[103] The E-Commerce Episode
Hey. Welcome back to Bootstrap Web. This is episode one zero three. Brian, this is the ecommerce episode. This is where we're playing on my home turf.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's right. I'm I'm looking forward to this one. Think it'll be a little bit of a change up from I don't think we've ever really covered ecommerce on this show before, so, like, not not dedicated.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Look. And and ecommerce is too big of a topic to cover in one episode, but we'll kinda see where it takes us, and we'll kinda yank out what, a lot of the stuff in my in my brain and from what I what I do every day talking to people.
Brian Casel:I'll I'll go into more depth on this on the next episode, but just wanted to let you guys know I'm currently hiring, in audience ops. I'm looking for somebody to be, what I'm calling a marketing tech. Somebody to help run PPC campaigns, set up automation flows, and a whole bunch of other stuff related to building marketing funnels. So if if that's your thing and you wanna come, join join the team and me at AudienceOps, check out audienceops.com/jobs. That's all the details are there.
Brian Casel:I think the reason I wanted to do this episode is because personally, I've never considered the idea of of starting an e commerce business myself. I've known a thing or two about e commerce. I've I've actually built e commerce stores for clients when I was, you know, couple years ago. But, you know, there's a lot to learn here. And and even if you've if you're like me and you've never even considered building the e commerce store or getting into an or some sort of e commerce business, selling products on the Internet, not software products, but physical products, it's something to at least take a closer look at if you haven't already.
Brian Casel:Especially, was listening to the Tropical MBA podcast a couple weeks ago, talking about an Amazon Gold Rush that seems to be happening right now, which which was crazy to me because it's like Amazon has been around since the beginning of time, it seems. And, but but only now there seems to still be, a lot of opportunity there. Of course, there are all sorts of other shopping cart software you can look at. But, obviously, you run a product, CardHook, for for e commerce store owners. So you see active e commerce stores every day.
Brian Casel:But, I mean, for those who who may not know, I mean, you you also built and you you built a successful e commerce store yourself before you started Cardhook and and you sold that business. So you definitely have, you know, a bunch of experience. So I I just kinda wanna pick your brain about, you know, bunch of questions in in this area.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Yeah. I think, you know, generally speaking, there's there's a lot going on in the ecommerce world these days. In some ways, it is easier than ever to enter the market and and get something off the ground. And in other ways, is more difficult than ever to compete and grow.
Jordan Gal:So it's a, you know, it's a tricky thing. It's just like software where there are now a lot of success stories out there. There's a lot of people writing content about how to do it, that attracts people. Like you mentioned the Amazon Gold Rush. There are a lot of people making very large sums of money on Amazon, and they're starting to teach people,
Nathan Barry:and they're starting to sell courses, and they're starting to come
Jordan Gal:out with software products that help you analyze what you should be selling. So there's there's a lot going on online in the physical product world. I guess the way I would start is there are a few different approaches to it. The Amazon thing is an example of selling on someone else's platform. That's kinda like eBay.
Jordan Gal:Then there is reselling, and that is taking other people's products and selling them on your own site. That's a lot of the drop shipping. Private label is like an in between. Right? You're selling someone else's stuff, but you have your own brand.
Jordan Gal:And that leads to on third
Brian Casel:your own site and Amazon or Amazon.
Jordan Gal:And that's that's a lot of the hybrid of what's happening. People get things moving on Amazon, then they figure out what works, they launch a site around that, and they have more control over the list, their target list and advertising and that sort of thing. And then there's the most difficult and most successful version of e commerce, is building your own brand. That's like the bonobos, Warby Parker, and that's the hardest thing to do because you've got to spend the time and money and energy on the product and the branding and your own site. And there's a bunch of different hybrid models in between.
Brian Casel:Got it. So so if you're thinking about getting into ecommerce, how do you start to think about what kind of product or what kind of product category to enter? And I mean, my assumption on this is it's different than than launching a software business in that you don't have to necessarily have a personal even like a personal interest or any sort of like personal expertise in the product, in the technical makeup of of the product itself. I mean, I guess, eventually you do need that, but, you know, when I say, like, what I was hearing about Amazon, but even hearing you talk about your previous Amazon, e commerce business, it's more about building the sales and and less and it doesn't matter what the category is. Right?
Brian Casel:I mean, any thoughts on that?
Jordan Gal:I think it's it's similar to software where if you have an interest, that oftentimes gives you an advantage, a deeper understanding and more of a fire to stick with it. But it like software, it's not necessary. A lot of people go about it in a very data driven analytical way, and they figure out what what will sell and why and where the competition is and isn't and how much margin they can make based on their conversations with suppliers in China, and they do all of that without emotion. They don't care what they're selling. They just say this is my analysis and this is where I'm gonna take my chips and put my chips down on the table on this particular bet because of this data.
Jordan Gal:There's a lot of merit to that because that reduces risk. So when you say where should people start, it really depends on your risk profile and your resources.
Nathan Barry:Right.
Jordan Gal:Right. If you have a $5,000 budget, don't try to build your own brand from scratch or at least that makes it more difficult for you.
Brian Casel:Well, I guess when you're evaluating different products or ideas for different products to get into, there are different factors that you're gonna take into account with an e commerce physical product business, as opposed to like a software. Like software, it's all about like, am I solving a problem for businesses?
Jordan Gal:Right, is it a painful enough problem?
Brian Casel:Yeah, and then, you know, the technical building of that software solution, almost anything can basically be built there. But physical product, mean, obviously, you have to see is there a market, is there a demand for this, but then it's like, much does it cost to get it manufactured? How much does it cost to ship? How would you go about reaching those people?
Jordan Gal:Right. Will there be demand for it?
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Right? And and now we're starting to get into the underlying reasons that things like Kickstarter have taken off and Indiegogo because it it gives this opportunity to say, I have an idea for a product and let's figure out if there's demand for it. And even, you know, even that has gotten so sophisticated that people are spending big money on Kickstarter campaigns to make sure that they're successful. But you can see the reason Kickstarter is so successful is because that problem of is there demand for my product is potentially addressed by a Kickstarter campaign because you can see. Right?
Jordan Gal:And and this is This goes back to the four hour work week and what Tim Ferriss talked about in his book of how much margin do you need and how do you get started. Just put up a landing page, run ads to it, see people will buy it and then go and place an order and so on. So it's risk mitigation and you have to be careful with your resources. So it's a tricky thing, there's the reason it's so alluring is because physical products are or can be easier to sell than software and services.
Brian Casel:Why do you think that is?
Jordan Gal:I think it's more easily understood. It's more straightforward. And there's an enormous amount of search and demand for physical products. I mean, it's and and it increases every year.
Brian Casel:Like, you could see exactly how many sales maybe not exactly how many sales, but you could see demand on places like Amazon, eBay, searching Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Amazon, there are very sophisticated tools like Jungle Scout, I believe it's called, that show you literally the full sales numbers. How many units of this are selling? What are the top three sellers? All the data. So that's part of the Amazon Gold Rush that's happening is there's a lot of data coming out of the Amazon marketplace.
Jordan Gal:Amazon's hit critical mass when it comes to the buyer side. There is so much being purchased on Amazon. It's just an unfathomable amount. So the quintessential product that people talk about is the garlic press. One of the first success stories that was really published and publicized by people in these groups is the garlic press.
Jordan Gal:Someone came out with a private label. That just means go to the manufacturer and have your name put on it. Garlic press and people were making tens of thousands of dollars a day selling garlic presses because the unit volume is so tremendous. And so it's these types of
Brian Casel:things I don't even know what a garlic press is.
Jordan Gal:Literally, you put the piece of garlic in and you press it through the little holes and it like minces your garlic with a little handheld press. So these things go for, I don't know, 12, but if you can sell a 100 of them a day, you can make a lot of money and you can sell more than a 100 a day. So that's when people started realizing these insane niches of face cream and avocado peelers. There's so much being purchased that if you can uncover where there's demand without too much competition, make you a lot of money quickly. I would warn people though that the gold rush is, I believe in its later stages.
Jordan Gal:There aren't that many things left. That might be a completely ignorant thing to say, but that's my gut feel.
Brian Casel:I would probably agree with you just because when I heard that that this is going on in Amazon, it's like, hasn't Amazon been around for, twenty years at
Jordan Gal:this point? Know? Right. Right. Amazon didn't always allow you to sell through their marketplace quite as easily.
Brian Casel:Right. And all this data and and like you said, the the consumers on Amazon. I I think consumers have become even more savvy as well. And that that allows for innovation. Right?
Brian Casel:Like that that's a big part of this is like, like these five garlic mincers are, garlic press are selling on Amazon. And they all basically do the same thing. They all press garlic. But if you could find out like, oh, there's a couple of reviews by these consumers saying, you know, it's not sharp enough or it always gets stuck or, you know, I don't like the color, then you can just come out with the same thing and and and make a blue one instead of a black one. Everybody's comparing on Amazon and everyone's looking at reviews and and seeing what the issues are.
Brian Casel:If you could just satisfy that issue, you can you can pull away a bunch of sales.
Jordan Gal:Right. And Amazon is a system, with a lot of potential gain, and that means people will will work that system. So people have come out with, review groups. You can send your products, like a few 100 of your products for free to a a large review group. So you'll get two, three hundred reviews immediately when you launch, and that helps with your rankings.
Jordan Gal:So look and we're
Brian Casel:talking giving deep discount, like 90% discounts to reviewers Yes. Kind of in exchange for for a review. But I don't wanna make this like all about Amazon. Think Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Was about to step away from it by saying that what what you talked about a minute ago when you said looking at people's reviews and seeing where there's opportunity for innovation in a product segment and then selling your own, that's what our economy is built on. There's very little that's completely original. It's a lot of small innovations and that there's always room for. That has nothing to do with Amazon. That's just real life and our economy and capitalism and the dynamism of people being able to start businesses very easily.
Jordan Gal:That's where I would look. If I was thinking about ecommerce, I would not go off and sell products that can be purchased easily other places. That is that's the game that I wasn't a few years ago, and that's the reason we sold the business because we knew the future of that was not a healthy business. It was increasingly slim margins and higher competition. The long term way to really build a business on e commerce is to is to innovate on something that people that there's a lot of demand on and then make it your own.
Jordan Gal:So I just purchased a pair of shorts from a company called Miles, m y l e s. Go to their website, beautiful site on Shopify, and all they sell is one type of short. That's it. They're like really, really comfortable workout shorts. That's it.
Jordan Gal:And there's like four colors and a few different sizes and like that's the way to start.
Brian Casel:I remember the the story of like Dodo case. Right? The the iPad cases and now I mean, they branched into iPhone cases and all this stuff. But, you know, when the iPad came out, like they they were the the nicest, you know, iPad case, and all they sold was just, like, this one wooden nice iPad case, and they did, like, over a million in the first year.
Jordan Gal:Right. And that's that I think is the right place to start. Instead of looking at a store and saying, I'm going to offer 500 different products, that's a very different thing and very different game and requires different resources. Someone in our shoes, that's the model I would look at. I would look at Bonobos and say, all they started with was pants.
Jordan Gal:They had two or three varieties of pants in a few different colors and they were better pants. That was their innovation and it was everything done online. And it was simple and straightforward and great photography and it was just a little bit of innovation and that caught people's attention. And then from there, you can you can go other places, but
Brian Casel:So how do how do ecommerce store owners think about profitability? Because I think it's completely different, obviously, than than software because it's there's gotta be much lower profit margins. Right? So you have to deal in much higher quantities of sales. Whereas a SaaS business or even a even a downloadable software can can make a 100 sales and do pretty well in in a quarter or pretty well in a year with depending on your price point.
Brian Casel:But that's like 80 plus percent profitable. You know, when you're selling $20 kitchen appliances or various tools, like whatever it is, $50 piece of clothing, how do you make that work from a profitability standpoint? And when is it not even worth it?
Jordan Gal:I I think it's a it's difficult, and I I see a lot of people making mistakes by launching things that are not that they're inexpensive or cheap, it's just that you look at it and it doesn't matter how profitable they are. There it just isn't that much margin per unit. So back to Tim Ferriss, the math didn't change from a few years ago when he wrote the book. To be able to sell something for minimum $50 and ideally closer to a $100,150 dollars, it gives you enough room where you don't need tons and tons of sales. So selling something, I would never start a brand of anything and then sell it for $20.30 dollars.
Jordan Gal:It just it's just you just need so much traffic and so many sales that in order to generate that much traffic and sales, you need to spend money.
Brian Casel:You're spending way too much.
Jordan Gal:Right. And now there are obviously there's a lot of opportunity in advertising and promotion these days from YouTube to Instagram to all these different things. One of our most successful CartHook clients, all of their promotion is YouTube. They work with YouTube stars and the YouTube stars promote the store and that's how all of their traffic comes in and they do really well. Other people use affiliate.
Jordan Gal:So there's a lot of opportunity in that, but the fundamentals need to make sense. You need you need margin. So that's Miles, right? The shorts that I just got, I think they were $58. So they're not reselling someone else's shorts, they're making it.
Jordan Gal:So they have a direct relationship. They had to pony up the money for the relationship with the manufacturer, but that gives them margin. They probably get it for, I don't know, somewhere between 10 and $20. So they're doing $30.40 in margin a pop and I've bought two of them over the past three months and you can see how, okay, you don't need that many. It's not that difficult in a consumer business to get into the $10.20, $3,040,000 dollar a month range if you have a little bit of money and promotion behind it and that gives you the opportunity to make enough money.
Jordan Gal:Typical is 50% for the product and then an additional 20 to 25 for everything else, for your your salaries and your advertising and everything else, and you're taking home 25%, like a retail like a normal retail business with Right. With the rent and a storefront.
Brian Casel:Of course, the the the advantage over a physical brick and mortar business is, of course, you don't have to pay for rent and the location. But, yeah, there's still so many costs that go into, you know, manufacturing and marketing to get that level of traffic. Because, you know, unless you have some kind of replenishable product, like if you're selling, you know, shaving cream or something like that, you get a little bit closer to that recurring revenue. But for the most part with e commerce, it's one time downloads. Alright.
Brian Casel:Downloads. It's One time purchase. Sales. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The the recurring element is ideal. But it's it's difficult to nail in a physical product.
Brian Casel:I wonder these days, like, how how much this this trend of the, you know, goods in a in a monthly box
Jordan Gal:Oh, yes.
Brian Casel:Is is gonna is gonna take off. It seems like it's it's stuck over the last year or two with with various niches. But, I mean, is this gonna be a thing that that
Jordan Gal:It's definitely a thing and you can understand why it's appealing, right, for the recurring element, but it is not any easier to make work. So we I'm sure
Brian Casel:churn is the same challenge that every other SaaS has with with churn. Right?
Jordan Gal:Not only is churn a problem, asking someone to commit is is different makes the sales important to
Brian Casel:sales also.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right. One of our biggest integration partners in Cardhook is a company called Cratejoy. And Cratejoy is an e commerce platform built specifically for recurring products. So all of their merchants are of the month variety and we see the full spectrum.
Jordan Gal:We see hot sauce of the month. We see Japanese snacks of the month. We see stickers of the month. We see everything and you it makes
Brian Casel:wrote into us a couple months back that sounded like, you know, the weed munchies every month.
Jordan Gal:Weed munchies. I got my my buddy oh, I can't remember the name. Damn it. Oh, yeah. One one one of guys I used to work with who I became, like, buddies with in Seattle has, a like a stoner of the month, to make your high more fun.
Jordan Gal:It has these little puzzles and snacks. So there's everything and people buy them as gifts and we see some spectacularly successful sites from that. I'm not going to mention any specifics, but eye popping, like you added a 100 k in MRR this month and every month for the past six months, it's kind of like
Brian Casel:it's And that basically took off with Dollar Shave Club. Right? That was kind of like the first big one. That was the first breakthrough.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Right. And then there's beard oil, right? You can see the blending of, okay, physical products easier to sell, software better business model, and you start to see things, you know, coalesce.
Brian Casel:You even start to see Apple doing this with iPhones. Right? Like, now you can you can get on a monthly they're really trying to push this monthly payment plan for iPhones to get people to upgrade every year instead of like what I've been doing every two years. You know, just just buy the thing for $200 every two years. Instead, you can pay $30 a month and get the latest iPhone every year.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:That's interesting. I'm about to go to the Apple Store this week to get my upgrade, so I'm sure I'll be sold on.
Brian Casel:They've been they've been pushing that for the last, you know, year or so. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It so and right. And that's that's a physical product. So it's so generally speaking, ecommerce is like everything else. There is a lot of opportunity, but it's not easy.
Brian Casel:Well, so, you know, you run CartHook. Obviously, it plugs into shopping cart software and you guys integrate with a whole bunch of different shopping carts. And and you've worked with all these different things. So any thoughts on like if if somebody was getting into it or or you're thinking about changing shopping cards like how do you compare Shopify to Magento to WordPress and WooCommerce to any of the other ones. And I know that some are, like, hosted, some are self hosted, some like HeartJoy are designed around subscriptions.
Brian Casel:How do you think about that?
Jordan Gal:The first thing to go in thinking and knowing is that there there is no perfect cart. Nothing will nail absolutely everything you want.
Brian Casel:You will compromise. Like, I just need three, but there are, like, hundreds.
Jordan Gal:There are too many, and I would go toward the top, meaning the handful of well known ones. That's who's most successful, that's who will continue to innovate, that's who will continue to release features, be dependable, reply to you and support. I'm not even going to mention the enterprise stuff, the Demandware, IBM, WebSphere, that's the million dollar website thing for bigger companies. The next step down in sophistication is Magento. That's what people generally think of if you have a decently big budget and you need things that are customizable and you have a team of developers to manage it.
Jordan Gal:So Magento sites will hold companies that do anywhere between a million dollars and a $100,000,000 a month, excuse me, a year. It's a very flexible open source, a hairy beast of a product, but you can make it do whatever you want. People who need very specific issues with this ERP, that this inventory center and very sophisticated stores use Magento and they pay for it. It's open source, but you got to manage it and you got to host it yourself and all that. The band that I think of as our sphere is the Shopify, BigCommerce.
Jordan Gal:Those are the two that have stood out over the past year from the crowd. So Shopify has been on a very big upward trajectory over the past few years. They just went IPO. That's they have all the attention in the room. They're the they're the hot chick in the at the bar, basically.
Jordan Gal:Everyone's going up to them.
Brian Casel:But that's not to say they're new. They've they they're well established at this point.
Jordan Gal:They're well established. They're not that old, but they they did something very smart where they they nailed design. So you can get an unbelievably good looking Shopify site very easily and quickly and cheaply. So that and that was a big differentiator.
Brian Casel:I mean, my light, use of of shopping cart software mostly when I was doing sites for clients and looking at Shopify, it seemed like that's the easiest one to get up and running. Like you said, with with a good looking site, but it's also like super easy. You don't even have to think about getting a payment gateway. I mean, these days that's probably even easier with with Stripe. But when I was doing a couple years ago, it's like authorize.net and all this crap and, you know
Jordan Gal:Right.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. When I when I when I opened a store, you had to apply for a merchant account and then wait and send things over the mail and wait for ten days and have an interview. It's not like that at all. And Shopify Payments is a partnership with Stripe. So if you start a Shopify store, you can accept payments immediately.
Brian Casel:I mean, how does WooCommerce play into all this? And, like, is it even a significant player really in in the grand scheme of things? I mean, obviously, WordPress is huge and and Woo is huge, but, that's within the WordPress world. I mean, how about the ecommerce world in large?
Jordan Gal:It is. And and let me get to that in for once one in in a sec. The the other big thing to say about Shopify is that they went the route of Apple in developing a developer ecosystem, and that is the differentiator. That is now what makes Shopify so difficult to catch up with because they made their API good enough that developers could build a lot of apps and make money building apps. Now Shopify has these core features and everything you could possibly think of, there's an app for.
Jordan Gal:That's what starts to be even more attractive and that perpetuates itself. The more apps there are, the more attractive it is, the more attractive with more apps and and so on. So that that's why Shopify sits in such a powerful position.
Brian Casel:Well, that's also like WooCommerce. Right? Like like, Woo has plugins and all that. So
Jordan Gal:Right. And that's that's the thing about WooCommerce being open source. So I would compare Shopify and BigCommerce in the same breath Mhmm. Sort of.
Brian Casel:They're they're both hosted platforms. You don't have to get your own hosting and yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right. So WooCommerce, I would put in a slightly different category where it's not hosted yet. Right. And maybe won't ever be fully hosted the same way, but I can certainly foresee, someone building a that's one of my business ideas.
Brian Casel:It's it's owned by Automattic now, and and they own word wordpress.com, which is hosted. That would kind of be, like, the logical next step there.
Jordan Gal:That's that's what that's what makes sense. Right? So so BigCommerce is similar to Shopify in that way. Doesn't have the same ecosystem, but they have been very successful in in making money and and attracting successful stores. So they have a lot going on also.
Jordan Gal:And then WooCommerce has its own thing off to the side where I used to kinda poo poo WooCommerce because I thought ecommerce is different, man. You you need to worry about payments. You need to worry about so many different things on security. Why would someone choose WooCommerce when they can choose Shopify knowing that WooCommerce comes with all the WordPress security issues? And that that was that was wrong because people have bought into it, and it seems to not be nearly as big of a problem as I expected it to be the the security element.
Jordan Gal:So if you look at statistics, you go to BuiltWith, WooCommerce has more installs, more stores running in the world than in The US than Magento, Shopify, Volusion, all those.
Brian Casel:I'd be curious to know how it compares in terms of revenue running through WooCommerce stores. I would imagine that the startups, the lower revenue stuff goes to WooCommerce. Not that it's not powerful, it definitely is. But the the more established is using something, you know, more dedicated.
Jordan Gal:Right. And I I assume the same thing. I look at WooCommerce and I say, okay. How long is a company gonna stay on WooCommerce? At what point do you say, Okay, we're doing $250,000 a month, we can't take these types of risks with security?
Jordan Gal:That's the part that I think will eventually be addressed by either Automattic or someone like them. This is the part, Brian, I put it to you, having a WordPress background. This is the thing I just never understood about open source. It's amazing to me that people don't take more advantage of it. Like, my my instinct is to look at WooCommerce and say it's open source.
Jordan Gal:I'm gonna build a Shopify on top of it and and do it myself and just profit off all of this open source stuff and host whatever themes I want, and and it it doesn't seem to happen that way.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I don't know. You know, I I think I think a lot of word WordPress developers, even WordPress entrepreneurs who also probably happen to be developers, are, in my opinion, way too locked in to the traditional model of build of building and selling a product in WordPress, specifically selling either themes or plug ins. I think I think there is so much more opportunity to build a SaaS, and it's and I think a lot of people have this, mistaken assumption that SaaS is just either not acceptable or for whatever reason not viable or not doable in the WordPress ecosystem when it clearly is. There are plenty of businesses embracing a SaaS model.
Brian Casel:And and I
Jordan Gal:know Yeah. Plenty of don't envy what they have to deal with.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and I and I know plenty of successful WordPress plugin owners who are going who are starting to go in the SaaS route route now. So, yeah. I mean, I I think, you know, when it comes to WooCommerce specifically, there are a lot of opportunities there, to be honest, you know. When I was working on Hotel Propeller, which I no longer own, near the end of my owning that, we built a hotel booking engine into Hotel Propeller, which as you guys probably know, Propeller and Restaurant Engine were both built on WordPress multisite.
Brian Casel:But then I I used WooCommerce to be the engine for that booking engine. And then I used Woo Woo's, booking extension for WooCommerce to power the hotel booking engine. And even that wasn't optimized for for booking specifically hotels. So you know, required some customization to get it up and running. I think there are definitely opportunities, especially when you get into niche, like niche services and niche, like like subscriptions or like booking services or anything like that, you know.
Brian Casel:Even downloads, you know, digital downloads. Obviously, easy digital downloads is probably the the biggest player and and I would say, like, the most reliable player in that. But I know that WooCommerce, you know, works pretty well for that too.
Jordan Gal:I love EDD. Pip Pipkin's the man.
Brian Casel:Totally, man. He's he's awesome. And, yeah, I've been using EDD to sell the plug ins on on Audience Ops as well.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Yeah. We have one of our one of our most successful integration launches was EDD. And I think that's actually the case study that I plan to talk about if I get voted into the the microconf talk.
Brian Casel:Awesome. Yeah. That's that's a good one. And and there are a lot of people who don't even touch WordPress who are missing out on on on a lot of stories happening within the WordPress world. Not to get off on a tangent here, but, I I mean, business stories like products and things like EDD and and things like what Pippen Williamson has been building.
Brian Casel:He's got, like, a whole plug in empire over there. It's it's been pretty cool to see.
Jordan Gal:So are my kids just like screaming their heads off in the background? They just got home from school.
Brian Casel:No. I I don't. Actually, my yeah. My daughter was just having a it's actually her birthday today, her two year birthday. So she's having fun.
Brian Casel:But
Jordan Gal:Oh, very nice.
Brian Casel:Happy birthday. Yeah. So, like, tell us what what's going on behind the scenes with a lot of successful ecommerce stores. Like, what are some tips and tactics and strategies that they're using that, you know, the rest of us software people probably aren't thinking about? You know, they could seems like, oh, you just get a Shopify account or just get a a WooCommerce store set up and and and find a product and and get inventory going.
Brian Casel:But, like, how do you actually market this stuff? Like, what are the tactics that people are actually using in ecommerce?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think it's not one thing. It's not, oh, I got the product right, therefore, I'm successful, or, oh, I got the promotion. It's the connection between several points. It's getting the product right.
Jordan Gal:Nothing works without that. So understanding the demand and why it occurs and who wants it. And then it doesn't matter nearly as much what platform you're on, what tech you're using. What matters is the fundamentals are right. You have a product that people want and you can sell it profitably, so you have enough margin.
Jordan Gal:Then that needs to be connected to a reliable, repeatable, scalable promotion. That might be affiliate, that might be YouTube, it might be Instagram, It might be straight up Google AdWords or Facebook. Whatever it is, it's the connection between these few points. What you see is that it looks like successful companies are doing everything. They're like, Oh, they're just all over the place.
Jordan Gal:But the key to the initial success is connecting all those points just once. If you can crush Pinterest and reliably bring in qualified traffic to purchase your products profitably, you can build a business on that. Then you can start doing Instagram and YouTube and PPC and all that other stuff. It looks like you're doing all these different things, that's because obviously, once something is working, you want it to grow, you start doing other things. But the the key to success is the the first time that you have things lined up.
Jordan Gal:Like, we work with one guy who Canadian, young guy. He sells, like, balance boards for surfers and skaters to be indoors. Right? So I see I see his stuff on Facebook. He does videos of him and his customers doing, like, tricks, and it's awesome.
Jordan Gal:You see underneath the video, 158,000 views, 500 plus likes and you're like, that's the channel man. You got people viewing it and liking it and sharing it and that's bringing qualified traffic and then you can sell your products profitably. And once you get that lined up, you have the foundation of e commerce success.
Brian Casel:Very cool. So I think we should probably cut it off there. But you know, if anybody listening to this is looking to really dive deep into e commerce, or maybe you're already in e commerce, like, what are some of the sites, podcasts, blogs to be to be reading up on? Obviously, I I heard this guy, Jordan Gow, hosts a pretty good e commerce podcast. So you you should probably go check that out.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We on the Carhook podcast, we talk a little bit deeper. We talk about, you know, specific topics for how to grow an ecommerce business, so it assumes that you're up
Brian Casel:and
Jordan Gal:running. Ecommerce fuel, that's a great podcast. Facebook groups. You're not going to try to do everything, at least I wouldn't recommend it. If you're into if you want to try the Amazon thing, get into a few of the Amazon Facebook groups, and there's an enormous amount of information that comes out.
Jordan Gal:You want to Reddit is actually phenomenal for e commerce because a lot of the people on Reddit and the e commerce subreddit is really active. There's a lot of information out there. Podcasts are really good. John McIntyre is amazing for email. Drew Sanaki is amazing for high level stuff.
Jordan Gal:There's Shopify Masters. There's Kurt Elster. He's fantastic. Kai Davis does a bunch of stuff. So there's there's a lot out there.
Jordan Gal:I think what you need to do is kinda start narrowing down what you're interested in, and then explore that that niche. If you wanna do Amazon, it's a completely different thing from I wanna do a a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Very cool. Well, that's a good one. Let's let's cut it off there.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. Thanks. Appreciate it.
Brian Casel:Alright. Alright, man. We'll, we'll talk next week. See you. Alright.
Brian Casel:Talk to you soon.
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