The WTF project - No shopify, no dropshipping, no facebook (15)
The WTF project - No shopify, no dropshipping, no facebook
Alright guys, here we go.
A follow along that has none of the popular ingredients: no
So WTF is Pekadis doing?
No "this is what I've done 3 years ago and in hindsight, this is what I think worked, but didn't really have a process, so I guess it was like, this uh, blah blah blah"
This is happening now.
And it's is me showing you what we're doing and the thought process behind it. Which is more valuable than "do this", "app that" for the right people.
So no, it's not for everyone. But that's OK.
1: Why add a new site in the first place?
Well, I have been working on the overall goals for the company, so I can meet my own goals.
The goal has been set to go from low 7 figures to 8 figures within 5 years with a net profit exceeding 15%, while running with no involvement in daily ops, thanks to processes.
This would give me a valuable company that can either be sold or that can buzz along nicely.
When you think about how you can get there, you need markets that are big and profitable enough to support your goals.
Which for us means a specific product group and export.
We could have gone for a different product altogether (mainly for margin purposes), but the knowhow, relationships and product range we have allows us to get there.
The current site will not get us there, as we are already the national market leader in our niche.
2 - why this market?
The market is big enough and an ecommerce site selling the low cost, high volume version of our product has been sold for $100 million a few years back.
Prices are high enough to support our relatively high shipping cost, but we have an advantage in lead times with a 2 day delivery service.
Price range is 300 - 600 euro per product, with accessories ranging from 50 to 150 euro.
Tested the market by selling the accessories through Amazon and seeing whether we could indeed be competitive (or whether a price war for the buy box would drive margins too far down to be profitable).
Created Youtube videos addressing general and technical issues and includes links and email addresses to drive enquiries / quote requests. Had 600,000 views in 6 months and about 500 subscribers. Videos cost about 500 euro and 3 days of work. This includes camera man on site and editing.
Number of enquiries is fairly low, but indicate order values ranging from 750 to 1500 euro.
Add to that a few K in sales on Amazon every month for 3 SKUs and we've got something to work with.
Next step - domain name, platform choice, who's doing the work, budget - this will be for the next post.
Now this is something to follow!
Thanks Manu!
So interested to follow this! Something along these lines is my current end game for E-commerce. I'm far more interested in a lower earning, stable, and kinda low maintence business than I am a slightly higher earning but super time consuming trend following business.
Damn, this one's going in next week's newsletter for sure.
And I'll be following along closely!
Good to see the positive response here and @caurmen thanks in advance for the newsletter inclusion - much appreciated
Alright, let's move on to one of the next decisions that had to be made - the domain.
We have been successful with EMD (exact match domains) and PMDs (partial match domains). But the trouble is that initially, it really helps, but it also puts you in a corner.
Because if your in the car business for example and now you want to offer motorcycles as well, carstoday.com isn't really great. Unless you can really build it into a brand / destination.
Given that it's hard to really predict everything you'll be selling / offering, it's best to keep your options open.
I had a few sweet domains, but we'll use these to support the main site. But I did not want to run into rebranding issues down the line. So, we want for a real brand strategy, where the name in itself doesn;t mean anything.
We will be giving it meaning.
Not through huge branding campaigns. In my eyes, branding is more basic than that. We'll be doing what we do and we'll do it well. Quality product, quality service, quality experience.
Add a recognisable logo, tone of voice and predictable actions (so people know what to expect) and that's what we'll be doing, It's really not more than that. From a positive experience, customers will build the brand for you. They'll define you through their words and actions (word of mouth and purchases respectively)
As for the domain name itself, it had to be available as a .com . Nothing says second best more than a .net domain
So I got that, and the .net .org. And the misspellings. And versions with a hyphen. And a few top markets: .co.uk / .fr / it / es / de
So yes, a whole bunch of them.
We'll redirect them to the main domain and for the misspellings etc it's defense purely. Don't want anyone to take it or have a domain squatter trying to sell it at a premium once the brand is more visible.
So that's the reasoning behind the domains / branding.
Next post will be about the team, hope it has brought some value
This domain strategy's one I've seen executed by a few people who know very well what they're doing, so not surprised you're going with that approach. Pivots happen, arguably more often than they don't, so keeping your options open is a good plan.
Add a recognisable logo, tone of voice and predictable actions (so people know what to expect) and that's what we'll be doing, It's really not more than that.
Nice one.
Staying away from the shiniest object has personally always been my way of thinking. I don't like competition, so I like to do similar thinking as you and figure out WHY I'm entering a niche, and if it has the right potential for my goals. Then I focus on the product and branding, and before you know it.. you're a market leader!
Quite often people just enter things randomly with no thought process, so you've done a solid job at planning!
Here's another - this time small - update on this project.
I am used to do most things myself. It's good in the sense that I know what I am talking about and can get things done.
But this approach also makes me a bottleneck.
So for this project, I decided to go with a marketing team that I tested on another, smaller project.
They will be writing the content, setting up the site, set up social profiles and get it ranking.
The budget is 2K per month, which is set up as a retainer.
I also got a freelancer to upload 100 products for $80.
Tools used:
- communication -> basecamp
- project management -> airtable
- mindjet -> used this to create a mindmap that gives the team an overview of the categories and products and as such a large part of the structure of the site
In the next update, I'll discuss our platform choice and plugins we use
Nice keep up the progress!
Cant believe i missed this one... Tuning in from now on!
As promised, here's a new update with some background about the platform.
As a side note, this is not real time reporting. As we focus on execution, I only write when:
- there's really something worth mentioning
- we have actually executed and / or learned something
I want you to get info from the trenches, not something I did 4 years ago. That means it sometimes takes time before I can actually write about it.
So back to the platform.
I am coming from Magento, but this is proving to be too much work and we don't have such a big catalogue of products (main site is between 500 to 1000 products)
So Magento was out.
I am not a fan of
I've seen enough entrepreneurs having their source of income yanked away to not run a serious project on
And as mentioned in the title, this isn't your average facebook /shopify/oberlo project, where the ease of adding products and rapid testing would be a good reason to go for this setup.
So we've gone for Woocommerce.
Main reasons are:
- well developed ecosystem of plugins
- lots of people are able to work with it (like writers)
- offers lots of control in hosting and setup
So what do we use in terms of plugins etc:
- Theme - Flatsome - a best seller on Themeforest with a great UX builder for pages -> $59
- Yoast Seo plugin - the most-used plugin for SEO - we use the free version
- Gravity forms - plugin for forms - I have a developer license and use it for quote forms and lead magnets and integrate it with Mailchimp to be able to use marketing automations
- woocommerce composite products - to create a product that consists of different elements - $99 for a 5-site license
- woocommerce dynamic pricing - allows me to offer discounts when people order more than one product etc. - $199 for a 5-site license
- stripe plugin - to accept credit cards we use stripe
I use siteground for hosting, which works well, as their go geek plan offers staging, which I find very useful when developing the site.
We have not yet started optimising the site and are currently at a load time of 2.7 seconds. Not too bad, but I'd like that to be lower and under 2 seconds at the most.
We'll look at content development next - so stay tuned
Interesting decision! I can certainly see the sense behind it for a large project: that's the point you really want absolute control of your platform.
(At some point I must look into static sites for ecommerce - they could be a very powerful way to run a store. But that's a side-note.)
What caching plugin are you using?
@caurmen - currently using the one provided by Siteground, but we have not been seriously looking into optimisation yet.
Once all products are there and all pages have been made (we're close to finishing), we'll go through an optimisation process.
We have a few variable products so we're using a CMS, but this looks interesting: https://snipcart.com/blog/static-sit...rt-with-jekyll
I guess that if you would build a database as the backend, this could work very well.
For this project, we're pushing at at the product side when it comes to innovation, so we'll put our energy there.
But I am convinced that innovation on the tech side (and I mean new to ecommerce, not new to the world) has a lot of value and can be instrumental to ecommerce success.
Originally Posted by pekadis
I've some experience with Wordpress, so here are my thoughts
Yes, Woocommerce is a good and flexible platform
Yoast does not work that well, try to optimize manually.
Loadtime of 2.7sec is to high, you need to optimize, and maybe get a faster hosting-platform (managed server?)
Security, Wordpress is very vulnerable, please put a lot of effort into protecting your website otherwise your business will be stolen.
Hope this helps,
John
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