I'm in the UK - I don't think our market can support higher margins (cost to import fabrics is relatively high), so just curious.
The reason for this is that by just summing your costs you louse sight of how various areas are performing, and you also lose the ability to compare. If you become a better buyer your gross margin improves, but by employing a picker it stays the same, however type warehousing costs do increase.
So in essence when most people say 'margin' they mean a simple sales-minus-cost-of-goods-sold.
Disclosure: I'm in finance at a retailer/wholesaler who is doing around 5x what the article is doing on ecommerce, it's smallest channel (about 1/20th of the company, but growing)
Context: trying to understand the design market.
The flat rate shipping under $45 in this example is probably because it costs nearly the same to ship half a yard or five yards; shipping 20 will cost a good deal more, but not be anything like 20 times the cost of shipping one yard. So there's no way to bake in a price that doesn't end up generating absurd results either for you, your customer, or both.
But, you can do that if it doesn't fly too much in the face of customer expectation. In some industries, like printing, it's common. In fabric I think there's a strong expectation of a single price per length unit, though I suppose you could challenge it.
I don't think lots of price tiers is a good customer experience, so I decided against it as a long-term customer satisfaction strategy. I do wonder if it's costing me sales. Maybe I should set up an alternate brand that does tiered pricing and free shipping.
[source] https://www.nickkolenda.com/psychological-pricing-strategies...
For me marketing is always the toughest part .
How do you do your marketing ?
What tips can you offer us that save the most time and money spent ?
I never respected sales,
Until I tried it.
- Get to know potential customers. This means talking to them, making friends with (some of) them, getting involved in the community around your product etc.
- Build up a solid blog, instagram etc. for inbound and discovery marketing
- Giveaways / discounts can give you a temporary boost
- Tell your story well, if you're a small business people love to buy from you, and they even accept slower delivery and issues if you personalize your support
- Go to relevant events / shows, try to get featured on podcasts etc.
- Work on SEO
- Pay for ads directly to bloggers, vloggers and relevant content sites
- Send free samples to targeted influencers
- Use but don't abuse your mailing list
What doesn't work for me is buying traffic from google/facebook, they just tend to send junk through with an appalling bounce rate.
It's kind of funny that people will get advice to get CS degrees, take a boot camp, learn a language, etc. to execute on an idea, but for soft skills you never see classes for business or marketing recommended. People could take 2-3+ business/marketing classes in the time it takes to learn React from zero Javascript knowledge. Instead, people are told to sign up to Stripe Atlas or Shopify and Instagram. "...and then a miracle occurs."[1]
Imagine a bizdev person saying, "for me, programming is always the toughest part, any tips?" and the response being, "Oh, you should definitely sign up for Stack Overflow. Simplifies things quite a bit." This may reflect a conceit on the part of programmers that it's soooo much more complicated and important, and the business side is full of chads and beckys who talk too loud on speakerphone (yes these people are a cancer, but that's beside my point).
Biz/Mark has its own, shall we say, "Data Structures and Algorithms" to it, there's just no one set of books that everyone (...) agrees on. Even so, people have been selling fabric for thousands of years, there's not much that the internet changes about that, or many if not most other business categories.
1. https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4003/4633000725_8817dcedb9_b.j...
The Independent Consulting Manual is a good place to start, then go down the list of authors and read their other stuff.
They often do a christmas sale too.
Follow Patio11 on twitter, read his stuff. Follow Amy Hoy, do 30x500.
Then spread out from there.
If you’re funded, great! All the same advice applies, you just have more gasoline to pour on the fire. Try things faster.
Patio11 taught me how to raise my salary in my full time job.
Amy Hoy got me off the couch and start building products (that user wants).
Not to forget advice from Rob Wailing, Kai Davis etc too.
Simple straightforward and so insightfull !
I think if you get really good at streamlining your marketing (Instagram photos and landing pages) as well as your pick/pack/ship operations (i.e running a warehouse), then you can expand into multiple niches. Fabrics, clothes, prints, whatever is super niche and high margin and can't be found on the shelves of a big box store.
Ultimately I think you need to actually be passionate about the product you're selling and embrace the community around it.
You buy the fabric, typically you'll double the price when selling to customers. Then you take off additional postage fees/packaging (note the flat fees on postage), payment fees (3-4%), discounts, returns, shopify monthly fees, accounting software etc.
You'll spend about 50% of your day cutting & packing orders, taking them to the post office etc. (or you can employ someone to help) and the rest of the time taking shots for instagram, sourcing new suppliers, working on SEO/blogging and doing admin.
If you're good at marketing you can shift quite a lot of fabric, but it will take you about a year to get your stock levels up to a sustainable amount to pay yourself a wage. If you want a real shop front you will generate most of your profit from running classes as the costs for a high street store are significantly higher than shopify and you gain little in terms of footfall vs online traffic.
This isn't a get rich quick model but over time it works well and is replicable at scale.