#4 LinkedIn Digital Mafia

People who (actually) have something to say — and say it — on LinkedIn.

The real reasons why most e-commerce businesses fail.

Aniket Katore is a freelancer working as a Facebook ads strategist for e-commerce brands.

Aniket named five very common reasons why eCommerce businesses fail. We’ll add a very important sixth. 

6. They have no product-market fit. 

Whatever it is they offer, it’s not compelling enough, so there is no demand for it. People often fail trying to create something new and interesting. But the reality is different as most of the innovations offer no benefits or just aren’t interesting enough.

Yes, there’s a chance that maybe you’ll create something unique that people want and your business will explode. But in 9 out of 10 cases it will collapse and result in you losing money. 

The mistake people often make is this: they try to reinvent the wheel to find something that’s going to work, without having the evidence that it will work.

The safest approach is to find a problem that hasn’t been solved yet. Then create a product that is going to fill that gap.

In the end, you can try to create a demand for a product through marketing activities, but more often than not it wont work, no matter how hard you try.

Marketing is not a magic wand.

Matteo Grassi is a co-founder and CEO of Popup, a platform that lets you easily build and start your online e-commerce store.

Spot-on 👌

Honesty is the best policy that any company can have.

Chayale Kaufman aims to help businesses grow their digital presence. She is the founder of Jewish Content Network.

There are a lot of companies that don’t have their client’s best interests at heart. And this saddens us a lot. The main goal of any business is to make money, but not at the expense of the client.

Lying to your clients just to extract more profit is not only morally wrong but will also lead to unhappy customers and a bad reputation that can really hurt your brand.

Our company is radically honest with our clients. If we don’t think that we can produce good results with a certain brand, we have an honest talk with them. It’s better to explain the real situation than to promise something that you cannot achieve. 

Sticking to your word and giving your clients the best service that you possibly can is the key to healthy, and long-term relationships with your clients.

What The right way to grow your company?

Camille Trent is a copywriter and a brand strategist. Currently, she is the head of content at Dooly.

The way a company evolves is by changing priorities. Your first goal is to sell and make money. Then you grow, and after a certain point, you can no longer control what’s happening because there is no process. 

So, you need to take a step back and switch to building processes to make things more efficient. Then this creates a lack of progress because it strangles innovation. It works but in a very one-dimensional way with no new ideas coming up. Soon, people get comfortable and growth comes to a screeching halt.

This is when you need to switch back to building and doing new things, trying new projects, even being chaotic again.

Also, we hear people say this all the time, focus on your customers the rest will fix itself. Instead, we suggest you focus on your employees first. 

Have discussions with your employees like you have interviews and surveys with your customers to understand how they feel. Unhappy employees are unproductive, and unmotivated. That is an atmosphere that can destroy your company.

Product development for e-commerce.

Lorenzo C. is an experienced CRO expert working as a freelancer.

We agree with Lorenzo, e-commerce is far behind compared to SaaS when it comes to product development. That’s because it’s very inflexible. To develop a product for e-commerce you need a lot of time and resources.

However, there is a cheaper way to experiment with e-commerce, and that is pre-orders. 

To use Lorenzo’s example: tell people that you will make new and stronger coffee and they can either pre-order it, or they can sign up and get it if the list reaches x number of people.

Product experiments are really expensive and probably not feasible in eCommerce, but pre-launch campaigns can serve as a proxy, and they can also work as a PR play.

Go ahead, sign up. It will show us you’re interested, and we will make it happen.