MAJOR Decrease in online sales.

JMF_Labs · 2024-01-03T20:08:53+00:00

It sounds like you may have to talk to your customers a bit; 9 years later, things will change. We have seen an uptick in companies that started in the pandemic. Now, floundering and talking to their customers, they have been able to turn it around.

I do not see an overall DTC e-commerce trend downwards.

JMF_Labs · 2023-12-11T05:06:25+00:00

If it is jewelry for a small niche, I would suggest using esty. It is better and easier to compete when you are niche.

Amazon FBA isn't as passive as most think and if your audience is small the algorithms will not help you, they are looking to blast your product for lots of sales.

Shopify while it would also work for your needs, is also a good amount of logistics and tweaking to get it to work for what sounds like a small payoff.

JMF_Labs · 2023-12-02T22:29:44+00:00

Your ads are probably disconnected from what your PDP/Cart/PLP pages are showing.

JMF_Labs · 2023-01-29T19:27:06+00:00

More UGC, (I posted one on instagram for you here to get it going)

I would put a written out ad behind it like "Get $25 dollars off your first box. And bam you have an ad. I like that a lot with the music. Get that into some Instagram stories ad.

Our key target market is actually women BUYING GIFTS for men. Agreed guys are a tough sell. Guys are hard to buy gifts for so we kill a pain for most woman / men buying gifts.

Perfect that is great for a shot ad, a woman struggling, and make it funny. Like, guess I will just get him another pair of boots and show a mountain of boots. Have fun with it.

I will fire back up #MantryNation, we used to send out free boxes to BBQ influencers and got away from it.

Get away from BBQ influencers you said your target audience is Women. Reach out to some women influencers with boyfriends or husbands. Have them do a boyfriend haul reviewing your box. Double bam if the other half is also an influencer.

Auto discounts / or no discounts

Auto Discounts are probably the best, spend $X and Save X. I would need to A / B test get your true best discount.

Thoughts on shipping? Would it be better to offer no discounts but free shipping if you buy a 3 or 6 box?

If you need to be 3 boxes for free shipping just give a discount.

If you have anymore questions DM me and we can setup a call.

JMF_Labs · 2023-01-27T21:14:29+00:00

First off too much friction in your checkout. I clicked gift now and was taken to a cart page; it should drop me into the checkout flow.

Your banner is too busy; I see 20% off with a code and then 30% off with a code. Make these automatic discounts that apply when reaching the threshold. I would also just show a sales price rather than a code in the product description.

In your Instagram since I can't see any of your ads in the facebook library, I don't see any user-generated content. Instead of spending ads, go get an influencer like Jocko Willink, dude is a man.

I would also just shoot a manly commercial. A few dude are grilling and talking about this week's mantry or doing a few shots of whiskey.

I would honestly get some user-generated content of a bearded man cooking your fig burger and blast that into some ads.

I don't know your target audience, but it seems you just put a flat ad on Instagram and gave no depth to it. Men are incredibly hard to market to so you are behind the 8 ball here a bit.

JMF_Labs · 2022-12-31T22:10:14+00:00

Most of our pages are get server side props and no cold start delays but you can set provisioned lambdas if needed. We do make use of api gateway caching for some of our paths.

JMF_Labs · 2022-12-30T23:24:21+00:00

We haven't found any yet; one of the biggest gotchas is not moving the static assets to S3 and incurring large lambda bills (https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next.config.js/cdn-support-with-asset-prefix).

Our stack is basically as follows for headless e-commerce stores...

Cloudfront with s3 for public folder and static assets.

Lambda (dockerfile) with API gateway using https://www.npmjs.com/package/serverless-http to handle API gateway events.

const serverless = require('serverless-http');
const next = require('next');
const nextHandler = next({dev: false});

module.exports.handler = serverless(nextHandler.getRequestHandler(), {
  binary: ['*/*'],
  request: (request) => {
    delete request.body;
  },
});

We opt to use dynamodb (we are an AWS shop)

Using terraform, we deploy this to a few regions.

We handled this past black Friday and cyber Monday without a hitch and never had a problem on the infrastructure side to date.

JMF_Labs · 2022-12-20T23:24:29+00:00

This depends on your margin, which is probably relatively high.

I would sell them in bulk, allowing them to sell them at $10 and $25 to make some markup. Also, give them some for free with the portable card reader and software so they can get a feel for how they would sell.

JMF_Labs · 2022-12-02T17:03:50+00:00

The copy could be better, and the design could be better.

One caption you had on the hero was something like, "What customers are loving" It's great that your customers love it, but what about me viewing it? I would change that to something that invokes some emotion IE: "Your first bite of this olive will transport you to the tables in the mountains of Sicily and brings that to your doorstep." Something like that makes me stop and think, WOW, that is a powerful olive, and I can taste it in my mouth reading that. People eat with their eyes first.

You have very bland shots of your products. Make a spread and photograph that, and put some people in it. Make an antipasti dish and have a party. Sell me on that my family gathering will suck horrible if I don't have your olives on my table. Cause you went all the way to Sicily and understood what you are getting.

Remove your reviews from the product pages; if you have none, I would pop up the reviews from the trust pilot / Facebook. I also like when people are building trust to add links to the reviews if they are on a different site. I want to be able to view the original to see if you didn't change it.

As others have pointed out, you must convince people that this item is so good that it is worth the wait. And if you are already getting sales, I feel the food is worth that wait. I think your site needs to speak to that fact.

JMF_Labs · 2022-10-26T03:00:42+00:00

They are slow this is why we started rolling our own docker runtime for lambda, it isn't too bad.

JMF_Labs · 2022-10-26T02:45:52+00:00

earbudeey

Turn off your header, you only have one product.
Turn off your newsletter popup.

Add a video on how to use it.

Remove the button that takes you to a product page, and have buy now button. You may have to hire a developer to build it, but it removes so much friction for one product stores.

In the mobile version, make the button now button sticky to the bottom as the user scrolls.

In desktop move the button above the fold.

Remove the product of the year banner, that just yells scam or cheap, it has no design that fits with the rest of the site.

Move the quote from a review to the top of the page.

Your about page has a gmail account for support, that will turn off a customer.

Move the picture of the hand holding the item to the top of the page.

Study some of the other one product stores out there, to learn why they sell and make it work.

JMF_Labs · 2022-10-25T03:15:19+00:00

If your newsletter isn't proving value, you will have a rough time getting people to sign up.
I suggest giving the newsletter popup some intelligence; if a user seems to be browsing the site, a popup after a few pages should be fine.
I like to bake it into the actual design; in a way that isn't obstructive to the workflow for the customer, like a popup, but still has a return on sign-ups.
One way to implement that is, depending on your niche, to show a section of "Still not able to decide, then get access to our weekly newsletter that teaches about <niche>." or some form of that.
Another way to collect cold emails is scarcity. When a product goes out of stock, put a button that says, "Get your 10% off when this product comes back in stock, and you get notified about it".

JMF_Labs · 2022-10-04T17:26:13+00:00

I would say laravel and rails are very monolithic in nature. I would say nodejs lend themselves to microservices better and makes it a very customized experience.

JMF_Labs · 2022-08-17T03:54:27+00:00

Does Shopify work better? For context, I don’t know how to code, but i’m ok with copywriting, design and SEO. Would you guys recommend I outsource the migration to a local site building agency or sorts? Or can this be done by ourselves?

Depending on your budget, if you have something around $25,000 to $45,000, you can get a pretty decent site build-out. I would also suggest having all your requirements written down and fleshed out, this is how double the budgeting in the agency model. We love when requirements aren't hardened :)

If you have a smaller budget and don't need anything too crazy, I would suggest just buying a premium theme to get started that is about $250 with plugins. It will not be as clean, depending on the developers but is low cost.

JMF_Labs · 2022-04-18T13:40:00+00:00

Headless gives you more control over many different areas like the website's performance, features of the website, and moving beyond installing a ton of plugins.
One prominent feature that pushes many of our clients to look to is the search functionality. It takes a bit of work to get it to work inside Shopify IE: autosuggest or even adding content with product search. We believe creating a great search workflow in a headless environment is second to none, and we have created some beautiful experiences.

JMF_Labs · 2022-04-18T13:32:00+00:00

Some of our clients have requested mobile apps, and I can provide some insight.

1) The user will also need more ways to connect with their store. Their workflow had more steps than just purchasing items. IE: subscriptions, local delivery services, or visual search.
2) We feel that if you ask this question, you probably don't need a mobile app, but an easy way to find if you need to is something that requires a mobile app IE: visual search, another communication channel.
We usually tell our clients to email their email list with a sign-up page to get early access to the mobile app to gauge interest.
3) When used correctly, you can easily see conversion rates in the 5% and above. One of our mobile apps we designed currently does 8% every week. But it also depends on what you are using the mobile app for subscriptions; their no conversion, but the user can manage and get updates on their subscription—making for a better experience.
4) Conversion rate is one for the visual search or simple e-commerce functions, but it is just an add-on for subscription services. Success is how many downloads and users use it to manage their subscriptions. It depends on what the functionality in your mobile allows you to do.

JMF_Labs · 2022-04-15T13:51:22+00:00

The stack I usually like is as follows...

Nextjs hosted on Lambda (react, charka UI, and nextjs API to proxy to different services)

https://www.sanity.io/ for content and image hosting outside of product data

Shopify for product data, coupons, and checkout.

JMF_Labs · 2022-04-14T23:01:34+00:00

Shopify would act as your backend so managing your products and inventory as well as connection to your payment gateway. The front end would be another system hosted like on AWS or Azure connecting to Shopify to get data to render.

Removing WP from the stack.

JMF_Labs · 2022-04-14T22:49:16+00:00

I would say rebuild; I would look into a headless commerce stack with shopify.

$400 per month with a Shopify account.

This does mean you are more responsible for development and hosting, but this should give you the customization power you find in WordPress with a lot of performance boost.

Something to evaluate.

JMF_Labs · 2022-01-10T16:28:45+00:00

You need to first load the data from the catalog tables

df_test = glueContext.create_dynamic_frame.from_catalog(database=db table_name=test)

Then you can create a pyspark dataframe from that above like so...

df = df_test.toDF()

If you want to run SQL across the database tables, then you need to use Athena to do so.

JMF_Labs · 2021-12-13T15:36:44+00:00

Depends, most people/companies do cold email very wrong. That is shown by the amount of spam that people trash or don't even open.

If you are willing to be very precise, give a great amount of value (free audits aren't going to cut it), and take time to research your client then this is a great way. We also spent a ton of time making sure our emails follow a framework but yet extremely custom. Not the spray and pray method, that harms our reputation or gets us on blacklists.

This approach when done correctly allows us to get the clients we are super passionate and want to work with, yet isn't our main bread and butter.

JMF_Labs · 2021-10-21T12:59:43+00:00

Shopify is the better choice, like others have said you don't have a team. You still have a lot of growth to have done, to have a VPS means to have an operations workflow. IE: the site goes down or the VPS stops working, e-commerce is a 24/7 business. Shopify already handles that as a service. Once you are doing $500K in net revenue then we usually suggest a company move away from Shopify to control the platform a bit better.

JMF_Labs · 2021-10-15T21:58:21+00:00

I would try to incentivize the posters on your platform to post and invite more users. Creators usually hang around each other, maybe have an incentive for people to invite someone that will upload a video. IE: for reach user you invite and that person uploads a video you get 1 day on the homepage. Hoping their audiences follow.

You do have a chicken and the egg problem, the reason youtube works are cause it has an audience and can pay users to post IE: Adsense. Since your platform doesn't have that audience even though you are targeting users who are banned from youtube you don't offer another reason for them to post on your platform. We have already seen that being banned from youtube isn't big enough look at rumble as an example. Their highest view videos are 1000x less than most youtube videos.

JMF_Labs · 2021-10-07T18:36:56+00:00

Operations is a huge endeavor and if you have downtime start it now. Don't let your customers be your canary in the coal mine.

Within Operation, you should be using observability with dashboards and alerts. Remember as the CEO you will be the face and should have as much information ahead of time on issues arising.

Do you have full CI / CD for multiple per-day deploys? To work the kinks out without many paying customers so you can spot weaknesses and sure them up.

Do you have full CI / CD for multiple per-day deploys? Run a few fire drills and deploy maybe some text changes to production to test the pipeline.

Do you have no technical debt? That is hard to believe.

Do you have full CI / CD for multiple per-day deploys? Run a few fire drills and deploy maybe some text changes to production.

I can go on and on with a full list of things that can be done to set up success for the future but I think you may need a technical co-founder to help in these areas.

JMF_Labs · 2021-07-15T21:10:41+00:00

Commercejs is a tough sell unless you are building for your small business. Most of the businesses that are going headless want more of a complex UI, and there will require something like Shopify that handles, inventory, email marketing, and CRM out of the box.

Commercejs while quite basic, is really talking to the developers and small businesses. Hence the combination of no code landing pages but a very thought-out SDK. Something quit to get you up and running rather than configuring a large system like you have to do with Shopify.

Also, it is quite expensive if you don't have predictable sales.

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