Exposing the Best E-Commerce Secrets with Industry Expert Matt Edmundson
Jan 02, 2024Season 1Episode 210
Firing The Man
Are you eager to discover the secrets of successful e-commerce from an industry expert? Matt Edmondson, a seasoned entrepreneur with a whopping $75 million in worldwide sales to his name, joins us for a candid chat. Matt's journey into e-commerce, which began in the late 90s, is rife with insights and lessons that are crucial for any budding e-commerce entrepreneur. He offers a glimpse into the top performers in the industry, particularly in the beauty and health supplement space, and emphasizes the importance of customer centricity and company culture.
How do you turn a hobby into a revenue stream? We navigate this exciting question, sharing our own experiences and insights. From discussing the impact of outsourcing paid media on cost acquisition to dishing out advice on product selection for nascent e-commerce brands, we touch on all the essential elements. Matt also shares his experience of setting up a wood shop as a hobby and the steps he took to transform it into a business opportunity, offering valuable advice on monetizing hobbies.
The future of e-commerce, the traits of successful entrepreneurs, and emerging trends like live shopping and podcasting - we cover it all. Matt even sheds light on his innovative e-commerce cohort and how it offers workshops on seven key areas of e-commerce. This episode is a windfall of knowledge and inspiration for anyone passionate about e-commerce or simply curious about it. Tune in and join us on this thrilling journey into the ever-evolving world of e-commerce.
Are you eager to discover the secrets of successful e-commerce from an industry expert? Matt Edmondson, a seasoned entrepreneur with a whopping $75 million in worldwide sales to his name, joins us for a candid chat. Matt's journey into e-commerce, which began in the late 90s, is rife with insights and lessons that are crucial for any budding e-commerce entrepreneur. He offers a glimpse into the top performers in the industry, particularly in the beauty and health supplement space, and emphasizes the importance of customer centricity and company culture.
How do you turn a hobby into a revenue stream? We navigate this exciting question, sharing our own experiences and insights. From discussing the impact of outsourcing paid media on cost acquisition to dishing out advice on product selection for nascent e-commerce brands, we touch on all the essential elements. Matt also shares his experience of setting up a wood shop as a hobby and the steps he took to transform it into a business opportunity, offering valuable advice on monetizing hobbies.
The future of e-commerce, the traits of successful entrepreneurs, and emerging trends like live shopping and podcasting - we cover it all. Matt even sheds light on his innovative e-commerce cohort and how it offers workshops on seven key areas of e-commerce. This episode is a windfall of knowledge and inspiration for anyone passionate about e-commerce or simply curious about it. Tune in and join us on this thrilling journey into the ever-evolving world of e-commerce.
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
Speaker 2:
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. On today's episode, we are joined by Matt Edmondson. Matt is an experienced e-commerce entrepreneur and coach with over 20 years of experience in the industry. He has generated over 75 million in worldwide sales and his coaching clients have a combined turnover of over 100 million. His passion is helping businesses grow and succeed online and specializes in customer centricity, company culture and all e-commerce related topics. We're very excited to have Matt as part of the show.
Speaker 3:
Welcome, matt Well thanks for having me, man. It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:
Thank you, as are we. So, to start things off, can you please share with our listeners a little bit about your background and your path to becoming an entrepreneur in the e-commerce space?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, sure, e-commerce was one of those things that I sort of stumbled across by accident In the late 90s. I was working and yes, it is that long ago, I appreciate this. A long time ago I was working for a friend of mine and I started what we would now call a side hustle. Back then we just called it a second job, but we called it a side hustle now and it all started when a friend of mine asked me if I knew anybody that did websites. I mean to heard about these website things and figured that they needed one. And did I know any company that could do one? And there was only one company that I knew that did websites back then and they were great but they were expensive. And this was back in the day when you had to write all the code out in no pattern and stuff like that so crazy money. I said to him well, listen, if you're like, you pay me, I'll figure it out, and just let's see what happens. And that was just it really, and that's never looked back since. We started doing websites and then E-commerce started becoming a thing and so I thought, well, let's just build our first E-commerce store and see what happens. And I called a friend of mine who sold. He had a traditional catalog business, you know, selling tanning products to tanning salons. These are kind of lotions and motions you put on your face to kind of help you tan better. And I said to him listen, I'm going to build an E-com site. I don't know what to sell online and I just need some products. Man, can I sell your stuff? And if I sell any of it I'll buy it from you as and when I sell it, so I don't have to buy a lot of stock. He said that'd be great. Six months later he'd bought that business from me and that website. It sort of took off a little bit. And yeah, that's how I started out on E-com and that's when I sort of fell in love with it. You know, when I started waking up richer than when I went to sleep, it was a wonderful thing.
Speaker 4:
Nice. So, Matt, glad to have you on the show. My first question is you know you shared a little bit of your background that you guys started in. What attracted you to E-commerce Like, was it the challenge or trying to figure it out, or was there another piece of maybe, maybe passive income, waking up in the morning being richer than you were? When you come, you know what attracted to you to specifically the E-commerce space.
Speaker 3:
It was this whole idea that you could sell stuff online without having a storefront, you know, like a shop, where you I didn't retail in sort of some of my previous jobs, and retail was hard work We'd done some catalog work in some of my previous jobs. You know where people would. They would send in all, they would fax in there I mean again going back a few years, isn't it they would send you faxes with orders and you would send out an invoice and they would write you a check and you'd pay and the whole thing would take week. And so E-commerce this is back in 2002, was when we did our first website. So there was no Shopify, there was nothing out there, really, and so it was. It was part challenge Could I write code that enabled us to put product online? And it was part curiosity, as in, you can really sell stuff on the web and people will buy it. Are they nuts? And I mean, I was obviously doing it myself and so I thought this thing was great. So, yeah, it was. It was curiosity, with no real sense of direction, no real sense of I'm going to, you know, create a life out of this. It was just, I just saw something that was intriguing and just wanted to have a go.
Speaker 2:
Really, Very nice. Now, your experience in the industry towers both Ken and I even combined, and so I'm really interested in asking you this next question so, when you look at all the brands that you've either created or or work with, what stands out about the top 10% of performers? Is there any characteristics? Maybe it's price point, maybe it's size, maybe it's industry, but what? What stands out about the top 10% of performers?
Speaker 3:
So, just thinking through one of that, in my head there's a number of things that I seem to have personally done well with, and that is to sell small, repeatable products. So we did well in the beauty space so that business a couple years ago. I'm currently involved in this, which is a health supplement space Again, small, repeatable product. Right, this is stuff that people want to buy time and time again, and the reason why they work well for us, I think, is because company as an organization, I suppose one of the things that we've we're good at, one of the things that I think is super important is to focus on the customer relationship, because you know this, amazon's great, but Amazon, in effect, is a commodity and it's a big old supermarket. There's no personality behind it, and so we're kind of like well, how do we do the customer aspect of it, the customer journey, the customer story, how do we do that really well. And so, if I think about the stuff that we've done, if I think about the brands that and that I've worked with, the ones that tend to do really well are the ones that sell repeatable products and do the customer service, the customer journey, the whole retention side of life, very, very well.
Speaker 2:
Can we expand on that a little bit more? I'm sure there's somebody listening that does have one of these consumable, repeatable products. What have been some ways that you've, after that first purchase, how do you get them coming back for more?
Speaker 3:
A million dollar question, isn't it? I should write a book on this and make a fortune. I think, fundamentally, you have to understand your customer. You have to understand what it is that they're really buying. So, if I take the beauty business, we started selling products in 2006 online and it was price discounted on that website, right. So we grew because we discounted, but it wasn't a long-term solution I don't think to being established for a while. So we changed our strategy and we spent a little while understanding the customer and we sort of dove deep and we asked ourselves questions like what is it that the customer is actually buying? I know they're buying a moisturizer and a cleanser, but what is it they're actually buying? Because you can get a moisturizer and a cleanser from the supermarket for five bucks. Why are they coming to my website and spending 80? What's the reason behind that? And we could talk about the science of skincare, we could talk about the results of it, but fundamentally it came down to a few key things, one of which, quite high up on the list, was they were buying a gift for themselves. They were treating themselves. You spend 80 bucks on face cream because you want to treat yourself. You know the L'Oreal thing. You're worth it that whole. I just want to feel better about myself. And so when we realized this, we changed a lot about our business in the sense of you take the packaging, for example. Before we realized this we were sending out customers goods just in a plain brown box, just wiped it in a box, threw in some plastic you know the plastic, abal things and sent it out. And we thought we were doing well, because all our competitors were sending them in the jiffy bags, you know the padded envelopes, and so that box was a would arrive. And so we thought, well, let's upgrade it to a box and at least you know it arrives in better shape, kind of thing. When we realized that we were sending out gifts, we were like, actually what we need to do is create an opening experience, like you're opening a gift. So we added an extra flap onto the cardboard box and on that inner flap we printed this lovely message about how remarkable they were as a human being and celebrated you know being human. And as they opened both flaps it just felt like you were opening a gift a bit more. You know you were unwrapping something and then inside everything was covered in tissue paper. So you kind of had to open the tissue paper. So then it stopped to really feel like a gift. And we also realized that you know our brand values we like to have a bit of fun, we like to have a bit of a laugh. So we thought, how do we? Plastic bubbles don't really speak gift, but we know we needed to put something in there to keep the products from moving around. So we looked at that you know the shredded paper like the bird's nest stuff. But that was crazy expensive and we thought, well, that would make it a bit gifty. Should we, you know, put perfume in there? And then one day I had a bit of an idea. We were brainstorming with the team and I just had this crazy idea, and I can't tell you where it came from or why I had this idea, but I thought I wonder what would happen if we use popcorn. And so we bought some popcorn machines. We tried all kinds of different corns to figure out the best one, and, lo and behold, we found that popcorn was this magical kind of substrate for one, to a better expression, to these boxes. And so we would. We had popcorn machines going constantly in the warehouse If you wanted a low calorie snack. It was a place to go, man. And so we would pack their products. So we'd put the beauty products in a box. We'd fill that box with popcorn, stop them moving around. We'd rep all that in tissue paper, put a little sticker on there because we had to do it after a while saying please don't eat the popcorn, it was not produced in a food safe environment, but do give it the birds and it is bi-degradable. And because sustainability was becoming a bigger thing, we added the extra flaps, we changed the tape and so it became this sort of gift that was more sustainable, more environmentally friendly. And when we it wasn't just that, but when we started doing things like that, that's when our retention rate became way higher than the industry. I mean way, way higher. That's when customers started posting pictures of their packaging on Facebook, which they'd never done before. I mean, why would you? The only time you'd ever put a picture of a box on social media was because the box was too bloody big. Do you know what I mean? You'd send out a tiny product in a massive box. So you only got those sort of complaints. But yeah, we started doing things like that. So that's what I mean about becoming a bit more customer focused, understanding what the customer is shopping for, what they want, what is it they really are after, and how can we orient our entire process around that to bring that out for them.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, I like that. That's like that's next level experience. You know, opening, opening something that you just bought, a gift, and so that's, that's genius. I've never heard of popcorn being used, and so I'm going to, I'm going to stash that one away for rainy days. I really like it though. Matt, you said the retention rates. You started noticing, noticing retention rates increasing when you changed the customer experience. Did you also track cost of acquisition for a customer and then see if that that decreased? No-transcript.
Speaker 3:
I think. I mean, we kept cost of acquisition pretty much the same. So, new customer acquisition we were like this is our budget, let's go and get them. Cost of acquisition went up and down because Google was becoming, you know, google shopping was getting more and more competitive, facebook was getting more and more competitive. So we were making these improvements but we weren't really seeing them in reality because everybody was putting their prices at. God bless them. So one of the things that did make a massive difference to cost of acquisition and the reason why I'm slightly hesitant is there was a massive step change for us with, and that's when we stopped doing all the paid media internally or in-house and we outsourced it. And I made that decision to outsource paid media and we were spending tens of thousands every month with Google and Meta, and so to make the decision to outsource it was not easy, but when we did, we got an agency involved, absolutely transformed what we were doing, bought in twice as much for half the money. It was incredible, really, and we quickly realized that we'd become really good at certain elements of e-commerce and we'd not kept up with paid media and the rules of it because there was so much other stuff to keep on top with and it was just kind of it was over there and it was working, it was maintaining itself. But yeah, when we got another agency involved, that was just eye-opening and so I've never gone back. We've never done paid media in-house. We still do some paid media in-house. Let me just be totally transparent and honest. For some companies, for our main major e-con websites, it's all outsourced.
Speaker 4:
Fair enough. So yeah, so it sounds like you brought in an expert and they doubled it and also decreased the ROAS already increased ROAS, so that's awesome, yeah. My next question is this is for, let's say, someone listening that they haven't started a brand yet. Maybe they got a full-time job. They're just kind of listening, kind of kicking the tires on, you know, starting what you call a second job, matt, or a side hustle, and so what advice would you give them in terms of product selection? How do they find out what brand to start, what product, what niche? What do you advise on starting? I?
Speaker 3:
tend to tell people several things about products. So if I'm looking for a product to sell online, I'm looking for something that's small and repeatable, because that's what we do well with those kind of products. I'm not saying this is true for everybody, but for me I'm looking for something that is small, repeatable and sales between 20 and 75 book. They're the sort of the sweet spots, I think. The way I tend to have people do this, though, if they really want to do it and sort of generate some product ideas, look to you know, have you ever read the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, and he has this sort of Venn diagram of what are you really passionate about, what can you be the best in the world at and what drives your economic engine? You know these sort of things to think about. I don't think they're particularly bad things to think about when it comes to products, and for me, there are two key elements about any product. So if I'm brainstorming a whole lot of products, right, I'm looking, I can look at my desk around me, I can look at my hobbies, I can look at things that I'm passionate about, and I can write everything down. The one thing we then have people do is plot out every single product into a matrix and that matrix has, on the vertical axis, we track. Let me get this right way around in my head. I don't want to tell you the wrong way around. We track demand, or is demand horizontal? Any of it doesn't really matter. On one of the axis we track demand and on the other axis we track knowledge. So, horizontal axis, we track demand. Sorry, vertical axis, we track knowledge. And what do I mean by that? So let's, I have on my desk. What do I have on my desk here? I have a Yeti cup. Right Now I can't sell Yeti because obviously I'm not a Yeti distributor, but let's say I think I really like Yeti. I want to get into selling Yeti. Is it small? It's small and she's irrepeatable. No, these things last a lifetime. But there are other things that I can sell with it. So it becomes a bit more interesting. Let me plot this on the demand and knowledge graph. So how much demand is there for this stuff? Well, there's a lot of the moment, and they're doing it. I saw, I saw an ad yesterday that they're doing sorry, that's my, let me just turn that off. I saw that on Facebook. Yeti had. Who did? They have Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, the Formula One drivers, buying something from their store in Austin just after the Austin Grand Prix, and so obviously the demand is there, right? So you kind of go well, that's great, because why would I want to sell a product that's not in demand? You know question number one. And so I had a guy come to me and he said, matt, I've got 500,000 fidget spinners. Can you help me sell them? You know the little things you're having your hand that you kind of fidget with. I was like no, he's like why? And I said, well, because the demand was two years ago. No one's going to care, right, just get rid of them as a job lot, sell them to someone like you. That goes, oh, I get half a million spinners and leave it at that. So you want to track demand, but on the vertical axis we track knowledge. What do I mean by that? You want to ask yourself a key question, and that is this how much do I know about this product? What's my personal knowledge level like? And if my personal knowledge is low, how easy is it to learn to become an expert in this product? And I'll tell you why this matters. So I don't know a whole great deal about Yeti mugs. I just I know I like them, but that's about it. But it's not going to be rocket science to learn a lot about them. Yeti may disagree with me, but I don't think that there's going to be an awful lot to learn. So I could increase my knowledge factor quite high, and this was when we started doing beauty. The first thing that we did was we invested a lot in the staff growing their knowledge factor, and the reason we did this was one think about customer experience. Good customer experience comes when you answer customer questions. So they've got a question, they've got a query. You want to know how to answer that well. Two, this is how you differentiate yourself from someone who is selling that exact same product on Amazon, because I can give much more knowledge and much more education about a product to a customer on my website than I can on Amazon, and that is super, super powerful, let me tell you. And so it drives content marketing. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I do. So, coming back to your original question, what would my advice be? It's a more repeatable product that's sort of $20 to $75 range and that's in high demand and that you either know about or can learn a lot about. So if you're into golfing, you want to sell golf gadgets. That's great. I'm never going to do that because I know nothing about golf. I appreciate this sacrilege. I could care less about golf. It's just not on my radar, so I never want to get involved in that because I don't want to take the time to learn. Do you see what I mean? Now, there might be high demand for products, but it's just not my bag. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's my advice to people. No, that's excellent. I like it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I really like how you're factoring in the two things, both demand and your knowledge. I really like that. I've never heard it phrased that way, but it makes a lot of sense. So, moving on, read a piece of content that you put out about the seven critical elements to e-commerce. Can you share with the audience? What are those elements and where most brands get it wrong.
Speaker 3:
So the seven elements for me. You start with product and you start with brand. So product, like we've talked about, get in the right products to sell. And this, I think, is probably where most startups get it wrong. I don't see it as much these days, but it used to be the case of you just go to Aliexpress or Alibaba or some site and you'd go and find a product like I don't know sunglasses or hairbrushes or something that was ridiculously cheap. You'd buy them for like 20 cents. You put them on your website for 20 bucks, thinking, man, I'm making $19.80 there. So that's an awesome product sell. The problem is no one wants to buy it. There's no demand and, going back to my knowledge graph, you know nothing about them. So, sure, there's one or two stories where people do exceptionally well for a moment in time, but there's no real longevity in it and most out of 10,000 websites, 9,997 of them don't work right. So you start with product and you also start with brand. They're the first two stages. Some people start with products and then move on to brands. Some people start with brand and move on to product. But brandish is understanding who you are as a company and it's understanding who your customer is and then understanding that overlap. So the example is popcorn. I've understood our customers and their need for gift, but also their need for fun and their need for environmental, you know, sort of sensibilities Crossed out over with what we were doing and popcorn was born and that came out about brand. So they're the first two areas and brand is more than logo. Brand is more like, you know, it's just story, isn't it? It's the customer story. We move on to tech stack. So what technology do I need to bring this to pass? We've got marketing would be number four. So how do I get? How do I drive people to this website? I've just gone and built Number five. How do I optimize it? So people are on my website? How do I get more of them to buy? Number six is all about the customer experience, and for me that's. I define that as everything that happens after entered their credit card details and click buy. What happens from that point onwards? We label as customer experience, because for me, this is where, out of every company I've ever done coaching with nine times out of 10, this is where the biggest opportunity lies, is in this part, here, because there's so much information out there about optimization. There's a lot of information about marketing. I mean, technology is easy, just go get a Shopify site. I mean it's. There's a lot of things which are now taken care of. The people have done well because there's so much information freely available. So the biggest opportunity is, I think, in most sites that have been up and running for a little while, is the customer experience. What happens once someone has put their credit card details in. And then the seventh area I call yo-yo. This is all about growth. This is all about repeatability. How do I get people back time and time again? How do I, how do I then grow this into being one in the top sort of 2, 3% of my industry?
Speaker 2:
Matt, from one woodworker to another, I noticed on your website that you list this as one of your hobbies, yes, and so my question is is this something that you've ever thought about turning into a brand? Yeah, the second part of this question is what advice would you give to someone who wants to turn a hobby into a job?
Speaker 3:
Well, yes, um, have I thought about something? So my a bit of backstory. I used to sell saunas and steam rooms before I got into e-commerce, and so I was never on the tools, I never did the in-stores. I did do all the designing and I've designed some really funky spas around the world, which is great. And when I got married, we had no money and we needed a new kitchen. So I just literally, when I got some 2x4s and built an entire kitchen out of solid wood and just fell in love with it, it was great. You know, here I am 25 years later still messing around with things in wood. How would I monetize it? That's a really interesting question. So we, when I saw my beauty business two years ago, we moved warehouse and so we're in a new, newer warehouse which has got a sort of a bigger space. I took a corner of that warehouse, I walled it off and I turned it into a wood shop, like a nice sized little wood shop, and I bought some new tools. It was a little treat to myself for selling the business. I built this and it's there. I'm down there a lot, I'm in the warehouse obviously quite a bit, and I'm in my wood shop quite a bit, especially the weekend. So what we've done is we've just set up some GoPro cameras in that wood shop. So all I'm gonna do is make stuff out of wood and film it and start to build a YouTube channel Just showing people what I've done and how I've done it, to build up some kind of audience. Then I will. And you understand, I don't need to make a living out of this just yet, so I'm in no rush. I still wanna maintain it as a hobby. But the plan is simple we'll just grow an audience and once we've got the audience then I can figure out what to sell to them. So maybe the plans, the woodworking plans, I think selling digital products for me is again we were talking about products earlier and sort of knowledge and demand and repeatable products. If I can sell digital products, that's the elixir, isn't it? It's just like that's the top of the tree. If I can do digital products and so we'll probably do plan downloads, would I actually sell the furniture? Would do? I think there's any money to be made in making stuff out of wood and selling it? Yes, do I want to do that? No, not right now. You know, like we were talking about earlier, I wanna keep it as a hobby. I don't wanna be in the woodshop making chopping boards all day and, to be honest with you, way more money selling healthcare supplements than I ever would selling chopping boards online, if that makes sense, I think I'm more interested in building the audience. So in 10 years time, if I wanna step away from this, that's something that I can do. I've got an audience and it's there. What would my advice be to people who are looking to turn a hobby into an income? First I would ask the sensibility of that. And what do I mean by that? Because the thing for me about woodwork apart from the fact it's physical, right, because everything in my life is pixels. So when I touch wood and I pick up a saw, it's real and I can carve it and touch it. If I turn that into a business, a manufacturing business, it stops being a hobby. And so then I have to find something to replace the woodwork as a hobby, because then it all becomes about business, and there's a reason we have hobbies. It's part of our mental health, it's part of our well-being. So first I'd ask the sensibility of it. But that aside, can you make money out of your hobbies? Oh, absolutely. You can do some really good stuff, you know, and I think if you can find a way to monetize a hobby, then great. Depending on the niche, depending on what you're doing. Like my daughter, for example, she loves to crochet. She crocheted some funky things, and so the easiest thing for Zoe is to stop building up an Instagram following and then sell the crochet patterns. Now she doesn't need to make a lot of money. She's 16 years old. If she makes 400 bucks a month, she is, I mean, she's happier than a pig instinct, right? I mean, it's not like she's not paying a mortgage or anything. But I think, build your audience, figure out something that you can sell to them, and just as long as you can enjoy it and maintain it, it's when it starts becoming there's always that tension isn't there, when it grows between what point, do I leave my full-time job to now work this full-time or do I hire somebody? There's always that tension at that point and it's not a straightforward decision. I think if you can do it, great. But just bear in mind it's a hobby for a reason.
Speaker 2:
Very good advice. Advice I wish I would have gotten Probably oh, this was a while ago, but I won't call it failed. It was a business that I learned a lot of lessons in.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, for sure. So, Matt, before we get into the fire round, are there any questions that we didn't ask you that we should have? There's probably thousands of them, right?
Speaker 3:
How about the top one? Here's the thing that I'm getting asked about the most at the moment. You know, people ask me what is happening in e-commerce that I should be aware of and that I should pay attention to, and there's two things that I think are really interesting opportunities at the moment. Number one depending on your site, obviously, and depending on what you're selling. I think live shopping is a big deal and I think it's still in its very early days and I think if you can get into live shopping in some way, you could positively clean up. In a similar vein to that, I think, podcasting. If podcasting makes sense for your e-com business, I would set one up tomorrow because of the power of it and what I've seen with podcasting in e-commerce. So I think live streaming, podcasting, that whole content creation thing, especially around Black Friday even just live streaming doing a YouTube live on your website, embed the YouTube live onto your website and just see what happens and test it and see how it works. Honestly, it's one of those things where I'm surprised that more people aren't doing it, and I know it's real big sort of Asiaway and we've not really done it here, and that surprises me, especially if you sell things like both thing. You know where people want to see it, touch it, feel it. Yeah, I just think live shopping, podcasting, that whole side of things is good from a content point of view. And the second thing that I would say is there's been a move, I think, and you've got what I call traditional e-commerce right. So you have a product, you sell it and the customer needs it. They're going to come back to your site, they're going to buy it. There was then a move to subscription. So you go, well, you come to my website once you subscribe to a product and I'll send it to you many times and subscriptions right. The evolution of that, I think, is membership, and so how can you utilize membership in your e-commerce business? That fascinates me and really, really intrigues me, because if you take something like Amazon Prime, one of the things that we all mentally ascend to, we all know it in the back of our head it's not a surprise if you go shopping for a product and you're on Amazon. You know, really, without searching, depending on the product, the chances are it's cheaper somewhere else because Amazon are no longer the cheapest, but you just don't care because you've paid your Amazon Prime membership, you know, and there's this sort of opportunity cost now of not using it, you're like, well, I've paid my 80 bucks, I need to get my value out of it. I mean, if the price differential is significant, you won't do it, but you are willing to pay more for a product to a site where you're paying some kind of membership than to a site that you're not. If that makes sense, there's an opportunity cost to it and you're more likely to use that site going forward, and this is one of the reasons I think Amazon has been really successful. So, understanding how that works for you and your e-com business, that would be something I would be spending a lot of time thinking about. So, yeah, the two things that I'd be thinking about your content creation, especially live shopping and podcasting. And then how do I incorporate some kind of membership in this site that's going to add three times the value of what I'm charging to the customer and that will really give you some longevity.
Speaker 4:
Excellent. Yeah, I like both of those. Those are high level forward thinking and I agree also.
Speaker 2:
Before we get into the fire round, could you talk a little bit about the e-commerce cohort and what that is?
Speaker 3:
Sure, I'd love to, and so the e-commerce cohort is a monthly membership group that we run. Going back to my what do you sell? We sell, so it's our membership notice that word. And also it's a digital project Product notice that word. And so it's just me taking my medicine. But we have a membership group, something called e-commerce cohort. It's not expensive. It's like 14, 15 bucks a month to be a member, and what we do every month is we have an expert come and deliver a workshop in a topic to do with e-commerce around those seven areas that I mentioned earlier, and so we have that. When we do recording, you can come and join it. We live stream it into the group so you can ask guest questions and all that kind of stuff. So it's a fun little group, a fun little community membership group that, if you're an e-commerce, you should definitely think about joining.
Speaker 4:
Awesome, thank you. We'll pull links to those in the show notes. Matt, are you ready for the fire round?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, absolutely not. No, but let's do it anyway. What is your favorite book? The book that I read the most would be the Bible, so I'm gonna go with that one. Okay, awesome. What are your hobbies? Would work and converting my van. I'm trying to convert a van at the moment, so yeah, they're the things that I would do.
Speaker 4:
Okay, is that, like converting it front until like a liveable on the road type travel there.
Speaker 3:
Kind of. So it's more I'm at a certain phase of life. I'm at a certain age, gentlemen, I'm not going to lie. And so my kids two of my three kids have left home. They're both at university. And Zoe, my daughter, she's not far away. And so life is at a very different stage. And two years ago I got rid of the sports car and I bought a van and just loved it. And what I want to do, what I'm actually doing, is in the back of the van. I'm making like a little mobile office type thing. So I'm setting up some monitors in there so I can drive the van down to the river here in Liverpool or up to a place in the UK called the Lake District, which is just the most beautiful place on earth, and I can park the van up and I can sit and I can ride and I can work and just totally enjoy it, and so there'll be a bed in there. So if I want to sleep there, you know, I'll just go up the legs for a few days. But it's more of an office. But I want to do it in such a way that I can still use it as a van. I still want to be able to throw an A before sheet of plywood in the back and it'll be fine, you know. So yeah, it's a multi-use vehicle. Let's just put it that way. I like it. Yeah, that's awesome. It's great when it's finished.
Speaker 4:
It's just taking a long time.
Speaker 3:
It's on the project list right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is just the thing about my van is because it's my van, it's not as important as my wife's projects that go on my list.
Speaker 4:
It's on the bottom of the list, right, all right. What is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?
Speaker 3:
One thing that I don't miss about working for the man being tied to somebody else's agenda. So you have to bear in mind I've been an entrepreneur. Now I've been working for myself. 22 years ago the works landscape looked entirely different. Right, there was none of this hybrid working, there was none of this fighter suggested to my boss. I want to spend two days a week working at home. Man, that would not have gone down as well. The fact that I don't have to go into the office nine to five, that I'm not tied to their agenda. You know they want that. I mean, I don't think they're on my old box as a wonderful person I still very good friends with him, Love the Bones Austrian. But yeah, that's the thing that's during. It's the flexibilities to make whatever decision I like whenever I like to make it, and then I'm solely responsible for the consequences of that. Fair enough.
Speaker 4:
All right. Last one what do you think sets apart successful e-commerce entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?
Speaker 3:
So everybody fails and everybody's response to failure is different and we can term it differently. We can use words like we just need to reframe that, or you know whatever the terminologies that we use. But we all screw up, we all fail, things don't work out, and it's what we do with that that, I think, separates those that are around for the long term. So I could tell you story after story about how we almost went bankrupt several times on our journey. Some of it was my own stupid fault, some of it was not, some of it I could take partial blame for it's. In those moments, I think you can choose to grow through what you go through. You can either come out stronger or you can just say this is this is not right, this is not for me. How you deal with failure and I'd probably go as far as to say is probably not failing quick enough. There are sometimes all working on things that we're so determined to make it work that we can't walk away. And actually I think successful people know when to say enough is enough and they know when to walk away, and so, because they're not afraid of failure, they tend to fail quicker. Yeah, if you're going to fail, fail quick, learn from it, move on, bounce back. Just make sure your success is far away. Your failures and you'll be all right.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely, Matt. If people are interested in getting in touch with you or joining the e-commerce cohort, what would be the best way? So?
Speaker 3:
e-commerce cohort. We'd love to see you there. Just come over to e-commerce cohortcom. E-commerce cohortcom. If you want to find out more about Maitre's, tell her to Matt Edmondsoncom, and I apologize ahead of time about everything's there Awesome and we'll post links to all of that in the show notes.
Speaker 2:
Matt want to thank you for being a guest on the Firing man podcast and we're looking forward to staying in touch.
Speaker 3:
That's been an absolute privilege, my friend, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Great series of questions as well. I got the old brain juices going, which is saying it's what? Nearly 9 pm here is a good thing. Let me tell you Thank you. We appreciate it.