eCommerce Lifestyle eLearning Course Freebie Bundle

Trellis and Shop Hacker are partnering on a freebie elearning course bundle promotion. The eCommerce Lifestyle eLearning Course Bundle contains 22 courses and 52+ hours of course content. This unique bundle was created for entrepreneurs looking to enhance their ecommece sales and marketing skills.
You can redeem the bundle for free here or enter the coupon code “shopify”
Marketing and sales are important to master when building your ecommerce biz. How do you find quality products to sell? You secure products via your sales efforts. You sell into dropship vendors and convince them to list on your shop. How do you market your products and your store? You need to learn Facebook paid social advertising, affiliate marketing, and email marketing in order to drive potential customers to your product pages. One of the most difficult parts of creating a profitable ecommerce business is the massive marketing efforts needed. eComm businesses are low margin which means you need a ton of traffic to generate meaningful revenues and cash flows.
The ecommerce industry is only about 20 years old. eCommerce is less than 15% of all US retail. It is still early in the ecommerce game. It is not too late for you.

Here are 10 points we recommend you think about when launching your ecommerce business:

1. Leverage platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, or others to avoid large development costs. The goal should be to launch fast and start mastering the marketing and sales components of the business. Don’t get sucked into the rabbit hole that is building ecommerce websites from scratch.
2. Realize this is a long journey. Execute hard daily but think monthly and annually. Don’t give up.
3. Pick a niche you are knowledgeable and passionate about.
4. Pick 1-2 marketing channels and focus exclusively on those for 90 days hard.
5. Set a small profit goal and build a plan around it. Making $1K in profit is harder than you think.
6. Master traditional selling practices such as building a prospect list, connecting with prospects via email, executing sales calls, and closing vendor partnerships.
7. Don’t get overly focused on social media marketing. If you want to do marketing activities on social focus on paid social advertising.
8. Find 5 affiliates who are willing to post about your products on a regular basis.
9. Traffic and revenue are more important than design and copy in the early stages.
10. Outsource low level tasks using virtual assistants where you can.

Here are 10 tips regarding ecommerce vendor sales:

1. It is a numbers game. If you want to close 10 new dropship vendors you need to contact 100-500+ companies.
2. Leverage multiple touches across multiple channels. Use email, LinkedIn, website contact us forms, cold calls etc etc. Contact each target vendor several times. Touch several people in a given company.
3. Use email automation and analytics apps. You want to understand your open and response rates.
4. Look at sites like Groupon or Walmart’s Marketplace to find large data sets of relevant vendors.
5. Be diligent about your list building and customer segmentation. You must focus on one type of product category vendor at a time. The more niche your prospect list and the more custom your messaging the higher your response rates.
6. Make on-boarding easy. If you do the hard part of closing the deal don’t make the vendor jump through 10 hoops to get setup. Make it a white glove service where you set up everything for them.
7. Focus on vendors from your home country to start. Don’t make it overly complicated with international shipping and long ship times. If you are based in the US, focus on US based vendors.
8. Track your activities in your CRM. Gamify your selling efforts by tracking each sales activity. Each week push yourself to do more sales activities than the last.
9. Realize 90% of the active deals you have in your funnel won’t close.
10. Just start selling. Send that first email, make that first call. You need to build the sales pipeline up and the only way to do that is to start.

In coordination with Trellis, Shop Hacker is also announcing the launch of the Shop Hacker Shopify App. This app allows any Shopify merchant to add and sell 1000s of elearning courses to their Shopify store instantly. The app is free. eLearning is the future of education and with the Shop Hacker Shopify app you can sell cutting edge courses on topics ranging from cyber security to iOS app development. These elearning courses have high margins and are the perfect products for any entrepreneur looking for a simple catalog of products to launch their store with.
Here is a demo video of the Shop Hacker Shopify App:

eCommerce is one of the “easiest” online businesses to start and scale. Enjoy the process and embrace the grind. Now start!