Do you test your E-commerce product before launch to make sure it will be profitable?
You may have dozens of ideas, done a lot of research, perhaps even launched a few stores – and seen poor results. Well, majority of E-commerce businesses end up like this.
They build massive funnels first, and then they try to figure out a way to sell their product just to find out that it doesn’t – after spending a ton of money.
The key to making sales is to offer a product that people are willing to buy!
Although, you do have to invest a little bit of time and money, it’s going to cost substantially lesser to test your E-commerce product first rather than taking the route most people take.
The following steps will help you find out whether there’s an actual demand for your product before you invest in it.
Build a landing page and write your sales copy
Assuming you already have your idea of what you’re going to sell, the first thing you need to do is to create a landing page. There are couple of options here, Leadpages is our favorite.
Then create a basic text-based sales copy for your landing page. If you don’t know how to write one, hire a copywriter to do it for you.
The right copywriter will craft sales copy which will help to increase your conversions (we will get to the conversion part in a bit.)
And if you end up deciding to go with a different E-commerce idea, the copywriter can help you edit the sales copy, so you won’t have to keep repay to create new copy all over again.
Create an opt-in form
From the landing page you will have an ‘Add to cart’ button which you can either link to a new page or a pop-up window. A pop-up is what I recommend unless you have a good reason to send them to another page.
Once you have this set up, the opt-in form copy will be something like “Please enter your name and email address.”
After filling out the form, re-directed the visitor to a page that says “Sorry we’re currently out of stock on this product, we’ll let you know once it becomes available.”
Opt-ins vs ad spend
So this way you’re not actually selling anything – you’re driving the traffic from the ads to the landing page and then measuring the opt-ins.
Basically, you’re considering every opt-in registration as sales in this scenario – hence the conversions. Let’s say your product was worth $100 and you spent $500 on your ads to get 20 opt-ins.
We know in a 2-step process not everyone is going to buy. Since there’s no way to figure out how many will drop-off, we need to assume every opt-in is a buyer.
If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend ($2000/$500.)
This means you have a profit potential with your E-commerce idea, which is a strong indicator that it makes sense for you to build or invest in the product.
If you didn’t get enough opt-ins to cover your ad spend, then you will need to test a new idea.
Create an email list
If you decide that you’re going to build the product, setup your e-store properly and then send an email to your opt-in list saying, “We got the product back in stock, visit the store to order”.
Majority of this list will buy – so you didn’t completely waste the initial ad spend.
If you end up going with a different E-commerce idea, you can promote that new product out to the same email list too, driving them through the top end of your funnel.
If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend.
Either way, you can leverage the email list that you build.
Wrap up
The bulk of your efforts would be in getting the sales copy and landing page right, and running the ads properly.
Click here to download the funnel model to test your E-commerce product.
