Big businesses have fully fledged teams dedicated to optimizing the output of every part of their business. Tech teams build optimized websites that accurately track traffic and build customer bases. Marketing teams analyze trends to find what works best so that content creation and advertising cost provide the most value for their spend.
But you don't have these luxuries as a small, or even solo business owner operator. You are just trying to keep everything afloat!
That being said, there's a few common pitfalls that you can avoid to make sure parts of your business don't fall into a sinkhole, costing you time and money.
Pricing Issues
You have a huge advantage over big companies: you are able to be extremely agile in your product offering and service. Lots of big businesses have to go through tons of market analysis and self inflicted red tape before they can bring a product to market.
One way you may have leveraged this advantage is by posting a product for sale that you don't even have made yet. You can wait to invest time into the new product until you see interest from your customers. This is a great way to stay agile so long as you can actually fulfill your product's promises.
I see one area that people commonly miss out regarding agility in their business: pricing. If you are able to charge 10% more for a product, that essentially means you can become 10% more efficient just by a pricing change (or more because your profit has increased by more than 10%). As long as you have some interest (sales) in a product you offer, you should be able to easily run experiments on pricing to see where you start to lose interest due to price.
Stay agile, run your pricing experiments, and optimize products early to receive the highest upside before order fulfillment becomes an unbearable process.
High Platform Fees
It's no secret that platforms make tons of money off of people doing business through them. Blanket "processing" and "service" fees quickly eat up your margin if you are selling things through sites that tell you there is a benefit to using them.
Now, I'm not discounting this benefit. Platforms like Etsy have built in traffic, so they genuinely provide value by giving you a slice of their marketing efforts. Now, is the benefit worth the 10% of sale you give up? That's up for you to decide - to me it seems pretty steep.
Real value that platforms provide may include some of the following:
- easy payment integration for your customer (average cost of payment integration is 2%-4% of sale value)
- built in marketing
- ease of sale fulfilment
- complicated customer fees (shipping, tax, etc) built in
- a brand trusted by your customer
Now, you have to decide if the benefit outweigh the fees. If you think you are getting the short end of the stick here, you do have options.
Shopify is a tool that you can build your own "platform" (website) to facilitate the sale of your products. With a little time, you can start selling through your own site with only two costs to you: the shopify fee (starting around $30/mo) and your card processing fees (around 3%/sale). This isn't meant to be a call to action to build a shopify site, it is just a single example of where you may be able to start saving more of each sale if platform fees are eating you alive.
We are also working on similar functionality through the Epicenter platform to offer native sales right on your link in bio page.
Not Focusing On Repeat Customers
One of the most clear signs that someone is willing to give you money: they have given you money in the past.
Very often, when someone creates an online business the first time, their first priority is to get as many people in the door as possible. They may do this with extensive posting on social media, advertisements, or great promotions. This is a great thing to focus on, because traffic will drive sales to your business - but if you are only focusing on new customers, you may neglect the people who have given you the strongest signal that they want to support your business.
Now, one of the biggest barriers for giving attention to repeat customers is that you don't have access to your customers through the platform you are using. This is a common pitfall of platforms because: the platforms think they should own your customers - not you. They make it incredibly difficult to message these people at the very least, and sometimes make it against their policy to remarket them because you risk taking them off their platform: the platform that they are making money through.
This is why you will often hear advise to "start an email list". Customer emails are just about the easiest way that you can "own" your customers, because it is incredibly easy to market to them when you have a new product or promotion: just send them an email.
If you are on a platform that doesn't allow you to "own" your customers - think about how you can leverage your traffic into an email list - or even find out what platforms do allow you to remarket to existing customers.
Unclear Customer Patterns
If you are like me, social media marketing has a big allure to you because you can create content for very little and have the potential to reach an massive audience. That sounds like cost effective.
The problem is, social media is often cost ineffective, because it is not really driving customers to your business for the amount of time you are devoting to it. One way you can determine this is figure out what channels your customers are actually coming from and spending more time trying to promote those channels.
But how do you actually figure out where your customers are coming from? This will vary by platform, but you will need some way to track incoming traffic on your sales page and tie that traffic to sales.
Now you may be noticing a theme in these pitfalls: if your platform doesn't allow you to do this, you are out of luck.
But, here's three ways you may be able to achieve this on your current platform:
1. Built in analytics for inbound marketing channels
Your platform may have robust enough analytics straight out of the box to show you where your traffic is coming from. Because of how links and the internet works, THEY DO HAVE ACCESS TO THIS DATA. Now, if they are actually saving this data and giving you access to it - that's a whole other story. Check your data dashboards to see if you are able to determine what social media channels (or advertising in general) your customers come from.
2. Google Analytics integration
Google Analytics is by far the most popular way to track traffic across sites. Because so many people use it, most sites you use are using Google to track your behavior. This is how they are able to send you personalized advertisements for example. If your platform allows for a Google Analytics setup, you can pretty easily create a new Analytics account and fill in a few bits of info to start tracking where your customers are finding you from and which of them are actually supporting your business.
3. Using the right links
You will need to follow this step if you are using Google Analytics as well, but sometimes platforms can track "UTM"s without Google. Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM) are parts of a URL (link) that can be added for websites to understand where a customer came from. For example, if I have a link on my Instagram page that goes to my-business-website.com, I could add a UTM to tell my website that the customer came from Instagram: my-business-website.com?utm_source=Instagram.
I'm working on compiling a full list of interesting things you can do with links for your business, so stay tuned on this blog for that list.
No Clear Value Proposition
This is the pitfall that killed my first business. This goes hand in hand with why the idea: "Build it, and they will come" is false. Just because something (your business) exists, does not mean that people will spend their time or money on it.
Your business has at least one objection, if not more than that: your product costs money. Because you have an objection, you need to learn to overcome the objections of your customers. The way you might overcome the price objections is by stating: your product is cool, so its worth the money.
Quickly, more objections can spring up after you try to squash one.
The key is to craft an easily understandable value proposition that overwhelms objections before they even appear.
A strong value proposition clearly communicates why someone should choose your product or service over others. It’s not about listing features like “our software has 50 integrations” or “our product is made of premium materials”—it’s about articulating what those features do for the customer. Instead of focusing on what your product is, focus on what it does. For example, rather than saying “our app has automated reminders,” you might say, “never forget an important deadline again.” This shift focuses on the outcome your customer cares about.
Think of your value proposition as a bridge between your product and your customer's needs. A good value proposition answers questions like: “How will this make my life better?” or “What problem does this solve for me?” Highlighting benefits rather than features helps customers immediately see how your product fits into their lives. When people feel that a product aligns with their needs or desires, objections like price or skepticism often fade into the background.
Ultimately, if you fail to highlight the value your product brings, you leave your customers to do the heavy lifting of figuring it out themselves—and most won't bother. A clear, compelling value proposition cuts through the noise, gets your message across quickly, and builds trust with potential customers. Without one, your product may get lost in a sea of competitors, regardless of how great its features are.
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