How to Grow in eCommerce

How to Grow Your eCom Store to a Million-Dollar Buyout

For some people, $10k in sales a month is enough—more financial freedom than they ever dreamed of. And if $10k per month sounds good, $30k per month can’t help but feel great.

But where do you go from there? Every niche has a ceiling. There are only so many people who want coffee grinders or CBD skin care products within your shipping range. What next?

The GROWTH phase of an eCommerce strategy is different from the START phase. It isn’t about finding a marketing message that works or a brand voice that resonates.

In other words, it’s not about the start—it’s about the endgame.

It’s about building that eCom store into an asset that will be worth millions of dollars to an investor.

And once the store sells for seven figures, you can … do whatever you like. Retire, invest, even start more eCom stores, repeating the process and building to another high six- or seven-figure buyout.

The True Purpose of Marketing

“Marketing” sometimes gets discussed interchangeably with advertising—in this day in age, Google ads, Facebook ads, and other digital advertising platforms.

While digital ads are powerful tools, the point of marketing is often missed.

Marketing isn’t about making sales or driving traffic—although good marketing should result in more traffic and more sales.

Marketing is about achieving top-of-mind awareness within your niche. It’s why, if I were to say “Quick, name a fast-food chain!” most people would name “McDonalds.”

It’s why “Xerox” is still synonymous with copier machines, despite the fact that “Xerox” is a brand name. Other examples include “Velcro” and “Ziplock.”

It’s why we Google things, Facebook people, and Uber places. These are all brand names that achieved verb status, because the companies achieved top-of-mind awareness in their fields through marketing. Most users would never even think of using a different brand for that product or service.

Dominating Your Niche

When an eCom store passes $30k per month in sales, it’s time to stop thinking about marketing in terms of “buying growth.” Forget buying more and more Facebook and Google ads. It’s time to put dominance into our sights … to become the McDonalds of our niche.

Imagine prospective customers throughout your shipping area Google-searching your product, or topics related to your product … and your home page, your Facebook business page, and three of your blog posts are the top five organic search results.

Imagine building so much loyalty and enthusiasm for your brand that your past customers flock to webinars, gobble up emails, and buy every new product you release.

Maybe we won’t become McDonald’s, but in the GROWTH phase, it helps to dream big. The Ecom Capital GROWTH team has been trusted by the likes of Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Nike, eBay, and Shopify to envision and execute growth strategies.

Obviously, these brands are well past $10k/month in sales. “Good enough” isn’t good enough for them. Every day they strive to move the line of dominance a little further. That’s the kind of fire we bring to our GROWTH-phase clients.

Beyond Dropshipping

Few practices lowered the barrier-of-entry to e-com, more so than dropshipping. By dropshipping, entrepreneurs could build online stores without ever touching products. Customer’s orders go directly to the manufacturer, who packages and ships the product.

Since products are being purchased one at a time rather than in bulk, the margins are much smaller. However, the store-owner reduces their front-end risk by choosing dropshipping, as well as freeing themselves in terms of time and location.

The role of the store owner in a dropshipping operation is product development and brand-building, establishing product/market fit and economic customer acquisition while acting as a highly-visible middleman between the manufacturer and consumer.

Growing past $30k is a whole different ballgame. With that kind of volume, it’s time to start thinking about bulk purchases, fulfillment centers, or warehouses with in-house fulfillment. By cutting links out of the supply chain separating you from your customers, you add back margin, as well as customer service capacity.

The dropshipping START phase was to make a little money, but also to prove the concept. The GROWTH phase is the time to go all-in.

Your eCommerce Store is an Asset

Most people understand that businesses are assets. They know that a business—for example, a gas station, a restaurant, an apartment building, a factory—can be bought and sold. By trading shares of stock, investors buy and sell portions of companies every day.

For some reason, many people don’t make the same connection for an eCommerce store. They don’t see them as assets that could be bought and sold like real estate or a brick-and-mortar business.

And yet, a robust eCom store is exactly the kind of business that gets bought and sold by investors. It has inventory and processes. It has intellectual property in the form of product blueprints and marketing collateral. If built correctly, it has brand trust. It even has “real estate” of a kind in the form of the domain URL. Through SEO, that URL real estate can appreciate in value.  

Clients of the Ecom Capital GROWTH program don’t even have to go hunting for a buyer. They know who the buyer of their business will be—us. The growth phase of Ecom Capital is all about building an online store into the kind of business we want to buy. Then we buy them, usually for prices in the millions, and sell the business to investors in our network.

Investment into eCommerce

That is the third arm of Ecom Capital—INVEST. Part of what we do is get the word out about eCommerce stores as an asset—not just to aspiring entrepreneurs in search of financial freedom, but to high-ticket investors.

We want these investors to consider eCommerce stores alongside real estate, stocks, and brick-and-mortar companies. We aspire to build the reputation of eCommerce as the business investment of the future, with a place in the portfolio of every savvy investor.

We will execute high six or, high six or seven-figure buyouts of as many of our clients’ online stores as we have to in order to make that point—and to make that sale.

After the buyout, that’s it… endgame accomplished! Take the money and chill on an island paradise for a while … and then get back to work. Now that you have successfully groomed an eCom store for a high six or seven-figure buyout, it’s time to do it all again!

Thank you for reading this article.

If you would like to learn about our proven 7-step process that we have used time and time again to help eCommerce brand owners grow their business by 10X within 90-180 days or less, then take a look at the information on this page.