It's been very long since posting here.
So here's an update explaining
- the struggles
- what got us to that scale and
- what things will help us scale even higher
March β°
March was a month of struggles in terms of back-end, suppliers not having enough stock for the variant we were selling.
After I was told that the variant sold wasn't found at all, I had to go through the production route, which led to many orders being delayed.
Thankfully, our CS rep were able to contain the customer panicking or wanting to cancel their orders because of that delay, and that did cause some chargebacks, but they were sustainable.
At this point everything was a mess in terms of cost, which leads me to April
April β±οΈ
The agent I was using was so messed, overnight, he increased the overall cost per order because he "miscalculated", adding an additional $1 to each order.
That was bearable until 2 weeks later, he announced that they "miscalculated" the shipping cost again, and increase the price.
Being too much, I offered to send a Chinese speaking person to their warehouse to clear the entire situation. He refused to let us get access to the warehouse due to "contract breach".
At this time, I was done and already looking to move agents, the bad thing is he had the name and access to the producing factory.
So I spent an entire week finding that factory and ordering a batch from them, to the new agent.
End of April β³
Getting scammed by them after announcing we're changing agents.
What they've done: cancel over a thousand orders that were paid for and already shipped.
So had to take an L and reship to customers, including many orders that they messed up (forgot to ship items, sending a totally different product than we were selling somehow, shipping randomly the orders)
The needle movers allowing to reach that scale and go even higher πΉοΈ
1. Switching Shopify to US
The shopify fee was outrageous, and quickly had to set up a US Shopify to save 1-2% on fees.
2. Ads
Ads that speak to one customer personally only, avoid having many angles or demographics within one single ad, when you try to speak to everyone you speak to no one.
3. Engagement on ads
Pretty obvious you might say but engagement on ad matters, the ads I saw working the best recently, were those triggering people to leave comments, starting war comments, literally.
The more comments on ads the more engagement it has, the higher chances of it being a winner. These ads usually trigger people within the first 5 seconds, but sometimes after.
Looking to push even more of that.
4. Split testing
This is a crucial task for us to reach higher scales, trying to split test many times a week, whether it's shipping price, offers, pages and collections, FAQ questions that tackle customer concerns. This should be a constant process of testing.
5. Post-purchase Surveys
Post purchase surveys is so important if you're not having that right now, this allows you to talk to your customers.
This helps us find new concerns customers might have, new SKUs, the reasons behind them buying, and other questions you might ask to yourself.
6. Pre-quiz funnels
Quizzes is a bit like the PPS, it helps us ask other questions that are even more specific, helping us to imagine our customers.
If you have any question feel free to let me know or dm, I'll try to answer
Margins are still volatile between 27-32% on average
7. Introducing new SKUs
The markup from selling price / cogs is not that big. The goal is to increase it with new SKUs, and split tests, to allow us to scale at a lower ROAS, but same margins.
2025 will be good whether you can feel it or not!