A great book review for eCommerce store owners!
So I’ve just finished reading a pretty good book on eCommerce, it’s called Ecommerce Evolved and it’s written by eCommerce titan: Tanner Larsson. It’s also available on Amazon:
Here’s the book on Amazon, click here to check it out.
It’s really filled to the “T” with practical and actionable tips and tricks on how to Build, Grow & Scale a Successful Ecommerce Business in today’s environment. I thought it would be helpful to give some of my insights gained & share some of the highlights of the book here.
The book is divided into 3 parts:
PART I: Evolved Strategy
PART II: Evolved Intelligence
PART III: Evolved Marketing
I’ll do my best to summarize the intro of the book, and might make additional posts to summarize the first 4 chapters that make up PART I, it depends on if this post helps enough people. For PART II and PART III, I would advise you to read the book because you won’t be disappointed. (I won’t summarize the entire book in grave detail as I have with Part I, because I realized I had reached the 10% fair-use threshold…!)
Here is a list of summaries of the 1st 4 chapters:
Chapter 1: Funnel-Based Ecommerce
Chapter 2: Recurring Income Core
Chapter 3: Think Before You Sell
Chapter 4: Conversion Tricks, Sales Boosts, and Profit Maximizers
Disclaimer: These are my personal insights & takeaways so I’ve paraphrased a lot of things to be brief. If you like what you read, do consider checking out the book.
Here we go!
About the Author -Tanner Larsson has started, co-founded, built, sold, scaled, bankrupted, and/or succeeded with over two dozen companies. -He has made millions of dollars in revenue for his own eCommerce companies and over $75 million in revenue for companies he has partnered with, advised, or consulted for.
The 12 Core Principles of Ecommerce
1. Your Business is Not Unique
A pretty common mistake for business owners: Most seem to always fail to ask for help because they believe their business is so unique that others can’t understand it. No matter how innovative your business and/or idea is, there’s somebody out there who can offer you some useful advice. If you realize that your business is not as unique as you may believe, you won’t ignore solutions.
2. Your Business is Marketing
You cannot hate marketing! Sales is the lifeblood & marketing is the high octane you need to keep your lifeblood flowing. You may have the best product in the world, but you can’t be successful until you accept that your business IS marketing and the product is just the thing you sell to your market.
3. Brand Centric, Not Product-Centric
You should focus on building a message or movement that your customers can relate to & align with. Skepticism is at an all-time high so there’s no better way to get people to lower their guard and purchase from you than by making them feel like they belong.
4. You Must Control the Order Process
Being able to control the order process is a must if you want to understand your conversion rate & increase it – product selection, payment processing, receipt page, follow-up emails, everything. You must own the customer data.
Example: Amazon FBA should just be one of your sales channels. Amazon doesn’t release customer data and controls the entire sales cycle. They can change their search algorithm or shut down your account with a snap of their fingers. Don’t make it the foundation of your business to rely on channels such as Amazon for sales.
5. Don’t Compete on Price
Competing on price can be a painful race to the bottom. It makes prospects devalue your product & think that the only good thing about your product is the price. As your profits disintegrate, you’d start looking for cheaper products or haggling with manufacturers who will in turn start cutting corners to offer cheaper prices, resulting in low-quality products. Or even worse, cheap products attract cheap customers that can cause problems for your support team down the line.
6. Don’t Be Walmart. Niche Down
When going niche, you can achieve higher ROls. You can morph your message and copy to a niche demographic, to target ideal customers with limited funds and maximize ROl.
7. No Such Thing as Free Traffic
Despite popular belief, SEO or content marketing takes a lot of TIME. When you buy traffic, you get traffic & data immediately and you can run tests, get relevant statistical data, and make more money. But it always comes down to how much Time vs how much Capital you have to invest.
8. Business Costs Money
Going for cheap, is a quick way to go for broke! Hiring sub-part workers or products will damage you right out of the gate. And this hurts the worst, particularly when you have to spend money on advertising & you run campaigns yourself and don’t know what you’re doing. It’s best to hire a professional advertiser or agency who knows how to get you the best ROI on your ad campaigns.
9. If You’re Not Mobile, You’re Out
Mobile-optimize your site. Mobile transactions will soon outweigh desktop transactions.
10. The One Who Can Spend the Most to Acquire a Customer Wins
Ecommerce businesses have some of the highest customer acquisition costs of any business. This can be done through marketing funnels.
Major Key: Be willing to spend up to your customer lifetime value (LTV) to acquire a customer. This can be difficult to calculate – another figure that’s easier to calculate is the 60-day valuation of a customer = how much your average customer spends in 60 days.
You should optimize your business (funnels etc.) to maximize customer LTV, so that you can afford to spend more than your competition to acquire customers.
Important: Being willing to spend up to customer LTV does NOT mean you should, or there wouldn’t be any profits.
11. Sell in Multiple Channels
The more places you sell your products from, the more customers will find them, e.g. your eCommerce site, Amazon, eBay, and offline retail stores.
12. There Are Only Three Ways to Grow a Business
As stated by Jay Abraham, there are only three ways to grow a business: 1) Get more customers, 2) Increase the size of your orders, 3) Increase the order frequency.
Most eCommerce businesses focus on 1) only, which is a mistake, as it’s 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to sell to an old customer. Because the old customer has already had an engagement/transaction with you.
Even small growth in each of the 3 areas will result in geometric growth.
I hoped this brief review helped! Let me know if you have any questions & I will try to help, thanks for your time!!
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