If you are looking forward to growing your eCommerce business, the best way to do it is to learn from entrepreneurs who have already accomplished it.
You need to look for their strategies for marketing, sales, search engine optimization, and others as well.
The more you study the steps these successful businesses took in order to excel in the market, the faster you learn to strategize for yours too.
So, here are the best E-commerce case studies from which you can learn by citing how they did it and what lessons you can take away from them.
Mellow Made $200,00+ In Their Pre Order Sales In Less Than A Month
Mellow offers magical kitchen robots to their premium customers that sync with your mobile phone to cook for you when you want.
The machine has ultimate automation and remote access control through your smartphone.
Ze Pinto Ferreria who is the founder of Mellow company used to work as an intern at Braun.
Image Source: ReferalCandy
That was the time when he realized how all of his skills in mechanical engineering, product design, and food can come together to create something completely unique.
He aimed to create ways of cooking utilizing technology and he went with the sous-vide.
He found Caterina as her co-founder to start this company, and both of them built the company together.
They used Trycelry.com as their pre-order platform which became a huge success.
As a matter of fact, they collected a total sum of $64,000 in their pre-orders in just three initial days..
And they eventually end up making $200,000+ in less than a month.
What To Learn
The founder Ferreria reached out to the 100+ reporters directly to market the brand Mellow.
Considering their background, PR must have been out of their reach as being expensive.
What you can learn here is the same strategy that worked for Ferreteria and Catrina for their Mellow.
It is the classic Paul Graham business strategy where you do things yourself that doesn’t need to be scaled.
For Example, if you don’t have investment to make for PR, learn, teach yourself, practice, and reach out to reporters.
Steinhoff Going Headless Architecture
Jamie Danby, the head of Business Transformation at Steinhoff UK came through a challenge to grow his company.
He find out that to grow his company from where it is then to where they want to reach, there are some requirements needed to be met :
- Getting an efficient team to complete their tasks independently.
- Boosting their capabilities to drive faster the conversion rate.
- Rapid and agile deployment
- Giving their customer a customized product experience.
When they listed out what exactly their company needed to grow sustainably helped them find the right technology for their requirements.
They apparently turn out to be headless architecture-based platforms.
What To Learn
You need to understand what your business lacks to meet the targeted goals in the given time.
Figure out the exact targets to meet and the very specific requirements you need in order to reach there.
Jamie focused on two primary aspects which you need to work on too :
- Giving a personalized buying experience
For every particular product, the buying experience customer looks for changes. So you need to make the distinction here.
The product itself defines what buying experience a customer expects or should get. So you need to customize the digital experience on the basis of the product.
- Augmented Reality
One of the other crucial initiatives Jamie wanted to add and improve on is giving customers to visualize their use for the product and buying experience.
The best technology available today to do that is augmented reality giving him a competitive edge over their competitors.
Depending upon your product, you can also include these two initiatives to your brand in order to grow.
Open Case Building A Million Dollar Business From Hitting 189% Of Their $15,000 Kickstarter Target
Open Case is totally unique when it comes to buying a pretty iPhone case. They aren’t just pretty cases but useful and practical accessories as well.
It is something rare and unique to offer to iPhone customers. The case comes with a slide-out bottle opener.
The open case serves its purpose of opening beer bottles at the party when you don’t seem to find anything by yourself.
Image Source: Opena
The company came up with a unique solution and integrated it into something that is simply used by everyone.
They started on Kickstarter in June 2011 and came out successfully raising $28,303 surpassing their initial target of $15,000.
Opena case focused to build a tribe or group of early adopters before even they launched the campaign.
Just on starting their campaign, they got those early backers for the Kickstarter making it more obvious for others.
They actually went all sold out in the half-hour of going live just due to their early bird backers.
What To Learn
What you need to learn from them is their customer acquisition techniques and the uniqueness of the product.
You need to spot a problem and try to find the most affordable and unique way to resolve them.
If you can leverage the kind of product or action that is habitual for people and turn it around to serve another purpose, things can work for you too.
Owen & Fred – Building A Successful Menswear Brand
Mike Arnot is the founder of the menswear brand Owen & Fred.
He started this company because over the years he realized how the market doesn’t offer high-quality but affordable American-made men’s accessories.
He started with an online store curating the best products and even helping others like him do achieve the same.
Image Source: Nomadic Habit
Their repeat orders make up 35% of their total revenue. And that’s something really incredible to achieve, especially in his kind of industry.
So why are they able to do so?
Well, it is because their brand Own & Fred focuses on acknowledging their customers, valuing them, and even giving prizes.
They primarily focused on the customer experience whether it is about their product, marketing campaign, or any aspect of the business.
The brand literally receives so much appreciation from their customer on a day-to-day basis just about they are extraordinarily focused on customers and products.
What To Learn
You can learn from Owen & Fred regarding how to offer amazing products to your customers even if you are just dropshipping or curating products.
The quality of the product and focus on customer satisfaction makes the brand stand out from their competitions.
And if not anything, you should focus heavily on these two aspects of your business for sustainable growth.
How Envelops.com Beat the Shopping Cart Abandonment Boost their Checkout Conversions By 65%
You surely have not given thought to the fact that envelopes can be a great business idea to sell with a variety of custom print envelopes to offer.
Well, Envelops.com made the business possible where they sell almost any type of envelopes that one can think of.
There is something really appreciating that marketers at Envelops.com did which you definitely need to adapt to your business.
Image Source: ReferralCandy
One of the most infamous enemies of e-commerce success is cart abandonment and that’s what also bugging them as well.
They noticed how a significant number of their website visitors keep visiting their website before making a buying decision.
So there is definitely something to encourage them to make the purchase that can help boost their sales conversion.
What they did is sent emails to their visitors to return to their website and continue the purchasing order.
This alone strategy improved their sales conversions and checkout processes by reducing the cart abandonment rate.
What To Learn
You need to understand how important it is to address the cart abandonment issues with your online retail shop.
Make sure you assess the case with your online store and why your potential customers are abandoning the cart.
Then, you go for the best strategy here which is to start an email newsletter campaign for all the visitors to your website.
Focus more on the audience who have visited many times but haven’t bought or abandoned the cart midway.
What more you can do is look for more optimization to do at your checkout page and product page to reduce cart abandonments.
SumoJerky Winning The Marketing Through A 24-Hour Business Challenge
Noah Kagan is behind the success of the company called SumoJerky using the 24-Hour business challenge.
This guy is very well-known for starting different companies and turning them into 7 or 8-figure successful companies.
Image Source: AppSumo
He basically started this company as part of the 24-Hour business challenge just to prove that anyone can start their business anytime.
He asked his followers which business to choose so he can make $1,000 a day. Well, as a result of that, his company made more than $1,000 in just 24 hours.
Noah Kagan made $3,030 of total revenue through SumoJerky in just 24 hours.
Here’s what he did :
- He crafted a basic budget to work backward to see how much money it will be required to sell so as to make $1,000 in a day.
- He profiled his ideal customer by creating a customer avatar so he knows who to target.
- He started reaching out to people who perfectly fit his customer avatar.
And, that’s all!
He fulfilled the challenge in the given time and even exceeded the value as well.
What To Learn
Focus on creating a customer avatar through profiling and researching to find out who is your target audience.
Lots of businesses fail to succeed or lack the impact in their marketing or targeting, so they do not actually get conversions.
Noah was able to make $3,030 just in 24 hours because he focussed primarily on creating a customer avatar that is perfect for his ideal customers and the product.
You need to find out the customers who are already buying the product such as yours or similar.
How They Made $2, 416.51 By Importing Gaming Classes With Alibaba In Just 5 Weeks
Another successful Shopify Challenge from their Employee made into this list to learn from.
Like the other Shopify challenges, this time their employee made their e-commerce business successful just within 5 weeks.
They decided to establish an online store selling blue-light blocking glasses for gamers which apparently made sales of $2,416.51 in just 5 weeks.
Just like the other Shopify challengers, they focused on running multiple marketing channels for their business in a very short amount of time.
What was apparently able to generate the most sales for them was their affiliate commission and collaboration with influencers to promote their products.
What To Learn
Always try to experiment with different marketing channels for your business and see what works for you.
One of the most powerful ways to promote your brand or products is to set up an affiliate commission and leverage influencers for promotions.
Especially if you have products like them, it is more likely to generate sales through affiliate marketing and influencer marketing.
Leveraging The Impact Of Word-Of-Mouth To Achieve Over $420,000 On Kickstarter
Space tech is already cool by itself but it becomes fascinating when it integrates with clothes that you can wear.
Intrigued! Right? Well, this is definitely something you would want to share with people.
A small menswear brand named the Ministry of Supply made it happen. They infused fashion with space technology.
This is one of those ultimate unique and amazing products that take people by surprise.
Image Source: Really Big Cool
The integration comes from Apollo’s phase-changing materials that are adapted from the NASA spacesuits.
It was a unique technology made to regulate your body temperature and now integrating it with menswear, it gets even better.
Since their strong suit was their unique idea, they decided to leverage word-of-mouth marketing to promote the product.
They directly approached huge tech blogs such as TechCrunch and others to talk about their product.
Ministry of Supply pitched more than 150 blogs that are relevant to their products with their customized and personalized emails.
And they did end up getting featured in many of those giant tech blogs including others.
And that promotion helped them raise $30,000 in just 5 days for their Kickstarter campaign.
What To Learn
A lot of things went right for the MoS brand, especially having an amazing and unique idea, to begin with.
What best they did is to utilize the potential and surprise factor of their idea to create a buzz around.
Pitching multiple blogs to feature your product is not something out of the box to do but there is something that made this strategy highly effective.
They didn’t just pitch all the big techs. They primarily focused on more numbers of small product-relevant blogs.
The idea was to tradition up the chain amongst the tech publishers, websites, and blogs.
When a lot of small but relevant blogs started publishing about MoS, the bigger publication tends to follow the trail.
And with creating such huge buzz when eventually getting featured in giant publications like TechCrunch and Forbes, their funding skyrocketed.
So you need to :
- Find a unique angle to market your product
- Come up with a product idea that has a surprising factor
- Encourage customers to talk about your product
- Pitch the product-relevant blogs
- Use trading up the chain method were starting from small blogs and moving up to big publications.
This Guy Built An Online T-Shirt Business Making $1, 248 In Just 3 Weeks
Sounds like something you can achieve?
Well, it is! This comes from the Shopify staff Tucker Schreiber who accepted the challenge to build a T-shirt business just in a month.
It was Shopify effective marketing attempt to prove their core value of “do something, tell people” to their potential customers.
Image Source: Shopify
However, surely encouraging for the entrepreneurs who are looking forward to starting a dropshipping business from the scratch.
Tucker generated $1,248.90 as their total revenue from their Shopify store ThinkPup in less than a month.
So how did he do it?
He first began trying different online marketing channels to acquire customers. Apparently, he found most of their sales from Reddit and Instagram.
And that’s it!
What To Learn
This might sound too easy to be true but it is! Sometimes you only need the available marketing channels to do effective promotions.
Sometimes overthinking your marketing channels or strategy strays you away from the results.
So focus on just going for trial and error with multiple marketing channels depending upon your product.
Find out which ones of them are the most effective. Double down your work on those but keep working on others as well.
Here’s what you need to learn :
- Keep testing different marketing channels to promote your product
- Focus on customer acquisition through the most effective marketing channels for your product.
- Don’t overthink your marketing strategy.
An Ex-Con Turning His Life Around With Building $80k Per Month ECommerce Business
The ex-felon turned businessman making into this E-commerce case study list is already quite fascinating.
Even not have much experience in sales and marketing along with no great financial positioning, he achieved great results with their online business.
He wanted to be unique and stand out amongst others, so he created his e-commerce business named National Parks Depot.
Image Source: ReferralCandy
His eCommerce business sells outdoor adventure gear, apparel, and accessories to a passion-driven targeted audience.
You may wonder how he was able to pull this off.
Well, the answer is Facebook Ads
Yes, that’s it. He started off with a small Facebook Ad budget of only $60 from which he got a return of $1,000 in his product sales.
Just after that, he made a better decision but doubled down on his ad spend further getting double ROI on it.
Then, he further scaled up his ad budget eventually ending up hitting $80,000 in sales.
What To Learn
You need to be strategic with how you spend your money for the ad budget to promote your product.
But even before that, don’t be afraid to invest in the promotion of your products. Also do not hesitate for the same if you haven’t much money.
Robert, here is the perfect example as he invested what he had at the moment, and more importantly he did it to test Facebook Ads.
So he kept investing when it worked for his business getting higher ROI.
The best you can do even with less money is to test whether it works for your business or not.
And double down on strategies that work for your business or give you the required ROI.
Raw Generation Taking Their Revenues From $8k to $96K Per Month
Raw Generation is the brand that offers raw unpasteurized juice from fresh fruits and vegetables conveniently to their customers.
They understood how health is the topmost priority for people all around the world and focused on bringing the product promising health with the right balance of taste and convenience.
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“Business, marketing, and Branding – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, Branding, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.”