Ask Me Anything About Growing an Ecommerce Brand

drehdinho · May 2, 2020

1. How does someone from a third world get rid of challenges of payment processor. For instance, Stripe offers card payment processor which is only available to Europe people, and PayPal known for not supporting some third world nation.

2. I manage a Shopify store at the moment and we do on average $22k per day with $2.5k adspend. Issue I have is scaling conversion.

I usually duplicate my ads, but that appears to have little or no effect.

I use Bing Ads majorly. Pls, advice.

DunderMannen · May 2, 2020

PUT0M0N0 said:
I work in a Digital Marketing agency with brands that make millions a week, and I know the potential of ecommerce but having a good product seems really difficult.

How can you get good products? The idea of reselling rubbish from Aliexpress doesn't sound good in my mind.

Have you even checked AliExpress? It's really not all rubbish, rather the opposite.

ryuu · May 2, 2020

Thanks @Busan and @Moon warrior for the email sequence

Busan · May 2, 2020

drehdinho said:
1. How does someone from a third world get rid of challenges of payment processor. For instance, Stripe offers card payment processor which is only available to Europe people, and PayPal known for not supporting some third world nation.

2. I manage a Shopify store at the moment and we do on average $22k per day with $2.5k adspend. Issue I have is scaling conversion.

I usually duplicate my ads, but that appears to have little or no effect.

I use Bing Ads majorly. Pls, advice.

Which country are you in? There's quite a lot of alternatives to Stripe for other countries .e.g Cashfree in India which integrates over 100 payment options.

I have very limited experience with Bing ads. As they have so little search traffic I'm not surprised you've run into issues scaling. Aren't you using Google and Facebook ads?

PUT0M0N0 · May 2, 2020

DunderMannen said:
Have you even checked AliExpress? It's really not all rubbish, rather the opposite.

I did... The problem is selling a product over which you have no control at all, with shipments from China, etc... You can avoid this by buying a lot of units and having your own stock but it's not that easy. Also, you will need to deal with refunds, offer support to the customer... Running an eCommerce is not easy.

lishu44275 · May 2, 2020

I own a Shopify store. with Facebook ads, failed; then switched to google ads, failed again; then Snapchat ads, still failed; changed my niche and products, the same. I've lost my confidence in this e-commerce business. And I still keep the store open right now but have no idea what to do next.

Busan · May 2, 2020

lishu44275 said:
I own a Shopify store. with Facebook ads, failed; then switched to google ads, failed again; then Snapchat ads, still failed; changed my niche and products, the same. I've lost my confidence in this e-commerce business. And I still keep the store open right now but have no idea what to do next.

Have you sold any products on other channels? If so have you had any feedback from customers?

win993 · May 2, 2020

What are your thoughts on a sustainable model for dropshipping of products made in the u.s.a.( or made locally for our international friends), instead of this almost pavlovian response of rushing to aliexpress(china)? I know we are limited in range right now, but we have to make a start somewhere.

cindyrose888 · May 2, 2020

Busan said:
I've been working in ecommerce for the last three years, and I'm currently head of marketing for a DTC brand doing $1,500,000 a month through Shopify.

I'm by no means an expert, but if you have any questions relating to anything ecommerce, e.g. Shopify, PPC, CRO, Email marketing, increasing AOV etc. comment below and I'll do my best to answer.

Are you one of the Actor or the producer of the movie

Train to Busan 2 (Peninsular 2020) ?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8850222/

Difficult to believe you are doing marketing for shopify...Should be instead MOVIE ! LOL

Zarre · May 2, 2020

Hello Busan,
I own one shopify store (cat toys store). I started in November 2019. But I quit because of pandemic in January 2020.
I worked dropshipping from Aliexpress to T4 countries (us, ca, uk, au).
How to find reliable supplier or warehouse in order to continue to work ?

Busan · May 2, 2020

win993 said:
What are your thoughts on a sustainable model for dropshipping of products made in the u.s.a.( or made locally for our international friends), instead of this almost pavlovian response of rushing to aliexpress(china)? I know we are limited in range right now, but we have to make a start somewhere.

I don't do dropshipping so it's not something I know a huge amount about. I think in general dropshipping is only going to get harder to do. A localised version could work well. I think there's a service already doing this called Spocket.

I know people who add "Made in the USA" to each of their Shopify product pages and it had quite a significant boost on conversion rates. People definitely love to buy local.

cindyrose888 said:
Are you one of the Actor or the producer of the movie

Train to Busan 2 (Peninsular 2020) ?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8850222/

Difficult to believe you are doing marketing for shopify...Should be instead MOVIE ! LOL

Haha! I actually haven't even seen the first movie but heard it's good.
Busan is a fantastic city

Zarre said:
Hello Busan,
I own one shopify store (cat toys store). I started in November 2019. But I quit because of pandemic in January 2020.
I worked dropshipping from Aliexpress to T4 countries (us, ca, uk, au).
How to find reliable supplier or warehouse in order to continue to work ?

Unfortunately I don't have any experience in dropshipping so can't really advise. Perhaps look at dropshipping products directly in tier 4 countries rather than China.

Zarre · May 2, 2020

Busan said:
Unfortunately I don't have any experience in dropshipping so can't really advise. Perhaps look at dropshipping products directly in tier 4 countries rather than China.

Sorry, I didn't mean tear 4 countries, the popular slang for US, CA, UK, AU is top T4. Thank you for your reply in any case.

aduseia · May 2, 2020

Thanks for doing this @Busan,

For a new store, you said building trust is important, which I agree with.

In regards to Email Marketing, what would you suggest as a good welcome series? (3-5 email welcome series was mentioned before).

For example:

1st email - "15% off promo code"
And then what? (2nd email, 3rd email, 4th ... etc).

Vikjohn · May 2, 2020

Busan said:
I've been working in ecommerce for the last three years, and I'm currently head of marketing for a DTC brand doing $1,500,000 a month through Shopify.

I'm by no means an expert, but if you have any questions relating to anything ecommerce, e.g. Shopify, PPC, CRO, Email marketing, increasing AOV etc. comment below and I'll do my best to answer.

If I'm going to start dropshipping, which payment processor do you think is good because PayPal a piece of shit, they hold money alot and an account can get limited anytime, 2checkout is good but it only pay out after 14 days
What I mean is which payment processor pays out quickly so you can easily other for the products for your customer

DunderMannen · May 2, 2020

How would you go about starting off a print-on-demand store? I don't want to do FB ads, as it's a long-term brand. Unknown clothing brands doing FB ads is like throwing money into the sea.

Dropshipped countless times before successfuly, but with print-on-demand it seems to be a bit harder...

Busan · May 2, 2020

aduseia said:
Thanks for doing this @Busan,

For a new store, you said building trust is important, which I agree with.

In regards to Email Marketing, what would you suggest as a good welcome series? (3-5 email welcome series was mentioned before).

For example:

1st email - "15% off promo code"
And then what? (2nd email, 3rd email, 4th ... etc).

They should mainly be educational. Make the second email about the story of your brand, how it began, what your mission is etc. The next email could be about why you're different, what makes you better than competitors. Then you could begin introducing your best selling products and explaining their benefits.
I'd recommend setting up a fresh Gmail account and signing up to a lot of different mailing lists from your competitors or brands who are killing it. It'll give you a lot of ideas and stuff you can replicate. This site is also really good for inspiration https://reallygoodemails.com/

aarisht inwala · May 2, 2020

HI there
so in google ads do you run shopping ads ? and can you recommend some marketing or essential plugins for womens clothing brand ? im trying to setup my brand in india. i do have a store and sales but have trouble scaling and the right approach for it .

Thanks
aarish

Busan · May 3, 2020

Vikjohn said:
If I'm going to start dropshipping, which payment processor do you think is good because PayPal a piece of shit, they hold money alot and an account can get limited anytime, 2checkout is good but it only pay out after 14 days
What I mean is which payment processor pays out quickly so you can easily other for the products for your customer

Lots of consumers prefer Paypal so personally I'd always offer it. Stripe, Braintree and Shopify Payments are all good. Also take a look at offering customers pay later with things like Klarna or After Pay (you still get the money quick).

DunderMannen said:
How would you go about starting off a print-on-demand store? I don't want to do FB ads, as it's a long-term brand. Unknown clothing brands doing FB ads is like throwing money into the sea.

Dropshipped countless times before successfuly, but with print-on-demand it seems to be a bit harder...

Have you considered working with micro-influencers? Find some Instagram fashion influencers under 10k followers and drop them a message that you've got a new t-shirt coming out and want them to be the first to try it or you could even design one with them. You could also look at Tik Tok influencers, most are young teenagers and don't really understand the value of their pages and just want free stuff. There are brands getting promoted on tik tok pages with 100k followers, and they aren't paying anything other than the cost of the product.

aarisht inwala said:
HI there
so in google ads do you run shopping ads ? and can you recommend some marketing or essential plugins for womens clothing brand ? im trying to setup my brand in india. i do have a store and sales but have trouble scaling and the right approach for it .

Thanks
aarish

I use Google Shopping, Search, Discovery and Video campaigns. I've never had much success with display but it would probably work a lot better for your niche. If you're getting sales through Google ads but struggling to scale the campaigns have you considered reducing the ROAS targets?
Also look at doing influencer marketing, it works well for fashion.
Plugins depend on your platform If your brand is using Shopify look at apps that can reduce abandoned carts increase average order value like Carthook.

handsomeone · May 3, 2020

Hi thanks for the thread!

1. Would you focus on generating sales organically or ads only?

2. Where do you grab people attention regarding your brand, your main platform and postings?

3. What would be the most significant change as for shifting from an online store/dropshipping store to a real brand?

Thanks!

yapierre · Aug 11, 2020

Whats the net net margin for new brand ?

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