned it in Florida for 14 and under. Did they really? Yes. Wow. Florida. How about that? Yeah.

21:29
14 and under, it’s banned. All my kids are not 14 anymore, so lucky them. They aged out of the law. Okay. All it takes is a couple states to start that, right? Yes. I don’t necessarily think banning it for kids under 14 is that bad of an idea. Oh, no. I am fully on board with that. I would say 18 until they go to college. Yes. I’m not really for people things getting banned in general. It bothers me when I watch those hearings and like,

21:58
clearly the people in the government have never opened the TikTok app once in their life. It’s embarrassing to me. It’s like, at least know what you’re talking about. I’m not saying TikTok’s great. It’s not all great, but you sound like a fool. Did you watch that hearing with the CEO of TikTok? Lord. I was just embarrassed. I was like, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that you guys didn’t even like open the app and watch Pookie for like five minutes. Come on. So anyway, yeah, there was a lot of talk of that.

22:26
And so what I ended up changing my talk to was, hey, you’re making really, these people are making really good influencer money, which is hard because I remember when I was making tons of money doing influencer deals and it’s like too good to be true, right? You’re like, this brand wants to pay me $5,000 to do what? know, put my dog in a stroller and walk it around. And so I remember how that felt. And so,

22:51
I tried to craft this balance between, this isn’t a bad thing that you’re doing this. These brand deals, you’ve worked hard to grow your channels, good for you. But every time you take a brand deal, you’re taking a piece of work that takes you time. And these people are creating really great content, so it’s not like they’re just talking with a phone, walking down the street, which is fine too, but these people are doing heavy edits, really nice production value type stuff, and they have to include their pet.

23:21
You know, it’s complicated. sounds like pretty miserable, actually. If your pet’s not cooperative, you can’t put together a good video, right? OK, yes. And can I just tell like a side note story? Sure. the opening night. Well, so pets were allowed to come to this thing. Oh, God. So like there was some some pee and poop places and they had like SPCA there with like baskets of puppies that you could take home. I had to like drag Liz away from a puppy.

23:50
But there were dogs everywhere, not as many cats. But the first night they had this big opening party. They had entertainment and the big entertainment was this border collie group that did tricks in the night before one of the border collies passed away. They had to cancel the performance, which was like this whole huge thing. I mean, they’re telling us and they’re like, the border collies aren’t coming. And I was like, oh no, that’s too bad. And she’s like, one died. And I was like, oh, like, what are you saying?

24:19
I don’t even know they were, but I was just like, this sounds terrible. So you’re like tripping over dogs. And anyway, it was there’s a lot of dogs in strollers, which I have a whole other opinion. How are you able to even give a talk? Isn’t there like dogs barking in the background? There was actually one of my talks. I think I had more dogs than people in the session. I’m pretty sure it was. I was not prepared. Let’s just say that. So the talk that I gave once I sort of interacted with all these people was like,

24:48
Yeah, that’s great, you’re making $5,000 a deal or $10,000 a deal or whatever and getting free product, it’s great, but it requires you to do a piece of work every time you get that deal. So if you’re not doing deals, you’re not getting paid. You have no residual from this. And not only that, you don’t have the ability to turn on the money spigot, right? So you don’t, you,

25:13
We know all these people that are in either digital or physical products where it’s like, I’m having a low month, let’s run a promotion or let’s do a webinar, right? Or let’s turn on this lever and bring in some revenue. And if the brand deals aren’t there at the moment, then you don’t have any way to make money if this is what you’re relying on. So that’s sort of what I switched my talk up to. And I talked about our five different ways to make money.

25:40
But then I really hit on how do you make that all work together? So yes, get your brand deal. That’s your bread and butter. Do that. But why aren’t you putting all that content on YouTube? And why aren’t you taking your top content and turning it into long form video on YouTube? And then trying to figure out what your niche is going to be on YouTube. And several people there were doing that to the tune of millions of subscribers. Wow.

26:05
And I said, you know, here’s the thing. I said, you can make a lot of money just on ads on YouTube, which is completely passive, and you’ve already made all this content. So you have content sitting over here on Instagram or in your hard drive that you could easily publish on YouTube today and probably within a few weeks hit the monetization level on YouTube based on the fact that they have such huge audiences other places. And this could just be a passive stream of income for you with the content you’re already creating.

26:34
by just putting it in a secondary place. And a lot of people just, was like this mental, it’s like the mental hurdle that we see from everybody. It was just like, oh yeah, I should do YouTube. And I’m like, no, you should do nothing else but that until you do, you know, that like, that should be your next thing. You know what’s low hanging fruit that I’ve seen a lot of TikTok people do now? They just put together like 10 of their TikToks back to back in a YouTube video and that’s a long form video. I watched them actually because

27:04
they’re entertaining these people that I watch, right? And I can sit easily through a long form YouTube video and watch all those clips. Yeah. I think they’re just so, obviously if TikTok’s where your bunny is, then that’s where you’re putting your focus, right? Like that’s how you’re getting your deals. But the fact that they’re, to me, it’s like most people’s hurdle is making the video. So they don’t have that hurdle. Right. That’s the biggest hurdle. Right. And so I was like, if you do nothing else after this talk, please put everything on YouTube.

27:33
And then the next thing I talked to them about was like, how do you grab those email addresses and getting people, I said, even if you just literally put up a landing page on a WordPress site, I was like, you don’t have to design a fancy site, you don’t have to do anything, just literally get one page up with a place for people to opt in for something. Because right now, you have no way to like interact with people except for hoping that they see what you put on social media, which we all know a small fraction of your actual audience sees that content.

28:01
I mean, you don’t even need a WordPress site. No, you could use a ConvertKit landing ConvertKit has a landing page. I mean, it won’t be a nice URL or anything, but at least you I mean, they’re using cloaked links anyway on the… Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah. And I said also, there’s AI now that will take your videos and transcribe them into content. could easily create the content that you’re putting on video into print form just to fill pages up, right? Like you could create a robot…

28:31
bus system without having to redo much work. So that was, you and I felt like I was like- you were like the star of this place, I bet. I was probably like, y’all are sick of seeing me at this point. But it was just, it was interesting because I felt like these people have done, like so many people we know can’t grow their socials, right? They struggle with that. These people have completely figured that out.

29:00
But yet, it’s not like a long-term thing, and it’s funny. So I started my talk, I used a Pat Flynn hack. You know how Pat Flynn starts with the black slide? Like it’s just a dark screen, you don’t see anything. So he gets up there and starts talking, and the screen is dark. And then when he makes his first point, he clicks on that first slide to make the point, and the first slide’s always something like really interesting. So I was like, it’s a great technique to get people, so if you ever have to do public speaking, this is a great technique to like catch your audience’s attention.

29:29
didn’t work as great for the dogs, but people works really well. So I started talking and I got up there and I didn’t introduce myself or anything. I just went right into it and I said, I started talking and then I said, and this is my first website and I put the picture up of my very first website, which as we know is hideous. I mean, to be fair, I didn’t think it was horrific. I mean, obviously, but.

29:54
My point was what I thought I was making was, as we often make when we do this together is you need something. You have to start somewhere. And then the next point I made was I often joke that I’m a dinosaur in the blogging space. I said, but that’s actually not true because dinosaurs are extinct and I’ve managed to find a way to reinvent myself over the last 20 years. And then I found the, what’s it called? The horseshoe shrimp.

30:21
or something like that, which is supposed to be the oldest living animal that’s like prehistoric, it still exists today. And I was like, so instead of a dinosaur, I’m now a shrimp. And I had my big shrimp photo. But the point was like, yeah, you’re doing on, you’re on Instagram, you’re on TikTok, that’s great. When I got started, there was no Instagram, there was no TikTok, there really wasn’t Facebook and Twitter had just started. And it’s like, what you’re doing right now is going to look, there’s none of this is gonna exist in 10 years in the way that it does today.

30:51
And so how do you leverage what you’re creating today so that in 10 years you still have a profitable business? And that’s kind of how I started the talk. Cause it was like, this is all fine and dandy, but this isn’t gonna take you to, this isn’t gonna take you 20 years in the business. No way. And then, you know, talking about email, YouTube, websites, and then how to even leverage more out of what they’re already doing. like, cause I, so this is something that was interesting. I talked about what we share all the time.

31:20
If you have an affiliate that’s performing well, you need to go to that company and ask for a better offer for your audience and a higher commission. Or just private label that product. Well, that was my last. That was my last section. Yeah. Actually, I had a picture of me, you and Jen in China. But I was saying, I said, you know, these rates are all negotiable. You know.

31:44
you think you can only get 4%, not from Amazon, but outside of that, working with other, especially directly with the brand. I’m like, if you’re sending good traffic and conversions, you can get more money. And it was like, it never occurred to them that that was a negotiable thing. I’m like, you’re in the driver’s seat. They want traffic, you’re giving it to them. You’ve gotta negotiate for better rates for yourself. talk through a lot of affiliate hacks and then,

32:13
Finally, I was like, but listen, 10 % is great, but how about 60 %? I was like, you have everything that brands want, data and audience. So how about you just private label the products that sell the best? And like eyes are like, you know, and then I said, and let me tell you something, I put the picture of us up and I was like, if I can go to China and figure this out, anybody in this room can go to China and figure this out. I was like, it’s not rocket science. It’s a formula, right?

32:42
And you also already know what everyone buys, which most people don’t when they get started. And so they were just like completely like, wait, what? And then I showed a picture of my dining room table with all the jewelry and right. Right. I was like, that’s ups and downs. Let me tell you. But, you know, it’s like they had never, you know, the people there, obviously people that are doing that, like the guy who invented the doggy Gatorade. But there were a lot of people that weren’t. And I’m like, you don’t have to invent something.

33:10
you can just sell something that’s already out there that you know your audience likes. And right now when you’re probably have a lot of like kind of free money from brand deals, like this is the time to invest some of that into something that actually can make you like lasting revenue. I want to know, did you go to any sessions? Did you learn anything about how these people are growing their socials? Cause I know if you have a pet that instantly gives you a leg up on the socials. Yes. A hundred percent. Step one, get a dog.

33:40
Um, I’m literally texting my family the whole time, get videos of the pets immediately start making content. Like, um, so anyway, uh, I, so the one session that I wanted to go to so badly, but it conflicted with my session was SEO for Tik TOK and Instagram, which I didn’t get to attend, but that was the one that I was most interested about because I didn’t even know that that was a thing. Maybe for Tik TOK, I didn’t know for Instagram. was a thing. I know it is a thing for Tik TOK.

34:10
Yeah. I attended a couple sessions, mostly I was speaking so I didn’t attend as many. However, I will say, we talked about this, the social content is a grind. These people are creating multiple pieces of content a day. They’re constantly testing, putting stuff up. It does not seem appealing to me because there’s really no…

34:35
I don’t know what the right word is. There’s definitely a way to do it, but it’s like, sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not always clear why something works and why something doesn’t work. There’s just no real formula to it. It’s almost like you just have to see if it’s right time, right place. A lot of people are talking about the trending audio or the trends or even times of day that you’re posting, length of reels, just all these different things that people are trying and testing, but it just seems like it’s a constant.

35:06
cycle of try this, try that, try this, do this, this is working, do this, do this, do this, wait, not working anymore, now do this. I was just like, and I overheard a lot of conversations like that, and I was like, yeah, no, not for me. Yeah, this is why it’s really hard to teach a class in this stuff. Yeah. Because it is, maybe one in 20 is gonna get any traction, right? Yep. And it’s like throwing spaghetti on a wall. Although once you have a formula down, it’ll last for a while. Yeah.

35:35
It kind of reminds me of like the fashion industry. Not that I know anything about the fashion industry, right? But you know, it’s constantly changing, right? You have to constantly release new lines. I mean, I’ve spoken to people who sell and you know, the stuff from like last year, you can’t keep it in your store. Right, right. It has to go. It’s got to go and you got to try something new. Yeah. The one overarching theme was consistent content. Usually people are posting multiple times a day. This person I had on the podcast a while back,

36:04
she just made it a habit. Like the first thing she did as soon as she sits at her desk is to film three short form videos before she starts her day. And then that’s how she’s able to be consistent. But she’s also really good. Like she can just pick, you could probably pull this off. I don’t think I could, but she just picks up her phone and just, and then she throws it over and someone else makes it nice. Yeah. mean, these people, these people were good. And they had all the like,

36:33
hot video equipment, all the cool gimbals. None of them really were filming with anything other than a phone though. Oh, that’s good to know. But just the newest ring light that attaches to something. It was just that kind of stuff, right? Where I was like, oh, these are kind of cool gadgets that I definitely don’t need to buy. But yeah, the biggest thing that was overwhelming was just the consistency of content and the frequency of content. Everyone’s posting a ton.

37:02
We do know works, right? Like, I mean, that’s why we’re doing the 30 day challenge, because we know that if you consistently post content, you’re going to grow. But that’s that’s a grind. That is a grind that I don’t. But I mean, everything is a grind. This one’s just grindier. Yeah. In my opinion. So I’m curious, the proportion of YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramers, bloggers. Did you have like a rough idea? No bloggers. No bloggers. I mean, less than 10 percent.

37:32
Wow. Huge skew to Instagram and TikTok. And most people were doing Instagram and TikTok. Like they were basically just reformatting stuff a little bit. But there was a, I would say less than 50 % of people were doing YouTube, which to me is nuts considering they’re making all video content. That’s the part that I couldn’t get over. I got the whole no do a YouTube video. True, true. But these people are putting a lot of effort in already. But it’s more effort to put together a cohesive 10 minute video, right?

38:02
than it is to just pick up your phone and just talk for a minute. Yeah, but even that, not just put it on, you’re still gonna grow on YouTube. You’re talking about shorts. Yeah, I mean, why not just get it out there and then, you know, make one long form video a week? Yeah, no, no, no, I’m not arguing with you. I’m just saying like the hurdle, like for me to put out a short form, scripting that up or deciding what I’m gonna say might take me like a minute. Yeah.

38:30
but a long form takes me like a good two hours to put together something that I want to talk about. speaking for 10 minutes, now I’m used to it, but sometimes I’m recording and I’m like, good Lord, how much more is there? I’m so bored of myself. know, I am. That’s where I felt like there was this huge golden opportunity for people was in YouTube. To me, the contents, the website, to me, that’s just a

39:00
you have to do it, right? You have to get a landing page set up, nothing, don’t worry about anything else, but like, please, please, please do YouTube. You’re already making the video content, you already have all the video equipment, you already have a dog that everybody likes. And it was interesting, because it was people either were like straight up influencers, or they had completely gotten this robust, so they were influencers, plus they had a dog product, and they had courses or memberships, like.

39:26
There was very little people that were like, oh, I’m edging towards that. It was like, I do this or I do that. But there wasn’t many people in the middle. Yeah. mean, long form is where it’s at, right? I think TikTok has realized that they can’t make money off of short form content. Yep. Like outside of TikTok shop. so they’re encouraging people to upload like 10 minute videos now. Yes. I watch them all the time. Mostly true crime. But I do watch them. Do you watch them all the way through? Like I can’t last for more than like two minutes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I need to know what happens.

39:55
And they’re actually encouraging people to upload the horizontal version. So there’s black bars in the top of the box. I know, which I don’t love. But yeah. So then total wrap up. But the last talk I did was the email talk that I a similar talk that I gave at Seller Summit. But what I realized after this is the literally the last talk of the event, not a closing keynote, just the last talk. Four p.m. on a Thursday. I’m like, is anybody awake? There was a guy in the like second row who I’m pretty sure was falling asleep the whole time. I was like, this is really encouraging. I’m killing it.

40:25
But what I came to realize is I was basically gonna re-give the seller summit talk, but take out a few things and nobody’s on Klaviyo. And that talk is just all Klaviyo-centric. So I ended up having to redo the slides. So instead of showing like the Klaviyo flows, I would just put the definitions, right? cause when you get in the flows, it gets confusing for people that don’t use, or that aren’t doing it at all, right?

40:54
But that was interesting, because that talk was not well attended, not surprising, because everyone was on an airplane going home. But the people that were in there were frantically taking notes, taking photos. I was like, I’ll send you guys the slides. And I said, I’ll send you the Klaviyo flows, too, if you want them. I just took them out, because I didn’t want to just absolutely bore people to death. But most people that came to the talk were not doing email at all. Well, they don’t even have a website.

41:23
These are the brands. Oh, these are the brands. Got it. Yes. Because there was like a brand track and a creator track. So like when we did the Amazon UGC for brands, that was on the brand track. So was the email one. Although there were a couple of bloggers in there. The handful of bloggers that did have websites were in that talk. But most of them are not doing most of the brands are because I don’t think they’re really D to C for the most part.

41:47
They’re either selling on Amazon or they’re selling wholesale, but they have some small level of DTC that they’re not utilizing. So while I think that talk was really good, it just, there weren’t a lot of people in there and I pitched Seller Summit heavily. I was like, there’s not a lot of people in here. It’s mostly dogs. I can tell everybody to come to Seller Summit and get even a better talk. I was just thinking the whole time you were talking, I would have opened with like this video of someone throwing a ball and then a frisbee.

42:17
You got to get the dog’s attention first, right? Yes. Listen, it was it was definitely out of my comfort zone for sure. Yeah, but it sounds like, you know, you learned a lot also. Yeah, I learned a lot and it was actually really good. So we met several inventors, people. In fact, we met someone who lives in Fort Lauderdale. I think she’ll be coming to Sellers Summit. She invented this dog and cat feeder and.

42:45
She was such a sweet, she came to all of our talks, even though she was a seller, right? And she, it’s been three years in the making, she had molds done, it’s really clever, you don’t know anything about pets, so I won’t go into detail, but it’s way to keep, it’s better for the dog’s back, it keeps bugs out of your dog food, like very cool features on this thing. And she went from idea, mold, manufacturing, got a patent on it, everything, right?

43:14
and she launched in like December and she’s like, I’ve only had like, you know, a handful of sales on Shopify. And I was like, yep. I was like, you’ve done all the really, really hard stuff and now you have to do the hard stuff. It’s like, um, and she just was, you know, she’s like, I feel like I worked so hard on this and then crickets, right? Like this is your, basically gave birth to a, an invention. If her invention is pretty innovative, should be really easy to sell on Facebook.

43:40
Yes. we actually, and we took such a liking to her, we immediately group texted her with Kim Meckwood. We’re like, first of all, because this is a Shark Tank product, 100%. Right. We introduced her to a couple of people that were at the expo that do like brand launches and things like that. Like we hooked her up because I was like, this is a really cool idea and all you need now is an audience. Right. Like you have everything and you’ve made a defendable product, right? Like, cause she has the patent and all this stuff.

44:09
But anyway, was pretty, and it was also reminded me of old e-commerce days. She’s like, I have 4,000 units, know, like was the whole, I was like, oh yeah, I don’t miss that part of it at all. But yeah, so anyway, we met a lot of people like her who had invented really cool products and just now need to get them out in front of people, which obviously is why she was there. But yeah, she was super sweet and she lives in Fort Lauderdale, so you’ll get to meet her in a couple weeks, a couple months.

44:37
This is gonna be a yearly thing for you? I mean, if they have us back, they might be sick of us. Nah, I think they’ll have you back. You did four talks. One note that I learned that I think I’ve never, I don’t know how I’ve never thought of this before, like changing our slides to really talk to the pet audience, because that was like, usually you don’t have such a tight demographic.

45:04
but was really actually really helpful. Like on our intro slides, we put pictures of our dogs, not us. know, like just little things and like for any examples, we always tried to use pet products. It definitely made the presentations better. And it wasn’t that hard to change them out. You know, at first I was like, ugh, I don’t want them to do this. Plus I was also sick going into that week, but it really like, it kept people’s attention because they immediately could relate to what we were talking about because it was something more familiar. And,

45:33
I don’t, I mean, I guess I’ve never talked to an audience that was so niche down before, but that’s definitely, if you ever have to do a presentation, like switching out your images is actually probably a really smart idea.

45:47
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, pet products are great products to sell because people always tend to overspend and your customers are generally not price sensitive either. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecluderjob.com slash episode 530. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

46:15
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 the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:26
The Seller Summit is an e-conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events.

00:54
so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off tickets at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250K or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, the tickets are almost sold out. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur Yet,

01:23
It’s available on Amazon at 50 % 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. 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.

01:55
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. It is day two of, actually it’s day three. It’s day three. Day three of ECF Live where we’re covering Andrew Udarian’s eCommerce Fuel event. And Bo, Tony and I went to a number of talks and we’re just going to do a little bit of a recap today. Yeah. You said you’re exhausted and can’t wait to get home. I did so much talking today. Actually all days. Yeah. I feel like I’m at that stage where your throat’s just starting to like get that, oh, I need to shut up.

02:25
for a little bit. So let’s record a podcast. Our friend Noah lost his voice on day zero. Yes. Right when he arrived at the opening party. Yeah, he has it back a little bit today. He does. Yes. Yeah. So. So what, are some key takeaways? So I’m seeing a couple common themes. One of the things that we did this time at ECF, which I don’t think we’ve done to this level, is break into those small groups called houses. And I think we discussed that last time.

02:53
but today we basically did mini masterminds with our houses. And the one thing that I’ve noticed throughout the several days, just getting more of those one-on-one conversations and small group conversations is that everybody wants to talk about branding and marketing and content. Yes. Actually, my whole table was mostly about content. Yeah. And how to do it, the methods of doing it and the types of content. Yeah. So I think that’s a common theme. And it’s interesting because we see this a lot with Amazon sellers.

03:23
where people are like, oh, can’t put all my eggs in one basket. I need to get off Amazon. I need to start creating that brand. These people already have brands. They’re not really, I mean, some of them are selling on Amazon, but primarily they are selling on Shopify or BigCommerce. They already have a brand created, but they have trouble creating the content to go along with it. Which I find interesting actually, because if you’re already doing pretty well at D2C, usually you have one channel down, one or two channels down, I would say. And I would say the majority of the people least I talked to are doing really well on.

03:53
Facebook advertising still and that’s what I heard as well though people were unhappy. Oh, okay They were unhappy with Facebook ads. Yeah, they’re just okay, you know, it feels like a roller coaster Well Facebook did go down really recently and yes did so So one of the interesting talks I went to yesterday Was a talk on digital product, which I don’t think Andrew’s ever had a digital product talk And so I was mostly curious

04:21
as to what it was going to be about. from the amount of people in the room, I will say that people didn’t think that was a good idea to have that talk. people were in the room, just curious? About 15. Oh, wow. That’s really small. small. Okay. And it was unfortunate because I feel like that was the sleeper session of the event because it was taught by Julia. She owns a Barware brand.

04:46
which I was explaining this last night to people and one person thought it was club wear, like dancing, like stuff you’d wear to a bar. Pat from Pat, the CB radio guy, thought it meant things you wore to ballet on the B-A-R-R-E bar. And I was like, no, it’s like cocktail shakers, bar wear. Like, so anyway, just to clarify, that’s what she sells. And she actually got her start with digital products and then moved into the physical product space.

05:13
and the way that they are using digital products and they basically are talking about courses. So I think they have eight courses on their site and she shared her numbers for Shopify. So they sell on Amazon and Shopify. For Shopify, about 20 % of her sales on Shopify are the digital products. making up a huge chunk of the actual Shopify revenue. But not only that, they use that instead of a lead magnet.

05:41
So we talk a lot about lead magnets. talk about creating mini courses, PDFs, things like that to get people on your email list. They’re using it as an incentive to buy. So they have a beginner bartender type course, which is $150. It’s set up similar to our courses with person talking video, although they’re actually showing like demonstrating, creating the drinks and stuff. It’s $150. And they basically offer that if you spend over a certain dollar amount, you get that for free.

06:10
So if you spend $75 in the store, you get the course as the bonus, right, as $150 value, which is a huge value and it costs them absolutely nothing, right? It doesn’t cost them anything to mail it. So even though like we do a lot of like free gift with purchase, but this is a hundred percent free gift with purchase and it’s an unlimited quantity. The other thing she said that it worked really well with is

06:36
when people want to give corporate type gifts, which they have a product that lends itself to that, the fact that you can get it, you can also purchase the class. So just think about this. If you’re like in a big company and you want to give your top manager something, you give them all a fancy cocktail set and they get this bartending class. So it takes this product that it seems good and makes it great. And so they’re spending double the amount of money and Julia’s spending

07:05
zero double, you know, she’s spending just what it costs to get the barware and people are double happy. Right. So it’s really a smart move. I talked to Pat for a long time about it last night. He’s like, I need to create a CV. You know, I was like, yes, you do. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity in that for people to start creating digital products, courses to go with the products that you already sell and using that as your either upsell or your free with purchase.

07:35
or as opposed to just a straight up like put your email address in and get this for free. I like that idea. You know what’s funny is I think at least at this conference, just digital products and courses are kind of looked down upon. Yes. Right. They don’t realize that’s 100 % profit. Yes. And it’s like her course is $150, which is really reasonable for a tad to learn how to mix drinks if that’s what you’re into. That’s a very reasonable priced course.

08:02
And it’s all profit versus maybe her $75 shaker set costs her 10 bucks or five bucks. Plus she’s got to ship it. Plus there’s all these other added costs to it. So someone who was in that session sells a product to style. It’s for men. It’s like how to style thinning hair. it. You just see this teeny tiny comb. Comb with two T’s.

08:28
I think like some sort of like actual like gel or it’s a baby brush. Anyway, but he was he’s been doing digital products for long time. So he actually chimed in on the conversation was really interesting. And he basically sells manuals or courses on how to style and get haircuts that are is good for like thinning or fine hair, which like I’m like, that’s a no brainer, right? You already sell the product.

08:58
it’s not hard to sell somebody on and now we’re going to teach you how to do your hair in a way that makes it look better. Oh, and by the way, with our products, right? Right. And his story was actually funny. So he got into digital products because before he even launched this haircare brand, he has a course that teaches people how to dance. And he said, he said it’s not about his quote was interesting. It was basically, it’s not about the.

09:26
minute details of the course. He’s like, I don’t teach any dance moves that that you can’t learn anywhere on the internet. He’s like, but I target my dance course to older men whose kids are getting married and they want to be able to dance on the dance floor. Like that’s his market because that’s his market for the hair products. Right. I’m like, right. I’m like, give him a microphone. But it’s genius. Right. So it’s like you can take a very simple digital course or product.

09:54
and add the right marketing spin to it, right? Because all dance moves are the same. It’s not like a 60 year old man has a different dance move than a 20 year old girl, right? So they can all do the same dances, but because he’s marketed it in this very specific way, he gets a very targeted customer, which is exactly the type of customer he wants. So I think that’s important for people to think about when they’re thinking about the products they sell, or maybe they don’t sell anything yet, right? And like, I just wanna do something digital.

10:20
you know, what should I do? It’s not necessarily about reinventing some sort of technique. It’s just about putting a spin on that technique that makes it relatable to your demographic of people. Does he still sell that dance course? Yes. To the to the hair? I mean, I the market, I mean, I don’t think he’s like selling it on the same site or anything. OK, I got it. And, you know, if you already sell on Shopify, Shopify has some native integrations that allow you to deliver digital products. So it’s not like you would have to go create something totally new if you wanted to add this to your product suite on Shopify.

10:50
If you aren’t selling anything already, you can do it on WordPress really easily. So we talk about digital products a lot, but it was really cool to hear it talked about in the e-commerce setting and to see people’s like light bulbs going off. All 15 of them? All 15 light bulbs are going off. Anyway, so I thought that was kind of the sleeper session because I think people could really take advantage of this and it’s not hard to create that content these days, especially with AI and overseas, VA’s, things like that.

11:19
So that was my, that’s kind of my winning session as far as like an idea that’s been around forever, but people aren’t utilizing. So my session was the complete opposite of yours. It was packed. It was a Facebook ad section and it was Taylor holiday and her David Herman. I had David Herman on the podcast before, so I kind of knew him pretty well. The first half was about finances. Like, do you even have the numbers to even support ads?

11:47
And I actually had this issue in my class, people want to run ads and they just start doing it without, you know, watching any of the videos and then they fail and they’ll go, Hey, can you take a look? And I’m like, Hey, this product’s not going to work or the numbers don’t work here. Yeah. Cause the product costs 10 bucks. You’re not going to be able to get a conversion for like three bucks. Right. Or whatever. So he went through and what was nice is someone from ECF volunteered their numbers to do a full case study. so they’re.

12:17
there was OpEx operating expenses and then cost of goods. The operating expenses on its own was over 40%. And the margins just didn’t make sense. Basically, if you just added the numbers, there was a negative 10 % profit. Right? And so the whole point of that talk was, you have to get this amount, you have to be able to support the ads before you even think about running them. Right.

12:43
And then the sweet spot average order value is usually 60 to $80. And one thing that I learned that didn’t quite make sense to me, so I talked to David afterward about it. He said anything that’s like over that is actually harder to run Facebook ads for because the impulse buy amount tends to be in that $68 range or less. And any more than that, you have to spend a lot more money

13:10
to determine whether your Facebook ads are gonna work. So it’s a much bigger risk when it’s more expensive because the conversion rate tends to be lower. Yeah, because people, it’s easy to get people to spend a certain amount of money on this for the moment. I mean, I’m not buying a $200 product because I’m scrolling on Facebook. Yes, yeah. And the other funny thing was, you know, he talked about like the minimum budgets and he was just kind of throwing out, you wanna get to like $1,000 a day and you know, this is how you do it.

13:37
Well, what’s nice about this particular talk over other Facebook talks that I’ve been to is that they did it from the perspective of a complete beginner and they kept it really simple. One campaign, Facebook advanced shopping, and then just maybe like three ads of your best ads and just go from there. So was very achievable. And I think it applied to most of the crowd who either just dabbling in Facebook ads or just about to start Facebook ads.

14:07
And then last night we had a party. We, you and I didn’t have a party. We went to a party. went to a party. I’m trying to think who I talked to. I talked to so many people at that party. I talked, this is probably the most people I’ve talked to at a party in a long time. Like the variety of people, met a lot of new people and oh, I also went to the women’s breakfast on Thursday morning. I am curious. So at the women’s breakfast, are you guys like a lot more open because us Neanderthals aren’t around?

14:36
Is the atmosphere different? Yes, we all sing songs and get out our knitting needles and we all work on a friendship blanket. It’s really wonderful. I don’t know. I think it’s nice because you can like make connections. It’s sort of like if they had a breakfast for runners or people that were really into like extreme sports or it’s just sort of like puts you in a group of people that’s smaller and more like so it’s easier to meet people. Right. It’s hard to meet people in a room full of two. If you don’t know anybody.

15:05
Wouldn’t you rather walk into a room of 10 people than 200? Sure. So I kind of look at it that way. It’s interesting because I ended up at the Asian table as I as I often do. That was on purpose, right? Yes. I know. I was the first person to sit there. You’re like, for the second person. I was like, oh, these are my people. I’m going to get better at math this morning. No, brilliant, brilliant women. So I’ve never.

15:33
I don’t think I’ve been to a women’s breakfast before. So I went to the dinner, so I don’t have much to compare it to. But we were pretty intentional at our table. I think there were three tables in the room that had people sitting at them. And our table, everyone went around and just basically said what they sold or what they did and just a little bit about themselves. So I was able to meet everybody at my table and a lot of people doing some really interesting and cool things. Not all of them are in e-commerce, like the data. I think it’s Celine, Selena, Celine.

16:04
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.

16:34
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.

16:44
I don’t know if I think she’s speaking today about oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she was there the girl that sold the jumpsuits She was there a girl that I ended up talking to last night named Brooke who sells leather handbags Actually, you met her. Yes. Yes. Right next to me. Yes today. Yeah So anyway met a lot of interesting people learned a lot about their products learned a lot about what they were doing and It was nice because then throughout like all day yesterday and today

17:12
I saw them because it’s easy to stand out as a female ECF because there’s not a lot of us still. There’s more. There’s more than there were in the past years. So it was really nice because it just kind of gave you more friends. as some like there were a lot of people at my table, this was our first ECF. So, you know, they’re coming in probably not knowing a lot of people. And so I think especially for those people, it’s really nice because now they have people to find at the parties and find someone to sit next to and things where in a very like

17:41
easy environment to meet people, which I think the houses did something similar, right? It allowed you to connect with people in a very casual, not like what do you sell walking up and like barging into a conversation sort of thing. Well, that was my indirect way of asking, should what you think about doing that for seller summit or no, we have enough women. We’re half women. OK, OK. We that’s we don’t have a big enough room. So but no, it was great to meet a lot of them and find out what they were doing and.

18:10
It’s interesting because at my table, I believe they were all younger. OK. Like I was definitely the oldest person at the table, but I’m one of the older people here and or feels like I am sometimes. And so like a lot of them didn’t even have kids or weren’t married or anything like that. So they’re in a very different phase of life. Right. Which is also interesting. I’m like, go get it now. It’s your chance. It is right. You get weighed down. the kids start popping out, it’s game over.

18:35
But it was, I do think it was a good way to connect with people. And then I’ve been able to like have other conversations with the same people from my table throughout the last two days. Yeah. What I enjoyed is at our table, we actually just went around and talked about problems and you know, all the businesses have problems. Everyone has problems. Yeah. And this is something I talked about earlier. Whenever I interviewed someone for the podcast, we usually just talk about their successes.

19:02
And then once I hit the stop button, like the real conversation happens. I really wish I could record that part of the conversation. Well, it was like when we recorded the podcast two days ago or yesterday. And then after we were done, Andrew came into the room. And so it was the three of us hanging out for like 30 minutes. And we were all like, this should have been recorded. Like that was the. Well, that was for different. That was ammunition. Yes, that was ammunition against each other. But it was still a really interesting conversation.

19:31
So today we did those masterminds. I don’t know what else to call them. They called them problem solving pods. But for all intents and purposes, they’re masterminds. I was very nervous about this. Why? Because when I was running it, the instructions that I had were, let everybody form into their own groups. And I was like, absolutely not.

19:53
because this, gave me like flashbacks to like the kid in fifth grade that doesn’t get picked on the kickball team. And there’s like the one lonely kid standing on the sideline. And I was like, that’s not going to happen to my group. We’re not going to have the one person left out, like no way. So I just made people count off like one, two, three, four, five, and then listen. Okay. What did you all just get into groups? We did. just sat and you didn’t even pay attention that there was somebody that was without a group.

20:21
No, there’s only two tables. Only 14 people showed up, I think, out of the 25. Oh, really? We had all but one show up. Oh, really? Okay. Guess Ocean Group wins. So, so there’s one topic that came up. One of the entrepreneurs wanted to hire like a director of marketing. And this person made about three million ish, I would say. And he wanted to hire someone local.

20:51
and just outsource all the marketing because he’s like a product guy. And he’s like, the problem is where I live, it would cost like $150,000 a year. And I don’t know if I can like stomach that. then the whole discussion was why are you like, are you looking for like a magic bullet director of marketing? Or can since you’ve been doing marketing and clearly doing a pretty good job, could you just kind of document what you do and then hire someone to just kind of pick up where you left off and have a really strong set of SOPs?

21:20
And maybe you postpone that decision. Maybe you don’t even need a director of marketing, but you’re still growing and you’re the one in charge of doing it. You just don’t want to do it anymore. Right. And so I think he came away with perhaps outsourcing, maybe even someone from the Philippines or overseas, Columbia came up as well. Yeah. And save a ton of money and you wouldn’t feel bad. It would just take a little bit of time to train that person up. Yeah. So in my small group today, I can’t talk about our specific conversations because we had a, we had a blood pact not to share outside the group.

21:50
However, one conversation that we had that was definitely shareable was that one of the people in the group sells some sort of supplement. It wasn’t a supplement, but like an herbal, all-natural type product. He’s a product and manufacturing guy, of like the opposite of your person, right? Who’s like loves branding. He needs more marketing because the problem is they have a hard time getting people in. Once people are in,

22:19
they stay, they continue to purchase because it’s a consumable product, that sort of thing. But his issue was how do you get those people in initially? And because they are like a health product, there’s definitely a lot of things you can’t say and things like that. So when he starts talking, the first thing out of his mouth, and I felt like we were on a coaching call, like it just gave me, I was completely transported to my computer in a Zoom because he said, we bought the fifth largest winery in Colorado, but we don’t make wine.

22:47
That was his starting sentence and I was sucked in and then he could started to tell what he did. He had, was showing us on video and I was like, dude, like this is made for like Tik Tok, Instagram reels, YouTube, like just the initial sentence of I bought the fifth largest winery in Colorado and I don’t make wine. Like you think about that or was it just a casual? It was just, and you know how many people we talk to in coaching calls, right?

23:16
who say like three things and it’s like the best branded statement they’ve ever made and they have not thought about it for two seconds. That was exactly what he was doing. And as he continued to talk about his products and share, I was like, this should be recorded. Like it was all so good. But it just gave me that flashback to so many people, all they needed to do is tell their story, right? Because so many people have such interesting stories. And there were four of us in our little group.

23:42
And all three of us were like hanging on his every word because we were so fascinated by the fact that he bought a winery and doesn’t make wine and he uses the fermentation with the herbs and stuff. And he’s showing this video of like in like one of those wine vat things that normally they stomp on grapes, but he’s churning, who knows, parsley and whatever. I don’t know what it is, but it was just absolutely fascinating. And I was like, oh, people will watch this and they will buy in. They will buy into your product. They will buy into your story.

24:11
they will try it. And he had no idea that his own just talking about the brand was an absolutely amazing story. So what’s funny about that conversation is that occurred at our table too. And people were worried about being the face of their brand because they didn’t want like, if they were to ever sell the business, then they’d have to go with it, right? But I brought up the analogy like Ezra, boom by Cindy Joseph. Cindy Joseph passed away, unfortunately. And the way Ezra solved that problem is he

24:41
just kind of transitioned away to multiple influencers. I think the whole point of that is once you’re successful and you’re ready to sell, you can solve that problem. Like with money or, phase yourself out essentially. And I don’t even think he needs to be the face of the brand. I think it could all just be video shots and information from the actual process. Like just, it could be voiceover, right? Because the story is so interesting, almost like a documentary.

25:08
But anyway, so that was really interesting. And our group primarily did not talk about business. It was a lot of life optimization hacks, time management hacks. One of the people in our group is scaling a business right now, working a million hours a week, really quite unhappy. Like as anyone is in this phase, no one is happy in that scaling phase and just was looking for some like help getting more discipline.

25:36
in their life. so I just think that, those things, you know, oftentimes we get in these masterminds and people talk about their business, like true business, like I need a marketing person, or I don’t know how to do Facebook ads, things like that. But I think some of the conversations that were had in my group are probably even more impactful, because it’s about how you actually optimize your life.

25:57
It even got into like parenting hacks and really we didn’t have any conversations about and one of the people was like, well, I’m Eastern European. So we kind of believe in a pretty firm. Yeah. And I was like, I’m I’m a white girl. Like you’re I’m lucky if I can get him in time out like, you know, but anyway, it was just really interesting. It was really interesting the conversations that we were having about life in general, because I think

26:22
Life does affect business. Business does affect life. know, like if you’re in a growth period in your business and you’re working 80 hours a week and you have a family that affects your family, it affects how you treat them and all those things. And vice versa. If you have a new baby that like, you know, one of the guys in my house, not in my group, you know, he traveled here with his five month old, you know? And so I was talking to him in the elevator. He’s like, I’m exhausted. Right. I was like, yeah, because you’re sleeping with a five month old baby after being out till.

26:50
one in the morning. So I think all those things kind of work together. So it always makes me happy when people are comfortable enough to share those types of things, because those are really personal. Right. And it makes me happy that they’re willing to share and talk through it and, really be vulnerable, which I feel like we get a lot at seller summit, but that’s because we really put those groups together on purpose. And I made people count off to get in a group. you know, so it was interesting in our group also is someone had the problem where all their customers were asking for a very specific product.

27:19
that this person could make but she didn’t want to make it because she didn’t she wouldn’t buy it herself or she didn’t like that product and then she asked the group hey should I just make it is actually should I make this color is the same product just a different color of the product she didn’t like the color she didn’t like the color but everyone’s asking for it so her question was should I just do it anyway and everyone’s like yeah yeah it’s not about you it’s about yeah it’s about what people want yeah and so

27:49
Yeah, that was actually one of our main key takeaways. think she got a lot out of it just for that one question. Some people just need to hear it, right, from other people. And then the other thing that we did in our group, which was this was not a whole ECF thing. I just did this on my own is do you remember? I think we talked about this. Andrew made us write a letter to ourselves a couple of years ago. Right. And so I had people at the very end write a I just had little note cards and with, course, Ocean themed because we are Group Ocean, whatever Ocean House.

28:18
I know you’re rolling your eyes at me. I had them write something that they wanted their future self to remember. Because what I hear a lot from every conference, and we go to a lot of conferences, and I hear this from everybody, it’s like they leave really overwhelmed. They have some takeaways, but by the time they get home, they’re just like spent, they’re tired, they’ve been up all night, they lose their voice, all these things. And I was like, just write something you want yourself to remember in six months.

28:45
Because a lot of the key takeaways from my ocean house were stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. Work on the stuff that you think is a priority, not what other people think is a priority. Stay focused. There was a lot of that in the theme and I was like, this is a really good opportunity for people in six months to open up this letter that they get and remember what they told themselves the last day of ECF. So I was a little worried because it was off the script.

29:11
that people will be like, I don’t want to do this because I didn’t want to do it when Andrew had it to do it, but I did it anyway. And I was glad that I did. But everyone was seemed everyone at least told me they were OK with it. They probably are lying. But what you wrote, I didn’t write it. I’m done. You said you did it last year. It was like five years ago. We did it. OK. have no idea. No, I have no clue. What a cop out. I wish I did. I can’t remember. I honestly don’t. So after that, I went to a session on TikTok shop.

29:40
I was given by Paul and he’s basically doing a million a month on TikTok Shop and he just talked us through, you know, exactly what’s necessary. And here’s some of key takeaways. If you’re going to do TikTok Shop, you want to pick like one hero product that you promote and you want to start seeding the people right away. He’d already done a lot of prep work before he started TikTok Shop, which he attributed

30:09
know, partially to the wild success he had over the holidays. But here he had influencers that had the product and within the platform, there’s a built-in affiliate program. There’s a built-in influencer program where you can give out products, people can request products. And it’s just this glorious cycle because once someone starts promoting and making money, your store goes up in these ranking charts that TikTok proposed. And then the creators see this, that they’re making money promoting a specific product. So they jump on board.

30:39
which causes TikTok to show your product even more. And it’s just this glorious cycle that turns in this gigantic tidal wave. I was thinking how I could apply this to my store. don’t know if I could find a hero. You have to carry a lot of inventory. He’s like, if you’re doing this right, you’re gonna run an inventory. But as soon as you run an inventory, all the momentum dies on TikTok and you have to build it up again and again.

31:08
And the beauty of it, he said, is for the people that are requesting product through TikTok shop, you shouldn’t discriminate because he had this one girl who had less than 500 subs promote his product and made over $90,000 for him. And she got a $20,000 commission. That’s amazing. It’s crazy, right? Yeah. And then once word gets out about that, all these other creators jump in and then promote your product because that’s like the cash product.

31:36
TikTok makes that perfectly visible to everyone too. So there was a strategy, I didn’t go to that when I went to AI, which we can talk about in a minute, but there was a strategy in my small group time where basically at Christmas time, they seeded their product all over YouTube, sending it to creators and they basically did it with only an affiliate relationship, not paid to make videos. And he was saying the goal was that when someone went on YouTube,

32:05
it gave the impression that every person in the world was using this product, right? Because there were so many videos about the product. And I feel like that’s how TikTok shop works as well with the affiliates is that once that one video hits or the shop climbs up in the rankings, other creators see it and then they want to work with them. so it’s like, have you been on TikTok and not seen the athletic greens? Oh yeah. AG1 is everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s, that’s what they’re doing.

32:32
They want you to think that everybody and their grandmother is using this product. So you have to buy it right this minute and drink it every day and you’ll feel amazing. But it’s a strategy that can actually work for smaller brands because you’re really just leveraging commission and the cost of your product, which is usually pretty low. So it’s not like you’re paying people to make the content. I think your margins have to support it, right? Because a lot of that is heavy on the discounting.

33:01
In that example from the presenter, I think a $24 product was being sold for like six or seven bucks. Right? that, I don’t know, you have to have really crazy margins in order to support that to go viral like he did. Yeah, I think we bought some stuff off TikTok Shop for Christmas. So they seemed heavily discounted. It’s funny too, the negative about TikTok Shop, and I think we’ve talked about this, is like you don’t get any customer information. It’s just like Amazon.

33:27
You do have their address though. So you could take their address and get their email, you know, through one of those append services. The other thing is that, and I’ve heard this from people who sell a lot on TikTok shop is that it’s hard to get them to be a repeat customer because they don’t remember who they bought it from. Right. Which is maybe why you plug in all the address information you have into a service. Yeah. But the other thing that was talked about was the halo effect. So when it went viral,

33:56
the Shopify sales went up like 30%. And this person’s not on Amazon, but I would imagine Amazon would have skyrocketed as well. Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. I think TikTok Shop is very similar to Amazon as far as like the pros and cons of it. I think it’s different because it’s like a roller coaster ride. You have a wave, you’re probably gonna go out of stock unless you have some gigantic inventories.

34:24
And what was interesting was that the presenter had to weigh in his mind, do I put down a whole ton of money and just go all in on TikTok shop, which is a risk, right? Because you might not establish that wave again. But fortunately, he played his cards correctly. Yeah, I I know people making a lot of money on TikTok shop. So I know it works. It’s just hard because you don’t get the customer. It takes work to get that customer information. You can put as much flyers and stuff in the product as you want, though.

34:53
Unlike Amazon, there’s no policy against doing that. So the people I know selling on TechShop are putting like, you know, basically catalogs in the shipment for people. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So I went to an AI talk, which was, can’t think of Kevin’s last name. Williams. So Kevin, what is he like a fractional CMO? He’s kind of like a jack of all trades. Yeah.

35:20
Um, far too much to cover on a podcast and he used far too many specifics. So like, I’d have to go look through my photos of his slides, but basically he was talking about how, like all the different ways he uses AI and his company, uh, or in his companies that he works with and what the capabilities of it. And he actually walked us through a whole process of, um, how to, he was working for a dog food brand and they wanted a picture of a dog with the dog food and how there was all these iterations that it took to look.

35:50
And by the end, the end result looked amazing. And the one thing that he kept saying that really resonated with me was, this is the worst it’s going to be ever, right this minute, which was like so interesting when you think about that. and we were watching this video of golden retriever puppies jump around in the snow and it looked almost realistic. the dog, like everything looked real. It looked like an anim, a very realistic animation. And you’re watching that going, this is as bad as it’s going to be.

36:19
Like this looks pretty darn good, right? In three months, it’s gonna look 10x better and in 12 months, it’s gonna look 50 times better, right? It’s nuts. So it was a really interesting talk. He gave a lot of resources. He showed how different ways that they’re using it in the companies, the tools they’re using and kind of walked through all the different, not all the different resources, some of the main ones.

36:45
He talked about you should not be using Chat GPT if you’re not using the paid version. He was saying that the free version is pretty much garbage at this point. And also if you’re using it, you are the product if you’re using the free version. So he really discouraged against that. And he also talked about a company that I think it’s on Wednesdays. It doesn’t really matter what day it is, but basically this company has their entire workforce spend every Wednesday only on AI.

37:15
learning it, using it, playing on it, like all the different things because they are so confident that it’s sort of the future of everything. Did I tell you that the last website critique I did as a student in the class, I actually redesigned her entire website and I used AI images. It was a cat harness and it looked really good. And the missing piece was, you I had it

37:44
generate a generic cat harness, but then you can Photoshop the actual harness on there. It looked fantastic. Like the images look completely real. And I got this idea actually from another student who designed a purse and didn’t have the money to hire models, know, to model her purse. So what she did was she just had, you know, mid-journey, I think is what she used to generate the models and then carrying purses. And then she Photoshopped her own purse in there.

38:13
So it looks like she has this huge budget with all these models. and yeah that Sounds similar to what Kevin and he was he made a good point about like the video production side of things and he was saying that this is really gonna level the playing field because Forever the only people that could afford big video budgets were huge companies, right? Because video productions it’s very expensive. And so now it’s basically leveling the playing field for some of these brands because anybody

38:42
can has access to these tools and can create these images, use them. And a lot of what it seemed to me, was like, you need a couple tools to be able to do these things. It’s not like there’s one tool that does it all for you. Like one of the ones that we were looking at, it was the pet food one. kept iterating and they got the right image. And then the pet food itself was wrong, right? Because this was like a wet dog food as opposed to like the pebble-y stuff that goes in.

39:11
And AI couldn’t get that, right? Like they know dog food is what most of us think of dog food is. So they ended up Photoshopping the dog food in at the very end. you know, they’re still using Photoshop to do some stuff with it, but it was super interesting. And it was interesting to watch sort of the process of everything. Like he showed us a video from last year and it was like Will Smith eating food, but it was all AI and it was…

39:35
Terrible. Oh, yes. Yes. I remember seeing that Yeah, and then it’s like and then you look at what we have today and it was like he was showing this it was a girl walking through a field and she was wearing some sort of sundress and They’re like make this under us right the Sora demo, right? I asked before his talk. He doesn’t have access to Sora yet But really he was just showing the stock Yeah, the stuff that you can do or will be able to do very shortly is pretty phenomenal It’ll make YouTube b-roll so much easier

40:03
And then I’m going to cancel my Storyblocks subscription. Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting is, especially because we had all these people wanting to talk about branding and content creation and things like that, is that I think there’s still some really important fundamentals that AI doesn’t have yet. And that I think you still need to be very aware of. Like I think about in our course, how we have a whole content section. And a lot of it is in formatting and stylizing and things like that.

40:31
Right now, AI is just shooting out blobs of information and still having been able to organize those in the right way for online content is important. But I think anybody will be able to create content and create ideas. And the other thing is, his big thing was right now, the best use is you’ll never have a blank page. It will give you as many ideas as you can possibly handle to create content. So you put in, own a baby brand, I sell blankets and

41:01
you know, pajamas, our style is, you know, Peter Rabbit, whatever, you can put all that in. Give me 100 video ideas for this. Give me 100 blog post ideas. Like that to me is where it really is. Like today you can start doing this and it’s a great resource. Yeah, absolutely. mean, we part of our discussion at the roundtable also was where the world’s going for the next generation too. Yeah, not just ourselves.

41:29
I mean, I think we’ll be fine since we’ll be on kind of like the cutting edge, hopefully. Yeah. yeah, I do fear for the next generation. Yeah. I was 20 years younger and I was working, you know, just some regular job and I was one day wanted to do something else, I would invest my free time in learning, learning everything I could about AI. Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. Maybe the I want to go that.

41:58
talk later today since the conference isn’t over yet about that woman who you had lunch with. Yes, the data girl. I think that one’s targeted towards like 100 million dollar businesses though, right? That was just, she did another talk that was targeted to larger businesses. I think this is a more broad talk. Okay, yeah, because it would be interesting to see how larger companies actually handle all the data that’s coming out with AI. well and he talked a little bit about using AI to mine data and understand data better.

42:27
He actually used Klaviyo as an example. They have an AI tool to segment people where you can, instead of understanding how Klaviyo segments work and how to set them up properly, you can actually use AI to say, want a list of people who have spent over a hundred dollars in one transaction, you know, blah, blah, blah. And if you tried that, yes, it doesn’t work terribly well. Oh, okay. But here’s the thing. I tried it three weeks ago. It might work great today, right? Like that’s how quickly things change. When I tried it and

42:57
once again, a lot of this is about the information you’re giving it. And I tried it a couple different ways and I couldn’t get exactly what I needed. So obviously part of it’s me not being able to define it correctly for a clavio. Maybe I’m not using the right terminology or the terminology that they understand, but it gets it pretty close. But you can just massage it from there. Does it literally just use the pull downs after you say it?

43:22
Yes, it does. create the answer. So you can just massage it. It might be off, but then you can correct it, right? Yeah. OK. That sounds like a pretty good feature. I do think it’s good. It’s not quite there, but I’m sure it will get there very soon. And there’s lots of Klaviyo competition popping up also. Yes, there is. So, yeah, I guess once you start getting big, Klaviyo just went public. know, once you become popular, there’s going to be a lot of, I guess, copycats or competitors coming in.

43:52
Anything else you got? We have two, I have a couple more sessions today. Yeah, and I gotta hop on a plane, unfortunately. It’s hard to be away for four days. It is. My biggest takeaway, I think, in the conference isn’t over, but I would say this year I’ve tried really hard to meet new people. I went to a breakfast, I went to a dinner, which I normally never do. I have breakfast and dinner and lunch with all my friends, which is one of the main reasons why I come. So I don’t feel bad about doing those things.

44:21
but I was like, you know what, this year I’m just gonna put myself out there and try to meet some new people. I’ve met some great people. And so I’m really glad that I sort of pushed myself out of my comfort zone to do that because I do think it adds more value to your conference experience. I’ve still hung out with all the people I know. So it’s not like I’ve avoided my friends, but although we haven’t seen each other a whole lot at all. Not today, certainly. No, but most of that has to do with scheduling and wanting to go to different sessions and things like that. So I actually think if you’re,

44:51
going to a conference and you don’t know anybody, it’s really hard to do that. It’s really hard to put yourself out there. It’s not hard for me. I was a house leader. People know me from seller summit. But even if you weren’t a house leader, I was chuckling when you were saying all that because you can just burst into a group and just start talking. I can. That’s not in my bag. However, it’s still hard. Just because I can do it doesn’t mean that I don’t find it difficult. There’s a difference.

45:18
And so I know if it’s hard for me, it’s really hard for other people because it’s definitely something that I’m pretty okay with doing. But I think it’s so valuable to meet new people. I’ve met a couple people this time that I’m like, I think we’re gonna probably be friends to some extent, right? Like online friends. And so I’m really glad that I pushed myself a little bit this year. Because it’s really easy to come to these things and hang out with your four best friends. And there’s nothing wrong with.

45:46
wanting to see old friends, I think it’s really important and one of the main reasons why conferences like this can still exist because people do crave being able to see people once or twice a year. But meeting the new people has been really valuable for me. Yeah. I would say I’ve met the same amount of people as usual. All six of them? Well, no, no, no, I always just talk with random people, but I always make sure to have at least one dinner with

46:11
with the people who are my good friends who I met. The OGs. The OGs, yes, that’s correct. I did feel a little older this year. Yeah, I felt super old. But it’s more of, I don’t know, for you, I feel like there’s still a lot of males here. I feel like the female demographic is really young. Probably true. Because at my table at lunch today, two people were at the table were 49, I’m 51, and the other person was 59. Oh.

46:37
So was like, we must have been at the geriatric. That’s what it was. But overall, like I said, some of the people who’ve impacted my life the most I’ve met at events at ECF, fact, Lars and Dana, Andrew Udarian, of course, Bill, Brandon, Eli, and they all keep coming back. We’re one of the OGs. I’ve been to every single ECF. You’re one of the nine, right? One of the seven. Seven. Okay. Seven OGs. Yeah.

47:05
Can’t wait to hear what your takeaways are for today’s session.

47:13
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, if you missed Ecommerce Live and you want to attend a conference of like-minded entrepreneurs, then join me at Seller Summit. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 528. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

47:43
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.

00:28
are almost sold out over at SellerSummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:57
Now I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, this is the last time you’ll be able to get tickets, because they are almost sold out, so go over to SellersSummit.com.

01:28
Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % 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. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away.

01:57
Now onto the show.

02:05
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit a Job podcast and a brand new segment to the show called Profit of Audience, where Tony and I riff about content, building an audience, all the above. So today we just happen to be in the same room at the eCommerce Fuel Live Conference, which is one of our favorite events. Yeah. This is actually year number 10. For you. For me, I’ve been here. I’ve been coming to this event for 10 straight years, which is pretty crazy. I think this is my ninth year. Oh really? It is. the first ECF was in Austin.

02:34
Yes. The second one was in Nashville and that is when I had just started selling, but I had such a crazy launch that I met the revenue requirements to join ECF. You told me to join. so this ECF was my second ever e-commerce event that I went to. Right. Outside of startup bro. That was the first one. was the first one. We don’t count that. I still think that that was my favorite conference of all time. Yeah. Cause you got, you were a speaker and you got the royal treatment. Well, no, it’s not that it was just.

03:01
They just spent so much money on it and lost so much money on it. It was so extravagant. My room was a suite. I think I had a two bedroom suite. They booked me at, was that the Ritz? was the Ritz. Ritz. So awesome. Anyway, we are going to talk about today, you kind of what we learned and I am actually curious because this is the first time at an event where we haven’t really been hanging out at all. I know. I feel like I haven’t seen you the whole time. So I’m curious what the chatter has been.

03:30
around the people that you’ve been hanging out with. Are we gonna be honest about the chatter? Of course we are. Oh, and Tony led a, I don’t know what you’re I’m still leading, I’m still leading. I’m not done. Tony’s actually working this event as one of the- House leaders. House leaders, yes. So she’s here to facilitate conversations, is that what you do? Yes, yes, and organize a bunch of e-commerce nerds. that’s it. I said yes, and that was January Tony that said yes. March Tony is questioning why she said yes.

03:59
So, Patrick, who is Andrew’s right hand COO, reached out and asked if I would be willing to lead a house. Having been in a house last year, I think last year was the first year they did it. And if you’re not familiar with what we’re talking about, it’s similar to masterminds, similar to what we do at Seller Summit with the masterminds, although there’s more people in a house. I think there’s 25 people in each house. And so your job as the house leader is to facilitate conversation.

04:27
organize people into smaller groups to talk about specific topics and just heard the cats, which I was actually pleasantly surprised with my group with Team Ocean. So I love this group. They actually were really great yesterday about not talking over each other because when you get in a group like this, the temptation is that everyone has so much to say and everyone wants to learn so much that everyone talks all the time.

04:52
and everybody loses their voice by the third day. I mean, if you’ve been to Seller Summit, it’s the exact same way. So I thought, you expect me to keep these people in line and actually have conversations and have them be quiet at certain times. As soon as I said yes, I was like, this was a terrible idea because I know what it’s like to try to get these people to do stuff. It’s hard. So give me the dirt I want to hear. I’ll share what I’ve learned too. OK, so the dirt from my ocean house is everyone is mad at Metta.

05:21
Really? Nothing’s really changed dramatically recently. I’m at a loss at this one, right? Because I don’t use it. but that is the it was funny because we went around in the circle and gave a quick introduction and then there were just a few pieces of commentary but everybody’s commentary was about meta and I need to figure out a way to stop relying on ads and I’m unhappy and every time someone would say that you could see the group like collectively nod.

05:48
So it was like, not only was the person speaking unhappy, multiple other people were in agreement. And as we went along, that was definitely an underlying theme. So we had two people in my group. One is in the high fashion industry and the other one is in some pet products. I can’t remember what she was complaining that Meadow was working so well for her two years ago. And then one of the iOS updates basically destroyed that. And she was just looking for some guidance on how to move forward.

06:18
don’t know if she was pissed at Metta. This is more Apple’s fault than anything. Yeah. Yeah. And I think maybe that’s where people are. That’s where their anger should be directed. I think the bigger issue in all of that was that people have realized with some of the changes in the ups and downs that their business is completely reliant on it. Without it, they would not have a business. They would not be able to pay people. That’s really interesting because that sounds like Amazon. Right. Right. Yes. It felt very familiar.

06:48
Yeah, which I guess it just goes to show that you need more than one channel just just in case something goes wrong, right? Yeah, the next one I’m hesitant to talk about but you said nothing was off limits. Sure. People are upset with Klaviyo. I was gonna that was mine. I’ll let you go then. Well, in my case, and it’s it’s weird because Klaviyo has sponsored Andrew, who’s the founder of ecommerce fuel. They sponsored me they sponsored my podcast for three years. They used to sponsor seller summit. Yep. But all of a sudden when they went public,

07:18
It seems like a lot of things went downhill and maybe they’re just focusing on their larger enterprise customers. So this is actually the first year that Andrew has allowed a non-Claveo email marketing company to sponsor the event. And that company is Sendlane. And I’ve been annoyed with Clavio for different reasons, but I’m actually going to go and get a full demo from these guys. actually chatted with them in the booth for a long time and they say they’re

07:46
going to be 30 to 50 % cheaper than Klaviyo for equivalent functionality. So I’m going to give them a shot. I don’t know what happens when companies go public or they get bigger, but I think they’re under so much pressure to grow, grow, grow. That like the smaller guys, and by small, mean like the seven figure sellers. These aren’t small guys. They’re not small, but small in comparison. Like I’m sure they’re going after like the huge companies, The hundred million dollar companies, the billion dollar companies.

08:16
I think in my group, people were upset about the pricing. Yes, exactly. And then feeling like they weren’t. It’s a weird positioning, right? Because people will say, I feel like I’m not getting my money’s worth. But let’s just say you’re spending $3,000 a month on Klaviyo to make $100,000 in email revenue. Those same people are spending $50,000 a month in ads to make $100,000 in revenue. So at the end of the day,

08:43
Any email is better than no email, right? Like anything that you’re doing. However, I think people who have been with Klaviyo for a while are frustrated because things have gone down a little bit. Even customer support time is longer. So remember if you ever get on chat with them, that takes a lot longer. They have changed some of what they do. So you have to go through the AI bot, which I know a lot of companies do that. But to me, it’s like if you’re a certain amount in Klaviyo, you don’t want to go through 10 minutes on a bot.

09:12
to get, because at that point, I already know the knowledge base. don’t, you know, I’m not going to find my answer there. anyway, there’s a lot of irritation at Klaviyo and it’ll be interesting to see how SendLane does. I mean, we won’t know, but- We’ll know for like another, I think my appointments were next week actually. Yeah. Yeah.

09:30
to see if people are angry enough to switch because as you and I both know, it is a pain to switch email service providers. It is. And I think one of Send Lane, what they were trying to explain to me is they have white glove onboarding service if you’re going from Klaviyo because they have to do that, right? So one of the interesting moments yesterday in our round group session was people were talking about affiliate marketing versus influencer marketing. And

09:58
there were a lot of people that hadn’t had great luck with affiliate marketing, but they were looking at affiliate marketing as influencer marketing. So basically they had reached out to an influencer and asked them to promote something for a percentage of the sale. So that’s really affiliate marketing, but I, know, we kind of suggested going through an agency and not really an agency, a service like share a sale or, um, something like that versus the one-offs, right? Trying to contact people directly.

10:24
then I dropped what everyone thought. I didn’t think this was a knowledge bomb, but everybody in the group thought it was a knowledge bomb. And it’s probably because you and I come from a content creator background. But I explained to them, I said, there’s two types of people creating content on social media and YouTube, TikTok, whatever. We have true influencers and we have creators and influencers are people that are telling you what they ate for breakfast, what they wore on vacation.

10:52
what they did on a Tuesday, what brunch spot they went to, those are influencers. And influencers actually don’t convert very well for most brands. So when you go out, we’ve had people that have had Kim Kardashian post their stuff and they didn’t see a lot of sales. I said, then you have creators and creators educate. So influencers entertain, creators educate. And I was like, think about it that way. And I said, if you find someone who’s educating people, and the first person that came to mind is our friend Jamerill, who does the large family cooking.

11:21
and she educates people on basically bulk cooking. If Jamerill talks about a bowl or a pot, it sells, right? And we know it sells. It’s because people aren’t just following her for entertainment purposes only, they’re following her to learn. And it was like, you could see the light bulb in everybody because they lumped all those people into the same category, right? To them, they’re just all influencers.

11:44
And so then I unfortunately had to use you as an example, which I I don’t want to give you any more credit than you already get in life. Okay. So you use me as a positive example. example. Yes. I use you as the influencer. There’s Steve again talking about his V-necks. No, but I talked about how on your YouTube channel, it’s solely for the purpose of educating people on e-commerce. And so people who follow you on YouTube and are watching those videos are coming to learn. And so when you do a video on using big commerce,

12:13
The chances of you converting people to big commerce are significantly higher because people are there with a purpose already, as opposed to just scrolling mindlessly on YouTube and be entertained. And you could just see the people’s, like the doors were open for them because they had all just been going after influencers. People who are talking about what they ate for breakfast or pictures of them driving around their neighborhoods, whatever it is. And those people we know don’t convert. But if you’re looking to find educators to talk about your products,

12:41
It’s a totally different ballgame and you can actually get your products to convert with those types of content creators. So for the people I talk to that say they’ve tried influencer marketing and it fails, the first question I always ask is how many people have you reached out to? Yes. And it’s usually like three or four. I mean, the hit rate is going to be pretty low. you got to, it’s almost like a shotgun approach and then hopefully you find one and then you press that relationship. Yeah. Right. I remember what I was going to say about Klaviyo now.

13:09
So we had this discussion at the table where I do my annual, I shouldn’t say annual, quarterly, you know, deliverability tests where I take Glock apps, which is this app that tests deliverability. Mainly I did this recently because that change just happened, right? Where you had to do DKIM, DMARC and SPF in order to get deliverability out for Gmail and Yahoo, right? So I did it for my Klaviyo account. And I noticed that on, I usually run the test like three times on two out of the three,

13:38
Clavio used an IP that was on a blacklist. And so I think I brought that up in office hours during Zoom. And it turns out a lot of my students who tried the test, because they just followed my directions, they was like, hey, these IPs are on a blacklist. Is that bad? I’m like, well, it’s not good. So I actually brought it up at the table I was sitting at. And one of the guys who does very high volume email, a very large company, he says that Clavio has three tiers, bronze, silver, and gold.

14:08
And if you’re on the gold tier, they pretty much guarantee the best deliverability and they’ll just kick out anyone who has emails that are that go to spam. So it’s very hard to get in that gold tier. You have to be a large company that does high volume. Yeah. And if you so much as send like a couple of emails and have a pretty high spam rate and by high spam, I mean over point one percent, you get degraded down a tier. And the lowest tier is what they call bronze. And there’s no knowledge about this, right? It’s not like they advertise this, but

14:38
If you’re small, and I don’t know if this is unique to Klaviyo, I’m sure all the email providers do it, but we were just talking about Klaviyo because everyone’s on Klaviyo, then their IPs might be on Blacklist. They don’t scrub those IPs as much. And so I don’t know what the solution is, because no one really knows the answer to this, but I think you have to be a larger customer in order to get on that list. And when you’re small, can’t really, it doesn’t make sense to get a dedicated IP.

15:05
I was going to ask you, is your client on a dedicated? No. Because we were talking about like, I think to make getting a dedicated IP for email makes sense. think you have to do like 5 million email sends a month or 5 or 10 million. can’t remember what it Oh, we might be able to get one then. It makes sense to get one. That way you’re in control of your own. Yeah. Because I think last year we sent 60 million emails.

15:31
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 obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

16:00
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.

16:11
So I did the same test on Drip, which is what we use for blogging. And the three tests, they were clear. So does that mean that they’re, I don’t know, maybe on a higher tier for Drip? I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, it’s funny, total side note about nothing, but I have like a win. So I went on Drip the other day to send something and I never checked my subscriber count. I just, I never look at it. And I gained 4,000 subscribers over Christmas.

16:41
I had no idea. Happy Housewife? Yes. Oh. I was like… Wait, are you not emailing weekly? I’m emailing like every other week. So I’m not emailing as frequently anymore. But now I’m upping it because I was like, oh, and I know exactly where it’s coming from because I get replies to the flow. So it’s a holiday-themed lead magnet. So the people start responding to me and then I get those in my inbox. But it happens every year, so I don’t even think about it.

17:08
And so I logged in the other day and I was having, I was having some issues. So I was having my tech guy work on stuff. So while I was poking around, I was like, look at that 4,000 people over, you know, a six week period. So get your lead magnet set up. work side note side. That was our, that was our advertising for the, the podcast back to our regular scheduled show. Yeah. So just the overall sentiment of several of the people I talked to was they were kind of not having the best year. Did you get that idea?

17:39
So it’s interesting in my group, either everyone people had a terrible 2023 or they were having a terrible 2024. So if they had a good year last year, this year has been terrible. Or if they had a bad year last year, they feel like they’re on an upswing. Like two people in my group very specifically were like, that was the worst year of my life. What business like business wise. Right. But I also think sometimes when stuff in business goes bad, personal life goes like everything tends to follow. Right.

18:08
If your personal life goes bad, sometimes you’re busy. So they kind of work together. And so two people were like, this was the worst business year I’ve ever had. And then a couple of people were like, we thought we had made it through, they made through all the Google changes and Facebook changes and all that stuff. And then this year has been absolutely terrible. I mean, we’re only two months in, but things aren’t looking good. Yeah. mean, Google just released another update while we were here. So I’m anxiously awaiting that. I think…

18:37
So of the people who are doing well, there’s a bunch of people who are doing well. The people who are doing well have kind of like a moat. So there’s this one guy who sells, you know those outlets that go in the drawer so you can plug in like your hairdryer in the drawer? No, I do not know about this. You know, instead of having like a cluttered bathroom counter, you keep everything in a drawer and the electrical outlets actually in the drawer. Yeah, I just never knew how it worked. Yeah. And then you install it and it’s all hidden, right? Yes.

19:06
his business is taking off because he has that proprietary design technology. And he’s got all these contractors that are rebuying and installing a bunch of homes. So he has that moat of the contractors. He’s got the moat of the design and he’s essentially pretty secure in his business. It’s going to be hard to kick him off that market. One of the things that I guess I’ve never noticed this before about ECF people, but

19:33
Most of them have multiple businesses. not the people, the people that are doing 50 million plus, I mean, there are some big time sellers here. But there are a lot of people that are under 10 million. And what I found in every conversation that I have, so last night I went to a women’s dinner, I was at the women’s breakfast this morning, led the house yesterday. So I’ve been in a lot of small groups more so than I probably normally would at event like this. Because normally I go to dinner with you, right? And we don’t even need to talk anymore.

20:03
So, a lot of people wouldn’t, because a couple of times we went around the circle and said, just, you know, who are you? What do do? And I would say 50 % of the people had at least two things, two completely separate things going. Whether it was like one girl sells compression socks, but she also had a secondary business. One girl does the data mining. Actually, I think she’s giving a talk, but she had another business too. Like all these people.

20:32
like our friend Blake who sells the face paint actually has four e-commerce stores. Really? He sells face paint. He has a store that sells flags like the decorative flags that you put up. Uh, and then two other stores. can’t remember what they are, but a lot of these people, people I talked to yesterday, Heidi, I can’t remember her husband’s name. They have a main business and then they, then they also sell odds and ends in a completely separate business.

20:58
So I’ve never, maybe either I’ve never noticed it before, I just haven’t had these conversations, but I was shocked at the amount of people who were running multiple e-commerce businesses or e-commerce businesses and other offshoots of those businesses. That’s interesting. Because I often am asked, like, why don’t I just start a bunch of e-commerce businesses? Yeah. And I don’t think I would ever start two e-commerce businesses, let alone multiple. I agree. Because it’s a lot of work.

21:27
And it’s much easier to just focus on one than just have to spare product lines, right? Yes. Although I felt good because I often come here and I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way because we’re sort of in the same boat. But I mean, for a long time, I had my jewelry business. So I had an e-commerce store, but then I also had my blog totally unrelated. And then we also had the course totally unrelated. Then I also had two conferences, one related, one not, know, podcast, whatever it was. Right.

21:56
And so I always felt like, oh, here I am, Mrs. I’m all over the map. And everyone else is here is like, I do one thing. I get up every day and do one thing all the time forever and ever. And then this year I was like, oh, like I can relate to you because I’m doing four completely separate things. But it was interesting to me how many people, and I feel like I would have noticed that before because I always felt out of place. And so that was really interesting to me. And I wonder if people are trying to…

22:22
protect themselves, right, by having multiple, so if something goes down, you know, something else will pick up for them. So I don’t know. I don’t know if you noticed that. I didn’t notice that in my group, but what I did notice in my group is that a lot of them are making most of their money from social media. Interesting. Right? So Instagram, organic Facebook reels. Okay. So Patrick’s wife, nail polish company.

22:50
had this one Facebook reel of her just mixing nail polish go viral. And she made a ton of money over the holidays just off that one reel. My group didn’t my group was like, we don’t get social. But also when I think about what the people sold in my group, it also matters what you sell. Correct. Yes. Nail polish is actually mixing nail polish. Awesome. Yeah. I had a lot of people in my group that did not sell products that I think would be amazing on social like one guy sells

23:19
tarps that you put on your furniture when you paint. Oh yeah. You know, it’s like a pure commodity. And so I was like, cause we were talking about, you know, branding and marketing and I’m like, I just don’t know how you market that on social media. Cause you’re just literally covering furniture and things like that floors. Yeah. That kind of reminds me too. There’s, certain products at Amazon that will not do well like tarps, example, I bet does pretty well on Amazon. Yeah.

23:46
But if you try to sell it in your own shop, unless you’re doing like an overall paint store, where you can cross all bunch of things, I think it’d be a little more difficult. Yeah, his main business, I think, is selling to hardware stores and contractors, things like that, which makes sense. mean, that’s a great… I’d rather sell to contractors than sell to individuals just randomly. But I feel like in my group, there weren’t a lot of people that sold those products that were real sexy for social media, except for Lindsay, who sells all those licensed rain gear and, you know…

24:15
basically art on umbrellas and things like that. Yeah, I had a conversation with a woman who sells fashion and they were just wondering what types of Facebook ads would work. I think just fashion is tough, right? I think it almost has to be an influencer play of some sort, right? I don’t know, have you talked to any apparel? Yes, I actually sat last night. So I sat across from this girl last night and she had on this fantastic jumpsuit.

24:45
And it was, I’m not even joking. I don’t know what a fantastic jumpsuit looks like. A jumpsuit is, I think it’s called a jumpsuit. It’s like a one, it was like a onesie. It was a onesie, but like really nice. And the colors were vibrant. Like it was just, it looked like a thousand dollar jumpsuit. And you know, like I like expensive clothes. So like I can, I can spot a $50 Amazon basics jumpsuit versus a, you know, designer jumpsuit. So I complimented her last night after dinner. said, I love.

25:14
your jumpsuit, it’s amazing. She’s like, oh, thank you so much. We were kind of walking in separate directions. So she ended up at breakfast with me and she was wearing another jumpsuit. And it didn’t even occur to me that she probably sold jumpsuits, which is stupid at ECF because everyone is usually wearing their brand if they have something like, whether it’s a handbag or a pair of socks. Anyone who sells apparel is wearing their apparel at ECF. And so she’s wearing another jumpsuit. So.

25:40
we’re going around the table. Everyone’s sort of talking about what they do and it’s her turn to go and she’s like, I sell jumpsuits. And I was like, you were wearing last night. I’m high end jumpsuits, high end jumpsuits. Wow. And they’re beautiful. The one she has on today’s really nice as well. And she does all of her sales from Instagram. Interesting. What’s it, did you get any hints of what her strategy was or no, cause was literally like they were digging the bell to come to the first session. I was kind of irritated because

26:08
She definitely has like a branded look and everything about her fits what she’s wearing. But when I saw her last night, I was like, that’s an amazing outfit. And then today, and she’s like, oh yeah, I use Instagram primarily to sell. And I was like, oh, this makes perfect sense because of what she’s selling. The fact that you noticed the jumpsuit means it would work well on social media, right? Yes. Just like one look and you know it’s high end. Whereas if you’re just selling kind of everyday staples for clothing, I’m talking about.

26:37
like Gap clothing, probably wouldn’t work as well on Instagram I would imagine, right? Right, but the girl next to me sold compression socks. See, I can see that working okay. Yes, because they’re designer, they’re designed, they’re not just the standard colors. But yeah, in the other thread that I got today, I didn’t hear this as much yesterday, was that one comment changes the trajectory of someone’s life.

27:03
And there were multiple people this morning at breakfast to the there was a girl who invented collapsible dog crates. Yes, I met her. Yes. She’s awesome. Yeah. But so she was this was like five years ago, I guess. And she had a dog and she was trying to collapse the crate and she smashed her finger trying to collapse the crate. And there was a comment like you should figure out how to make one that collapses easily or something like that. There was just like one random comment made. So she did.

27:32
And she developed this collapsible dog crate. Well, the girl in the compression socks sitting on the other side of me, she used to drive for work and she was in the car for like hours and hours and hours every week. And one of her friends is like, you should start wearing compression socks because you’re sitting so much. And she’s like, compression socks are for runners and old people, you know? And they’re like, no, no, no. And so then she ended up, but she thought they were ugly. So she developed stylish compression socks. And she even said, she’s like, it’s amazing how one random comment completely changed my life.

28:02
you know, gave her this business, made her all this money. And that’s kind of a thread that I’ve seen this week of, you know, one little spark, right? One little piece of information and people make a decision on it. You know, she invents a dog crate, right? She makes compression socks, whatever it is. And then they build these really successful, awesome businesses. Yeah, I had to make my wife cry in order to start my business, right? Start our business together. All it took is gallons and gallons of gems tears for…

28:31
So I had a highlight of my night last night as you know, I had someone come up to me. yes. Good old Ted if you’re listening. Thank you. I appreciate you more than you know. This is that we were at the party last night. Someone came up to me and said, hey, I listened to your podcast. And I was like, oh, thank you so much. And I was like, this is how Steve feels every time now. Like I’m getting it. And he’s like, he talked for a minute and then he’s like, yeah, you co-host it with some guy, right?

29:01
So anyway, I pointed you out. I was like, he’s over there somewhere. No, you didn’t say the second part of what you said. OK, so Steve was walking in with Kevin, who is also Asian. Another Asian guy, yeah. And I was like, yeah, he’s over there. I just waved at both of them. Like, I’m not even going to tell you who it’s one of those Asian guys. It’s one of those Asians guys walking through. Highlight of my week at ECF. So one thing I was actually kind of surprised about is the amount of people that I talked to that do not do content is

29:29
pretty high. Yes, right. It seems like they just sell and I always wonder how they get their business but it’s either through ads. It’s mostly ads actually. Yeah, it’s all ads. And they’re not doing any content. They don’t really know how to do the content or even short form or video. So I think that’s like a huge gap that people have to figure it out. So this was another aha moment that I had in at breakfast this morning because we were talking about that exact thing because most of people at my breakfast table

29:58
all were content create, like they all created content around their products, which is rare because most of the people that I’ve talked to before that were not making content about their products. And so we were kind of throwing around ideas on why it’s so hard for people to build the brand side of it. And I said, well, if you think about it, let’s just take selling on Amazon versus selling on Shopify or BigCommerce. You can basically outsource everything on Amazon. You can hire someone to do your listing. You can hire someone to optimize your listing. You can hire someone to do PPC.

30:27
And you can find companies that do really good jobs in all of those things, right? There are quality companies out there. So you don’t have to figure, like once you get a product idea, you can have other people do a lot of your work for you or help you along or get you started. But with branding, to pay a company to create a brand story for you, and first of all, there’s a lot of really bad companies out there. And two, if you get a good one, they’re very expensive. So it’s not as easy to…

30:55
create a brand around a product and a story without spending a whole lot of money. Most people don’t have a whole lot of money to spend initially. So I think that’s why people struggle because unless you’re naturally drawn to branding and content and in that storytelling, it’s not something that you can just, okay, let me hire a PPC company. Right. Right. And so I think that’s why people get hung up on it because it’s not something that comes naturally to everybody. And it’s really hard to outsource. Here’s some objections I heard at my table. They’re like,

31:25
how much content could I possibly make about this product? And what I was trying to tell them is that you don’t make it about the product. You just try to target the people who would buy it and just get them to like you and then just kind of casually mention your products. Because I was kind of outlining my social media strategy for Bumblebee, which hopefully will get implemented sometime this quarter or the latter half of the year. I’m just going to talk about the business, just funny things that happen and whatnot. And just over time, people will want to just follow the story or the day to day.

31:54
And whenever they think about buying a keepsake or something, they’ll think about my store. That’s the long-term strategy. Yeah. Well, so we met up with Anja, who came to Sellers Summit last year, sells first aid kits for moms. And she was talking this morning, we were talking about the branding thing, and she said, you know, content’s a huge part of our strategy. What they do is because it’s a first aid kit for moms, but it’s sort of a, actually, you’ve got one in your bag. It’s portable.

32:20
And so basically they create content for, yeah, there it is. got it. I got it right in of me. So look how small it is. It’s the size of, I don’t even know what that’s, you know. It’s like a coin purse if anyone carries coins anymore. If anyone has a coin purse laying around, that’s the, This is something that Jen would love because it’s kind of fashionable, right? Yeah. So they, so the, the, the selling point of her first aid kits is that they are fashionable. They are

32:49
portable so you can take them when you’re traveling if you’ve got your kids, you know, if you’re doing like around town playgrounds, things like that, they’re easy to take along with you. And so they do content on, you know, things to do with your kids traveling ideas. So their content is not about the first aid kit. It’s not about how to put a bandaid on. It’s all about

33:12
what moms who would buy that first aid kit are doing. So travel tips and it’s all seasonal, right? So right now they’re coming up on spring break. So what they’re doing now is talking about, you know, traveling spring breaks, travel ideas and the things you need to pack and stuff like that. And then they weave in obviously the first aid kit. And I think people don’t always think about it that way, right? They think they have to talk about everything in that first aid kit and how you use it. And, know, the difference in cotton balls or whatever it is, which no one cares about.

33:39
What they how they’re going to find her is through looking for travel ideas and then seeing this first aid kit and thinking, oh, I totally need to bring that with me on my trip. And it’s cute. And you can have there’s a bunch of different color options to for it. So are they doing video content or I did not ask her if she was doing video content. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is a it’s a really cute idea. And I guess unless she creates a it’s so essentially I know you guys can’t see it because the podcast, but

34:07
It’s a very stylish little bag and then inside is like antibiotic ointment, band-aids, and then like hand sanitizer and the balm and that sort of thing. It’s essentially just a stylish first aid kit. Yeah. And they sell refill packs. So obviously that’s how they get their customers back. Right. But yeah, I mean, think it’s a great idea. And I like that her idea around it is not to talk about like how to use the first aid kit, but what moms are doing in that phase of their life. Yeah. And absolutely correct. mean,

34:37
in order to make it work, you can’t really talk about your product because then it’ll come across as a pitch anyway. Right. Yeah. Unless your product is stands out in some way or or uncomplex and you have to explain the complexities of the product. Unless you’re you’re an IKEA furniture and you need to give people step by step instructions that have been together. Yeah. The other thing I maybe this is normal for UCF, but there’s most of the people here do not depend on Amazon.

35:06
Yes, for the revenue. They’re all D to C. So it’s funny because I was sitting at the table with Getita. Getita is a very well-known company in the Amazon space. Yes. But everyone at the table during lunch was like, oh, so what do you do? I’m like, you’ve never heard of They literally go to every single event. They do. They do. Yeah. So how can you not have heard it? So I think the people at ECF are just generally better off because they have their own brands in their websites.

35:32
What’s funny is, is in my house yesterday, there were a large group of people that wanted to get on Amazon. So they were, and this is, we talk about this all the time, but like, if you don’t sell on Amazon, you think you need to be on Amazon. If you sell on Amazon, you think you should be off of Amazon. No one’s ever happy. But yeah, there were several people that are like, I know I should be on Amazon because they know people are searching for them on Amazon. And I do agree with that. Like, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be selling on Amazon.

36:01
But that was actually one of the breakouts in my house was there were probably five or six people that wanted to know more about Amazon and getting on Amazon and how that would work. Well, I was sitting at lunch and someone was just kind of dipping their toes in Amazon. They were doing Merchant Fulfilled. And the question I was asked was, do you think I should do FBA? And I’m like, I think you’ll get probably three X to sales and much more visibility. If you do go FBA.

36:29
And he was like, so is it better? Like, is it easier? And I’m like, well, well, well, you know, that’s, a very loaded question there, right? Yeah. Cause FBA will introduce some other problems, but in general, it is better to do FBA. then again, there’s all these new fees that they introduced this year as well. it’s just funny how it’s completely different. Like, cause I go to Amazon conferences as well. It’s always the opposite. Like you said, everyone wants to have their own store and here people are just kind of dipping their toes in Amazon.

36:59
And the other thing that we get got here, which we get everywhere we go is, we thought you were an Amazon conference for seller summit. Oh, yeah. For seller summit. Yeah. Which I think is funny because we’ve never advertises in Amazon. We’re not an Amazon conference, first of all. And then, too, I don’t feel like any of our branding is around. We have Amazon sellers and we probably do Amazon Sessions because we do think Amazon is an important part of the e-commerce world. But we’re I mean, half of our attendees don’t sell on Amazon.

37:28
So it’s just funny that we’ve somehow been branded this way. is because I think we have sponsors that are Amazon sponsors. Whereas I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Amazon session at ECF. I don’t think I have either. Right. And I don’t think there’s any Amazon sponsors aside from Getita. Yeah. Here. You’re right. So when I went to the ECF Austin, like one day event, they did have an Amazon session. Oh, OK. It wasn’t like selling on Amazon. That was more like a strategy.

37:56
optimization sort of thing. But yeah, I agree with you. I don’t think there’s ever been an Amazon session here. Yeah. Actually there’s, are some people that I talked to who we’re all friends with that don’t really sell anymore, but they keep coming back to the event. Yes. That group is getting bigger. Well, one of, one of those people is what got me, who got me started on Amazon in the first place. Lars. Yeah, Lars. And you know, he’s getting off of Amazon and it’s just, I’m still very appreciative. Yeah. And, uh,

38:25
Who else? There’s so many people at this event that got me to where I am today and I never would have met them had I not gone to UCF. Yeah, I think it’s a great event. It’s fun to see people. I’ve met actually probably this I’ve met more new people this year or not new people, new to me people this year than I have in the last several years combined. And that’s because I won because I’m leading the house. So I was forced I was forced to be friendly, but also

38:53
I just, I made a decision because I’m like, well, if I’m leading this house, I can’t just sit back and listen. And so I went to the dinner last night, which I normally wouldn’t do. I went to the breakfast this morning, which I normally don’t do. I didn’t even eat breakfast. just sat there. I’m in my no breakfast phase right now. But yeah, it’s, it was interesting. I feel like I’ve met a lot of people and I’ve, it’s very interesting to like see the changes in ECF over the years. Like it’s changed a lot.

39:21
One of the ways I think in a very positive way is there’s a lot more females here. Yes, I did notice that this year. Dana and I joked that the first CCF, was, or not the first, the first one I came to, it was me and Dana and Miracle and Carol Reigns and we think one other person at that event. So it’s nice to see other female entrepreneurs attending because we know they’re out there. Right. And we know they’re out there because they come to Seller They do come to Seller Summit. And that was what was so funny is that

39:49
You know, I spend a lot of time with Dana at this event and she’s such a Seller Summit cheerleader, which I greatly appreciate. But every time someone would say, oh, there’s a lot of there’s so many more females here. And Lindsay said something like, oh, I think it’s up to 10 percent. And Dana’s like, Seller Summit’s 50 percent. Just like matter of fact, I was like, we might be over 50 percent at this point. don’t know. Actually, for this year, we might be. Yeah. Yeah. Which is strange. I guess it’s just.

40:17
by nature of the title of my podcast or our podcast blog and that sort of thing. We just attract more more females. You know what I discovered? Females is not politically correct. You have to say women now. Did you know that? No, I had no idea. So I got to watch myself. say women? Women. Well, you could say whatever you want because you are a woman, but I can’t say females. I can’t keep this. It hurts my brain. It’s too much. I agree. But I am excited about Seller Summit. And there’s actually a number of people here that

40:47
didn’t know about Seller Summit at all. It’s a shock and a travesty. Well, no, maybe because we’ve been doing it for eight years now, right? But there are a couple of people I’m pretty sure are coming now after I talk to them. One thing that… So I took this cooking class. Yeah, I have met everybody who was in the class with you. I’m not joking. Everybody I meet… Because one of the easy icebreaker questions at ECF is like, oh, what adventure did you do?

41:13
If you don’t really know how to start the conversation, that’s a good one because then they can tell you, I went kayaking and there was a gator under the boat or something like that. So everyone I’ve met is like, I took the cooking class. was like, did Steve do any work in the cooking class or did he make? Here’s what happened in the cooking class. There was three vegetables on a cutting board. There was an onion, there was a pepper and there was a celery. OK. And that’s the only thing we did. We cut that up and then we threw in the pot and outcome came jumbo and jumbo. That was delicious.

41:42
No, seriously, that’s the only thing that we did. Oh, no, I got to stir the pot. Oh, you stir, huh? How came delicious food? It’s like I have no idea how we are from this piece of celery to that. But I just like that we were supposed to record this yesterday. I run into you in the lobby and you say to me, I’m really hungry, so I’m going to the cooking class. And I’m thinking to myself, you do know that a cooking class requires cooking before you get to eat.

42:09
Like you’re not eating for two more hours Yes, I grossly misjudged how long how long we laughed about that all afternoon Brian was like you think Steve’s eaten yet. I’m like, nope Actually by the time I ate it was dinnertime I because I had a dinner with quiet light at five and so yeah, and we finished at five. In fact, I was late. Oh, that’s a quiet light, but um Yeah, I’m actually after going ECF. I’m really looking forward to seller summit now, which is in just

42:39
Two months. May 14th, May 16th. And I’m looking forward to the mastermind in particular. I am too. And I think the houses here at ECF got me more excited for the mastermind because with the houses at ECF, you’re breaking into these smaller groups. And that’s basically what our masterminds are, groups of under 10 people, 10 or under, and getting together for an entire day in a room. As we joke, we lock you in a room and don’t let you in until all your problems are solved.

43:08
And just the friendships that are developed. We actually heard this from a Seller Summit attendee this weekend or this week that they she formed a mastermind. Yes. Out of Canadians. So we’re not invited. But just seeing the friendships that are formed in those masterminds and then seeing how a lot of them carry on after Seller Summit, because we don’t facilitate that. I mean, that’s facilitated by the attendees. And to me, that made me so happy to hear.

43:36
because that means that they really did form those connections during the mastermind time. And those friendships will now become, it’s kind of like how you and I and Dana and Lars and Mike, like we’ve made these friendships years ago and through events like ECF and Seller Summit, the friendships just continue to deepen. And now like I see, I’ve seen everybody but Lars basically at other events or other things throughout the year or years, because it’s like a real friendship. It’s not just people you run into at a conference.

44:05
Yeah, and one thing that I’ve just realized also is that, you know, the houses that that mastermind part of ECF is only for like a couple of hours. Yeah. And it just made me realize that that’s the part I value. Yep. Chatting in a more intimate environment with other people as opposed to the breakout sessions. Yeah. Which we’re actually recording this during a breakout session right now that that that that we’re missing. So, yeah.

44:29
If you guys want to participate in a mastermind, make sure you go over to sellersummit.com. We’re almost sold out of masterminds. We are, yeah. So hope to see you guys there.

44:41
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, if you missed ECF Live and you want to attend a conference of like-minded entrepreneurs, then join me at Seller Summit. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 527. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

45:11
head on over to mywipequitterjob.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.

00:29
The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:56
I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. Now if you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers, but as of right now we actually only have 5 of those tickets left. The Seller Summit is going to be held at Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th May 16th, and right now,

01:24
This is the last time you’re going to be able to get your tickets because they’re almost sold out. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % 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 mywifecoupterjob.com slash book.

01:53
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.

02:06
Welcome to the My Web Coder Job Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the phenomenon known as Tmoo and how it’s taking the e-commerce world by storm. if you’ve never heard of Tmoo before, Tmoo is an online marketplace that offers extremely low prices on thousands of products shipped directly from China. And the company is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings, a Chinese company which is publicly traded on the NASDAQ. And Tmoo is one of many Chinese companies trying to break into the American market and their prices are

02:35
Possibly low according to Wired magazine team who is losing hundreds of millions of dollars to send you cheap stuff from China in order to grab mass market share from US shoppers and it’s working their growth has been beyond Exponential in less than a year team who already has one-third the monthly active users of Amazon from $3 and 37 cents for a pair of shoes to just $4 and 50 cents for a woman’s sweater Their prices just seem too good to be true and it turns out that they are

03:05
An analysis of the company’s supply chain cost by Wired magazine, which was confirmed by a company insider, shows that Tmoo is losing an average of $30 for every order made. In addition to the U.S., Tmoo also operates in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and is estimated to be losing $588 million to $954 million every single year. But the real reason for this episode today is whether this is affecting U.S. businesses. Now, if you’ve listened to the archives,

03:33
Recently, I interviewed my friend Jerry Kozak on the podcast who runs an online store selling t-shirts both on Amazon and Shopify that makes over eight figures per year. And according to Jerry, he believes that companies like Tmoo and Shien are taking sales away from his company, especially on Amazon. Shien is one of these Chinese fast fashion companies. Ever since both Tmoo and Shien burst onto the US scene in 2022, Jerry’s business has cratered by nearly 50%.

04:02
Now granted, Jerry’s in the t-shirt business, which as you know is one of the most saturated and most competitive niches to sell into. So you should probably take his numbers with a grain of salt, but according to an Amazon representative, the entire apparel category on Amazon is down 30 % year over year. Meanwhile, other apparel and t-shirt companies and e-commerce communities that I belong to are down year over year as well. Right now, companies like Tmoo and Shien seem to be mainly hurting lower end apparel businesses

04:31
and companies without a powerful brand or intellectual property. And here’s why. Both Tmoo and Shien have two gigantic advantages that US companies do not when it comes to making and selling apparel. Now for one thing, they have a huge cost advantage over US sellers because of extremely low labor costs. Now according to the LA Times, products made in China’s western province of Xinjiang are being sold to US consumers through Tmoo in breach of a ban.

04:58
that forbids goods from being imported from the region due to links to forced and slave labor. The statements were former detainees and reports from an array of researchers and advocacy groups have alleged that the Chinese government put more than one million people in detention camps in that region and that laborers in fields and factories were forced or coerced to make cheap products for Tmoo. Now the Chinese government said the camps are for re-education purposes, but I don’t really believe them. And no one knows for sure.

05:27
but slave labor could be one way that Tmoo is commanding such low prices. Now just for some context, a blank t-shirt costs about two bucks and shipping within the continental US is about four bucks for a shirt. This is the rough cost for a business in the US and in order to make a decent profit after printing a custom design on the shirt, you gotta be able to sell the shirt for at least 20 bucks. Meanwhile, Tmoo is selling a printed t-shirt direct from China to a US address for less than seven bucks and that includes shipping.

05:57
so they can literally sell apparel at or below the minimum cost. Now the second reason Timo has an advantage is due to the de minimis loophole that allows Chinese sellers to not have to worry about paying taxes, tariffs, or customs duties. Now the de minimis loophole is that any shipment sent to the US that is valued at less than 800 bucks does not have to pay any taxes whatsoever. And because Timo is shipping individual products into the US, they don’t have to pay any customs duties or taxes at all. Meanwhile,

06:25
In order for a US apparel company to get low pricing, they have to import a large quantity of t-shirts into the US and pay both customs duties and tariffs on the products. Now whether this is fair or not is really up to you, but let me just put it in simple words to sum it up. A product on Tmoo is seven bucks, no import duties, and arrives in one week with free shipping. Now the wholesale cost for the same item made in the USA is 10 bucks, retails for 20 bucks, and this price differential is a problem.

06:54
because the math doesn’t work out for the consumer. Now at the same time, Tmoo is squeezing small manufacturers in China to cut prices to even lower levels that makes it even impossible for Chinese manufacturers to make a profit. Now one Chinese manufacturer who goes by Tai Chi was approached by Tmoo to sell on the platform when it launched in 2022 and he joined, but soon found out that he had little control over prices. Tmoo will often ask to lower prices and if you agree, the platform will decide what the lower price is.

07:24
You don’t have say over your pricing, and if you refuse to lower your price, you simply won’t be listed on the platform. This is their method of operation. Tmoo’s parent company, Pinduoduo, burst onto the scene in China by providing deep discounts to gain market share as well. And heck, Amazon did the same thing back in the day, and the formula works. Offer impossibly low prices to shut everyone out and lose a ton of money for many years, and then once you’ve become a household name, raise prices and turn a profit.

07:54
This is what Amazon did and this is what Tmoo is trying to do right now. But the difference this time between Tmoo and Amazon is that Chinese companies like Tmoo have the advantage of favorable taxation and impossibly cheap labor compared to U.S. companies. They don’t have to pay any taxes at all and they can get away with paying their staff pennies on the dollar. Now the real question though is whether they can keep this up. As I mentioned earlier, Tmoo’s low prices is costing the company a ton of money.

08:21
and they’re estimated to be losing $30 per order and hundreds of million dollars per year. Tmoo is also squeezing their suppliers to get the lowest pricing possible, and many Chinese sellers are leaving Tmoo. Meanwhile, Tmoo is also gathering data from millions of US citizens, which is attracting the scrutiny of the US government. So in my eyes, something has to give. And right now, TikTok’s about to be banned. Who knows Tmoo might be next. But on the flip side, we just happen to be living in a very interesting period right now. The average American

08:51
is carrying a record amount of credit card debt and the savings rate is at an all-time low, which makes for the perfect storm for a company like Timo to thrive. Now as a small business owner, what can you do to fight back? You all know that I teach e-commerce over at mywebquaterjob.com and I run a seven-figure store over at bumblebillindens.com. Is it all doom and gloom? And here’s what I have to say, and I’m going to be quite frank and honest with you guys. If you are selling commodity products,

09:19
that do not have a strong value proposition, you probably aren’t going to survive regardless of whether Tmoo and Shien exists or not. So for example, if you’re selling generic t-shirts that are easily copied by manufacturers from China who have a cost advantage over you, you’re just not going to make it. But if you can tap into the emotions of your buyer and establish a strong brand, you will survive regardless of pricing pressure. And since we’ve been talking about t-shirts and apparel so far, I’d like to talk about

09:47
one of my favorite companies, is called True Classic Tees. True Classic Tees is a company that sells generic solid color t-shirts, which is probably one of the most saturated and competitive niches out there. But they brought in over 250 million bucks since they opened in 2019. Now, how does a blank t-shirt company that sells plain t-shirts for 25 bucks a pop make so much money? Well, it’s all about the marketing and how they make consumers feel about their product. Now, if you’ve never watched one of their True Classic Tees commercials,

10:17
Basically, they show an overweight guy wearing a shirt with his beer belly hanging out and the shirt doesn’t really fit well at all. Then they flash forward to a picture of the exact same overweight guy in a true classic t-shirt and all of sudden he looks buff. The t-shirt emphasizes his biceps and hides his Buddha belly. Now, can T-Muscle a plain t-shirt for three bucks? Yes, but it cannot replicate the mind share that true classic tease has created. Selling online is all about triggering the emotions of your consumer.

10:46
and it’s not all about price. I’d much rather pay 25 bucks for a t-shirt that makes me look and feel good rather than a cheap throwaway $3 t-shirt. And incidentally, this is exactly how Dr. Squatch sells men’s soap. Now as a dude, I don’t really care about what soap did I use in the shower. When I’m in a hotel, I’ll use whatever soap that’s there. But Dr. Squatch hooked me with their commercials. Instead of telling consumers about how good their soap smells or how well the soap cleans and exfoliates, Dr. Squatch sells soaps

11:15
by catering to the sexual desires of men. Now in almost all their commercials, they show a woman smelling her man saying words like, man, you smell so good. I want to jump you right now. And as a guy, when you watch a commercial like that, you’re probably thinking to yourself, wait a sec, if I use Dr. Squatch, I’m going to get more action? Well, sign me up. Now can T-Mu sell a bar of soap at half the price? Definitely. But can they compete with Dr. Squatch? Probably not. Right now,

11:43
Tmoo is a junkyard that sells cheap generic products from China, and their rock bottom pricing is affecting the apparel industry the most because apparel is a commodity, and most clothing, especially on Amazon, is generic and unbranded. Now what I didn’t tell you about my friend Jerry Kozak earlier is that even though his business has dropped around 50%, he’s going to be just fine because the other half of his business does not depend on sales from Amazon or being price competitive.

12:10
The other half of his teacher business is where he custom prints products from NATO, college sports teams, and other organizations. The other half of his business is where he’s established a solid repeat customer base and strong relationships with his customers. And these are customers that he will never lose. His added value is his customer service, his attention to detail, and the loyalty he’s built over time. And this is what it takes to create a lasting e-commerce business.

12:38
So while Tmoo is probably destroying the low end apparel market, as a small business owner, you can succeed by niching down and going for the high end. If you were competing purely based on price, you’ve already lost. Now as for the other unfair advantages that Tmoo currently possesses, that’s up to the US government to decide. If you feel as though the de minimis rules that prevent Chinese sellers from having to pay US taxes sounds unfair, well then you should write a letter to your local representative in your state. And if you are against

13:06
possible slave labor practices in the creation of Tmoo’s products, then you can show your support by not buying these products as well. But for myself and my e-commerce store, I’m not really worried about Tmoo at all. Now, if you want to learn more about Tmoo, there’s a lot of episodes on my YouTube channel. And if you want to listen to Jerry Kozak’s episode, just go back and look through my archives at the podcast. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now with all the Google AI changes, Tmoo, Shein and TikTok Shop, e-commerce is going to change dramatically this year.

13:36
For more information about this episode, go to MyWifeCoderJob.com slash episode 526. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at SellerSummit.com. If you want to hang out in person, in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs, and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to SellerSummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeCoderJob.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.

14:05
Thanks for listening.

00:28
But before we begin, want to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. And right now, actually, they’re almost sold out. We only have seven mastermind passes left. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business.

00:56
Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year,

01:23
We also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that does not require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print-on-demand

01:52
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.

02:12
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my long friend and colleague Scotty V back on the show. And personally, I like to call Scott the grandfather of selling on Amazon, as he was one of the first and most popular podcasts in the space. And today he runs Brand Creators, where he teaches others how to start their own brand and future proof their business. But the reason why I decided to have him on the show today,

02:40
is because he’s been doing a lot of work and a lot of content on YouTube about Etsy as he and his wife run a thriving Etsy business as well. And my daughter has been dabbling with Etsy and I’m pretty sure she’s going to be thrilled and she’s going to actually listen to this episode. And with that, welcome to show, Scott, how are doing? I am doing fantastic. And I just, I think it’s great that you do that intro right on the fly like that. That’s pretty impressive there.

03:08
So good job for that. wouldn’t expect anything less, but that was pretty good. Good little intro. So my daughter’s selling an Etsy and she’s actually watched a couple of your videos. Okay. And I think she’s a fan. think she’s a really, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think if, if she takes with what you have taught with e-commerce and what I’m sharing with the Etsy side, she could probably do pretty good. Cause the crazy thing is though, with this whole Etsy thing is it’s

03:36
To me, it is untapped as far as like with what we bring to the game. It’s like a lot of Etsy sellers right now are not using the marketing stuff that you and I have been using for years. Whether it’s even the Amazon space, there was a lot of people when I was in that space teaching it, they weren’t doing the marketing stuff, right? They’re just doing whatever.

04:03
whatever the platform would allow them to do a lot of the things. And there’s a lot of good things that that does, but they never really did anything externally. And that’s really what I’ve been trying to teach and preach. And it’s what we’ve been doing with my wife’s little Etsy shop. it’s been really, really working. And I’m excited because I get to teach with what we’re doing and it feels good because it’s what we’re doing, but it’s also, I think, an underserved market.

04:30
And I just, I like being in the forefront of that right now because a lot of people are benefiting from it, from what I can tell. I’m just curious, why did your wife decide to sell an Etsy? Cause you know a lot about Amazon and some of the other marketplaces. Why did she choose Etsy? Okay. This is a great question, Steven. I don’t think you and I’ve ever had this conversation, but okay. So back in the day when I was selling on Amazon, you know, a neighbor of mine, we had a brand that we started together, right? And

04:58
Uh, you know, we started, it was in the cooking niche. Okay. And so we were selling accessories for some of the top brands and just things like that. Right. So, and we built a blog on the backend of that, that was getting a significant amount of traffic. Um, and we just launched products, built an email list, like did all that stuff. And to be honest with you, I got tired. Uh, and so did she, and that’s when she messaged me she’s like, I think I want to sell. And I’m like, okay, let’s do it. Like I’m, I’m fine with it. Right.

05:28
And again, that was a way for me, like it was a way to make money. We made good money. We sold the business. We made a good chunk of change, but, uh, it also allowed me to teach the thing that I really love doing. Like I love talking about marketing. I love talking about email. I love talking about all that stuff. It’s like, how can I be in the trenches and do it, but really also be able to teach it. And so when we got all done, I was like, all right.

05:54
kind of I’m done with Amazon for right now. I’m not saying I’m retiring from it, but I’m kind of done and her and my wife are friends and she’s now Debbie. That’s her name. She, she basically said, I’m going to just go and start playing on Etsy. And so she started doing Etsy and then she starts sending me screenshots. Look at, made 20,000. Oh, look at this. I’m going to do a hundred thousand this year. Oh my gosh. I’m going to do 250,000 this year. Debbie, what are you doing?

06:17
Right? Like what’s going on? She’s like, I’m doing print on demand, Scott. It’s beautiful. We don’t have no inventory. We got nothing. I’m like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. No inventory. Like the things that we were struggling with, like warehousing, like all that stuff. And she’s like, yeah. And I said, all right, you got to tell me more. And so then her and her husband, we went out to dinner and then she kind of explained it. And then my wife was interested. So she actually came over to our house and helped my wife set her little shop up and, and got started. And,

06:44
And then from there, it’s kind of been just like a little bit of a side hustle. And, and then from, you know, I say probably about eight months in after my wife had her first fourth quarter, which wasn’t, it wasn’t huge. was like 20, 30,000. That’s a lot, man. That’s a lot. It was, it was, and it got my attention and I was like, well, wait a minute here. Maybe I should kind of come in here and try to work in the business a little bit, like everything that we’ve done before.

07:09
We start a blog, we do an email list, we do all the things that we did before and maybe I can do that and I can also teach and share. And so that’s what happened. But I didn’t really get into it too much until actually Cody from Everbee, who’s a good friend of mine now and it reminds me a lot of Greg Mercer. It’s almost the same pattern of how it happened because Greg came to me.

07:32
years ago, like he did you and said, Hey, I got this little Chrome extension. It helps you find products on Amazon, whatever. And, uh, and then we became friends and then his thing blew up. mean, the thing is, um, you know, I don’t even know how much it’s valued at now millions. Um, but it’s a great company, big company, hundreds of employees. Um, and now Cody reminds me of this same guy. And so of, of Greg, and he just said to me, you go Scott.

07:58
we need someone like you in this space. There’s no one in there doing this right now. And he was a fan of the podcast before and he sold on Amazon and all that stuff. And he’s like, we need someone like you. I’m like, I don’t know. And I kicked it around for probably six months. And then I said, all right, I’m going to do it. And then talking with you about YouTube, said, let’s just, let’s just start helping people and see where this leads. And that’s kind of what I’ve been doing. So yeah, I mean, to answer your question, she got referred to by my ex business partner.

08:26
No, we didn’t leave on bad terms. We just sold the business. Is she, is your wife doing print on demand then? Yeah. All print on, you know, what’s ironic about this is that we just bought a printer. we’re, doing the printing on demand now in our shop. Yeah. So it’s actually there’s a, there’s a guy I know, uh, Steven Chin who actually, um, they built their business through COVID doing masks, right. And customizing masks. then he did over a million dollars in masks on Etsy.

08:56
And then they obviously went out of business. You know, it didn’t go out of business, but the business stopped. So he’s like, what do we do? And he bought all this equipment to print them in-house. So then they ended up doing their own print on demand and they, do it all in-house though. But he had hundreds of employees and then he went out and built a tool that basically now will automate that through the backend and the API and stuff. But, he still does in-house. Awesome. I just don’t want anything to do with employees. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have the employees are ready for Bumblebee doing the embroidery.

09:26
Printing is actually easier. Yeah. So Etsy in terms of like the numbers in the marketplace, it’s probably like a thousand times smaller than Amazon literally. So I actually looked at that before I jumped on her because I knew you’d want some numbers. Um, I think right now, I think right now the last that I checked it was 7.5 million sellers. Okay. Etsy sellers and they’re like 95 to a hundred million buyers. Right. And I think Amazon right now,

09:55
is around million shoppers, buyers. So that’s the number that I came up with. Could I be off? Could be, but yeah, Amazon is a lot bigger and I think e-commerce in general is pretty large. But the numbers that you were just quoting, those are really high numbers. There’s this common misconception that you can’t make that much money on Etsy. For the people that you’ve interacted with, what would you say like the revenue potential is for a business like your wife’s?

10:22
Gosh. Well, we just had this conversation the other day, Steve, because we also built out a Shopify store. We got that going. Um, we actually just did that recently. I’ve had a blog that’s been attached to this, a content site that gets about 30,000 views a month. So that’s a blog. is. Yeah. And I’ve got it. I’ve got Mediavine on it. So we’ve got Mediavine that’s making maybe 1500 bucks a month and just passive, you know, kind of media money when

10:46
You know, when, when I was looking at like the whole thing, I’m like, we could build this into a sizable business, like seven figure plus easy, right? But I’m like, you know, I don’t know if I want to, I literally said that to my wife. I’m like, I don’t know if I want to, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing. I keep teaching. Yeah. You know, we’ll make enough money. Like, like we’ll do what we love to do, but you have to also look at like when you’re doing print on demand, even if you’re using another third party company to do it, like printify.

11:14
You still have customer support. You got people saying like, Oh, I didn’t want it to say that. I wanted it to say this. Right. Cause my wife’s doing personalization. She is doing that. So she is personalizing things and she just had it happen the other day where, someone’s like, no, I wanted it to be this year. I put in the wrong year. Right. So now you got to go back in and hopefully you can catch it and printify and, and all of that stuff. So yeah, it’s still, um, there’s a ton of potential. So to answer your question, I, uh, I, uh, did an interview.

11:44
with one of the, actually not one of the number one seller in Etsy. And they have been for like the past five years and they sell jewelry and they have over 2 million sales. Like, yeah, crazy. And up till recently, they were just doing Etsy. And I say recently, probably in 2021, I think is what he said.

12:10
Um, that they, uh, they, decided to do a Shopify store and I think they have about 30 employees now. Right. But yeah, that’s a multimillion dollar business. So is the numbers there, depending on the products, depending on all that stuff comes into it. I think that it doesn’t matter what platform you’re selling on it still, but I think handmade is always going to be bigger on Etsy, right? But it’s not only handmade anymore. Everybody thinks it’s only got to be handmade. Um, now there are people coming in trying to do drop shipping. That’s going to get kicked off pretty soon. Like.

12:39
It is gonna happen. But print on demand is pretty big as long as you’re designing the design, know, and you’re making the design and stuff, it’s handmade in their eyes. So walk me through the process of getting visibility on Etsy. And let’s say you’re launching a new design or your wife’s launching a new design. Walk me through the steps. Is it like Amazon, keyword dominated, that sort of thing? Yeah, so keyword, yes, keyword. I would say keywords is definitely a big deal.

13:08
But again, it’s exactly, this is what I love about this because everything I was teaching on Amazon, it’s pretty much the same over on Etsy as far as like the algorithm goes. You know, like we all know that if you wanted to rank a product, but again, you got to know that what you’re targeting, right? Like I just had a conversation with one of my students the other day and she has a great product. It’s doing great on Tik Tok. It’s getting like, she made like $4,000 on this product, which is like a $30 product on Tik Tok, but she’s not really selling anything on Etsy with that one product.

13:38
And I’m like, well, what’s the difference here? And I looked at the titling and I’m like, it’s, just doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense. We have, we have to fix the title. Um, and then you’ll start getting traffic. But to your point, as long as you’re, you look at the numbers and that this is where a tool comes in to show you like, what’s the potential for a product. Right? So in her case, she sells like reclaimed wood, right? And she created this reclaimed wood personalized. Uh, it’s a little sign for Christmas that has, uh,

14:08
that has all of the different days of the Christmas that you put a candy cane through. Right. And so we did great on Tik TOK, but she didn’t have it labeled like farmhouse Christmas decoration. Right. We know farmhouse is a really popular search term. And if people see that, even though they’re not searching for a candy cane, you know, Advent calendar type thing, if they see that they might want to buy it because it’s, it’s rustic wood and it’s farmhouse. So if you took that same idea, right, let’s say that that is being searched for

14:38
And then you get an influx of sales. It’s going to automatically, uh, get the attention of the algorithm because Etsy, like any other platform is going to promote products that are selling. Right. So to me, our launch plan is very, very simple. And it’s very similar to what we used to do on that on Amazon. You launch the product, we discount the product pretty heavily. We run Etsy ads, push it as hard as we can. We have an email list. We tell them that this week only it’s 40 % off because we’re doing a launch special.

15:08
Um, and then basically that’s it, right? We just want to try to get as many sales through that listing as possible. Number one, it’s going to get sales. We’re going to spike the algorithm, but then we’re also going to be able to start getting reviews on that item. What’s what a review is going to do. That’s going to help us convert hire when people land there and all of this stuff that we all know, um, turns people into buyers. So yeah, it’s pretty, that’s pretty much what you’re going to do. The people that are like, I’m just going to launch a product and let organic take over. Good luck. You know I mean? Like it’s just like,

15:38
Everyone else is doing that. What’s going to separate you? You’ve got, I mean, think about it logically, 50 listings of almost the same type of product. What is, what is Etsy going to promote? What are they going to put at the top? Because you’ve got better SEO. Who cares? Right. So with print on demand specifically though, can you just kind of walk me through what your margins look like? What do you sell? First of all, print on demand wise? Yeah, it’s typically going to be a sweatshirts, shirts, obviously, pillows.

16:07
Flags, yard flags are big. Regular flags that you hang up are big. Obviously this time of year, stockings, ornaments, all of those things. And there’s other things, blankets. Blankets are a great one. They’re great margins. We’ve got a couple on our couch. Basically like a fleecy type of blanket that you can use for the couch. You can print the whole one side. They might sell for 79, 89 bucks and the margins on those are about 40%.

16:36
That’s not bad. That’s pretty good. It’s not. It’s not for completely like to me, automated in a sense to like, literally you put up the product, you got no inventory. If it sells great, if it doesn’t, you’re out 20 cents for the listing fee for three months. Right. 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.

17:04
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. 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.

17:33
And in terms of choosing the keywords, I imagine you’re using Everbee to figure out what keywords are special, but a lot of times it comes out of the design though, right? 100%. Yeah. It does come down to keywords. Now the other cool thing is, like what we’ll use Everbee for is like, like Everbee is like any other tool though that has like keyword data. It’s not exact. It’s guesses. Right. And so what I like to look at more than anything is I like to look at the products that are selling that are similar. And then I look at their title. What did they use?

18:03
And then I look at their tags because we can expose their tags using a tool like ever be. Right. And then I can go, Oh, they’re using these. didn’t think about putting in there, uh, you know, uh, you know, sweatshirt for Nick, you nurse, right? Like that’s a tag. Okay. Well, maybe I should use that. Um, so that’s how I think about it, but honestly, your SEO can be 80%. You know, good, but if you’re getting sales, just.

18:29
it takes it up a notch because you’re getting those sales as long as you, and you know it Steve, like there’s going to be probably a handful of keywords that are driving a bulk of the traffic. Right. Walk me through Etsy ads. Is it just like running Google ads or Amazon sponsored it? No, it’s okay. The one thing that’s, that’s good about it is there’s not a lot of knobs to turn. I’m not a lot of buttons to click. Okay. It’s very, very basic. You can’t isolate keywords. You can’t isolate, uh,

18:57
You can’t isolate a certain product. You can’t do any of that. All you do is you basically say, I want to advertise these five listings. I want my budget to be 25 bucks a day. Right. And that’s basically all you can choose. Huh? So you can’t really, there’s no knobs to turn really. There’s really isn’t the only thing you can do.

19:19
is on the backend. Once you start getting traffic through there, you can see the impressions, which is a good thing. So I always tell people like, even if you ran ads just to get the data to say, okay, we’re not relying on a keyword tool so much, but we’re relying on true data. I can see the impressions. I can see my clicks and I can see my sales. The other thing I can see is keywords that drove people to the listing. Okay. That’s important. Right. So now what I can do is I can go, Oh,

19:47
I’m selling a reclaimed rustic wood sign, right? Christmas sign, but I’m showing up for the keyword wood. Nah, I’m to turn that one off. I don’t want to show up for just wood because if someone goes there, they might click on it, but they’re not really targeted for what I’m selling. Okay. So you can do negatives. You just don’t have control over the positive keywords. Exactly right. You just turn them off and then that way they’re, you’re training, you’re training the, uh, you know, the Etsy ads algorithm.

20:16
to not show up for that because it’s not relevant. So in terms of return on ad spend and cost per click, I imagine it’s significantly lower than, I mean, I guess it’s hard to generalize, but compared to Amazon, I mean, are we talking lower CPCs and? Yeah. And that’s the other thing that Etsy really doesn’t have. They don’t have a really good way of tracking. They show you the sales that came from it. They will show you that.

20:45
Um, so we can look at it look at ROAS and all that stuff. But again, when you have your ROAS in there, it’s not taking what you paid for the product. Of course. Yes. Yes, of course. So we still have to figure that stuff out. Well, yeah, but a lot of people don’t realize that they’re like, Oh, look at that. I got a 15 % ROAS. You’re like, did you? You know, like, no, because we need to take out the money. So how much did you really make on that? So, um, and there’s not a lot that you can do from someone clicked on it.

21:12
Uh, they didn’t purchase it right now, but maybe they bought 30 days from now. Right. Right. So we, don’t have a lot of that. So I don’t look at it like that. I look at it like I use the Etsy ads to get those, that sales velocity. I also think that when you’re running Etsy ads, and this is just my hunch that I do believe that Etsy might give you a little nudge in your organic because they’re like, Oh, they’re spending money. They’re a real business. They’re like, they’re trying to push their business. I think it gives you a good check.

21:42
mark against your, your brand. Um, but the other cool thing that it does though, is it will show you, you know, the orders that came from it, but not just the order that they clicked on. It’ll show you everything that that customer purchased from you or anywhere from us. like in, the shop, if, if they clicked on the, the wood reclaimed sign would sign, but then they also bought a sweatshirt and they bought a pillow.

22:11
I can see that underneath there. So that one customer now didn’t just buy the one they actually bought. You see, so we can get to see that. But the other cool thing is too, is, and this is what they have set up inside of the Etsy platform for, for sellers is you have the, call them internal email triggers. So if someone favorites one of your items, you can set up a coupon code to go out to that person. It’s all built into the Etsy backend.

22:38
So let’s say that you drive someone over from a ad on Etsy, but they favorite a bunch of your items. can have one of those favorites become a email that gets sent out to them on the behalf of you from Etsy that’ll say, hey, we noticed that you liked this item. Why don’t you take 10 % off? So it’ll do that. The other one it’ll do is it’ll do add to cart. So if you have someone add to cart,

23:04
You can set up a trigger there that’ll basically say, Hey, we saw that you, uh, that you wanted to buy this thing. You haven’t purchased yet. Why don’t you take 15 % off and buy today? So you can set that up. And then the other one that they have is if someone buys a product, you can send out a thank you. Here’s 20 % offer for buying it from our shop. That’s all internal within, within that. So what’s the timeframe on like the add to cart and not purchase? Like you obviously don’t want the email to go out right away, right? Yeah. I don’t know what the exact is, to be honest with you. They don’t tell you, um,

23:34
but I’m assuming it’s going to be within that same kind of time period that has been kind of proven over time for e-commerce. I would say like it’s going to be soon, but it’s, not going to wait a week. Um, you know what mean? And also you have to keep in mind that Etsy also is only sending this out to people that have, um, basically raised their hand to receive Etsy emails. Sure. Yes. And this doesn’t cost any money. No. Do you need to discount the product?

24:02
You do need to give them some type of coupon, a reason to do it. So, I mean, you can give them a 5%. I was doing 5 % for the favorites for a while, but then I opted for 10%. I’m like, ah, what the hell? Let’s see what happens. And then they’ll show you the numbers. They’ll, they’ll show you like, okay. Um, a hundred emails got sent out and you got three sales from that. So it’ll show you that. Okay. Um, one little trick though, that I figured out and I did it by accident was if you go in there, I’m going to do this after the holidays, because what you can do is if you.

24:31
If you turn one of them off and then turn it back on again, you can, you can choose to send it out to customers 90 days in the past. Ah, okay. So if you, if you kill it, let’s say you kill it you go, Oh, I want to take my 5 % and make it 10%. It’ll say, start, you know, create a new campaign. And then it’ll say, um, would you like this to go out to the customers in the last 90 days or people in the last 90 days that added it to their cart, but didn’t purchase or favorited the item and didn’t purchase.

24:59
So you can actually do that and they don’t really tell you that until you actually do it and then you can check that box, which is pretty cool. So for the people who shop on Etsy, they probably know this, right? So are they just favoriting and adding stuff to cart and I don’t know, Steve, they’re not as slick as you and Well, no, I’m just, I’m just wondering. Yeah. That’s all automated. I know earlier you were saying that you were really excited about email, specifically email that you control, right? In this case, you don’t have their actual email address. It’s all built in internal to Etsy, right? This is

25:27
This is true, but the cool thing that Etsy does that Amazon doesn’t do is they do want us to email market and they actually have an integration right now with a Weber, which by the way, on the record, I don’t like a Weber. Um, I’ve used them for years. Uh, I used to use them for years. I did when I first started, it was my first provider and they somehow got to be promoted by Etsy in the integrations. I used them because it was the only way that I can make it work because that was the only integration.

25:56
But now the guy I was talking about, Cody, they just created Everbee email, which is now part of their suite of tools, which allows us to do that, but way more. Um, but yeah, Etsy says right in their documentation that you can collect an email from your customer. You do have to get their consent. You have to let them know what you’ll be emailing them and you have to get them to double opt in. Basically that’s what you’re doing. Um, and there’s ways that you can, that you can do it just like we used to do it years ago with, you know, tools like feedback genius or.

26:26
sales backer or any of those. but yeah, we get to have their email address now, um, which is really awesome because, you know, let’s say that you have a great Q four, which we’re going to all of those people now can become subscribers, which then I can get repeat customers from. Um, so yeah, and they become part of my email list so I can port them right. I can export them out of my ever be account. And then now all of a sudden I can put them wherever I want, or I can keep them right in there.

26:54
So how can Etsy enforce what you’re emailing if it’s the real email address of the customer? They can’t, right? Oh, I don’t follow you. What do mean? You just said, uh, well, okay. Maybe let’s take a step back. How do you actually get the email of the customer? The real one? Okay. Yeah. Right. Okay. So the email is automatically given to you from Etsy and it’s, it’s automatically exposed. Like I can see it right in.

27:19
the orders, right? I can see that. And there’s tools out there right now that have been scraping them for years. It’s not legal, it’s not terms of service, but people have been doing it. All Etsy is doing right now, and this is one thing I’ve noticed with Etsy, they’re not that sophisticated, right? Like they’re still kind of behind on their UI and just certain things, right? Like it’s just, it kind of reminds me of like 1990s, right? Like with AOL and stuff, that’s kind of what I think of. I really do. I’m like,

27:47
Guys, we can step this up a little bit, but with that being said, you can take that or that email is automatically given to you, but it’s almost like they’re not making it. Like if you don’t get a double opt in, you can’t email them. But what they’re saying is in so many words is if we get complaints that customers are saying, Hey, this, these people are emailing me for my Etsy order, you’re probably going to get flagged. if you get flagged, you’re going to probably get banned, right? That’s, that’s what’s going to happen. So.

28:16
It’s kind of like, don’t want to call it the honor system, but in a sense it kind of is you could just skip the double opt-in and get them on your email list. I wouldn’t, um, just cause I wouldn’t want to take that risk. Uh, but yeah, that’s there’s, there’s nothing holding you back from just getting the email addresses. in terms of the automated integration of taking that email and adding it to an email provider, as far as you know, only a WebRN ever be have this capability right now. Yeah. I think Alora.

28:45
might as well. think that’s how you pronounce them. Yeah, I think they might as well. I don’t know. But the only one that’s publicly in there right now, like if you went into your integration in Etsy, the only one that you can see is a Weber pretty soon. Ever be will be in there, but you can connect with ever be. I mean, they’ve got the integration all in there. It’s like one click. It just connects to your shop. The minute it connects to your shop. The cool thing is, and I don’t want this to be a big promotion for ever be, although I love those guys. But basically now it just, once you, you sync it up and connect it.

29:15
It immediately goes into a sequence where you will, um, you can basically send an email out to, cause Etsy has said you can send emails to your customers about an order. Okay. That’s in their terms of service. So if you, if you’re going to confirm your order, uh, you can basically send an email about that. Hey, just got your order. We’re preparing it. We’re going to ship it, whatever. When items shipped, Hey, just want to let you know your items being shipped. Uh, if you need anything in the meantime, let us know. And then when it’s delivered, Hey, we just.

29:44
Notice that was delivered. Let us know if everything’s cool. You can send those out because it’s pertaining to the order, but where you are able to now get the email to become a subscriber is inside of those emails. You’re going to put a little blurb in there and say, Hey, and by the way, we have a VIP club. If you’d like to be part of it, click here and we will send you, uh, you know, emails about our upcoming specials, something like that. Once they opt in there, it’s fair game, whatever you want to email. It is. is.

30:14
100%. And then once they’re there and they’ve confirmed there, then you could export that list out of that and go to whatever platform you want. If you want to go to convert kit, if you want to go to any of them. Um, I personally wouldn’t because everything’s in house now, right? It’s all under that one, one roof, but you could, right? If Etsy decides to ban you, you can just export your list and take it with you. Do those providers also have knowledge of what the person bought? So you can do cross sells automatically and that sort of thing. Yes.

30:41
Um, yes, they, they absolutely do. And even a Weber does where you could then see a product and then you can create a sequence for that product. Um, now ever be, I believe does they’ll actually, what’s cool with ever be though now too, is it’ll show you like on the order confirmation, it’ll show you your open rate, your click through rate, and it’ll show you if they ordered anything extra from that order confirmation. Nice. Yeah. Cause inside of there too, they’ve got a feature.

31:08
that they built in that’ll pull in your products from your Etsy shop. And you can say, I want it to be my best sellers. And you can put it at the footer there and it’ll show like two of your products or four of your products. So you can actually cross promote right in that one email. What’s funny about this is I feel like Etsy has been around as long as Amazon. Maybe, a lot. But, and this is just starting to happen. That’s, that’s what I’m saying. Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. And you know, you know, uh, Scotty V likes email. Yes.

31:38
Yes. Scotty V all over, all over this Steve. Yeah. This is good stuff. So if you’re brand new and you’re starting print on demand, people are listening to this episode. It seems like ads is par for the course. Yeah. Right. And you might not have an email list in the beginning. So what is it? Just list, do a little bit of keyword research ads, press the winners. Yeah. The only thing I would add to that is, and, uh, this is something I know Jackness has done, um,

32:07
I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve probably done these, but just doing your typical giveaway, right? Like, so that’s a big one for us. Like we launched our Amazon brand by building a list of 5,000 people that were interested in cooking, right? And then we were able to launch our products and get a hundred sales on a brand new product and then climb the ranks. Right. And so, and I know Steve or, um, Jack, this has done that before too, for his brand color it.

32:32
Um, but yeah, I mean, that’s my thing right now. I’m not, I’m even doing it for my, my wife’s brand is like, we’re going to take four or five of her products. We’re going to put them in King Sumo and we’re basically going to run a Facebook ad, you know, over, you know, target the right people that would be interested, run them over to the giveaway, let the get giveaway do its thing. And then we’re collecting those emails and then I’m going to add them to my email list. Now they’re not from Etsy, so I don’t have to worry about that. I’ve already got them to opt in and now I can import them into my ever be account and I can start emailing them.

33:02
through that account. But are you driving those people to Etsy? Yes, I will be. Yeah, like right now, like in that, I think that’s a debate too. Like people are like, well, what if I have a Shopify store? Shouldn’t I send them there? I’ll spend in less, less fees. And the answer is yes, but you also won’t be getting the benefits of driving the rank up by getting sales. So you almost have to like in the short term, maybe sacrifice your Shopify and just push to Etsy. So that way there you can spike the algorithm. Cause I know that some people just

33:30
Don’t shop on Etsy. So I guess maybe in your targeting, you target people who are Etsy shoppers. that you could sure. Yeah. Yeah. For you, a hundred percent could do that. Um, but yeah, I mean, think regardless, if people like the product, they’re going to buy it on whatever platform it is, whether it’s your, your site, Amazon. I think the thing with an Etsy or an Amazon is it’s a trusted platform. It’s been around for years, right? So your conversions were going to be higher versus going to, you know, your Shopify store. You gotta have a lot of.

33:58
you and you do on yours, you have a lot of like accolades and things that you guys have accomplished and you’ve been around for this many years. You got a phone number, like all those important things, but you go to Etsy, you’re like, I got a problem. I’m just going to tell Etsy. don’t like it. They’re going to give me a refund. So, but one other thing though, too, Steve, that I don’t know if whoever’s listening, if they do sell on Etsy, if you, if you haven’t heard of this yet, they rolled it out about, actually I know the exact date was September 6th. It’s called their share and save program. Okay. Did you hear about this? No, no, no.

34:29
Okay, good. Let’s come into here live with, with me from me to use them. September 6th. mean, that’s just a couple of months ago. Yeah. Yeah. So share and save what Etsy decided to do is they are giving us Etsy sellers a 4 % refund on our Etsy fees when we drive our own traffic. So if you, um, if you had a hundred dollar order, they’re going to give you four bucks.

34:57
that you would have paid in fees. Okay. Um, so I just did a little case study, uh, a month ago. Uh, it was, well, it was in October and just from email, think we, I think we generated like maybe 3,100 bucks. Just from email got about $140, $150 in fee money that I would have paid. That’s now in my pocket. That’s profit. So clearly Etsy wants us to drive our own traffic.

35:25
Right? So if they want us to drive our own traffic, they recommend starting a newsletter, right? Using social media, like all of these things. So that’s another reason why I love email so much because I can control that. I can also see it. So now before, when you couldn’t track sales from email that much, cause Etsy didn’t give you the, you couldn’t put a pixel or anything. Now I can see my link. I can see how many times it was clicked. I can see how many times that people bought and I can see how much money I made extra outside of the fees.

35:55
It seems like they’re following an Amazon’s footsteps because Amazon does that stuff too. I’m sure. Yeah. Let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk about the creative side of creating the products. Uh, is the wife, the brains of that operation? Okay. Yeah. Does she have any methods? Like, uh, do you have goals on how many products you release or is it just whenever she feels like creating a product line, she does it. Yeah. Well, okay. So anybody that knows my story, like her and I back in the day, uh,

36:22
We had a photography studio and she was a creative on that, right? That’s her, that’s her almost like a creative outlet and almost Etsy for her as a creative outlet. Like she just loves designing. She loves creating and she loves making people happy and putting a smile on people’s faces. So that’s her thing. The marketing side, not so much. She doesn’t really care to now if I wasn’t around, she would probably figure it out and do it on her own, but that’s kind of my wheelhouse. But for her right now, she’s

36:49
We know that like when you’re leading into the holidays, you that you got to basically take advantage of it. And there’s been so many people that I’ve interviewed and talked to about Etsy that are selling on Etsy, even the million dollar sellers, 80 % of their sales are typically coming from Q4. 80%. Yeah. But you’re talking like I was talking to that Steven and he’s like, yeah, I mean, we’ll do, we’ll do like four or $500,000 in November. And I’m like,

37:17
Okay. I mean, that’s, great. He’s like, you know, and then in December we’ll do a good portion too, but then it kind of, tails down. It’s steady, but it tails down. Um, and so knowing that going into the season, you’re always gonna, even though you might say, well, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, uh, uh, know, create 30 products a month. might say, but I probably should, because I want to take advantage of this traffic that’s going to be coming through the door. Um, so for my wife, I would say she’s in.

37:46
creation mode, I would say leading up to the holidays, she’ll probably stop like right now she’s still creating, but she’s going to slow up and then it’s going to turn into now more or less like support and getting the stuff done. Right. I would say she was probably at the pace where she was doing, I don’t know, a new design a day, you know, like it was a new design, but then sometimes that new design might go on five different products. That’s the beautiful thing is too. You take one design and now it gets put on a pillow, a flag, a blanket.

38:15
Sure. Uh, you know, so now you’re be able to create five products out of one design. Does she pick a certain theme each time? Like I guess, cause I’ve never seen her Etsy store before. Does she say, okay, this is my Christmas line of products. And then she just pumps out a bunch of designs related to that. Yeah, it’ll definitely be theme related for sure. So if it’s like, if it’s like Christmas, you’re going to go down that, that line. Um, and also trying to bring, bring something like new and clever. Um, and, and again, like,

38:44
you’re pulling inspiration off of other products that might’ve did well, but they aren’t even close as far as like what the design is because my wife will come up and she’ll either make it a lot better or she’ll just take the idea and come up with her own. but yeah, it’s definitely theme based. So if you’re heading into Easter, she’s going to be going Easter heavy, right? If she’s, if she’s leading into, um, even fall, right? It might be like fall decor, home decor, right? It might be in that, but

39:12
The cool thing is, is when you’re adding it to your catalog, the stuff is still going to reside there. And we’ve had people buy Christmas stuff in July, right? Because it’s still in the shop. Right. Um, but yeah, I would say typically it’s going to be, um, it’s going to be going down that, that road. mean, and you using, you know, one of my students there who does the reclaim wood, like she’ll do like, she does like reclaim wood where you can buy the wood to put on your wall, but she also sells those big, tall Christmas signs that you lean up near your door that says something cute.

39:41
about Christmas, right? So she’s gonna do a bunch of those leading into the season versus she’s not gonna do those in July. July is gonna be more spring summer, right? What tools does your wife use to create the designs? Can she get away with the Canva or does she use Illustrator? 100%. Like I’m a Photoshop guy, you’re a Photoshop guy. Yeah, Canva 100 % and Canva is crazy because that’s all I pretty much use now for my stuff. Like I don’t even get into Photoshop anymore. Interesting, I didn’t know that.

40:09
Okay. I don’t, I kind of retired it, man. I don’t have it on my new laptop and I don’t have it on my other computer. I only have it on my older computer. So if I want it, I’ve got it. But yeah, I mean, I’ve been able to manage myself with Canva as well, Canva pro and, that’s it. And then she’ll use creative fabrica at times to get some fonts or get design elements or something like that. And then she’s also hired a fiber gigs. She’s had people go out there and draw certain

40:36
components that she would want and then she’ll add them to her thing. Um, and that’s pretty much it. So tool wise, I mean for design is like Canva, creative fabrica, you know, maybe fiber. I was going to ask about AI actually that that’s where I was leading. We, we experimented with it. Um, and, we, created a few elements here and there, but, uh, but honestly, uh, she hasn’t really felt the need for it. Okay. You know? Yeah. But

41:03
There’s definitely been times we’ve, we’ve experimented with it. I mean, when it first come out, obviously I was whipping things up and saying, what do think of this? And she’s like, Oh, that’s cool. You know, but at the end of the day, uh, she’s been getting by with what she’s been doing and she kind of has her own system and rhythm. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna mess with you. What’s funny is that we’ve been buying some designs on Etsy for our stuff. Okay. So people buy designs on Etsy too, right? For commercial use. There’s a lot of people that’ll do the SVG files. That’s all that they create.

41:30
It’s a great little business. I don’t love it because it’s so easy to copy and replicate. And also the margins are so they’re good, but the price tag is so small. It’s like what? Three bucks for a graphic. Correct. It is small, but it is a digital thing because it is, it is because we’ve been doing personalization for 15 years. Like people come back. It’s a physical product. They don’t like this or they made a mistake. You kind of have to cater to them. Yeah. So it’s, nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

41:59
That’s cool, Scott. I am curious about like the whole creative process, but it sounds like you guys have been doing a great job with it. I am shocked that 80%, like I’ve heard 50 % for e-commerce, but 80, I guess it makes sense because most people will look on Etsy for gifts, I feel, right? Gifts. It’s a big gift-giving site for a hundred percent sure. Yes. Gifts. It’s big gift-giving. So again, Mother’s Day will do great. Father’s Day will do great. Like all of those major gift-giving holidays and events.

42:28
You know, weddings is big, like weddings is big on Etsy. If you’re like, if you’re in the wedding industry, like, and, so like your audience, like we had talked, right. And you’re like, yeah, my, don’t know if my audience really would care that much about Etsy. And I’m like, I think that they should, because it’s a platform that all they got to do is put their stuff there and pick up another hundred or $200,000. Like who wouldn’t want to do that? Um, like the girl I talk about with the reclaim would, I mean, she does, she does seven figures a year.

42:56
Right. And she does a lot of it on her own website, but she does about, I don’t know, 150 to $200,000 on Etsy. Hmm. And it’s pretty much, she hasn’t put any other, she put like 60 products up, right? And she might sell 20 % of those, but that’s money she wouldn’t have had. And it’s new customers that she wouldn’t have had that are now going to buy on her own, her own Shopify, um, you know, shop. So I think for anyone out there that’s in e-commerce, I don’t care what it is. Um, obviously if you’re selling like, you know, a cell phone.

43:26
You know what mean? Like you’re not going to be doing that, but like cell phone cases. Yeah. Like if you had something unique and original, why not? Why not put it up there? Right. Um, you know, certain things like that. I saw someone that was crushing it and he made like, he made like these X-Box like holder, like cases and stuff. And he was doing like 30 K a month in just those. Um, so I just really feel like it is an opportunity that a lot of people are just like, ah, it’s Etsy. It’s only handmade, right? It’s, only stuff like that. Right.

43:55
It’s really just to me, it’s untapped and it’s a super easy platform to navigate, to manage. I mean, there’s a lot of people on there not selling handmade goods, but if you sell stuff that goes into handmade goods, that counts too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You know? So yeah, I think it’s a great opportunity. I mean, we’re having, the big thing is Steve, you know me, like, I just want to have a good time doing what I’m doing and the content that I’m creating or

44:22
Um, the things that my wife, like my wife and I, it’s either we’re talking about her Etsy shop and what’s happening and this, that, and the other on that. And then we’re talking about the stuff that I’m doing with the podcast and with the YouTube, but it all kind of comes together. So her and I are still, and I’ve, we’ve been like this for years, like a team, like I’m going to be married for 30 years coming up here, Steve. 30 years, man. just celebrated our 20. thought that was a long time, but I get the great grandfather of, selling online.

44:50
Yeah, right. Yeah. Hey, Scott, where can people find your channel, your podcast, all the cool content that you create? Yeah. Brand creators.com is home base for me. YouTube brand creators just go there. Um, and basically like you, Steve, mean, everything that I do, I give a lot away for free. I do have some paid things, but for the most part, just go to the YouTube channel, check that out and, you’ll probably get the information that you’re looking for. And if you have anything that you need help with, just reach out to me and I might make a video on it.

45:20
Sounds good. Hey Scott, great to have you back on the show, man. It’s been a while. Yeah, it’s been a while Steve. Appreciate it. Keep working on that backswing.

45:33
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Scott’s got the Midas touch. And if you were interested in selling on Etsy, go check out his YouTube channel. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoder.com slash episode 524. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com. And if you were interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

46:02
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.

00:29
The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not just some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now I personally hate large events

00:59
so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, we’re pretty close to sold out on the mastermind passes. Also,

01:27
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01:55
Fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:05
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Drop podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have John Lawson on the show. Now John is actually someone who I met 10 years ago at perhaps one of my favorite e-commerce conferences of all time, the Startup Bros Conference. Too bad they didn’t do it again. But he is the CEO of Third Power Outlet, online retail clothing and accessories company. He is a platinum eBay power seller, a top rated Amazon merchant and small business influencer of the year. He’s also written

02:34
many bestselling books and speaks all over the world. Now, John has been really deep into AI. So in this episode, we are going to talk about how to apply AI to your eCommerce business. And with that, welcome to show John, how you doing? What’s up? That’s so funny. That is the best eCommerce conference I’ve ever been to. And everybody I’ve met from there always says that and means it. It’s so weird.

03:03
from that event. They spent gobs of money, lost tons of money, but it was a blast. Yep, yep. That’s why it was a blast. So it was good seeing you a couple months ago at the Alibaba Co-Create Conference. Now, for the audience who might not be familiar with you, how did you actually get into the apparel business, selling on eBay, and all the different things that you do? Oh, man. I’ll give you the abbreviated story of my nightmare.

03:33
So I was a consultant. I worked with like a Accenture and you know, I was making a pretty decent wage and I had a friend he was, you know, always hustling up something. This is early 2000s and he came to me and was like, hey, we should flip a house. And I was like, okay, what is that? You know, he’s like, oh, like you see on TV and all you got to do, you, you be the, you know, financer, time to pay for it. We’ll get the house flipped.

04:02
And we’ll split that like, you know, 50-50, probably 10 for you, 10 for me. Like, oh, okay, sounds great. I’ve signed the paperwork at the closing. We have a hard money loan, which means that it had a balloon payment in three months. So we had three months to change the house over or, you know, refurbish it. And when we got the house, it was a three-bedroom, one-bath, you know, so it’d be good for section eight. I do the walkthrough.

04:30
and it’s a two bedroom, two bath. What the heck happened to the other bedroom? Long story short, Section A ain’t gonna give you the same amount that they give you for a three bedroom, for a two bedroom. I don’t care how much nicer it is. So I ended up upside down and I was not going to get out from the hard money loan. Time moves forward and I’m really in a struggle. I’m making two mortgage payments.

04:58
on my one salary, which I wasn’t, you know, I had my own home, wasn’t ready for a second one. And I was about to go broke and bankrupt. And somebody mentioned, well, you should sell stuff on eBay. And that’s how I got started selling stuff on eBay. Right. And so we started selling my used books, you know, which I had around the house. And that was like the first thing I started. Ran out of books, start looking for other things to sell.

05:28
Ultimately, I landed in doing like accessories. So I didn’t actually do the clothing. I started with clothing, hated it because, you know, they sell clothing in weird packages and bundles. Yeah. Right. So it’s like you always get left with the smalls and the mediums and all the extra large and the two X’s go. So anyway, so I landed in the hip hop accessories category.

05:58
So we would sell bananas, sweat bands, jewelry, all the things that a hip hop kid would want back when I was a kid. You know what I’m saying? So that’s how I got started. Yeah, I know what you mean about apparel. I think selling apparel is one of the most difficult things to sell. Probably also because the return policy is like 40%, like the return rate. Right, right. Is it like that in accessories also? No, no, way lower.

06:27
Okay, way lower. Not only that, our cost of goods was lower, right? And I mean, we ended up niching out in shoelaces. So interesting. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s a whole nother story, right? Because we’ve been around so long. But if you think about it, you know, in the first or the other recession, right in the 2008 frame, with you know, people stopped wanting to

06:57
wear fake jewelry even, right? And so we had to shift. I did that 80-20 rule, right? And I started looking, I’m like, wow, shoelaces, we sell a lot of shoelaces. And then I went to the categories and there was like, if you go to Amazon right now, there’s hundreds of shoelace sellers. When I did it before, nobody, literally, I believe we built the category, you know? So,

07:26
But when I looked and I said, hey, this is something we could go deep in. This is something we could brand out. And that’s how I ended up with shoelaces. before we get into AI, I know you said that you’re not really selling on eBay anymore. What is your view of the marketplaces right now? Amazon and eBay, the competitiveness, just the overall landscape? mean, you know what? I think they keep taking market share, which is kind of interesting. It’s amazing to me that eBay

07:56
It’s still doing what it does so much in fact that I’m like, well, maybe I’ll go back and revisit eBay a little bit and see if we can actually move new merchandise on eBay as well. Because I’ve noticed there are people that drop ship our product from Amazon to eBay buyers, you know, which I don’t care. I get paid the same amount whether you do it or me. But I’m like, there’s some things that I would like to just offload.

08:26
on eBay, so I’m looking at it. But I’m thinking that especially when you look at what these TikTok shops are starting to do, that the marketplace competitiveness is about to heat up. Oh, yeah, for sure. Everyone’s getting in the game. It is. Yeah, they have to. They have to because they recognize that, especially with this AI thing, which we’re going to talk about.

08:53
I just think that, you know, it’s going to even the playing field for marketplaces. Like you’re going to be able to build your own marketplace for real now, where, you know, people have tried in the past. But did you leave eBay a long time ago because it just got too saturated because you used to be a platinum seller, right? Yeah, I was a platinum seller. It wasn’t that it got too saturated. They were making too many changes. the changes at the time.

09:21
this look at the timeframe, you know, when they were getting rid of the old CEO, new CEO coming in, trying to compete as if they were Amazon, they weren’t, they didn’t have the same, you know, systems in place. And it just got to be such a pain that I was like, okay, and the sales started slowing. So that’s when I took Amazon seriously. And then suddenly over maybe a two year period, it went from our sales on eBay were here, Amazon here to this.

09:51
And then I was like, you know what? I’m cutting you guys out and just focusing on the Amazon platform. So it was more of a focus play while eBay got themselves together. That makes sense. Yeah. And I know you’ve been kind of on the forefront of AI. You said you’ve been into AI for, I don’t know, it seems like eight years, I think is what you mentioned before it even became mainstream and popular. I’m just very curious, what are some use cases that you’re using it specifically in the context of e-commerce?

10:21
I mean, for e-commerce, mean, more than anything, it’s content creation. OK. Right. So I mean, that, course, is I think that’s the initial phase. Yeah. You know, so people don’t understand. when you think about it, just a week ago, it came out a year ago. It’s only one years old. Right. And now, you know, actually, it’s exactly exactly a year old. Right. So now we can see it can hear it can talk.

10:51
I mean, it’s absolutely amazing how far it’s come in just one year. So what’s going to happen in 2024? Oh my God, right? However, yeah, I’ve been back in the day. I don’t even remember the day I got a question. I’ll tell you my story. What was the initial question? Because I want to answer that. Applications of AI. Applications, right. So like I said, yes, that’s what it was. So it was.

11:20
great for content creation, right? Written word content creation. So writing product titles, descriptions, getting SEO rich descriptions, creating audience segments, creating a very detailed avatar and long tail keyword reports, right? So these are things you used to have to spend a lot of money on or get experts to do, right? And now I’m able to get that done

11:49
with a short command inside of ChatGPT. And we really have seen an increase in effectiveness of a lot of the content we put out. And that’s just on the salesy side. That’s not talking about market leadership kind of and thought leadership type of product or content that you create as well. So it’s…

12:15
When you’re talking about effective, are you talking about effective in ranking and search or you just talk about effectiveness in conversion rate? You know, here’s the deal. I don’t, it’s effective in ranking and search, but search ranking is only in my opinion, based on how much it resonates with our audience. Right? So it’s more effective for me in sales. It’s answering the questions that people are having and the conversations that they’re having in their head.

12:45
when they’re trying to determine who to buy from and when they’re going to purchase. So top Give me an example of how you’ve used it for maybe one of your shoelace products or something like that. Yeah. So like tying shoelaces. Okay. It’s a very, shoelaces are a weird kind of category because shoe people are weird people, right? They’re absolute

13:13
fans of the entire thing. And so having to, it was hard for me to communicate without somebody actually touching my shoelace versus another shoelace, because you think all shoelaces are made the same, right? And once I started putting in, here’s the materials we use, here’s the weaves that we have, and if you have a problem with it, we will refund you or replace.

13:43
Getting that to look, I can’t even talk about it myself, but having chat GPT talk about it has made it very, very real for our laces. So it’ll have that conversation. Hey, do you know how it feels when your shoes start looking dirty? What’s the best way to clean them up? Buy a new pair of laces, right? That kind of thing. So we have, there’s just so many different kind of people. got the skaters, we got the collectors.

14:13
We’ve got the everyday fitness person. You’ve got the runners. They all use shoelaces, but the conversation with each of those are different. How do we make content for those different audience segments for this exact same product? So in terms of chat, you BT that you mentioned several times. Are you using the paid version and do you in your opinion, is it worth it to to get the paid version? So up until so up until now, I would say you can use any version.

14:42
Right. And most of the content that I wrote, I wrote in 3.5. Okay. 3.5. Right. Right. And I’ve really been good at isolating content in 3.5. So most of the stuff I teach for e commerce folks, you can get out of the 3.5 with recent advancements in the last couple of weeks. Yeah, two weeks. Literally weeks like literally last week. Yeah. Yeah. So

15:12
Its ability to do imagery inside of there is you’re only able to do that with plus and the GPTs that are coming out, which are like these little modules that are being made to do one specific task over and over again. You can only get that with four. So I think those are reasons to upgrade to four. But if you’re just creating everyday content, I’ve never found like, oh my gosh, you know.

15:41
This is so much better with four. If you know how to prompt it right, you can get away with 3.5. And I think, you know, in the next six months, four is probably going to be, you know, I’ll say six months to eight months. Four is going to probably be the lowest level as five gets ramped up and put out here. We got 4.5 for now. I upgraded to four right away, like as soon as it came out because of the plugins.

16:08
And the fact that it was only up to 2021, the four lets you browse the web and it just made a lot of things faster. personally I recommend. Yeah. Three. Yeah. What’s that? It’s up to April, 2023. is. Yeah. It’s up to April now. Yeah. That’s all very recent. Yeah. Yeah. So I think those little things have made it worth the $20 upgrade if you can get in.

16:37
because they’ve just put it on hold. They’ve paused it. They really? Yeah, because so many people were trying to get in, slowed it down. It’s like, OK, we need to put this on pause. I didn’t even know that. Good. guess I’m great. Yeah, in the cool room. So what are I imagine you’ve been playing around with it? How are you using the new features? So honestly, I actually wrote all of the prompts that I used to use into a GPT.

17:09
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.

17:38
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.

17:49
Okay, right. Can you define for the audience what that means? Yeah, so basically, chat GPT is basic knowledge, it has knowledge on everything. And a GPT will allow you to create a little robot that only is good at a specific task. Right. So I’ve taken all of the prompts that I used to put in the knowledge base, and are not into the knowledge into the

18:19
general knowledge into this one GPT. So if you go to that GPT, you can write a product title and description, create a customer avatar, get an audience segment report and a long tail keyword report. So those four things I’ve programmed it to do using my methodology. Does that involve coding or is there an easier If there’s no code needed.

18:48
You’re able to do it with natural language and just typing in commands, or you could actually do audio into it as well if you got that set up on your computer. This is only for the latest version, right? It’s only for the latest version. It literally just came out a week ago. Yeah, literally just came That’s what I was asking. You’re quick to the trigger there. Oh yeah, man. like, look, I think, well, we know. This is all the future.

19:16
And honestly, is what we’re seeing now is you’re going to be able to have these little robots do a lot of the research and the repetitive work that we used to have to do manually, or we would outsource. A lot of that is going to be done by these type of robots. So if I’ve got a robot that I can put in a product skew or an ASIN even,

19:44
and it go out to the web and give me all of the product details of other people, all the reviews from other people take out. This is something I do. I’m giving away secrets, but you can get all the reviews. You take out all the reviews, right? And guess what? When it comes to reviews, it’s like, you know, the Olympics, you need to throw out the top score and the bottom score and take the ones in the middle, right? Because the ones in the middle all have the information.

20:13
on how to make a product better, right? It’s like, oh, we like this product, but it would be cool if it did X, Y, Z. So you find all of those and you have ChatGPT go through it, right? And then find the areas where you can make a better product than your competitor, shoelaces, based on what people’s suggestions, complaints actually are. Walk me through the training process since it is pretty new. Like, what does it take?

20:44
to create this GPT that you created? And is it for public consumption right now, or is it behind a paywall? Yeah, actually, let me make sure because I don’t want to turn it off and on sometimes. OK. And that’s because I’m actually asking people to go out there and beta test this for me. Right. So it’s at Ecom AI boss dot com. Ecom AI boss dot com. OK. Dot com. Right. And the training process is

21:13
if you can imagine having a screen that’s split in half. On the left-hand side, it’s where you create and configure the app, the GPT app, and on the right side is just a little bit of a preview of how it’s going to work. So as you are talking to it and creating this GPT, you can see what you’re doing on the right-hand side. And so when you start the GPT builder,

21:42
It literally says, what do you want to create? And you tell it simply with natural language. Hey, I want to create an AI based bot that will write product titles and descriptions for e-commerce products. That was the first thing I would put in. And it would be like, hey, OK. And it’ll start configuring that in the background. You’re not even touching it. Right. Right. And then it’ll come back and say, hey, well, here.

22:11
Here’s what you should call it. Do you like that name? You know, now I don’t know what it said that it should call, but I already had the URL for Ecom AI balls. So I said, no, you’re going to call it that as a name. And then it comes back and says, okay, great. That’s a good name. You know, nothing you ever do. Does it tell you that sucks? It never does. Right. But it’ll, it’ll come back and then it’ll say, okay, cool. Now let’s create a little icon for it and it’ll use.

22:40
you know, Dolly three inside of chat, TPT and create the actual icon for the GPT. And then it’ll come back and say, how do you want it to speak? Right? What kind of language do you want it to be very professional or informative? So you put that kind of information in and literally going back and forth like that in natural language. You don’t have to use a whole lot of, you know, tech speak.

23:10
You just tell it what you want it to do. And as I’m telling it, I’ll go over to the preview, try it, see what the outcome is. If I don’t like the outcome, or if I was saying, hey, I want more bullet points, you know, and then I’ll tell it, hey, let’s make it where it has five to seven bullet points. Hey, let’s make it so the title is no more than 200 characters. Things like that. And it keeps writing the instructions as you’re going through this conversation.

23:39
Ultimately, you end up with a app, which is a GPT. So a GPT is just an app that runs on chat GPT. Ultimately, one more thing, ultimately, they’re gonna build an app store. Yeah, I know the master plan. Do you think this is gonna put all these AI companies out of business that have these very specialized apps? Yeah, it already has. I mean, so, you know, cause so many of them jumped up.

24:08
to do these little specialized things. And I remember when I was seeing it, I was like, yeah, that’s not gonna be around long. Because if you think about it, like I said, I’m a dinosaur, so I’ve been around a long time. But I remember when we used to have word processors, right? And then you had Microsoft Word, right? And the things that the word processor would do,

24:35
Microsoft would look at it and then make it part of Word. mean, spell check and all that kind of stuff, which is AI, right? Yeah. Did not exist in the first versions of Microsoft Word. People built these spell checkers and said, hey, use this, then create your content with that, put it in your Word doc. Well, ultimately, Microsoft literally found out what other people were doing and just put it into the product as a feature.

25:04
So I knew a lot of these things people were doing were gonna end up being features anyway. It’s just the way it has, that’s the way it goes, Yeah, And now that this functionality is kind of sanctioned by ChatGPT, everyone’s probably just gonna use it to create their own apps, right? I think so. At some level, you know, there’s certain people that just won’t be technical. There’s always an opportunity for do-it-yourself. There’s always like,

25:33
people that will do it themselves, right? Then there’s people that need to have some guidance that will do it in a group, you can do it with them, or you can actually have a service to do it for them. I think there will still be a tier of do it for you. That’s my business. Can we talk a little bit more about the training process? So it asks you questions and you respond. How do you add your knowledge to it?

26:02
that is not prompted by the bot? Yes, that is a good question and something, excuse me, new that’s just came up. They’ve got a knowledge section, right? So these are conversations you can, or conversation things that you can put into ChatGPT. You can upload, you know, images, PDFs, CSV files, and docs. And I think a couple of other things, right? So you can upload those.

26:31
and they become part of the knowledge base that the GPT will reference when it needs to respond to customer inquiries. So when I say that I put my prompts in there that I used to use individually, I took them, put them in a PDF doc and uploaded it and it goes and references that when it makes the responses. these are not, know, the responses you get are not,

27:01
just the standard knowledge-based responses. They’re very, very tailored based on the prompts that I’ve put into it. And that’s how I put them in there, was with that. Now, having said that, there’s also the ability to have actions, right? So you can use API actions. So I could have Zapier APIs put into one of my GPTs where it will

27:30
let’s say I wanted it to go reference a Google Doc or a Google Sheet to find out like what is my latest inventory and it’s all in this sheet. Go check that sheet. It could go pull that from that sheet, make the updates and it could then go back and update the record through a Zapier kind of Zap. Lots of possibilities here. So your APIs

27:58
now can actually be part of a GPT. Haven’t gone that deep into rabbit hole yet, but it’s only a week. So I’m guarantee you it’s going to have a whole lot of functionality, you know, as I start learning more and more. And here’s the cool part, right? I mean, do you know about how to use API’s? Of course. I’m a former electrical engineer. Okay, great. Great. All right. So I have no idea how to use.

28:28
All right, I do. I know the concept, but I’m not a coder. Now, I can literally have it go out with the URL to the APIs, go read through the API, and then code what I want the API call to be. That’s just, dude, and I did that by telling it to do it, not doing it myself.

28:53
Yeah, I’ve been using it for coding a lot, because I don’t know the syntax a lot, because I don’t do it every day. It’s not my main thing anymore. But it works remarkably well. I mean, it does put some bugs in there and you have to understand kind of like how to read the code in case something goes wrong. But it’s pretty good. It’s pretty good, right? Yeah. And it’s only a year old. What’s it going to be, you know, in 2025? So we were talking about this before we hit record, but

29:20
I was going to create SteveBot a while ago. And I was always worried that I’m passing all this information to a large company who’s just taking that information and incorporating into the bot. Do you foresee the ability to be able to do this on your own that’s not owned by one of the large conglomerates like Google, Bing, or Amazon? Absolutely. Matter of fact, so you got to think about this, right? There are people out here right now because you know,

29:49
these language models are LLMs and the first L is large, right? And so there’s research all over the place on how to compress the learning experience for these LLMs. And it’s very similar to the fact that we can, I remember my first MP3 player, right, was

30:18
It was a brick. It a big old brick and it held a thousand songs. Was it the Rio? Was it the Rio? I learned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had a thousand songs on it. Yeah. Right. Today, you can get like, you know, five thousand albums on your phone. I mean, give me a break. Right. So the deal is, is that, you know, memory compression is going on at the same

30:48
speed and at the same rate as a lot of this stuff we’re looking at in terms of functionality is LLM. I will project to you that by this time next year, you will have a chat GPT 3.5 version that will run on your phone in its own environment. Right? Where it doesn’t need to go out anywhere. Matter of fact, there’s already stuff inside of these developer communities.

31:17
that are, I was just watching a video on it yesterday, don’t remember what it’s called, but there’s already one that’ll run on your laptop that has all the functionality of a chat GPT 3.5. So it’s totally inside of your own environment. So if that’s something, I think that’s gonna take off like crazy, right? So we’re not gonna run around trying to get to, I’m getting, hey, you’ve reached your limit over here.

31:47
to write this, that, and the other, I’m going to have it all inside of my own environment soon. So yeah, it’s coming. So we talked about ChatGPT. Are there any other programs that you’re actively using, or is ChatGPT the main one? You know what? Honestly, that’s the only one that I’m actually using. And it comes from the fact that I recognize all these other ones are pretty much using that as the back end anyway.

32:16
So the more I learn about it, the better I feel about myself. But I’m really actually waiting for the next iteration of what Google’s going to do. Honestly, between Google and Microsoft, mean, those are the two. And like we were talking, it’s like, yo, either Google, Microsoft, or Amazon is going to be probably the big three that are playing in this game. I’m probably putting my chips behind Google.

32:46
just because of all the data that they have and own way more than anybody else. So if you’re talking about training, they’ve got more data to train on. But I don’t know. We’ll see where that’s going. used Bard or do you use Bard at all? You know what? I have, yes. I’m on the version where you can use Bard with your apps, but you can’t use it with the paid apps.

33:13
So it’s like my JohnLawson.com is a paid URL. I can’t use it there. I can only use it right now in beta on one of the free IDs that I have. So the things that it’s able to do in terms of updating and filling out spreadsheets, being able to do chat type, chat GPT type functions in the doc.

33:42
and having it come back in the doc is pretty exciting. So I can update the doc right there as opposed to, know, chat to PT copy paste, make adjustments there, you know. So yes, I like it. But the content yet it’s not it’s like still for me at GPT three level, not even three point five. So I know what’s happening. You know, you they’re in the background watching loading up.

34:12
and then they’re going to release. So probably at the beginning of next year, Google will come out with their answer to GPT’s Developer Day. And we’ll see where we are after that. How do you think AI is going to affect search? Because Google released the Google search. I can’t remember what the acronym was, but it had an AI response at the very top. How do think it’s going to affect search and all the affiliate sites and all the SEOs out there?

34:42
You know, to be honest, I think they’re in trouble, you know, but I think they were already kind of in trouble. If you think about it, and me and a friend of mine were having a discussion about this, is that the world pre-TikTok and after TikTok, TikTok has changed user experience so that people are not doing the things that they used to do, you know, they don’t necessarily sign up.

35:11
and follow things. They don’t follow things, they discover things. So I think that nature in and of itself was going to be a big impact on SEO. And I think Google’s not stupid, they understand that. When we started this conversation, one of your first questions was about me and content. And I was saying, in the SEO of the content, I said that the content, it’s really about the

35:41
consumers engagement with my content. That is the most important. I don’t care how it ranks. don’t care if they read it and they take action on it. That is the KPI that I’m looking at these days. So I want to usurp the, let’s stuff this with keywords so we can get to the top. Cause you’re not going to be able to get to the top. The top’s going to be basically, you know, curated from an AI and it’s going to serve it to you.

36:10
as a discovery as opposed to a search. So I think there is some deep impact that’s going to be had. you figure like this, it’s a whack-a-mole kind of world for SEO anyway. It’s like every once in a while something pops up and it was a way for somebody to cheat to get at the top and Google responds by smacking down.

36:40
the mole and you know, AI has made the moles pop up even faster. And I think, you know, their response is going to be like, you know what, forget it, we’re going to take up the whole first page. And then everything else will be after that. And it’s close. Unfortunately, that’ll kill their business model though, right? They have to figure out something else. Yeah, but they know that. You know what I’m saying? I’m sure. Hey, they built this thing really.

37:10
You know, they were one of the leaders. So I’m not really sure how advertising. So the real question is how will advertising change? Yeah. You know, it’s not just SEO, but advertising itself is going to change. And I’m sure you’ve you’ve done this. I mean, you’ve had a podcast for years. Right. And I mean, you advertise. Do you take advertising? I did. Yeah, you did. Right. So like.

37:37
in-stream advertising is way more valuable. When Steve holds it up and says, hey, this is what I used to drink, that’s a lot of value. But you just got to have an audience. So I think we’re moving to the influencer as opposed to the SEO results. Yeah, I would agree with that. What about e-commerce? Where do you foresee people shopping?

38:05
going forward, like looking fast forward maybe like five years, what platform? If I said, I don’t know, would that be okay? Oh yeah, no one knows. Okay, so I don’t know. What’s your best guess? My best guess? Yeah. Honestly, think my, you know, I’ve been saying a long time, you know, that something will replace Amazon. I mean, that’s just inevitable. Yahoo got replaced by Google.

38:32
You know Amazon replaced eBay something will replace Amazon. Will it be in the next five years? pretty possibly In terms of you know overarching You know Amazon right now is the big gorilla in the room I see What tick-tock is doing to be kind of interesting? Yeah, I’d like to see what YouTube Actually lands at because they keep testing all of these different things

39:02
but they don’t seem to ever nail it, which to me has always been a problem with Google. They’ve always had the ability to really make shopping, you know, the thing, but they always would kind of sit back and like, but we had SEO and I think they felt like shopping was competing too much with their main core business that they didn’t spend enough time. But I think now they need to make that shift. So wherever influencers

39:32
have the most ability to do that kind of marketing for brands, I think is going to be the most important place. So would you say that if you were to start an e-commerce business today, that content is going to be king? I’ve always said content is king. OK. I don’t know. is that? See that thing? There it is. I wrote that book, Thick-Ass Social Commerce for Epreneurs.

40:01
Social commerce, right? This is what we’re talking about. Today, I wrote that in 2014. And in that book, I said content is king, but context is queen. Right? Can you define that? Yeah. So content is great. Telling me about your new car. Here we’ve got a new electronic car. I’m really digging the Lexus and their new car, right? So it’s the RX, the first RX, right?

40:31
That’s great, right? But if I get that commercial after I just bought the old RX, it has no relevancy. There’s no context for me there, right? But if from whatever they might know about me inside of these engines, it’s search engine, whatever, if they know I’m looking for a car, when they show me that ad, that context,

41:01
because I’m actually looking, deciding, and just really figuring out where I’m gonna buy that vehicle, it has a whole lot more meaning for me. So the more we can nail that context, the content gets way more valuable, right? So we’re moving from throwing spaghetti at the wall to, I don’t know, serving up Italians, I don’t know, a good way.

41:28
Saying that I mean this is when you wrote that book Facebook ads were just killing it, Absolutely busters before Apple kind of made it difficult for them. Yeah Absolutely, right and to be honest, it was even before that You know, that’s because that was when those ads were killing it but a lot of people didn’t even know that the Opportunity was there and how to use it or that it was going to actually

41:57
be a thing, right? So if you look at that book, I’m talking about, oh, this new platform that’s about to take off, which is Instagram. So where are we at with Instagram now? I mean, come on. It’s launched so many brands and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sales. And now it’s the dinosaur. But there’s principles.

42:26
That’s the key. Let me close with this question. Sure. Let’s say you have a product and we’ll just call it shoelaces just for kicks because because that’s what you sell shoelaces just for kicks. Yeah, I didn’t even mean to do that. I’m taking that. What platforms would you be using to create content on in order of priority for you? OK, first, I come from this real thought of one platform. OK, only one platform. I don’t want to be everywhere.

42:56
If you manage to exhaust one platform, fantastic. Start other places. Multiplication by zero is still zero. Nobody watching your stuff on Facebook. Go somewhere else. If I were starting over, I would probably start with TikTok. Okay. Right? And I’m actually opening up a shop right now. More than anything, my coaching consulting thing. I want to know what the opportunity is.

43:26
and how to take advantage of it. But I think that is an emerging platform. And sometimes you gotta be where the puck is about to go. And I think the puck is about to go somewhere in that realm. Will it be TikTok? I don’t know. The government could cut that out in a heartbeat, you know. But guess what happened? They just had dinner with China. Very important for those of us that are building TikTok businesses. They’re getting that

43:56
that harmony back or at least enough harmony to be able to exist in these kind of digital spaces. It’s very important. So I think those kinds of things are a TikTok type platform and with shops are going to be where this stuff is going for sure. So John, where can people listening to this episode find you? Definitely. I’m gonna make it easy. Colder ice. Just look up.

44:26
Colder Ice. Search for Colder Ice. C-O-L-D-E-R-I-C-E. And you’ll find me on every platform. I am Colder Ice everywhere. Of course, my name, John Lawson, but it’s very common. But Colder Ice is where to find me. And if you want to beta test that eCom AI Boss thing, check out eComAIBoss.com and you get straight to the preview of my product that I have a GPT around.

44:56
Cool. Well, John, hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show and talking AI. Awesome. Thanks so much, bro.

45:05
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, if you’ve been on the sidelines with AI thus far, then get off your butt. Otherwise, you will quickly get surpassed by your competition. More information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 518. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com.

45:35
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and it’s sending the course right away. Thanks for listening.