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| Ralph Wilson: Hi, this is Ralph Wilson with Web Marketing Today. I'm here in San Francisco at the eMatrix and Marketing Optimization Summit. I'm here with Rob Snell, who's an expert in eCommerce. I wanted to talk to you today, Rob, about how you decide what to sell online. You've got a lot of experience with clients. Rob Snell: I've been working with Yahoo Store owners for over 10 years, now. Ralph: And so you've written about everything. So, with the clients, say, how do you help them figure out what to sell? What are the basic steps? Rob: First off, you want to figure out what's selling online. Ralph: Okay, how do you do that? Rob: There are two ways to do that. You can look online and see what other folks are selling and you can look offline and see what other product categories are doing well for retailers. So what I get my retailers to do is I say, "Go online. Go look at eBay." Ebay is pretty transparent about letting you see what other people are selling; the same thing with Amazon. You can go look at their best seller list and see, actually in numeric order, what the best products are on Amazon in different categories. Ralph: Okay, can you do that on eBay also? Rob: Yeah, you can actually see the completed auctions. And there's some third party software like Terapeak.com and there are a couple of other third party providers that actually can subscribe to their information for 40 or $50 a month, and actually see specific sellers, what they're selling, what the final completed price was on an auction and get a pretty good idea what's moving on eBay. And online, it's like with an online store it's a little bit different than with an auction site as far as trying to find something to sell. Because you know you're not competing against people in the exact same marketplace. It's kind of like having your own store versus being in a flea market. Ralph: Okay. So the first step is finding out what's selling. Rob: Right, because you want to make sure that you're selling something that there's actually a large enough audience for you to make a living selling this product. And I've seen people try to sell you know calligraphy of their poetry. I mean anything from that to like their paintings or their grandmother's crochet or things like that at bottom end. As far as like seeing what other niches are out there, you want to make sure that you're focusing enough, though, on something to where you're not competing... you're not trying to sell every book in print like Amazon does. You want to focus in a niche. Ralph: Okay. So the first step is what's selling. What's the second step? Rob: The second step, for me, the client needs to be interested in what they're selling. If they don't have a personal attachment to the category, whether it's a business they grew up in or it's what they do for fun as a hobby or they sold that stuff before in the real world, they're going to have a hard time selling online. Because you're going to be competing against the best people in the world, the most enthusiastic people in the world, who sell those types of products. So if you don't have a personal attachment to the product, you're not going to be able to do as well. Ralph: Yeah. So, you might say, "Boy, this is a wonderful product, though I'm really not interested." Rob: Or a good example would be with our family business, Gundog Supply, we sell dog tracking collars and supplies for hunting dogs. Well, I got the geek gene where my brother got the hunting gene, okay? And so, it's something I'm not personally interested in, but my brother is so into it, that it's so easy for him to write content and do videos and do blog posts that it just flows out of his mouth naturally. Ralph: So, you're the dog that doesn't hunt? Rob: Absolutely. Ralph: So, secondly, you really need to like it. And liking it probably means you have some in-depth knowledge. Rob: Right. Usually the folks I've seen that do best with their Yahoo Stores are retailers who actually have product knowledge, either from years of being in the industry and selling it offline like they're a brick and mortar store, or folks who, like I say, grew up in the family business; or, folks who are hobbyist who just finally decided they are spending 10 hours a day working on this, they may as well get paid for it. Ralph: Okay. So, Step One; what's selling. Step Two is make sure you like it. Rob: And I would say Step Three would be make sure you can get it because there's so many things that people are interested in that they just can't get distribution for it. There's certain retailers that have expansivity, there's certain distributors that won't allow you to sell their products online. I've seen lots of retailers who have stores who don't have permission from the manufacturers to actually carry their products online. We run into that ourselves. We were selling some Warhammer science fiction roll-playing miniatures. And the manufacturer decided that that was going to be their channel and the retailers were out of luck. If you were selling it online, you had 30 days to get their products offline or they would cut you off completely. So you have to make sure you can get the product. A good way to do that is to look at some of the drop-shipping companies like Doba.com, is a good source of supply. They have like probably 600 or 700 different vendors and they all get fed through the same apparatus as far as like processing orders. Ralph: Worldwide brands drop shipped directly. Rob: Absolutely, like Chris Malta's. Ralph: Another good one. Rob: And there are places like that the only caveat that I would tack onto that would be is that when you are shipping through a drop-shipper, you are competing with somebody like me who is buying direct from the manufacturer. And let's just say that we had the exact same websites in terms of quality and information and exact same pricing because we're both really competitive, but I'm going to get a better break on price. So, I either I can pay more for clicks and beat you in PPC or I can pay the same thing as you and actually beat you in profitability, and 10 years from now I'll still be here. So, you also want to do a little research... Ralph: Let me just slow down here a bit. So, you buy the stuff in bulk and keep an inventory? Rob: Absolutely. We have a warehouse. Ralph: So, you've got money tied up in inventory? Rob: Right. Ralph: But you're able to ship quickly, control customer service and sell at a better price or a better margin. Rob: Better margin. Ralph: Whereas, if I'm a drop-shipper, it costs very little to get into the game, but I can't compete on price and I can't have as big a margin. But I've seen some that do both, the best selling products they keep in inventory and other ones they make available, but they're not their core business. Rob: Right. Drop-shipping is a great way to get your little toe into something and just see if it's going to work for you, and see if folks are interested in buying from your website. And then later on, you can establish a relationship with a distributor or buy direct from the manufacturer when you get to doing that kind of volume. Ralph: So, see what' selling, do you like it, can you get it; what's the fourth step? Rob: Can you make money selling it? I guess that ties back into... Ralph: How do you mean that, how do you make money? Rob: You've got to cover your costs; your marketing costs are going to be... it's just getting more and more expensive everyday to sell online. PPC costs are going up, revenue share, every single channel that we go through-- they keep raising the percentages that they want-- eBay, Amazon's doing it. Ralph: Getting greedy, huh? Rob: Yeah. Hopefully, Yahoo won't do it, but you never can tell. So you just want to make sure, you sit down and you actually look at the numbers and you go, okay, based on the conversion rate, based on what I have to pay for traffic, based on my gross margin, can I actually make a profit selling these products? Ralph: Okay. And then, and only then, should you go through the hard work of setting up a store and cranking this business up? Rob: Absolutely. And one of the things that I recommend that folks do is like maybe build out a baby site. You know, the last thing you want to do is get a 50,000 product data base fee from a supplier or a drop-shipper, populate a Yahoo Store with it and just have a clone of the 7,000 other stores that are out there that are doing the exact same thing. You know, you can take one or two products, do a little bit of keyword research, build out a micro site, you know, with a product page and information page, build out your shopping cart just like you're going to do when you actually blow your store up big. But you can actually see what keywords convert for you; you can see where folks go on the site. You can just learn so much about that type of customer. Ralph: But do your research. Now you wrote a whole book on this. Tell me about your business and this book and what you do. Rob: Yeah, I wrote this book a couple of years ago from the Dummies people, it's "Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies." Ralph: There you go. Rob: There's a year of my life, right there. Ralph: Yeah. Rob: But I put all the information that I wish I had 10 years ago when I got into eCommerce, when I put my mom's business online. Ralph: It's a great book, by the way. Rob: Thank you. Ralph: I appreciate that. Roy: I appreciate the review. Ralph: Where do they get the book? Rob: You can get it on Amazon.com, I'll make a dollar. But you know, robsnell.com and I've got the reviews there and links to the Amazon page and everything. Ralph: This is Ralph Wilson at Web Marketing Today. [Music] Ralph: Hi, this is Ralph Wilson with Web Marketing Today. I'm here in San Francisco at the eMatrix Marketing Optimization Summit, and here with Rob Snell who is the author of the book "Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies." I've read it and it's an excellent book. There are three things that really can help you sell in your online store and really boost things up. The first of those was what? Rob: The first of those is actually take a position on a product. If you're selling something and you have 17 different variances of a product, tell me what to buy. When I'm the consumer and I'm shopping on your website, I know a little bit about the product, but I mean, you're the retailer. You know all about the stuff. You can tell, based upon what my needs are, you can tell me what specific product I should buy. Ralph: So instead of just a product description, you really want to inject that with your opinion about the value of this for certain kinds of buyers. Rob: Absolutely. Really for products that have a higher price point, I've seen, like on our side, we had a 20% increase in conversions and revenue when we took an active position and said, "This is our opinion: These products rock. These products, they really don't rock. For this application, if you're in Texas and you've got a wide range in bird dog, you need to use this type of tracking collar versus if you're hunting in the mountains you need to use this type of tracking collar." Ralph: Okay. Why do you think this works? Why do you think it boosts sales? Rob: I think people are so busy these days, it's like they don't have time to dig through all the information and make their own decisions. I like to have all that information on the website. If you like to drill down and read all the nitty-gritty about the specifications and that kind stuff, I like to have the information there. But for folks who are busy, I like to have the information that says, "We recommend this. This is our most popular, Number 1 best seller." Ralph: And they trust you now because they feel like you've been there and you can guide them. Rob: Absolutely. And we put my brother on our family business website. We actually made him the spokesmodel with hunting gear on. We've got a little column called "Steve Says" that goes on every single product where he talks about, "Well, this product, I like to use it this way." And that was when we saw the 20% increase in sales and conversions by actually taking an editorial position on what products we thought folks should buy. Ralph: Okay, so that's Number One. What's Number Two? Rob: The second thing, as far as boosting your eCommerce site, is download your brain. Ralph: What do you mean by that? There might be not much to download, you know? Rob: Well, it depends. You don't have a USB port in the back of your head, so I have to figure out how to do this. As a retailer, you know so much more about your products. And your employees know so much about products than your customers ever will. It's like anything I can do to get that information out of your head. And one of the best ways we've done it is by looking at emails. Like, in our dog supply business, whenever my brother is answering questions about products or dealing with customers, it's like he has this huge backlog of emails where maybe we didn't answer things on the website quite the right way, because people are asking really specific questions. We take those emails that he sent, export them all out, I've got a Macintosh, we export all of those out into a text file and I can go through there and data mine all that content. I've got a thousand pages of content where my brother sent emails from about a year's worth of emails. Ralph: So you look for his answers... Rob: Absolutely. Ralph: And then just kind of strung those together. So, what good does this kind of brain dump do for a website? I just had a thought. Rob: The first thing is is that our employees can actually use it for a knowledge base. Instead of having an internal knowledge base, we actually have a publicly available knowledge base that's called a product description. On the website you can search for something and the customers have access to the same information that our call center reps have access to. The other thing is that from a search engine optimization standpoint it is amazing how this content generates traffic because of the long tail. People do really specific searches. Ralph: Okay, so every page that's up there is fairly focused in what it's talking about. Rob: Absolutely. Ralph: So, someone searching on some kind of obscure thing... Rob: Well, what kind of range does this have when the humidity is 20% and it's in the winter? Is salt water corrosive to this? Can my dog wear this and actually go out into the surf and retrieve a dummy and bring it back in? It's like somebody that was doing our keyword research, I would never think about those kind of terms, you know? Ralph: So, the more content that you have that's tightly focused, each page, the more likely someone that has kind of an obscure search words, they're more likely to come to your site because you've got content on it. Rob: Absolutely. And just anything you can do. We've done it with video; we've done it with audio. As far as like when somebody is on the telephone, recording one side of the conversation so that I can see what kind of questions people are asking and what answers we give. Ralph: So this is content creation? Rob: Absolutely. Ralph: How to [inaudible]. Rob: And you want to make it as easy as possible for the retailer because locking my brother in a room and getting him to write a buyer's guide is one of the hardest things in the world to do. Ralph: Now, does this help most with generating targeting traffic or is this something that helps people find out what to buy once they are to your site, do you think? Rob: I think it's more about generates some long tail traffic, you know obscure, more obscure keywords. But I think it shows product knowledge that not all the other competitors are going to have on their website. Ralph: Okay. Rob: So, it establishes you as an expert as well as taking an editorial position. Ralph: So, taking an editorial position is Number One. Number two, put down everything you know about that product and put it on your site. Number Three... Rob: The third thing is more of an SEO Specific thing. Ralph: Search Engine Optimization. Rob: Absolutely. Retailers have a hard time getting links, because if you have content website and I go, "Hey, Dr. Wilson, give me a link." You know that I'm making money off of that link because I'm saying, "Link to my cash register, please." You know? And it's very difficult for retailers to get links. One of the easiest ways you can get links is look at all the people you send money to. Basically we take a Quick Books file, we export all the people we sent checks to in descending order by how much money we sent them, and we make sure those people link to us. Ralph: So, these people might be who, for example? Rob: Basically, your suppliers, your wholesalers, your distributors, all the way down to the kid you gave a donation to when you made a donation to the high school, you want to link from that .edu page. Ralph: So, everybody that you're sending money to on a regular basis, or even irregular, you're going to ask them for a link? Rob: Yes. And that includes the Google Adwords, I'll ask them; they won't give you one. Even The folks at Yahoo Store, but you know sometimes we've gotten, it's amazing who will link to you. The electric company probably won't link to you but it doesn't hurt to ask. Ralph: Sure. Rob: It's a vendor link, is what we call it. Ralph: So, what happens, because some of these people will link to you? Rob: Absolutely. Ralph: But what happens then? Rob: You actually get the link popularity from their sites but they actually send super targeted traffic. So like, a good example would be this company that sells hunting vests to us. We actually outrank them for their keywords for even their brand name in Google right now. And they just gave us a link. So when somebody goes and searches on their site and makes it to their site on the dealer's page, they click on our link, they go straight to our section page. That's one thing I want to emphasize, with your distributors and your manufacturers, make sure that those links point to the section page that has the products they sell, not just the home page. You get such a boost out of that because it's on topic, it's relevant, it usually has your keywords in the link because of the URL. It's really easy to rank sometimes higher than the manufacturer for their own keywords. Ralph: Great tips; three ways to boost your eCommerce sales. Well, tell us about your book, now. Rob: All right, about two years ago I wrote "Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies." I've been doing Yahoo Stores since 1997, actually, since back when it was Viaweb. It's available in Amazon, just do a search for Rob Snell and for Yahoo Store and it will come up. Or you can go to RobSnell.com and I've got links there to my own site. Ralph: It's a great book. Rob: Thank you. Ralph: And the company where you're selling dog collars and stuff? Rob: It's gundogsupply.com. Ralph: Gundogsupply.com. Rob: Yes, sir. Ralph: All right. Thanks, Rob. This is Ralph Wilson with Web Marketing Today. |