195: The Software Tools I Use To Run My 7 Figure Online Store With Steve Chou

195: The Tools I Use To Run My 7 Figure Online Store With Steve Chou

Everyday, I get between 100-400 emails and a bunch of the questions I receive are about which tools I use to run my 7 figure ecommerce store. So today, I’m going to go over every single piece of software I’m currently using to run Bumblebee Linens.

In addition, I’ll talk about the pros and cons between the different options.

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What You’ll Learn

  • Which tools I use for hosting
  • Which tools I use for marketing
  • Which tools I use for shipping
  • Which tools I use for product research
  • Which tools I use for Amazon

Other Resources And Books

Sponsors

Payability.com – A financing company that provides high growth Amazon sellers with daily payments. With Payability, you can say goodbye to cash flow issues and stockouts and hello to scalability and profits. Click here and receive a $200 credit upon signup.
Payability

Klaviyo.com – Klaviyo is the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store. Created specifically for ecommerce, it is the best email marketing provider that I’ve used to date. Click here and try Klaviyo for FREE.
Klaviyo

Privy.com – Privy is my tool of choice when it comes to gathering email subscribers for my ecommerce store. They offer easy to use email capture, exit intent, and website targeting tools that turn more visitors into email subscribers and buyers. With both free and paid versions, Privy fits into any budget. Click here and get 15% OFF towards your account.
Privy

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Sellers Summit

Transcript

You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners, and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now as part of running my blog and my podcast, I have the opportunity to try out a lot of different e-commerce tools. So in this episode I’m going to go over every single tool that I use to run my e-commerce store.

But before we begin I want to give a quick shout out to Privy who is a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now what does Privy do? Privy is an email list growth platform, and they manage all of my email capture forms. And in fact I use Privy hand in hand with my email marketing provider.

There are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store. And customers love the gamification aspect of this, and when I implemented this form email sign ups increased by 131%.

So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed into my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ For 15% off. Once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

Now I also want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. I’m blessed to have Klaviyo as a sponsor because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again that’s, mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to actually have myself on the show. That’s right, today is going to be a solo episode as part of an experiment that I’m going to be doing for the next several months. Now what’s funny about this is a number of listeners have been e-mailing me asking me why I don’t talk more during my interviews, which is hilarious because I never get that at home. My wife never wants me to talk more, the same goes with my mom.

Anyways the reason I focus on asking questions is because when I bring someone on the show, I want them to be the main focus of the conversation. And as my guest is talking, I’m usually concentrating on asking more probing questions to extract every last detail. In any case, today I’m going to be doing all the talking, and I thought that it would be interesting to simply answer the most common questions that I get asked.

And every day I get between one 100 to 400 e-mails, and a bunch of the questions that I get are regarding tools that I actually use to run my seven figure e-commerce store. So here it goes, question number one, Steve what shopping cart do you recommend, and what do you use? And the answer to this question is always a little bit complicated for me. So first off, I started my store back in 2007.

There weren’t a whole lot of choice out there, and so I think at the time there was Yahoo and there was OsCommerce, and there was Zen Cart, and at the time I chose OsCommerce. And today I’m still on OsCommerce. So I’m basically on a heavily modified version of OsCommerce, and over the years I’ve pretty much learned almost every line of code in this cart. And so I manage all the source code myself.

Now I do not recommend that any of you out there follow this path because today there are so many better carts out there. But I do want to add that there is something to be said about owning the source code for your own shop. So for example if there’s any feature that I ever want or need, I can simply just code it up myself. And I’ve done this a number of times with my cart over the years.

So for example recently I wanted some custom sales reports created from my cart so my wife could do some of the accounting a lot easier. And so one afternoon I just quickly whipped something up that matched her exact specifications. Another recent example of something I just coded up is I wanted a way to automatically apply a coupon code to a customer so they don’t actually have to enter in anything during checkout, and this is all based on a cookie, a couple of lines of code and boom.

And the reason why I actually did this is because over the holidays we ran this promotion for our aprons and a bunch of people were abandoning their carts, and I just could not figure out why. And so I actually went and I called each one of these people who abandoned their cart, and one of the main complaints is they went through checkout with this coupon code that I gave them, they got to check out, they forgot the actual coupon code, and when they hit back they couldn’t find it again, they got frustrated and they left.

And so that’s why I went ahead and implemented this automatic coupon code, and I’ve actually since extended this functionality where when people get a coupon code from our site in return for their email address for example, the coupon code is automatically included into the cart so that when they check out — so I limit the coupon code for 24 hours. So when they check out, they don’t actually have to enter anything, and there’s also this sense of urgency in this countdown timer that they actually have to use this coupon within a day.

Anyways when you own your own source code, it’s actually really easy to make custom modifications. But for most of you guys out there, you probably aren’t tech savvy, you probably don’t want to deal with any source code. So when it comes to recommending shopping carts, here is actually my take. If you are totally tech averse and you don’t want to deal with anything, go with a fully hosted shopping cart like Shopify or BigCommerce.

Now one of the main questions that I get asked is, Steve can I use one of the cheaper shopping cart solutions out there like a Wix or Squarespace? And here’s how I always answer, if you want the most e-commerce related features at your fingertips, you need to be on a real e-commerce platform that specializes in e-commerce. Most of the cheap site builders out there, they’ll offer you some e-commerce functionality that will get you by for a small shop, but it’ll have very limited features and it won’t be good enough in the long run when you actually become really successful. And as a result you’ll probably eventually have to switch platforms, which is a major pain in the butt.

It’s actually one of the main reasons why I haven’t switched over from OsCommerce to a cart like Shopify for example. So moral of the story is, don’t be cheap with your platform. I know it’s going to be a little bit hard to tell what the right platform is in the very beginning before you’ve actually even started selling. But as soon as you start using some of these simpler basic cheap platforms, very soon you’re going to realize how limited they are, and you’re going to have to switch eventually, and it’s just not going to be easy once that happens.

Okay so if you want to own your own source code, go the open source route, I recommend a cart called OpenCart. It’s fast, the code is easy to understand, it’s feature rich, and there’s actually a decent size plug-in library. There’s actually developers out there who are writing plug-ins for this cart that add a bunch of functionality in case you don’t want to code up yourself. If I were to do it all over again, I would probably choose OpenCart as my open source cart instead of OsCommerce.

And finally if you are on WordPress, so first of all a lot of people ask me whether they should start their own store on WordPress. I tend not to be a fan of WordPress mainly because usually when you run something on WordPress you have a bunch of plug-ins, and then WordPress upgrades itself like maybe every three to six months. Every time I hit the upgrade button, it’s like playing Russian roulette, something inevitably breaks.

And so if your cart is on WordPress and there’s like real money on the line in real time, I’m a little hesitant to rely on a platform with a bunch of different plug-ins when there’s actual money on the line. And so I tend not to like WordPress as a platform. I also don’t like the fact that WordPress, its main functionality is as a CMS. It’s not meant to be an e-commerce platform out of the box. As a result, there is all this extra code in WordPress that can slow your site down.

And so a lot of the WordPress e-commerce sites that I see tend to be slow. And so in order to host an e-commerce WordPress site, you kind of need more powerful hosting. And so that’s why I tend to discourage people from starting an e-commerce from a WordPress. That being said, there’s a lot of people that do it, and they do it successfully. But if you’re going to start an e-commerce store in WordPress, I like a plug in called Ecwid. And the reason why I like Ecwid is because it integrates seamlessly with WordPress, but the e-commerce part of it is actually hosted on Ecwid servers.

So think of it like a Shopify except it’s like a widget that you can incorporate easily into your WordPress blog, which actually does not bog the site down at all, and it makes your store seamlessly integrated within WordPress. And I’m talking about this all based on experience. I’ve had students in my class basically go nuts after things have started breaking every six months, or I’ll critique a site on WordPress and it’s really, really slow mainly because they have all these plug-ins, and they’re not using caching properly with their e-commerce store.

Anyways as I mentioned before, I’m currently on OsCommerce, and I’m hosting my shop on Storm on Demand as my web host. It is basically a virtual private server, and I have it all to myself. I’m paying about $100 a month, and I actually have I think four or five sites on the server, and it’s not even close to being maxed out. If you think about it this way, if I were on a fully hosted platform like Shopify or Big Commerce, I would probably be paying on the order of $500 to $600 a month for the equipment functionality.

Meanwhile I have like four to six sites on a server and I’m only paying $100 a month. It is a lot cheaper, and I have full control over everything which is why I do it this way. Once again, if you guys are tech averse go with a Shopify, go with a BigCommerce, and you should be fine.

Next question I get asked is about email marketing. Now if you guys follow my blog or my podcast, you probably already know that I use Klaviyo for my e-commerce store, and they are also a sponsor of the show. And the holiday season just passed, and over the holidays, email represented over 35% of my revenues this holiday season. And what that means is that 35% of my sales were actually from either repeat customers or people familiar with my brand.

And incidentally the reason I mention this is because the one main advantage of selling on your own site versus relying solely on a platform like Amazon is that you can get repeat sales, and you get real customer relationships. And a lot of these people that were buying at our store via e-mail, these are people who have bought from us for the last ten years. And one of the reasons why I like Klaviyo as my email platform is because they track every single customer and every single sale on your site.

And so I can easily create segments on the fly, send emails based on what people have purchased and at what frequency. So I’ll give you guys a quick example. For people on my newsletter who have been on my newsletter for quite a while but they haven’t purchased, I’ll send them out a coupon to encourage them to buy. However, these same people on this list, if they have made a purchase within a certain period of time, they do not get the coupon. And all this stuff happens dynamically.

And so I end up only sending out coupons to people who haven’t bought, and I don’t send coupons to people who have purchased from us, which basically maximizes our revenues. Over the holidays I sent out a 12 Days of Christmas sale. Basically what that was, was every single day I sent out a flash sale email. So for example one day I might offer like 50% off a certain style of handkerchief. And every time I sent out this promotion, I weeded out the people who actually bought that product that I was going to flash sale within the last two weeks so they wouldn’t get upset when they saw the flash sale and they bought that product recently.

These are really powerful things that you can do with Klaviyo that you can’t do with other email platforms because they don’t have knowledge of your entire track record of sales and what they’ve bought. Not only that, Klaviyo allows you to export these audiences over to Facebook automatically, these custom audiences where you can then run simultaneous ads on Facebook as well. Anyways, Klaviyo is a little bit pricey, but if you’re going to be running a serious e-commerce store and you want to get repeat business, it is worth every penny.

Now another service I use is called Privy, and you guys have probably heard me talk about privy because they are also a sponsor of the show. And what Privy does is they help you create email sign up forms. Normally I’m a DIY type of guy; I create all my own forms. But for all of my pop ups, I actually now use Privy, and here’s what kind of instigated the change. Last year I wanted to implement a Wheel of Fortune pop up.

Basically what this is, is you try to get people to sign a free email list in return for a spin of the wheel where they can win valuable prizes. And at the time last year there were no real out of the box solutions for my particular shopping cart. There were Shopify plug-ins, but there was nothing custom that you could create. I wanted to create my own solution and Privy was powerful enough to basically allow me to create my own Wheel of Fortune pop up. And as I mentioned before on one of my posts, I managed to over double the amount of email sign ups that I got from using this wheel of fortune pop up.

Anyways, today this wheel of fortune pop up that I’ve been talking about is now out of the box in Privy, and they actually offer a nice drag and drop interface so you can create custom pop ups super easy. It’s super easy if you aren’t tech savvy, it’s free. I actually started using it now for pretty much everything because I can design something in Privy a lot faster than I can code it up in HTML. So I’ve actually found myself using the tool for everything now as well.

Okay the next tool that I want to talk about is also a tool for the first time that I got a chance to use over the holiday season and it is actually pretty good. I actually haven’t written much about this tool, but it’s basically a push notification tool on steroids. Now if you guys aren’t familiar with what a push notification is, basically when people land on your site they are prompted to receive notifications. You’ve probably seen this from a number of sites.

If you opt in or if a customer opts in, you can then send messages that appear as notifications on both their phone and their desktop, really powerful. So for example if you have an Android phone and you come on Bumblebee Linens and you opt in notifications, I can send you things that actually pop up in your notification bar on your phone. Now there’s actually a bunch of tools out there that do this, but the tool I use is called Vizury.

And the reason why I use Vizury is because it specializes in e-commerce. In fact I would tend to compare Vizury to Klaviyo. So Vizury is like the Klaviyo of push notifications. You basically upload your entire product catalog, and Vizury can instantly send push notifications of your products taken from this catalog based on what people have either browsed or purchased. So let me give you an example here.

Let’s say a customer was looking at pink holiday themed handkerchiefs in our store but they did not buy, four hours later they would get a reminder on their phone in their notification bar to come back and continue shopping. All the notifications I run for Vizury are automated, and they’re extremely powerful. So here is just a couple of examples. If someone has purchased on our store but have not purchased again in a month, Vizury will send out an automated notification giving them a coupon code to remind them to come back and buy more.

Likewise if they browse any item on our site and they haven’t purchased, they’ll get a reminder two times, once four hours later and once two days later for them to come back and complete the sale. We use this tool also extensively to run flash sales during that 12 Days of Christmas sale that I was just talking about. Basically these flash sales appear on their browser and on their phone for like 50% off, and all they have to do is tap on it, they’re taken to the product, they can add to cart and then instantly check out. It’s extremely powerful, and it really caters to those kind of impulse decisions that people make when buying online.

I just want to take a moment to thank Payability for being a sponsor of the show. Now if you run a successful e-commerce business like I do, you probably know that the worst thing that can happen to you is to run out of stock. Now my wife and I regularly import container loads of merchandise from China, and having the cash flow to do so is very important.

Right now Amazon pays you every couple of weeks, but imagine what you could do if you got paid on a daily basis. My friends at Payability make that possible for thousands of Amazon sellers. Right now high growth Amazon sellers are using the extra cash flow from Payability to buy more inventory, stay in the buy box and keep up with demand. Here’s how it works.

Every single business day Payability gives sellers 80% of their Amazon earnings from the prior day for a 2% flat fee on gross sales. The remaining 20% is reserved to cover returns and charge backs, and is released to you on Amazon’s regular 14 day schedule. Your money isn’t doing anything for you if it’s sitting with Amazon, so why not get it faster. Sign up now and put your earnings to work today. Go to Go.payability.com/Steve to get started, and receive a $200 credit on sign up. Once again that’s Go.payability.com/Steve to get a free $200 credit upon sign up. Now back to the show.

In terms of some of the tools that I use to just keep the store up and running, I use ShippingEasy to manage all the shipping for our site. Now there’s a lot of different options out there like ShipStation, ShipWorks whatever. The reason why I actually chose ShippingEasy is because they offer this free tier. And they got me in the door with this free tier, because at the time I think I was using Stamped.com, and they let me use it for free. And it’s actually free forever as long as you don’t exceed a certain volume.

And basically because it was free, I decided to give it a try, and I actually got addicted to the service. And of course our shipping thresholds went beyond the free tier, and then we started paying, and that was that. And so the reason why I like it over the all the other solutions is if you guys are just starting out, and you actually don’t ship that much right now out of your own store, well you can get all the functionality of ShippingEasy shipping software, and not have to pay anything, and then once you exceed the threshold then you start paying.

It has all the features of all the best services out there, and it’s really easy to integrate. It integrates with all the actual popular carts out there, and it’s great and it’s free. In terms of credit card processing, we actually use three different services, and you’re probably thinking to yourself, why the heck would you need three credit card processing services for your store? And here’s why, and mainly it stems from my paranoia.

So by default we use PayPal, Website Payments Pro, and these days I would say that you pretty much need PayPal especially for mobile. And the reason for that is PayPal allows you to quickly import a customer’s information. They don’t have to enter in anything, they don’t have to put their credit card, they don’t have to enter in their address, and it makes the whole mobile transaction space a lot more seamless. And unfortunately PayPal is also one of the most expensive solutions out there. But if you want to make your mobile transaction a lot more smooth, then you pretty much have to go with PayPal.

So outside of PayPal, we actually have a service called eMerchant as our backup credit card processor. Now here’s the thing, for the past year and a half pay, PayPal has actually gone down for us multiple times during periods of very heavy traffic as well. I don’t know what’s going on, maybe it’s the fact that they spun them out again, but routinely I want to say there’s a period where I was getting messages every day that PayPal was down for certain services. And another time, we actually had our PayPal account suspended for a day for no good reason.

And so that’s why, and I don’t know how paranoid you guys are out there, but if credit card processing doesn’t work for a day, that’s actually a huge deal for us. And so that’s why we have backups. So we use eMerchant and eMerchant is actually way cheaper than PayPal for just basic credit card processing. I think we’re getting about 2.2% as opposed to PayPal which of course charges 2.9. And I think they charge even more for especially cars like Amex and that sort of thing.

So finally we actually have Stripe as a third backup in case eMerchant and PayPal go down just because I’m paranoid. Stripe is free, there’s no monthly fee. So it’s just nice to have something else there in case the other solutions go down. Again most of you guys out there probably aren’t going to be as paranoid as I am, but I would say that you should at least have one backup credit card processor.

Okay in terms of ads and marketing. For Facebook ads I use a tool called AdEspresso. Now prior to AdEspresso, I was actually using the Facebook power editor to run all my ads, and you know the power is pretty good. But once I started testing a lot of ads, I found it extremely clunky. So here’s an example, every time I run an ad today, I use multiple images, multiple creatives, multiple headlines and multiple audiences. And in order to split test everything properly, you need all the permutations in separate ad sets.

Now you can imagine if you want to create all this stuff by hand in parallel, it’s extremely tedious. But AdEspresso what it allows you to do, it allows you to create all these different permutations at the push of a button. And so instead of spending like an hour creating all these permutations in power editor, I can just click one button and AdEspresso separates everything out, and tells me how each permutation is performing. And I can easily turn off the ones that are not performing and let the winners run really easily using their interface. AdEspresso is highly recommended if you want to be serious with Facebook ads, and so go check it out. It’s actually not even that expensive.

Okay so we sell on Amazon in addition to our own site, and when it comes to selling on Amazon we use a bunch of different tools. So for product research on Amazon, I use Jungle Scout, and if you guys aren’t familiar with Jungle Scout by now, it’s basically a tool that gives you estimates on how well certain products are selling on Amazon so you can make an educated decision whether you actually want to carry that product. Once again you know most you guys are familiar with the tool already.

Recently however, I’ve been testing a tool called Market Intelligence by Viral Launch. And Viral Launch is what I consider Market Intelligence by viral launch on steroids. So just a couple of examples, Viral Launch highlights products that have recent surges in sales for example if someone has been doing a giveaway. So you can basically disregard those products in the reports. It also has integrated sales history in there, so you can determine whether there is some funny business going on, or whether these sales numbers are actually inflated.

They also give you estimates on the sales velocity that you need to get on the front page of Amazon for a given product or a given keyword. Now I’m still in the early phases of testing this tool, but it seems to be super promising. So product research on Amazon I’m using Jungle Scout and Market Intelligence.

For search demand on Google, I use a keyword research tool called Long Tail Pro. Now what I like about Long Tail Pro is it tells me how often a keyword is being searched for on Google, and it gives me an idea of how easy it is to rank that particular keyword. And so I basically use Long Tail Pro before publishing any blog post or any product on my site, because I want to choose the keywords that I’m most likely to rank for, and the keywords that have the highest volume.

So if you’re publishing any sort of blog or whatever, you definitely need a keyword tool to make sure that you’re writing something based on what people are searching for. For product research on eBay, I use a tool called Terapeak. Now what Terapeak does is it scrapes all the completed listings on eBay, and it gives me real sales numbers on listings. Now in terms of product research tools, it’s actually one of the few tools out there that will give me real sales numbers based on products that I’m considering selling.

So in that respect I think Terapeak just recently got acquired by eBay, which should allow the numbers to be even more accurate than they already are. And so if you’re thinking about selling on eBay or if you just want some real sales numbers that will tell you whether you want to sell something or not, go check out Terapeak.

Now there’s also a number of tools that I’m using to just kind of maintain my Amazon account. So Ignite is a tool that I’m currently using to manage my sponsored product ads. And when I first started running ads on Amazon, I was just shocked by how bad the Amazon ads interface is. I’ve been running Google AdWords for ten years, and I was just shocked because Amazon’s interface is just so bad. Basically Ignite makes Amazon sponsored product ads actually usable, and they provide suggestions on how to adjust your bids on the fly.

In terms of keyword research on Amazon, I use Scope. And what’s cool about Scope is the tool that allows you to look into your competitors’ listings to see the exact keywords that they are ranking for, the exact keywords that they’re using to generate sales, and basically the exact keywords that you need to be targeting with your own products. I use Scope to select keywords for all my listings, and I also use Scope to kind of discover seed keywords to use in my sponsored ad campaigns.

For Amazon accounting I use Fetcher. And I don’t know if this is on purpose or not, but Amazon has made it really difficult to calculate your true profit. Once again I’m not sure if this on purpose, but you pretty much need a tool to tell you how much money you’re making on Amazon today. If you’re not, there’s probably all these hidden fees that you’re not taking into account and you know perhaps you’re not even profitable day to day.

Another tool that I use is a tool called Efficient Era, and I basically use this tool to monitor all my Amazon listings. We have a bunch of skews on Amazon now, and I actually don’t have time to look at them all on a daily basis. And what I like about Efficient Era is they’re the only tool as far as I know that provides 100% accurate buyer review matching. So if someone leaves you a bad review, I can find out who that person is, and basically respond directly.

So I can basically offer them a refund, apologize; maybe offer an additional free item to make the situation better. Efficient Era also lets me know if I got a bad review in the first place, if I’m running low on stock of something, if I’m seeing unusually high or low sales volume, basically anything that I might need to take action on, Efficient Era sends me an email alert to basically alert me that I need to do something about it. And it allows me to manage my listings without having to watch them like a hawk with my own time.

Some of the miscellaneous services that we use for payroll because someone asked, we use Intuit Online Payroll. For shipping we use UPS and USPS. And the only reason we decided to use UPS over FedEx was because UPS was more willing to negotiate. So we actually negotiate some pretty good discounts with the UPS that FedEx was actually not willing to match.

Okay so this next tool is something that I use to get instant feedback from real humans about anything that I want to sell online. So for example whenever I put up an Amazon listing, I’m never sure which photo to use as my main image. And so to figure these things out I use a service called Picfull. Now here’s how it works, I upload a couple of variations of different product images, I click go and within 15 minutes I’ll have at least 50 real people respond telling me which image is more appealing.

And based on this feedback, I can make a decision of which image to use for my Amazon listing that will generate the most clicks. Now what’s cool is that Picfull allows you to choose the demographics of the people that you want to respond to your poll. So for example, I can choose to have only women who buy on Amazon take part in my survey. You can also use Picfull to get a real opinion on product copy, landing pages, product descriptions, you name it. And what’s nice is that you get instant feedback on everything.

Now this isn’t a replacement for split testing. But personally I’ve done a lot of split testing in the past, and I actually hate doing split testing because it takes forever to gather data. And oftentimes you need a lot of traffic to get an answer within a reasonable amount of time, usually on the order of like two to three weeks. And what I also don’t like about split testing is I’ll run all these split tests, and I would say 80 to 90% of them are inconclusive. So what’s nice about Picfull is that you can get an answer within 15 minutes, and as a result you can run a whole bunch of these polls, get instant feedback from live humans, and make a decision that way.

And finally, I save the best tool for last because I want to talk about a tool that has replaced half an employee at my company and it’s basically a tool called WinTask. And what WinTask does, it allows you to automate tasks on Windows PCs. So to understand the power of this tool, I had to give you an actual use case. So in our shop, we actually offer personalized items. And so what that means is on a handkerchief, people can specify what they want to write on the handkerchief and we actually have embroidery machines, and we actually personalize these handkerchiefs on the fly in-house in our warehouse.

Now the tools that allow you to personalize, they’re kind of a pain, because you have to manually type in what you want personalized to the tool, and it’s a Windows PC only app, there’s no API, nothing, right? And so basically every single morning we had to have an employee come in and cut and paste all the personalization that someone ordered to this PC tool before it could be sent to the machine to be embroidered.

Now as I mentioned before, WinTask allows you to automate tasks on Windows PC. And so I wrote a script that basically you export from our site, so it’s automatically generated, you click a button and it automatically types in all the personalization to these old Windows PC apps that do the embroidery. So an employee would spend between two to four hours a day doing this, and now a computer program just kind of runs in the background and does this automatically. This tool it wasn’t even that expensive, it was a couple of a hundred bucks, and it literally allowed us to replace half an employee at our company.

All right, so there you have it. Those are all the tools that I use to run my e-commerce store. There’s probably a couple others that I didn’t mention, but if you guys have any questions about what I use, feel free to leave a comment on the show notes, or feel free to email me directly on what I use and I’ll be happy to respond to you.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. I know that I threw a lot of tools at you all at once, so if you want the full list, you can actually head over to my blog and check out the show notes at mywifequitherjob.com/episode195. Now once again I want to thank Payability for sponsoring this episode. If you’re looking to take back control of your cash flow and scale your Amazon business fast, then sign up for Payability, and say goodbye to cash flow issues and stock outs.

With daily payments, you can speed up your supply chain, buy inventory at optimal times, and stay in the buy box. The more control you have over your cash flow, the more buying power you will have. So visit Go.payability.com/Steve to get started, and cash in on a $200 credit just for being a My Wife Quit Her Job listener. Once again that’s Go.payability.com/Steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo.com for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

And finally I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop ups for any primer that is closely tied to your e-commerce store. If you want to give it a try, it is free. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

Now, I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

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2 thoughts on “195: The Software Tools I Use To Run My 7 Figure Online Store With Steve Chou”

  1. Sony says:

    It will be interesting for me. Nice post

  2. Justin says:

    Can you tell me the tool you mention just before scope? I have tried to slow the podcast down but I still can’t figure it out. Thank you!

Comments are closed.