[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
E-COMMERCE
How do you prepare to sell your store?
This is a question coming from Frazier Christie in the Ecom Empires group. Many people who build a store for the long-term certainly think about selling it at some point.
And many do all the time!
There are a few steps that you clearly should take if you want to make your store appealing to potential buyers.
1. Make sure it’s profitable
Sounds like a given but some people think you can sell something for a significant amount even if it’s not doing well.
Yes, you have the examples of some companies like Snap and Tesla that are not profitable, but they are not your small-time e-com shop. They have global plans which required more capital.
2. Streamline or automate fulfilment
A potential buyer doesn’t want to buy a job. They want to buy a running business, so if your store doesn’t have this covered, you’ve already lost.
3. Show them ways this can scale
This applies to any business, not just stores. Buyers want to know this can go big. Even for your e-commerce store, you should have a realistic story of how you will attract the attention of someone like Amazon.
Whether it’s the IP on the products, the manufacturing relationships, the access to untapped markets – you should have a story for how this business can be multiple times bigger than it is now.
Of course, there’s more to it, but those are 3 very important items based on the comments and our own knowledge of investing in businesses.
You should check out the original post to get an idea of what store Frazier has on his hands, and maybe you can learn a thing or two from his situation!
Ads Manager issues over the weekend? Here’s an update.
Everyone was in the same boat over the weekend when there was a major Ads Manager outage.
Facebook was reasonably quick to put out the fire, it took about 30-60 minutes before people saw things working again.
There’s some good news and some bad news about this.
The bad news is that it’s not completely fixed for everyone. For example, Depesh Mandalia reported in his Facebook Ads Experts Academy that there are still intermittent issues for him.
On the bright side, Revealbot rules are still working to cut bad performing ads and scale good ones.
The lesson?
Try to have a backup solution that connects to FB’s API. The outage was only on the front-end. All tools that use the API still worked properly.
FB Ads Power Hour with Ben Malol and Depesh
In this Facebook Ads Power Hour Depesh Mandalia talks to Ben Malol about his career in e-commerce.
Ben started out with the classic Aliexpress dropshipping 4 years ago, but now puts his focus on branded e-commerce and also his coaching and consulting business.
One of the reasons for this transition was that Ben didn’t enjoy dropshipping that much. “It can only make you money, but it doesn’t make you happy.”
Today Ben still has an eye open for trends and sets up e-commerce stores around them. Like selling physical bitcoins during the crypto boom.
Besides focusing on trends only he also puts way more money and effort into testing products.
According to him, it’s rare that you can have success with setting up a store and only using Aliexpress creatives. This means Ben usually spends a few thousands of dollars upfront if he decides to test a product.
Ok, great. But what if I cannot afford to spend tons of money on testing products?
If you don’t have a huge budget to work with try to sell a story, not a product. When doing your research for a product don’t only think if the product serves a purpose. Think about building a story around it.
Most of Ben’s businesses are not profitable on the frontend! That is made on the backend – upsells and email. He even recommends putting 70 to 80 percent of your effort on the backend funnel!
When asked how to choose good suppliers he has an interesting tip. Don’t ask the supplier “Will you be able to scale if our store grows?” The answer to this question will always be yes.
Instead, ask them “We need 10k of these within a week, are you able to handle that?” The answer to this question will give you a better idea of the supplier’s capabilities.
If you want to hear all of Ben’s story, you can check out the recording right here.
You should check out the original post to get an idea of what store Frazier has on his hands, and maybe you can learn a thing or two from his situation!
GENERAL
What’s the deal with Dennis Yu and Jeremy Schoemaker?
OK, so not being around for 10+ years in the industry has its drawbacks. We have little idea about the beef between bloggers that happened many years in the past. Or the potential scams…
Anyway, if you’ve been around before, you might have heard of Dennis Yu. We haven’t so this is quite the news for us.
Seems there’s quite the controversy behind him, and we’ll try to get to the bottom of this.
This is where we are at in this whole story, to begin with.
9 years ago, Dennis connected with Jeremy Schoemaker. They tried working together, there was plenty of miscommunication and Jeremy thinks there was also plenty of deception from Dennis.
Why bring this up now? Because Jeremy posted on Facebook about this on the weekend again.
You can read Jeremy’s full story about it right here on his blog, from when it first happened.
In short? After the failed partnership, Dennis threatened to sue Jeremy and bad-mouthed him to all possible companies. Those companies, however, seem to trust Jeremy more than Dennis.
So right now, we have the word of 2 people – Dennis Yu and Jeremy Schoemaker, that more or less have a completely different version of the story.
Both of those people are quite known in the industry, have a following and their fair share of haters.
We’re reaching out to people and companies mentioned in the blog post linked above, and keep you up to date.
By the way, some of you nice readers might know a thing or two about it as well! Reach out so we can get to the bottom of this!
Our recommendation: Don’t jump to conclusions yet but certainly do your research before working with anyone.
As many pros as there are for working online, there are some cons as well. One of those cons are… well, the cons!
PRODUCTIVITY
Quickly create new Google documents
If you’re anything like us, you depend on Google Docs. And Sheets, and Slides and Forms…
And you’ll be glad to hear about this new little update.
You can now just type some .new domains to instantly create a new file that automatically is saved to your Google Drive.
Here are the shortcuts you can use:
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Expedia is fighting its hardest to compete with Airbnb.
In the pre-Airbnb days, people would use Booking and Expedia to get themselves a hotel… Over the past few years, Airbnb took a commanding lead when it comes to market share for short term rentals.
And Expedia isn’t having it! They’ve acquired both Pillow and ApartmentJet.
Both companies that just joined Expedia are focused on software tools for property managers.
While Airbnb is the cool kid in the industry, that focuses on its community, Expedia wants to fire back with practicality and ROI.
The WTAFF Crew likes Airbnb overall, both as hosts and as guests. But more options for this is almost never a bad thing. More competition will mean better hosting services. Bring it on!
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]