eCommerce Case Study:
Thomas MacKay Co.
I had seen a lot of ecommerce businesses popping up all over social media. Everywhere you look an ad for some product is hitting you in the face.
After doing some research, the process of starting an ecommerce brand from scratch seemed fairly achievable in theory. I wanted to experiment with building a brand and store myself to see if it, in fact, could be done.
In 2 months I built and launched my brand. I hit a wall shortly after launch with a ban from Facebook and ended my advertising campaign, however, everything else was fairly simple to set up.
I did not set out to make this brand my new career. I did this simply as an experiment and learning experience.
I was doing all this in addition to my regular career. All the energy and time put into it was done so either after work or on the weekends, as many of the claims of ecommerce gurus stated.
In the end, It was a substantial amount of work to get the foundation laid, but nothing that could not be achieved by someone willing to sacrifice some of their leisure time to get some side work done. I even think that I could pick it right back up if I wanted, now that the Facebook bans have resolved and the account has had time to cool off. (more on that later.)
Please continue on to find out all the steps I took in getting my “brand” set up. From researching ecommerce, picking my product, setting up the store and taking a shot at marketing. Learn about the challenges, what was harder than expected, what was easier than expected and whether this is a practical goal for someone trying to start a business.
When I committed to this project I was frustrated. I had made a few half hearted attempts to build an ecommerce store, usually dropshipping and trying to skip the hard stuff.
I decided that for this experience, the product itself was not as important as taking the time to practice every small step that goes into PROPERLY building a brand.
The first store I ever started was a sunglasses and wallets store. I had ordered a few samples at that time to see what kind of stuff was available through aliexpress. There was one wallet I ordered that turned out to be quite exceptional. So exceptional that I was actually still using it.
The construction was good.(held up, no popped seams, loose threads)
It was slim and minimal. (trending at the time)
It was real leather (didn't feel cheap)
They came blank, without a logo, (I could do my own branding)
They were small and light (keep packaging and shipping costs down)
. Without even realizing it I had already put in a year of wear testing and this thing had passed.
So I got back on aliexpress.com to see if they were still available, and low and behold they were.
They came in 4 colors and I wanted some of each, however the minimum order was 50 wallets. I wanted about half that many to start. If I could sell 100 wallets, that would validate this business.
Before I fully committed, I wanted to briefly validate my product idea just to be sure. I needed to check and see if there were any other companies focused specifically on selling a minimalist wallet.
I new there were big brands selling these types of wallets, but to see if there were smaller startups focused specifically on wallets i needed to check:
Facebook
Instagram
Google
If you know what to look for, It's easy to find small ecommerce startups on these sites. I know what they look like and can tell based on their pages, whether they were having success or not.
After doing some research I found a few brands that were focused on the same type of niche and seemed to be doing ok, but had gaps in areas I thought I could improve upon.
Deciding on a Product
Product Validation
Validation 1
I first used google trends to get an idea of how the slim wallet market had been performing. I wanted to see at least some rise in interest to help support the idea. Even if it wasn't strong, I wanted to confirm I wasn't fighting an incredibly uphill battle with a product NOBODY wanted.
The graph bolstered my confidence in the product. There was a clear enough uptick in interest that I was sure that the product was good enough to use for an experiment like this.
I knew I wouldn't be selling the next fidget spinner, however that's not what I was looking for anyways. I wanted a stable, reliable product that a brand could be built around.
Validation 2
After somelight searching on Facebook and Instagram, I found a few startup wallet brands. None of them were going exactly for the vibe I had in mind, but there were signs of enough success that I felt good about the idea.
One company had built a very successful brand image around a metal slim wallet. They crafted an image of a durable, simple product for a rugged, outdoorsy customer. You can probably figure out who I am talking about.
Another, was very similar to what I was going for. They were a leather based wallet with a very sleek minimalistic feel. In comparison to the first brand they were much smaller, operating right at the target size I was aiming for. They had a sleek and modern feel to them, whereas I was going to target a more rugged and rustic image.
So with that information I had:
Validation of a solid product to build around
A snapshot of what my competition would be doing
Confidence to move forward
Finalizing Products
I reached out to the seller on Aliexpress to inquire about splitting colors between order quantities. I wanted to have 4 colors, but did not want to invest in too many wallets. I asked if they could split the 50 pcs orders between 2 colors and they agreed. I placed 2x 50 piece orders and we were on our way.
I had the main product to build around. I wanted to add something though. I needed a low barrier of entry product for people that didn't want to buy a full priced wallet, but wanted to be part of the brand.
I had a few ideas:
Money Clip
Key Chain
Bracelet
Pen
Phone Case
I started by going through AliExpress to see what kinds of products were available. I needed to find something that would match the wallets to a point where a regular buyer couldn't tell they were not from the same set.
That was always one of the best ways, for me at least, to tell the difference between a “dropshipper” and a real brand. The products of a real brand always have the same feel.
Besides the dead giveaways, like the random brand names on chinese goods, dropshipping stores, even the best ones, would have slightly disconnected products.
Real brands, like Belroy or TUMI, all have similar design elements, materials, even subtle details like stitching or hardware. Little things that tell you they are all part of the same family of products and designed under the umbrella of the brand.
With details like this being important to me, I took note of the wallet listing calling out its material “crazy horse leather”. I had seen a few other wallet styles from the vendor made from the same material.
That gave me the idea to search for all products that used the key word “crazy horse leather”.
And just as I thought, it returned a bunch of products that were being made from the same leather that was used on the wallets I ordered.
There were a variety of wallets, bags, belts, key chains and even rolls of the leather itself!
I ended up deciding on a keychain to be my low cost of entry item. This was for a few reasons:
I didn't want it to compete with the wallet
I wanted it to be an accessory that I could package as a set with the wallet if I wanted.
Keychains promote the idea of travel and adventure, which was congruent with the image I was planning to craft.
It was interesting enough to sell on its own.
I needed to be able to brand it
The problem was none of the keychains being offered were really what I wanted. I like the idea of an HK key clip. A keychain that uses a heavy duty clip lashed to a key ring with a thick band of material.
This style was congruent with the rugged, adventurous image I wanted for the brand.
I reached out to a few vendors asking if they could make a run of keychains for me in the style I wanted, but it wasn't cost effective for them so they all declined.
That left me with two options. Either change the style of the keychain, or find a way to make it myself, but I had found my second product.
Project Management
Building something like this from scratch was not going to be easy, a lot of work was a head.
It could be product research, marketing, brand design, customer service, whatever, every part of the process is critical to the success of the whole thing. One misstep of any of these pieces can lead to major headaches and setbacks.
At this point I had finalized my product and had a good feeling for what the vibe of my brand would be. It was time to get down to business and start building the website and the face of the brand.
I knew organization would be critical to my success. I am the type of person that loves to have a list of steps to get through, and just check them off one by one. This would require mapping out the process as best as possible at the beginning, and updating the plan as I moved along.
I built a google sheets spreadsheet to help keep me on track and visuals of what tasks needed to get done.
I created an overarching checklist that outlined the big picture of where the project needed to go. Then I created tabs for each sub-category I felt was going to need its own roadmap in order to be properly executed.
I like turning my work into a process of steps. Do X, Y and Z and get RESULT. Doing this project in my freetime, it was imperative that I maximized what time I had and not procrastinate. I can get overwhelmed very easily if I don't have a clear path laid out. If I'm not checking items off a list it's very easy for me to start panicking when I don't have a clear goal and pick up something else when I get stumped.
With this list in place I had plenty of guidance on what I should be doing, so off we went.
Brand Design
If there is one thing I've learned, it's to not get hung up on things that do not have a huge impact. I wasted a lot of time in the past trying to develop the perfect logo or find the best name.
I knew I wanted something simple and straightforward. For three reasons:
It would make marketing relatively straight forward. A lot of iconic brands are just simple words or names. (Coke, Dior, TUMI, etc)
A simple logo would make stamping the leather much easier.
It was congruent with the simple, minimal brand image I was crafting.
I started with the name first. I wanted to avoid anything too try-hard. In my opinion, brand names that try to do too much or are too trendy turn me off. If your name feels like a gimmick, your product is probably a gimmick. This is like:
Removing a vowel ex. Ambulnz
Putting your product name in the brand name, it may work for Coca-Cola but it doesn't work well for consumer goods.
Complicated or hard to pronounce names to promote the illusion of status or quality.
For me, the product will speak for itself and as long as you don't work against yourself, a simple strong name will do.
I was going to go with my name “Ethan McBride '' however, I didn't like that it started with E. I wanted 2 hard consonants to create a little bite.
My middle name is Thomas and I like that much better but “Thomas McBride'' just wasn't it.
I liked the “Mc” though. The hard “K” was solid. And then it hit me. My brother's middle name.
MacKay. Simple, strong and flowed well.
“Thomas MacKay”.
From there, the logo was super easy. It was going to be extra simple, so as to make stamping easy. Also, It needed to be congruent with the brand image I was trying to portray. Minimalistic, sleek, but somewhat rugged and tough.
I am pretty creative, and in the past I have made some pretty cool logos if I do say so myself. I have a pretty decent hand in Adobe Illustrator. However, I needed to keep myself at bay and keep this logo to the point.
I booted up Illustrator and typed out “TM”. I went with a serif font because it brought a touch of elegance.
I like Illustrator because vector files are very versatile. They create a very clean, bold image and can be exported a number of different ways. They are also compatible with CAD software, if say, you needed some leather stamps made?
I put a nice thick box around it to give it some presence.
Finally, I took the end of the “T” and connected it to the “M”.
And there we had it. A simple, strong logo with just a touch of creativity. Subtle, understated, minimal. Just what we were looking for.
Without giving myself much more time to overthink it, I moved on.
Manufacturing Process / Creating the final product
Now that I had my branding built out, it was time to put it all together. I had 2 products I had to create a “manufacturing” process for:
The wallet
The key clip
The Wallet
The base wallets were coming from Aliexpress. I was able to order them in 4 colors: Black, Brown, Green and Aqua. These wallets came in fully manufactured but free of any logos or branding.
They were a bifold style with a few card slots inside and one ofn the outside. Taking influence from other slim wallet products on the market, I wanted to put my logo in two places on the product.
First, I wanted my “TM” logo on the lower right corner of the front of the wallet. Nothing too attention grabbing but prominent enough.
Second, I wanted to place a fully spelled out impression of the company name on the inside pocket. Tasteful and out of the way.
I knew I would be stamping the logo onto the leather in some way. I did some research on youtube to get an idea of the best methods to stamp leather. I decided on doing a hot stamp method as it appeared to give the most consistent impression and have the highest lasting quality. Cold stamping ran the risk of the impression fading over time.
I found an inexpensive leather stamper on amazon with basic heat controls and ordered it.
As well, I found a small online business that made custom leather stamps out of brass. All I had to do was send them an image and size and they would make it for me. They also had seen the amazon hot stamps I bought and offered adapters for them so I could plug and play right away.
Shout out to Leatherstampmaker.com, my experience with them was great. They quoted me very quickly and turned around my order within a few days. The stamps I got were CNC cut from brass stock and the finish on them were very nice. All the small corners and edges were nice and clean, with no burrs or or anything.
I also made sure to get the logo stamp in a size that would also fit on the key clip so I could use it for both applications.
Now that I had my workpiece, my machine and my tooling it was time to fire it up and see how it worked.
Attempt 1
The stamp came out really nice, at least half of it did anyway. What I didn't realize was that I was stamping on top of where the tops of the card pockets all stacked up. This left an uneven surface on the underside of the wallet which resulted in a very uneven stamp impression. Not good.
Attempt 2
I needed to find a way to fill that space of missing material so I could get a nice, even stamp. My first solution was to make a jig out of wood. I took a small piece of plywood and used a chisel to remove a few layers of the plys. I mapped the contours of the wallet pockets onto the plys and shaved away material until my little wooden jig fit in the vacant space like a puzzle piece.
I set up another test wallet and stamped again. This time the opposite problem. Now the side with the jig had a much deeper impression than the side without. Back to the drawing board.
Attempt 3
I attributed the problem this time to the different thickness of leather being compressed on either side of the stamp. What I needed to do was fill that gap in with leather. Ideally the same leather. Since I had already scrapped two wallets I cut the pockets off of one of them. I would cut the jig out of the old pockets as the material should be exactly the same.
After I got the contour right and fit everything together, I attempted the third try. Bingo. Perfect even stamp, right on the money. Third time really is the charm I guess.
This solution would work for now. If this business took off though I would need to figure out something better. Ideally I would end up having the manufacturer stamp the leather before assembly to get the best impression.
The inside panel stamped perfectly on the first try since it didn't have uneven layers of material like the front portion.
The final product ended up like this:
The Key Clip
The key clip was going to be much more involved. It was going to require full assembly from start to finish. The bad thing was that it was going to be several steps. The good thing was I had much more control over the process.
I had my inspiration that I was soliciting manufacturers, so I had an idea of what I wanted. I started with a list of design parameters.
Product: Key Clip
Materials: Clip, Key Ring, Leather
Fastening system: Rivet or Stitch
Clip Finish: Black Oxide, Brass, Bare Metal
Key Ring: Black Oxide, Brass, Bare Metal
Leather: Same as wallet (Black, Brown, Green, Aqua)
I decided on the black oxide finish for the hardware. I went back on Aliexpress and found a vendor where I could order the clips and keyrings in bulk. They were fairly cheap and seemed widely available all over the internet so if this vendor went really wrong it damage control wouldn't be that hard. Plus, less time deciding, more action. I put in an order for the hardware, and ordered a few rolls of the leather while I was at it.
I went to my local craft store and picked up a basic leather making kit and a hand riveting set as well.
When everything arrived I got started on the prototype. I cut out a few different strips of leather and practiced fastening the clips together using the rivets vs the stitching.
The craft store rivets felt cheap to me and installing them by hand wasn't very repeatable. More often than not the rivet would be hideously smashed and the integrity of the joint was not that great.
The stitching was much more reliable and gave a nice touch of robustness. It took a little more effort to do, but ultimately I felt that it produced a better product over all, both aesthetically and from a quality standpoint.
Another huge issue I had was cutting the leather. Cutting every strip by hand was not only tedious, but impossible to control. Making consistent cuts and straight lines was almost impossible.
The first thing I thought of was a die. Like the teachers would have in elementary school to cut out the construction paper.
Apparently I'm not the forest person to realize this, because a quick search for “customer leather cutting die” brought up a trove of results. I found a store on etsy that had good enough reviews. They weren't too expensive either, but I had to give them a drawing to follow.
No problem.
I went to Onshape.com, a free 3D modeling software sight and began designing my drawing. The CAD software was great because you can add dimensional call outs to your sketches.
I mapped out my leather strip with the holes for all the stitching. I even added a little taper to give the key clip a little style instead of being perfectly straight.
Shipping took a little while, but once it came in I was super excited. I got to my local harbor freight tools and picked up a small press to use for cutting. They said a hammer would work but I want consistency and efficiency.
I was a little nervous as I thought I may have to adjust some dimensions, but the die cut straight through like butter and everything was on point.
After finishing the first clip off the line, I couldn't believe how well it came out. The taper lined up perfectly, all the stitching holes lined up. I had managed to create a pretty high quality product if I do say so myself.
There was even the perfect amount of room to stamp the logo onto the leather strip.
After Dialing it in we had a nice little process:
Cut leather
Stamp Logo
Slide hardware onto strip
Stitch HK clip seam
Stitch keyring seam
And voila! You could pump out a key clip in about 10 minutes. Not bad.
Building the Store
I had had experience using Shopify for my failed attempts at dropshipping. I was already familiar with how it worked and even knew a little about how to edit the code. It's fairly intuitive and has a very large and active support forum that will usually do their best to help you with any issue you have.
My goal was to get launched as fast as possible. The experiment I was really interested in was on the marketing side, so the main goal was to get a good enough website that felt trustworthy.
Not trustworthy in the sense that you will get your Identity stolen, but trustworthy in the sense that the brand, product, social media and website were all congruent enough to prove to the customer that this was actually a brand and not some gimmick site.
However, before I could tweak the aesthetics, I had to ensure the foundation was there first to provide a functional site to my customers.
I started with a basic free theme that comes with a shopify subscription. These are pretty bare bones, but it worked as I was going for a minimalistic style. As well, since there isn't a lot going on, the code is fairly simple if you want to make some tweaks and customize stuff.
I had to set up the critical areas of the store before anything else:
Main pages (ToS, Contact, Refund Policy, Warranty Policy, Privacy Policy)
Shipping Information ( Tracking, Shipping policy)
Social Media Integration (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter)
Custom Domain
Install apps
The main app I was looking for was an email marketing app. As much as people talk about facebook ads, as you peel back the onion and really dig into successful brands you find that a lot of them actually get their conversions from email newsletter lists.
Think about it. It is a small pool of people that have not only validated that they like your brand opting in, they hand you their contact information and invite you to sell to them. No wonder it works so well, and in comparison to facebook ads, no one is talking about it!
I decided on an app called Klaviyo. It's an all encompassing email marketing tool that allowed me to do everything I needed. I could:
Set up a email list
Design an email collection pop up
Create a contact form
Design marketing campaign series like a welcome series
The next thing I needed to do was get some good photos of my product. This is always a dead giveaway for me when people use the stock images of their product for dropshipping.
However, Good photos alone were not going to cut it. I needed great photos, professional looking photos. I knew that this would also not be the only time I would have to take photos of my product. Social media is where everything is nowadays and engagement relies on always having fresh content.
I made the decision to invest in some photo equipment. I ordered a few standing lights and a lightbox with multiple backgrounds. This would definitely help me get some great initial product photos and help with who knows what else down the road.
I created a checklist of all the photos I would need to take for each product page as well as some initial miscellaneous content ideas.
For each wallet I took a front, center and back photo as well as “functional” photo of the product laid in a pocket or bag.
For the Keychain, I did a front view and a “functional” photo..
Last, I took a few products down to my local park and snapped a few photos to start filling out the initial website and social media feeds.
Product Descriptions and Pricing
Everyone seems to have a different opinion on what you need to have in your product description. Some people swear by nothing. Some write paragraphs. I have seen apparent success both ways but still wasn't sure.
Sticking with my theme, I figured it best to be as minimal as I could while still answering critical questions a customer might have.
Size
Material
Features
Warranty
I browsed around many big brand sites to see what they were doing and I started to notice a common theme that seemed to make sense.
A product description is not going to sell your product. If a customer is there it's because they already want your product. Your product and brand image basically sell themselves.
The product description is basically there to blast through any last minute hesitance a customer might have. It should only reinstate the good feelings of what it's like to own the product.
I went with a brief description, adding technical specifications at the bottom. I wanted the pictures to be the focal point of the page anyways.
Pricing is half the battle, and in some cases might be the whole battle. Finding the price point that is congruent with everything your product and brand says is not the easiest thing in the world.
Firstly, you need to know what your costs are before you set your sale price.
What is the actual value of your product? Well that's simply a summation of the work put into it.
I used a spreadsheet from a “guru” I had followed during my time studying ecommerce. Tim Kock wrote numerous dropshipping case studies and provided tons of free valuable information to his followers.
He actually inspired this write up.
I compiled a summation of all my expenses to start up the store and divided it by the number of wallets I had to sell.
Then I used a calculation to establish what price point and how many wallets would get me to even.
I used a few assumptions in my calculations:
Around 8% of customers would end up asking for a refund. I assumed I wouldn't be getting the product back, even though the return policy required the product be returned. I used the cost of the product to calculate this.
I also assumed a cost of acquisition of 7 dollars to account for ad spend. This may have been conservative looking back. It would take some time and money to get the ads dialed in, if I did at all and the success of the brand would really depend on cost per conversion.
The 7 dollars was based on a few case studies I read, however with the increase of costs from facebook this may be an underestimate now.
As well, I would be offering a discount to some customers via my newsletter sign up. I assumed a 15% discount and calculated break even for both with and without discount pricing.
Store Design
As I mentioned before, I decided to go with a free shopify theme to start. I selected the “Debut” theme. I have used it before and I knew the code a little bit already.
I used some of the pictures I had taken earlier to fill out the landing page with a nice hero image and content sections.
I adjusted some of the code to create a sticky menu that tracked with page scrolling so that my customers could always get straight to the product pages.
Additional content
I knew I wanted to add some extra content that your get rich quick stores didn't usually have. I opted to include a few things:
An About page, to discuss the brand mission and connect with my customers. I was pretty honest about it and that was going to be a theme with this brand. I wasn't trying to trick anyone. I had tested my product for over a year and I believed in it so there was no need for that.
A FAQ page was added to quickly direct any potential buys to answers for their common questions.
Lastly, I added a blog. This is where I would utilize my mailing list and content marketing. The plan was to pick a few themes the brand was focused on and develop some blog posts around them, then notify my customers of new posts via the newsletter.
I put together a quick brainstorming spreadsheet for blog article ideas. I listed out a few themes I could have my blog focus on. Underneath each theme, I began to list specific article ideas that could relate to the overall theme.
Then from there, I could link potential ideas together to be part of different overarching campaigns or focuses. This way I could begin to think about batches of articles I could produce in chunks and turn into different series.
To start though, I wanted to get a few initial pieces of content to fill out the blog before launch and give my potential customers some content to skim through and get some value from.
The first three articles are wrote were :
Challenge: Reduce your wallet
Principles: One credit card
The first wallet: A year and a half n the making
I wanted to focus on the mission of the brand and highlight that some real thought went into building this product.
Telling the story of “wear testing” the first wallet for a year and half before committing to sell them would instill confidence that the product would be a quality one.
As well, the other two articles would mix principles of good financial habits, minimalism and discipline to show our customers we wanted to help them be better, not just sell them something.
Getting Feedback
I sent the link to the store to a few different people I knew. Some I didn't tell them it was my store, some I did. I did this to get an idea of what people genuinely thought of the store plus have an opportunity to fix any mistakes I may have overlooked.
Marketing
Social Media is the bread and butter when it comes to ecommerce. Facebook ads changed the game and the exposure you can get is second to none.
As I mentioned earlier, I had already secured accounts for all the major social media platforms. However, I only planned on really focusing on one or two.
Edit: I ran this experiment before the launch of Tik Tok but have since secured an account.
Really, the only content I would be posting would be on Instagram. Facebook I would only be using for ads.
I put together a “Coming Soon” series with a launch countdown for my store. A tactic I took from CRAFTD london, a brand I had been following. I set a launch date a few weeks out and got to work creating a backlog of content to post in the coming weeks.
My plan had a few elements to it:
Instagram content with a round robin like for like group that would hopefully drive up engagement
Facebook for an initial ad campaign to get eyes on the brand and collect audience data.
A giveaway to jumpstart the email mailing list.
I used another page in my spreadsheet to start compiling content ideas for photos and ad sets.
To get an Idea of how I wanted to deliver content I went back to the companies I had checked out during the validation phase.
I compiled a list of all the potential companies that were in my niche, as well as a few that weren't but had proven successful.
I went through each one and compiled all of their different social media handles and website addresses.
Then I began going through each one of their feeds looking for the posts with the most engagements. I would take a screenshot of that post and compile it in a folder for reference.
I created a matrix for all my “competitors” that I had found and categorized them based on where they fit in terms of my competition. I looked at all their products and picked the one that I felt best represented the competing product to mine and recorded its price point.
I then used Facebook ad library to go through the running ads for each one of the companies on my list to see what kinds of ad sets they were running. I looked for a few things:
What kind of ad is was (Image, Video,etc)
How they wrote their copy
Did they feature the brand or the product
Where the link took you
Was it still running
Using this information I created a content plan of what type of pictures to take and what kinds of ad sets I would consider running.
Instagram is highly visual. It's fairly simple to use and post but takes a keen eye to get right. A poor instagram page can be a dead give away of an illegitimate or poor business. In some cases you are better off not having one, as an Instagram page acts as “Social Proof” to your customers.
For my content, I got inspiration from all of the posts I had skimmed during my research to get an idea of what a quality post looked like and what kind of feed I wanted to curate.
I went with a staggered feed, alternating between close up, clean product photos and action or use shots of the product out in the world.
I made sure to include a variety of staging, including flatlays, actions shots, candid shots, etc.
Getting the content itself can be very time consuming. I definitely have to tip my hat to social media managers or influencers after this. Collecting content takes a lot of time.
You have to go to a location. Bring any props you want to have. Find a good spot. Set up the shot. Get the light right. Take the pictures and then rinse and repeat for all the other shots you need.
It seems simple but man let me tell you, it can take some time to get proficient. By the end I had developed a bit of a rhythm but it can still take up a big chunk of time.
A full afternoon of shooting may only land you with a handful of really good images to use, and if you are posting daily like I was, you burn through it FAST.
Getting the pictures was only half the battle though. Then you needed to edit the images to really get them Instagram ready.
Because I was trying to keep costs low I decided to just use a free online photo editor. I went with Photopea as it was fairly intuitive and got decent reviews.
Getting good at editing photos can take a long time, however, there are a few easy first steps that can really improve a photo right off the bat.
The first thing I would do is clean up all the blemishes with a spot removal tool. So any dust, or fuzz on the products, or any odd spots in the photos I would remove.
Then I adjusted the levels. This would change the lighting of the photos where I could brighten the image and make the colors more crisp. This really ups the quality of a photo when you get it dialed in.
That was the editing I would always start with, and in many cases that was all that was needed.
However, sometimes the photos would require removal of things in the background, cropping, blending, blurring or other major changes to add an effect or get the piece just right.
Then it just became a matter of posting on a schedule to get a consistent stream of posts. If this brand really got going, I would definitely consider buying an auto posting app so that I could schedule everything in advance and not have to worry about it.
The last thing I did was join a like for like group. I had talked to a buddy that had some real success with them. It was free to join and only took about 15 min every day to do.
They would send out a notification about 30 min before asking everyone who wanted to participate in the round to join in.
Then, at the set time, they would send out a list of all the people in the session. We would then have about 30 minutes to like everyone in the group's latest post and that was it. It usually took about 15 min to complete.
While I did get some exposure from it, I didn't see the same results my friend had. Instagram is constantly battling against people trying to cheat the system so I imagine that may have played a part in it.
While it didn't take too much extra time, I would still rather just focus on curating quality content.
Facebook itself was not really going to be a priority other than running ads. I never use Facebook and I only had an old account with no friends that I would occasionally log into for dropshipping purposes. However, This account had been dormant for close to a year by now.
This would eventually prove to be my downfall, but we'll save that for the end.
I set up a basic brand page and linked it to my Shopify store. I also liked it to my Instagram account so all I had to do was post to Instagram and the posts would also show up on the facebook page.
I wasn't expecting a ton of engagement from facebook anyways, but you have to have it in order to set up an ad account.
Ads
My first ad would just be practice. I wasn't expecting much, but I had to figure out how it all worked. I went with an Ad for brand awareness to get the word out, start collecting audience data, and maybe get a few newsletter sign ups or instagram followers.
I used some simple copy and a nice image of the wallet.
Then it happened: ACCOUNT SUSPENDED
Right off the bat my account was suspended, saying that I needed to provide a copy of my ID to prove I was the real owner of the account. I don't really like providing information to social media companies like this but hey, we are trying to do business so I get it.
It said it could take a few days for review, so in the meantime I worked on some other stuff and designed my next ad set for when we really decided to go hard.
I wanted to run an A/B test with a good photo and different copy to see which performed better.
After a few days, my account was restored and we were back on track. My initial ad was running and everything seemed fine.
I set up the A/B test and started running it alongside the first ad.
I let the ad run and didn't think about it for a while. Until I came back to check and:
ACCOUNT SUSPENDED
Again. Same thing, they said they needed to verify I was who I said I was. So again, I submitted my ID but this time I didn't wait.
I immediately opened up another Facebook account and reset everything up. New page, new business account, relinked to Shopify, everything. I figured there must have been a glitch with my old account and starting fresh would be best.
I got everything done and set up and hit run on my first ad: ACCOUNT SUSPENDED.
Huh. I guess it wasn't a glitch. I did a little research on it and it turns out Facebook's security is pretty liberal with the ban hammer.
Apparently they have a hidden social scorecard for you based on your account activity to determine if you are trustworthy. And I, with my dormant account and new account, was not.
Soon after, both my accounts were permanently disabled. I tried a few more times to set up new accounts but faster and faster they were disabled as I set them up.
I tried on different computers, from different IP addresses. I even had my friend in Chicago try to set up an account in my name, instant disable.
Apparently, one Facebook black lists you that's it. They track you so well that you can never have another account,their AI will find you.
Seeming hopeless, this really threw a wrench in my plan. Ecommerce was basically dependent on Facebook ads. If I couldn't use the ads system, this whole thing would be over.
In telling some friends about it, I had a friend who worked for Google at the time saying he had some connections at Facebook. I shot him the account information and left it at that. I wasn't expecting much to come of it, all the horror stories online didn't end well.
I left it at that and decided to move on and see if I could find some alternatives
I decided to run a few Pinterest boards, really just to have them. Pinterest is really popular among young women, not my target audience, but it couldn't hurt.
Since I wasn't getting anywhere with facebook, I figured I could at least give pinterest a shot.
I set up a few boards and repinned a few items, while also contributing some of the content I created for instagram.
At this point, I decided to give their ad system a try. I wasn't getting anywhere on Facebook and needed to find an alternative.
I reused the adsets I had made for Facebook and let them run for a bit to see what would happen.
It didn't take long to see that I was barely converting at all. Not only no sales, but barely any traffic.
I turned the ads off until I could get some time to really dive into some research to hope to optimize Pinterest.
Email Marketing
I knew that if this business were to take off long term, a lot of the conversions down the road would come from email marketing. Email marketing often gets lost among all the information out there on starting an ecommerce business.
It's probably because email; is not as sexy as social media, and fancy ads. As well, email is an old medium that has a stigma of being an extinct path of communication.
However, If you dig around, you'll find a lot of reports from people finding a lot of success with email marketing. In fact, it's quite the opposite of what you might be led to believe. Some companies are actually generating most of their sales through solid email marketing campaigns.
Email lists are great because it is a group of people that have already validated that they are interested in your product. They just need a little push.
You have an identified pool of people that you can market to directly and already have a higher likelihood of conversion. We would be foolish not to capitalize on this. The trick becomes finding an effective way to build out the list.
First thing I needed to do was install an app to manage all my email marketing. I settled on Klaviyo. A few people I had been following swore by it and their businesses reflected a lot of success. As well, I found a lot of tutorials on how to use it.
With Klaviyo, I was able to link all my sign up forms to my master email list, and they had an integrated sign up form pop up builder in the app.
This was the sign up form I designed, and set it to pop up 4 seconds after a new visitor landed on the page.
The design was based on a promising template I found from another company.
Now that I had my sign up forms, I needed to create a welcome series. This would be a series of emails welcoming new sign ups and sending them offers to entice them to convert to customers.
These people have already established themselves as potential buys, they are just waiting for the right offer. Our job is to give them that offer.
The welcome series would be a set of 3-4 emails that would go out over the next week, with each email having increasingly better offers.
Klaviyo makes setting up this system super easy. The email series portion of their app allows you to set up what are essentially logic diagrams that dictate if and when the next email will be sent.
They have a variety of function gates that you simply click and drag onto a series map and each email address is fed through the series.
Here is an example of the first email they would receive after signing up:
This is just the start of the types of email campaigns you can launch with a good email marketing tool.
Long term, the idea would be to launch a regular newsletter with various pieces of content marketing, providing interesting articles that are congruent with the brand's vibe and that resonate with our subscribers.
With the preliminary welcome series set up, the next task was to drive sign ups. There are really three ways I thought of how to accomplish this.
Organic Traffic - I say “organic” but really any traffic coming to the site whether it's by stumbling across the site while browsing or being taken there by an ad.
Giveaway - Running a giveaway is a great way to generate leads, awareness and maybe nab a few sales in the process. You make entering the giveaway dependent upon signing up for the newsletter and it's a great start to an initial mailing list.
The Giveaway
One of the marketing tactics I had read about was running a giveaway. A giveaway is a great start to a base email list for marketing and build a social media following.
Entering in the giveaway requires submitting your email and following various social media accounts. As well, you theme your giveaway prize towards something that resonated with your target audience, hopefully increasing the likelihood of quality sign ups.
I had a good idea of who my target audience was, I just needed to get a prize that crossed over their interests but did not give the product away for free.
Since I was going for urban, adventurous types I decided to give a gift bag with an assortment of books about top cities to explore and tactical accessories. It included:
Thomas MacKay Key Clip
Maglite Keychain Flashlight
Explore Everything, by Dr. Bradley Garrett
LA Exploration Book
New Orleans Exploration Book
Chicago Exploration Book
I had read good things about KingSumo. Itis super easy to use and you can set up multiple parameters to control the giveaway:
Duration
Winners
Sharing Options
Bonus Entries
Integrations
You can embed a sign up tag directly into your website, so that any visitors will see it. As well, you can get a link to put into any social media post.
I had run a giveaway in the past, and I noticed that getting quality entries was a struggle. A lot of people who just enter giveaways would sign up, but not so many are interested in the brand.
What I really wanted to do was circulate an ad on Facebook for the giveaway and see if that had any effect on getting sign ups. At the very least, it would be a fairly strong offer to start crafting a good target audience for my facebook ad pixel.
This would be something I could build lookalike audiences off of later. So for the time being I held off on the give away until I resolved the Facebook issue.
Conclusion
Honestly, the Facebook issue lasted for over a month. I had explored other routes of advertising but Facebook really has a monopoly on social media advertising and not being allowed to use their platform really hindered my progress and killed my motivation.
The issue persisted for about 6 weeks before I finally had an account unlocked for whatever reason. I never actually heard back from the contact my friend went through at Facebook.
In that time, I did a lot of research on running ads and the accounts used to manage businesses. Supposedly, facebook has a social score for every account, and things like age of account, inactivity, friend count, fake names, and trying to run ads out of nowhere are all things that contribute to getting red flagged.
These things, in combination with Facebook's ruthless policies, can lead to permanent bans for people, with Facebook monitoring names, email addresses, IP addresses, Devices and more to ensure that banned persons cannot circumvent their bans.
Many ad accounts have been known to get permanently banned for poorly or completely unexplained reasons. So when I was finally granted access again, I was pretty worried that any misstep would cause me to get banned again. I decided to pause the project from a marketing standpoint. I set up my facebook profile as accurately as possible and slowly added some friends to try to improve that hidden social score.
The profile has just been sitting, hopefully earning credibility and when I'm up to it I will probably take another shot at running ads, when I feel like my account is more established and the risk is lower.
Over, the process was very positive. I learned a ton and was very proud of the little model brand I made. Unfortunately, nothing took off organically so the only sales came from a few friends who wanted to help out. However, the work put in was definitely quality enough for me to showcase so anyone else can learn from it.
But I guess that's how it goes, doesn't it? It's a rollercoaster, with ups and downs and roadblocks and straightaways. I don't plan on stopping here, I still think this whole ecommerce thing is really possible. It's just breaking through and finding that first real evidence of success, turning the corner so to say.