How To Succeed In Ecommerce was written to help guide you to see the bigger picture. There is so much more than the one horse pony show depicted by webinar sellers.
The post below is an excerpt from a response I posted today in a closed Facebook sellers group. My friend Michael Russo gets the credit for giving me the idea that this needed to be a post all on its’ own.
I have 19 years of experience selling on every major eCommerce platform and marketplace out there. I’ve seen a lot of sellers, techniques, platforms and hacks come and go. The post below was written in response to a post that only said “I lost 9000€ in 2017 nice job with Amazon PL”
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If you only hear the Amazon propaganda, you will never get past Amazon as a seller. Most sellers are clueless if their demographic even shops on Amazon or only use it for the final purchase.
FB has 7x the amount of users that Amazon does. 87% of Pinterest users purchase based on a pin they have followed. Google will index a well SEO’d video for the keywords in under 2 weeks.
If you have no clue how to sell or market, what the heck are you doing starting with pl in the first place?
Basic Core Ecommerce Principles
It is too easy to lose touch with what is important. Follow these key principles and you will give yourself a much higher chance of not only succeeding, but also creating a lasting eCommerce powerhouse.
• For the most part bad products do not exist. There is a buyer for everything. Bad sellers, bad decisions, bad judgement. bad tools are pervasive
• Products dont make mistakes, people make mistakes.
• Proper planning prevents piss poor performance
• If you do not know your audience down to preferences, needs and how to target them, how can you expect to speak to them, their values to get them to buy
• You do not sell products, let that go, you sell experiences
• Your efforts and your listings will be the sword that slices your way to the top or cuts you to pieces
• Commiserating only with other people unable to figure it out will not improve your position.
• Don’t listen to everything you hear in these(facebook) groups. Mis-information and trolls are in every group – some more than others
• Why should anyone go out of their way to leave you a review when you sell the same ho-hum product with the same ho-hum listings as everyone else?
• If you are sourcing from the same crap lists as everyone else, buying the same washed up products from the same old places and create a listing that does nothing to be light-years different than any other then expect the same as the majority of sellers – failure!
• Knowledge plus action equals power. Turn off the television, turn off Facebook, one night a week and read industry related blogs and best practice guides, implementing one major thing per week. Keep track of the what and when so you can look back and know what worked. Every little improvement helps.
• When you have done this for months, all of those little improvements add up to solid progress that produces consistent, lasting results. Little initiatives, done consistently and often is what I consider one of the major key that has led to my and my clients success and solid performance over the years.
• Final Thoughts
• Everyone complains about competition on the marketplaces. The true competitions is who can be the laziest, have the worst listings and maintain. Long-time, successful sellers see no competition except between themselves and other power sellers.
• They see all of the lazy sellers with terrible listings as market research. You spend the money, identify the great categories and when they are ready they move in and optimize you right out.
• Ecommerce Success or Failure
• This is not intended towards any one person, comment or thread in particular. So dont feel like Im calling you out. if you are thinking to yourself, I mind as well give up, then you should because you missed the entire point.
• Stop blaming or looking to blame listing and planning issues on your perceived disadvantages.
• Get off your butt, learn your trade inside, outside and upside down. Become a listing specialist for your products. Turn your listings into well oiled, well researched, highly targeted listings that speak to the needs of the buyer presenting them with the ultimate solution to their issue. You owe it to yourself to give it 110% of your time and effort.
• Overwhelming? It shouldn’t be. Start with, and focus on the basics. Listing basics, optimization basics, keyword research basics. Master those subjects and you are ahead of the majority of your competition.
• About the Author
• Joe Reichsfeld is an Ecommerce Consultant with experience going back before 2000.
