The Cycles Of Ecommerce (harsh reality, but not really - IMPORTANT)
Hey and what is up Rocket Ecom members! It has been a little while. I have not been posting on here or on Youtube. Why? I got a little burnt out posting content and there are cycles to everything. Energy on. Energy off . Now it is time to get the energy back with posting, and tonight I wanted to talk about "the cycles of ecommerce". A CRUCIAL lesson, for newcomers and those who are experienced feeling a little disgruntled. So its March, 2024 - and myself and the team - we are feeling very confident in our ability to scale our main brand: We had hit $250,000.00 in January. Febuary slowed down a little, but we were confident March was the month we would get to $300k-$400k. What happened? Total shit show. All of our ad costs were sky rocketing. CPMs were rising. CPCs doubling. We went from paying $2 per click to $4. At these levels, we did not have a business. We would have to operate negatively in order to take money on the backend/via recurring repeat business - something we did not want to do. My brother was getting a little worried. I told and assured him, "do not worry, this is what happens when we run a brand, it goes up, and it goes down" - you must remember the past history. And so it did. The lesson from this message - in ecommerce you are going to face massive ups and massive downs. It is never going to go, simply up, up, up. Why? We are simply at the whim of large advertising networks like Meta, TikTok, Google. Usually - a successful brand is always 80% on one platform. In an ideal world it would be split equally for diversification. But it is simply not the case. It never is. But I learned from experience over the last 8 years, running 2 brands for 5 plus years - there are huge ups and downs. The key is remembering this is simply an algorithm problem. It is NOT that your product is done or your brand is done (usually). Unless you see everyone in the industry is copying you - in which case you never really had a brand. The algorithm sometimes will massively spike your cost per sale, CPC, CPM.