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- 🛍 DTC Daily - Tuesday, Jan 31
🛍 DTC Daily - Tuesday, Jan 31
Today's DTC news, tips, & tools you need to know
👀 1 - 50 DTC brands to watch
📰 TL;DR - The Lead put out a list of 50 of the most promising DTC brands for the current year in the fashion, beauty, and lifestyle spaces. There are some more established brands on the list, like candle-maker Boy Smells, and also some brands you may have seen filling your Instagram ad slots, like scrubs maker Care+Wear. Also on the list: when available, how much capital these brands have raised.
💡 Insight - Studying other brands is one of the best things you can do as an e-commerce entrepreneur, and it's free! If you're smart and have some spare time, go through this list and examine each brand. What does their social media presence look like? How is their checkout flow? What are they doing that you're not?
🗑️ 2 - The "junkification" of Amazon
📰 TL;DR - We all know what to expect from Amazon: a ton of listings, many from unknown brands, and very little guidance on how to actually pick a good product. If you're getting this newsletter, you're probably savvy enough to understand the gamification of Amazon and what it takes to be a third-party seller on the platform. This long piece dives into how the system works and how that creates a less-than-stellar experience for customers.
(Interestingly, Wired just published an article called "The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok" — also worth a read.)
💡 Insight - My gut says that Amazon sees its junky nature as a feature, not a bug. You're not going there because you're expecting a high-end customer experience. You're going there because you know you find the thing you want and have it arrive as soon as tomorrow. However, this is also instructive of how non-Amazon DTC brands can stand out. Lean into not being junk. Provide the aesthetics, customer care, and luxury-tinged experience Amazon has no interest in curating.
😈 3 - Etsy has gremlins messing with listing renewals
📰 TL;DR - Some Etsy sellers are experiencing a bug (charitably being called gremlins) that seems to be messing with listing renewals. People who set their listings to renew manually are finding they've somehow been toggled to renew automatically. According to the Etsy community forums, this seems to be a chronic issue with no fix in sight.
💡 Insight - Obviously if you sell on Etsy and have your listings set to renew manually, you need to go and make sure that's still the case ASAP. Every time a listing renews, merchants get hit with a fee, so it's no small deal in addition to being incredibly annoying.
📱 4 - How to actually sell on Instagram
📰 TL;DR - There's more to selling on Instagram than uploading your catalog and patting yourself on the back. This guide has tips and tricks to set yourself up for success with social commerce on the platform, including enabling payments in DMs and adding a sales action button.
💡 Insight - There's certainly been talk lately about whether social commerce will thrive in the future, but for now you can't ignore that Instagram is a major destination for shoppers. It's a no-brainer to have your profile set up for shopping as an alternative channel.
👩🏻💻 5 - This cosmetics brand has entered the metaverse
📰 TL;DR - DTC beauty brand Buxom Cosmetics has set up a digital experience in Decentraland, a metaverse platform. Users can visit the "Buxon Plumpverse," which includes a virtual lounge/bar and an area to try on Buxom makeup. The promo will run for six months and joins fellow beauty brand Laura Mercier, who just opened an e-commerce experience on Obsess, another metaverse platform.
💡 Insight - This is a very enticing time to get in on the metaverse trend. There have been enough brands who've done it that there's a rough playbook to follow, but it's early enough that you can still be an early adopter. There's also a plethora of platforms to choose from now, from Decentraland, to Facebook's Horizon Worlds, to Roblox. The return on these efforts is yet to be determined, but it's definitely a way to build buzz.
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