POV: Building an e-commerce brand (episode 2)

So we spent the last year working on a secret side project that we revealed in this video. It's a card game for couples and no, I'm not asking you to buy this. Instead, in this series, and we're back for episode two now, we are building this e-commerce business live so you and I can learn and grow together as we expand the business. So in the last video, I went through the process of creating, designing, and manufacturing the product. So the whole kind of product creation phase of the business. So in this video, we'll go over the five major sales channels and marketing strategies that we're testing for this business. And at the end, I'll break down the net investment so the profit or loss thus far. And then in the next episode, we'll see the results from some of these initial marketing tests and approaches that we are testing. So we're going to learn a lot about e-commerce and marketing in this video. And that's why I wanna tell you that this video is sponsored by Skillshare. Now, I've been wanting to learn more about e-commerce recently to help me out with this video and the classes and learning paths on Skillshare. It has been easy for me to learn about e-commerce in addition to more general skills that are really valuable to me like coding and giving this channel content creation. There is a course for you no matter what you want to learn, whether that's creating a video, starting a business, or trying to sell a product like we're doing in this video. I personally have been taking the Facebook ads and Instagram clads masterclass for Shopify e-commerce sellers by Rehab Seb on Skillshare. And that's to refresh my knowledge of e-commerce ads. I'm also taking the Python for beginners learning path, which has five courses and over nine hours of content in it. Now, if you're not familiar, Skillshare is the largest online community for creatives with thousands of classes led by industry experts across film, illustration, design, freelance, productivity, coding, content creation, and a whole lot more. Skillshare can help you take your career skills, hobbies, passions, or side hustles to the next level. There are also learning paths which are curated class collections so you can master a specific skill. I think personally in the last year, I've really got caught up and I'd say this honestly in the things that I'm currently doing and I haven't made as much time for learning new things, for reading, for courses, and so on. So both YouTube and videos like this and also Skillshare are now helping me with that and helping me get back to that place of taking that time in my day and making time really to learn about things that I find valuable and interesting. So if that's you too, whether you're a hobbyist or a professional, you can get started with Skillshare as we head into 2025 completely for free. On that note, the first 500 people who click the link in the description will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare. You'll click on it, get started, and with that said, back to the episode. So sales channel number one that we have tested is a little bit of a strange one and that's eBay. And specifically, that's not just eBay but eBay ads. So I hadn't been familiar really with eBay ads prior to this. I'm more familiar with the meta ad suite, so Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and Google, but eBay ads are a new one. But going off the test, they did in fact work. So I just listed the product on eBay and then I clicked promote and created ads there. And to be completely honest, I forgot about those ads and then they just ran for a few weeks. And then after a few weeks, I went and I checked the dashboard of the ads and we had in fact gotten two sales. Now two sales isn't going to blow anyone away, but we got $26 nearly in sales off of about $14 in ad spend. And our cost per unit is about $4, so if we add $8 to the 14, we get about $22 in net costs for $26 in revenue. So that's just under a 20% net profit margin, which especially for e-commerce isn't at all bad. Now I don't wanna call that sales channel fully validated because we only sold two units, but if those numbers hold and we can sell 5, 10, 20, 100, whatever the number is per day on eBay and build reviews and testimonials and build a client base, I think that could be a very valuable channel in the future. So we'll keep testing that and I will update you on it in the next video. And just going off how it has gone return-wise, I would suggest that you try these eBay ads yourself. They're not paying me to say that if you are in e-commerce as well. Okay, now marketing approach in channel number two is listing on TikTok Shop and using the affiliate program on TikTok so hopefully other people promote the game for us. And the reason that we wanted to proceed with that option is because user-generated content is super valuable for a game like this. And it inherently creates these kind of viral moments just going off the more scandalous, excuse me, questions in the game. So we thought maybe, well, creators can get great content out of it and if they get a cut, then they'll drive traffic to us and vice versa. So our plan is to list on TikTok Shop and give a really, really good, strong affiliate cut to creators that wanna promote our product for us. And that's a win-win for us because we don't have to put effort into actually sell the thing. They do it for us, they make money, and hopefully we make some money as well. So we'll see how that one goes. And I think number five, honestly, on this list is the one that I'm most looking forward to. With that said, number three is Amazon ads. This is kind of the go-to if you sell on Amazon. It's the equivalent of Meta, Instagram, et cetera ads if you sell on your own website. So we're gonna be testing a number of different Amazon ads. I won't bore you with the details about the product and we'll take a look at the return from those in the next video. Okay, now number four as well. I do really like this one. And you may have seen a few months ago that I put out a video about programmatic SEO. And that's this SEO approach where you create a large volume of highly searchable quality pages that are gonna rank well, but you don't do it manually, you do it automatically through code and data and whatnot. And I'm curious how that could apply to this game. So my plan is to create a large number of pages so that when people search for a couples game, some kind of card game, they can come to this website to buy. Now we can't do that on the main website that we currently set up for the product. So I'm gonna create a whole nother website and then create page templates there. And then I'll put the data together and we'll have say a few thousand or 10, 20, 50,000 pages that we can push out to Google to see how much traffic we can get from that. We've gotten pretty impressive results from this prior, like the website from that video just passed half a million impressions in nearly 10,000 clicks, which is pretty wild. So if we can do that again on this game, that's completely free traffic. And if it can generate sales, it should do so into perpetuity if we get some pages to rank. That's number four, it's an exciting one. And number five, again, in my opinion, is the most exciting and that is retail, right? E-commerce is great, but the traditional, just, hey, let's put a product in a store and maybe people will buy it. That's also an option that works really well. And there is strong precedent here where companies like We're Not Strangers have done really well in Target and bookstores and so on. And our product as well is even more kind of evocative, just going off the name, the relationship test, right, than something like We're Not Strangers. So we think it can do really well in stores. And so what we're going to do is twofold. First, we're going to apply to some of the larger chains, right? So the Barnes & Nobles, the Target, some more mid-sized chains as well. That's one. And then number two, we're going to email store owners in Boston, where we're located, and then trying to get into some of those smaller outlets. So that's going to be local bookstores, cafes, kind of game stores, and really just try and get stocked. And how it works there is we would sell them or just give them sometimes for free a certain number of units. And if they sell those fast enough and they see demand for it, then they come back and actually start buying units from us at wholesale prices. So I'm really excited about that one because that's real physical impact, right? That's getting the product materially out there. And I think we'd have a lot less competition than we would online in many cases. So those are the five sales channels and marketing approaches that we will be testing and validating. And with that said, here's the net financials breakdown thus far. So to order some sample units from China initially to figure out which manufacturer we wanted to move forward with, we spent about $150 there. And then to actually order the initial 500 units was about $2,500, which has been the biggest expense reasonably so thus far. And then the net website fees, so domain hosting and whatnot, as well as emails has been about $120 total. And then we've had $120 in various Amazon FBA fees, as well as that $14 in eBay ad expenses. So that's a grand total of $2,894 of expenses thus far, with a grand total of two sales to show for it. So about $26 in revenue. So obviously the numbers, the finances are not yet there. And the question is, which one of these sales channels can we validate? And just to sell that first 500 units or roughly the remaining 500 that we have, that at $14, $15 per, if not $20 per, that's anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 in revenue at anywhere from 20 to 40% margins. And really the question for me is just, can we create a system that is profitable on a per unit basis? And if we can do that, the numbers will work out just because we can sell a lot of units over time. So we're not profitable now, but if we crack that system, then it doesn't really matter because we'll be profitable at some point and that money will just keep coming in. So comment if you have any ideas or your experiences as an e-commerce seller as well. And with that said, we'll see you in episode three.