277 | Maximizing Online Sales on Amazon and Shopify with Grace Hayden | Shopify Simplified

woman smiling at camera. text overlay: "Grace Hayden Maximizing Online Sales on Amazon and Shopify"

For those just starting out on their commerce journey, selecting a sales platform can sometimes be intimidating. Do they go with something like selling on Amazon or Etsy where there is a built in audience, or should they build on Shopify where they then have to drive traffic to their site?

Today’s guest is Grace Hayden, an e-commerce CEO and expert who has built and sold multiple products on platforms like Shopify, Etsy, and Amazon. She has over 20 years of retail experience including a degree in retail business. She now helps others build successful e-commerce businesses by focusing on the fundamentals and foundations of retail.

On today’s episode Grace runs us through the 5 P’s of e-commerce explaining how they work together to create a strong foundation for your e-commerce business. She shares the pros & cons of selling on Amazon and she shares two of her favorite Shopify apps that she can’t live without!

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The 5 P’s of E-Commerce

When it comes to considerations in your e-commerce brand, the foundations are built on five primary “P’s.” These include:

Product
Person
Pricing
Place
Promotion

These foundational P’s are the key elements to look at when starting out, but also to review when something isn’t going right in your business. They all work together to help your e-commerce brand succeed, but they work in the order listed above too.

These P’s offer a strong framework that helps demystify the process of design, selling, and retail for your e-commerce brand.

Online selling platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and Etsy have made retail accessible and sexy, therefore everyone is trying their hand at it. This doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed, especially if they don’t have these five P’s in place.

Selling on Amazon

While we see a lot of our Proof to Product community selling on Etsy and Shopify, we don’t often see them on Amazon. Grace has not only sold on Amazon, but she has so much knowledge about how sellers are using Amazon for their businesses.

The question to be answered though—is selling on Amazon worth it?

In the beginning, Grace was testing out her products and getting feedback from customers—which she loved! She learned quite a bit from the platform about her brand, products, and customer, yet in the end, she pivoted away from using Amazon to sell specific products in her business.

text overlay: "I loved selling on Amazon in order to test new products and get feedback from customers"

The Cons of Selling on Amazon

At the time that Grace was selling on Amazon, there was no brand protection in place, which meant there were a lot of counterfeits in the market. Even brands like Birkenstock have decided to move away from selling on Amazon because of the counterfeits and lack of protection. To protect your brand products on Amazon now, you have to trademark your name and file for brand registry within Amazon.

Amazon also lacks profitability in that it is a race for the lowest price and they take a large percentage of money from each sale. For creators, this doesn’t offer much opportunity to profit from your work.

text overlay: "Selling on Amazon became an unprofitable business- it became a race to the bottom for price and then they took a huge percentage to do fulfillment for me"

The Pros of Selling on Amazon

With the cons, Amazon does offer you very valuable pros.

For Grace, this meant testing products she wanted to incorporate into her brand and getting feedback from customers. Whether it was a custom product or white labeled product, Amazon allowed her to sell without marketing to her own customer base.

Additionally, Amazon will manage a lot of the work if you allow them to store and ship your products on your behalf, which takes responsibilities off your plate.

Is Selling on Amazon Worth It?

Depending on your strategy and goal, you can find success with selling on Amazon. You could consider a loss leader strategy where you try to pull the customers you sell to from Amazon over to your website.

It all comes down to your goals and strategy for selling on Amazon. If you can successfully sell your products there and it fits into your business model, Amazon is a platform to consider selling on.

As Grace explores a new business and product, she’s gone through the process of trademarking her product and filing for brand registry as well, meaning she will find success since she is the only one who can sell her product.

Selling on Shopify

Shopify is simply a platform, just because you add to it doesn’t mean people will find your products. Shopify gives you the tools to build a website, but it’s not going to support you in growing your business or marketing.

If you’ve considered selling your products on Shopify, it’s important that you avoid making this mistake: Many sellers treat Shopify like they would Amazon or Etsy.

When you’re designing your website, you need to consider the imagery, copy, and design; including the mobile format of your website. More and more people are shopping from their phones now. In addition to these settings and features, you need to build trust with your audience, like testimonials, photos, and user-generated content.

If you’re selling on Shopify and want to ensure that you’re running a functioning store, sign up for Grace’s Shopify Self-Audit.

Using Analytics to Make Decisions in Your Business

Platforms like Shopify offer you data and analytics from your shop that are beneficial in making important decisions if you take the time to review them.

For Grace, she would look at all of the top sellers to know what she needed to create more of, then determine what wasn’t selling and find ways to sell it as quickly as possible, then remove it from her shop.

A few metrics to consider watching include:

Conversion Rate: Keep an eye out after any changes made on your site and if it impacts conversion rate.
Return Customer Rate: If your return customer rate is low, reach out to them.

In LABS, we recently did a training on customer retention and how that low-hanging fruit is something you should immediately take advantage of in your e-commerce shop. LABS members can get immediate access to this training at the link below! If you’re not in LABS, make sure you’re on our waitlist!

WATCH NOW

You can use your shop data to test, iterate, and build better experiences in your business for success.

Shopify Apps to Add to Your Store

With so many apps in the Shopify App store, Grace has two in particular that she couldn’t run her business without!

Recart: This keeps the customer’s cart filled; if they leave your site after putting items in their cart, they will still be in the cart when they return! It will also send abandoned cart emails.

Lucky Orange: This app will record visitors on your website, allowing you to see where they get stuck, where they click, and more. It will give you insight into your customer experience on your website.

Strategic Advice to New E-Commerce Shop Owners

In every business, we go through journeys that lead to lessons. Grace shares three strategies that she would have implemented immediately if she was starting fresh with her e-commerce shop.

Pick a product that fits into your life, that you love, and that you connect with the customer base.
Get a handle on your pricing so that you are making money—this also means paying yourself.
Keep the business as lean as possible.

In today’s episode, we mentioned a Customer Retention training inside of Proof to Product LABS, our 12-month group coaching program that was built for product based business owners who want to streamline their systems and revenue. Learn more about LABS and join the waitlist to get access to this training and dozens more.

JOIN THE WAITLIST

In Conclusion: Selling on Amazon vs Shopify

In this conversation with Grace, the pros and cons of selling on Amazon were covered as well as the importance of considering your own platform, like Shopify, to sell your products. Here’s a recap:

Sites like Amazon, Shopify, and Etsy make selling products seem easy and sexy, but there is more to it than just putting products on a website
The 5 P’s are crucial to a successful business: product, person, pricing, place, promotion
Pros to selling on Amazon: quick customer feedback, fulfillment by Amazon
Cons to selling on Amazon: risk of counterfeit items being sold, costs to sell on Amazon
A platform like Shopify will help show your items to customers but you have to get them to your website
Data from Shopify can be really helpful in knowing what your customers want more of and less of

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MEET GRACE

Grace is an ecommerce CEO and expert who has built and sold multiple ecommerce businesses on platforms like Shopify, Etsy, and Amazon. She has over 20 years of retail experience including a degree in Retail Business. She now helps others build successful ecommerce businesses by focusing on the fundamentals and foundations of retail.

CONNECT WITH GRACE

WEBSITE: itsgracehayden.com |TIKTOK: @shopifysimplified

Connect with Katie Hunt

Katie Hunt is a business strategist, podcaster, mentor and mama to four. She helps product based businesses build profitable, sustainable companies through her conferences, courses and coaching programs.

Website: prooftoproduct.com | Instagram: @prooftoproduct