E335: How to Pick the Right Niche and Platform for Your Ecommerce Business

Welcome to E335 of the EcomCrew podcast! This is a special episode because it's the first time that we have a returning guest from our Under the Hood segment. We started doing Under the Hood back in 2018 to give free hour-long advice to other ecommerce sellers and feature them on our podcast. This year, we're touching base with our past guests to see how they're doing and how our advice impacted their business. When our guest, Richard Phillips, was here 2 years ago, he had recently made the transition from affiliate marketing to actually selling physical products. If you missed that, check out E155. In this episode, Richard and I talk about Richard's ecommerce journey - 2:28 Not being discouraged about business mistakes and failures - 6:28 Why Richard went into the glassware industry - 7:40 The importance of packaging for giftable items - 10:05 Is Amazon the right place for Richard's products? - 15:15 Buyer behavior during holidays - 15:45 Using Amazon customization to make products more special - 18:15 Who should be using Facebook ads - 24:00 Using Google AdWords - 30:40 Using influencer marketing to promote your products - 34:15 Influencer tiers and what factors to consider- 35:24 How many products you should give away to influencers - 37:54 The advantage of having a catalogue of products - 40:35 Increase in traffic at tactical.com - 44:15 How Mike's writers make good content - 48:55 If you would like to get more reviews for your Amazon listing, we have a great deal for you! We are partnering with Captain AMZ to give EcomCrew podcast listeners 10% off on their paid plans. We know how useful they are to sellers because we use them personally. Want to be a guest in our Under the Hood episodes? Sign up now and get the chance to be featured on our podcast and get an hour of coaching. If you liked this episode, please leave us a review over at iTunes.