Selling Online

For twenty-five years we had a website and did zero internet marketing. Zero. We thought if people wanted hats, they would find us. Field of dreams. Build it and they'll come.

They didn't.

We were doing 17 to 20 percent of our revenue direct-to-consumer before COVID and that was with no effort. No paid ads. No email strategy. No SEO. Nothing. People just found us somehow and bought. We thought that was the business working.

COVID hit and we could not do wholesale anymore. Retail was shut down. Our wholesale accounts went away overnight. We had to figure out how to sell online or we were done.

So we hired agencies. A lot of agencies. I can not tell you how many times we wrote a $10,000 check and got nothing back. You do that enough times and you either give up or you get smarter. We got smarter.

The thing I got most wrong was thinking acquisition was the business. You run ads, you get customers, that is the whole thing. It is not. Acquisition is just buying customers. The business is whether those customers come back.

Our average order value is around $110. Customers buy 1.3 times a year on average. Thirty percent of buyers come back. Those are the numbers that actually matter. If your retention is bad, no amount of paid media fixes it. You are just filling a leaky bucket.

We are still learning. I would not say we have it figured out. What I can say is I understand now what the questions are. Before COVID I did not even know what to ask.

Being late to ecommerce turned out to be an advantage in one specific way. I had fifty years of real relationships with real customers to build on. I understood the product cold. I just had to learn the channel.

That is harder to start with than most people think and easier to build on than most people realize.