If you haven’t already guessed, I’m big on educating people. A few weeks back I put together a presentation called “Bootstrapping to Seven Figures” which took me about a week to create.
Basically it contains the core ideas and strategies we’ve used to build our company to over 50,000 clients and high seven figures in yearly revenue. I shared my presentation with around 3,000 people on a webinar I did recently for one of our design partners and was blown away by the response – I even managed to score two marriage proposals before I was done!
Anyway, I wanted to share the exact same presentation with you, our loyal clients. If you’ve just started your business and you’re looking for a way to grow your sales to $1,000,000 within 12 months then this is it.
I’ve broken my presentation up into four videos, each of which is embedded below – the entire presentation runs for around 40 minutes. It contains absolutely no sales pitch (I HATE pitches) – just good, honest advice based on my experiences building Interspire (the parent company of BigCommerce) to what it is today with co-founder Eddie Machaalani and our awesome team.
The presentation I used in the video is also embedded at the bottom of this blog post.
Groupon is all the rage with retailers at the moment, but what about e-commerce vendors who want to get their own piece of the groupon pie?
In this video I share a strategy you can use to create and distribute your own group-activated coupon. You’ll attract more customers (as well as their friends) and your cost per acquisition (CPA) will effectively be zero because you’re relying on potential buyers pulling in their friends from Facebook and Twitter.
In this video I share a simple strategy you can use to gather customer feedback and implement it inside your business. Using this strategy you’ll improve your business processes and bottom line. You’ll also turn one-time customers into repeat customers who will send their friends your way because you’ve taken the time to a) ask for their feedback and b) implement it.
In this video I share six ideas to wow customers after buying. As a business on a budget, you really need to do whatever you can to turn one-time customers into lifetime customers who will tell everyone they know about you, and these six tactics will help you do exactly that.
Even if you only implement one of them, your repeat customer count will grow significantly. The six ideas are:
Call them on the phone and thank them
Upgrade their shipping to express/overnight for free
Include something free (such as a product sample) with their order
Include a hand-written thank you note with their order
Include a 5-20% coupon code on their printed invoice to use for their next order
Refund their shipping cost as store credit to encourage a second order
In this video I look at the old business mantra of “being the one selling shovels when everyone else is digging for gold”. In this video I explain why sales of the iPad fuel huge sales of custom iPad cases, how the preference for green/organic products has generated billions of dollars in revenues for new business and more – all rotating around the same simple concept.
Note: On July 7th I posted a “before” video of our new Sydney office which we’re currently renovating so you might want to check that out before watching the video above.
As you may know, we have an office in Austin, TX and one in Sydney, Australia where our engineering team and co-founders reside.
As our Sydney team continues to grow, we’ve been on the lookout for a new office. We’ve now found that office and over the last few weeks have been renovating it (or “funkifying” it, as we like to say) with beautiful wooden floors, down lights, a new paint job and a new fit out.
The video above is the “almost after” state of our new Sydney office – we still have to build a few glass walls for offices and a meeting room, and of course get our furniture in!
We’re aiming to move in at the end of August 2010.
When I type define:diminishing returns into Google, this is what I get:
“In economics, diminishing returns (also called diminishing marginal returns) refers to how the marginal production of a factor of production starts to progressively decrease as the factor is increased, in contrast to the increase that would otherwise be normally expected”
What a mouthful. Long story short, there are certain areas of your business where adding more horsepower won’t necessarily give you the exact same result forever.
For example, if you build a customer service team comprised of only untrained, unmotivated, lazy customer service reps then eventually you’ll end up with frustrated customers who won’t be able to get their questions answered no matter how many people are on your customer service team.
In this video I discuss the economic principle of diminishing returns in the context of e-commerce and shares three examples that demonstrate how diminishing returns can impact your business productivity and bottom line.
The examples include:
Spending more on Google AdWords to counter competitors bidding on popular keywords just to attract the same number of visitors
Quality over quantity of autoresponders
How to create a successful customer service department that when combined with automation will reduce your costs
This video is a bit heavy on theory, so if you don’t understand anything just leave me a question below or ask me on Twitter (@mitchellharper).
Whether they realize it or not, your customers go through four distinct steps before they buy anything online or off. This process is known as the buying cycle and the four steps are:
Realizing you have a need or problem
Researching solutions or information
Comparing options, price and value
Buying the solution to your problem
Repeating this process (optional)
In this video I explain the buying cycle and shares strategies you can use to assist your customers regardless of which stage of the buying cycle they’re in. The trick is to make your e-commerce store appropriate no matter which stage your customers are in, so they start with you and end the buying cycle with you, ideally coming back for more the next time they have a need or problem they need to address.
“A survey of the largest 500 online retailers in terms of revenue found that only 12% have Web sites that have been adopted for mobile devices. And only 2% have made it possible for consumers to make purchases with their mobile devices, says the survey produced by the Acquity Group, a digital services and consulting firm. It used data supplied by Internet Retailer Magazine.”
So whose to blame here? Well, instead of pointing the finger, we’re looking forward to doing our part for mobile commerce in the small and medium-sized business space (or as our friends at 37Signals call it, the Fortune 5 Million).
When we roll out BigCommerce 6 in a few short weeks, our 6,000 customers will have an instant mobile offering of their BigCommerce store ready to go for iPhone, iPad, Andriod, Palm Pre and Blackberry devices. No application for their client to install on their device. No coding or customization. No approval process. No configuration files or scripts. It’s automatic and “just works”.
Take a peek at what’s coming:
(Thanks to our PR ninja Leyl for sharing the link to this story)
The BigCommerce blog is written by Mitchell Harper, co-founder of BigCommerce and e-commerce expert, having sold both physical and digital goods online to over 50,000 customers since 2001.
The blog includes proven tips, tricks and strategies to help you sell more online, or if you're getting started you'll learn how to launch your very own online store from scratch.
If you haven’t already guessed, 
The BigCommerce blog is written by Mitchell Harper, co-founder of BigCommerce and e-commerce expert, having sold both physical and digital goods online to over 50,000 customers since 2001.