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Tag: Shopify

Spying On Shopify Based E-Commerce Stores

I don’t know about you, but spying and reverse engineering are the top two most popular things that we’ve done for years in our company.

In fact, without spying the space, we couldn’t have done much of what we’ve done so far. Two brains are better than one right? A hundred thousand brains are even better. So by all means, always spy in the space you’re trying to create a dent in.

One of the things that we’ve constantly done in the e-commerce space is watching and tracking all the stores hosted on Shopify. Since all the Shopify stores are hosted by Shopify themselves, they actually exist in a very small IP-range. Reverse look-up of the IP range will actually output all the stores hosted on Shopify ever.

If you’re smart and want value out of this data, you could always track their rankings, watch out for sudden movement in stats, identify new entrants that are growing fast i-e trending stores etc. If you’re smarter, you could then dive down even deeper on the stores of your interest and then do the same thing with the products of the stores. You know where this is going, and what all the possibilities are.

It’s really all out there on the internet. Isn’t it?

WooCommerce Vs Shopify

I recommend everyone to commence their e-commerce journey with Shopify. But many e-commerce veterans are seen siding with WooCommerce instead. From the data available, it seems that WooCommerce is more widely used than Shopify. I wanted to compare the two based on my experience.

You will likely find much more detailed reports on this comparison, however, many of those are written by web hosting companies which are biased towards WooCommerce as Shopify comes pre-hosted while WooCommerce is self-hosted and requires a hosting plan. I recommend that you read those reports since they are very detailed, but for the ones written by the hosting providers or by the affiliates of the hosting providers, please take what they say with a grain of salt.

Let’s explore.

Cost

Let’s begin with the cost. Shopify’s basic plan starts from $29/month but you will also need to pay 2% of the order value as transaction fee to Shopify. By upgrading Shopify plan, you can reduce this to 1% and 0.5% depending on the plan you choose. You also need to pay a monthly subscription for most Shopify apps.

WooCommerce in comparison is free and has many free apps available as well. But since you need to host it yourself, there will be a hosting cost of roughly $10/month. You will also require SSL certificate which you can get for $50-$100/year or for free using Clouldflare or a similar service. WooCommerce ‘seems’ to be cheaper in most cases but Shopify is also only expensive when you’re doing large volumes. For someone who’s just starting out, Shopify is going to be very affordable as well.

In addition, since WooCommerce is self-hosted and self-managed, there could be outages, security issues, hacks etc which may cause you monetary losses. In order to avoid these issues, you may require a technical resource. So after assuming these costs or losses, I don’t think WooCommerce is truly cheaper than Shopify. It may or may not be depending on who is using it.

Ease of Use

Ask anyone you like, including the ones who are using WooCommerce as their goto solution, and you’ll likely hear that Shopify is easier to use. It truly is. You don’t need to know anything about domains, hosting, SSL, security, integration, customization etc. Everything comes pre-configured and you can start a store in a jiffy, literally.

I recommend everyone to begin their journey with Shopify for this very reason. You’re likely working on your products, developing and frequently iterating them. If you’re a dropshipper, you’re likely constantly hunting new and trending products for your store. You’re likely figuring out a marketing plan. You or your team need to have A game when it comes to Facebook ads. If you can do Google, Snap, TikTok and emails, you could literally add at least as much revenue as you do from Facebook. All of this needs your attention. When your attention deserves all of this, you shouldn’t be wasting anytime looking into non-issues such as whether the hosting can take enough traffic, or whether part of my traffic is getting stolen from malware etc.

The ease of use is huge.

In addition, you don’t need to know much about how to optimize your conversions. Or how to have a perfect sales funnel. Free Shopify themes are VERY nicely done and have high conversion rates. They are perfect for inexperienced sellers looking to start a store on a budget.

Features & Customization

WooCommerce is light years ahead of Shopify as far as features and customization is concerned. It is why I think many advanced store owners eventually need a WooCommerce store. The amount of customization that you can do with a self-hosted platform is unthinkable.

I was listening to this podcast of a founder of a large D2C brand, and he said he hates the fact that you’ve to manually put in Zip Code, City, State and other information on your Shopify store. This became the reason for him to switch to WooCommerce since he wanted to just take in Zip code, and auto fill City and State info which wasn’t possible with Shopify. When your brand requires conversion optimization on that level, your hands are tied on Shopify.

Hence, it makes total sense for the advanced users to go with WooCommerce.

Conclusion

As a general rule, I think that new and small e-commerce businesses should start with Shopify while large business doing larger volumes should use WooCommerce so they can avoid transaction fee, hire a technical resource if needed, and get unlimited flexibility and customization.

At Socialoholic, we’ve been doing 7-figure e-commerce for a while, but still have found ourselves using Shopify. For 8 figure and beyond, I think one should definitely be using WooCommerce.

Artisans of Pakistan, E-Commerce & Government Plans

In 2017, a software company in Pakistan reached out to us for support in a project that they were building for the government. The government wanted to provide an end-to-end e-commerce solution to the artisans of Pakistan so they could easily export their product on D2C basis. This means access to e-commerce software/platform, payment gateway, training on how to sell etc. The budget was over a billion Rs. I don’t know the exact budget but I do know it was more than 1 billion Rs. Here’s how I saw the project evolve.

The government required of the software house to build the e-commerce platform in-house in Pakistan. I saw it, it wasn’t bad. But I’m sure it wasn’t and can’t be as good as Shopify – a $100B company, with over 5000 employees. Majority of the billion Rs budget went into the development of this software, which could have been offered to artisans for $29/month with an existing solution or for free with the likes of WooCommerce. For the payment gateway, the government wanted the software house to setup a company in US and setup a payment gateway e.g Stripe that could be shared between all the artisans. And the last stage was to train artisans to enable them with e-commerce skills.

The correct distribution of funds, in my opinion, could be to have the least amount of money spent on the software/platform, slightly more for access to payment gateway, and the most to enable artisans to sell.

In reality, almost all the funds were spent on creating a Shopify clone, that may never see the light of the day with no budget left for payment gateway and training.

This was either yet another attempt of action faking by the government, or a complete lack of strategy despite having good intentions. Whatever it was, it was a disaster, and we quickly saw ourselves disassociate from the meetings.

Facebook Announces “Shops” – Native Shopping Experience on Facebook Family of Apps

Only 2 days ago I wrote this piece about e-commerce being the real fuel of the internet. I feel more confident about it today than I’ve before as Facebook diversifies away from ads and inches closer to the e-commerce space.

When we ran our network of content sites that leveraged Facebook’s influencer marketing, I realized that we were working against the force. That each day, Facebook would do something to cap, limit or control our business or business model in a certain way. I knew that they will take over the business model. So much out-bound traffic making tons of ad-revenue all outside the Facebook platform.

They let us run for a while, for a long while, because their users engaged very well with the content. But eventually they launched instant articles to get a piece of this pie. A native facebook article reading experience where Facebook serves the ads and also takes a cut.

They did the same with the videos. In the early days of Facebook, Youtube videos appeared as embedded content on the platform and not as links. As they started to prioritize their videos on the platform, they started treating Youtube videos as regular links. Eventually they launched in-stream ads, a video monetization program just like one for Youtube.

Now they are doing this for e-commerce. Every day 100s of new D2C brands are launched. Their primary source of customer acquisition has been Facebook. It is estimated that most indie e-commerce brands acquire over 50% of their customers through Facebook advertising. While Facebook already takes a massive chunk of the revenue generated (often 40-50%), having more control by hosting native e-commerce experience on the pages could mean more revenue for the company, better user experience & higher conversion rates.

Just like instant articles, each product would need to be approved by Facebook now when you import the catalog.

How do I perceive this news? troubling. I know this will improve user experience but Facebook already practices more control than I appreciate and the counter-party risks continues to increase.

While you practiced full autonomy over your woo-commerce and Shopify stores, now you’ll be on the mercy of Facebook. In the worst case scenario, which by the way is often the normal case scenario for me, no longer will I only lose ad accounts, I could also lose my “shop”, because of course my “shop” has to adhere to Facebook’s TOS. If the AI, which isn’t very fond of me, constantly throws ban hammers for allegedly violating advertising policies, why wouldn’t it do the same for the shops.

Here’s how Facebook’s Shops look like

There Must Be Something That’s Recession Proof Right Now?

COVID-19 has disrupted businesses of all types across the world. I have already written about the turmoil that markets are in. I’ve also mentioned that our business was largely affected too. In fact, our business was affected before most other businesses when COVID-19 was only limited to China. All this while I’ve been thinking what could be the right thing to do during this tough time.

I thought about software businesses, which may also be struggling, but far less than other kind of businesses. In fact there are some software businesses that are doing better than they have ever done before; Zoom for example. As S&P500 index goes down as much as 30%, the stock price for Zoom is up by 30% as more and more people resort to work from home.

You may have also read that Amazon is hiring as many as 100,000 people to fulfill the customer demand. So Amazon doesn’t seem to be doing too bad either as people resort to online shopping to follow social distancing.

The more you read about the bad news on Twitter, Facebook or wherever you get your news from, the more opportunities are presented to you. In fact, when the world was functioning on full-throttle, it was tough to find opportunities because every industry was so competitive. Now, opportunities present themselves to you.

For example, you may have read that in many parts of the world, everything has been closed except for pharmacies, groceries and food deliveries. This is an obvious proof that if you could deliver medicines, essentials or food, you might be doing better than others. But what’s more obvious is that if there was a delivery version available of everything else that’s on a complete shutdown, that could be an even better opportunity.

If people are locked in their houses, they might need more than food or medicines. They certainly need video conferencing (zoom) to continue to work from home. They need Netflix, obviously. They probably also need to workout, right? Probably other things to keep themselves entertained or busy.

Because people need to still workout, we’ve launched our “workout from home” brand in the last couple of days. We’ve seen initial demand for it, and plan to scale it in the coming weeks. There’s a big e-commerce opportunity right now and I encourage that you seize it.

Moreover, Shopify is giving away 90 days free trial instead of the regular 14-days to help small businesses stay afloat. So what are you waiting for? This could be the time to kick-start your e-commerce journey.

Protecting Your Ad Campaigns From Yourself

Lately, I’m writing only about Facebook ads & e-commerce. That’s because since 1st January, we’re busy with the launch of our new store. We took a big part of 2019 off and planned to do some work from 1st January 2020. It has consumed us so far. But today is a good day because today we made it profitable.

In 12 hours, we have done $415 in sales. We’re projecting to close the day at $700.

Our ad spend for today is $154.81 which is about 37% of our gross sales. The net-margins are low right now but since we’re just getting started and the pixel is developing, we’ll see improvements with conversion rates over time. We also haven’t introduced any kind of lookalikes at this point in time.

These aren’t our desired results. We have to make up for the losses incurred with ads in the first 15 days. We need to optimize the ads after removing whatever segments aren’t converting to bring the costs down. We also then need to scale this campaign. If everything goes right, we should be able to do that in the next 7 days.

The reason why I’m not touching the ads right now despite that there’s room for improvement is because campaigns take time to optimize. Many people suggest not to touch your campaigns for 24 hours after you make them. While this could work if your campaign is completely off, I generally suggest 48 hours if there’s some sign of success. And so I’m going to let these go on for at least 48 hours and will not modify them.

After 48 hours, I’ll decide how to modify them by looking at breakdown data.

So if you want your campaigns to work, you need to protect them from yourself. Stay away for 48 hours, be patient. The cash might burn and it is going to hurt you, but the profit lies after that.

Making a Million Dollar Out of Thin Air

It sounds surreal. A million dollar out of thin air? How can you create money out of nothing. You can’t. But you can create money without having any money. Like you do in an employment. Although, you probably can’t make a million dollar with employment. Then how can you make a million dollar without investing any money. Only a few people can imagine something like that. Let me assure you, it’s possible. Not just possible, I personally know dozens of people who have done it.

You start with doing work that has no associated cost. The only cost would be your time and effort. Like starting a YouTube channel with your phone. Just like my friend ZSM did. Or you could work as a freelancer on UpWork / Fiverr and build your way up to becoming an agency or creating a product. Or you could just write a blog. Or create a following on Instagram or Facebook to be an influencer. Or you could sell arts and crafts, or T-shirts and hoodies on Etsy, or TeeSpring or Printful. If you’re a developer, you could be selling services on Fiverr and eventually start making plugins, apps and themes for WordPress and Shopify creating a product and a value-asset.

Let me assure you, I’m only scratching the surface here. If there are 99 ways to make money online without investment, I only know of 1. And I’ve written about what I know here. My brother recommended me this channel. May be you’ll find a lot more options to kick-start your internet journey there.

In summary though, there are hundreds of ways to make a living on the internet. Hundreds of things that need no capital to start. And hundreds of them that can eventually make you a million dollars. Sure, you’d most likely need to pivot at some point, but you can most certainly get there. Let me talk a bit more about the pivots below.

Suppose you start as a T-shirt designer on Fiverr. You sell time and skill to make money. Eventually you pivot and also start selling your designs on Etsy and use a print on demand to fulfil your orders. Once you get the hang of it, you now want to hit a larger audience or a global market. You pivot again and you take your designs to Shopify. You now invest a lot of money that you have made thus far in audience acquisition using ads on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest etc. You find more print on demand services in different countries so you can locally fulfil your orders. Eventually, you’re doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. You have created a million dollar value-asset. All with sheer hardwork and no external funding or investment. You have successfully turned $1 into $1,000,000.

I don’t want to mention names here for the sake of privacy, but I know at least one millionaire in Pakistan from each of those categories: an influencer, a designer, a blogger and a developer.

The question is do you just like reading articles with a million dollar in the title, or are you gonna take actions.