New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

User experience. This phrase has been tossed around a lot in the last few years, but few have actually mastered applying it in all aspects of their business. Most businesses focus on the wire-framing and usability testing, but there are some even easier ways to reel in customers and keep them coming back. Jason Broughton, head of UX for Zappos, weighs in on how to make your website useful, usable, and an experience that will ensure customers will keep coming back for more.   Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Jason Broughton of Zappos.com) Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven-figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I'm your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur, Andrew Youderian. Hey, you guys, it's Andrew here, and welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Today on the show, talking about UX, otherwise known as user experience, and joined by Jason Broughton, who's the head of UX at Zappos. Zappos, of course, is the very well-known shoe and apparel retailer. Jason's got an incredible depth of experience doing this both at Zappos and a number of other companies. And we dive into what UX is. UX is one of those issues that is a little bit ambiguous, sometimes. What it is, the process at Zappos for improving UX, how data-driven they are, some of his favorite tools. We talk about the future of site usability and what's coming down the pipe in terms of changes, things that are coming down the road, a lot of different ground. So I came away with a pretty substantial to-do list for my own site, and I hope it's something that you find applicable as well. We'll go ahead and dive right in. Jason, UX is a term that gets thrown around a lot online, and I think people are very familiar with what paid advertising is, what web design is, what programming is. But UX is a little fuzzier for a lot of people in terms of what it actually means. Can you give us a sense of what it means to you and what it encompasses? What Exactly Is UX? Jason: Yeah, it's a good question. To me, UX is a lot of the things that you just mentioned, plus it has a lot to do with the usability of your site, the accessibility of the site, and the overall pleasure a customer has interacting with your site. It needs to be both useful, usable, and delightful, and not necessarily in that order, but we try to encapsulate all three of those. If your site isn't useful, no one is going to come to it. If it's not usable, people have a hard time interacting with it. And lastly, if it's not delightful, the loyalty of your product is not going to be what it could be. Andrew: That puts a lot of weight on your shoulders, it sounds like. Jason: It can. Yeah, it does. But we have a great team. And it is a lot of stress at some times. The Most Important Thing to the Zappos Customer Andrew: What is most important to the Zappos customer in terms of user experience? Obviously, Zappos is a brand, is immensely focused on customer service, that's what you guys have built your brand on. But how does that translate into the actual user experience of the web experience, of the website? Jason: Yeah. I think that customer experiences encapsulates all of your customers' touch-points, whether it's over the phone or on the website, or when they un-box to package. User experience is more about the interaction touch-point on the website. So it's when someone's interacting with the website, specifically. And so a lot of the things that we have to worry about, and our users care a lot about, is accurate information from pricing, to being sure that there's trust when they're going through the checkout process, so the usefulness, the usability is quick. And then also,

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

Trying to drum up some press for your brand or business can be a full-time job. And with all the effort that goes into trying to get media coverage, how worth it does it end up being for your brand? Today, we're looking at three success stories of landing major press and how each business was affected differently. Join us as we dive into how you can get press for your business and your eCommerce store and what you need to do in order to woo reporters. Even more importantly, we uncover whether expensive PR firms are worth the price and whether you can build a business with one big press mention. Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian and Laura Serino of eCommerceFuel.com, Kirby Allison of HangerProject.com, Mac Bishop of WoolAndPrince.com, Allen Walton of SpyGuySecurity.com) and Elaine Pofeldt of ElainePofeldt.com Andrew: Hey guys, Andrew here with a quick message before we get started. If you remember from last week we are running an experiment with one of our community members David Heacock to help him decide if he should advertise on the podcast for the Tim Ferriss Show. So we gave him a couple spots on the eCommerceFuel podcast and we're going to follow up and let you know how this pans out, what the response was, what it a success or a flop. Stay tuned for that. David owns FilterBuy.com where he sells high-quality air filters for your home or office furnace that he manufactures and here's three reasons why you should pick one up. First, the air quality in your home or office is probably pretty terrible. Think about it. When was the last time you changed your filter? I know I can't remember either. It's probably been years and years and you've got filthy air floating around giving everyone you love asthma, like I mentioned last time, potentially allergies. Get a new filter. The second reason you should is that David makes this incredibly easy. Go to FilterBuy.com, sign up for a subscription, you get a new filter on a regular basis right to your door. And finally, it keeps away these crazy expensive HVAC repair guys. I had one come to my house, it's astronomical what they charge. He left $500 later and it's money well spent to invest in the longevity of your heating system. So check them out at filterbuy.com/ecommercefuel. You'll get 15%-20% off everything he offers. We'll be following up with the results of this experiment in the coming weeks so stay tuned on how it all turns out. Mac: He said he hadn't washed his suit for an entire year. That got worldwide media attention. So something about not washing your clothes freaks people out, and people want to read it. Andrew: Earlier this year I was starting my morning with a cup of coffee and a copy of the Wall Street Journal when a familiar name jumped out at me. One of our community members Kirby Allison and his business The Hanger Project were profiled in a page one story, right on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. My first reaction was excitement as it's so cool to see someone you're rooting for get major press like this. And my second reaction was one of immediate curiosity. How in the world had Kirby managed to pull off press of this magnitude? Well thats what we're gong to talk about today. How to get press for your business? How do you woo reporters? Are expensive PR firms worth the price and can you really build a business with one big piece of press? Our podcast producer and community manager Laura Serino talks with three of our community members about how they did it and how you can too. Laura: Kirby Allison runs the Hanger Project, a luxury clothing and shoe care line. Kirby has always taken a traditional approach to getting press. He started out by mailing Hanger samples to fashion reporters, and it landed him his very first big break in a column in the Wall Street Journal called "The Catalog Critic,

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

The art of sorting out your customers, weeding out the qualified from the non-qualified, is one of the most important skills you can develop in business. There are hundreds of tools out there that claim to help you to weed out these customers, but none as effective as the 80/20 rule. This week AdWords guru Perry Marshall is here to discuss the 80/20 rule of marketing strategies. We discuss everything you need to know about predicting what your market will be spending, getting those higher-ticket sales, and making your mark in your industry. Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Perry Marshall of PerryMarshall.com) Andrew: Before we dive into the episode, I want to tell you about an experiment we're going to run over the next couple of weeks. One of our private community members David Heacock posted a discussion about asking for advice about if he should advertise his eCommerce store on the Tim Ferriss podcast. And its really expensive to do that given Tim's reach and before he made the plunge and made a huge investment we said well hey, tell you what, what if we use the eCommerceFuel podcast as a little experiment to gauge if potentially it would be a good idea based on the reaction of our podcast listeners, the percentage that listen to the episode and take action and compare to Tim Ferriss' rates and get an idea if this is a good investment. So thats what we're going to do. And we're going to follow up on this after they run to let you know if they worked. Did you guys actually respond? Was it useful? If you have an eCommerce store, should this be something that you consider? Should be kinda interesting. At this point you're wondering what does David sell. David is the owner of Filterbuy.com where he manufactures high efficiency quality air filters for your home furnace. And if you're listening I could tell you to buy one of these filters because it's going to increase the life of your furnace and keep away the $500/hour HVAC guys. I could try to scare you with that. I could also try to scare you by saying hey you've probably got a nasty filter in your home right now, the air quality in your home is terrible and more than likely it's giving all of your family, everyone you love, your young children, chronic asthma and allergies. I have asthma and I'm fairly certain it's because my parents didn't change their furnace filter as much as they should. I could try to scare you about all these things and those things are all true. But I think the most compelling reason for me is that you don't have to make those terrible trips to the home hardware store, where you waste an entire morning or afternoon, you drive across town, you wander around a store, you run into a couple of acquaintances and before you know it, it's been a few hours and $200 later you're finally home. You don't have to do that. David will ship these filters right to your door. And if you sign up with one of his really convenient subscriptions services ever year, or however often you need them, a filter magically appears on your doorstep. No home depot run required. So check him out at filterbuy.com/ecommercefuel. David is going to give you 15% off all his stuff or 20% off all his filters if you sign up for a subscription. That's filterbuy.com/ecommercefuel. Check them out, grab a filter for your home and make it a better environment and be a part of the experiment. We're going to follow up in upcoming episodes and let you know how it worked out. Alright. On with the show. Today on the podcast joined by Perry Marshall who is a fairly familiar name online, and in the eCommerce world, most notably for AdWords. He quite literally wrote the book on AdWords, "The Ultimate Guide to AdWords," which has been one of, if not the definitive guide in the space, and so we do, we definitely talk about AdWords.

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

Knowing how to read a financial statement and a few other basics of accounting is vital in an eCommerce business. Without basic knowledge of accounting, you may think you're raking in the cash when you're actually in the red. We're covering everything from the basics of reading an income statement to the ins and outs of your store revenue. Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (Wth your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Bill D'Alessandro of RebelCEO.com) Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel Podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I'm your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur Andrew Youderian. Hey guys, it's Andrew here and welcome to the eCommerceFuel Podcast, thanks so much for tuning in today. Today on the show, extremely gripping topic we've been wanting to cover for a long time. The absolute bare minimum you need to know about accounting. And joining me, an ex-finance guy who is the perfect man to geek out about this. Bill, I'm sorry we don't have whiskey this time to chat but hopefully you'll still stick around until the end of the episode. Bill: I really should have put that in my contract, shouldn't I have? Andrew: Top shelf, $400 a bottle whiskey otherwise I'm not coming back to the show. Bill: That's right, I need whiskey or we'll not record this stuff. I won't hang out with you if we don't have any whiskey. Andrew: To keep things interesting without the whiskey and also, let's be honest, accounting unless you're Bill may not be the world's sexiest topic, we've inserted a couple fun little secondary scenes shall we say throughout the episode. You'll have to listen real carefully to hear them but yeah, just keep your ears perked for those. And Bill, should we get into it? Bill: Yeah, we should get into it. We should call this episode "Front Lines Accounting." The Function of Your Income Statement Andrew: "Front Lines Accounting," I love it, I love it. So Bill there's really three crucial financial statements that you need to know. The income statement, the balance sheet and the cash flow statement. And we're going to tackle each of those individually and we'll go ahead and start with the income statement. So Bill, how do you describe the income statement in a nutshell? What is its function and how do you look at it? Bill: The easy way to think about an income statement really is, this is the amount of money that your business made over a certain period. Most income statements you'll see are kind of yearly or monthly. And you in theory could do a daily income statement but I don't think it would be very instructive. So most people will do monthly, will do an income statement and it will show a total for the year and then broken down by month. At the top you'll see revenue and then you will subtract from revenue your cost of goods sold, which is basically the amount of money it cost you to make that revenue. Then you'll have a gross margin, and that's basically the amount of money you have after selling your stuff, the amount of money you have available to use to pay overhead. And then you'll have a section called expenses or sometimes you'll see it called SGNA or selling general and administrative expenses and those are all the overhead expenses of your business, salaries, rent, your subscription to the eCommerce Fuel private members forum, all sorts of things like that go in the SGNA expenses section and then at the bottom you have a number called net income, also or hopefully known as profit and not loss. Andrew: Yeah and it's kind of important to clarify that revenue is equal to sales, revenue is at the very top. It's not how much you make, it's just the gross amount of money you collect from your customers before you pay any expenses. Sometimes you might hear that called top line,