Question Featured On: Episode 4 - #AskRussellAnything

The biggest problem with that kind of a business is your margin is small, because your drop shipping from somebody else, which is okay. I talk about this to a lot of people, like Flex Watches. When we worked with them on The Profit we talked about this, we talked about it in other places. Ecommerce stores are awesome, but the problem is it’s hard to profitably drive traffic into them.

What I would do is look and see what is something that I can get that my dream client, the person that’s going to buy all the rest of the stuff in my ecommerce store in the future, what’s something I could create to get them excited? I would create a separate funnel outside of this whole store. I would buy stuff from China or create info products, some kind of thing you can have as a front end funnel. Every ecommerce store should have a front end funnel. Shopify has an article on its site that says every single Shopify store should have a front end funnel.

The goal of a front end funnel is to be profitable through paid ads. So you create a front end funnel, for this I don’t know exactly what that would be. Maybe you could find a special kind of Yoga Leggings and you go buy them direct so you have a profit margin in there and create a funnel that just has that. Then you go and sell that and people buy it. And what happens is they purchase, become a customer, join your list and now you can say “Thanks for buying our sweet yoga leggings deal. By the way this is part of our store, click here.” And you send them to the store and they can go and shop around and find all the other stuff.

If you look at the real world you get a coupon. In the newspaper it tells you to come to the grocery to get hotdogs, 2 for the price of 1. So you go there because there was this front end funnel that brings you in. You find the hotdogs and then look around and you need buns, ketchup, mustard, bbq sauce. You walk around and find other things. You walk in the store for 2 for 1 hotdogs and leave spending tons of money. That’s how it works.

The same thing works online. I’m on Facebook scrolling around and I want to see a super good funnel, offer, deal. They’re going to see and buy it and now you’ve got them as a customer and you can introduce them to your actual store. Sending someone from an ad to a store, very few people have made that profitable. So build a front end funnel, bring people in profitably and then send them to your store on the back end. That’s what I recommend.