Apple’s iOS 15 update is going to greatly damage email marketing by allowing users to avoid being tracked by email.
“When it comes to email marketing, this move puts a proverbial nail in the coffin for email open rates,” said Greg Zakowicz, the director of content at Omnisend, an email marketing and SMS platform, reported Digiday.
Email open rate analytics can be hidden by the new iOS 15 feature Hide My Email, which will use random email addresses to forward to personal emails which will be kept private. It will also hide user IP addresses.
The update is scheduled to launch in the coming weeks and it will increase privacy protection for its users, making tracking more difficult for marketers.
Alibaba will offer new dropshipping services and grants of $500,000 to support existing e-commerce businesses.
“The disruptions of the last 18 months upended the small business sector, forcing entrepreneurs to adopt more digital business models and requiring new skills, services, and capital,” said John Caplan, President of North America and Europe of Alibaba.com, according to a report by businesswire.
“Over the last year, transactions involving US businesses on Alibaba.com were up by over 150% as US businesses rapidly turned to Alibaba.com to get digital and go global. This so-far-overlooked group of entrepreneurs is using platforms like Alibaba.com to become more efficient, spend less, travel for business less, and worry less, all while selling and achieving more. Our new services, support, and grants program all aim to support a new wave of Digital Entrepreneurs as they set out to reshape their futures,” he said.
The new dropshipping services can access the new services on Alibaba.com Dropshipping Center that provides access to “over 1 million dropshipping products that you can sell straight from your online store right away.” There will be quality products with “no minimum order requirements.”
Orders will be fulfilled automatically and shipped quickly to customers globally and synced using tools on Alibaba. There will also be the functionality to “import trending products in bulk to your store with a single click.”
There is a new Alibaba.com app on the Shopify App Store and a WooCommerce extension that eases the importation of products from Alibaba’s vetted dropshipping suppliers.
The Alibaba grant program is an opportunity for the top 50 applicants to receive $10,000 each building their businesses. Entrepreneurs can apply from now until Oct. 21 here where applicants will receive a score based on their business plan. The winners will be announced in early December.
Dropshipping influencer Anton Kraly revealed on Youtube his strategy for dealing with Apple’s iOS 15 update that makes tracking more difficult for marketers.
Most iPhone users decided not to allow Facebook to track them, making ad results incomplete and harder to evaluate. Kraly says that there is still no solution or software that can get conversion data into Facebook from people that opted out.
He said that there is a way to structure the adsets to make sure that money still gets spent on iPhones even though the conversions are not being fully tracked.
A hack that Kraly suggests is to create two adsets: one excluding iOS devices and only advertising to android, and the other only showing ads to iOS devices.
In order to know if the iOS adset is converting, use Google analytics, he says.
Apple’s iOS 15 operating system is scheduled to launch in the coming weeks and it will increase privacy protection for its users, making tracking more difficult for marketers.
A new privacy dashboard will show which apps have permission to access data on your phone and eventually will allow iPhone users to see who is tracking them and when, reported Forbes.
The new operating system with Apple mail also will stop email tracking that allows senders to observe how many times and when an email was opened. The user of iOS 15 will be able to opt-in to end email tracking.
App Tracking Transparency made tracking opt-in only and wreaked havoc with those tracking purchases when using Facebook ads.
Another feature, according to the report, will be Private Relay, which will be part of iCloud and if used will allow users to browse anonymously without being tracked on Apple’s Safari browser similar to how a VPN works.
The iOS 15 update will further damage Facebook’s ad tracking which is already suffering from the updates in iOS 14.
TikTok has overtaken Youtube for the average time spent per user in the United States and the United Kingdom, according to a new report.
According to app monitoring company App Annie, since May the average user spends 24.5 hours a month on TikTok in the United States and almost 26 in the United Kingdom.
However, the report notes that in Souther Korea and Japan, Youtube maintains a big lead over TikTok with 2.5 times as time spent per user in May.
The shift in viewers to TikTok is one of the reasons that media buyers say they are spending less on Facebook and more on other social media.
This comes as TikTok and Shopify announced a new partnership in August that includes pilot testing TikTok shopping with some Shopify sellers in the United States, U.K., and Canada.
Facebook Viral Product Review - This Pet Bed Just Keeps On Selling!
This pet bed has been selling for years now and each time some dropshipper out there manages to explode with it.
Now the question asked is how come this dropshipper is able to sell this “saturated” product successfully while many others fail.
Is it a special trick he’s using? Or maybe a new marketing technique only he knows about? What did he do right to make this product blow up again on Facebook?
The answer is quite simple actually:
He just created a new ad creative that was good enough to stop people from scrolling. That’s it.
It could also be the timing of this ad and the targeting, but it’s mostly a new ad creative followed by a good store & offer that easily converts visitors to actual buyers.
In this week’s article, I’m going to review everything there is about this product and give you my own tips on how you can take this product and sell it too.
Or you can look at this case as an example and search for other “saturated” products on Ecomhunt that you can bring back to life.
The Ad:
As you can see, this ad is going crazy on Facebook with 26k likes, over 5M views, and almost 4k comments.
When this ad popped up on my feed a few days ago, it had only 21k likes and 3.2k comments – It’s still going strong and they haven’t stopped their ads.
A video that keeps on getting good engagement in a short period of time is an indication of a healthy ad that works and brings sales.
Now let’s review the actual ad:
The ad starts with a “bang” by showing the product being dropped on the floor and put to use almost instantly.
This is a GREAT scroll stopper! A scroll stopper (for those of you who don’t know what it is) is the first 3 seconds of the video which should make people on Facebook stop from scrolling their feed and focus on our ad.
If the first seconds of your video are boring, you will find your CTR(Click Through Rate) to be lower than average and less people will notice your ad.
BUT if you make it interesting, you’ll get much more clicks and interest which will increase your chances of getting actual sales.
So just by looking at the first 3-4 seconds of this video, I can see that the original seller did some research and knows how things work in the marketing world.
The rest of the video is focused on a single dog really enjoying his new pet bed followed by some scarcity texts and a call-to-action.
The video is pretty short, there’s no other dogs or cats being shown, but this isn’t really an issue because it works great for him.
I remember seeing much longer video ads for this product explaining all the Pros about this product, but this seller just skipped all that.
Sometimes skipping some obvious explanations about the features of a product and cutting it short can work even better.
But you still have to test different ad creatives to see which one performs better!
Ad copy:
Instead of talking about it in the video ad, they mentioned the anxiety calming features in the ad copy which is totally fine.
Their Buy One get One Free deal is at the top for people to not miss it, and you have a few emojis here and there + a call-to-action text at the end.
Pretty standard ad copy, but I see already a small problem which I’ll talk about when we get to the store review.
Overall, the video ad and the ad copy are pretty good and the only thing I would’ve done differently is adding another animal to the video.
If you’re also targeting cat owners, it would be cool to show a cat enjoying this bed as well.
The Store:
First of all, I really like the branding work on this store. They made sure their logo appears on every product photo on this store, including the greenish color as a background as well.
The logo is also really cool and it’s not just a static image – This one is a GIF and you can see the cute dog blinking and wiggling his tail. Overall, really nice job on the branding and great choice of colors in my opinion!
The product description is pretty standard, although it would be a lot better if there were a few more picture or GIFs instead of so much text.
The size chart also isn’t the best as it’s text only and doesn’t come as a picture. It can be a bit of a struggle to some because they’ll have to scroll way too much to see what size they need to purchase.
If all this information was available in one picture, it would’ve been much easier for the customers to quickly understand what size they need to buy.
Reviews:
The review section is perfect – You have plenty of 5 star reviews with great photos in them. The texts all look to be written by real customers and it’s not some kind of Chinese to English auto translation.
Even though importing reviews isn’t an issue nowadays, people still forget that some reviews found on Aliexpress are just auto translation that sometimes make no sense at all.
People read reviews so make sure to import only the best reviews and the ones that make actual sense.
This store is looking great but there’s still some things I didn’t like – Here’s what I would definitely change:
1. Annoying popups & apps:
The gift icon is a Spin the Wheel app that gives you a discount and the notification below is a popup that shows what other users are getting/buying on your store.
In my opinion, I think it makes the store look a bit spammy and cheap. I prefer keeping it clean to keep the focus of my customers only on the product I sell.
I’m not saying these apps don’t work… It’s just that if you bombard them from the start, you’ll have a hard time figuring out their actual efficiency.
Start clean and test different scarcity apps when you get sales – This way you can monitor if the new app you just added to your store makes you more sales or not.
2. BOGO discount isn’t automatic:
Like I already said, you have to make sure the purchase process on your store is simple. Any addition, like asking your customers to MANUALLY add a discount code, will prolong the purchase process.
For example:
Imagine a customer who knows about the BOGO deal checking out with 2 pet beds in his cart. He has gone through the whole process but he forgot that he has to manually type BOGO to get the discount.
Now he’s either confused about the price and leaves the store without buying, or he goes back again to your product description to see how the discount works.
In both cases, the purchase process is now much longer AND there’s a chance you might lose a customer. If this were an automatic discount, it could’ve been avoided.
Always work with automatic discounts(if possible) for a better and faster purchase experience.
3. Too many options:
One of the issues people seem to miss is that sometimes they offer too many options to choose from when there’s actually no need in that.
Yes, it’s nice to have different color options but will it really matter for your customers if you didn’t have a brown & light gray color options? The answer is NO.
In this case, having a few less color options probably won’t hurt your sales. In fact, it will shorten the purchase process because your customers will pick their color much faster.
This isn’t like size, where having different option actually matter a lot, this is just colors for pet beds. If it were me, I would’ve just offered pink, dark grey, and white colors – That’s it.
Other than these 3 issues, and the lack of pictures/GIFs in the description, everything else is fine.
Checkout
Looks like I was wrong about their manual BOGO discount. I added 2 pet beds to see what will happen and one of the pet beds is automatically free.
Good for them for applying this discount automatically and not asking their customers to do it manually.
Note:
This pet bed goes for a really cheap price on Aliexpress, so there’s enough profit to make even if you sell it for $24.99 like they do.
The BOGO discount though changes everything… Two pet beds for the price of one. I wonder what they will do next to increase their profits and if there’s some hidden strategy I don’t know about.
It could be also that they are running this deal to get a lot of customers fast and later sell them more stuff – A strategy used by a lot of retailers.
Customer Information page:
They didn’t forget to add a logo to their checkout page and they don’t require a phone number. The customer information page looks good to me, and there’s nothing really to fix here.
If I were to nitpick, I’d definitely add a phone number field and set it as Optional. You still want to give your customers an option to leave a phone number just in case the shipping company needs to contact them.
Shipping Page:
I’m honestly surprised that they offer free shipping. I was expecting shipping upsells like Priority shipping, Warranties, etc. And for a much higher price like $10 and not $3.98.
Now I’m more than sure that this is their plan to get a big amount of customers and fast before Q4. Once you have a ready list of customers, and a HOT working Facebook pixel that knows exactly who’s your audience, you have much higher chances to crush it this Q4.
I believe they have a few upsells right after the purchase, but unfortunately I can’t test that as I’m not going to purchase the product.
Overall, the shipping page looks good and the only thing missing is the amount of time for the product to arrive if Priority shipping is chosen.
Payment page:
I’m a bit surprised they don’t have PayPal on their store, but they do offer Stripe & paying in installments. Not having PayPal will definitely reduce the conversion rate, but it isn’t that big of a deal and you can still make crazy amount of sales.
They made sure their store is trustworthy so people will have no problem paying with their credit cards.
To Sum It Up
As I said in the beginning of this article, this calming pet bed has been on Ecomhunt for ages and every year some dropshipper out there manages to pick it up and make bank selling it.
Same thing can be said for a lot of other old winners on Ecomhunt, so make sure to go through the old pages of Ecomhunt and maybe you’ll get your first 4, 5 or even 6 figure winning product!
Good Luck!
Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?
Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!
Shopify announced the release of Dawn on Friday, a new theme created by Shopify that allows for flexibility and more features.
Shopify said that the new theme makes it “easier to customize than ever” without having to do any coding. “Dawn’s site-wide cross-selling and media-optimized product pages make uniquely designed to boost sales,” stated Shopify.
Shopify says the free theme is good for clothing, accessories, home and garden, health, and beauty brands.
The Dawn theme features include recommended products, blogs, promo banners, a FAQ page, and product reviews. It also has a sticky header and product filtering and sorting.
Dawn is an Online Store 2.0 theme which means it uses sections and blocks to create a layout.
Facebook Pay, the main payment platform for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp, is being integrated on Shopify giving another payment option for U.S.-based stores, the company announced Wednesday.
Plans also include expanding Facebook Pay to additional platforms, according to the report by WWD. Facebook Pay is almost two years old.
The expansion of Facebook Pay “means that you’re going to start seeing it as a checkout option on the web and especially in web views that you see within our app after clicking on ads or other business content,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a June earnings call.
“The commerce experiences are now accessible across most of our services, and we have a full road map of deeper integrations that I’m excited about in the months ahead,” he said.
Shopify stated that it also is expanding the use of its own payment platform. Shopify stated: “Shop Pay will become available to all merchants selling in the U.S. on Facebook and Google, even if they don’t use Shopify’s online store, positioning Shop Pay to become the preferred checkout for all merchants, whether they are on Shopify’s platform or not.”
Amazon is undergoing its largest leadership change since its founding, raising new questions about its continued growth, according to a report byInsider Intelligence/eMarketer.
The E-commerce giant had strong growth in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic but is only up about 8% year to date with other tech companies doing better in 2021.
Former CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Andy Jassy took over from founder Jeff Bezos in July and Adam Slipsky took over Jassy’s previous position at the successful cloud-computing division.
Other key figures are leaving the company such as Charlie Bell who left for Microsoft’s cloud division and Teresa Carlson, who was vice president of AWS public sector and industries. Other notable departures are Jeff Wilke, who was CEO of Amazon’s global consumer business, and Wei Gao, who was heading much of the company’s grocery efforts.
The report said that the company is no longer seen as growing by job candidates and therefore it could be harder to recruit top talent.
The company may be able to continue growing at a fast pace, but questions hover over the company because of the high turnover of key officials and the dependence on the AWS division which accounts for half of Amazon’s operating profit, according to the report.
CEO and founder of Ecomhunt Mordechai Arba said that a product that is breaking even during the testing phase could be a winner.
“If a product is breaking even then you can try to improve the social media ads or the store conversion rate,” said Arba.
“People tend to search for winning products right from day one, but it does not often work like that,” he said.
Arba explained that if a product is breaking even it could be a winner if some changes are made. Unfortunately, he continued, “many people stop testing a product that is breaking even and move on to testing new products instead of trying to make a breaking even product profitable.”
Therefore, before giving up on a product that is breaking even during the testing phase, first, try changing some things with the ads and/or the website and see if that makes a difference.
