I'm super excited to welcome today’s guest - Julie Fredrickson.She is the CEO & co-founder of Stowaway Cosmetics ( https://www.stowawaycosmetics.com/ ) - a venture backed direct to consumer and potentially disruptive cosmetics company that retail their own-brand 'right-sized makeup' that are half the size and half the price of conventional cosmetics. I brought Julie on to discuss how she went about raising capital for a product based business. Before I introduce her; here is a list of some h...
Jan 12, 2016•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 60
I super excited to introduce today’s guest: Dimitri Semenikhin.He is my first non-ecommerce guest in the traditional sense of ecommercebut has a LOT to share today with us about influencer marketing on InstagramThat is because his Yacht portal - called Yacht Harbour has garnered 42,100 followers and counting on Instagram since 2014.He is a 20 year entrepreneur born in Moscow, raised in Monaco currently running a business in London as well as a student at Kings College London.Their social media m...
Jan 05, 2016•46 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Happy New Year's Eve - this is 2015's last episode! At the start of the year I made some bold predictions about the outlook of ecommerce in 2015 . To be more precise, I made 11 predictions.Whilst a few of my predictions missed the mark, I was quite surprised to hit the mark on most predictions. Here is how I fared... 8 of my 11 predictions saw the light in 2015. Not too shabby... ★ Support this podcast ★...
Dec 31, 2015•25 min•Season 1Ep. 58
Chad Ledford has founded and exited a successful ecommerce business and is a Co-Founder and COO at AddShoppers - a social media referral SaaS platform. He is a proven expert in digital marketing & Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). On this episode, he talks us through how to turn your customers into advocates and then influencers. He also talks us through the key conversion types you should measure as metrics for your business: cookies > email > account registration > sale > adv...
Dec 29, 2015•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Vitaly Gonkov is the Chief Marketing Officer at MageWorx ,a fast-growing Magento extensions and solutions company that develops a full range of Magento extensions used on 30,000+ Magento stores worldwide. I personally recommend one of their technical SEO extensions called, SEO Suite Ultimate to clients because of its exhaustive feature-set for technical SEO deployment. I invited Vitaly to today's show to talk about Magento 2.0 and it's new SEO features. This interview is based on an article publ...
Dec 22, 2015•28 min•Season 1Ep. 56
My guests on today’s show are: Jennifer Chong and Roman Khan, the co-founders of a Luxury Direct to Consumer (D2C) consumer fashion brand that launched their business and raised capital through crowdfunding...They managed to raise over $180,000 on INDIEGOGOand then went unto KICKSTARTER to raise more capital and doubled(YES DOUBLED) what they raised on INDIEGOGO by raising $360,000 just over a year ago. The are the founders of LINJER - D2C makers of Minimalist leather bags without the luxury mar...
Dec 15, 2015•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 55
So lets rewind back to Episode 49 , when I had Will Tjernlund on the show to talk about the LEAN way of starting and growing a Fulfilled By Amazon Private Label Ecommerce Product Business….you will recall that Will worked with his Brother Andrew for 2 years where they both managed to scale an Amazon business from $1.2m to $8m. TODAY - I have with me on the show ANDREW TJERNLUND…Will’s brother to talk us through the specifics of how he managed to grow his Amazon business from $350,000 to $1.2m an...
Dec 08, 2015•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 54
On this episode, Kunle covers how to go about growing your Fashion ecommerce business - and NO don't do it via Google AdWords or SEO. Focus on brand building targeted at your target customers. Listen to the show to find out more! This episode's show notes can be read on http://2xecommerce.com/podcast/ Message from Our Sponsors: This episode is brought to you by Remarkety . Remarkety is an email marketing platform specifically built for eCommerce businesses.With Remarkety, emails are automaticall...
Dec 01, 2015•33 min•Season 1Ep. 53
2X eCommerce’s first roundtable discussion: today’s discussion is all about about the Magento 2.0. We talk about it's evolution, feature set and upgrading.On today’s roundtable, I have on the panel: - Michael Bower - CEO of Sellry in Colorado, United States- John Arroyo - Founder & CTO at Arroyo Labs in Los Angeles, United States John is a software developer and entrepreneur. He started Arroyo Labs to help enterprises and start ups build and scale their ideas. A veteran of multiple startups ...
Nov 26, 2015•47 min•Season 1Ep. 52
I recently came across an interesting survey commissioned by BloomReach: they found that 44% of online shoppers in the U.S. began their ecommerce product searches on Amazon.com. Then only 34% of online shoppers use search engines such as Google And the remaining 22%of online shoppers go directly to retailers websites Google ecommerce position at the moment does not looks very good, because it relies on product-related searches for a big chunk of advertising. We all know that Amazon.com is the 80...
Nov 24, 2015•28 min•Season 1Ep. 51
My guest on today’s show is Will Tjernlund. Will and his brother Andrew sold $6 million worth of products on Amazon.com in 2014. The year before, 2013, they sold around $1.2 million on Amazon. And in 2012 about $350,000 This was just a year after Will's graduation from the University of Minnesota, doubling the business’ full-time headcount from one to two as a 2-person business...! He has just recently exited this Amazon business to purse a LEANER STARTUP Amazon business on his own. He is here t...
Nov 17, 2015•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 50
In 2011 when Jameson Morris was just 22 he co-founded Conscious Box with a $10,000 student loan. Conscious Box as most of our U.S listeners know is one of the biggest players in the subscription box ecommerce space. Jameson exited conscious box due to the complications of VC funding and having learnt never to use outside funding to launch a subscription commerce business, he went unto found multiple bootstrapped subscription-box businesses. He sold one of the business commerce businesses for a t...
Nov 10, 2015•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 49
7 years ago, right in the heat of the 2008 recession, Chad Rubin took over his parents' failing vacuum brick and mortar business and converted it to an Ecommerce and Amazon Private Label business called Crucial Vacuum selling own-branded vacuum spare and accessories such as: vacuum bags, vacuum rollers, vacuum hoses, vacuum filter and vacuum belts. Over time, he has turned Crucial Vacuum into a leading brand in the Vacuum parts and accessories space largely through his Amazon stores in the US, C...
Nov 03, 2015•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 48
I am quite excited to introduce today’s guests: Randy and Angie Stocklin. They are a husband and wife team that run an ecommerce business called One Click Ventures . One Click Ventures owns and operates 3 eyewear brands: Readers.com (cheap prescription glasses) felix + iris (premium prescription personalised try-before you buy) Sunglass Warehouse (cheap sunglasses less that $20) They started their business from their home office back in 2005 and today; 10 years on have a 60+ person strong team. ...
Oct 27, 2015•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 47
On today’s show I have with me Katie DeCicco, the Founder and CEO of Celebration Saunas - a fast growth online retailer of infrared saunas.I brought on Katie to this episode to share her remarkable ecommerce journey she started in a little less than a year and half ago. She is a rare to find solo-ecommerce entrepreneur.YES, she is the sole employee of her ecommerce business that has surpassed $1 million in sales. She instead hires a handful of contractors, maintains zero inventory as a dropshipp...
Oct 20, 2015•49 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Black Friday (November 27th) through to Cyber Monday (November 30th) are the biggest shopping period of the year. In the UK, this coming Black Friday is predicted to be the first ever £1 billion shopping day.And in the U.S, a staggering $80 billion has been forecasted to be spent over the Black Friday weekend into Cyber Monday!In this webinar taking place on Wednesday, 30th September at 4pm GMT and 11am EST ; PCA Predict’s Henry Thomas, their resident Senior UX Expert and Web Developer who has w...
Oct 18, 2015•5 min•Season 1Ep. 45
Yale Zhang is a co-founder of Clinical Guard , a health and personal care device distribution business that generate 80% of their sales from Amazon.com and the remaining 20% from their website. They are a multi-million dollar 7-figure ecommerce business that have predominantly sold through amazon since 2008: Yale talks to us about: - How they have managed to grow their business on amazon - How they handle competition - How they win the coveted BUY BOX and more... Message from Our Sponsors: This ...
Oct 13, 2015•51 min•Season 1Ep. 44
According to a VentureBeat article : Mid-Sized businesses get an average ROI of 246% percent from Email Marketing - in Online Retail, this average might be higher.The devil however is in the detail….because the success of email marketing campaigns is down to execution. Well, my guest on today’s show is here to tell us exactly how. Max Katsarelas, is an email marketing automation expert and the Director of Marketing at Remarkety ; the email marketing automation platform recommended by John McInty...
Oct 06, 2015•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 43
There are pretty much only 3 ways to drive more sales and grow your online retail business: Drive in more targeted traffic (customer acquisition), Increase the frequency of purchase (customer retention) and Getting customers to spend more when they shop (increase average order value) I am going to extensively take you through point #3: Getting your customers to spend more when they shop on your site i.e. increasing their Average Order Value (AOV). There are no show notes for this episode but I w...
Sep 29, 2015•23 min•Season 1Ep. 42
Today's show is a solo show! I'm sharing tactics that you can employ in your online brand building and domain authority building strategy. With an SEO background, all of these tactics are proven tried and tested ways of building an ecommerce brand online that double-up as link acquisition activity as by-product (after brand reach to PEOPLE). I start off with the core SEO metrics that you must understand and track on both your site and that of your competitors such as: Trust Flow, Citation Flow, ...
Sep 22, 2015•37 min•Season 1Ep. 41
My guest on today’s show is André Morys ; the founder of Web Arts AG - one of the largest and a leading world class Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) agency based in Frankfurt, Germany. With leading global brands like: C&A, Konica, Minolta, Sage Accounting, O2 and Monsoon as clients. If you have attended any major Conversion Rate Optimisation conference in Europe, then you will most likely have heard André on today show speak. I met him and his team earlier this year at the Digital Elite ca...
Sep 14, 2015•55 min•Season 1Ep. 40
If you haven’t implemented an email marketing strategy for your store yet, you’re missing out big time. A properly-implemented email marketing campaign can lift revenue by as much as 50%. With that sort of potential, it boggles my mind how many mid-tier etailers that don't do email marketing. My guest on today’s show is John McIntyre who is also called the Auto Responder Guy - for good reason. John runs an email marketing consultancy focused on the implementation of advanced email marketing prog...
Sep 01, 2015•50 min•Season 1Ep. 39
How should you structure your marketing campaigns for the upcoming holiday selling season? On this episode of the 2X eCommerce Podcast Show, I shed a 6 step framework to use to sell more this holiday season for: - Black friday - friday after thanksgiving - Super saturday - Panic Saturday is the last Saturday before Christmas - Cyber Monday or Green Monday - 2nd monday in December - best sales day in december according to eBay - Boxing Day - December 26th post christmas sales in the UK/Ireland Th...
Aug 27, 2015•25 min•Season 1Ep. 38
When it comes to Ecommerce Loyalty programs; one SaaS company seems to be leading the pack: Sweet Tooth (https://www.sweettoothrewards.com/). They deliver some of the highest quality content on customer retention and customer lifetime value. A name seems to pop up everytime I read their brilliant content: Alex McEachern; a customer retention expert and one of the top ecommerce loyalty marketing experts around. He is runs the Sweet Tooth blog and has immense knowledge in the domain of customer re...
Aug 25, 2015•37 min•Season 1Ep. 37
What is the single most important thing I should be doing right now to prepare for the upcoming holiday selling season? The single most important thing to do right now is to have a thorough analysis of your performance from last year's holidays; for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and pre-Christmas. Outline and section out your analysis as follows: 1. Stock control and management, 2. Traffic 3. Marketing & PR 4. Marketplaces 5. Website Sales, Discounts and Offers 6. Fulfilment 7. Financials This ...
Aug 20, 2015•27 min•Season 1Ep. 36
I talk with Nate Holzapfel, the founder of Mission Belt, a micro-adjustable belt that was successfully pitched and funded by Daymond John on the US TV show Shark Tank. We talk about the effect of Daymond and Shark Tank on business; prior to show, Mission Belt sold $39,000 in 3 months and after the show, $1million in 3½ weeks, and now turns-over multi-million dollars ever since. We discuss this company’s “right fit” team and it's hiring culture in Utah. We are also privy a range of juicy social m...
Aug 18, 2015•56 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Selling other brands is a challenge but can still be rewarding. This is a follow on talk from episode 30: What Kind of Ecommerce Business Are You Building? Where I provided the only two routes to selling online: Sell products from a range of brands Vs designing, inventing, developing, manufacturing and sell ‘direct-to-consumer’ (D2C). In this episode, I explore various tactics you can employ as a merchandiser of a range of brands to thrive. Sign Up to My Newsletter on: http://2xecommerce.com Thi...
Aug 13, 2015•24 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Aihui Ong 爱慧 (pronounced as I-WE) is the founder and CEO of a Silicon Valley based subscription ecommerce snack business most of our U.S listeners will have heard off: Love With Food. For as low as $10/month, Love with Food provides organic or all-natural snack boxes on a monthly subscription basis. These boxes tend to be packed with hard to find snacks that are typically not in grocery stores - its like a discovery engine that helps its health conscious customers find new healthy snacks; while ...
Aug 11, 2015•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 33
Today’s show is particularly quite exciting: that is because if you are signed up to my newsletter, you'll know by now how I bang on about how fundamental repeat customers are to achieving ecommerce success - and how repeats customers are truly the lifeblood of most ecommerce businesses. So, I did some digging around for Ecommerce customer retention platforms and came across Ometria (https://www.ometria.com/); a predictive Ecommerce Customer Lifecycle Marketing platform that helps mid-tiers reta...
Aug 04, 2015•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 32
There are two major routes in the business of online retail, you either: Sell products from a range of brands and in other words ‘curate’ a range and offering of products for your target market. You’d most likely be a specialist i.e. like a store selling only high end headphones, or wooden floors or affordable leather goods. Margins are typically slim in this instance and you’d find that Amazon dominates a significant number of verticals. You need to dig deep to position your store as a speciali...
Jul 30, 2015•11 min•Season 1Ep. 31
