Transcription
This video will show you how I took a brand new Shopify store from 0 to $5.7 million in sales. So this store was started in February 2023, and you can see the first months we did on the store, uh, $1,300 in sales—a massive amount of money—but we scaled it to $783,000 in July, $655,000 in August, and this month so far, just in the first 10 days of this month, uh, it's already done $434,000. And I also created this so you know this is real; this is not like made up. Yeah, you can see this is all real. So let me take you back to the beginning when this store was started February 8th, 2023. Here, February 8th, you can see zero in sales. AOV, the first product that we were selling was $29.95, and so you can see the average order value is $29.95. From there, uh, you know, I made the first sale here on February 8th, and literally 1 hour later, I had to refund that sale because the person who made the order asked for a refund. Uh, that didn't, you know, that would stop a lot of people; that didn't stop me, and we started gradually scaling up the store. So last 365 days, this store went from those very small numbers to over, uh, 600, basically 600, $700,000 per month. And this month, this store is on track to do over $1 million per month. By the end of the year, it should be a few million in months in sales. And at the same time, we have drastically increased the average order value. This made a huge, huge impact on our ability to scale, and I'll talk about that in the video ahead.
So today, I want to share with you four main things that went into scaling the store to millions of dollars, and these four things are: number one, the product; number two, the funnel; number three, the Facebook and the creatives; and number four is the back end and fulfillment. For those of you that are new to my channel, my name is Alex Fatov. I've been in e-commerce for the last 8 years, generated over $100 million in sales, and here I'm sharing my experiences, my learnings, my mistakes, so you guys can accelerate the growth of your business. So let's get into it. Number one: one thing that we'll cover is the product, and this is where a lot of people are getting stuck. They're either taking too much time researching the product, or they're choosing the wrong product in the first place. For me, the factors to choose a winning product are those: number one, the product needs to be evergreen, something that I can sell throughout the year; number two, it has to solve a real problem in a customer's life because it's a lot easier to market and sell; number three, the product needs to have some "wow" factor, which means solving an existing problem in a new or a different way; number four, the product needs to have a good margin, and for me, it's at least 3x talks, which means if the product costs you $10 and shipping costs you an additional $5, I want to be selling that product for at least $45. That gives me enough margin to spend on customer acquisition, on marketing, on hiring some people for my team, and scale the business profitably. Also, the product needs to be compliant to advertise. I don't want to be dealing with Facebook bans, Facebook page bans, all of the things that come with selling non-compliant products. You don't want to be selling products that are too aggressive, making crazy claims, because that will lead to banned accounts, banned pages, and it will be very difficult for you to scale. You don't want to have situations like this happening to you: "Hello, Mr. Zach, can I sell my win product pills using Facebook ads? No." So you have to do everything in your power to avoid that Facebook slap. And one more thing that's super important: the product needs to be light; you don't want to be selling products that are heavy to ship. If your shipping cost increases, it will dramatically cut your margins, and it can make you unprofitable.
Now let me walk you through the whole process from start to finish, how I found this product, how I decided to brand this product, and how it went through the whole process. This product I'm currently selling, I found on Amazon. A lot of people think of Amazon as something where people go to compare prices or something where people only sell lower-cost products, but for me, Amazon is an amazing product validation because you can see the categories of products that are selling very well; that if you know how to brand those products better and sell those products more effectively, you can build an amazing business out of it. What I did was to go to the bestsellers category here on Amazon, and then I found the category which I liked the most, which is Beauty and Personal Care. So if I go here in the bestsellers in Beauty and Personal Care, I see so many different ideas of products I can sell. I see the dark spot remover soap, right? So this is, this by itself is an amazing product. Here I see some other products here, which is power repairing essence snail mucin, right? So this is something that I can sell for skincare problems. Uh, I see some other skincare problems. Uh, I see makeup remover. So this one is a little bit low price point, but here I'm looking at product categories and I'm seeing how big those categories are. So if I found, for example, this product here that has 64,000 reviews, this product most likely sold millions and millions of dollars, probably tens of millions of dollars. If I can brand this product better, I can sell it effectively using Facebook ads. Once I found the product idea and product category I want to penetrate, I'm going here to the tool called GetHook. This is the tool that we have internally built, and it has 7.6 million ads for different products and different categories. And here I'm looking for some advertisers that have cracked advertising on Facebook, and specifically the ones that are using UGC kind of ads, like this one here, that I know they're advertising profitably on a front end to get customers for their store. For example, if I take this brand here, I see exactly how many ads they're currently running. I see how many ads they launched this month. So this month so far, they already launched 1,000 ads to their store, which means they're advertising very aggressively, which means there is demand, and they're probably doing it at a profitable level. So just like that, I found the product category I want to enter; I found some examples of other advertisers. Now I can build my whole advertising strategy around that. One of the biggest mistakes people make when choosing products to sell is that they want to sell products that are not saturated or products that don't have a lot of competition, but this is a big mistake because you want to be selling products that have a lot of competition because those products have been validated by other people. And I built this whole template to help you choose products to sell effectively and also to rank them by different factors, like is it a problem-solving product? Is it high perceived value? Is it a good margin product? So all of these categories, you can simply rank the product by all of these categories, and then it will give you a total rank. So if this rank is high here, you can sell that product effectively, and if it's not high, then you have to keep searching for other products to sell. And if you want me to send this template to you, just comment "template" below this video, and I'll send it over.
Now, because you watched the video until this point, I want to share with you some ideas for products that you can sell. For example, this one here has a good margin, has a good landing page that you can mod and emulate, and you can sell this product effectively because there are tons of people—like literally millions of people—that are struggling with knee pain. Another product that you can sell is this one here; it's a UV mini vacuum. So this one here is $79, $80 actually, and this product has a good margin, the problem that it solves; it has all of the good factors that make it a good product. And another one here has a decent landing page on top with a very concerning ice from this lady here; it has a very nice design; it solves a real problem, which is skincare, which is like an evergreen category; you can sell these products throughout the year; it has good margin as well. If you click on this button, you'll see the price for this product is $79, so it has good margin, solves a real problem, light to ship, so it basically fills all of the categories that we just discussed.
So now, as we found the product to sell, we want to figure out how to effectively sell that product, and the best thing that you can do is to use funnels to sell your product. A lot of people are still driving traffic to regular product pages—very basic pages—they don't convert as well; they have low average order value. So if you want to be profitable with your advertising, you want to be utilizing funnels, and more specifically, you want to be utilizing advertorials and landing pages. These are the pages that educate people more about your product and the problem that you're solving, so it allows you to charge higher prices and also to have higher conversion rates. This is literally the funnel template that we're using to sell our products. You can see there's the description of the problem; there's some authority figure, which is this doctor here, which seems like AI-created; there is some description of the problem, why the problem happens in the first place; a lot of education about the problem; and only after that you click the second button here, and you see even more details, and you see different bundles of the product. So you don't see the price of the product until the second page of this funnel. This is crucial because a lot of people are just showing the price of their product right away, which means people are not educated enough on the problem, and they don't care which product that is; they're just looking at the price, and they're like, "Okay, I'll just go on Amazon and find the alternative." Whereas if you're using advertorials, you're educating customers a lot on the problem they're having, why other solutions haven't worked for them, and why your product is so special, and only after you did all of that, you're showing them the price for the product; you're showing them the different bundles that they can buy the product with. So now you can charge higher prices, and you will have higher conversion rates. So now if I click on one of these buttons here, I see all of the social proof; I see some of the results; I see frequently asked questions; I see all of the details about this product to make it sell effectively. This is a typical three-step funnel, and I highly recommend using it to sell your product.
Now, to show you how impactful funnels can be for your business, for example, we had an average order value of $43.50 back in April 2023, and after we started using funnels in the last 30 days, we increased the average order value to $92. This is more than a 2x increase in average order value, which means we are a lot more profitable with every sale that we are getting. When you're building your advertorial or your landing page, you want to make sure you have these four elements in place: number one is attention; you want to grab the attention with a headline and an image that gets people to see the rest of the page; number two, you build interest in your product; you do that by educating customers why they have the problem in the first place and why all of the previous solutions didn't work for them; number three, you're building the desire for your product because when you're introducing your product with an advertorial, you're building desire for your product because your product is so special and it has all of the things that other products do not; and number four, you're moving people towards action; you do that by creating nice bundles of your product, like I showed you in the previous page here, and by telling them that there's only so much of your product, so they have to hurry up in order to buy it before it sells out. Now, if you want to crack advertorials for your specific business, I prepared an amazing resource with examples, with breakdowns, with all of the things you need to put in place in order to make advertorials work for your business. Comment "advertorial" below, and I'll send it over to you.
The third element of this store that we'll be covering is creatives and Facebook ads. There are many different types of creatives you can choose to sell your product, and you have to choose those according to the type of product that you are selling. So if you're selling a simple jewelry product, you can just sell those with images, but if you're selling a gadget or a beauty product, most likely you will need a video that explains the benefits of your product, explains how this product is different from any other product people have tried or are thinking to try, and builds more desire for your product in the video before people even see the landing page. Out of all of the types of ads that work for us in our business, by far my favorite is UGC—user-generated content. This type of content looks like someone is explaining about the value of your product, what the product does, what benefit it has, without actively selling it, so it looks very organic and very authentic. To create these kinds of ads, you can reach out to micro-influencers. There are also different platforms that you can use to get micro-influencers to work for you. My favorite platforms for this are Backstage.com, Fiverr, and Upwork. There are also platforms like Billow, but I have heard mixed reviews about that. Alternatively, if you're low on budget and if you don't have a lot of money to spend, you can just use yourself or some of your family members or friends to shoot the ads for you. I have seen people using themselves, using their mom, using their sister, using their girlfriend to shoot the ads that are generating millions of dollars. So this is the example of the UGC ad; let me play it for you so you know exactly what I'm talking about. "This is how I got rid of my neck pain for less than $60. I was honestly surprised when this worked for me because I had pretty much tried everything: pain medication, massages, twice-a-week chiropractor visits." So you can see just in the first few seconds, this lady here disqualifies all of the previous solutions that people have tried: medication, chiropractor visits. You have to disqualify other solutions if you want people to believe that your solution is better. "Visits, sure, I feel some immediate relief, but it would never last for very long. I even tried like five different pillows: fluffy ones, flat ones, firm ones, but nothing. But then I found this really interesting-looking one, and it turns out the culprit really was my pillow. This new butterfly design gives you support in all the right places." So now it's an explanation of the product, all of the benefits, how it works. "I haven't felt this well-rested in years. Mornings are now a breeze because I just feel so rejuvenated and actually wake up pain-free, which I have not been able to say in a very long time. And then at night, I don't dread going to bed because I know I'll get great sleep. It's all thanks to my new DreamTe pillow. Get yourself one too; it will be the best thing you did for your sleep and your body." 40 seconds, pretty much explanation of the problem, explanation why other solutions haven't worked, and benefit-driven explanation of the product that's being sold.
Once you've sorted the creatives that you want to test with your product, now it's time to do some Facebook ads, and on the Facebook side, I like to keep everything super simple because everything comes down to the creative. The creative is like 80%, 90% of the success of your ad. A lot of people obsess about targeting options, about how complex their structure has to be, but if they just focus on the creative part and really making good ads, then none of that matters. All right, so here I am inside of the ad account. You can see the structure is extremely simple. I have all of the main campaigns here; there are only a few campaigns that are active. I have their retargeting one; I have sandbox; I have Advantage Plus, which is pretty much very broad; you just choose the country, you choose the language, you choose where you want to advertise in the ages, and nothing else. There's also one campaign here that's designed for creative testing because we never stop testing creatives on a weekly basis; we're testing at least 30 to 50 pieces of content, different creative pieces, because each one of those can potentially generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. So no matter how much success you have on Facebook, you can never stop testing new ads. From all of my campaign spend, I like to allocate 75% of the budget into scaling, 20% into testing new ads, and 5% into retargeting. And the real key to success with Facebook is to become data-driven. You don't want to be attached to some ad because you spent a lot of time creating it. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work; or if it works, let's just scale it. I have seen so many entrepreneurs wasting thousands of dollars because they're trying to make the ad work that wasn't good in the first place, but because they spent a lot of money creating that ad, they're emotionally attached to it, and they're trying to justify all of that effort. Let me let you in on a little secret: you don't decide which ad is going to work or not; your market decides. If something doesn't work, cut it, forget it, kill it. If something works, scale it as much as you can. And I would recommend, even if you're starting out, to start with a broad target because Facebook is so good at finding customers for your product that the only thing you truly have to worry about is your creative and your ads. For scaling, I like to keep it simple as well; there's vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is when you're increasing budgets on your high-performing campaigns; horizontal scaling is when you're trying to take the winning ad and you're trying to show it in front of different audiences. Personally, vertical is my favorite by far. There are seven other different ways to scale, and if you want the whole list of nine different ways that you can scale your Facebook ad campaigns, just comment "scale" below, and I'll send the whole SOP.
All right, now we get into interesting stuff, which is back-end and fulfillment. This is the part that most entrepreneurs neglect; they only focus on Facebook ads; they want to scale their campaigns as much as possible; they all want to post those juicy screenshots on Facebook and Instagram to impress other people, but at the end of the day, your back end is what makes or breaks your business. For us, we always want to maximize every customer that we have, and one of the things we do that is by utilizing email marketing. Email marketing should get you between 10% and 30% of extra sales with your store without spending an extra dollar on that. Wait, let me get a sip of coffee, and I'll show you exactly how to do that. So in the last 30 days, we've generated $163,000 purely with email marketing; we didn't spend a single extra dollar to get these sales, and if we didn't get it, our profit would be much lower. So entrepreneurs are leaving so much money on the table by not utilizing email marketing campaigns. There are two main things that you can do with your email marketing: number one is you can send campaigns to your whole email list, and you can promote different products; you can promote different offers; you can even validate new product ideas by sending emails to your email list; and number two, you can use flows; these are automated sequences that are set up once, but once they're set up, they'll trigger every time you get a new email subscriber or you get a new purchase. So with this store, we made $80,000 with automated sequences that we have set up months ago, so it's pretty much money coming in on autopilot. And you can see just one of the days here; we have generated $113,000 in sales purely by sending emails. This is how impactful it can be for your business. Another must-have channel you need to have to maximize your profitability is Google. Google is important because as you're advertising a lot on Facebook, a lot of people would go to Google and search for your brand name, and as they search for your brand name, you definitely want your brand to pop up, not just your competitor. This way, you can maximize the sales that you're getting for your business and also catch some of that overflow of traffic that you're generating. For us, in the month of August, we spent $22,000 on Google ads, and we have generated $41,000 back, and we wouldn't have this sales come in if we didn't use Google ads. This is an extra profitability boost that you can have for your business, which will allow you to spend more money on ads and become more profitable overall, so you can scale. Getting some extra sales with Google, extra sales with email, and all of those help you to scale further. Back in 2016, 2017, e-commerce was so much easier; you could just run Facebook ads, and you would be very profitable; we would get 30%, 40% profit margins, but now, in 2024, in order to maximize your profitability, you have to utilize every single channel available. And if you love this video so far, you probably will like another video here which covers the infrastructure that's needed to build an 8-figure e-commerce business. I covered team building, I covered fulfillment, I covered the supply chain, I covered creative sourcing systems. If you want to watch that whole video, just click here, and you'll be able to watch. I hope you guys like this video; I hope it gives you some inspiration or some clarification or insight. If you have any questions for me, just drop them below in the comments; I answer personally to each one of them, and I will see you guys in the next one.