Online Sales and Profit Margins with Carole Rains

 

Show Summary

Welcome to Episode 71 if the Profit First Podcast! Mike Michalowicz, Chris Curran and Kristina Bolduc get into the nitty-gritty of  online sales with business owner Carole Rains. Carole is an amazon seller facing the challenge of growing a profitable business where there is a high volume of inventory she needs to purchase. One major roadblock for Carole arose when Amazon lost her order and she had to quickly replace her inventory. In this episode we also discuss some novel approaches to addressing inventory that cost literally nothing and will make those amazon lost shipment problems dissappear. In addition we talk about profit margins and how Carole can dictate at least a 4x markup (or more!) by using simple things like a name change or packaging her products with educational components too. Listen in…

 

Our Guest 

Carole Rains

Carole doesn’t fit the mold of the majority of entrepreneurs today, which is men in their 20s and 30s.  She didn’t start her own business until her mid-fifties, making her one of the few women in that demographic who become an entrepreneur as her mid-life crisis event.

Prior to that, Carole was a chef (she makes a killer crab cake) and before that she did pharmaceutical advertising and marketing.  It was her adult daughter’s foray into entrepreneurship that inspired Carole to take the leap.

Having become an expert at online shopping through plenty of practice, she decided ecommerce would be her next venture. In 2013 Carole launched RusticArtistry.com, an online shop featuring rustic chic furniture and décor handcrafted by American artisans.

Parlaying off the knowledge she had learned about ecommerce, Carole founded a second business in 2014, EmuJoy.com, after learning about the outstanding, but not well known, benefits of emu oil for dry skin, eczema, pain and more.

Carole likes to share her knowledge with others and has been a guest and contributor on podcasts and blogs, including Build My Online Store, My Wife Quit Her Job, Bootstrapping Ecommerce, Ecommerce Marketing Podcast, Ecommerce Pulse, Horses and Heels and Mountain Living Magazine.

Although she hasn’t yet won any trophies or plaques for her accomplishments, she did win something better: M&Ms with her face on them, at the Fuelies, the award ceremony at Ecommerce Fuel Live.

She can be reached at carole@emujoy.com.

Show Links

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/carole-rains-92735022

Facebook: facebook.com/rustic.artistry.shop

Facebook: facebook.com/emujoysocial

Find our more about our Certified Profit First Professional, Cyndi Thomason at http://www.bookskeep.com/

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Mike Michalowicz will be speaking at Scaling New Heights 2016 ( #SNH16 ) at the BEAUTIFUL Atlantis on Paradise Island in the Bahamas!

May 22-25, 3016

For more information on this conference and to register, click here!

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Corporate Partners

Nextiva – VOIP phone providers for small businesses.

Fundera – Single source online funding for entrepreneurs. Also offers an adviser program for CPAs, bookkeepers and business coaches.

TSheets – The #1 customer rated time tracking solution!

Fundbox –  the simplest and fastest way to fix your cash flow by advancing payments for your outstanding invoices.

Comments

1 thought on “Online Sales and Profit Margins with Carole Rains”

  1. Another fantastic podcast. We’re in much the same boat as Carole (ecommerce business selling a bespoke product) although our percentages are the other way round – we do 20% on Amazon and 80% on our shop. We also have horrendous problems with Amazon losing stock – usually near Xmas which is our busiest time so we split shipments. We also have duplicates of our products that are fulfilled by us so if the amazon fulfilled product goes out of stock (cos they lost it), we pay for ads to redirect customers to the backup product. Conversion rate is lower but at least we make some money.
    We implemented Profit First in October 2014 – best thing we ever did.
    Thanks for the advice – spot on as always.

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