A business partner and I have scaled an e-commerce business from nothing to about one and a half million dollars per month in sales with a very healthy profit margin. In fact we produce right now a profit of about 10 percent.
So if you do the math we’re doing about 150k and this last month we did about 160k a month in profit, and so I want to show you the number one secret that I think has helped us succeed and can help you succeed building your own e-commerce business.
First before I do that I want to show you that this stuff is real. So this is last month. I’m inside Shopify, this is last month. So this says compared to September 1 to September 30th. Right now it’s looking at October of 2020 and so if I just show you a couple more months here.
So I think our biggest month was back in August and you know things go up and down just based on seasonality. I think back in August yeah we did about 1.7 million dollars that month so far.
Let’s see the year to date, this is 2020. Year to date we’re at about 12 million dollars for this business. It’s up about 600, 700k, from last year. Let me show you something, so if I go back all the way to the beginning, this is when we really started scaling this thing.
If I go back to January of 2019 let me show you this. So this business was only doing about 17 grand a month and now we’re doing 1.7 million dollars. We’ve grown massively about 100x in just the past you know in less than two years. So there’s a lot of reasons we’ve been able to do this and I’m more than happy to share that stuff with you, but I do want to share with you the number one secret I believe that it takes to scale an e-commerce business.
If you try to do everything else first, if you try to expand your sales through you know Facebook ads, Instagram ads, social media posting, influencers, even doing it on amazon all that sort of stuff that we know how to do.
If you try to do all that stuff first without getting this one step right, your business is going to struggle.
Number one thing is having a super high quality product.
This right here is the actual product we sell. It’s a super healthy coffee product. I personally love it. I drink it every single day. As you can see right here this is the actual coffee, these are some cool custom mugs we got that have a little sort of affirmation on there. But this is a really good product. You know it’s certified organic beans, high elevation grown, shade grown, low acid like our customers absolutely love this product. If we didn’t have that piece nailed before we started doing all this other stuff it wouldn’t scale.
I mean right now we spend about 400,000 a month on Facebook ads alone and we’re also ramping up on Google. We’ve got like a massive subscription base. We did about 600,000 a month in subscription sales. We couldn’t do all that stuff if we didn’t have a really good product.
So before you get super excited about you know doing the latest and greatest on Facebook ads, and conversion optimization and all that kind of stuff. You’ve got to have a really good product that you personally love.
I believe ideally it’s a product that you can use on a regular basis because you’re going to be the best tester of the product when you start making improvements to it. Do you actually like it? If it’s a product that you know you’re selling that somebody else uses, but you don’t use, it’s going to be a little bit harder because you’re going to have to keep getting feedback from them.
As opposed to actually using the product on a daily basis ideally, or weekly basis, and you test it out you can make improvements. Do you like it? Do you not like it? You can ask friends and family to try it out and get their feedback. That’s going to make it way easier for you to win in your business before you start doing all the other stuff.
Another super important point is that you’ve got to own your own brand. If you’re out there doing crazy stuff like drop shipping, and getting products from aliexpress, and china that has nothing to do with you. They’re not your brand, there’s some generic product or worst case somebody else’s brand. It’s not a good position if you want to own the brand.
It’s not that hard, you can go out there and you can find suppliers for just about any product you come up with. A brand name and a logo, put that on the product ,make some improvements as you go and you’ll have way higher profit margins.
The most important thing is that you’re not just making money in the short term. Making income is great but what you really want to do is be building an asset at the same time. A business that can actually be sold. It’s a heck of a lot easier to sell a business when you own the brand because people will want to buy that brand. They can take those products and sell them all kinds of other places.
If you’re doing another business like drop shipping or something like that. People will already be selling those same products in a lot of other places. So there’s less of a reason for somebody to want to buy one of those businesses. You’ve got to sell a super high quality product and you have to own the brand.
Now the next major thing that I want to teach you which I’m not going to be able to do in this video so it doesn’t end up being super long, but I’ll teach it to you next time is how to create a one-page website that can do high sales volume.
Like we’re doing a million dollars plus a month and you can do it with one single page. You don’t need a massive online store, you don’t need tons of conversion optimization, you don’t need a fancy Shopify theme any of that kind of stuff. Literally just one page can help you sell as much as you want and that’s basically what we’ve done.
We’ve started to do some optimization on our store, but ninety 90% of our focus up until this point has been on a single page. I’ll show you what that looks like in the next video, for now what I’d like you to do is subscribe to our youtube channel so you make sure to get the next videos that I release talking about how we’ve been scaling this business.