🛍 DTC Daily - Monday, Mar 6

👩🏼‍⚕️ How this nursing influencer made nearly $2 million on Etsy

📰 TL;DR - This is an example of how a simple but brilliant idea can turn into a thriving business. Stephanee Beggs was in nursing school during the pandemic when she started creating videos to help herself study. She ended up posting one on TikTok and it blew up. Viewers wanted in on her study notes so she launched an Etsy shop to sell them. Two years and 64,000+ sales later, she's made nearly $2 million.

💡 Insight - Nurses and other healthcare practitioners are frankly an underrated community for marketing. Brands do seem to be catching on, with several DTC scrubs brands cropping up as of late. The other takeaway to pay attention to is that Stephanee has a disciplined approach to TikTok, which is the majority of her marketing. She's not just a business owner, but an influence in her own right. She also doesn't just push her products, she creates educational videos about her profession. If you're also in a small niche community, this is great inspiration.

➡️You can read the article here...

📈 "I realized optimizing our site was the single best use of my time"

📰 TL;DR - I came across this tweet thread about how one DTC business owner grew sales by focusing on the fundamentals of CRO. Mathias Schrøder describes how he had hit the ceiling with ads and struggled to get traction with his audience on platforms like Snap and TikTok. Rather, he went back to the drawing board and focussed on optimizing his site. Each successful tweak led to a jump in sales and, in turn, made other marketing more effective.

💡 Insight - Marketing really feels like the sexy side of e-commerce. Ad spend, acquisition costs, which platforms to experiment with and all that good stuff is much of what I see talked about on places like Twitter. I love this reminder that your site can't be forgotten in all that. Returning to the basics of great layout, copy, and product images can go a long way and should be revisited routinely.

➡️You can read the tweets here...

👀 Shopify has its eyes on B2B

📰 TL;DR - Shopify has made great efforts to position itself as the name in DTC but is now looking at B2B as a place to grow. It refreshed its offerings for wholesalers last year and, in turn, B2B owners are wondering if that's enough to sway them away from BigCommerce and Magento. B2B can be much more complicated than DTC, and any platform that wants to attract B2B clients needs the tech to support them.

💡 Insight - This caught my eye because of the growing trend of DTC and B2B looking more and more like each other. While B2B has more logistical problems to solve, wholesale buyers increasingly want to interact with a B2B the same way they would if they were a customer buying a DTC product. That means, as Modern Retail lists, "elements like per-customer pricing, product availability, quantity purchasing rules, payment terms and flexible payment options." If you're a B2B, what would sway you to switch to Shopify?

➡️You can see the article here...

📹 Is liveshopping a forgone conclusion in the US?

📰 TL;DR - This piece argues that livestream shopping simply isn't going to take over e-commerce in ways that have been predicted. There was a moment in the pandemic where liveshopping looked promising in the US, but a return to pre-pandemic shopping habits as put a dent in that. Even in China, which is really the epicenter of liveshopping, it's only 10% of the market. Big, but not huge.

💡 Insight - What's really interesting here is that the author points out that the successful livestreaming tactics used in China haven't really been replicated in the US. There are two key aspects: FOMO and entertainment. Chinese liveshopping streams have limited time deals that create a sense of urgency. They're also, well, fun to watch. My takeaway isn't that livestream isn't worth the bother, just that it's completely wrong to think the format itself is what's magical. If your stream is boring, no one is going to buy a thing.

➡️You can read the article here...

🗑 Funko to throw away $30 million in inventory

📰 TL;DR - Funko, the makers of those little figurines that have basically taken over every comic and fandom convention, announced it was going to trash more than $30 million in inventory. It's all going straight to the dump, which is a curious move considering eBay owns a stake in Funko. The company apparently had to rent extra storage space to deal with its excess stock, hurting its bottom line.

💡 Insight - What I liked about EcommerceByte's coverage of this is they paid attention to how consumers are reacting. And they're not reacting well. For collectors, of course, there's a question of why they can't have access to this overstock at a deep discount. The other side is that that $30 million dump means tons and tons of plastic going right into the garbage. Managing stock is an important issue, but so are the optics of how you deal with it.

➡️You can read the article here...

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