How integrating a messaging service into our e-commerce platform can help us acquire new customers.
January 31, 2023
It takes a lot of people to build a bridge, but just two to tango. This applies to the analog world as well as the digital one. In the digital space, I'm using tango to refer to messaging between two people. I believe messaging is a service we can add to our offering to diversify how our company Shop Local grows.
Different Networks Require a Different Number of Users in a Group
Andrew Chen in The Cold Start Problem states that a key difference among network models is the required minimum ...
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In the movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon, who plays a handsome MIT janitor moonlighting as a math savant (can one say, “Hollywood career vehicle”?), woos a young lady (played by the actress Minnie Driver) by outmaneuvering a few competing, obnoxious cads. When Damon’s character gets the girl's telephone number, he proudly shows it to the other guys and boasts, with his South Boston access, “How 'bout ‘dem apples?” I imagine Tim Cook imitating this...
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When talking about memberships and subscriptions, these two business models are sometimes interchanged but actually are different. They often differ in their pricing, customers, and offerings. A subscription is often not a membership, but a membership often encompasses a subscription. A membership is often an elevated and more powerful subscription that collectivizes and leverages the subscribers.
What They Have In Common
With both models, you often pay a fee and receive a ...
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An article in today’s Times cites the high cost of acquiring customers, which ranges from $100 to $800. Excerpt:
“Estimates of an often-cited retail metric known as customer acquisition costs range from $100 to more than $800 per customer, said Daniel McCarthy, a professor at Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business, who has done extensive research in the field.”
Physical retail is one of the most expensive ways to acquire customers. An online ...
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This past weekend on the way to Florida to visit my brothers, I read about Squarespace’s advertising history. (Read the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/business/how-did-squarespace-know-podcasts-would-get-this-big.html). In 2009, Anthony Casalena, the founder of Squarespace, paid $20,000 to advertise on a tech podcast. While that was a lot for a small, young company (Casalena had started his business just six years earlier in a dorm room in 2003), Casalena said the ...
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Yiren Lu shares her experience of setting up a Shopify store in the New York Times magazine. Ms. Lu reports the setup process was easy, but her online Shopify store failed because it lacked marketing, aka eyeballs and orders. In her next article, I hope Ms. Lu tries Bridge. Bridge Store helps members fill the marketing component that Shopify is missing. When a store joins Bridge, Bridge instantly points hundreds of links to the store from other Bridge members, which Google sees and ...
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February 29, 2020
February 29, 2020
Think that your business should be making big bucks selling online? Wrong. Most businesses lose money online and have unprofitable online operations. Walmart’s online operations and Wayfair both lose money, and thousands of other businesses do, too.
There is a popular myth that online sellers are casino-like winners with the winning slot machine bells sounding with each order—generating buckets of quarters (profit) for the business. Casinos often produce losers, and most ...
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Curious why you don’t sell more online? Answer: selling online is brutally competitive. Just ask Brandless, a company with more than $100m in funding that just closed and laid off all 70 employees. Selling online often produces the opposite of what you’d expect: thin margins.
One bright spot in e-commerce: gift registries. Gift registry orders have higher margins, lower customer acquisition costs, and a built-in promoter for your site: the bride. Don’t think this...
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September 3, 2019
September 3, 2019
What is your customer lifetime value (CLV)? Customer acquisition cost (CAC)? Check out this article to learn how to calculate it:
Other important metric tools: + Customer Conversion Rate (CCR) + Average Order Value (AOV) + Online CRR (Customer Retention Rate) +Online Order Frequency + Average Order Processing Time + Net Promoter Score (NPS)
“Wayfair reports it spent $196 each on its 3.6 million new customers this year. Customer acquisition costs have an adverse effect on the company's bottom line.” ~ CNBC
I looked up the above information after reading in today’s WSJ that Wayfair reported an increase in active users to 15 million—but it’s still spending amost $200 to acquire each new customer. Wayfair, which has negative cash flow (debt?) of $137m, appears to be open to exiting its predicament by selling itself to a larger retail ...
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