Hi Everyone,
It’s been a long time since I’ve updated the blog and I apologize for that. We’ve been real busy. Good news is the pace of growth of the 10M project has really accelerated. In case you’ve not noticed I recently updated the stats in the header. We are now on pace to do $2.4M in annual sales and we have 18 months left in the project. So at this point we are still considering ourselves “on track” even through it will probably be pretty close on making our big goal of 10M in 3 years or less. But, what ever happens it’s exciting and we are succeeding.
Also a shout out to all those who are in the online retail businesses (especially the logistics and customer service side of things). With our increased sales we are totally beginning to understand the real logistical challenges that come with larger sales figures and larger customer bases. One of our main reasons for doing this project was so we could understand Ecommerce from the ground up (not just from the marketing end out) and that for sure is happening.
When I started the 10M project I anticipated being able to post a nice amount of information along the way with what we are learning. So far I have not had the time to do that and I apologize to all those following the project that I’ve not made this happen. I still hope to do some more detailed blogging about the project in the future but for now it’s on hold (except for posting significant developments like this one).
Thanks for reading. Hope to have some more significant updates for everyone soon.
Greg
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I recently did an interview with Practical Ecommerce that just came out. The focus of the Interview is the development of our 10M project site TheUncommonDog.com. I thought some of you might like to check it out. There's some pretty good tibbits in it which should be helpful for many ecommerce businesses.
You can find the article here:
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The Goal: Take an ecommerce store from startup to 10 Million in annual sales in three years.
Time Remaining: 24 Months
Current Annual Sales: $540,000
- One Year Into Our Journey -
My business partner (Anna) and I started the 10M Project because we wanted to see what we could accomplish if we applied everything we’d learned from working with our marketing clients over the past years to a business of our own. We’ve always worked with Ecommerce stores and that has become a specialty of ours. Also, because of the depth of experience we’ve had working with ecommerce business owners, we felt that this would be an area where we’d have the best chance of success.
Then there’s the dog factor. Anna is just crazy about dogs. She’s got two of her own and in her “spare time” is like a semi-pro dog trainer (she’ll never admit to that but trust me she’s amazing with dogs).
The kernel for the idea for the 10M Project site started with Anna about seven years ago. She had the idea that she wanted to do an online store for dog products. Anna put the basic concept together way back then but the business got shelved as “more important” priorities came down the pike.
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Video Transcript
There’s a lot of talk about how to add value to online services or to Ecommerce commodity sales. This video series of “Ecommerce Best Practices” is specifically for ecommerce businesses or ecommerce business owners. We’re producing another “best practices” series of videos for business-to-business and lead generation. So I’m going to assume if you’re watching this, you’re probably in an Ecommerce commodity market and you’re an ecommerce business owner.
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Video Transcript
Unique positioning is usually not found in most ecommerce stores. If you go out on the internet and look at most ecommerce stores, what you’ll typically find are commodities markets. This may be true of your store of your competitor’s stores. So whether you’re selling batteries or lighting or carpet fibers, typically you have most people selling the same thing. Sometimes there’s variation in selection. Sometimes there’s variation in price. But most people are taking the same sales angle. This is one of the largest underexploited opportunities that I see with ecommerce businesses and ecommerce business owners – they don’t fully exploit the uniqueness of their business.
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