Apologies for my absence from your inbox.

Your boy has been heads down in the weeds as peak CROSSNET summer season is finally here. The good news is yesterday we had our best ecommerce financial day of 2024. The bad news… well we will get into that!

Before we get into this week’s send, I have been working on a free gift for you.

Lets be real, you guys have changed my life from reading this every week. The growth of the business, the creation of the Founders Club, the events, the sponsorships. I’d be an idiot to not acknowledge that all ends if you guys stop reading. So here it is. Click the link or photo and download it for free now.

8 Ways to Save Money for Your Business

The Best Worst Week Ever

So in a week where business is on the up and up, we’re selling hundreds of units a day and things seem like they are going pretty damn solid how could I possibly have bad news?

Well if you read last week’s edition I told you guys that I was going to start doing micro-daily P&L’s for each SKU. Well, I did and the results were shocking.

Before I dive deeper, I will say this probably wont work or wont be worth the time if you’re selling a catalog of clothing, jewelry or just dozens and dozens of products. For those reading that have maybe 1-4 products that make up 80% of your revenue then this is DEFINITELY worth your time.

So here’s what you do. Take all your daily ad expenses for that ONE PRODUCT, your Shopify & Amazon revenue (not wholesale), daily cost of goods (you can get this from Finaloop or multiply out your cost of landed goods versus units sold), estimated shipping expenses and you’ll be left with your marketing efficiency ratio & resulting profit.

We sell two core products in the summer CROSSNET & CROSSNET H2O.

We found out that 95% of the businesses’ profit was coming from one of the SKUS and only 5% from the other.

The bad news - they were selling neck and neck every day.

So $10k a day for H2O, $10k a day for CROSSNET. Only one is pulling in profit dollars and the other one is shrinking our profit due to overspending!

I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the business of cranking up top line revenue, doing all this work, or racking up expenses just to make zero money and flex on Instagram my Shopify dashboard. Give me the $100k month with $20k profit over the $200k month with $5k profit every day of the week.

So What Are We Doing?

1) We immediately cut back Facebook ad spend by $500 to see what happens to the topline revenue & SKU level profit

2) Once we establish a better understanding of what happens to revenue when we cut ads, we will be working to introduce 7 new ad creatives that we have created and have been waiting to deploy

3) If the new ads we launch have better metrics (cost per click, cost per acquisition, etc.) then we will continue to scale down the old “winner” and scale up these new ads

4) To offset the revenue dip that we expect from scaling back (it is important to generate cash for the business), we have increased the other SKU’s ad budget by $500 daily that is crushing it. If we keep seeing similar success and efficiency we will scale this up by $500 every single day, if not more!

5) If steps 1-4 do not work to make the SKU more profitable and hit at least our 20% profit target then we will need to look at discontinuing the product or increasing price. The good thing about math is it doesn’t lie. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and hope that the numbers are going to change because you are happy. Sometimes the math equation is doomed from the start and it takes you a few years to figure it out. It sucks but its the truth. If we were to look at a price increase we would need to plan around 9 months out as the product is in mass retail.

6) Introduce new products! We only made 2000 of these “Stars & Stripes” CROSSNETS and launched them last week. You can order one here.

ShipPlug Gets Money on Shipping

I want to give a huge shout out to ShipPlug, this week’s sponsor of CROSSED Commerce. They are new partners of mine and are crushing it with helping us get money back from FedEx, UPS, and USPS when they deliver a package late… which happens ALOT (waiting on my new On Cloud sneakers for 9 days).

You may not know it but you can actually get a refund from FedEx, UPS and many of the carriers if they are late on delivering your shipment. Realistically it takes too much man power to look through every tracking label or wait to hear from an unhappy customer.

Instead ShipPlug does all this for you. Think of it as a tech tool that takes no setup time, is commitment free, and only makes money when they make you money back. They will audit all your shipments, create all the claims and do all the heavy lifting. Essentially there’s nothing to lose and found money to gain. What we call a no brainer and why I thought you guys would want to know about it.

I’m currently having the audit done myself and expect to get back a couple thousand dollars. Simply shoot my guy Bobby an email at [email protected] and let him know I sent you. They are hooking up all readers with the first month for 100% free with zero commissions. Get your money back. Help me help you.

https://www.shipplug.com

See You Soon?!

With that, I’m heading back into the trenches to my e-commerce deskjob. I’m currently working on getting out a 500 unit order to Bass Pro Shop and sending several thousand units into Amazon so we can continue to dominate the summer.

I’m on the road for the rest of June and would love to hang if you’re in Nashville, Dallas, or San Diego. I’ll be hosting three events out there so reply back for the invite and will be off the grid all next week for Bonnaroo! This is year 8 of Bonnaroo for me (a four day music festival in Manchester, TN) if you are going let me know and we’ll link up!

Thanks for reading,

Chris