Transcript
Hello everyone. My name is Miles Bassett, and this is Ask Wildman. Hello again, my name is Miles Bassett with Wildman Web Solutions. This is Ask Wildman and open Q and A for anyone and everyone who wants to join us here and asks me and my team. Any questions you want about technology, business, marketing, advertising. You just want to ask us how our day is going.
That is perfectly fine. So, we are streaming this live right now to Facebook, YouTube, and our Twitch channel now if you want to interact with this, if you want to ask a question or you have a comment on something that we’re talking about here, please throw your questions in the comments below. If you’re catching this later, you’re not watching this live.
You can still be part of the conversation by emailing us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I do have that address scroll below me here in that crawler. Email us your questions there. And we will either respond to your email or get to your questions next week. As we’re doing this every week, Wednesdays at 11 live streaming to again, our Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch accounts.
Pick one there and tune on Wednesdays at 11 tasks. All right. That being said here, I’m going to be bringing in my partner, Mike Hanna, to help me answer some questions. Larry is hello miles. How lo heck is you doing today? Good. I think we need to figure out a way to play walk-in music or something.
When I pull you in here, I think that’d be fun. Yeah, I definitely need, I can get, I didn’t know. That was an option. I can have walk-up music. I don’t know how to do it, but I’m sure we could figure it out. We are technology people after all the hard part is going to be deciding what your song would be.
Oh, it’s good. Yeah. It’s going to be hard. Narrowing it down. I might need, I might just pick a different one for each week. Actually. It’s probably the way it’ll go. Yeah. I think we’ve pretty much just hit the space jam soundtrack for me. Any one of those? I’d be happy. All right. So very sophisticated musical story. It’s fun. I’m allowed to be, I’m allowed to have fun. What else?
All right. So, like I said, this is an open Q and a, so please feel free to jump into the discussion here. I know we have a couple of points. We want to talk about a couple of news updates. I know one, at least that Mike is going to bring up later, but the rest will be a surprise. But if you want to jump in and be part of the comp and be part of the conversation, ask them questions or anything you want, please jump in the comments below and we’ll hit those as they come up.
Okay. Okay. So, to get started here today I did have a couple of things that I wanted to talk about as usual. I am coming right off the tails of 1 million cups this morning. If you guys don’t or haven’t checked out 1 million cups yet, it’s a really. Incredible local community of business owners and entrepreneurs that get together once a week, Wednesday mornings and listened to a presentation from a local business owner.
So, this morning it was a candle company out of Topeka called analog candles. I recommend checking them out because they had some really good products. And she had some really great questions. She is building this up from scratch, building up this company organically with her family, still making all the candles by hand.
And out of her home workshop and it looks like she’s really doing some really awesome things and she has been selling everything online primarily over the last year. I know she wants to get back into retail, especially for those of us. Yeah. I think most people like to smell a candle before they buy one.
So, I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t want to get back into retail, but she has been pushing stuff online through an Etsy store. We’ve had a lot of conversations here on this show about e-commerce how the world of e-commerce has evolved over the last, especially over the last year, but over the last couple of years even more than that and how it’s changing the world of retail, but we haven’t really talked about some.
I don’t even know what to call it. So more established marketplaces, places like Etsy. I think we’ve referenced selling on Amazon. But there’s a lot of different ways that you can get your product online, selling your product either through your own website, through your own e-commerce solution, through existing marketplaces, through affiliates or partnerships with other companies here.
So, I did want to take a little bit of time and just talk about those different options. Discuss the different technologies, different players, the pros, the cons, and where ultimately, we think that at least small businesses in our space in our area should land. I’m not entirely sure how I want to divide this up, but I think that we can break this into.
Existing marketplaces versus your own e-commerce setup. So that would be selling on Amazon selling on Etsy or something like that versus selling on your own website, whether that be a Shopify site or maybe you’ve got a WordPress site with a WooCommerce or you’re leveraging some other technology like Magneto or equid or a wild man store, if you want to use our tool, Mike.
Do you have any thoughts on that division there, or like where maybe you want to go one way versus the other, any S any big benefits stick out to you between working within an existing marketplace or trying to build up your own thing? Yeah, I think, there’s a couple of key questions that you have to ask.
I actually had; I had a gentleman call me I believe it was last Friday afternoon. We had a. Similar discussion along these lines where he was basically, he was starting from scratch match a jewelry e-commerce business. And, my initial thought was, how serious are you are about this?
Meaning, is this a hustle for you on the side? Is these one of seven businesses that you’re running is this your full-time thing that you’re going to, throw your heart and soul into, and it’s going to be what you’re paying your bills off of. Because I think that’s the first place that I would start with somebody if you’re doing this for the long run and this is your bread and butter.
I think yeah, a hundred percent want to go to the customer yeah. Way. And you want to get onto an open platform that you can control all that you can optimize. You can manipulate if you will much more than you can on some of these closed platforms, say a Shopify or Etsy or something like that.
Yeah. If you’re just wanted to dip your toes in the water, and have a little fun and, do this from. Maybe seven o’clock to nine o’clock at night, as you’re winding down after dinner, there’s nothing wrong with building it out on Shopify, my mind, or Etsy or something like that, but w when you be when it goes from being a hobby to really being a business, many times with miles, you could, I’m sure.
Speak to this even better than I can, but we’ve seen this so many times that people just get stuck. If they’re on one of these, one size fits all kind of platforms, and they can’t really do what they want to do with them with their store and with their web presence to get them to that level where they are a serious business and a real contender in the e-commerce space.
Now, there’s some exceptions to that rule. There’s not to say there’s not Shopify sites out there that are just apps. Absolutely crushing it. They are, Let’s be honest, but yeah, so I’m doing some generalization here, obviously, but by and large especially in the more competitive spaces like let’s take jewelry, for example, you’re going to, you’re going to spray spend a lot more money than you ever would trying to get, something like a Shopify store to be competitive with some of these bigger e-commerce players than you would, if you were able to be more nimble.
On something like a, WooCommerce or WordPress platform where you can optimize SEO a little bit better. You can, do some more things with content, make your site stand out, be a little bit stickier, be a little bit more engaging, hopefully get a higher engagement for purchases off of it, things like that.
And so by and large, that’s the first question I think everybody has to ask is what am I really trying to build here? And again, if I’m just trying to maybe like test, oh, I want to test a category or test a niche or test a product line or something like that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing it on Etsy, or Shopify.
And then the other big thing here is we have to ask ourselves is who’s my customer, how am I going to really engage with them and get traffic? Because in some cases it may make sense for you to go on an Etsy, go on, even on Pinterest or Amazon, are one of these platforms that has built in traffic.
If you don’t have the ability the budget to go out and create traffic for yourself to take it to. Even do a Shopify site, but any website out there that’s not connected to this larger ecosystem of buyers and shoppers then that’s something that you should certainly consider because you may be better off just like I said, just, doing it inside the ecosystem of a bigger platform that’s already out there and there’s more and more of those.
Coming online is, as we’ve talked about many times over the course of the past few weeks, there’s from everybody from Walmart to Macy’s to, all of these big retailers. They’re now going to the Amazon business model and they’re going to allow buyers to come in and sellers, excuse me, to come in to sell their products to their buyers.
Basically, as small businesses, in their platform. So those are the two things miles that I think, we should just from a strategic level answer before we give advice on, oh yeah, you should go here. You should go there. And again, just to recap is, what kind of businesses this is, this kind of a side hustle thing.
Is this a full-time thing? And where do you envision leveraging customers? Is that going to be from traffic that you’re creating, say I’m doing a Facebook ad. And I’m going to create an interest and I’m going to bring the traffic to the website, or are you better off going somewhere where there’s already a built-out ecosystem of shoppers and leveraging that on a platform?
Yeah, it’s a really great question to start off with, what kind of business is this? What are you trying to do with this? I think an extra point that we can throw in there is just no, to put a little bit of thought into this. I feel like too many people, when they want to sell something online, they go to that first tool that they’re aware of.
Maybe they have heard the word Shopify before. Maybe they’ve heard of Etsy or something like that. And they just jump on that without really doing their due diligence. And it’s, it can be very difficult to move e-commerce platforms. As someone who’s worked with a lot of different businesses, trying to get them online either for the first time or move them from one shop to another, it’s a big undertaking, especially if you’ve actually established yourself.
Built up a business. You’ve got a lot of different products on there, a lot of different options. And more than that, you’ve got to connect to your payment processor and to your bank and all these other configurations and settings that aren’t going to be in the same place on this new platform. So, it’s always better, if possible, which I realize it’s not always how I’m running a business works out, but, if possible, to pick something and stick with it.
So, if you think that you’re going to outgrow something or you’re going to move in a different direction that isn’t really allowed on the platform you’re talking about, or the one that you’re looking at, then maybe you should plan for the future there and get yourself set up on the platform that you ultimately want to be on.
The, some of these tools are really quick and easy to get started on. And they, but they all have different limitations. We keep hitting Shopify here. Shopify has a really great. E-commerce tool for selling stuff online. It’s built specifically for that and for nothing else. If you want to get spun up quickly, you want to get a good online store that works and looks professional.
And it’s your own space. You’re not on an existing marketplace. Getting set up on Etsy or something that Shopify can be a really good solution for you, but it does have its limitations. And we were talking with someone a little while back who had a Shopify site and wanted to do all of these other things on their website and use it in a number of different ways.
It was really primarily a service based. Business, but wanted to sell retail. In addition to that on top of that, now, Shopify, you can technically put other content on there, but it’s built to be an e-commerce store. It’s not built to be a general, all-encompassing website builder, where you can do anything, you want with it.
So, if you want to do something outside of just that e-commerce space and selling products off of that website, Shopify has all of a sudden going to become very limiting, very restricting. Whereas, if you were using an independent e-commerce product, like our e-commerce product, for example, it doesn’t come with a whole website.
We put it on to a website. So, we either build you a website or we’ll work with your existing website and put it on there so that you can use what other, whatever website tool you want and build up your website that way, and then also have a store on there. So, it’s important to understand where.
Where do you use each one of these tools and to do a little bit of research and also just to think ahead, it’s not just, what is your business now? It’s what do you want it to be in six months, 12 months. A couple of years from now. Cause I would rather you pick something here and stick with it rather than having to deal with moving things later, then you hit another point there and that’s the division I was at initially trying to Try to draw here.
Although there, there are a lot of other important factors here and that is the existing marketplace versus your own setup. There’s a clear advantage to operating within a marketplace in that an Etsy is a really interesting example because it straddles the fence here. It does a little bit of both because you can link directly to your own Etsy store and put your own domain on it as if it’s your own website and you can market it and push people to your store.
It just has your products on it. But then you’re also on the Etsy marketplace. So, people doing branded searches or searching for. Your type of product, not you specifically, but your type of product could just happen upon you. So, you don’t have to generate your own traffic. You just have to make a really great product and get yourself in that marketplace.
So, anyone anywhere, if they’re searching for handmade, soy candles could potentially find this business that was talking to this morning. On Etsy, without them doing any marketing or any outreach or having any that without the Spire, having any idea, what that brand is, they could find that product versus if you set up your own Shopify store if you have our e-commerce product or another one like that, where you’re off on your own, and you have your own website, that of course gives you a little bit more control over your online experience. But it does take you out of that marketplace. So, you have to generate your own traffic and pull people in. On your own, you can’t just leverage the already existing traffic of an Etsy or an Amazon or Macy’s or whoever else is going to set up their online marketplace.
Now there’s also going to be some other fees and restrictions and everything here. If you are selling on existing marketplace, you’re probably not getting a hundred percent of the profit, but I think that’s probably one of the big wins of setting up your own site and your own online store is that you really can control everything from the very beginning of the interaction all the way through the.
Marketing funnel and ultimately to the purchasing process you can set your own prices there, and you’re probably going to be able to maintain a higher set of margins. There’s not going to be any other fees or anything like that outside of, whatever tools you’re deciding to use for that. Whereas if you’re selling on someone else’s marketplace, there could potentially be some other costs associated with that.
So, I think that’s another important variable to throw into this conversation. I guess maybe that is the key distinction here. Are you going to set up your own traffic? Do you have a marketing budget? Can you get people to go to your own website or do you need to leverage an existing marketplace and put yourself out there on some of these it’s going to be fairly restrictive?
Like I said, Shopify works with Shopify and that’s it. You have to set up everything on Shopify. You can’t put a Shopify site, a store on a different kind of website versus, something like Etsy where you could have your own. Store on your own website and you could sell your products on Etsy.
There’s no reason you can’t do both. If you want to try to link people over and pull traffic away from one of those big marketplaces over into your own space, maybe that’s how you get started. Maybe that’s a quick and easy way to get some traffic upfront before anyone has any idea who you are. So now we’re talking about this and a lot of ore type scenarios, but in some key places, this could be more of an end for that or.
Definitely usually yes, always is. I always, I hate saying that I feel like that ends up being our answer a lot, especially when we’re talking about social media and content and everything. It’s an, and not an aura. You have to do all of this stuff. Unfortunately, running a business 2021 means that you have to wear a ton of hats and do a lot of things to be successful.
Okay, so we are talking about e-commerce here. But we are open to taking your questions. I see a couple of comments coming in here. Hello, Jeff. He says hi in the comments. So, thanks for jumping in. If you have any questions, if you had anything that you want us to talk about more specifically, please throw that in the comments here.
Otherwise, I think we’re going to continue on this e-commerce conversation and talking about. I guess we’ve been mostly in the retail space, but this does apply to anyone who wants to sell anything online. Getting some emails in as well. So then let’s talk about let’s talk about e-commerce tools. We talked about Shopify a lot. That’s obviously a huge player in town. There’s also WooCommerce and Magneto and All sorts of other e-commerce tools. And they all have their place. I think all of these tools have their time in place.
It’s not liked a clear winner or anything here, but it’s important to do a little bit of research and realize which one is going to be best for you. Because again, it’s a little bit it’s, it can be very difficult to transfer later on. And if you just jump on the Wix e-commerce bandwagon or something up front, cause that’s what you had your initial site on and then your business grows.
And that no longer becomes a good tool for you. That’s going to become an issue. I guess there’s which ones do we want to compare here? Shopify is definitely a big one. There’s also big commerce, which is fairly similar. I can put those in the same bucket here. Magneto is in there as well.
WooCommerce is the WordPress e-commerce tool. So, it’s a little bit more extensible. It’s not really a self-contained tool. It’s something that you would add on to a WordPress site. So, if you have a good WordPress site or a good WordPress developer, then that can be incredibly extensible. You do have to do a little bit more setup there initially.
It’s not, it doesn’t just work right out of the box. So that’s probably one of the big downsides of that, again, you can do a lot more with a WordPress site if you want it to make it a blog, or you want it to do a little bit more, as far as your content marketing play on your website. And then also have also have a shop on there.
I realized that I keep saying Magneto is the magnetized billing and X-Men. That is not what the e-commerce platform is called. It’s M a G E N T O. And for some reason, every time I see that, I S I say, Magneto, I don’t know why that’s not right. It’s Magento. Anyway. Yeah. That is also a PHP based.
E-commerce Then there’s some other ones that are built into their site platforms as well. Like Squarespace has its own e-commerce platform and their Wix has its own e-commerce platform built in there where you are. You can do a little bit more with those sites, but you are very restricted to that particular platform.
So, if you build your site on Squarespace, you have to use this Squarespace. E-commerce tool. If you will build your site on Wix, you have to use the Wix e-commerce tool. If you build your site on WordPress, you can use WooCommerce or you can use other e-commerce tools.
Versus, Shopify you have to make is primarily an e-commerce tool, but you have to use the Shopify website builder in order to get your shop up on that. You can’t put a Shopify site on a WordPress website, for example. So, they’re all limiting in their own way. They’re they tend to operate within their own their own platform within their own space.
So again, moving one to the other can be very difficult. Some of them are a little bit better at. Search engine optimization. This one of them have some more premium features, a little bit more extensible things like Wix and Squarespace. They’re totally good for if you have a couple of products, it’s a very small shop and you just want to sell a couple of things online.
Totally good for that. But if you are a larger store or you’re trying to grow into a larger store, that’s going to have hundreds or thousands of skews. That’s very quickly going to become a problem for you. Those really aren’t developed. They’re not built to. Handle very large retail plays and just the platforms themselves are going to be a little bit more limiting as well for building really cool sites or for handling a ton of different traffic.
Those are sites that have their hosting built into the platform. So, if you have a Squarespace site, you are hosted by Squarespace. Or if you have a WIC site, you are hosted by Wix. And their infrastructure is just not that awesome for huge sites. So as soon as you get a ton of traffic, a bunch of people in their shopping through a bunch of different products, you’re going to start seeing performance problems. It’s not going to be very easy to use and manage. So that’s going to cause a problem there, but if you only have 10 products or something, that can be a very quick and easy way to get going.
Versus, something like WooCommerce on WordPress. You can have a WordPress site hosted very on a very high-performance platform so that it can maintain a lot more. And a lot more traffic there and handle a much larger store and something like Shopify or big commerce, those are much more built out tools and they’re managed there.
They’re going to be a lot easier to manage a ton of different skews. If you’ve got a thousand different products in there that you want to sell, Shopify can handle that really well. And it’s going to be a lot easier for you to run your business and run your store through a larger e-commerce tool like that.
There’s also going to be a couple of different fees based in there. You got to be careful, there are some e-commerce platforms out there. That’ll actually take a percentage of all of your sales instead of doing a. 20 bucks a month, that’s your subscription to the platform or whatever.
They’ll just say X percent of your sales are going to come to us. And again, if you’re just getting started, you’re selling five different products. You have a really small operation. Maybe that percentage is going to be pretty low. And that’s going to be a really quick and affordable way for you to get up and going.
But as soon as you grow and you become a million-dollar business, all of a sudden, that’s going to become a massive cost and is going to really limit you in what you can do with your business moving into the future. So that’s another red flags watch for, but also it really depends on Mike’s initial question.
What are you wanting to do with this business? Where are you and where are you wanting to grow to? If this is just a little side hustle and it’s not going to turn into a massive thing, you’re selling a couple hundred, maybe a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of merchant month. No, maybe that’s a, that’s not a deal breaker for you and the ease of setup there and that low cost is going to be worth it. If you really are willing to jump into this with both feet, and this is your full-time gig, this is what you’re paying the bills with. And every percentage point of that margin is going to matter. And you’ve got to watch those kinds of fees that can grow with you.
So that was a couple of different points in there on the e-commerce side of things. Mike, did you have anything to add there? A couple of things, miles. Yeah. I do want you to get into a little bit about this hybrid idea if you will, of, how e-commerce is going to AR it is, and it’s going to continue to slowly merge into physical.
Commerce, if you will, meaning that people will be in physical locations, but they’ll still be ordering products off of their phone, for example, or a wireless tablet of some kind, we think about the event space a lot. When we talk about this example of, I go to a concert, I go to a festival or an event in the park or whatever, and they have contactless ordering where I can get.
Concessions or merchandise or something like that, but I’m not actually handing somebody my credit card for them to run into a machine. I’m simply purchasing it from my phone, walking over to a designated location and picking up my merchandise. Before I let you run with that, I did have interesting tidbit to throw in here related from some news from the news desk.
That I came across as you were doing a little deep dive on that. And that is from the company yum brands, of course, the owner of Kentucky fried chicken taco bell and pizza hut. They bought those three companies from PepsiCo. I know a way back. You don’t usually think about Kentucky fried chicken, taco bell and pizza hut as technology companies, do you miles, but the interesting news here of the day is that the young brands last quarter, so earlier this year made two major acquisitions.
They bought an artificial intelligence unit as part of a performance marketing firm. And they also purchase a. Con conversational commerce developer in tick-tock technology. It was the name of that company. And they’ve integrated both of these companies into the young brands to help their businesses.
Adapt to more digital connectivity with their audience and e-commerce, and so really interesting that these guys are going all in, on building out technology to do a lot of the things that we’ve talked about often on the show, which is leveraging technology to remove the hoops and your business and your buying funnel to make it easier for customers to give you money.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing. And it turns out that digital sales across y’all’s portfolio have reached a record is $17 billion. In 2020 I 45% increase. From 2019, here’s a quote from the chief executive David Gibbs, the key focus point for our teams to continue acceleration of digital and technology innovations across the globe, all geared towards providing customers with new and seamless ways to access our brand.
So really interesting stuff there from the e-commerce technology side, coming from yum brands. That’s my update here for now from the news desk miles I’ll have much more later on. Yeah. You did bring up a good point and that is, we used to, I say used to like just a couple of years ago really seem to divide the two worlds of in-person retail.
Business and e-commerce and this last year, this COVID year has completely smashed the barriers between those two things. I think they were already cracking and leaking before, but now there’s nothing left. More and more brands, at least the smart ones out there are. I don’t know, changing or enhancing their overall strategy to meld those two worlds together a little bit.
And I’ve seen a lot of different creative ways around that to get people, to engage with the brand, both online and in person. One of the, one of the easiest examples I can give here just to give the people out there an idea of what we’re talking about is going to be contactless, ordering.
We were actually talking about this a few days ago doing something like at a restaurant, you can just have a QR code on a table tent. Someone pulls out their phone, they could, they sit down at the table, they pull up their phone. They pointed at the QR code that opens up a menu for the restaurant.
They can then order as if they were doing like an online ordering kind of thing and submit their order. That way that goes directly through that restaurant’s point of sale system directly to the kitchen makes the food. Wait staff brings it out. And so that completely changes how that restaurant works.
Makes you skip a couple of steps. It started off with people, wanting to have this contact list, ordering procedure for obvious reasons during the pandemic here just for safety precautions, but I don’t see these kinds of things really going anywhere. As we move out of pandemic world and back to some kind of normal here, just because it’s cool.
It’s convenient. Maybe you’re not doing contactless ordering, but you’re doing contactless payments. You’re having that QR code print off on someone’s receipt. And instead of walking up to the cashier or something and paying that way, they can just scan the code and pay on that mile.
Not only is it easier, but from the business owner’s perspective, it’s just going to make you more money. And I’ll give you an example of this that I saw even before the pandemic hit. This would have been 2019, maybe 2018. I’m getting my years confused now at the PGA championship at in St. Louis, PGA championship, obviously a huge event, thousands of people there. It’s coming up again here in a week or two. And they had. Your regular concession line, you go through the line, and you pick up, you slide your card, and you basically pick up whatever you need and it’s you scan it.
And then they had a whole separate area for the beer concessions, because we don’t care what event you’re doing, what, what’s the biggest profit center, usually your beer sales. And so, they completely siphoned that off into another location and it was all automated. To where I go up there.
I, again, I run my credit card, I get a cup and then I go up and I hit a button. It’s going to charge me, compare comparable to what, if I get six ounces, 12 ounces, 18 ounces, and then it fills up my cup automatically to whatever I purchased. And then I take it and I go on my Merry way. I never stand in a line.
I’ve never talked to a person, anything. So, what does this do? This makes it easier to get beer. What are people going to do? They’re going to get more beer. So, what are you going to do? You’re going to make more money. And so that’s the thing that we just need to keep driving home. It’s why are we doing all this?
Why are we making all these changes? Why is a brand like yum, investing in artificial intelligence? It’s because it’s going to, it’s going to be hard upfront, right? Like short term short-term pain. Long-term gain. It’s going to be hard upfront to completely revitalize your business but think about it when you have a much better business model, your customers are happy and you’re making more money and it’s like that for the long-term.
So yeah, a lot of this stuff, it can seem daunting, but I guess that’s why we’re here. We founded this company with the mission of making some of this technology more accessible to smaller and smaller businesses. I guess we’ll take that one guys. But yeah, just getting involved in where the people are, that the attention is online.
Everyone is online, whether they’re in front of a computer or not. If you’re walking around with one of these phones all day, then you are basically a hundred percent connected to the internet at all times. And so, if you’re business isn’t interacting with people in that space, then you are missing out on a gigantic marketplace.
And I guess necessity is the mother of creation. And so, this last year has brought up, is brought out the creativity in people. And in brands of all sizes where people are trying to engage with each other, they’re trying to engage with their audience in a more virtual way and leveraging technology more and more.
That’s where you see contactless ordering. That’s where you see that automated beer dispensing service. I don’t even know what to call that. There’s got to be a cool name for that. And also, I want one this kind of creativity is exactly what is going to separate the wheat from the chaff here in the upcoming years, I think where digital marketing and marketing become more one in the same digital business, online and business in the real world become one in the same.
All of those barriers are just getting knocked down right and left. And if you mastered that and you are able to think outside the box and engage people where they are. You’re going to win. You’re going to succeed. You’re going to grow and you’re going to surpass the competition. I guess that ties back into our e-commerce conversation from earlier.
Other reason to be thinking about different platforms and different tools for experiencing e-commerce or for getting your business online, no matter what kind of business you are, first of all, you need to be selling something online. I don’t care what it is. You need to be leveraging your online presence to make sales in one way or another.
And to some of these. Tools, some of these e-commerce platforms are going to merge better with the real world than others. We talked about the Wix e-commerce platform, super easy to get something up and going. You can put some products on there, you can sell them. You can make money on an easy drag and drop website creator, and it costs next to nothing.
But it is not going to interact well with your other marketing efforts. You, with your social media marketing efforts, with your email marketing efforts, it’s not going to interact well with your brick-and-mortar shop. Very well. It doesn’t have tools to do the kinds of things that we were talking about here.
Whereas some of the larger e-commerce platforms are coming out with these things. I was talking about contactless, ordering and integrating directly with the point-of-sale system. We work with an online e-commerce technology that does exactly that and builds it into the platform at no additional cost.
You just start putting that out there. You start printing these QR codes on your receipts and people can pay that way. It’s just one, one less point of friction as Mike was saying, it makes it easier for you to get beer. What are you going to do? You’re going to buy more beer. So, I, that works in pretty much any industry.
If you can find a point to remove a little bit of friction to take away one hoop that someone has to jump through to give you money, then you make more money. Your business is more successful and it’s just a nicer, a smoother experience for your customer. Anyway. So, part of it. Just makes me want to say that people are lazy.
So, convenience wins all the time, but I think that it’s more than that. It’s deeper than that. People like having that. Smooth, intuitive experience when they interact with the business. When I walk into a store and I it naturally draws me around a certain path and I walk in and even though I don’t, I’ve never been in the store before, I have an idea of where everything is.
I don’t have to wander around forever searching for something or. How maybe the staff there is really awesome and supportive, and they walk up, and they guide me through the entire thing. That’s a much more pleasant experience than walking in, having no idea where anything is wandering out around for an hour to find whatever it is I was looking for finally not finding it because they don’t even have the kind of thing that I’m looking for.
Like that those frustrations drive people away from a brand and that smooth, integrated, intuitive experience is what. Not only draws people in but keeps them coming back. And so, this is just the next step of that. It’s the next evolution is leveraging technology. E-commerce the internet to give your customers a more yeah. And all, yeah. Encompassing, intuitive experience of your business of your brand. I guess that was my bit on that, but if you guys have any questions on that, please throw that in the comments here. We’re going to continue on. I think
Do we have any other news updates or anything coming out here we want to hit? Or did you want to expand on the organization at all? There’s a lot of new stuff we could hit here if we want to move on from e-commerce. If there’s no questions about e-commerce. Yeah, let’s get on to some of the news here.
Yeah, I think we have a hard stop at noon today, so want to make sure that we hit all those things. I know we have a couple of exciting updates that I want to make sure to get out, to do the people here. So, let’s go ahead and move on from that. But if anyone has any other questions or wants to talk a little bit more specifically about e-commerce or integrating that into the real world, or if you have a great example of that, please put it in the comments or email us, ask Wildman at Waymo, web.com.
And we can expand on that later. I don’t think that conversation is anywhere near done, sir. Okay. News desk time. Let’s start with the, what happened over the weekend. And getting to some stuff that happened early this week. I think we would be remised if we didn’t at least mention the fact that Elon Musk hosted Saturday night live on Saturday, not really a hard news story, there was some takeaways to come out of it, some skits about Mars and Tesla and in doge coin, of course in the doge father, But I think just the big kind of big picture takeaway was, it’s cool to be a business person now, which is something that’s been in the ecosystem of popular culture for a while, but I think this was.
Clearly the first time than any kind of a massive fortune 500 CEO had been in this kind of role as a as a popular culture icon. And I, I don’t think that this is like a trend that’s going to, I don’t think we’re going to see like Bezos on it next year. I think Elan was already, pushing the envelope of business and popular culture.
It’s just, I think, worth noting that maybe we’re at this peak point in time of entrepreneurship in general, just being hip and cool. And I think that there’s a lot of good things about that and there’s, maybe some not bad things, but things that people should take with a grain of salt and be a little be a little casually optimistic about not just.
Jump in and think, oh yeah, now I have to be an entrepreneur. And, and we get this whole rise of wantrepreneurs and we’ve talked about this a little bit on the show before, so I’m not going to belabor the point, but I just thought it was interesting in this moment in history, there of Elon being on SNL.
But some other historical stuff that came out over the weekend was our favorite app clubhouse. Has now officially launched on Android and it is here. The voice revolution has now Britain bridge the gap from iOS to Android and is open to the entire world. So really excited what this is going to do.
Not just for clubhouse, but for voice technology and voice social apps in general, we’ve, this has been an ongoing story that we’ve been talking about. For months and months now, Facebook is jumping in the game later on this summer, we know Twitter is probably not going to be far behind.
And so, it was really important for clubhouse. I feel like to get this launched on Android this month at least have a little bit of headway before Facebook’s got out there. And I haven’t been a whole lot on the platform. The last few days, but it’s definitely been interesting when I have been on there.
Just the influx of Android users. It’s like when you just get like a massive influx of new kids into the school and everybody’s wandering around the hallway’s loss, like what do I do? And it’s been fun though. If you are on Android or if you are on iOS and you haven’t hopped on clubhouse, yet they’ve also made it really easy to do that.
Maybe miles you could put the link to our clubs in the comment section down below, but now you don’t need to wait on an invite from somebody. You can still get an invite from somebody to join directly. But you can also just join any club. Doesn’t have to be our club and that’ll automatically get you in the queue.
He just needed to get approved in by one of the club administrators and you’ll be automatically on, but so definitely go and check it out. Even if, if you don’t think it’s for you, this clubhouse in particular, like I said, I think just the more that we get trained in and voice technology and voice marketing, a better on we’re going to be in the long run because this is not going out, going away.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. And this is going to be really important for how you communicate with your audience and your customers moving forward. Into the future. So even if clubhouse went away tomorrow, the time that you spend learning how to communicate in this new platform is going to be valuable.
So definitely check that out. If anybody has any questions, feel free to reach out to us. So more interesting. Tech-related talk here. Miles. We’ve been exploring NFTs a little bit the last few weeks on this show and. Last week we talked about Don Julio, a great tequila brand that was doing an NFT drop more companies that you probably wouldn’t think of as being again, tech savvy, or jumping in the space.
Again, taco bell is jumping in the NFTE space, but also Sharman and Pringles are getting involved in it. And I kid you not miles. I kid you not that Sharman is teaming up with digital artists to create digital art. Based on Sharman, toilet, paper products and patterns and designs on a popular Sharman toilet paper throughout the year.
People are not wasting time getting creative with this stuff. Let me tell ya to think outside the box. So, I’m glad that Sharman is listening to our show. Today, they are certainly, getting outside the box with this, but also some more use cases of a bit more practice practicality is coming out as well.
Brands are leveraging QR codes the parent company of product. Is doing this as well. So again, removing hoops from giving, allowing people to purchase your products easier. So now you can purchase exclusive product products from QR codes that are generated from these NFTs.
That was a really creative, yet practical way to increase sales. And then of course, are good friend, a friend of the show, Gary V Gary Vaynerchuk. Something really interesting. Last week when he launched his own NFT line, but he’s connected it to this whole community that he’s created called V friends.
And basically, if you do purchase an NFT you also get put into this community, which also gets you access to certain things that he’s offering, including live events later on in the year and next year. And so, I think that is a really interesting space. I think that the live music and the event space is just going to go ham.
With NFTs. Once they realize how to leverage this and give people unique experiences that they can only access through the NFT. That was really interesting as well in the NFT site, not done with tech and big brands here. Miles, are you familiar with the game angry birds? Okay. The developer of angry birds has now worked with burger King to develop an augmented reality game for King junior meals at participating locations.
So, we all probably remember from our youth, the happy meals that we would get as kids. And we, course bug our mom or our dad as we were in the backseat, driving down. Sixth street or wherever your nearest McDonald’s was mom, dad, we have to stop in there and get the heat, the latest, whatever it was addition of the happy meal toy, because you got to collect them.
All right. And so, a new twist on a very old idea gets the kids in young, of course, because the kids are the greatest salespeople to their parents and get them to leverage a game of vacation. In which they will want to keep collecting these items except they’ve updated it to an augmented reality platform.
So certainly, a little bit different than what we were into back in the day miles. But I think the principles still apply. And then also just some more good news coming out of the world of ad execs. More and more ad budgets are being planned to have live events as part of their ad budgets.
For third and fourth quarter later on this year. So again, cross our fingers hopefully that is going to be happening and we’ll be getting this vaccination rollout complete and herd immunity reached, and we’ll have a mass live event later on this year. And that’s something that’s been completely off the table, more or less for brands as part of their advertising and marketing for the last 14 months or so.
And so, it’s going to be great to hopefully get that back online later on this year and leveraged live events, leverage experiences as a way to do content marketing and bridge that gap to connect with your audience. So that was some hopeful news there. And then miles, I’ll just, I’ll wrap this up here.
With an interesting, I’m not even really sure what to make about this this news piece here that came out, but Walmart cooks up healthy eating experience based upon a Netflix show. So, Walmart has leveraged a Netflix show that is geared towards kids to create. A content marketing campaign all around healthy eating and teaching kids and families, how to engage in healthy eating in their homes.
Now, the thing that I’m not quite sure how to make about this is just, I wasn’t expecting Walmart to be the ones that do this because you don’t usually think about shopping at Walmart. What’s healthy eating, but why they’re doing it themselves? I think it’s well. And the fact that they’re targeting kids while I think it is, it’s a long-term play at correcting a misconception, which is really important thing to do. We talk about marketing bridges a lot. We talk about. You know how you’re foreseen from the outside. And that’s the most important thing to do is to really, have an accurate picture of where your pitfalls are and where the, the negative criticism, the negative feedback.
And sometimes they are just misconceptions, for example I’m just guessing that Walmart over the years has probably. Put a whole lot of effort into bringing in more organic foods, bringing in healthier options. They have a whole now, fresh grocery produce section in most of their locations, but probably what they’ve done physically in the stores has not matched up.
With the brand image, like I just said, you don’t think Walmart healthy eating. And so perhaps this is a way for them to close that gap through include or to improve that marketing bridge gap that they have there. But a really interesting take. And I, listen, I just love the idea of them doing content marketing in general.
They’re hitting on two things that we say just. Very frequently on this show. And that is, being creative with content marketing, and also thinking in the long-term this sounds like a very long-term play, which of course Walmart can just bleed money for decades and there’ll be fine.
But for smaller businesses, we also have to catch ourselves and make sure that we’re thinking in the long-term. We’re not just focusing on next week’s sales or next month’s numbers, but we’re thinking years down the line and. Operating in a way that serves our future selves. Yeah, a hundred percent.
And I was, I think I said it a couple of weeks ago on the show. If you’re not planning on doing a complete exit or like retiring from your business in the next 12 to 18 months, you need to be doing some serious planning on how you’re updating, optimizing, and evolving your company for all of these rapid changes that are happening in the marketplace right now.
Otherwise, you’re going to get left behind. Great point miles. It looks like we’re almost out of time here, so I’ll wrap it up from the news desk and send it back to you. Awesome. Yeah, like I said, we’re going to be wrapping up here at noon, but we will be back next Wednesday at 11:00 AM to talk a little bit more about digital marketing, how it is changing in this.
Weird world that we’re in and hopefully answering your questions as they come in here. So, make sure to email us those questions. If you’re watching us later at, ask wildmanweb.com, we’ll use that to pick our subjects for next week. Okay. Mike, thank you very much for your valuable insights today and we will see you next week. Thanks for putting up me Miles. All right, see you Mike. All right, that is it for today. Make sure to check back in with us next Wednesday at 11. Visit our website for more free resources at wildmanweb.com. And we will see you next week. Thanks.
