The Future of Ecommerce in 2022 and Beyond - 4 TRENDS

I heard it said once that the most predictable way to make a ton of money is to be at the beginning of an emerging trend. If you can be part of a really big industry and there's a trend that is coming and you get in there early, you're in a position to make a lot of money. I know a lot of you who watch my content sell in E commerce or sell on Amazon or via Shopify. And there's a few trends happening in that space right now that are worth paying attention to. I'm certainly paying attention to them because I see them as kind of the next chapter of our industry. Just for context, where we are right now is that valuations on companies are exploding. Like E commerce is the hottest game in town, everybody wants to buy E commerce companies, but yet everybody is doing it like it's two years ago. Everybody's operating their business as if we're still in like a pre pandemic world. And the world has changed and our industry has changed and there's new opportunities that are emerging that I would suggest you start paying attention to.

The first is brands with limited supply. So we all have experienced these supply chain issues, right? We've all seen our inventory get stuck at Amazon or stuck on the ocean somewhere, and yet we're treating it like as soon as this bottleneck is cleared, like we'll be back in business. That might be true, but there's a different way to approach this and that is instead of trying to serve the entire marketplace, it's serving a limited supply of people. In order for you to do this, you have to be absolutely crystal clear about who your customer is and what the transformation is that they are taking when they buy your product. So if you're selling spatulas to moms, this may not apply to you, but if you're selling fancy golden spatulas to high end moms or whatever, having a very limited supply available will bring a ton of marketing attention and solve your supply chain issues. So one example of this would be supreme. They do very limited runs of any product that they release and people line up ready to get it. I mean, when you're buying from one of these companies online, there's people sitting there hitting refresh on the page, ready to pay whatever price that product is going to be sold for. And they're buying it for two reasons. One, they know that they got to be first if they're going to get one. And number two, there's a secondary market created because there's so much scarcity around these products. You see, we're craving scarcity right now. The businesses that win in the next chapter of entrepreneurship are going to have scarcity built into their business models, right? Only a few people can win the mass market game on Amazon. You can only have a few top selling spatulas, you can only have a top few selling bedsheets. But if you have a limited supply of something and you differentiate it from what everybody else is doing in the marketplace, you can sell out every single time and let that be your marketing and be absolutely committed to what the customer wants because you know that it's going to sell out anyway. Your job then becomes to create the best product for the customer, not the product for the masses, the product for the hundred thousand people who come back over and over and over again. So limited supply E commerce is going to be one of the emerging trends in the next chapter of our industry.

The second is the return of premium pricing. We have been squeezed as E commerce sellers. We've been squeezed in terms of the amount of competitors coming into the space, we've been squeezed with the limited amount of inventory that we can order from overseas. Our profit margins have started to get squeezed, which is interesting because the valuations of our companies are at all time highs. Mazel tov. But there will be a return of premium pricing. Premium pricing, meaning we go the opposite direction of what most people are doing in the marketplace, which is competing on price. In fact, right now is a beautiful time for you to launch a new brand or reposition an existing brand as being very, very premium. I would encourage you to to ask the question, what would we have to charge to be the most expensive in our industry? There are benefits to being the cheapest. There are benefits to being the most expensive. There are fewer benefits to being somewhere in the middle. I like to operate being on the high end of that spectrum and preferably being the most expensive. When you are the most expensive, you have more to spend on marketing, you have more to spend on making a great product, you have more to spend on great branding, and you get the best piece of the marketplace. The people who tend to complain least and the people who tend to refer more people to your brand. Low end customers tend to complain the most, give you negative reviews and not tell other people about it. So if you go after that high end piece of the market, you have the best shot of having the best profit margins. Yes, but also creating the most raving fan base. And I think that's the real secret to succeeding in E commerce right now. Having that raving fan Base. One way to do that is it just be always premium and you're going to see a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom in the next chapter.

The third trend this is going to melt your mind is NFT VIP memberships. A lot of you use VIP groups or Facebook groups or email lists to get early access to your products in exchange for reviews. And you do rebates and you use rebate key or a bunch of the different services that exist out there to do search, find, buy on Amazon or just buy and leave a review on Shopify, whatever you guys call it. But moving forward, forward, I suggest that you treat that like a real business. And what I mean is, instead of just having these groups of people that are there to do your bidding, like get free product and then leave you a review or whatever it is, treat those like real VIP customers. Here's how this is going to play out. I'm just waiting for the first brand to release an NFT that gets you access into your VIP group. What's inside that VIP group? The same thing that you are giving your existing VIPs. You just treat them like real VIPs. You might have a thousand people and it's never going to be more than a thousand people and they buy an NFT or you just airdrop it to them and that NFT gets them access to your discord, your Slack channel or your Facebook group. That allows them to interface with you and be first in line to try new products, give their feedback and whatever other bonuses that you want to give. On top of that, if you treat that like a real VIP group, this is your early access group. You will not only create raving fans, but you will get the best marketing ever out of that group. Because now those 1000 NFT holders are financially incentivized to see the brand succeed. Can you imagine how loud they give you great reviews and tell their friends and bring in influencers and market your business for you and send you video testimonials of how amazing your product is, you're building a real VIP group, not just this thing that you call a VIP group. And I think the way that's going to play out is by issuing NFTs to your best customers who now have an aligned incentive with you, the aligned incentive to see this brand succeed. When the brand wins, the value of that NFT goes up because they can sell their access to somebody else who wants to be on the front lines of your new brand. And you now have a group of people who are incentivized to leave reviews and testimonies and all of this without you having to do the incentivization. Incentivization, Incentification. The incentives. See, most people are breaking terms of service right now by incentivizing people to do things that they want them to do. But what if they were just inherently incentivized because they own an NFT that gets them access to the VIP membership? Oh, that is going to change E commerce in so many ways and it's going to be a beautiful thing to watch unfold.

And the fourth trend that is emerging right now is influencer sponsored brands. I do not mean influencer marketing. It's different. I mean influencers that own equity in the brands themselves. Influencers do not like trading their audience for dollars. They just have to. They have no other way to make money from their audiences, at least right now. But the day is coming when these influencers realize that they're making the brands way more money than they're getting paid and they want to be incentivized properly. That means getting equity in the businesses or it means getting an NFT around the business. It could play out either way. But I already recommend to all of our students inside of our capitalism incubator that they build relationships with influencers that are much deeper than just sponsoring their podcast or their Instagram. It is giving them an incentive for the brand to grow, giving them 5, 10, sometimes 15% of the business, especially if you're a brand new business, to incentivize them to really care about the brand. If you do that, then you can make them the face of the business and you can get in front of their audience without you having to build an audience on your own. I first discovered this when a friend of mine noticed that there was a big brand with a big email list. And every time they emailed their list, they sold a bunch of new products. And he said, man, it would be nice if like you had that type of track record and customer list, right? And I thought, I mean, why can't you build one? So I spent years building audiences that wanted to buy my product, so they were lined up and ready to buy from me on launch day. But now there's a faster way. Instead of me spending two years building an audience, I can just partner with somebody who already has one. Because now There's Instagram and TikTok and blogs and email lists and NFT groups and all this other stuff where there's already concentrated attention. Why would I build it myself when I can just go to them and give them a piece of the action and we create a partnership that allows the business to grow much, much faster. Well, influencers are starting to see this and you're starting to see a lot of famous people release E commerce brands. So get ahead of that trend. Be the person that goes out and builds those relationships. So you are the person with the influence about how this brand is going to turn out and the influencers want to come to you to partner with you. I think that is the best opportunity right now for E commerce sellers that very few people are doing so. Limited supply, high price points. NFT groups and influencers are going to be the new chapter of E commerce. And we're going to see businesses grow even faster than they have in the past. We're going to see valuations even higher than we have in the past because those four emerging trends will create raving fan bases, high profit margins, a lot of free press and people who want to market on your behalf. That is the people who own the NFTs, the people who own the products that were on limited supply, the influencers themselves. It's going to create more demand and more profit for your business. And you can get ahead of these trends right now by positioning yourself to take advantage of them before they're popular and everybody is doing it. If you want some help with that, that's what we do as a business. We help entrepreneurs build eight figure visions, launch profitably and create the relationships and the infrastructure to have a seven figure brand that they can sell. And you can find out more about what we do that around this video. It's called the Capitalism Incubator. It's really, really good. If you're looking to have a meaningful exit, you should probably hop in here. In the meantime, what you can do to position yourself is learn about relationships with influencers and how NFTs work and what it might look like to have a limited supply of your next product. And you'll start to see that that is where the puck is going. My name is Ryan Daniel moran. I run capitalism.com we help entrepreneurs build businesses and invest the profits. Thanks for watching this video. See you next time.