So first, I have to apologize for being dormant. I’M SORRY. I was busy building the biggest project of my life. So far.

I thought I could maintain everything. I thought I could be a good husband. A good father. Build the fastest growing oral care brand in the US…while bootstrapped...with an anemic team… Maintain my sanity. Maintain my Twitter. And run this Substack.

I was wrong.

It was just too much. My health has suffered. My relationships. I didn’t intentionally cut the Substack but you can only maintain and build so many things before things fall off.

So the Substack just went on the back burner.

Now that I’m no longer anon, the Substack and social media is easier to maintain.

There’s a reason why I’m not anon and you’ll soon realize in the story that I’m about to outline. It’s been a crazy 5 years. It’s time that I tell you what has been going on and why I’m now giving up the Opossum identity.

During my time in the military and working as an engineer for the defense department, having a minimal social media presence was pushed hard. A level of secrecy was ingrained in every part of my life. That’s what initially led me to having an anon online identity.

Running this brand has forced me into having a more and more public life to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish.

Unfortunately, that part of my life is over. I say unfortunately because I liked the privacy. I still do as much as possible. If you have the choice to be private or public, always choose private.

For what comes next with our brand, I just no longer have the choice.

I’ll explain what comes next when the time is right over the next few months, but for now, I’m going to outline what this Substack is going to become.

What It Won’t Become

• It won’t be me shilling every product under the sun and selling my soul like so many newsletters do.

• It won’t be “hoorah! You can do it if you just materialize it!”. I’m not sacrificing my morals or my identity to please anyone.

What It Will Become

• It’ll be the same me trying to convince you to start a business, steps on how to do it, tips on ecom and marketing, and escaping the rat race that is Corporate America.

• A story of what has happened over the last 2 years.

• A step by step as to how we built NOBS from the old articles that I wrote.

• A lessons learned narration of the pitfalls that we fell into as we built the brand from ground up.

• Everything that the old Substack was but with updated articles. I’ll delete the old articles as I update them.

So where do we go from here?

Well. Here’s some rough bullet points of what I have planned for future content. I’m sure I’ll deviate from it a bit as I refine my writing style again. Along with a few announcements that are happening through Q1-Q2.

It’s going to get messy. There’s going to be broken links. But you’ll see first hand how the info in this Substack was actioned on to build an amazing brand.

Very Rough Outline of Future Posts

1. Background of how NOBS started, I disappeared, and team structure.

2. The CJ era and keeping everything private. How we did it. The company structure. The alias names. The exposing myself after quitting my job to affiliates. The conferences. The fact that people still call me CJ to this day…

3. SEO & Twitter growth era.

4. Transitioning manufacturers and formula hell.

5. Secret announcement 1.

6. Podcast era and attribution of podcasts.

7. Secret announcement 2.

8. TikTok fail then launch of TikTok Shop.

9. Breakout growth.

   1. Huberman freakout.

   2. Can’t get inventory fast enough.

   3. Overbought inventory…All of this inventory with no money to push it in ads…

   4. Go mini viral with first influencer the next week. Provide enough capital to start advertising again.

   5. Couple weeks later, first viral moment.

10. Riding high then counterfeits hit. Don’t have IP. The importance of IP. How we dealt with counterfeits. Almost destroyed our business.

11. Prioritization and how distractions can destroy your growth.

12. Affiliate trust eroded and why doxing made sense.

13. Rebrand and why IP matters. Doing the rebrand.

Wrapping Up

Opossum is dead but I’m back. Stay tuned for the the story of how NOBS was built and how you could replicate the success.

Follow me on Twitter, TikTok & Instagram.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter, TikTok & Instagram.

Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, built up over years working in retail, e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

My career is atypical.

My life is atypical.

My online identity is definitely atypical. AND.

Dr. Jonathan Snow's career is also atypical.

While many know him as the owner of a digital marketing agency or his previous ecom companies, his journey began in a completely different field – Orthodontics.

I wanted to get him on my Substack so that you all can see that getting to success is NOT linear. How you define success when you get there may be completely different than how you’re defining it now. It’s not linear and there’s rarely a perfect answer to “How do I get there?”.

Jonathan is smart and has the ecom resume to prove it. You’d do well to follow him on Twitter & read what he puts out.

The other amazing aspect of his story is the sheer speed of his execution. A ton of people have been reading me for a year talking about “As soon as X is over, I’m going to start!”

Guess what. There’s always another X. There’s always going to be another excuse for you not to start.

Here’s Jonathan’s Story:

(with a few edits by me)

It all started in 2014 when I graduated dental school in NJ.

I started my career as a dentist in the US Air Force. I was shipped off to Shreveport, Louisiana. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this area…it’s in the middle of nowhere. Deep South. Where Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma all connect.

My days in the Air Force would start at 7am and end at 3pm.

As a single guy living in the middle of nowhere, I had absolutely nothing to do each day after work.

At the time, my brother Dan was building large organic social media pages (like @rap his biggest social property). He was getting deep into the organic social media community and had the idea to monetize social media pages that had substantial follower counts. He reached out to me to help bring this idea to life.

We ended up building an affiliate marketing platform that leveraged organic social pages as traffic sources (mostly influencer and publisher pages on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter).

We saw quick traction. In less than 2 years from launching, we drove 9 figures in revenue through the platform.

We then realized that we had massive leverage. An entire affiliate network with predictable traffic. What could we do next? 

The answer was ecommerce.

We created an LLC, opened a business card and got started.

We launched our first brand together, a jewelry/accessory company. Fulfilled orders out of my garage.

My garage soon turned into a warehouse that I couldn’t even use to park my car.

That first brand ended up driving 7 figures in revenue within 6 months, profitably, all through our influencer network.

We then launched a second brand, this time a different niche: phone cases/accessories.

Different products, same results: 7 figures in revenue within 6 months. All through affiliate traffic.

Well, how do we get to 8 figures in revenue? 

PAID MEDIA, that’s how.

We locked ourselves in during a long Memorial Day weekend and taught ourselves FB and Google Ads. Scaling paid media turned out to be way easier than scaling influencer deals. You could drive millions of impressions with the click of a button.

This was exciting.

We then launched our 3rd brand: this time in the shapewear/activewear niche.

8 figures in revenue the first year, with a strong profit margin.

We then began assembling a team to manage our fulfillment, influencer campaigns, media buying, creative and more. 

We launched an office in NJ (while I was still in the Air Force in Louisiana) and outgrew our office 3x in the first year. Too many people, too much inventory. We were scaling and our office space couldn’t keep up. Good problems!

You’d be shocked to hear that I was still working as a dentist during all this chaos.

Making more money on this side gig than on the career I worked the prior 25 years to achieve. But this didn’t even feel like work, it was fun.

My Air Force career was finishing up, as I only had a 3 year commitment.

Opossum Fourth Wall Break: Do the math here. Three 7-8 figure businesses in 3 years while working a full time job. Stop being afraid of moving fast and breaking things. Scaling quickly can be scary at first but it’s exhilarating.

Well, I didn’t stop there. 

Just because I had this flash-in-the pan success, doesn’t mean I was ready to walk away from the career I dedicated my whole life to.

It was my dream to become an Orthodontist. So I moved back to NYC and embarked on a 3-year residency program at a hospital in Brooklyn.

During this time, we launched more brands, built the team even bigger, secured our own 15,000 square foot warehouse, and now had 9 brands in our portfolio. All bootstrapped.

We were fulfilling thousands of orders per day.

THIS IS WHAT SCALING LOOKS LIKE!

During this time, we began building a reputation… the common sentiment was “man, these Snow brothers must be doing something right.”

Brands then started coming to us offering us a retainer and upside each month if we could apply the same marketing strategies and execute it on their brands.

We never intended to get into the client services industry, but hey we were up for a challenge and truly loved marketing and scaling. It got the juices flowing.

It felt like one big video game.

We took on our first client. Crushed it.

Then they referred a client. Then they referred us another client. & on and on.

Next thing you know, we had as many clients as we did brands of our own.

We were coming to an inflection point… we had to decide which side we wanted to be on: brand or agency - 2 totally different business models.

We chose the agency side.

We weren’t too passionate about the brands or products we were selling, we just really loved the marketing and growth hacking. We actually disliked the operations of running our own brands at scale: logistics, supply chain, fulfillment, call centers. 

Transitioning to the agency side seemed like the best move based on our passion.

We ended up selling our brands to focus on building out the agency back in September of 2019.

Since we were on the brand side and managed every marketing lever ourselves, with our own money and team, we had a unique perspective that most other agencies simply did not possess. We had a competitive advantage. It’s not easy being a full-service agency, but since we managed everything in house across numerous brands, it was already built naturally and we excelled at it.

Throughout all of this, I was still a full-time hospital employee in the middle of my journey becoming a dental specialist.

I had a nice 4 hour round trip commute to and from Brooklyn from NJ where I lived. I leveraged this time to manage teams, respond to emails, build SOPs, and more.

As I was wrapping up my 3-year residency program, I was ready to start my own Orthodontic practice. I was under contract to buy an office in the Bronx, NY.

COVID hit the next week during due diligence. Everything in NYC shut down.

Especially for elective medical treatment like fixing people’s smiles. Who knew when it would be able to reopen full-time and to what capacity.

I pulled out of the deal. 

I focused on the agency, as I literally couldn’t even practice if I wanted to thanks to COVID and restrictive NYC policies.

By the time things opened back up months later, the agency was double the size. Over 30 full-time employees.

Fast forward to now, I haven’t treated a patient since COVID.

I moved down to Miami to escape the cold and restrictive environment of the northeast and no better place for the opposite vibe than Miami.

The agency really took off.

We had done good work, we were good to people.

Sounds simple, but that’s the recipe for business success.

We are now 1 of only 15 Shopify Plus partners in the United States for Paid Social, among the other services we offer. We’re 1 of only a handful of official TikTok Shop partners (my most bullish efficient growth channel for 2024 & beyond). Last year we were named the Inc. 5000 #2 Fastest Growing Marketing/Advertising Company in the US.

We sold the agency a year ago. 

I’m still full-time with the business since we are still in the early innings of this ecommerce game. I had the opportunity to partner up with an industry veteran that has over $500M in agency exits on his own and build the next big agency with The Snow Agency as the foundation. I’m still running The Snow Agency, but also serve as Chief Innovation Officer at the parent company, Avenue Z.

As you can see, success is not linear. Journeys are unpredictable.

But, if you remain committed and passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll generate life-changing outcomes. You also need to be honest with yourself, be flexible, and don’t be afraid or slow to pivot when you have conviction about something.

People often ask me how I could leave a career as a dental specialist that took 11 years of higher education excellence to achieve. It wasn’t easy. But it was the right move; personally and financially.

While I shifted careers, it’s not like it all went to waste. Everything I learned and experienced in the Air Force and as a medical provider gave me a strong foundation that I now leverage in the business world. 

In the high-pressure environment of Orthodontics, I honed skills in rapid problem-solving and meticulous attention to detail. Managing dozens of patients daily, each with unique needs, mirrored the challenges of crafting tailored marketing strategies for varied brands.

It’s all problem-solving. 

My disciplined schedule in the Air Force instilled habits that aligned with entrepreneurial success. My early-morning wake-up routine became a catalyst for embracing opportunities in the burgeoning e-commerce sector, leading to several successful ventures and exits.

Here’s the cheat code: do work that doesn’t feel like work. Do something that gets you excited. Leverage the learnings of your life experiences. Surround yourself with smart people. The results will follow. 

If you got this far in this long-winded narrative, chances are you’re already doing the right things and I have faith in you.

Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter “In The Snow” where I share weekly insights on all things ecommerce, digital trends, and personal/professional growth.

Subscribe Now

I've always prioritized learning and staying ahead. It's become a competitive advantage. Surrounding yourself with optimal information inputs takes years. I've done the hard work so you don't have to. Main objective is to help anyone in DTC stay informed and ahead of the game in under 5 minutes per week.

Don’t hesitate to reach out anytime. Give me a follow on Twitter and LinkedIn, where I frequently share insights and updates.

Look forward to connecting with you all!

Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

I wanted to do a full writeup about all things TikTok Shop/Ads/Affiliate like I did with WordPress and Shopify. Then it hit me.

The platform is changing so much and so quickly that it would be quickly out of date. So instead, I’m going to do a high level write up and dive into specific reader requested sections.

One of which is a guest post from someone that’s recently had massive success with affiliates.

As of today, TikTok is the most interesting

• New platform for ecommerce

• Organic opportunity

• Affiliate/influencer opportunity

• Advertising channel

Why?

Because we’re currently in a gold rush and I don’t know how long it’s going to last. TikTok has been a gold rush for a few years in the creator space. If you can make short form video, you can bring eyeballs to anything you want on the platform.

I’m not talking about the creator space though. I’m talking about the ecommerce space. TikTok Shop.

I’m also not saying it’ll die by Q1 2024, but gold rushes never last. They end up in one of two categories.

Category 1

There’s a risk that TikTok Shop does die and it’s going to go to the history books like Myspace.

Category 2

On the opposite end of the spectrum, TikTok could turn into the next Amazon for commerce.

TikTok’s Goal

Social Commerce.

In short, social commerce is about using your platform and the social aspect of it to sell product. Everyone has their own definition. Don’t @ me for my definition.

Google was on their way to trying to dominate it with Google+. They failed.

Facebook had moderate success with local social commerce with Marketplace.

Instagram had less success with Instagram Shopping.

IMO, Amazon Creator Hub and Amazon Vine were failures.

I knew TikTok was eventually going to try social commerce and go after Amazon. This was confirmed in 3 ways.

1. Talking to a TikTok employee that goes to my gym

2. Talking to my TikTok ad rep

3. Running ads and building on the platform

Let me be very clear here. TikTok is going after Amazon. They may actually succeed in pulling a large share of sales away from Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, etc.

The Gold Rush

TikTok needs to do 3 things to succeed.

Read more

People like to feel smart so they focus on the easy things that they can feel confident in.

You should not do this. You should focus on the hard things because the hard things are what move the needle forward.

Attribution is hard. And so so important.

Before we start, it’s well worth it to review this post on Attribution Models from 2.5 years ago.

What is Attribution?

Attribution is the process of assigning sales or the credit of sales to certain marketing activities. Not just to the channels where customers come to your website.

It’s not an exact science. There’s no perfect way to do it. It’s hard. It’s a never ending endeavor.

Let’s give a very straightforward example before we move into the hard stuff.

Let’s say you go to a business and they’re getting a ton of organic traffic from Google that’s driving sales.

Most people will say “that’s great! We should pull resources and focus more on SEO to ramp this thing.”

They do just that and sales decrease substantially.

Why? They didn’t understand why people were coming in through the organic channel to begin with. In this hypothetical example, organic search was doing so well because it was all brand search. Their radio ads were driving people to Google. When they pulled resources to focus on SEO, they pulled from radio.

This is an easy example to understand why your attribution tools (Google Analytics, Shopify Analytics, etc.) and reality don’t line up. The user journey is much more complicated than last click attribution or any attribution model usually accounts for.

Let’s define some things.

Read more

1. Ecommerce Blog Posts

2. Contribution Margin

3. Shopify 101 Part 5

4. Shopify 101 Part 6

5. Shopify 101 Part 7 (Final)

First, thank you. I love seeing this project grow and help people.

Secondly, I feel like many of you are missing some context about this Substack and Twitter account. It is not designed like a normal newsletter. I’m not going to send out emails just to send out emails. It was designed to be read from the beginning similar to a course.

Every new subscriber should read that post to catch up on why this Substack exists. Don’t skip it. If you’ve been a subscriber, go read it before you do anything else.

WiFi Money

New Subscribers

In the last 100 days or so, the number of readers of this publication has almost doubled. While I’m extremely happy to have the opportunity to help so many people, there’s probably a lot of confusion…

Read more

3 years ago · 18 likes · 12 comments · BowTied Opossum

Question #1

Can we assume the amount of ad spend is going to linearly scale down based on where you target? E.g $300 USA to test a campaign vs $50-$100 small countrylike Romania?

The original question came from a conversation about setting up ads and testing different creative. I’ll have a post coming out about this soon…

If you’re testing creative, with experience, you can usually get a decent enough read on whether your creative/copy is good with $300 of spend. $300 at least allows you to put the ad into 1 of 3 buckets.

1. Isn’t and won’t perform well enough to be margin positive. Kill the ad.

2. Could perform well enough. Need more time/ad dollars to see.

3. We’re going to the moon baby.

So the real question is. If you’re in a much cheaper country than the US, is it still $300 US dollars?

Short answer is No.

The long answer is that the CPCs or CPMs should scale linearly down. Nobody in Cambodia is going to pay American CPCs when the revenue is 1/5 for the same product.

Generally speaking, advertising campaigns need to be ROI positive. If the cost of items in a country is 1/5 of items in the US, the advertising costs should be roughly 1/5 of the cost.

While there’s going to obviously be noise in the data and it won’t be exactly linear. It’s a good rule of thumb to go by.

So if I'm paying anywhere from $0.30 - $1 CPC for a good converting ad in the US, and Cambodia is 1/5 the cost of the US, the ad cost should be $0.06-$0.20 CPC for the same item.

If my CPA (cost per acquisition) is landing in the range of $15-$20 for a good ad, in Cambodia that should equate to $3-$4.

Again. Not exact, but it should be a good starting guide for when you start running ads and deciding if your CPC and CPA is normal. The best way to do this is to keep iterating after knowing your contribution margin and what makes you ROI positive.

If you don’t get why this will scale down, go review the supply and demand curve in Economics 101 for commodities. Ad algorithms will maximize profit for the platform. Which means that there will be no demand for the ads at the US CPC price in a low cost country. The platform will be forced to lower CPC costs until demand for the ads come in. Then it will shift CPC cost to maximize profit to the platform.

Ultimately, scaling down roughly linearly based off of competition and the cost of items in the country.

Question #2

I spent the past year and a half building this site. I feel I'd do better in sales via Twitter and Insta. But, my following count is weak.

Just wanted your opinion if you think the site/idea is shit or not. I've got like 15 new designs I'm about to launch. And I'm updating the backdrop.

There is a level of mental masturbation here that I rarely get a glimpse into anymore.

First, you should absolutely not be spending 1.5 years building a site and getting to this point. You should have your site done in less than a month if you’re a complete beginner.

Second, 15 designs when you haven’t even proven out the concept, market, or marketing channels? There’s literally an audience that will buy every product. You just have to

1. Find them

2. Figure out how to market to them

3. Figure out how big the market is

Every day that you spend time on design and wait to market, you’re losing market share.

Third, “I’d do better in sales via Twitter and Insta but my follower count is weak”

That’s because you’re not good at organic marketing. Social media is a game of organic marketing.

1. Get good at some sort of marketing. Paid social, organic social, SEM, recruiting influencers, etc. Your best bet is to go to Instagram or TikTok as they’re the most viral.

2. Stop everything you’re doing. Design, tweaking logos, backdrop, etc. GET TO MARKETING. That should be the number 1 goal. Figure out how to market and test the audience/market.

Question #3

Is it worth it to sell a homemade product? Going to be doing carbon fiber work for school, so I think I could at least give it a shot to sell this stuff on the interwebs.

This is actually a good way to get started. It only scales so far but it’s the same idea as a service business. Get cash flow up to invest in other things and learn how to build and market. Any one of you reading this could probably turn homemade products into an on demand service business afterwards doing custom work.

I know one girl that was making $20k a year, not even really trying, by selling knitted dog hats on Etsy. She had a ton of competition and didn’t even do marketing after the first few months. There’s that much demand in the world for pretty much anything.

After you know the demand is there, you can also turn homemade products into an on demand service business. Even in a major city where there should be a ton of competition, you’d be shocked at how much I had to pay for my custom wine rack…

Question #4

I want to launch a brand but big success in the beginning is extremely unlikely. Is it better to follow that model or just find products that sell and sell on Amazon? Is it worth the extra effort to white label my own singular product and sell it through my own website?

I don't advocate drop shipping or anything like that. I advocate reselling on Amazon or starting a service business to get your feet wet and build an initial capital base.

Most people don't have the

1. Capital

2. Skill

3. Determination

4. Or Built in Audience

To pull off building a brand in the beginning.

If you create your own brand, and you should long term, you need an abundance of one or more of the above 4.

The problem with most people is that they don't know how to market. You HAVE TO get good at some marketing channel or have a lot of capital to hire good people.

The other problem that most people have is they're terrified to drop $20k on an idea even if they have it. Which I totally get.

It took me years and years working my way up Corporate America before I was comfortable doing that and risking losing it all. You can avoid a lot of the risk by being good at marketing (point above).

Question #5

Recently built a new site for the company I work for. Our old site was built 8 years ago on Joomlah. The new site is built on WordPress. We used to rank at the top of Google on a handful of search terms. All organic from being on the web for those 8 years... plus being in specific niches. After the switch, we don’t rank on any. Is this normal ? I’ve read on many websites that once you switch site frameworks it does in fact affect SEO and google has to reindex. I’m shocked there’s no historical data somehow tied to our main URL.

This is what you get when you hire website build agencies. Very few actually know anything about SEO.

There are a few things that are necessary for rankings to not take a complete nosedive.

1. Your main domain has to be the same. https://domain.com can’t just switch to https://www.domain.com without having redirects that tie everything together.

2. The URL of the old pages have to be the exact same as the new. Even the trailing slash if there was one needs to be there. If not, there needs to be permanent (301) redirects in place from the old URL to the new URL. You’ll lose rankings if you do this but not nearly as bad as not redirecting the URLs.

3. Any pages that were on the old site need to be on the new site. If you take away a page for whatever reason, there needs to be redirects in place to the closest page.

4. Meta descriptions & Headers should be the same on each page. You can change these but there’s no telling how little (or much) Google will change the ranking of a page if you do.

Here’s some things you need to remember if you’re rebuilding a site.

1. Google ranks an individual URL. The URL is what gets the ranking. You change that URL and it’s a completely different page. Meaning it starts back at 0. This can be negated some with a URL redirect from old page to new page.

2. Historical data matters. A LOT. Google has historical data on each and every page. When that page disappears, so does the historical data that Google is using to rank you. Again. Redirects.

3. Link juice matters. A LOT. If you don’t have redirects for every link coming to your site, and internal links, you’ve now lost all of your link juice. Cool. Your 404 page will have a lot of link juice but that’s not helping the rest of your site. An estimate is 80% of that link juice will flow to the new page with a 301 redirect.

Even the trailing slash needs to be the same in the URL or Google will view it as a different page

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

Free articles on WiFi Money are supported by:

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If you want to get smarter about all things digital, upgrade today from free to paid for only $10 a month. The paid posts are where I dive even further into the weeds to help you truly understand and capitalize on the digital landscape.

WiFi Money is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

I thought it was a stupid request but I went along and made a segment in Google Analytics to segment out traffic that had landed on the posts.

“These numbers don’t look good. Maybe I can explain why this is a dumb metric to put in a presentation”

Why’s it a dumb metric? Especially using last non-direct click attribution…

Blog posts aren’t supposed to drive direct revenue.

They absolutely do drive revenue but usually not in a way that’s easy to measure at scale.

What Are Blog Posts Actually For?

While a small amount of people will land on your blog post and buy in that session, it’s a very small amount. The point of blog posts is to:

1. Introduce your brand to customers much higher in the funnel

2. Educate your customer/future customers to increase conversion, basket and retain them

3. To provide relevancy to your product and listing pages so that those pages can rank and drive revenue

Read more

If you’re not a paid subscriber to BowTiedBull, you should be. On my way back from the gym tonight, I was reminded that my audience on Twitter isn’t the same audience here. Many of you might not have heard of Bull at all.

For those of you that haven’t, it’s the #1 Substack I read. If you care about the economy, WiFi Money, Real Estate, or Crypto, it’s the best synopsis of current events and dare I say “seeing into the future”, that you’re going to find on the internet.

I wrote a guest post for Bull earlier today and have included it below for those too stubborn to sign up to another Substack or click on a link to read it.

If you’re not too stubborn, go sign up to the Substack now since I’ll have a guest post going out to his paid list within the next week. It’s titled Uncommon Marketing/Sales Strategies and it’s a must read if you’re building an ecom business.

It will not be sent out on this Substack.

BowTied Bull

The #1 Paid Crypto Substack. No non-sense writing style covering: 1) Crypto, 2) Tech Stocks, 3) WiFi money and 4) Real Estate. Written by anon Ex-Wall St and Tech Individuals.

Now the Giveaway…

As a thank you, to you for being a reader, and a thank you to Bull…

If you’re a *paid subscriber* to my Substack, be one of the first 5 people to reply to this email (or comment on it) and I’ll comp you a subscription.

If you’re a yearly subscriber of mine, I’ll comp you a year.

If you’re a monthly subscriber of mine, I’ll comp you a month.

If you’re already a subscriber to BowTiedBull and want a friend to have the subscription, include your friend’s email in the reply and I’ll comp them.

Maybe I’ll comp 10 people. 5 just doesn’t seem like a round number…

Today we’re going to cover one of the most important topics to scaling your ecom business. Outside of attribution of course…

Contribution margin is often misunderstood & foreign to people that are used to managing a business based off of a normal P&L.

What is contribution margin?

Contribution margin, or unit margin, or flow through profit, is the profit on a sale after the variable costs.

Think of your expenses in two parts.

Variable Costs - Manufacturing product, shipping, Shopify transactional fees, boxes, pick & pack fees, Amazon referral fee, apps that charge a % of revenue or a fixed cost per transaction, etc.

Variable costs stay a fixed percent of the percent of revenue, no matter how much you sell. Your 2.9% or 2.6% or 2.4% credit card fee on Shopify is the exact same on every *incremental unit*. So if it’s the same on every incremental unit, it’s going to be the same percent of total revenue no matter how much you sell.

Different channels will obviously have different variable costs. This is very channel specific. You won’t be paying an Amazon referral fee on DTC orders and you won’t be paying Shopify transactional fees on Amazon orders.

Fixed Costs - Salary, services, fixed software costs like Shopify/email/SEMRush/etc., debt, etc.

Fixed costs change as a percent of revenue when you sell less or more. If you’re selling 1 unit a day, your Shopify subscription may be 5% of monthly revenue. When you’re selling 100 units, it will be 0.05%.

Two things to note here. First, fixed costs are rarely fixed. If you go from selling 5 units per day to 5k units per day, you’re obviously going to have to hire more staff, upgrade your Shopify plan, bring on more software, etc. Second, variable costs actually do come down as you scale. You get discounts on larger orders, economies of scale, etc.

The point of this is to look at the next incremental unit. NOT the next incremental 5k units you sell.

How are you going to manage your business around contribution margin?

Marketing.

You need to figure out what your contribution margin is so that you can figure out how much you can spend to acquire a customer profitably. One customer profitably. Not whether your entire business is profitable.

All you need to do is to make at least $0.01 off of each customer after marketing and as you grow, your fixed costs will be covered. After your fixed costs are covered, that’s where the excess money falls to the profit line.

Variable Costs + Fixed Costs + Advertising + Profit = Revenue

On a unit basis this becomes:

Revenue - Variable Costs = Contribution Margin

Which means that:

Fixed Costs + Advertising + Profit = Contribution Margin

Since we’re going to make the assumption that we’re only going to buy media on the unit level that’s profitable, the fixed costs will eventually be covered as we scale. Taken towards infinity, this then leads us to the assumption that everything other than variable costs can be spent on advertising.

Let’s take an example looking at it through two lenses. The numbers aren’t accurate because I had to make them round for simplicity sake. (You’re never paying $1 for shipping)

The below assumes you’re selling a widget for $25 and you sell 100 widgets this month. This also assumes your sales are coming organically and you’re not advertising.

The variable costs are in yellow where the fixed costs, advertising, and profit are in white.

Most people that see this would say “I have can't advertise because I need to make payroll! I only have $100 in profit!”

Wrong and misguided.

If your advertising is profitable on a contribution margin level, whatever is left over after the advertising will flow to the profit line.

Here it is on a unit level.

Since fixed costs don’t increase when you sell 1 more unit, they don’t matter as you scale. Once you get to a certain sales level, fixed costs are covered and any revenue minus the variable costs falls to the advertising and profit lines.

This means that if you spend anything less than $12.50 on advertising to acquire your next customer, the difference will be pure profit.

So if in this example, the owner of this business took the $1000 that was sitting in his bank to pay his VA at the end of the month and placed it into advertising… At a $10 Customer Acquisition Cost - CAC (remember, it has to be less than $12.50 to be profitable), his sales would double and it would look something like this.

Notice how the advertising pays for itself and the $2.50 ($12.50-$10) falls to the profit line.

$2.50 X 100 incremental units + $100 in original profit = $350 in profit.

So lets wrap up why this is so important.

Contribution margin tells you how much you can spend on acquiring a customer while still growing profitably. From a DTC perspective, you can also do this exercise using lifetime value if you want to push the envelope of growth if you have plenty of runway with cash to wait 3-12 months to be profitable.

Media Spend On and Off Amazon

If you want to translate this into what *incremental ROAS* you need, it’s a simple formula. Remember. Incremental ROAS and attachment ROAS are two completely different things.

Unit Revenue / Contribution Margin = Incremental ROAS needed to be profitable on a unit level. If you’re profitable on a unit level, you continue to scale until you’re not. Keep spending ad dollars until the ROAS comes down.

In the above example, contribution margin was $12.50 on a revenue of $25. A ROAS above 2 gives you a license to print money (thanks for the phrase BowTiedBrain).

If your contribution margin was $6.25 on a $25 AOV, it would take you a >4 ROAS to be profitable.

This is a cautionary tale as to why you need to control variable costs…

Affiliate Partnerships

With a variable cost at $12.50 and a contribution margin of $12.50, this gives you the leeway to to have your affiliate percentage close to 50% to acquire new customers. I highly advise you not to do this for a bunch of reasons, but you could…

This tactic is used with SaaS providers a lot where they use an extremely high affiliate commission on the first purchase to entice affiliates. They know that their customer base is going to be very sticky (repeat buyers increase LTV) so they can have a high affiliate commission and make up the profit difference on the back end of the customer lifecycle.

Wholesale

Variable costs are the “at cost” level of your product. What your company actually spends to get a product out the door. Contribution margin is the money you have to play with after the fact.

Continuing on with the above example, how should you price your products for a wholesale deal?

Your variable costs are going to be different with your wholesale channel than they were in the above DTC model, but let’s assume they’re the same.

If you strike a deal with Target and they want a first run of 10k units, how much profit will you make?

Retailers generally want a profit margin of 33%+. Using that as a gage, they’re going to buy your product for $16.75. Your variable costs are $12.50/unit, so you make $4.25/unit X 10k units or $42,500.

Normally it’s a slam dunk to get into retail from a brand exposure POV. Your contribution margin is $4.25/unit and you have no advertising costs to offset it so it flows straight to the profit line. Assuming Target doesn’t cannibalize your DTC sales…

Now what if the supply chain is locked up because of whatever reason and you can’t get product? You have the chance of running out of product given that there’s 100 cargo ships sitting off the coast of California that can’t dock.

You’re now sacrificing your normal $12.50 contribution margin for the wholesale $4.25 contribution margin. $8.25/unit X 10k units. Can your company sacrifice the $82,500 in contribution margin at your chance to get into Target?

This is a real example of what happened to a lot of DTC companies in the past few years.

Hook & Build

The Hook & Build is a popular marketing strategy where you sell something cheaply to draw a customer in and try to get them to build their basket. A similar strategy is used in a lot of different scenarios.

You’ve probably heard of the “give away a free PDF in exchange for the customers’ email” strategy. It works on a cost basis because the variable costs for an incremental PDF is $0.

McDonalds uses this strategy with their $1 fountain drink. They price the item close to variable costs with contribution margin approaching $0 knowing that most all people will buy more than a coke.

The entire razor industry is built on the same idea. Sell the handle (acquire the customer) at unit variable cost and the profit comes later.

It all goes back to the same concept. Figure out your variable costs so that you know how much contribution margin you have to play with for discounts, commissions, advertising, wholesale, etc. All in the name of growth. With growth comes profitability.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for me today. Don’t forget. Go sign up for BowTiedBull’s Substack now. Even if it’s just for the free articles.

BowTied Bull

The #1 Paid Crypto Substack. No non-sense writing style covering: 1) Crypto, 2) Tech Stocks, 3) WiFi money and 4) Real Estate. Written by anon Ex-Wall St and Tech Individuals.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

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Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

If you want to dive further into each category in this series, Shopify has great resources to help you learn everything. Much better than most platforms.

Subscriptions

If you have a product that can be a subscription, you should 100% focus on this. Focus on getting people into a habit using your product however you can.

This is the ultimate customer retention strategy.

If you can figure out how to do this correctly through your email flows and incentives, you’ll drastically increase your lifetime value. This isn’t just about increasing the lifetime value of your customer. It’s a strategy that can lead to a lot of growth.

1. The more you can retain your customers, the greater the lifetime value.

2. The greater your lifetime value of your customer, the more you can spend on new customer acquisition.

3. The more you can spend on new customer acquisition, the bigger you’ll grow.

4. The bigger you grow, the more profit you’ll have.

5. Go back to #3

This is the cycle that customer retention enables and subscriptions enables a higher customer retention rate.

Starting out, you’re likely going to want to use Appstle as your subscription app just based on cost and functionality.

Loyalty

I may get some hate for this opinion but I don’t care. Do not worry about building a loyalty program until you’re much bigger.

Yes. It’ll help you retain customers which will help you grow much faster. BUT it’s not worth it until you’re bigger. If you’re doing less than $100k a month, you have bigger fish to fry like getting eyeballs on your product and building your infrastructure for growth.

Think about how many stores you shop at per year. Now think about how many loyalty programs you’re *actively* involved in. Now remove travel like hotels & airlines. I’m guessing it’s less than 5% of the stores you purchase in.

I’m not saying it’s not worth it for a business. I’m saying it’s not worth it for a business that’s your size, yet. If you execute a loyalty program decently, it’s going to increase your revenue by a few percentage points. Huge when you’re selling $100M a year. Miniscule when you’re selling $10k a month.

When you do ultimately implement a loyalty program, I have one piece of advice for you. Stay away from loyalty apps that charge based off of number of orders or transaction fees. Paying 1%-2% of your revenue to have a loyalty program is absolutely asinine. Stick with a cheaper solution that charges a flat monthly fee like Joy or Appstle.

Taxes

Anybody that has been in ecommerce from 2018 to now hates talking about this.

Ecommerce used to be fun. You could sell all over the country and never had to worry about sales tax unless you had a physical location in the state…until South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc.

Long story short, you have to pay state taxes everywhere you sell *once you hit nexus*. Stealing from Stripe below.

So what do you have to do to hit tax nexus in a state and when do you have to file?

It depends on the state… All 50 states have different nexus limits, filing requirements, filing timelines, etc.

50 state registrations, 50 filing timelines (monthly, quarterly, or yearly), 50 rules to monitor, etc.

It’s a nightmare.

Shopify helps a little bit but you’re going to need a 3rd party service once you get big enough that you start hitting nexus in multiple states. Lets go through a few things here.

Economic Nexus

First if you have a physical location in the state, you have nexus and have to pay sales tax in that state. This includes your DC, a physical store, and where you’re HQ’d. Next is where it gets complicated.

Every state has their own rules for when you hit nexus. It’s generally something like this.

• $100,000 in sales in a year. Easy enough. You could get to a few million in revenue before you have to worry about this problem.

• OR 200 transaction in a year.

That OR is a problem. Some states use AND. Some states don’t have a transaction limit, only a sales limit. They’re all different. Which creates 50 different issues.

You’re guaranteed to start hitting nexus in some states by the time you get to $50k a month though.

Registration & Timelines

So when exactly do you need to register and file with each state? NO ONE KNOWS! It’s a mystery because 50 different bureaucracies love to keep you guessing.

I’m kind of joking. Some states are clear in their requirements and some states aren’t. But you know…there’s 50 of them so not easy to keep up.

Once you actually hit nexus, you have to go register with the state individually. One by one. With 50 different logins. With 50 different times you have to file. Some monthly, some quarterly, etc.

How Shopify Helps

Barely.

To be fair, it’s not really their job. What they actually do is keep track of your sales and the nexus rules and tell you when you’re about to hit nexus.

If you go to Settings → Taxes and Duties, you can see everything laid out. It’s actually pretty nifty and if they didn’t do this, most ecom owners would be uncompliant on accident.

Once Shopify tells you you’re close to hitting Nexus, that’s when you better figure out a solution because you’re going to have to start collecting and paying sales tax soon.

Getting a 3rd Party Service

“Opossum. What’s the best 3rd party service to use?”

Don’t know. They all have their downsides. Could be cost, could be the work that you have to do, could be the ambiguity of it all. I’ll give you two pieces of advice.

1. Go talk to an accountant that has some experience here.

2. Here’s your options and I’m not advising one way or another because I’m not advising you on tax issues.

   1. TaxJar

   2. Avalara

   3. Accountant. I’m repeating it for a reason. Go at least talk with one.

   4. Numeral

Miscellaneous

There’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t fit nicely into the rest of the guide, along with other questions that I received that I think are important to touch on. I’ll briefly go through them here to wrap up this series.

Sitemaps

Your sitemaps are going to be located at this location.

https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Which will then lead to your secondary sitemaps.

https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_products_1.xml?from=some-unique-number&to=some-other- unique-number

https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_pages_1.xml

https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_collections_1.xml

https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_blogs_1.xml

You could then have more sitemaps because you probably have multiple blog URLs.

GTIN

If you manufactured your own product, register for a GTIN immediately.

A Global Trade Item Number is the Social Security number of your product. A unique identifier that is encoded in the barcode for scanning and other purposes.

Want to get into retail and don’t have one? Not happening.

Want to have any shot at ranking on Google shopping? Not happening.

Want to send your product to Amazon for FBA? Well. You can do this but they’re going to charge you to place labels on each and every one of your products since you don’t have a barcode on your product.

Go to that link above and pay the roughly $100 a product to register your product.

Any way to stop all the people who find my contact form and spam me offering their SEO services?

Nope. You still want your customers to be able to contact you right? If you have access to the backend service of a website, you can stop this. Unfortunately and fortunately, Shopify doesn’t give you access to this. This is generally one of the benefits of the platform to not have to worry about the backend processes.

On Shopify, there’s only a few things you can do if you have this problem.

1. Remove your contact form and replace it with a sentence saying “contact us at customer-support “at” yourdomain.com”. This will stop some of the automated bots that are leaving you messages. Don’t recommend this as a lot of your customers are too stupid to actually put the email together and email you appropriately. They’ll then go on and leave you bad reviews because you never answered them when they emailed the wrong address.

2. Have your VA filter all of your emails and delete them if they’re getting that bad.

3. Create a filter in your mailbox filtering out common words like “SEO”, “Marketing Service”, “Dear Sir”, etc. and check on this filter once every few days.

4. Deal with it.

Materials Inventory

If you’re one of the select people that make your own items, here’s an app that will save you a lot of time. You line up your raw material in your inventory with how much of it is needed to make a finished item.

As you push through sales, it’ll help you not run out of raw material to make your product.

Setting Up Canonical Tags for Products in Multiple Collections

One reader said this was a huge issue. It’s not. Shopify does this for you. It would be insane if somehow Shopify didn’t think to do this.

Use Link Direct Trace or a ton of different extensions to see that the canonical tag is already placed.

App for processing actual exchanges in a touch free way as opposed to manual workarounds in Shopify?

First, you shouldn’t automate this process until you’re getting a lot of returns. Not because you shouldn’t save yourself time, but because you need the experience dealing with customer issues to dial in your processes and product.

That being said, if you’re selling clothing or similar products, you’re going to have a lot of returns. If you’re selling supplements, comparatively, you’ll have a lot less.

Search “exchange” on Shopify apps and pick the best app that fits your budget, aesthetic style, and needs out of the top ten results.

Can I use Shopify for my blog and add affiliates to the site?

You can. I don’t know why you would though. You’re generally going to make more money trying to sell your own product vs someone else’s.

In the off chance that that’s not the case or you can’t make the product, sure. Another option is to go the Shopify Collective route and sell other stores’ products on your site.

What are the bare minimum requirements financially to get started?

There's no blanket answer here. Are you selling cars or $0.50 erasers? Do you want to grow slow or fast? Organic or paid ads? How good are you at social media?

I’ve seen some do it and be successful with $10k and I’ve seen people that need $100k to get it right and get off the ground.

Note that $10k is very low and they only succeeded because they already had an audience. They would have grown much faster if they would have started with $50k or more.

How To Find Suppliers?

• Thomasnet.com

• Alibaba.com

• Google.com

• ImportYeti.com

• Data-axle.com

• Junglescout.com

• Go to Walmart or order your competitors’ products online and see if you can track it down from their packaging.

Then start dialing and emailing. Over and over and over again.

Recommended Stack to Start?

Really going to be dependent on your needs but there’s not a lot that you need to start. Recommended stack would be:

• Good (paid) theme. You can test most paid themes for free to see if it has the functionality that you need.

• 1 bank account. You don’t need to add PayPal, Amazon Pay, etc. Just start with a simple checkout.

• Klaviyo or an email sender. You can skip this in the very beginning. Once you start getting traction, this is going to be a must.

• Appstle or another subscription app if your product can be a subscription.

• Shop Channel app. I suspect that the Shop Channel is going to be more and more important over time.

• Shopify Email app. Used for your transactional emails.

• Judge.Me product reviews app or another good product review app.

• Google & YouTube app. Easy GA4 implementation and easy way to replicate your products to Google Merchant Center and Google Ads.

• Minimal pages to start.

  • Privacy Policy, Refund Policy, Shipping Policy, Terms of Service

  • About

  • Contact

• Some graphic design skills or a cheap overseas graphic designer.

• Printer, boxes, bubble wrap or paper, packaging slip sleeves.

• Capital and/or marketing chops for advertising.

Wrapping Up

This wraps up the Shopify series. While it was fun, I hope I never have to write a 7 part series ever again.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

If you want to dive further into each category in this…

Read more

If you want to dive further into each category in this series,

Read more

First, thank you. I love seeing this project grow and help people.

Secondly, I feel like many of you are missing some context about this Substack and Twitter account. It is not designed like a normal newsletter. I’m not going to send out emails just to send out emails. It was designed to be read from the beginning similar to a course.

Every new subscriber should read that post to catch up on why this Substack exists. Don’t skip it. If you’ve been a subscriber, go read it before you do anything else.

WiFi Money

New Subscribers

In the last 100 days or so, the number of readers of this publication has almost doubled. While I’m extremely happy to have the opportunity to help so many people, there’s probably a lot of confusion…

Read more

3 years ago · 18 likes · 12 comments · BowTied Opossum

Question #1

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned with regards to improving customer retention?

There’s 1000 customer retention strategies and a lot of them are good and worthwhile endeavors that you should do. The #1 lesson that I’ve learned though. Is that

You Have To Retain Your Customers. Period.

Non negotiable. Not up for debate.

If you want to really grow, you can’t do that through churning and burning customers. The customer acquisition costs and reputational damage are just too high. Some businesses will top out at $10M a year in a $20B market because none of their customers stick with them. Then when new customers come into the businesses funnel, many realize that they want no part when they find out the business’s reputation…raising their customer acquisition cost even higher…

Which leads me to my next point.

Get brand advocates.

Some people call this Net Promoter Score or some other metric. I hate that metric because it’s derived from asking people how likely they are to recommend. People lie…

Since “brand advocate” is such a vague/nebulous term, I’m going to define it like this.

A customer that comes back to buy from you multiple times and tells people in their circle to buy your product.

Lets start with a hypothetical example.

You acquire 1000 new customers a month. Each month you retain 30% of the total customer base from the previous month. Each month, each current customer tells 1.1 people about your product and they buy also.

You’ll top out at about 2500 orders a month 6 months in. The only way to increase your revenue in this situation is to constantly throw more and more money at ads.

Same example as above with acquiring 1000 new customers a month. This time you have a 40% retention rate and each customer tells 1.2 people per month.

10% higher retention rate and .1 extra people per person per month doesn’t seem like a lot but it’s huge. You surpass the previous example in month 3 and at 20 months, you’re over 3 times the size.

Same ad spend the whole time.

Sooo…about those brand advocates…how do you get them?

It’s really going to be specific to your niche, product, and brand but here’s a few tips.

1. Create a great product. Or at least a product that most of your customers think is really great.

2. Position the product and brand to make people think they’re in the “in group”. They’re buying something special or they know the secret that the rest of the world doesn’t. If your product is good enough, this by default is true.

3. Customer service is way more important than you realize. You’re not just losing one purchase. You’re losing their future purchases and the future purchases of everyone that they tell or don’t tell. And on and on and on in the referral cycle.

4. The little things. There’s a lot and I won’t go through every scenario here. Some could really matter to your customer base and some won’t and will feel like wasted money. Could be packaging for beauty brands or could be something like Chewy did below.

If you don’t know much about Chewy, it’s worth it to at least read the first few paragraphs on Wikipedia.

Question #2

I bought an affiliate marketing site that’s doing well but looking for a good website developer that could take it to the next level. Do you know anyone?

No. No I don’t.

I mean I do but there’s a few things wrong here. First, never buy a business if you’ve never operated one unless you’re at a scale that you can hire operators. (Millions in revenue)

Second, if you’re not in the above group, you don’t need a developer. No affiliate site making below a few hundred thousand dollars a year needs a developer unless you’re running ad funnels. It won’t help anything of meaningful magnitude.

You need to learn how to do almost everything yourself in the beginning or you’re destined for failure.

Go all in on a business or don’t go in at all. No half assing it.

(This does not mean quit your job. It means mentally)

Question #3

If someone wants to make $3k -10k per month. Ready to put all his time, effort and money to learn. What would you recommend?

Me: A service business on an actual skill that you have.

Do you think it can be done with content writing, copywriting, etc. without selling courses?

Social media users have been seriously brainwashed by get rich quick influencers on social media. Lets make the ridiculous assumption that the only service businesses in the world are digital agencies since that seems to be everyone’s go to.

There are a few agencies doing $10B in digital, advertising, and PR services per year globally. Omnicom Group, Dentsu, Publicis Groupe, etc. are all doing $10B+ per year while not selling courses. Markets are absolutely huge in the real world when you log off of Twitter. Lets go through a few market sizes in the US alone. (Numbers will vary a lot on which source you use and how you define these)

Accounting services -$150B

Digital agencies -$55B

Landscaping -$170B

Flooring installation -$30B

Pet grooming -$5B

Copywriting -$10B

Yeah there's millions of businesses and tens if not hundreds of thousands of niches to go into. The business world is much bigger than Twitter. You don’t have to sell courses. You don’t have to do what all these get rich quick schemes are telling you.

If you’re living in a town with more than 50k people in it, there’s almost no niche or service that you can’t easily get to $10k a month if you’d just look at the real world.

Question #4

I have been running a side business of [redacted] for ~18 months. I am running up against scalability issues, still feels like I am trading time for money, which is better than nothing but it does not feel like it's got room to run. Should I try to pivot out into trying to run Ads for companies and take a % of ad spend or double down on the non-dev side to marketing with my digital analytics background?

I took out some parts to hide what this person is doing but let’s just say he is working with a multitude of companies on a small scale. It’s a great place to be in to scale.

Because of all of these small jobs, he now has access to 100+ companies that trust him. At this point, he needs to start adding on services/partnerships/referrals. Use his low cost, time for money service as a lead gen.

Here’s what a lot of agencies do to drastically increase revenue in a situation like this.

• Add on a complimentary service that’s less time for money. This could be ads, SEO, rev share partnerships, etc.

• Build a one time complimentary product that can sold (customized) for each client. This could be Google Data Studio/Tableau dashboarding or the like.

• Act as an affiliate to pass clients off to other businesses. Don’t want to learn SEO? Fine. Strike a deal with an SEO agency where each client that you pass, you get 20% of revenue share for the first 12-18 months. Tons of opportunities here with other service businesses.

• Act as an affiliate or partner for SaaS companies. Can be very lucrative. Got a client that needs SEMRush? Well you have a coupon code that will save them X% on the first month. Client larger than that and thinking of going to Shopify? Be the one to make the introduction and receive 20% of their plus fees recurring.

The beauty here is once this person builds out his extended offerings, he can then contact his past clients (and they’ll take the call) to see if they need any more help in any domain.

Question #5

What does "incremental ROAS" actually mean?

This is the least well understood concept in marketing while also being one of the most important. You will set money ablaze as you scale if you don’t fully understand it.

ROAS - Return on ad spend. The sales you get from the ad spend. Also called attachment ROAS. ROAS = Revenue/Ad Spend

Attachment ROAS - In measuring your return, ad platforms like Meta and Google have to make some assumptions. If someone saw an ad and bought within the attribution window (1, 7, 30 days), the sale is assigned or attached to that ad. Doesn't matter whether the ad caused the user to buy or not. The only thing that matters is whether the ad platform can track the click or view of the ad and attach it to the sale. Every ad platform takes "credit" for as many sales as possible. Why? If they can make their ROAS look better than it is, and you don’t understand this concept, you'll spend more money with them.

Incremental ROAS - This is the actual sales *caused by* the ad. Just because an ad appeared on someone's screen, that doesn't mean that that's what caused them to buy. You should only care about incremental ROAS and not regular ROAS. You should only care what drives revenue, not that it's attached.

Example Let's say that your customer base comes back every 30 days to buy your product religiously. If you accidentally target one of your recurring customers in your ad set, that ad set is going to take credit for that sale during their next buying cycle. Meta or Google tells you that they caused the sale and put the sale into the Revenue line in ROAS. This makes the revenue line and ROAS in general larger.

Making you think that you're getting a good return on your ad spend. The truth of the matter is that that customer would have bought anyways. Meaning it's not incremental and you're not allocating your ad dollars appropriately because you're not measuring what your actual (incremental) return is.

IE setting money on fire.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

Free articles on WiFi Money are supported by:

►SiteGround - SiteGround is one of the easiest hosting providers to get setup on quickly. For a full guide in getting setup with your first website in less than an hour, read how to start your own website.

►Shopify - The #1 and only ecommerce website builder that you should be using. If you’re selling a physical product online, look no further. They handle 90% of the hard stuff. Start building on Saturday morning and be selling by the afternoon.

►Surfer SEO - Save hours by using Surfer SEO to prepare content optimized to your domain, niche, and audience. Use the #1 AI writing tool on the market that the best affiliate marketers are using.

►SEMRush - The one tool I cannot live without. This tool has almost everything you need. Keyword research, spy on your competitors, local SEO, site audits, social media management, paid advertising tracking, PR monitoring and much much more.

If you want to get smarter about all things digital, upgrade today from free to paid for only $10 a month. The paid posts are where I dive even further into the weeds to help you truly understand and capitalize on the digital landscape.

WiFi Money is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

If you want to dive further into each category in this series, Shopify…

Read more

If you want to dive further into each category in this series, Shopify has g…

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1. I DON’T HAVE AN IDEA!

2. Getting To Middle/Upper Middle Class

3. The Underbelly of eCommerce: Product Creation, Supply Chain, and Logistics

4. Shopify 101 Part 1

5. Shopify 101 Part 2

First, thank you. I love seeing this project grow and help people.

Secondly, I feel like many of you are missing some context about this Substack and Twitter account. It is not designed like a normal newsletter. I’m not going to send out emails just to send out emails. It was designed to be read from the beginning similar to a course.

Every new subscriber should read that post to catch up on why this Substack exists. Don’t skip it. If you’ve been a subscriber, go read it before you do anything else.

WiFi Money

New Subscribers

In the last 100 days or so, the number of readers of this publication has almost doubled. While I’m extremely happy to have the opportunity to help so many people, there’s probably a lot of confusion…

Read more

3 years ago · 18 likes · 12 comments · BowTied Opossum

Question #1

Should I spend $1000 on this perfect domain?

Your money is likely better spent on anything else but the perfect domain.

Why?

Well. If you’re asking this question, there’s a damn good chance that you quit or realize later that you have to pivot or that your idea wasn’t good enough to grow.

$1000 down the drain that could have been used on something that would actually make your business successful. You’re literally lowering your chance of success by doing it.

If you have the extra money, then the "is it worth it" question is really about how much you want it. If you know that the business is going to be successful (after some time and/or experience), then the question is a personal and branding choice.

If you're buying for an aged domain or backlinks, then that's a whole different thing.

"If you have to ask the price, then you can’t afford it.”

If you’re asking whether you should do it, you don’t have the experience to pull it off.

Question #2

How should I price building a SaaS site that’s integrated with the SaaS and not just normal pages?

How much should I pay for a car?

It’s too vague of a question and if you have to ask a question like this for a complicated project, you shouldn’t be taking the job.

1. Integrating a website into a SaaS is a lot more complicated than just standing up a normal site. You may be in way over your head and not even know it.

2. If there developers for the SaaS can’t figure this out, I would run as fast and as far as possible away from that project.

Question #3

Do you have any recommendations on where to find affiliate offers?

There’s a bunch of ways you can go about this.

1. Go sign up for all of the affiliate platforms and search on there. The list is in this series here. (It’s the first series I wrote. You should be reading from the beginning)

2. If you know the space well and find an offer you like, go to the bottom of their footer. They should have a page there if they run affiliate. IE search for products in your niche

3. Use your competitors to tell you. Find your competitors in the space and see where they’re linking off to. There’s a better way to do this rather than just clicking on their site page by page… Use Screaming Frog or SEMRush to crawl their site and look for outbound links. Do this to a few competitors and you have a pretty good list to start with.

Question #4

I dove nose deep into Amazon arbitrage and have been doing pretty good and seeing slow and steady growth. I am also looking to build a service/info business. [insert follow up question about growing a service business]

Do not do this. If you have been seeing modest success in a WiFi business, don’t go the service route.

The point of a service business is to get your cashflow up to invest in an online business. If you try to spend the time learning how to build a service business, all it’s going to do is distract you from the main goal.

If you’re not having success yet, and you’re short on cash, this would be a good idea.

If you're already seeing modest success though…I would just double down on that and learn more to grow more. That's probably going to be your highest income opportunity since you already have a head start on that.

Question #5

I’ve set up a website to resell products. How do I get traffic?

Everyone needs to stop trying to do this. It’s usually too expensive to drive any meaningful demand to your website.

You're going to have a lot more luck selling on Amazon/Ebay/Walmart as you don't have to create your own demand. You just have to capture the demand that's already there.

Shopify is better used to build a brand. If there's already a market for the exact products, the marketplaces will be a better place for you to start.

The marketplaces are "busy" but if you build up shipping history and can undercut price, even by a few pennies, you can win the buy box on Amazon leading to huge demand even if there's other sellers.

Question #6

What kind of schedule do you recommend to follow for someone working from home and going the Ecom route? how many hours would you put into focused work, how many hours for healthy hobbies, and how much into learning?

Push yourself as hard as you can go before your physical or mental health starts to break. Not for weeks, for months. Then you'll learn how much your body and mind can take long term. If you're actually honest with yourself, it's a minimum of 80 hours a week of work.

Learning? - Minimal. Only what's required to push yourself forward. If the learning isn't focused on your business, it's probably just mental masturbation.

"Healthy hobbies" - Idk what your interpretation of this is exactly. My personal opinion is a half day per week or two. Work for 6 hours and spend the rest of the day golfing or on a "healthy hobby". If you mean workout/basketball, then yeah 1.5 hours 3-4 days a week should do.

There's no exact formula here. Some days I do 16 hours and other days I can only manage 10. Sleep, diet, exercise, and figuring out a way to enjoy the grind/your life should keep you continuously pushing yourself.

I haven't had an actual vacation longer than 2 days in over 4 years but I'm also insanely burnt out so might not want to take me as an example for how to relax.

Question #7

Should I be worried about supplier concentration / risk at all at this point?

I don’t know where everyone is in their journey reading this but it’s probably too early to worry for most of you. If you’re doing less than $1M a year, it’s a distraction.

You shouldn’t worry about it at your size but if you are, you can do a few things to ease your mind.

1. Make sure you develop relationships with as many people internally as possible. Take a playbook from salesmen/account managers in other industries. If you’re ever in the same town as your supplier, take them out to dinner. Send a Christmas gift. Ask them about their family. Etc.
   
   We all like to think business decisions are made in a vacuum of what’s most profitable but oftentimes relationships play an enormous part when decisions are being made.

2. Have other suppliers lined up just in case you get rugged by your supplier. This is a lesson from Covid. Even if your suppliers are great, a war, a tariff, a virus, etc. can bring your relationship to a grinding halt. The most important part is having your IP on hand before anything goes down.
   
   Have your formulas, dimension, and IP ready in case you need to pivot to a new manufacturer/supplier quickly. Even if you have to go to a lab to get your product independently tested, it’s better to waste the money and not need it than not have it when you need it.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

Free articles on WiFi Money are supported by:

►SiteGround - SiteGround is one of the easiest hosting providers to get setup on quickly. For a full guide in getting setup with your first website in less than an hour, read how to start your own website.

►Shopify - The #1 and only ecommerce website builder that you should be using. If you’re selling a physical product online, look no further. They handle 90% of the hard stuff. Start building on Saturday morning and be selling by the afternoon.

►Surfer SEO - Save hours by using Surfer SEO to prepare content optimized to your domain, niche, and audience. Use the #1 AI writing tool on the market that the best affiliate marketers are using.

►SEMRush - The one tool I cannot live without. This tool has almost everything you need. Keyword research, spy on your competitors, local SEO, site audits, social media management, paid advertising tracking, PR monitoring and much much more.

If you want to get smarter about all things digital, upgrade today from free to paid for only $10 a month. The paid posts are where I dive even further into the weeds to help you truly understand and capitalize on the digital landscape.

Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

Before we start, I’d again like to thank BowTied Gator and BowTied Fawn for giving me access to biom to use in this series so I don’t have to dox stores that I own or have access to. They’ve each written guest posts on this Substack that you should go read (the links on their names).

Also, after much hesitation to change, I’ve recently become a NoBS maxi after switching from my other hydroxyapatite toothpaste.

Remember, if you want to dive further into each category in this series, Shopify has great resources to help you learn everything. Much better than most platforms.

Themes

I wanted this to come in a little later in the series, but since it’s one of the first things you should change, I decided to move it up. Just like with WordPress, this is going to make or break you in terms of design.

First, don’t get a free theme if you’re going to start a brand. You’re going to want to change too many things and you’re going to run into limitations. If you’re starting a brand, $350 (max) shouldn’t make or break you.

So what theme do you choose? Here’s the beauty. You can try before you buy.

Download a bunch of themes, try them all out to see if each has the functionality/look feel you need, and pick one.

Now. If you’re managing multiple stores, and $350 per store is too much to spend, then you should really focus on just growing one business. If you have 5 stores, no wonder $350 is too much to spend. You’re splitting your time amongst 5 businesses and not focusing on actually growing one.

You’ll get further ahead by growing one brand than trying to grow 5 stores.

Click on Visit Theme Store. View all themes. Sort by price high to low. Click into a theme. Click Try Theme.

As long as you pick a theme that fits the design and functionality you need when you’re trying it, you almost can’t go wrong. All of the themes do have differences but at the high end, it’s mostly about design.

Yes there’s individual functionality differences too but that’s something you should be testing if you really want product quick view, quick buy, or some other functionality.

For WordPress, I’ve been adamant about only going with GeneratePress. For Shopify, there’s a lot more latitude depending on your need. Just make sure that the store scores well on speed tests and has the functionality you need.

Today we’re going to be working with the Impulse theme. Even on mobile, it scores well on Google’s page experience reports.

Customizing Theme

So now that you’ve downloaded a few, how do you check on whether it will work or not?

Once you click “Try Theme”, it will populate just like a backup where you can customize and test it to your heart’s content.

Backups

Unlike WordPress, automatic backups aren’t going to be done for you. Lucky for you, you have a lot less to worry about with Shopify. You should however, create backups before you update themes, every few weeks, or before you make any big changes with apps.

Just click on the three dots next to customize and click “Duplicate”. A backup will be made for you as a reset point or a way for you to test code changes in your theme. Later we’ll talk about development stores to test larger scale changes.

Updating Theme

Updating a theme works a little different than WordPress.

In Shopify, when you update a theme, Shopify makes a copy of your theme, applies the update for you to review before you push it live.

Here’s where it’s important to pay attention to details.

You can review the theme’s look and feel to your hearts content but if there’s code changes that you applied, like structured data for reviews, you won’t see them in the review. That’s why it’s important to use development stores for updates like this.

Templates

Ideally, you’d have one template for all of your products. One template for your blog posts, etc.

If you have 1000 products, managing 1000 templates would be a nightmare. If you have a smaller amount of products, it’s manageable.

All of your templates for different pages are managed under this drop down. Let’s look at how biom manages their templates.

Pause for a minute before we get to that. Look at the left on the image above. There’s two things that you need to note.

Read more

This will be a solid reference guide to be able to wrap your head around what everything means and where everything is located.

Some of this is going to be a repeat of the WordPress 101 guides. Since everyone doesn’t read from the beginning of the Substack, I’m going to repeat myself some.

No matter what type of business you’re building, you should read from the beginning of this Substack.

You will learn things in each section that you can apply to your business even if it’s not labeled in a way that makes you think you will. The alternative is that I make every post 10k words and repeat myself on many aspects in every article.

Before we start, I’d like to thank BowTied Gator and BowTied Fawn for giving me access to biom to use in this series so I don’t have to dox stores that I own or have access to. They’ve each written guest posts on this Substack that you should go read (the links on their names).

Also, after much hesitation to change, I’ve recently become a NoBS maxi after switching from my other hydroxyapatite toothpaste.

(It was in no part a deal to switch toothpastes to get access to their store. My brand loyalty isn’t bought off that easily.)

Why You’re Using Shopify Over Wix/SquareSpace/WordPress

I’ve written on platform choice before, but in short, it’s just a better solution. Let’s quickly run through why you’re choosing Shopify over other platforms.

First, Shopify has much more scale, customization, and integrations than almost any other platform other than WordPress.

With Shopify, you don’t have to worry about load balancing on your servers, setting up payment processors, hiring a dev team, dealing with most 3rd party integrations via API, etc.

The downside of that is if you’re in the grey market. Shopify won’t be ideal as you’re likely to get booted by their payment processors or Shopify itself. Leaving your site dark until you work it out with Shopify or rebuild on another platform like WordPress and get a payment processor known for handling products in the grey.

Outside of that, you should absolutely go with Shopify.

I was asked about Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a comparison. I won’t dive too deep into those but the main reasons are cost, speed, and ease of use. If you go with either of those platforms, you are absolutely going to need a dev team. With Shopify, much much less so if at all.

The conversation changes when you’re dealing with a large networks of stores and API connections that print at the speed of the Fed. Even then, I wouldn’t say Commerce Cloud is better, but it’s the platform of choice for so many retailers.

Personally, I hate Commerce Cloud. Every change seemingly needs a developer to get involved and Salesforce tries to lock you into their CRM/marketing solutions. I’ve never seen a large retailer use Shopify but I imagine it’s due to needing more access to the backend servers at such a large scale and other customizations not available in Shopify.

So unless you have an IT org with 10’s of people, Commerce Cloud and Magento are probably out. If you do, you shouldn’t be taking platform choice advice from this newsletter. Go talk to your devs.

Different Shopify Plans

The 3 Shopify plans are essentially the same except for a few things.

• Credit Card processing fees

• Staff accounts

• Reports

• Ecommerce automations

• Third-party calculated shipping rates

The 2 most important options to consider for most people are credit card processing fees and staff accounts.

Basic

This is where 90% of you should start unless you have more than 3 people that need access to the store.

Shopify

If you want ecommerce automations, better reporting, or need 4-5 people to have access to your store, this is where you want to start. If not but you’ve got a meaningful amount of sales going through your store, you might want to pick this option just to save on credit card fees and the slightly better shipping discount.

The monthly difference between the Basic and Shopify plans on a yearly plan is $50/month but you pay 0.3% less in credit card fees. $50/0.3% or $50/0.003 is $16,666.67.

If you’ve reached that on a monthly basis, you need to upgrade just to save in fees. Let’s just call it $15k when you account for the shipping discount.

There’s a different calculation if you use Shopify POS or a 3rd party payment provider but you can do those calculations yourself.

Advanced

The difference here is just a slight step up from the Shopify plan.

• Better reports

• 15 staff accounts

• Lower transaction costs

• Automatically collect international duties/taxes

The real differentiator here is an extra 0.2% decrease in transaction costs. The cost difference is $220/month. Running the same calculation yields an extra $110k in sales needed to make up for extra cost.

So at $125k per month, you’re going to want to upgrade.

Plus

This is where the cost starts to increase drastically. Shopify plus starts at $2000 per month with an extra 0.25% knocked off of your transaction fees.

This puts you needing an extra $680,000 in revenue to counter the transaction fee difference. $805k all in.

Here’s where Shopify still gets its money no matter what. They’re like a casino in this aspect…house always wins. Any sales on Shopify Plus over $800k, Shopify takes a 0.25% cut. No matter if you use their payment gateway or not.

Convenient number, right?

So if you’re doing $900k a month in sales, Shopify plus is $2000 + ($900k - $800k)*0.0025 = $2250 a month.

One caveat here. If you’re a nonprofit, you can bypass that 0.25% cut and always pay just $2k a month.

So if you’re not a nonprofit, and the cost is going to be the same above $800k/month, why would you upgrade?

• 24/7 chat support with Shopify “Tier 1 gurus” without the wait times (this is actually huge)

• Assigned launch manager if you’re transferring to Shopify

• Access to a “Growth Team” to help you with SEO, Analytics, CRO, etc.

• Better API calls for 3rd party integrations

• Checkout customization

• Shopify Audiences which leverages their database of all customers that have shopped on Shopify to target ads to. They’re essentially acting as a data broker like LiveRamp. (haven’t used it so can’t speak to how good it is)

• Multiple stores in one account for sub brands or multiple countries/regions

• Unlimited staff accounts

• Headless ecommerce which I won’t touch on

If you’ve made it this far, go talk to your team and contact sales. If you know someone that’s a Shopify Partner, let them make the introduction so that they can get the commission (20% recurring of the Shopify Plus cost).

Shopify POS

While I can’t speak on a large retailer using this, for a small retailer, this is a god send.

I’m currently in the process of unraveling a POS for a single unit location and their website. Not pretty. Not cost effective. Not easy to setup.

Selling online and in store means you have manage inventory for both platforms seamlessly. This generally requires you to make a costly connection between your POS and website which usually requires dev work and a 3rd party. Not cheap and easy if you’re a 1-2 unit retailor with an online presence.

I won’t dive too deep into this as it doesn’t apply to much of my audience, but if you’re a small retailer standing up an online store, take the time to switch everything over together.

Here’s a few benefits of doing this.

• The hardware is going to be cheaper. Hell, you could literally have your in store POS be your phone if you wanted to. Not recommended.

• You can take your POS with you. If you sell at popup shops or anything like that, all you need is WiFi.

• You can sell even without WiFi. I don’t remember if this has been launched yet but if you don’t have access to internet, you can still make sales and all of your orders will be uploaded when you connect to WiFi again.

• Unified CRM/loyalty data for marketing

• The setup is going to be much easier than configuring Shopify/Woocommerce/etc. with your POS or trying to integrate selling on different channels like Amazon/Etsy/Walmart/etc.

• Automatically send purchase orders from Shopify, inventory analysis, demand planning, inventory alerts, etc.

I understand most of my audience doesn’t care but Shopify POS is truly a game changer in how small B&M businesses do business if they also sell online. Most small retailers are 20 years behind the times and Shopify can bring them up to a world class solution in less than 3 months with minimal capital.

Basic Terminology & Layout

I’m not going to go through the structure of a website, what everything means, and waste everyone’s time. Review the WordPress post if you don’t know the difference between main content and a sidebar.

I want to touch on the things that are different than WordPress and what you need to know about it.

Shopify Core

When someone is talking about Shopify, similar to WordPress, they’re talking about the core framework. Each of these platforms use similar terminology and work the same way.

Framework - WordPress is built on PHP while Shopify is built on Ruby on Rails. On WordPress, even non-devs might have to mess with PHP files occasionally. On Shopify, unless you’re developing an app, you’ll never touch Ruby code. This would be analogous on Shopify (not the same but analogous) as messing with the Liquid files (another language). As a beginner, you shouldn’t be messing with the theme’s liquid and json files but for those interested, this is where you can find them.

Once you get inside, it looks something like this allowing you to edit pretty much anything you need to.

Cart & Checkout

I won’t explain what a cart and checkout is but unless you’re on Shopify Plus, you can’t change it much outside of your logo, fonts, colors, and making some fields mandatory or not.

Product Pages

Product pages are also referred to as PDPs (Product Description Pages). We’ll dive deeper into these later but know that you’re URL structure is going to be a certain way and you’re SOL if you want to change it.

Every product structure is

domain.com/product/product-url-that-you-want

Collection Pages

Shopify calls PLPs (Product Listing Pages) collection pages. Again, you’re SOL if you want to change it as your collection pages will follow this structure.

domain.com/collections/collection-url-that-you-want

Blog Archive

Every blog archive that you want to create has to follow the below structure.

domain.com/blog/news OR

domain.com/blog/learn OR

domain.com/blog/blog ETC.

It’s a pain. I know. It’s the way Shopify works. There’s a lot less flexibility in URL structure than there is with WordPress. Get used to it.

If you’re used to WordPress, think of it in terms of categories where you’re forced to put the category in the URL while also having the /blog/ right beside it.

Blog Posts

Same as the archive with the actual URL piece that you want.

domain.com/blog/learn/blog-url-that-you-want

Pages

You guessed it.

domain.com/pages/about

domain.com/pages/contact

domain.com/pages/page

So why is this important?

If you’re converting from another platform, there’s no way to make all of your URLs the same. You need to put in redirects for every single URL so that traffic and link juice gets redirected.

Apps

If you’re used to WordPress, replace the word “plugin” with “app”. It’s the same exact concept.

If you’re unfamiliar, apps are additional pieces of software added to your store to make up for the limited functionality of your theme or Shopify in general.

They can also slow down and mess up your site. Hence the importance of picking a good theme that works for your products, design, and needed functionality. We’ll get to themes later on.

Security

Shopify is fully managed hosting. No configuring an SSL certificate. No load balancing when you have sudden increases in traffic. No security plugins to update and monitor. Fully managed.

Until you get to real size, the only thing you really have to worry about is keeping your login credentials safe.

Page Builders

I’m not even going to recommend you use a page builder…

There’s 4 reasons you should use a page builder in my eyes.

1. You’ve been transported in time to before July 2021.

2. You care more about design than your time and focusing on things that will make you money.

3. You’re not going to take my advice on buying a good theme and there’s functionality that you just have to have.

4. You’re a masochist who enjoys a page builder changing so much code on your site that you’ll never be able to track it all down if you decide to unsubscribe to their service.

July 2021 is oddly specific, huh? Well at the end of June 2021, Shopify launched Online Store 2.0. For the most part, this made page builders useless if you pick a good theme. Online Store 2.0 allowed theme and app developers much more flexibility in a stores design and functionality.

Shopify redid the architecture allowing for sections on every page, allowed apps to work in tandem with the themes’ sections, and a host of other updates.

Wrapping Up

This is going to be a long series ranging from 4-6 posts. Probably 15k words in total. The rest of the outline is already 500 words before adding any substance to the outline. Expect the next post in the series to be sent out later this week.

As always, if I get anything wrong, missed anything, or you have any questions, please let me know so I can fix it going forward.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

Free articles on WiFi Money are supported by:

►SiteGround - SiteGround is one of the easiest hosting providers to get setup on quickly. For a full guide in getting setup with your first website in less than an hour, read how to start your own website.

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Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

If you have spent any time operating an eCommerce business, you quickly learn of the multitude of operations that get very little airtime. The majority of the content out there discusses setting up your Shopify account, payment processing, product photos, etc.

All of the glitz and glam; the front end experience.

The back end is where the magic happens (yes that’s an innuendo). It’s where you transform ideas into products, moving them efficiently, and get them into customers' hands. I’m not formally trained in any of this, but merely a practicing dentist that’s learning things along the way.

Today, I’m sharing what I've learned about how to take a product from “shower thought” to receiving reviews on your website. I have found solace in many of the unsexy aspects of this side of running a business, and I’m hoping you will too.

Product Creation

Ah, the best part, creating the actual products. The very genesis of why we started our company in the first place. It's the guiding melody, the consistent rhythm that every other step in our dance follows.

It involves identifying a need, nurturing an idea, crafting a design, testing a prototype, and finally, the grand reveal - the product launch.

Some products will be easier than others, but ultimately they should solve some sort of problem and have a unique angle that market leaders do not possess. I hate that I even wrote that sentence, because it’s empty and vapid. I remember reading a similar sentiment at some point.

The very notion implies that you sit down with this calculated framework to solve a problem. Let’s say you want to make a desk chair. That sentence just told you to solve a problem. What fucking problem do desk chairs even have? Not many, and even if you find one it’s probably minuscule at best.

The point of me saying that sentence and then walking back on it is deliberate: change the way you define “problem” and reframe it to “feature”. Before we get carried away, that doesn’t mean aimlessly add features, but rather make a mundane object have a layer of excitement to it. This can be in the product function itself, it can be in the design, or even in the way it’s described in the copy.

Take Tesla for example. Were cars completely broken before Tesla? Not at all. Elon came in and made the car a more fun experience, which has caused a cult-like following on an arguably more needy and issue-prone vehicle.

Not every product will strike you like lightning where you frantically make a note on your phone to investigate more details, but the process should be approached from a sense of wonder, curiosity and excitement.

Let’s move ahead and assume that you already have your perfect product idea. Now you need to transform it from a thought into a working prototype.

How the hell do you do that?

There are a variety of ways to do this, industry-dependent, but there are some universal principles that you should abide by. You need someone who’s going to make the thing, you need someone who’s going to design what the thing looks like, and you need someone who’s going to package the thing.

Sometimes you can do this under one roof, other times you need to diversify the talent into multiple people.

The best way to start is by figuring out who’s going to make the thing. Go on Alibaba, Thomasnet, or Import Yeti and try to find relevant manufacturers. Set up a call to discuss your idea and align on timeline, minimum order quantity, and cost. Now do this with a few others to compare and contrast.

Side note: Products will take 3 times as long to produce and sell than you anticipate. Prepare accordingly. I go into product creation assuming it will be at minimum, 6 months until it is for sale.

Once you align with this manufacturer, you can begin to prototype. Some will charge you, others won’t. You’ll find that those who charge you for prototyping will take you much more seriously and will be incredibly more responsive. It may seem like a ridiculous fee to pay for a prototype you aren’t even sure will sell, but the juice is worth the squeeze.

Now you have a prototype. You can search for a designer on Behance, 99Designs, Dribble, or even Upwork to get the packaging squared away. When you find a good designer, keep them, as the design consistency will be felt from the consumer perspective. In some cases you’ll need to find a separate manufacturer for exterior packaging, so account for this possibility.

Step Two: Supply Chain Management - Creating a Symphony of Efficiency

Supply chain is a big topic from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished products to the customer. Every step needs to be coordinated and efficient. If you’re not careful, small details can destroy your whole operation.

Let’s take NOBS Toothpaste for example. There are multiple suppliers for a single product. Each of the following components have their own manufacturer:

• Lids

• Jars

• Raw Hydroxyapatite

• Peppermint

• Tablet itself

• Exterior Box

• Mailer Box

What do you think happens if there is a shortage in peppermint extract from the UK?

Or if the lid supplier suddenly gets a huge order and places you on the back burner for production?

Or if the hydroxyapatite supplier decides the recent popularity justifies doubling their prices?

These are all variables that have not only happened to me personally, but are more or less a guaranteed obstacle that you will face in your supply chain.

How do we prevent this? Well, you can’t. At least not initially. However, you can minimize it and prepare for it. Creating partnerships with reliable suppliers is your first goal. People buy from people. Treat your suppliers with decency and respect as it goes a long way. It’s also important to have multiple suppliers, even if you’re happy with your existing one.

You’re going to want to understand the following processes in order of importance:

• Raw Material Sourcing

• Product Cost

• Production Lead Times

You can’t worry about the lead time if you can’t afford the product. And you can’t worry about the cost of the product if you can’t source it. Understand the hierarchy of supply chain, and then smash each layer with efficiency and quality.

Once you are happy with your current supply chain, wait 2 months, then start picking it apart again and finding ways to improve it further. As you scale, one small change can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout the year.

If you develop sloppy habits when you’re small, they will fester like a cancer as you grow. Then it’ll be extra hard to make changes. Always be iterating.

Step Three: Logistics - The Last Mile is the Most Important Mile

Now for the finale, the triumphant end of our performance - logistics. At its core, logistics is about delivering your product into the waiting hands of your customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s the final twirl, the dramatic lift, the flourish that ends your performance on a high note.

Now let’s say you’ve got a killer product that’s already in production, and it’s ready for shipment. It's time to move them into the warehouse - a place where they'll wait for their final destination.

This is another huge topic that we’ll lightly go over today. Some smaller companies opt to store and fulfill their own orders. Depending on the size of your products, inventory quantity and order volume, you can decide whether this is something you want to take on personally or outsource.

From the beginning, we outsourced our fulfillment to a Third Party Logistics company, also known as a 3PL or a Distribution Center.

These companies can make or break you. Choose carefully, and generally stay away from the large corporate 3PL’s like ShipBob (Just google testimonials to read the horror stories for yourself).

The goal is to find someone who has the infrastructure that will allow you to scale, but will also give you that personal touch and extra bit of attention even while you’re small. There are plenty of them out there, so don’t think that you’re limited to ShipBob, ShipMonk, or any of the other big players. You will have to go into the deep results of google, but your best bet is to find other DTC founders and ask for a referral.

My first 3PL company got purchased shortly after I onboarded, and orders weren’t being fulfilled for over 10 days after being placed. Shipments were getting lost in the mail. I was being overcharged. It was a disaster and almost killed my company in the first 90 days of operation.

Each logistics partner will have their own quirks, inventory management software, methods of communication, and style.

Don’t go into a relationship with your logistic partner trying to mold them. Either accept them and determine whether they are a good fit for your brand or move on and find another one. Once you scale, changing 3PL providers will prove difficult (Unless you’re adding another one to improve shipping times in different regions).

Finally, you need to have a system in place for dissatisfied customers and returns.

Regardless of what you want to believe, you will have unhappy customers. Every company does. The magic is behind how you handle this dissatisfaction. So, have a clearly defined return policy and a straightforward process to manage those situations. It can turn a potentially negative experience into a positive one, further cementing customer trust and loyalty.

Throughout the process from raw materials to last mile delivery, you will want to have a deep understanding and tight control of all of your expenses. This section was only a few hundred words, but the A-Z process will take your $1.20 item and bring the total cost of goods up to maybe $5 or 6.

Then you need to account for fulfillment fees, postage costs, and even shrinkage (lost or damaged inventory). If you’re haphazard about the costs, you can find yourself working hard only to lose money on your business.

Wrapping Up

Cultivating a successful eCommerce business is not much different from managing a brick and mortar business. You'll face some missteps, perhaps even a stumble or two. But with each fall, there's a lesson learned, resilience built, and before you know it, you're moving with a rhythm and grace you didn't realize you possessed.

Embrace the challenges that come with product creation, supply chain management, and logistics. See them as opportunities for growth and innovation. Remember, every professional was once an amateur, and every expert was once a beginner. Keep pushing boundaries, questioning norms, and seeking better ways to serve your community.

If you haven’t yet heard of biom, checkout our flagship product NoBS nanohydroxyapatite toothpaste tablets.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

Free articles on WiFi Money are supported by:

►SiteGround - SiteGround is one of the easiest hosting providers to get setup on quickly. For a full guide in getting setup with your first website in less than an hour, read how to start your own website.

►Shopify - The #1 and only ecommerce website builder that you should be using. If you’re selling a physical product online, look no further. They handle 90% of the hard stuff. Start building on Saturday morning and be selling by the afternoon.

►Surfer SEO - Save hours by using Surfer SEO to prepare content optimized to your domain, niche, and audience. Use the #1 AI writing tool on the market that the best affiliate marketers are using.

►SEMRush - The one tool I cannot live without. This tool has almost everything you need. Keyword research, spy on your competitors, local SEO, site audits, social media management, paid advertising tracking, PR monitoring and much much more.

If you want to get smarter about all things digital, upgrade today from free to paid for only $10 a month. The paid posts are where I dive even further into the weeds to help you truly understand and capitalize on the digital landscape.

Subscribe now

Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

Read more

1. How to Start an Ecommerce Business on a Budget

2. Demand Planning For Inventory Management

3. Broseidon - From Zero to Something More Than Zero?

4. I DON'T HAVE AN IDEA!

5. Mar Q/A Roundup

First, thank you. I love seeing this project grow and help people.

Secondly, I feel like many of you are missing some context about this Substack and Twitter account. It is not designed like a normal newsletter. I’m not going to send out emails just to send out emails. It was designed to be read from the beginning similar to a course.

Every new subscriber should read that post to catch up on why this Substack exists. Don’t skip it. If you’ve been a subscriber, go read it before you do anything else.

WiFi Money

New Subscribers

In the last 100 days or so, the number of readers of this publication has almost doubled. While I’m extremely happy to have the opportunity to help so many people, there’s probably a lot of confusion…

Read more

3 years ago · 18 likes · 12 comments · BowTied Opossum

WiFi Money is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Question #1

Any ideas on how to use digital ads to drive foot traffic to an event?

Almost every advertising platform today allows you to geo-target ads. The problem isn’t whether you can use digital ads to drive foot traffic to an event, it’s at what cost? Let’s look at 2, arguably bad, examples of how you could do this.

Let’s say you’re holding an event in a busy downtown area of a city. You can absolutely target everyone in the vicinity and try to convince them to come to your event. You can even target based off of interest to try to lower your costs and hit your correct market.

For events, it’s not that efficient from a CAC POV. This is essentially what retailers/restaurants do with LIAs (local inventory ads) and other ad types. If the potential customer is within 1 mile of the store, they’ll be shown an ad on Google maps, search, or various social media platforms.

It works for them because they’re targeting customers at the right time and place. If the person is searching for restaurants, they already have an hour of free time and are deciding where to go. If you’re trying to drive them to an event, they likely already have a set schedule and aren’t going to skip their plans to take 2 hours for your event. Some will, but most won’t. Leading to a very high CAC.

As old school as it is, you’d have better luck doing in person marketing with signs, people, and other things to increase your events visibility.

Let’s look at this from a different angle. An angle that everyone should be focused on no matter your business type.

Where do your potential customers hang out online?

To shoot broadly for the sake of not saying what the event is, let’s say your event is a concert in NYC with a crappy band that nobody knows. If I was trying to drive people to an event that they have to go out of their way for, I’d consider two factors.

Where do the potential customers hang out online and how long in advance do they decide to go?

I’m going to assume that there’s a large audience of people that listen to crappy music on Reddit. It’s also easy to target them.

I’m also going to assume that they’re deciding less than two weeks out as you’re not planning to go to an event for months for a band that you barely or don’t even know.

You can hit ads or you can astroturf to try to drum up interest.

r/nycmeetups - I’d target this group for a week looking for last minute ideas of something to do on the weekend. You could go the ad route or you could create a couple of accounts (or a few friends) and create a meetup group of buzz around getting lonely people to this event.

You could also use a similar tactic on r/nycmusic, r/NYCJam, r/NYCConcerts, etc.

I’m not saying Reddit is the best route here but just like the article I DON’T HAVE AN IDEA, you have to learn to build a mental framework to run through ideas of how to target customers.

Build a framework/mental model of how you target customers. Work through 10+ ideas, write them all down, and start testing your theories.

Focus on the buyer’s journey. How potential customers making buying decisions and how they might run upon a similar product/service/event as yours.

Question #2

Need to target people who would spend $12k on [redacted], not getting the right kind of traffic. If you know of something to set for targeting on meta, that would be helpful.

This is going to be very similar to the second part of the above answer.

Where do your potential customers hang out online?

Do you think the people buying $12k [redacted] are just scrolling FB all day? Most of your high end customers aren’t wasting their time hanging out on social media all day. Without an email match list to sniper target these people, you have a very large lake targeting an almost extinct fish species.

Know who your target customer is and go where they are.

If you’re struggling with finding where they are, you don’t really know who your target customer is.

Question #3

Do you have any benchmarks regarding email marketing? An agency is pitching that 30% (currently at 10%) of revenue should be from email marketing

Here’s the thing about benchmarks. They’re benchmarks. Averages.

If your business is the exact average of your industry in everything, then sure you’re well below. Your email revenue as a percentage of total is going to depend on a ton of factors.

• How fast you’re growing

• How you incentivize email collection in the first place

  • Are the users cold?

  • Are they people that only signed up for a coupon?

  • Are they past customers?

• The buying habits of your niche. Is it a product that needs replaced every 60 days, or 1 year, or never?

• How you use email. Promotions, new product launches, upsells, etc.

This is all very industry, niche, and business specific.

There’s three major ways an agency that’s trying to sell you on email services is going to increase your email revenue percentage.

1. Focusing on making your emails better.

   1. Better subject line, better first line, better copy, better visuals, etc.

   2. Better flows and timing.

   3. Better targeting of emails based off of past buying habits.

2. Sending more emails. Sometimes you need more emails but there’s a balance *long term*. Anyone that says to just constantly blast or “if they unsubscribe, they were never going to buy anyways” has never seen/measured the data on the LTV of tens of millions of customers over years. Big CPG/retailers measure this relentlessly and more is not always better in the long term.
   
   The short term, sure. If you’re not wanting to optimize your business for 5 years instead of 5 months. Send as many as possible, make as much as possible in the short term, burn out your list, and deteriorate your brand.
   
   If I went by similar logic of “if they unsubscribe, they were never going to buy anyways”, then I’d put a CTA below here and unsubscribe all of my free readers.
   
   You all have never subscribed to the paid version so you’ll never buy and it’s a waste of my time…
   

   Subscribe now

   There was recently a course that launched that I’ve been looking forward to buying for months. When it launched, the creator sent 20+ emails in the matter of 5 days. Along with not having an easy CTA for me to click on, the sheer magnitude of emails annoyed the hell out of me and seemed desperate.
   
   So what did I do? I unsubscribed and didn’t purchase. I was literally going to buy within a week (when I got around to looking through all of my emails) but the smell of desperation and lack of awareness made me not want to give this person my money.
   
   A good email marketer knows that it’s their job to put the right offer, at the right time, and with the right message in front of the potential customer. It’s not to send them 4 emails every day in hopes that one of those times is the right time.
   
   So do I unsubscribe all of you free subscribers? No.
   
   I know that some of you are casually reading and you aren’t yet at the place in your life to take building a business seriously. Even though you should be…
   
   But when you are. I’ll still be here sending you valuable content with a backlog of valuable information to get you started. When you’re ready, I still need to be in front of you and top of mind.

   Subscribe now

3. Sending promotions

   1. Pulling demand from the future (with less margin)

   2. Stealing demand from other channels (attribution transfer with less margin)

   3. Getting customers to try your product or steal share from your competitor (margin accretive)

Note that just because the percentage is higher, it doesn’t mean that it’s all incremental revenue…

From above you can see that all 3 are valuable. #1 should be your main and first focus. #2 & #3 above should be utilized but carefully.

Figure out the benchmarks in your industry, run through the above and see if you can spot and improve your company’s weaknesses by signing up for your competitors emails. If you can’t, hire an agency and watch #2 and #3 very carefully.

Question #4

Currently using paid shipping. I’m very tempted to test threshold shipping. Our average order volume is ~145 over the last two months and shipping costs ~7. Would imply to go for 159 for free shipping following your 2x rule.

Would a higher/ more conservative threshold be counterproductive?

Here’s the link to the tweet that inspired this question.

https://twitter.com/BowTiedOpossum/status/1547037091816546305

First, you can’t just take the AOV and run with it. You have to make sure it’s a normal distribution first to use that formula. The distribution could be not a normal distribution. It could look something like this.

This could easily be the case if all of your products are priced at $30 and $60. You may have an AOV around $45 with literally no way to have a $45 basket. So you look at the distribution and see if you can shift the consumer buying habits to the right by placing the free shipping threshold just to the right of one of the peaks by a factor of 2X your shipping costs.

If you’re starting with flat rate shipping, going more conservative will be detrimental as you’re not changing the buying behavior for the majority of guests. In that case, you’re just going to give margin away on shipping to over half of your guests.

Going higher *may be* incentivizing less people than you’d like to purchase an extra product. This is going to depend on the cost of your items.

As with anything, the above is a guideline. Test different thresholds and see what works best.

Question #5

Hello BTO, any tips on scaling an ecom store from $1m+ to $3-5m revenue? We are one of the many authorized dealers of brands in our niche (we didn’t go down the create our own product path)

I actually made this mistake once. I wasn’t an authorized dealer, but I partnered with one on taking over their ecom business.

Authorized dealers is a nasty niche to be in if there’s competition. Generally speaking

• You can't compete in price

• You can't differentiate your product/brand

• Any marketing that you do will often flow to competitors

Without knowing what the product is, my only advice is to:

• Dominate SEO

• Sell on every platform imaginable and dominate the SEO there

• If you're going to run ads, focus on product ads that are very bottom of the funnel.

• Use your traffic to launch your own product so you can get out of the authorized dealer hell hole

Wrapping Up

Lastly, if you run a health or beauty website and want to make a little extra money reviewing a product (maybe even being an affiliate), I have a new brand that would like to have a review of their product posted on your site.

Just respond back to this email or message me on Twitter with the site/how to contact and I can put you in touch with the team.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you need to keep in mind why we’re here.

Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about your growth and your future.

You are the only one that can save yourself and make your life what you want it.

Single player. Just you.

This Substack is here to help you build a business and build the life that you want. I’ve laid out the basics to understand, analyze, & grow most any online business.

The best way to learn how to do this as fast as possible is to start from the beginning of the Substack. That and follow me on Twitter & Instagram.

Free articles on WiFi Money are supported by:

►SiteGround - SiteGround is one of the easiest hosting providers to get setup on quickly. For a full guide in getting setup with your first website in less than an hour, read how to start your own website.

►Shopify - The #1 and only ecommerce website builder that you should be using. If you’re selling a physical product online, look no further. They handle 90% of the hard stuff. Start building on Saturday morning and be selling by the afternoon.

►Surfer SEO - Save hours by using Surfer SEO to prepare content optimized to your domain, niche, and audience. Use the #1 AI writing tool on the market that the best affiliate marketers are using.

►SEMRush - The one tool I cannot live without. This tool has almost everything you need. Keyword research, spy on your competitors, local SEO, site audits, social media management, paid advertising tracking, PR monitoring and much much more.

If you want to get smarter about all things digital, upgrade today from free to paid for only $10 a month. The paid posts are where I dive even further into the weeds to help you truly understand and capitalize on the digital landscape.

Subscribed

Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.

I think the problem most people have is two fold.

1. They have a ton of limiting beliefs. We all have them. Myself included. Some people just have more limiting beliefs than others.

   1. “That won’t work”

   2. “Nobody will buy that”

   3. “Nobody will pay that price”

   4. “Market’s too saturated”

   5. “Market’s not big enough”

   6. “I’m not smart enough”

   7. and on and on and on…

2. Ignorance to business. Most people understand very little about the value chain and the amount of businesses that exist. They’re stuck in their little piece of 9-5 and don’t notice the rest of the world and how it works. If you don’t know it’s out there, how business is done, and the economics behind everything, your brain is very limited to what you can ideate.

Limiting Beliefs

Motivational porn gets a bad rap (by me), but the truth is, this is a lot of people’s problem. They don’t believe in themselves or believe in anything. Always too quick to dismiss everything because they don’t understand it.

Let’s debunk a few of these.

Too Saturated - Almost no market is “too saturated”. Some markets may be more difficult than others. Some markets may be difficult for you to differentiate your brand/product/service.

That’s a skillset problem, not a market problem. So what’s a market that’s “too saturated”? What about salt? There can’t be room to build a business around that can there?

Read more