Ep 61 | How To Start An eCommerce Business Outside Of North America

Anyways, if you guys have a question and you want to be featured make sure you go to www.fredlam.com/ask. The first question for today right now, the first question is by Arturas Sladkevicius. Arturas said,

Hi Fred I have just started to watch your Zero Up Lite videos and I am very excited and willing to start running my own eCommerce business. So, my question is as I live in London, which currency I am going to need in my store for pricing? it’s for me now a bit confusing because if someone from US is going to buy product from me and the price will be in British pound, so for customer it’s going to be more expensive than buying same product from other store in US dollars. Do I need to make pricing by British Pound equal to US dollar? I mean if I convert pounds to dollars the price should be similar, am I right? Thanks in advance for your answer..

The answer to your question is actually very simple. First of all, you got to definitely check the currency exchange on what is the difference between British pounds and also US currency. I don’t know what it is, simply just go to www.xe.com, you’ll see the live number on what the exchange rate is going to be. Now, obviously you are in London and you are in United Kingdom that means that you are eligible for Shopify payment. When you create a Shopify payment in London, what’s going to happen is that you’re basically going to default charge British pound. Right now, at hand there’s two options that you can actually choose (1) is still charging at British Pound but the pricing on your store and also the shipping table on your store should basically reflect US dollar. So, you do two exchange rate based on whatever it is and based on the table that I’ve given you, use that at the same time. Obviously since that by default your store is going to be in British Pound, what you wanted to do is to use an app called the multi-currency.

I’ve been using it, it’s awesome! It actually does a real-time currency converter based on the person’s IP address. So, use that multi-currency app and if they’re in US, they go to your store, they would automatically see US dollars; although they’re being billed on British pounds but it doesn’t matter, right? At the end of the day, we don’t have to worry about that and most importantly, here’s one thing though on your ‘About Page’ or somewhere on the website, make sure you let people know that you are a London-based eCommerce business so that you don’t run into any trouble, people complaining, saying that they are basically losing money on exchange rate.

Now, the 2^nd option that you have is to simply just use PayPal. If you just strictly use PayPal, you can actually choose whatever currency you want in your store. It doesn’t really affect your conversion back drastically if you don’t have Shopify payment or a credit card processor and you’re just strictly using PayPal. It doesn’t affect anything at all. I just say it does affect at some magnitude but not a very massive magnitude – like very, very small percentage. That’s another option that you can take a look at.

Moving on to the second question is by Duncan Omondi Owiti. Duncan asked,

 What is the best way to run an eCommerce online? Should I go international or just start with Kenya?

Here’s the answer to your question, Duncan one of my elite member that spent for a day with me he was actually from Kenya too. Getting sales on day one; he was so ecstatic right now because he could see that this obviously really worked. For you, what I would suggest you to do is that you should go in your case, in your country international. You want to first go after basically countries like US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia first. Now, the best thing to actually start is US first, because you could test out the market, see how it works before you diversify into other English-speaking country.

If I were you, I won’t even go after Kenya. It’s going to be off the radar and I would focus my business solely and strictly around the gate in US first test the product, test your ads and see how it works because here’s the deal, when you’re running an online business you’re not restricted to actually sell within your country. The beauty about running an eCommerce business and also an online business is really YOU. The day that you have your website up, you have global access to the entire world. You can sell to wherever you want. US is always the biggest market. They are basically one of the biggest market when it comes to eCommerce and obviously you want to leverage that and take advantage of that and if your ad actually works in US market, chances are it will work in a lot of other countries at the same time.

So, I always use US as my base regardless of where I am even for me, I’m in Canada obviously US is still considered international for me, but I still focus solely on United State traffic first and once I know it works, then I diversify into other countries at the same time. So, again for those of you that are basically international, outside of North America, just go after the US market first.

Strategy is the same, everything is the same and you’re not restricted to the location of where you’re living, where you are having a disadvantage. That it’s not basically a case or an issue at all. Again, if you guys are first time watching this video, you guys don’t have access to my training which again I have a ten-part video training series called Zero Up Lite where you can get access to it. It’s for free and it’s a ten part video where you can start building your eCommerce business. I even showcase in that video for international entrepreneurs, what you should do, what you should use like PayPal to checked-out etcetera. So, definitely check out that video.

So, moving on to the third questions by Yousuf Aqeel. Yousuf said

Hi Fred, I sincerely want to thank you for providing so much support to us. You are an inspiration.

Thank you very much. It seems like today I’m getting a lot of people really excited about my daily huddle. It seems like after like 61st episode right now. You guys are feeling that I am making an impact in your life, making the change in your life and empowering you to do so. Again, that’s what I’m here about. I wanted to make sure that I empower every single one of you through my daily huddle to help you guys, to share with you guys my knowledge, give you things that I can to actually give back to every single one of you for you to succeed online and actually figure a way where you can escape the 9-5 rat race which our parents and our grandparents teach us because we are definitely in a golden era of entrepreneurship right now; however, here’s the deal. Yes – I am giving a lot of knowledge away. I am giving a lot of information away.

A lot of people even said that all my daily huddles combined is actually worth like thousands of dollars and it has a lot more information than what other people are selling in their courses. I’m only doing this for one reason – first of all, I want to empower you. I want to educate you guys. I want to basically give back and be the person to make an impact in everyone’s lives. My goal is to inspire a 100,000 people to really build a business online and I’m going to be that person that they said that it is Fred Lam that make the change. That’s my legacy right now. That’s why I am aiming towards.

Here’s the deal thought, I’m going to be honestly and brutally upfront with you. At times, I may say that I have something that it’s available for you guys, maybe a software, maybe I recommend a course and if you take a look at it and you know and you feel that it will have an impact in your business, obviously I will make sure that anything that I share of you guys are going to be things that it works, then I would obviously ask you guys to pull all your credit card and join a program or get the software.

So if you guys are fine with all, that put in a ‘deal’ into the comment box right below just so I know that it is going to be fair. Obviously, I have business to run and I need to make sure that at the end of the day, when I recommend something it’s something that you guys are going to jump onto it right away and again I’m just going to be openly talking about, I’m just going to be as transparent as possible to talk about it because there’s nothing to hide. You guys will know that if I were to ask you for a sale, you all know that, there’s nothing to hide on that.

Yousuf said, my question is I am thinking of writing a blog post about one of my products and marketing that on Facebook by setting up a traffic ad or a conversion ad. I know that you recommend conversion ads but after checking out Gary V’s book “Jab Jab Jab Right Hook”, I think will be better to give some content and retarget the readers (that way I will be targeting warm audience) and I can run cheap ads as well. Can you please give us your honest opinion about this?

Here’s the deal, there are definitely a lot of strategies online when it’s selling a product and obviously Gary V, his concept is basically is used by a lot of people and I use it at times too which is writing a content, a very kick-ass content to give a lot of value that retarget them with an ad. Now, you can definitely do that. It is definitely not a problem. A lot of people run it and it’s called content marketing. It is a great idea to do that, but here’s the deal, you are potentially going to pay more money in advertising in order for you to acquire a sale and usually when you wanted to sell a higher-priced product, like things that are above $50, then running a content marketing strategy is obviously excellent. It’s phenomenal, it’s the smartest way to do it because you’re building a retargeting list, end up with the retargeting list.

You may be spending a lot more or less in ads etcetera. So again, like I said there are so many other strategies out there but what I wanted to share this that at the end of the day, if you’re asking for the sale with you’re a, then you want to use a conversion ad. In your case, because you want to write an amazing article to give a bunch of values away, then running a website conversion ad doesn’t make sense. You want to run a traffic ad because again like you were saying, you want people to go to your blog or read the blog so that’s what you wanted to do.

Here’s a hack for you guys, I haven’t been playing around with it a lot but I know that some marketers are using this and does make sense especially if you’re running a content marketing campaign. You can actually delay if you use the Google tag manager. You can delay the firing of your page view pixel of your blog page because let’s be honest, if the person actually click on your ad to go read up on your blog or basically read up on your content and if they don’t spend more than 3 seconds on your page, chances are if you retarget those people, they’re not going to buy your product. You want to actually target people that actually spend more than 3 seconds because it makes sense from a psychology standpoint and again like you guys know for the last several episodes I’ve been talking a lot about psychology because it really drills down to that.

You got to understand the behavior what that person is doing to really maximize your advertising dollar. So let’s say from a content standpoint, when your ad is basically all about content and person actually go to your blog and you want to retarget them, there’s going to be a big difference on people that went to your blog for 3 second and left versus going over to 3-second mark because you know that if they go over to three second mark, chances are they’ve been reading the article.

If they only go by accidentally clicking it or they are not expressing interest then it is no point. So, you want to actually create a trigger where your pixel for the retargeting to that content page shouldn’t fire after 3 seconds. I would even go as high as five second because again if the person actually spent time reading your article, that means that you have a higher chance of retargeting them and actually selling that product. I hope that helps you out and again if guys are watching this, I hope you guys actually caught on on what I just shared with you guys because it is definitely a pretty advanced strategy that I just shared with every single one of you.

Let’s move on to our question number four by David Tran. David said

Hi Fred love the value you provide daily. I love listening to your videos because you break down a lot of things on a technical level which is understandable and can be put into action.

It seems more and more people are appreciating my daily huddle, loving it, sharing you how you guys love it. I actually got a comment on my YouTube channel the other my daily huddle has been broadcast in the entire office, at a workplace. I was like WOW! That that is definitely something that I feel very, very proud of, thank you for you guys support. Again, like I said I’ll continue to do these daily huddle for as long as I can and in March, there’s going to be something very different that’s going to happen in our daily huddle.

So keep an eye on that. Anyways, moving on my question from David,

I know you mentioned building a niche store is better than a general store because your pixels get confused; however, if you’re creating a lookalike pixel based on specific product conversions she didn’t that negate the issue? For example, you have 500 sales in a pink lipstick product and you create an LAA for a pink eye shadow in your general store which may sell things such as men’s clothings, kids toys. Thank you keep up the good shit.

Here’s the answer to your question David – YES if you have your pixels set up correctly (1) when you basically set up a product-based conversion for your particular product for your general store, yes definitely that’s the smartest way to do and also you want to run the same look-alike at the same time. Yes, you can run a general store but you got to basically be savvy and really even get Pixabay to help you with all these because when you’re creating an ad, you want to basically let’s say your pink lipstick you want Facebook to optimize up your pink lipstick. So, in this case, the funnel is basically the person actually see your pink lipstick ad. They go to your page, they go to your ad to cart,  they checked out and they bought the lipstick.

You tell Facebook specifically that I only want to optimize based on the lipstick. Once you got 500 sales you want to run the look-alike on the lipstick. Obviously because the entire thing is based of lipstick then what you essentially wanted to do is when you run your look-alike ads, because it is built off of the lipstick, you want to then just advertise your lipstick. Now, here is a scenario which I a vast user use. Let’s say that the 1% picture started to exhaust and I’m not able to actually get to convert and I don’t have any assets ready. You can still use that pixel as long as you don’t have that look-alike running to run another product that is similar. You don’t want to go ahead and sell men’s clothing or toys or kid’s toy to that look-alike. You want to sell something like pink eyeshadow like you said is a wise move but only if your product that you created with the look-alike doesn’t work, then you can actually try that out because you don’t want the audience overlap. I hope that really helps you out.

So to our last question of today is by Chilam Yiu. Chilam said,

 Hi, Fred. I did three different stores on Shopify on the past five months and I just failed. The key points that I failed is the traffic of my stores. I did Facebook ads before but the traffic was too little only 10 to 50 people visit the store per day. What kind of promotion activities do you recommend for a new store and how much should I spend on it? Please advise.

Based on what you’re saying I don’t know how much you have spent but I can basically say that you may not have found the right product for your niche or/and for your store so that’s why the audience and the market is not responding to your ad or even let alone clicking on your ad and buying for your product. When you’re starting out it all drills down to deep products, you don’t have to care about any activities. Well, there are some strategies like using tripwire method, things to increase perceived value, things like this counting etcetera, but at the end of the day. it really drills down to the product itself.

The key in order for you to actually kickstart your eCommerce business and to really just go like that and skyrocket it all goes down to the product. If that product is actually peaking interest to the audience because at that level when you’re running an ad when person see the product, the click really show you if they’re interested or not if you’re not getting any clicks and that means that the market is just not responding to your product. They don’t like the product that you had they think that your product is too generic. Again, you want to actually drill down and look for the product first before you do anything else that’s the key. That’s why I actually created the 3×3 ad formula which you can find on YouTube on why I use 3×3 formula. It actually helps me to find the product, it helps you find the targeting, it helps me find the ad at the same time. So, definitely check that out and again your question is very simple it’s really your product.

Other than that, that is really it for our daily huddle today. I’m actually getting a lot of texts from people that are in Vegas right now asking what I’m doing and I am obviously doing all these lives. I’m not texting them back but at the end of the day guys, if you like my daily huddle and you have some comment about it, you have some feedback, let me know write in the comment box below on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook and at the end of the day guys, if there’s something that you don’t like share of me I don’t mind I love to actually get critiques. I love basically get feedbacks because that’s how I can improve to serve every single one of you better and that’s my goal.

Also, at the end of the day please please like this video, share this video, subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow me on Instagram, follow me on Facebook so that you guys can benefit from all my daily huddles and get all these information. Again, there’s going to be some pretty epic stuff happening in March after all my travel is completed. If you guys wanted to be the first to actually know what it’s going on, it is best to actually be in our daily huddle and also watch out for my videos on YouTube. Emails usually has a day delay only because I do things obviously in a heartbeat and when I do a live, I share what this happening, I do more videos to share you guys more knowledge and usually I follow up with email the next day.

Other than that, that is really it for a daily huddle today. Again, leave your comment below let me know what you guys think and I hope to see you guys tomorrow. I know it’s going to be a pretty crazy conference starting tomorrow. So, I’ll do my best to actually get on live as soon as possible. I look forward on seeing you guys tomorrow, remember leave me a comment below and I will definitely check it out. Bye now.