Drive and Convert (Ep. 003): COVID-19 and Ecommerce

How should online businesses react to the economic disruption caused by the pandemic? Find out in the third episode of the Drive and Convert podcast.

Listen to this episode:

About This Episode:

As the coronavirus pandemic is changing the game for businesses around the world, Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow (Logical Position) offer some timely advice on what you can do to propel your ecommerce business forward instead of just sitting on the sidelines.

Subscribe To The Show:

Episode Transcript:

RYAN GARROW:
Jon, we are all working from home, because there’s a virus running around the country, scaring us but also driving us to be safe and do different things. I’m not at all making light of that, but it is changing the game for every business. If you’re a business that hasn’t been impacted by this in a positive or negative way, you might be on vacation somewhere not knowing what’s going on. As you’re talking to companies over the last week or two, what are you hearing? Have you seen anything work, anything that’s been terrible? What’s the general gauge of customers that you’ve been speaking to or prospects you’ve been speaking to when it comes to business right now?

JON MACDONALD:
Good question. I’m hearing two camps, pretty exclusively, and it seems to be clear cut one or the other for e-commerce. The one camp is, “My sales are going better than ever. People are home, they’re not shopping on retail at all and we’re picking up the slack.” A lot of brands that also sell through retail are seeing this because they still have a demand for their goods and they’re still shipping. A lot of them are even offering special deals right now to get people to purchase even more.

I see a lot of e-commerce brands I’m talking with that fall into the camp of, “Things are better than ever,” and that’s great. I’m so glad to hear that. Then there’s the other camp that are saying, either, “I’m already out of stock of items, and I don’t know when I’m going to get more,” because they’re having challenges– In the United States, we’re probably, what? Eight weeks behind where China was with this health epidemic.

You look at that and you say, “Okay, eight weeks before the factories got going again.” If they’re full scale in eight weeks, we don’t really know and then, the ports are really backed up and people aren’t able to get the goods, even into the country. If they are, they’ll be in China right now. We have a lot of issues with supply chain and I’m hearing a handful of folks that are saying, “This is a problem, I need to stop all spending. I’m not going to drive traffic anymore, because, why would I drive traffic? Why would I spend to convert my site if I can’t get any product in the hands anyways?”

I’m not suggesting that’s right or wrong. I would love to hear your opinion on that aspect, but that’s what I’m hearing. It’s one of those two camps. What about your side? What are you hearing on these daily conversations?

RYAN:
Because we touch companies that are all e-commerce as well, we’ve got probably the full gamut of it. We have some small local businesses that only have storefronts and they’ve– Obviously, nothing is happening. I can think of escape rooms like for entertainment, those companies stay with small little companies, didn’t spend a lot but we helped them do well but nobody’s going to go to an escape room for the near future. They have just nothing, no chance to market.

They’ve got to do some interesting things. We’re advising them in different ways. E-commerce, there’s a lot of gut reaction we hear, mainly from smaller clients that it’s like, “Pull everything back in, don’t do anything. We just got to ride this out and huddle and protect what we do have.” Then we have other companies of all sizes, saying, “Hey, this is great. Let’s step on the gas. Let’s go.”

Again, there’s supply chain issues all over the place. Some of them are pivoting, some of them had backstop because of the previous issues with China production last year with tariffs, so that has some of our clients. They have a bunch of back stock from that even because they were worried about 25% tariff, so they had loaded up before that. We have, like you said, the full gamut. I don’t think we go back to where we were three weeks ago. We’re going to have a new normal for almost every business in the United States, no matter what your business is. Just lots of change.

JON:
Yes. Talk about that new normal a little bit, then, I’m interested. What do you think won’t change? What do you think will stay the same, and what do you think will change?

RYAN:
What’s not going to change is people are going to buy stuff online. People have already been buying online, they’re going to continue buying online and so that doesn’t necessarily change. What you’re buying right now, I mean, if somebody had an online toilet paper retailer, they are probably in great shape right now. That’s probably the ones that are like, “This is great, this is the best thing that’s ever happened.”

I think we’re going to have a reaction to that and people that sell petits are probably going to be doing wonderfully well because people are going to be sick of buying toilet paper. I think there’s going to be a shift in retail, obviously. I don’t know if– I knew retail was going down and you’ve probably known this as well, like, it’s not been a secret. Somebody told me today, I haven’t actually found the article, but JCPenney may have like Forever closed all stores and gone online totally. Probably it was a good decision anyway.

JON:
They were headed that direction before, right?

RYAN:
Yes, so it accelerated that. What I see with a lot of these things that happen– I mean, this is a very rare occurrence. I did a lot of research and I was preparing for talks around what do you do in a down economy, and you look back at the depression, and you can see how you can spend through that and you can do depressions– Companies that advertise through recessions, depressions do better.

There’s a bunch of studies around that, it’s no secret but when you have a cliff that we fall off of, it’s not necessarily economic related. You do have to look at it from different lens and the easiest, closest thing I saw was 1918, when it was the Spanish flu, the first H1N1 and it was after World War 1 and the US was already in a recession to a degree and so this exacerbated it, but it was also, we had people that couldn’t find work already and then people couldn’t move. It was a very similar scenario, kind of a lockdown.

They also didn’t have e-commerce, they had local stores. That was basically all you could do. Retail obviously came back from there, but very unique times, but I think what it does is that when things like this happen, it shines a magnifying glass on things that were going really well and things that were going really bad. If you had a store that was already not doing well, it’s really not doing well now, unless you randomly got some of the products that people need right now.

JON:
Right. I’m hearing that same thing that the best way to think about this is that your company needs to be able to survive this initial shock. I keep hearing the biggest similarities economically are 9/11. You get through that initial big shock and then we’ll get into the recession, and then we can deal with the financial impacts. If you had a business that was having challenges already, you’re not going to survive that shock because all it takes is one shock to a weakened system if you will, and your business is going to suffer the ultimate consequence because of that.

If you were able to get through that shock, then you can probably pick up the pieces and we should see– I’m not an economist, I’m just telling you what I keep hearing is optimism about this coming back up quickly. That, “Yes, we’re going to hit a recession for a minute, but then we’ll work our way back up pretty quickly.” I think the long term effects are going to be more of an issue because of all the bailouts and money we’re pumping in, we got to pay that back somehow as a United States economy, but we’ll get there.

The reality I think is if you are already running a business that couldn’t survive the initial shock, then you had other issues as well, and if you run a decent business that had some cash that could weather the storm a little bit, then you’re likely going to be better off coming out of this because maybe you’ll run a little leaner, maybe you’ll make sure that you’re spending more effectively. I think that for you and I in terms of E-competence is what we’re going to see on a regular basis is more emphasis on return on ad spend, coming out of this.

I think there’s going to be more emphasis on conversions for sure. I’m hearing that already from our customers and our clients. We did some research reports and interviewed everybody and the data was very eye-opening, and where people are going to cut and how they’re going to cut. Are you seeing the same things?

RYAN:
Yes. Every company is a time to step back and analyze what’s going on. I think what companies have to protect themselves against is making a really quick decision, just like, “Oh my gosh, we got to pull back and stop everything and then figure it out.” It’s like, “Let’s stay calm, even if everything goes down.” Let’s hypothetically say the economy drops 20%, that’s a big drop, but that still means that we have 80% still going. That’s not a terrible thing.

It’s painful, bad things are going to happen. There’s going to be people out of work. If 3 million people lose their job. I, it’s 3 million people that can’t buy your stuff but it also means there’s still 97 million people probably working. It’s not the end of the world. For some businesses, it will be, but I think it’s– Step one, remain calm and understand where we’re at and that it’s not a death sentence for every business out there.

JON:
I pulled up the data from our survey we did of e-commerce store owners. We ran the survey for about a week, last week, and I feel like it’s already been a month since then, just in terms of how quickly things are moving. At that point as of the end of last week, we asked the question, “Have your e-commerce sales been negatively impacted by the recent health and economic events?” 52.2% said no.

Again, it’s been pretty split down the middle there, right? 52% are saying that they have not been negatively impacted. I know you sent out a bunch of great data as well, from what you’re seeing from January to February, February, mid February and then end of March. Any thoughts on that data? You said January 1 through February 17th, that shopping impressions were up by 17% year over year, and revenue was up almost 14% year over year.

RYAN:
We saw really normal data. E-commerce has been steadily growing at that rate for years. For us, it’s like, all systems go, everything’s normal. I think we’ve got somewhere around 3,200 to 3,300 e-com clients. Then for some reason, I don’t know why, I pulled some big snapshots of large segments of our e-comm data. Something happened on February 18th, couldn’t find a news article or a reason. The first death in the Us– this is US data by the way, first death in the US wasn’t until February 23rd so in my head, there was something building up, some reason that people are starting to shop more.

Impressions jumped to 37.4%, I think, year over year from the February 18th to 28th. I eliminated the 29th because of the leap year but that significant bump for no reason. External, there’s no holiday involved and this is your year data too. Then we went into March and we looked at March 1st to the 9th, year over year and it got a little less crazy but it was still up 27% year over year. We didn’t have a big move of Easter this year. I mean, there was no data other than people are online to buy things or search for things at a much higher rate.

I didn’t bring conversion data into those yet because latent conversions are important in a few of our clients that we just couldn’t calculate that yet, but people are online. Even take my family, for example, we’ve been buying our groceries online for store pickup and delivery for, I don’t know, a couple of years. Now, we have four small kids, nobody wants to take four kids under six to the store to buy groceries and out of everything. You can’t get meat at Fred Meyer, for example, here in Portland.

We had to check Walmart, can’t get meat there. Costco, you could probably get meat but you’re going to wait in line for an hour to get in. You’re going to wait in line an hour to get stuff. They don’t do pick up or delivery. Found Whole Foods, so we did a lot of searches actually just to find certain things we needed. That could be a part of it. Just continuing to search at a local level for certain things. Again, if you’re being appropriate with your budgets and search, then you can capture a lot of these people that are trying to find various things. If you have it, people want to buy and they’re not going to stores.

JON:
I think you made a good point there. I think there’s goods that you need to purchase locally. You’re not going to get online like meat, but even then, it’s interesting. I mean, there’s a lot of frozen meat companies out there that will ship you– Omaha Steaks, things of that sort.

RYAN:
Exactly. If I could order Omaha Steaks for every meal, I totally would. Unfortunately, I haven’t made enough money for that to be the case yet, but someday Omaha, you’re shipping my steaks on a daily basis. How about that?

JON:
Love it. It’s interesting because I’m also hearing, despite all of that, one of the questions we asked was, “Do you anticipate seeing your e-commerce sales grow as people take health precautions by not shopping in retail?” Again, 52% said yes. It aligns with those who feel their sales have not been impacted. They’re also hopeful that they’re going to do more of the capturing that retail group that is not buying at retail. I think that’s really interesting that we’ll see some hit from the e-commerce world, but it probably won’t be as bad as retail.

RYAN:
I sure hope not. We do a lot in e-commerce together, so it’d be bad for us. I look at this, I’m an optimist. I’m an eternal optimist. I always think I’m going to win. I always think things are going to be great. I fail, of course. That’s the way I look at it. I get excited because I see economic downturns as opportunities. The last time we had a big downturn, 2006, 2007, 2008 I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have businesses in the places that I do now, so I couldn’t capitalize when things got bad, they were house deals all over the place.

If you had cash in 2008, 2009 you have a fleet of rentals at this point that probably tripled in value because you had that and you were prepared. I see this, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is exciting. I am prepared. I have the ability to move in and get aggressive where it’s appropriate.” Businesses, you might be able to buy competitors for pennies on the dollars very soon if they weren’t prepared.

If you’re an e-com store for example, and you don’t have the overhead of a retail and some of your competitors have expensive retail spaces, they have to support and still pay rent, or they have employees that maybe aren’t being utilized in an e-commerce scenario, they’re going to be struggling and it creates significant opportunities. For me, I’m excited because I think there’s so much to do and this is where companies that really want to win will be able to distance themselves if they take appropriate actions.

JON:
I think that’s a great point of taking the optimistic view of this of, “Well, how can you help someone out by perhaps bailing them out a little bit, buying their company and helping them turn that around and everybody win from that?” I think we’re going to see a lot of that coming down the line just from an economic standpoint. You mentioned there’s going to be deals to be had and if you’re an e-commerce company in a position to be able to invest and take advantage of those, you’re going to be doing I think very well coming out of this.

JON:
Well, we asked a question as well around what is the response these brands are going to take. “I predict my brand will respond to these health and economic concerns by,” and reducing marketing spend was 61% of the response and I thought that was interesting because that’s not taking advantage of this opportunity. I mean ad-words and stuff, are going to get a lot cheaper because people aren’t bidding.

RYAN:
I feel bad for companies that their default reaction to the tough times is to pull back marketing, especially when we’re in e-commerce. For example, my brand. I separate my accounts so I have brand terms and non-brand terms. You’ve heard me say this constantly. I probably preach it every event you’re at with me. Non-brand, that’s a free agent. If somebody is searching for your product but not you, they have intent to buy based on the search, they’re choosing you or a competitor.

There is no scenario for a business that I am involved with in an ownership and I have some say where we are not spending down to break even to buy that customer, no scenario. I want that customer and I want them more than my competitors do. It’s going to become mine so I am turning up marketing. In fact, I hired people last week in the middle of this to increase production like we are going in and we’re going in aggressively.

Hey, it might not well be able to win as much as I want or could, but there’s no scenario. I’m actually taking it. I’m going all in and if I fall a little bit short, oh well, at least I’ve made some gains and I got some clients that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to get even as recently as two weeks ago because my competitors hadn’t pulled back their marketing yet.

JON:
I think that’s interesting because in that same response, 8.7% said they’re going to spend more on marketing. I think that’s 8.7% that’s going to win. I look at that and I’m like, “If you’re in that minority of 9% let’s just say, you have a big opportunity where you’re just going to be able to take over your competition and if you keep marketing through this, there’s a very high likelihood that you’ll have more revenue. You’re going to have more resources when you come out of this, frankly, be able to overtake your competition and just in overall spend, because they’re going to be limping along through this.

They’re hurting themselves or their sales not being able to be propelled by this marketing. When they come out of this, it’s just not going to be as pretty for them as it would be for somebody who tries to maintain their marketing as much as they can.” That’s been a big message to my team here too. It’s like, “Let’s continue to keep marketing.” Now, it needs to be done tactfully. Let’s not get mixed up in the COVID-19, “Here’s how we’re continuing to serve our customers,” emails. That’s not helpful.

RYAN:
Oh my God. That’s like popups to me for you. It’s like, really? Thank you 500 people that I’ve ever bought something from in the last 10 years emailing me. Kudos.

JON:
That’s exactly the problem. Most people aren’t going to be upset about those emails, but they’re certainly not going to read them. It’s not a good opportunity.

RYAN:
My password keeper sent me an e-mail, the one on my iPhone that stores all my passwords that I pay for once a year, sent me an e-mail. I was like, “Do I care if your developers are working from home or working from the office?”

JON:
As long as I can get to my passwords.

RYAN:
I don’t care. Why would you waste the, I even cost you something to send it like human capital, fractions of pennies for emails. Like, Oh my gosh.

JON:
There’s that for sure. The way to get through this in terms of the marketing is to acknowledge it’s a problem and just say, “Hey, you know what? We know that this is going on. Don’t ignore it, and certainly don’t take advantage of it and try to say ‘Oh, we’re running a shop from home sale because everybody’s stuck at home right now.”‘ That’s not going to go over very well.

RYAN:
No. I was talking to one of our clients that sells, it’s a beauty skincare cream. They focus on organic and teens or preteens. It’s something like that. They’re like, “Okay, what do we do with COVID-19?” I’m like, “What do you mean? You sell skin– You’re not going to talk about that. That’s terrible.” They’re like, “Well, people can’t go out for Easter.”

I was like, “Well, yes, they can’t.” “What about getting Easter baskets? You’re going to buy your daughter some makeup for,” I was like, “That’s great. Maybe you can do an Easter sale and push your heart on social and get some–” Influencers may be involved, but you don’t want to necessarily say, “Hey, you can’t go out on Easter. You still want to dress up.” I mean, that’s just rubbing into somebody’s face because there’s going to be a lot of disappointment.

Every Easter we do a big event at my barn with my whole family, because I have a large one and we do a beer tasting. We work our way through the Easter letters. The beer had to start with E one year, then A, we’re around S which was a great one because there’s a lot of great beers that start with S or they have to have like Jesus in them. There’s some bad beers with Jesus. I’m just telling you that right now. [crosstalk]

JON:
I can’t imagine it’s good beer.

RYAN:
But we’re doing it virtually, we’re doing a virtual tasting.

JON:
Talk about taking advantage of a situation, naming your beer off of religious figures.

RYAN:
Oh man, there’s– I won’t mention a brewery but there’s a pecan Jesus beer that it is not very good.

JON:
Pecan beer sounds horrible to me.

RYAN:
Everything about it was like, “That is not a good sounding beer.”

JON:
I’m much more of a wine person, unfortunately.

RYAN:
Well, we could do wine tasting too, but it’s changing. Don’t push it on people.There’s two things I’m telling a lot of companies [unintelligible 00:21:30] is number one, assume everybody knows I’m going to tell them to keep marketing. Outside of that, you have to be creative but move. If you don’t do anything, you’re never going to start moving. Understand that you’re going to make some mistakes and you’re going to go out there.

Maybe you accidentally mentioned the COVID or coronavirus when you maybe shouldn’t have, but at least you’re out there testing something and you realize, “Oh, that wasn’t great.” Get out there and do something to expand your brand. You have to think outside the box. This is unprecedented. None of us have been through a giant downturn related to a virus. If you find somebody that’s been through this, I’d love to know what country they were in when this exactly happened.

They had e-commerce versus Amazon not being able to send anything but toilet paper. Getting out of, it’s going to take some testing. I say also talk to an expert, whether that’s Jon, whether that’s me, somebody else. Talk to somebody that understands something about what you’re trying to accomplish and run some ideas by him and then say, “Hey, I’m thinking of doing this. Is there a reason that you would say bad idea or yes, it’s worth a try. Let’s measure it.” Pull back quickly if it’s not working.

JON:
I mean one of the benefits of a slowdown right now for e-com brands is that there are experts like you and I who were a little bit slower perhaps than what you would typically see and we’re giving our time back and saying, “Hey, I’m happy to chat with you. I’m happy to help as much as I can, answer questions, let’s do these things.” We’re stuck at home. We have an extra hour a day because we’re not commuting.

We have extra time on our hands as a whole, as a community that I think is really interesting. It’s really, really fun to see how you can use that goodwill in a way that– I’m answering questions. I sent an e-mail out last week instead of an article which we’ve sent out for seven years in a row over seven years now. We send one every Tuesday and last week I was just like, “Team, it doesn’t seem right to send an e-mail out this week with an article that’s quite frankly a topic we had booked three months out. On our content calendar. It’s not really relevant to what’s going on. I don’t feel we should send that out this week.”

They were like, “Well, we don’t want to just send no e-mail. Let’s send, ‘hope everybody’s doing well.”‘ I was like, “No, no, no, that’s not going to go well. Nobody wants to hear that.” Instead what we decided was let’s send an e-mail that’s basically being helpful. We really wanted to just be as helpful as we could for these e-com brands and be in it with them. The whole goal was,”Okay, we have all this content, seven, eight, nine years of content that we’ve have up on our site that we’ve written. It’s super helpful.”

I just said, “Hey, if you’re having a challenge, you want some expert advice on it, reply to this e-mail and we’ll look at our back catalog of content and send you the article that’s specific to your need along with some context and a little bit of help on that.” The amount of responses I got is overwhelming. We sent it on Tuesday, we’re recording this on a Thursday afternoon. I still have dozens of emails in my inbox that I need to get through.

The benefit of that is not just that we get to help the community, but also that now I’m basically writing content because I’m answering these people and saying, “Here’s the old content, but here’s all the stuff I would update on this right now and here’s how I would be thinking about it.” Then I sent that e-mail to our marketing team and they’re taking that and they’re updating the content on the site, or they’re writing new content based off of what I’m suggesting.

We’re able to produce a lot of great content with this extra time that we have on our hands because everybody’s working from home, not commuting. We do have some clients who are like, “Hey, talk to me in two weeks when things calm down.” They’re not dropping but they’re saying, “Hey, I just need some time right now,” which is understandable. I think that it’s really interesting to see how we can all band together and help each other out and really use this to generate some great content that will be everlasting out there. I think the knowledge base, the communal knowledge base is just going to grow so much.

RYAN:
I think it’s going out with the idea people want to give help, they want to be helpful, but they also are going to be looking for help. I think it opens up a lot of doors to maybe a partnership that you wouldn’t have even been able to approach or do anything with before. One of my companies is a brand that sells to retail as well as online and my retailers are closed. They’re struggling. They still have expensive rent to pay in certain areas, and so I’m like, “Okay, well, you don’t sell online. I do. I know how to do it. Let’s get some of your stuff online, how can I help you move product?”

They’re going to sell more of my product probably with some of these things as well but it’s like, “Hey, you’re being forced as a local business to start selling online now, let me help you compete with some of those big retailers,” because a lot of times it surprises me. We have some rather large advertisers and some of them came in and said, “Yes, right now we’re going to cut budgets 50%,” and there’s no data around that.

We didn’t have anything to say around it. They just dictated that. We’re going to go back and talk to them through some of the logic, but that was an e-mail we got yesterday and I was like, “That makes no sense.” If you have one of the largest advertisers in a category that’s going to pull back 50% of their digital spend, small guys have a huge opportunity to fill that void because people are still buying these things. The volume is still there.

JON:
That’s so true. That goes back to just that small 9% in that survey that said they’re going to invest more or continue the same. I think those are the folks who are going to come out winning. If nothing else, their brand is going to get in front of new people that they wouldn’t have been able to afford to get in front of before. There is some bright spot here for sure.

RYAN:
I’m excited but it’s also, I guess I get nervous, but it’s almost like an excited nervous. We don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m pretty confident with our team’s skill set and what we’re going to be able to do and your team skill set, we’re going to come out of this fine. Hopefully, most of our clients do and we’re able to help that but if some of their competitors of our clients don’t make it.

JON:
Maybe they should have talked to us first.

[laughter]

JON:
I think there’s a bit of a Machiavellian message here. I don’t want to say take advantage of the situation but definitely think twice about how you can utilize this in a way that is going to help your company instead of hurt it. If you start thinking with that mindset, I’m not suggesting even a growth mindset, I’m just saying every company is going to have down revenue this year. If you are just thinking about how do I maintain, then when things pick back up, you’re going to really pick back up much quicker.

If you say, “Hey, you know what? I know we’re going to have a 20% drop, I’m just going to cut everything.” Like you mentioned with that one customer, that’s just the wrong mindset. I understand. Of course, that sounds, coming from you and I, of course, we should be saying keep spending on marketing because that’s our business. I cannot stress the data that’s behind this and the reality of this. I know I’ve seen you do presentations on just how car companies back in the depression came out of this and how Ford really blew up coming out of that because of the actions they took versus what is it, GM at the time?

RYAN:
Chrysler.

JON:
Chrysler.

RYAN:
That was crazy.

JON:
I think the same situation can apply here. People who keep moving forward, keep marketing are going to grow like Ford versus Chrysler did back then. Different time maybe different industries, but I think the same tenants apply.

RYAN:
Yes, I probably would agree. If you Google recession studies, and I think I’ve referenced one from the ’70s and then one from the early ’80s they were recessions. They did some studies around companies that advertised in, during and after a recession and compared their growth to companies that cut marketing and every time companies that advertise and marketed through the recession, despite what maybe they felt like doing grew and their marketing wasn’t even as traceable as our last-click attribution type tracking that we have online.

We have unprecedented tracking online that if you have profitable or even break-even marketing, I don’t care what the economy is doing, there’s no reason not to spend that money. I mean it’s just, it’s layups.

JON:
Well, Ryan, this has been a lot of fun to connect about this today. Hopefully, there’s been some value here for listeners, some things they should be thinking about. If nothing else, hopefully, they decide that they can be the Ford of the world versus the Chrysler coming out of this in a way that is really going to help propel their business forward versus sitting on the sidelines.

RYAN:
Yes. Hopefully. If anybody wants to reach out to either one of us, please do. This is fun for us to talk through and help companies and advise them. It’s what we live for.

JON:
Yes.

RYAN:
And we’ve got extra time with no commute.

JON:
There you go. I’m happy to help. I’ve been putting this on LinkedIn. Anytime I see any of our partners or any offers out there, I repost them on LinkedIn. It’s like, ”Hey, guys, look, e-commerce community is banding together.” I don’t know if you saw, Privy just came out with today ShopSmallEcomm.com.

RYAN:
I did see that, yes.

JON:
Ecomm with two m’s at the end. It’s just amazing. They’re really trying to just help all of these e-com businesses to get listed in this directory and they’re doing this effort for free. Yes, it’s a marketing thing for Privy, nobody’s hiding that. The reality is that it’s helpful and it can’t hurt to list your site on there. Right, so why not?

RYAN:
No, not at all. I already sent it out to my wife’s businesses. I’ve sent it to all our directors and VPs like, ”Hey, there is no reason not to support a partner, number one, because we want to do that.”

JON:
I’m hearing things like Brex does credit cards for e-com. They usually offer net 60 terms with no fees and they’re extending those terms out to 90-120 days with no fees, no interest. Things like that are like, ”Hey, can you see three months in the future right now. If you are sure your business is going to be around in three months, why not do this and give yourself that runway, and perhaps be able to pay some employees in this time. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to and keep advertising and take advantage of this opportunity.”

There are ways out there. I know there’s Clearbanc that does funding, as well B-A-N-C, Clearbanc with a C. There’s a ton of these type of things out there that are offering a lot right now. They understand that your balance sheet looks low, there understand what we’ve all been going through and they’re willing to work with that. If you can show that going into this, you were doing okay, they’re confident you’re going to do okay when you come out of it, and they want to help you see that through.

There’s a lot of stuff out there right now, Ryan and everybody’s got a little extra time to contribute. Everybody’s kind of banding together, it’s been amazing to see the e-com community. I just recommend that as many as e-com brands can take advantage of these opportunities that are in front of them and the help that has been extended, will really see it through. As you mentioned, we’re both happy to help on paid search and how to keep marking on that front. Also on conversion to make sure that once you get those people there, that those dollars go as far as possible so definitely reach out. Any last thoughts on your side, Ryan?

RYAN:
I think the last webinar was probably just when in doubt, go. Just do it. See what happens. Again, that’s kind of just get in motion. I think you can’t fail if you’re moving somewhere. You’ll figure it out.

JON:
I’d rather go down swinging, right?

RYAN:
Heck, yes.

JON:
That’s it. All right, Ryan. Thank you. This has been fun chat today, considering the sad circumstances and topic, but I think we’re going to pull through this.

RYAN:
I agree.

Want a free landing page teardown?

We’ll provide a data-driven critique of the usability and effectiveness of your site free of charge.

Jon MacDonald smiling at the camera for The Good

About the Author

Jon MacDonald

Jon MacDonald is founder and President of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm that has achieved results for some of the largest online brands including Adobe, Nike, Xerox, Verizon, Intel and more. Jon regularly contributes content on conversion optimization to publications like Entrepreneur and Inc. He knows how to get visitors to take action.