eCommerce Growth Vault
Don’t Forget to Diversify as You’re Growing
The value we provide inside the vault is from our learnings and experiences in the eCommerce space over the past couple of years.
Warren Buffett once said, “Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing” He’s completely right in the stock market, but as you probably know in eCommerce, we want you to diversify everything.
Meaning your business is quite fragile. Just to give you an example. One algorithmic change to an advertising account or an issue with a supplier could cause your business to come crashing down and you won’t be able to do anything about it. It’s a scary situation, so have a plan for it.
And I’m not just talking about finding a few different suppliers. We’re talking about finding suppliers in entirely new countries, even continents. We’ve seen clients order one batch of product from a supplier in one country and another batch from a supplier in a different country.
To pull this off effectively, you need to build a network of suppliers throughout the world and score them based on location, quality, price, and speed. Create tiers of suppliers – regularly order from your tier 1 suppliers.
China is the obvious choice, but suppliers in Vietnam, Central America, and Europe add value in ways that China simply can’t.
We hope you’ve never had a Facebook ad account banned, but if you have, you know how devastating it is. Or imagine being banned by a payment processor.
We’ve heard horror stories of payment processors freezing hundreds of thousands of dollars because they suspect fraud. It’s a massive blind spot for most business owners and we want you to prevent this at all costs.
For that reason, start investigating alternative payment providers now.
Just like some of our clients order from different suppliers, we’ve seen some clients send part of their transactions to one payment provider and other transactions to a different payment provider.
For example, they’ll use one payment processor for one month and use another payment processor another month. If you get banned or penalized by a payment processor, it can take you 30 to 60 days to appeal and reactivate your account, and that means you have absolutely zero ability to collect payments.
Overall, you need to plan for failure and expect things to collapse and expect things to go wrong. That’s better than expecting everything will go great and facing an unpleasant surprise.
