I'm excited to share that I'm starting something brand new. I'm joining Xero Shoes as a Sr. eCommerce Engineer. 🎉
Continue Reading…Joining Xero Shoes
Category Archives: Discussion
Seek Opportunities to Cut Your To-do List
We live in a world where there's always incentive to do more.
- Write more blog posts for organic SEO
- Tweet daily
- Create Tiktoks to promote your products
- Write unique content for your premium email list
And after a while it just adds up and you're paralyzed with an unending to-do list. I've found that the more on my todo list the less I actually get done. The more I can focus my attention with a clear priority for the day the more productive I am.
Recently I've been looking for ways to cut down my to-do list. Not by evaluating each individual task, that takes a ton of time, but by preventing tasks from getting on my list in the first place. I want to create rules so I know where I should spend my time.
Continue Reading…Highlights From ECF Live 2023
This article originally appeared on eCommerceFuel.
I’d never experienced anything like it. I was standing inside a real aircraft carrier surrounded by fighter jets while Maverick himself, THE Top Gun, took photos with smiling eCommerce entrepreneurs. With that perfect swagger and smirk I could have sworn Tom Cruise must have taken a break from filming Mission Impossible 8 to schmooze at the Opening Party for eCommerceFuel Live.
Last week over 300 eCommerce Fuel members gathered in San Diego for eCommerceFuel Live. With an exclusive guest limited to business owners who bring in more than seven figures, this is the top event of the year for many of the eCommerce entrepreneurs who attend.
If you’ve spent any time in the eCommerce space, then you know there’s a veritable glut of networking and informational events for online entrepreneurs. But only eCommerceFuel Live gives its guests the opportunity to mingle with the cream of the crop. By making this a private event for the most successful business owners in our already-vetted community, we guarantee each person in the hall is a peer with top tier knowledge and experience in their field.
Continue Reading…ECommerce Financing: How to Grow Your Business When You Need Cash
This article originally appeared on eCommerceFuel.
One of the perks of an eCommerce business is that you can often get started with very little upfront costs. But at some point, nearly everyone with a growing business has to consider financing. A monetary boost empowers you to invest in essential resources for your company, such as inventory, marketing, and technology.
Without adequate financing, your eCommerce business may struggle to compete or fail to reach its full potential. In this article, we will explore the basics of financing for eCommerce businesses, what financing options are on the table, and when you might use each of these financing options to help you grow.
Continue Reading…Amazon FBA or Shopify? Which Fulfillment Network Is the Best?
If you are are an eCommerce merchant you've probably heard about fulfillment networks or 3rd party logistics (3PLs). Fulfillment networks like Amazon FBA & Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) are incredibly powerful. If you can afford the cost they’ll store, pack, and ship all of your orders for you.
They handle an entire area of your business for you. For a merchant this is 25-35% of your responsibility. So being able to outsource this obligation and focus on other areas of your business can be massively helpful.
But calculating if a 3PL is worth the cost is complex. Shipping costs themselves are a nightmare of complexity. If you have more than 1 item in your store you will probably just understand the range of shipping costs to get several items from point A to point B. Trying to figure out a fair cost for the 3PL on top of regular shipping costs is challenging to say the least.
And there are challenges beyond just costs. You have to order and send in your products according to their schedule and in their preferred formatting. With all of that overhead switching 3PLs is painful and costly.
So fulfillment networks have some serious costs. But they also allow eCommerce entrepreneurs to live that idyllic lifestyle where you order piña coladas on the beach while your business continues to generate revenue. 🏖
Let’s look at the costs, procedures, and the tradeoffs for two of the biggest fulfillment networks: Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) and Amazon FBA so you have a baseline understanding of when and how you'd set up a 3PL for your own e-commerce store.
Continue Reading…The Secret to Overcoming Creative Blocks
One of my favorite challenges at my job is learning how to be a good manager. You might have heard the expression, “people join companies and leave bosses”.
My goal as a new manager is to not be the reason someone leaves.
It's challenging to motivate, inspire, and direct people to do their job while also holding them accountable. And it's especially challenging in a creative field. You need to be in the right headspace to create.
A few weeks back one of my teammates had a creative block and was falling behind on a project. I took note to find a solution to help her get over her creative block in a hopeful and inspiring way.
Continue Reading…2021 Wrap Up
Another year is coming to an end. This one is a bit more bizarre than most with lots of job updates and still being affected by COVID-19.
Continue Reading…What I Learned From Nexcess
It's almost the end of 2021 and I moved on from Nexcess. I created a new LinkedIn Learning course about Speeding Up Your WordPress site and then I joined Paid Memberships Pro. That's a lot of new work things in a year.
But before I get into why I joined PMPro I want to share some of the things I learned at Nexcess. Because I learned a lot of valuable lessons:
- I dove deep into the technical aspects of speed with WordPress & Magento
- I created new onramps to the product
- I ran some A/B tests on pricing & product pages
- I learned how corporations look at numbers
2020 Year in Review
2020 has been… a lot. I generally don't think of years as good or bad. But I do think 2020 is uniquely bad. We had (and are still going through) a global pandemic.
Continue Reading…Calculating Subsidy Costs
One of the things I get to do at Nexcess is influence when & how much we discount our products. There are some obvious dates like Black Friday and the New Year. But there are also less obvious dates like the end of summer, Halloween, and WordPress' birthday.
Should we put our products on sale? And if so, by how much?
Continue Reading…