The Ecomcrew Ecommerce Podcast

I always enjoy meeting people who listen to our podcasts. Our audience base is largely located in the United States, however; we do have listeners in the Asia Pacific and in Europe. More recently, I’ve discovered that we’re reaching entrepreneurs in Central America. Proof of this Elias Manopla, our featured ecommerce entrepreneur on this episode of Under the Hood. Elias owns an online butcher shop that sells a variety of barbeque meat, poultry, and fish items in and around Panama. Grill accompaniments like corn and arepas, the local corn cake, is also available for purchase. Taking quality meats ‘online’ Elias, a big barbeque fan, got the idea to sell these products after ordering meat from a supplier that was recommended to him by a friend. Impressed by the quality, he has since partnered with this supplier to make these meat products available online. He used Shopify to set up an online butcher shop and is now looking at ways that he can grow the business by extending his brand’s reach. My two cents Elias’s ecommerce business belongs in a highly niched industry. Given where he’s located, it can also be assumed that a chunk of his target market has yet to try shopping online. Some might not even have access to the internet. Facebook ads are great for reaching more people with minimal effort. However, they have to be strategically targeted in order to work. Start with existing customers. Do they have something in common? Knowing your target demographic allows you to be more successful at targeting those ads. Speaking of ads, videos are a great medium for promoting foodstuffs. Creating videos should be part of the marketing plan. Finally, increase repeat orders by crafting a flawless post-purchase sequence. The goal is to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers. Listen to the full episode for more tips on how to grow a unique food-based ecommerce business like the one Elias has. Under the Hood is a segment where we do an hour-long coaching call with one of our listeners. We take a look at their businesses, provide honest feedback, offer our best business advice, and answer whatever questions they have. In exchange for the free coaching, we will turn the call into a podcast episode so that our community can benefit as well. It’s a win-win! Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. Find more information on the link below. Free Video Courses As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

The first month of the Q4 is nearly at an end so its high time that I give you guys an update on my 2018 goals. There have been a couple of snags along the way but I remain optimistic about the coming months and what we’ve got planned for the business. If you haven’t been keeping up with my previous updates, here are the other podcast episodes to listen to. My 2018 Goals 2018 Goals Quarterly Goals The Half-Way Mark And now, here’s where I’m at. 1. Develop 50 new products We’re currently very far behind because of the fact that we were forced to make changes tie due to existing market conditions. The advent of tariffs has resulted in us canceling further product launches in favor of having a more sustainable cash flow. 2. Launch on Amazon Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and eventually, Australia We’re already on Amazon CA and also Amazon UK. However, sales figures for Amazon UK have been lower than what we expected. Amazon CA remains a bright spot though.   3. Optimize our Amazon PPC listings to increase sales by an average of 50% On-track but the whole process has taken longer than expected. However, I expect that we’ll get this done before the end of the year, at least for top listings. 4. Optimize Amazon PPC We’ve managed to drop ACOS from 30% to under 25 %, this figure represents 5-figures a month in savings for us. 5. Implement the concepts in the book Traction in our business You can track how we’ve done so far by listening to these series of podcasts - part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4. 6. Reach $10 million in revenue at a 10% net profit Again, market conditions will mean that we won’t be meeting this goal. I’m hoping that we’ll end up somewhere around the $7 million mark, depending on Q4 performance. 7. Lose 12 lbs To date, I have already lost between 8 -10 lbs from doing intermittent fasting and going on 3-mile hikes. 8. Record 100 episodes of the EcomCrew podcast We’re already on episode 193 and can end up doing up to episode 198. 9. Launch a new version of ecomcrew.com Done. 10. Launch at least 4 new courses We’ve now done this with the recent launch of the Facebook Messenger course. 11. Speak at 4+ industry events This has also been accomplished. 12. Hike 80 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail This didn’t happen but I did go on a 3-day trip backpacking and hiking trip to Mammoth Lakes. 13. Take an epic 2-week vacation We went on a great vacation to New England. We also visited Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont and checked out the cities of Quebec and Montreal. This brings my total to 48 states visited. 14. Visit the Philippines office at least once Visited the guys out there in April was planning to go back in October but that fell through. Planning a trip there next year. 15. Read 4 books For this quarter, I read Phil Collins’s memoir Not Dead Yet. 16. Handoff my Facebook ads to other people within the company Was checked off but now it’s unchecked again because our marketing person left. We’ll have to go back to the drawing board on this to rethink things because what we’re doing at the moment isn’t working. 17. Come up with at least one new tactic that no one else is doing Haven’t had a whole lot of time to do this but we’ll see what happens. 18. Never lose sight of the bigger picture: create 5-star products that customers will truly enjoy. Enjoying coming to work every day and ensuring that we creating jobs and opportunities for employees ensuring that they’re excited to come to work every day. I have been getting positive feedback on our products and from our employees. Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. Find more information on the link below. Free Video Courses As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

Stress is perhaps one of the many constants in running an ecommerce business. Whether you’re a starting entrepreneur or someone looking to scale that business, stress is always bound to creep up. Dave and I have both been in business for some time now. Over the years we’ve encountered situations that resulted in much worrying and a number of sleepless nights. Unfortunately, stress in relation to developing and growing an ecommerce business isn’t something many entrepreneurs talk about. This episode aims to initiate that very conversation. Unsurprisingly, we share quite a few stress points. Here are some that made it to our lists. Inventory Staff Logistics Amazon Tariffs Sales Tax Competition Business failure = Personal failure We end this conversation with some tips to de-stress. Don’t put money on the table that’s more than you can spend. Take a real vacation. Set aside time for yourself. Exercise. Spend an hour or so at the end of the day for family time. What aspects of the business do you stress over? Let us know in the comment section below. Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. Find more information on the link below. Free Video Courses As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

The second week of October was a particularly busy time for me. I was up in Vegas to speak at back-to-back conferences. First up was Retail Global Las Vegas, an ecommerce event organized by Aussie ecommerce veteran Phil Leahy. This was then followed by Rhodium Weekend, a gathering of online business owners and potential buyers. In today’s episode, I talk to Dave about my biggest takeaways from attending and speaking at these events. There are a lot of investors looking to invest in ecommerce businesses. With banks offering low interests, a 50 to 100% ROI that’s typical of ecommerce businesses is all the more attractive. Many ecommerce entrepreneurs have their significant partners involved in the business. More often than not, drawing a balance between your professional and personal relationship can prove challenging. No one really knows how to deal with the online sales tax issue. I joined a three-person panel session on this and about ten minutes into it, these experts were arguing amongst themselves on how this issue can be addressed. Tune in to this episode for the details and Dave’s input on them. Overall, I was quite happy with how these speaking engagements. I was more relaxed and able to focus on how to deliver my presentation better to the audience. We’ve opened up registration for EcomCrew Premium for 3 days. Get access to exclusive content - courses, webinars, swipe files, and conference presentations. You also get unlimited 1 on 1 email time with both Mike and Dave. Finally, we have our members-only Facebook group, which allows you to interact and learn from other ecommerce entrepreneurs. Registration closes at midnight Pacific time so go ahead and sign up today. If you want to get involved in the Online Merchants Guild, you can get all the information here. As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

I really enjoy doing these Under the Hood episodes for many reasons. I get to ‘pay it forward’ and help people who are just starting or scaling their ecommerce businesses. It’s always interesting to look at what other people are doing in niches that we may not be involved in. Today’s interview was quite a treat because I got to talk to a medical professional and entrepreneur who has a potentially winning product and strategy in his hands. Greg, the nutritionist Greg Williams comes from the unique perspective of someone who not only sells his products but formulates them as well. A nutritionist by profession, Greg works with people who have chronic health conditions like colitis and Crohn’s disease. His journey with food supplements started with a desire to help his wife overcome colitis. After achieving success with this, he saw the opportunity to help more people in an easier and more affordable way by selling his supplements online. Business profile Greg started selling his supplements back in 2016 and has enjoyed a steady increase in profit. From initial sales of £5,000 two years ago, his 10 products have brought in over £100,000 in sales. The statistics for repeat purchases are quite impressive. From a base of just under 4,000 customers, his products have a 30% repeat order rate at 1.75% purchase frequency. Greg’s marketing efforts are heavily reliant on Facebook ads so he is interested in exploring other potential traffic channels. He is also keen on bringing in more of business into Amazon. Mike’s advice Don’t push things too much with FB to prevent account shut down. Instead, work on your organic rankings. Have a long-term keyword and content strategy. Tap influencers who can promote your product. Create email sequence to inform customers that products are already available on Amazon Include a discount. Use this to redirect traffic from Facebook. Advertise on Amazon. Start by creating the perfect listing - with high-quality images, keywords, and providing as much detailed info as possible. Turn on automatic campaigns with a very high budget and do the aggressive bidding. This strategy will allow you to determine the best keywords to target for manual campaigns. Explore other traffic and marketing channels like Google Shopping ads and Instagram if applicable to your target market. Create a free plus shipping not to achieve the ‘marketing trifecta’. Under the Hood is a segment where we do an hour-long coaching call with one of our listeners. We take a look at their businesses, provide honest feedback, offer our best business advice, and answer whatever questions they have. In exchange for the free coaching, we will turn the call into a podcast episode so that our community can benefit as well. It’s a win-win! Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. Find more information on the link below. Free Video Courses As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

Hey everyone! Dave here going solo for this episode. Mike is down with a terrible cold after a couple of Las Vegas speaking engagements, so he might miss the podcast for a while. For this episode, we'll uncover the mystery that is Amazon A9. If you've been selling on Amazon for a while, you probably have a basic understanding of how SEO for Amazon works. But with the crazy competition from prominent companies and obscure Chinese sellers alike, how do you really propel your products to the top? This episode ties in with a recently published article that dives deep on how Amazon A9 SEO works and the strategies to take full advantage of it. As a sneak peek, here are some discussion points for this episode: How rankings are most often determined by relevancy and conversions What makes a listing relevant to Amazon with respect to keywords What the "hall pass" of new listings is How to create converting listings How to optimize your Amazon product listings If you want a deeper look at how this all works and how you can apply it for yourself, check out Dave's article on advanced Amazon A9 SEO strategies. In the article he shares a bunch of advanced SEO tactics for Amazon, strategies even the “courses” won’t teach you. If you liked this episode or found it helpful, we'd be stoked if you left us a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening to this episode! Until the next one, happy selling.

A brick and mortar business can be vastly different to owning an ecommerce one. Each offers a unique selling experience and would require different kinds of resources. Having said that,it can be challenging for traditional entrepreneurs to make the transition. Today’s guest is poised to make that very transition. Wilson Lee has been a traditional entrepreneur for 10 years. He’d previously dipped a toe at an ecommerce venture or two but is now ready to get both of his feet wet. Initial Plan Wilson is looking at two potential brands to sell online. The first is a green tea brand which he will source from a farm a business partner owns in Taiwan. The second is a baby brand. The plan is explore other online channels to sell on apart from Amazon. He also intends to set up a free plus shipping offer for these brands to test the waters and collect information on his potential target market. Mike’s Input Mike stresses the importance of taking the focus off Amazon when looking at online marketing channels. Diversification is important in order to develop and scale an ecommerce business. He offers this play-by-play strategy for getting Wilson’s ecommerce business off the ground. Start with brand name and URL Design a logo - this will inform other branding elements like font style and colors to use File for a trademark - a crucial requirement if you plan to sell on Amazon Make the product - focus on creating that free plus shipping offer A product belonging to a highly competitive niche can make an impact by having a premium look and feel about it. Great packaging is more important in other niches than others. For example, new moms or moms-to-be would be more discerning about product packaging than tea aficionados.   Under the Hood is a segment where we do an hour-long coaching call with one of our listeners. We take a look at their businesses, provide honest feedback, offer our best business advice, and answer whatever questions they have. In exchange for the free coaching, we will turn the call into a podcast episode so that our community can benefit as well. It’s a win-win! Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. Find more information on the link below. Free Video Courses As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

It's been a while since we've had an Under the Hood episode! For those of you who are new to this segment, we sometimes bring on podcast listeners to the show where they can talk to us about their businesses and ask us for advice. It's essentially a free 1-hour business coaching session turned into a podcast episode. It's a win-win! If you'd like to be featured on the podcast and get advice from us, just send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com with the subject line: Under the Hood application. For this episode, we bring on Sebastien Taché, an ecommerce entrepreneur from Canada. Sebastien holds a full-time job while running an ecommerce business that nets him $170k in revenue. His ultimate goal is to be able to grow that revenue to $700k-$1.2M by 2020. Get high-quality articles without breaking the bank One of Sebastien's first steps towards this goal is to improve his content. However, he is facing a problem most ecommerce owners with blogs do: experts who produce high-quality work are too expensive but generic freelancers on sites like UpWork who charge on a per article basis will most likely produce mediocre work at best. We faced this problem too early on in our business and we found that the best way to get around it is to hire a full-time content writer. Granted that it takes longer to find a good content writer than finding a freelancer, and that you'd have to pay them a monthly salary, the advantages are tremendous. As a result, number of articles writter by our content writer has consistently been on page 1 of Google search. We discuss this strategy in detail on the podcast, but aside from that, here are a couple things Sebastien and I discussed as well: Whether outsourcing PPC is a good or bad idea How to develop your own brand in a competitive niche Is it a good idea to go to China when you're bootstrapping your business? How to use available line of credit How to approach a product that's potentially patented Tips from the conversation Here are some of the tips I gave Sebastien during our conversation: Aim for low-traffic, more-specific long-tail keywords that will yield better coversion rates Put your writers through a digital marketer training course Never, ever outsource SEO DO NOT rely on the manufacturer telling you that a product is not patented I enjoyed this conversation with Sebastien and I look forward to talking to him again in 12-18 months and see where he is in his ecommerce journey. If you'd like to be a part of the show and be featured in your own episode, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com with the subject line: Under the Hood application. Looking forward to hear from you! Thanks for listening to this episode! If you found this helpful, please leave us a review on iTunes. Until next week, happy selling!

The avid listeners of this podcast would know that I don’t do interviews with people I don’t actually know in person, with the exception of one business-savvy MMA fighter. As it turned out, the guest on this episode is another worthy exception. The person I’m referring to is Mikael Yang, the co-founder of ManyChat. By some fated scheduling twist, Mikael and I ended up on the same call. After an awkward start, we finally figured things out. Being a fan of the software, I was excited to have Mikael on the podcast and ask all those ManyChat questions I had tucked away. Here’s a preview of our discussion. How did Manychat start? ManyChat traces its roots back to a messaging platform called Telegram, one of the first messengers to open up their APIs. Mikael and his partners thought that people would want to use the platform to broadcast marketing messages. By October 2015, ManyChat was already at 20K bots and enjoyed 50% growth on a month per month basis. In November, it was able to scale up to 30K bots. This steady growth led to the opportunity to join a startup accelerator program that helped the company scale and grow. ManyChat for Facebook Messenger was launched on April 2016. Mikael and his co-founders had to make a very hard decision to migrate to Facebook since they were already getting good traction on Telegram but they took the plunge. “And obviously if you wanna be the biggest and best marketing platform, you have to work the biggest social network.” , he explained. Today there are 400K Facebook Business pages connected to ManyChat in over 100 countries worldwide, with 150 million subscribers to those pages. Why is Facebook Messenger the “future” in terms of messenger marketing? There are two billion people using messaging apps. Most of your clients are probably using one; it’s where all the consumer communication is already happening here. Businesses need to adapt and use the platforms that they’re customers are using. Statistics indicate that 50% of people prefer text over other communication mediums like video or voice. If you’re serving a younger demographic (18-44 years old), the stats for text increases to about 61-62 %. According to Mailchimp’s data, email open rates are about 20%, on average.  For Messenger, it’s about 84% percent. Doing the math, you can say that “...there’s a 10x engagement on Messenger that makes it appealing as a channel…” Tips for creating non-promotional messages that add value to your list. Do not include a link in the first message. Do not use words like “sale” and discounts”. Add an unsubscribe button to avoid being blocked or tagged as spam. Businesses need to adapt and use the platforms that their customers are using. If you’re a marketer, you’d want to take advantage of this because this is where businesses are going to go to talk to reach their consumers. For those who want to start using ManyChat, you can download the software here. You can connect with Mikael on his Facebook and Twitter. Listen to other podcasts about Facebook Messenger and ManyChat. Dave and I also talked at length about these topics on a recent webinar. Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. Find more information on the link below. Free Video Courses As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

It’s been a hot minute since Dave and I sat down and did a podcast focused solely on discussing news and updates from Amazon. And so that’s what we did for this particular episode. Here’s what we covered. Amazon Raises Employee’s Min Wage to $15 (for US and UK) The company’s move to raise the minimum wage was lauded by critics but there’s a fear that the cost will trickle down to third-party sellers by the beginning of next year. Increase in long-term and Q4 storage fees Amazon storage fees appear deceptively cheap but if you do the math, they could potentially cost 10 times the amount of what a 3PL would normally charge. You’ll find a table comparing the old and new storage fees here. If possible, we recommend using a 3PL and Amazon fulfillment. Update to reviews policy The latest announcement basically clarifies on the sanctions a seller can receive for violating the updated review policy. Log in to your Seller Central account and read the verbiage. States collecting Sales Tax A couple more states have joined South Dakota in pursuing sales tax collection for online sellers. We are actively fighting this via the Online Merchants Guild and have plans to take the fight for this “undue burden” to federal court. A hope in the horizon comes in the form of a Congress bill specifying that compliance should be restricted to $10 million dollar sellers and more. Image non-compliance We have recently been receiving emails from Amazon about this and have taken steps to clean up our listings and improve our images. Otherwise, they’ll suppress ASINs that don’t meet their guidelines. Supply Chain Connect This is a new FBA feature that essentially gives manufacturers some level of access to a seller’s account on Amazon. With this, there’s a real danger that Chinese suppliers themselves will start selling on the marketplace. European Union takes legal action Amazon over antitrust issues Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's competition commissioner, said concerns had been raised over how Amazon was using data from third-party sellers and whether it was helping the company predict the 'new big thing.' That’s our roundup for the month. We’ll hopefully do another one in November or December.  You can check out our previous podcast about Amazon updates on the link below. New Amazon Developments - June 2018 Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. More information here. Free Video Courses As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!