Faceless eCommerce Is Dying: eCommerce 3.0

Well there’s a number of different ways to do it, but the absolute best one is to create a video on some kind of regular schedule, so like a weekly basis. And that video should be relevant to the topics and conversations and problems of your community. Take my skin care company for example. We have a group of women who are all baby boomers. They’re all over 45. Now there’s 50 million of these women in America and they’re all going through what I call a collective experience. And their bodies are aging on the outside faster than they are on the inside and society is treating them differently as a result of that and they don’t like it.

So we create a weekly video with our viewpoints on this collective experience. Topics like menopause and man/woman relationships and being fabulous over 50 and whatever it happens to be. But the point is that we’re creating a community. We’re building a brand and this takes you from just being another person who retails products to actually having an impact on people’s lives. It makes your store more valuable, it allows you to be able to command higher prices for your products. It also fortifies you from channels.

So that skin care company I was telling you about, 50% of our traffic, over 50% of our traffic actually, comes from people who are typing in our brand name or typing in our URL directly into the address bar. So, if our Facebook account gets shut down, or if our Google rankings go away, or if we lose one of our channels of traffic, it doesn’t matter, because we’ve built up a brand. We’ve built a community of people around our store that are looking specifically for us because of our viewpoints on these different topics. And another thing this does for you, is if you ever intend to liquidate your store or sell your store, you’ll be able to command a higher multiple because you’ve got more than just a line of products and an advertising account. You have an actual community of people who are engaged with you, who are in communication with you, who respond to you when you make offers, when you do sales.

We know that we need to do more than just put up products. We need to have a community, we need to build a brand, and we need to add value to our marketplace. So how else can we do that? Well, I think the easiest way is to create content, educational guides and informational videos that solve your customer’s problems. So in video form this could be videos about the features of your products or guides on how to use them. Another way to add some value to your market would be to interview experts on that particular product line. Or get other people’s opinions and share it. So, people like to know what other people think. So if you have a bunch of customers, you can call them up and ask them if they’d be open to being interviewed and you can use that interview on your blog and let your other customers see why other people just like them are buying your products.

And lastly, another really, really easy way to add some value to a market, is to put together lists of resources. People love lists of resources. They just love knowing what is out there and what can help them. So like in the microphone space this same website had a list of 10 other products I could use, a few different websites I could go to, to learn how to better use my microphone, some pieces of software that I could download that went along with my microphone. So it had a really in depth list that I could use to might benefit and showed me how to better use that product. So that’s the ecommerce 3.0. It’s the shift from selling to serving. From a store that just has products to a brand that engages a community and adds value to its marketplace. Thanks for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next one.