The evolution of FringeSport?s KPIs
March 16, 2016 3:06 pm
How do you run your business? What numbers are meaningful, and on what intervals do you review them?When FringeSport was a side project, I mainly looked at revenue and gross product margin after projected shipping costs. I reviewed revenue whenever we got excited, which was daily or hourly, and margin rarely ? usually only when we were pricing a new product.The reason we chose these two metrics was tha
Pop-ups bad for the web, bad for business
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
Our company is approached frequently by app makers that are selling pop-ups, or modals, for our ecommerce site. The pitch is usually the same: Use our pop-up to get more email subscribers, close more deals, and keep visitors on your website. But the question isn’t which app to go with. It’s whether we should use pop-ups at all.Let me first separate categories of pop-ups. There are user-expe
Entrepreneur, founder, C.E.O.?
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
What is a C.E.O.? If you founded and are running a start-up, when should you really take C.E.O. as a title?These are questions I?ve struggled with over the last year. It?s easy to look at Silicon Valley unicorns ? companies with at least $1 billion in valuation ? or public companies and see their C.E.O.s as ?true C.E.O.s.? But what about bootstrapped start-ups? It seems like every person who has an ide
Ecommerce in South Korea: Aggressive Discounting, Rewards
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
South Korea is a hotly competitive ecommerce market. Consumers there often prefer marketplaces, such as 11street, shown above, as well as aggressive discounts and loyalty-reward programs.South Korea is the seventh largest retail ecommerce market in the world and the third largest in Asia Pacific, after China and Japan. It boasts the fastest Internet speeds in the world, which drives one of the hi
Instagram Ads: Low CPAs for Right Audience
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
Instagram ads, such as these from Michael Kors (left) and Ben and Jerry’s closely mimic non-promotional Instagram posts. ?With compelling photography, advertisers can often achieve a low cost per acquisition ? provided their target audience aligns with Instagram’s. ?Images courtesy of Postano.com.If you asked an ecommerce marketer what her?lowest cost-per-acquisition channel is, she would l
A tale of two suppliers
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
The attitude of some suppliers amazes me. Recently, we have been going to trade shows to find new products. We have been looking for quality, niche suppliers that have higher-value goods, to increase our average sale and margins.At the trade shows, there were two types of suppliers. There were the ones that spotted us at their stand and made us welcome. They offered us coffee and took the time to show
For PPC ads, filter by demographic data
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
Driving traffic is at the heart of building a successful ecommerce business. There are so many retailers and so many options?for consumers that you must continually find new ways to drive traffic. The most common methods are search engine optimization and pay-per-click search ads.In this article I will focus on PPC ads. It is much faster to implement than SEO, but, conversely, it typically costs a lot
3 Ways to Sell Products That Don?t Sell
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
Most ecommerce sites have some products that are of great quality and do a good job, but don?t sell very well. The problem may be pricing, positioning, or presentation.Many storeowners will eventually take these non-selling items and move to the clearance section. Sometimes, that won’t sell them either. In fact, many big etailers have clearance stock that sits there for months ? even years ? desp
Ecommerce in Japan: Marketplaces Dominate
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
Rakuten’s marketplace in Japan is the largest ecommerce site in that country. Japanese consumers shop heavily on marketplaces. Yahoo Japan Shopping and Amazon Japan are also popular.Amazon is no longer the world?s largest ecommerce site in terms of number of visitors. That position now belongs to Taobao, the online marketplace, from China. Ecommerce is growing quickly outside the U.S. With cross-
Developing a Content-marketing Editorial Calendar for Ecommerce
March 14, 2016 4:24 pm
Ecommerce merchants often struggle with content-marketing ideas. But there are many sources of inspiration. For example, a t-shirt retailer could note a t-shirt in a movie. This “Warning Offensive” t-shirt, from the movie Lockout, could spark the idea for an article about t-shirts from science fiction movies.A content-marketing editorial calendar is simply a list of what content your ecomme
