Ecommerce Strategy: Why Your Ecommerce Is Not Sustainable (and how to fix that)

Gabriel Gutierrez May 06, 2016

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Video Highlights

  • 0:22 Tanner gives a wake up call
  • 0:56 eCommerce is like any other business
  • 1:20 What ever you are selling it’s not sustainable
  • 1:43 Tanner explains how to make eCommerce sustainable
  • 2:17 Tanner’s response to a Facebook Post
  • 2:35 Continuity in eCommerce
  • 2:54 Residuals make your eCommerce sustainable
  • 3:42 Tanner challenges you

What’s up guys, Tanner Larsson here and I just wanted to talk real quick about traditional eCommerce businesses and how they are not actually sustainable. If you guys know me, you guys know I’m very big on the sustainability kick, I don’t like businesses that are here today, gone tomorrow, and that don’t have sticking power or staying power in a market.

You know, I was on a call with someone earlier and they were talking about how they were so excited that they were in the eCommerce business now after years of not having a sustainable business in the information marketing space.

I had to stop them right there, and I just said, “Hey, you realize that what you’re doing in eCommerce is not sustainable either.” Kind of shook them up a little bit because they like a lot of people I think, believe that because they’re selling physical products or because they’re in eCommerce now, or because they’re an eCommerce that it’s sustainable.

Well, it’s just like anything else, if you’re selling a physical product, so you drive traffic to your store, you sell that product, the second you stop driving traffic, or you stop getting the organic search or whatever else like that, your sales stop. So it’s no more sustainable than selling information, or whether you’re selling t-shirts, or widgets, gizmos, gadgets, lotions, potions, diet creams, it doesn’t matter.

Whatever you’re selling it’s not actually sustainable.

eCommerce is no more sustainable than any other business specifically traditional eCommerce. Okay, there’s so many different things that can happen that wipe your business out, whether it’s product, supply chain, traffic, Facebook, Google, none of these, not liking your brand, your niche, whatever.

The reality is that an eCommerce business is no more sustainable than any other business unless you build it that way. Without continuity or some kind of recurring income tied into a business, you really don’t have anything that’s sustainable.

No business is sustainable without having solid recurring revenue. That’s just something that most businesses don’t have no matter what their space. It doesn’t matter if they’re eCommerce businesses or they’re not, but specifically eCommerce businesses, they don’t think of business in the terms of recurring.

There was a Facebook post not too long ago, someone asking about how to do their up-sales and they asked me, and I said, “Well, hey, the only time we do upsells is when we can push a continuity and all of our businesses revolves around continuity.” They immediately assumed that I was talking about information marketing, but I’m talking about eCommerce.

Our eCommerce brands are built around continuity. We sell recurring income as the focal point of our business. Why, because that makes it actually sustainable. So when the next month rolls around, we have income that we start with every month.

If you’re an eCommerce business without continuity, you don’t have that. You start at zero every single month. You made $500,000 last month, congratulations, but this month you have to start at zero to make that same $500,000 again or build beyond it.

When you have continuity in place, now you have a significant portion, hopefully, of your revenue that’s residual, it’s recurring. So every month, you start the month over with that baseline cash flow that you then build upon and every month that money grows, that income grows until pretty soon you have a really nice, sustainable business that has baseline monthly cash flow that you can depend on day in, day out. Then all the other product sales that you make in addition to that are gravy and they help sustain and support the growth of your recurring income course.

So all I want to do on this video right now is challenge you to think about how can you build recurring income into your eCommerce business and if you don’t have it, and you’re fighting it, why, wouldn’t you like to have money that comes in month in, month out, and you know for a fact you’re going to have that much and each month is going to continue to grow? So challenge you to figure out a way that you can build a recurring income into your eCommerce business.

It is a lot easier than you think. It’s not a pie in the sky dream. It can be done. We’ve done it; we help our clients do it. We help our coaches, our master members, and everybody that I’ve worked with has been able to build recurring income into their business. I know you can too. You don’t need me to do it, but I want you to at least start thinking about it, and figure out how it can work for you.

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Gabriel Gutierrez

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