Kaleb Ufton With eCommerce Wizards

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Caleb with E-commerce Wizards. Welcome, Caleb.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:00:26] Hi. Thanks for having.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:27] Me. I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about E-commerce wizards. How are you serving folks?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:00:34] Yeah, so Mark is my business partner. Uh, we met through a what you could call a chance encounter, although I don’t really believe in that. And we’ve combined our skill sets to sort of form this beautiful mixing pot, if you will, where we’re serving Shopify store owners, and we’re helping them break through their barriers, achieve revenue that they, in some cases, have previously achieved, but they didn’t really understand how. And then it disappeared or, uh, things happened in the business and it’s dropped back significantly and we’re helping them get back there. Or for some of our members, they have never achieved, uh, their revenue targets. And we help them break through those plateaus.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:17] So what is kind of the the mindset of a new person to e-commerce or Shopify? Do they think that if you build it, they will come and that’s all you have to do is kind of build out an e-commerce store and then all of a sudden business comes your way. Is that how they think?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:01:34] I mean, it depends who they listen to. There definitely is, uh, mentality out there that if you build it, they will come. Uh, but traffic’s traffic’s an important part of the puzzle, and a lot of people don’t understand how to get traffic or where to get quality traffic, or how to turn low quality traffic into high quality traffic. So there’s quite a few different components to it. We tend to deal primarily with businesses that have been established for maybe 2 to 3 years. They have a proven product at this point. They’ve already gone through some of those initial hurdles, but we do get a lot of people who are just starting out as well, sort of come through our front end and they have, you know, fairly similar questions. How do I get started? How do I find traffic, what product should I use? And a lot of times it can be actually quite challenging to answer that because if you’re starting any business, the question I tend to ask is is why? Why are you starting it? Um, why do you care about it? Why do you care about the solution? Why do you care about providing this for other people as a solution? And then another really important question to ask is, are you solving a problem that’s big enough for people to pay for it? And unfortunately, sometimes the answer to that is no.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:52] Now, um, like, what’s your typical customer? Are they selling like an item or are they selling a service like something invisible, or are they selling something that’s, you know, like one of my best friends sells tea online?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:03:07] Yeah, yeah. So I mean, tea is a great example. Um, at this point, all of our members are doing physical products. I don’t believe any of them are dropshipping, per se. They all have a product that they’ve sourced or they create, uh, you know, source from a manufacturer locally. We have a, uh, somewhat well known, uh, woman who runs a clothing store who creates her own designs, for example, and she gets a manufacturer to create them for her. But the manufacturer also creates other designs which she stocks and sells online.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:44] So let me help my friend out here. Let’s use him as an example. He’s selling tea, uh, in the manner you described. You know, he came up with a formula, got somebody to make it for him. So he’s got these packets of tea that he’s selling. He’s right now primarily using Amazon. Uh, but he aspires to one day do Shopify. So what are some of the things, some actionable things he could be doing right now to sell more tea?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:04:12] Yeah. So that’s actually a really common example. We’ve had quite a few people come through who have Amazon and they want to move. Uh, well, I wouldn’t say they want to move away, but they want to diversify. Um, and the main reason for that is to do with owning your customer database and wanting some independence. So one of the Amazon does let you do. An element or a few elements of testing you can through their platform. You can test out different things, and testing is probably one of the biggest ways to increase your revenue over time is just consistent testing, documenting what you’re doing, uh, researching who your customers actually are. Uh, and we’ll tell people who don’t have Amazon stores go look at similar products on Amazon, read the reviews. Because reviews are so useful. They’ll tell you what people are looking for. They’ll tell you their pain points. They’ll tell you what they like. What they wish the product had is it’s a gold mine of information. So for your friend, I would say take the time while you’re getting set up on Shopify and you’re learning how to get traffic to your Shopify, getting email sequences in place, all that kind of stuff take take time as well to really get to know your customer. Because Amazon has the customers, they bring them to you. When you leave any marketplace, you got to find the customer, which means you got to be able to speak their language. You got to know their pain points, their dreams, their hopes, uh, all that kind of stuff so that you can actually communicate to them in a way that is emotionally engaging and makes them want to click your link, go to your site, and hopefully your site convinces them to trust you enough to purchase.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:04] So what are some of the strategies to get more traffic going to your site?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:06:11] We tend to focus primarily on paid ads through Meta or Google, simply because those are platforms Mark and myself have mastered to some degree. I won’t say that we’re the world’s best in it, but Mark’s run over 80 million in ad spend in Google ads and meta, and I’ve managed millions in ad spend myself and done some pretty interesting things with it. So we’ve got enough experience and enough industries to be able to help people with those platforms. Both of us have done SEO and ranked on the front page of Google for SEO as well. So you can either go pay for traffic with money, or you can generate traffic with time, which is the organic method. And if you happen to have an existing email list, then that’s traffic you already own. So you can use that to generate sales as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:08] So is that kind of at the heart of a strategy if you’re in e-commerce that you want to at some point own a list, whether it’s a texting list or an email list, that you can reach out to these people on your own schedule, rather than pay to reach people and hope they get their.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:07:28] I would say yes, absolutely. I mean, any business that whether you’re in e-commerce or not, if you let’s say you have an email database of 50,000 people and maybe say 10,000 people have opted into SMS, the cost for you to reach those people compared the cost for you to find those people online through paid media. It just doesn’t compare for 50,000 people. You might be paying something like, let’s say on the high end, $1,000 a month to to maintain that email database. You can send an email out to them every few days. You can send an SMS out to them for cents, uh, if you try. And and these are people, ideally, who have already bought from you or are thinking about buying from you. So a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done. If you’ve got a special a sale, a cross promotion, a new product line, whatever it is, you can go to them for pennies. Uh, but if you try and do that any other way, there’s a massive time component or you’re going to pay for it, but you’ve already paid to get these people on your list.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:42] So now, um, if you were just starting out or you’re, you have a, you know, an emerging brand that’s starting to get traction, um, do you so you just what are the levers? You’re kind of, um, kind of pulling in order to keep this growth going? Is it just just more paid ads, like you just keep, you know, as long as the math is going your way, you just keep funneling money into the paid ads. Like, are you, uh, experimenting in other platforms? Like, how are you, um, growing a brand?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:09:16] Yeah. Great question. Uh, we’re about to launch. Uh, Mark and I are about to launch our own e-commerce store. Mark’s founded a few seven and eight figure ones, and I’ve scaled a couple to seven figures as well. So we’re launching one together as part of sort of like a follow along. And we’re taking exactly what we teach and implementing it in there to show everyone like, this is how you do it. And we look at three levers. We look at cost for acquisition, which could be, yes, more paid ads. Absolutely. Uh, it could be SEO, it could be doing joint ventures as well. Uh, we also look the other two levers that we look at are what’s your average order value? And then the third one is your lifetime value. If those are the three metrics, if you will, that you look at, generally speaking, you’ve got control over each of those. And the more you test around how you can improve those. So for CPA cost per acquisition, you want that one to go down for you or for the other two, you want them to go up. So the the higher the lifetime value, first of all, the more you can spend to acquire a customer, which means you can be more competitive in your marketing, you can be more aggressive in your marketing, and the higher the average order value that has a flow on effect for the lifetime value. But it also helps recoup cash flow in the short tum. So they interplay. But those are really the only three that. Determined growth at the end of the day, in our opinion.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:56] Now, when you’re coaching or consulting with people, how do you help them with the pricing? Like pricing to me, uh. It’s a tricky subject and a lot of people they want to go, in my opinion, too low, too quickly. Um, how do you kind of, um, or is it just strictly experimentation that you’re just look, we’re going to put a number out there and we’re going to see what we get, and then we’re going to try to beat that number. And then and where we land is where we land.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:11:28] Pricing is an interesting one. Uh, we tend to try and let the market decide that. Um, the lady I mentioned earlier that has the clothing. When she came on board, one of the first things I said to her was, you need to up your pricing. And she said, I haven’t haven’t changed my pricing, uh, in 3 or 4 years. And I said, great. Now’s a good time to add at least another 20%. And the only reason I was so aggressive in doing that was she’s selling. Clothing to a market that is willing to pay a lot more than what she was charging, and her margins were so slim it was choking her business. I still think she could charge a lot more than what she currently does, but there really isn’t any need to and it acts as a competitive advantage. She might make more margin and that’s great, but we’ve also got her from doing $17,000 a month in struggling. So she’s she’s already done something like 36 grand this month. So price is important. But it kind of comes down to how well you know, the audience and how much you’re willing to.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:12:37] When you test price, you absolutely run the risk of alienating customers. Uh, and so you’ve got to test it in a sensible way. You’ve got to approach it in a very logical sort of scientific manner where you’re going to say, okay, this audience, for example, is going to see this set of pricing, and this other audience is going to see this other set and or you split test it between them, which can be quite tricky to do on Shopify. So generally, it’s not something we suggest people test a whole heap. But if we see in the market, oh, you’re severely underpriced or the value. Maybe the value proposition is really good, but the price doesn’t match it right? Gucci doesn’t try and justify their pricing. Louis Vuitton doesn’t try and justify their pricing. They let their branding dictate. No, this is premium and you’re going to pay through the nose for it. But if you go to Walmart and you see a t shirt that’s like $15 next to one, that’s $2, well, yeah, it’s not the same.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:40] Right? But that’s part of your, um, the brand that you’re trying to build, right? Like, like you said, you can buy a t shirt for a dollar, you can buy a t shirt for $100. I mean, they’re just t shirts, you know, it’s just, you know, one, one label is going to be different than the other. And then the perceived value is going to be different in the eyes of that consumer. But when it comes to pricing, is it do you recommend having kind of a range of, of different things that cost different prices so that you can hit that person, maybe at a lower price, but also have some premium thing in there just to test the limits of what, um, you know, the consumer is willing to spend.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:14:22] Let’s use your, uh, your friend with the tea shop as an example. So, um, I’ve worked with the tea brand before, and one of the things I said was, okay, like, well, first of all, what’s your average order value? And the average order value was something like $28. Okay, that’s fairly low. Uh, what’s about 1.2 products for this guy? It was about 1.2 products per order on average. And his cost to get a sale was, say, $12. So he’s almost paying half just to get the sale. And then you have your cost of goods and all that kind of stuff. So then I was like, okay, what if we. What if we put a sample pack together for $50 or $49 for him? It’s still within that impulse purchase range, but it’s basically double. And so we tested that out and it went quite well. Okay, cool. Now what if we did say a monthly box or a seasonal box. And we started playing with how we position the product to increase the perceived value to match a higher price. And one of the ways I did this, um, many years ago, I decided to.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:15:33] Uh, this was a company that I was directly sort of like running and helping with manufacturing with. I decided to just put a product up that cost $999. The average product on the site was maybe $150. I decided to put it up, run like $5 a day with ads to it, and we got a sale within like three days. And that immediately validated my my theory that people, a certain set of people were willing to to spend a lot more, um, with Renee, the clothing lady, because she makes her own designs. She’s actually won some awards, uh, for wearable art. And I’m pressing her to get some updated photography for those, because I think there’s room for her to have a boutique side that’s, you know, more like couture, where people are paying 3 or $4000 for, for an item of clothing or more. But that’s not the same market that’s going to be spending $60 on a dress that she sells. So I think it’s something that you need to test. And the way you test it is by looking at the value for the audience.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:46] Right, but understanding also that they’re right, but understanding also that within that universe of an audience, there’s going to be likely, I would think, somebody that can afford to spend an insane amount of money for something way more than you think generally.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:17:06] Yeah, generally there is. Absolutely. I mean, it it depends who you’re targeting. You know, if you’re if you’re going after people who barely have disposable income, then, you know, maybe not, but with some, some quick tweaks, you could probably target an audience that have, you know, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars of disposable income a month, at which point, yeah, you can start charging $500 for a product and not bat an eyelid, and people will buy it because the value is there.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:37] Right. Or or they want to be the guy that bought the thing. Like, I mean, I’ve interviewed a bunch of the other side of it. Yeah, I’ve interviewed a bunch of people over the years, local restaurateurs or people who had even carts like this one guy was selling, um, popsicles in a cart. And I’m like, you should have $100 popsicle. Like, I don’t care if anybody buys it. You’re going to be known as the guy that has $100 popsicle. Like, that’s like the.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:18:03] Thousand dollar haircut.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:04] Right? Like somebody’s going to buy that. And as a goof to be the guy, hey, look, I’m a big spender. I bought this like, somebody out there is going to do it. Um, and even if they don’t, it’s going to improve your brand. Like you’re going to be seen differently. Your positioning in the mind of a people will be different.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:18:26] It changes the perception. Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:29] So now when you’re working with, uh, clients, like how much are you getting into? Are you getting into kind of this psychology and you’re getting into kind of brand positioning, or is it more just like, this is the nuts and bolts on how to get, uh, you know, a product online and draw traffic to it.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:18:48] I personally quite enjoy getting into the psychology and the sort of, you could call it spiritual or esoteric side of things, where it’s a lot more touchy feely. We tend not to. We do deal with tactics a lot, you know, nuts and bolts. But most of the time, if we notice that we’re dealing with tactics on a regular basis with a particular, um, client or member or however you want to phrase who we’re working with, it’s a symptom of a higher order problem, if you will. If there’s a particular tactic that works and it stopped working, oftentimes it’s not the tactic. There’s something else behind it that it has changed. And maybe you weren’t aware of it or it’s not obvious. And that’s where the experience helps. That’s where we’ve been able to step back and go, okay, well, you know, how well do we actually know our audience? Do we have customer avatars? Do we know what really drives them? Do we know if this person is a mom of a child versus a mom of four children? Because there is a fundamental difference. Having three kids myself, one child is an experienced two children is a different experience. Three is a completely different experience. Um, I can’t imagine what five is like. So the more you know about your your customers and the more you understand them, I think it’s a massive advantage in business. So I tend to encourage everyone, uh, not not just the people who work with us to really spend the time because a lot of businesses don’t. If you spend the time to get to know your customers really well, it’s such a competitive advantage.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:35] And then so what is an engagement with your company look like? Is this kind of a group experience or are you working one on one with the people that are work that, um, come to you?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:20:47] Yeah, we have front end products. So, um, Mark and I put together, uh, 70 something experiments that over the however many thousands of experiments I’ve run, these are sort of the top ones that tend to increase conversion rates. So you can kind of if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can kind of blindly test those. And if you do nothing else, you’ll see a significant increase over time just by following a test measure process with that. That’s sort of like the easiest way for people to get started. And then we have some other products, but the main thing we do is as a mastermind, and we work with an intimate group of people who are looking to become seven eight figure e-commerce store owners. And inside that, we do have a boutique side where we sort of do the done for you. Side of things, but we’re talking about maybe three clients at a time. Like it’s really exclusive because Mark and I started this to have fun and we’re both run agencies. We don’t want to keep doing the agency thing. If it’s something we’re interested in and we enjoy it, then we’ll take it on. But it really we enjoy helping on the ground, you know, boots in the trenches, ecom store owners that are just sick of struggling or sick of being on a plateau and they actually want to hit revenue, that’s going to be life changing.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:11] Now. So how much is it to be part of this cohort?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:22:17] Depends on how you want to go about it. If you want to join the membership outright, you’re looking for a year. It’s ten grand. Um, otherwise we have a sort of like monthly option, which is considerably less. And that’s what most people take ends up being about 1300 a month. It pays for itself more often than not within the first month. Um, you know, depending on where you’re at in business, if you’re doing 50 K a month, we had we actually had a Pakistani guy join us who was doing 50 to 70 grand a month, and then within 60 days he was doing 140. Um, on one call, we were we’ve done goal setting and everything, and he’d set his goal to 200. And then three weeks later, I think it was we checked in with him and I asked him, what what was your goal? And he said, oh, 250. And I called him out because I knew he had said 200 and said, yep, I’ve already hit that. So the.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:18] Goal moved.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:23:19] We kind of we yeah, we we try and, um. Focus on how do we actually move the needle for you and make it so that it’s a no brainer for you to either stay with us or go to the next level? That’s our business model. So. Transparent. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:37] So but you’re looking for people who are already making ten, 20 grand a month right now so that their thing is kind of proven and they just need it, you know, maybe some escape velocity to get to the next level.

Kaleb Ufton: [00:23:50] Yeah, there’s different plateaus that you run into. So typically reaching 10-K is its own challenge. Um, that’s where you’ll see a lot of people that get stuck with dropshipping or they’ll, they’ll have an idea and they’ll struggle to get to about 10-K. The 10 to 30 K mark is sort of this, this no man’s land where you’re, you’re having to wear 70 different hats and do 17 things at once, and you don’t quite have the revenue to outsource, but you desperately need to outsource some things. And it’s this really sort of difficult place. We certainly can help those people. It’s just it’s going to be a lot more uncomfortable for them. Once you reach that sort of 20 K mark, you’ve kind of got the capital to be able to invest in systems and people and to you’re not necessarily in survival the whole time. You’ve got the capacity to be a bit more creative and start having fun again. And then. From, from there to about 70 grand a month. It’s it’s really just about you as a business owner working out. How do I not be the bottleneck? And then from 70 onwards, it’s it’s largely around leverage and. Offloading whatever you can in the most optimized way possible so that you’re in your genius zone, and everyone else in the business is in their genius zone, and things are working efficiently. But there’s always some problem that if you unlock it, it’s going to lead to two, three, 400% growth in the business. There’s always something.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:28] So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or your team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to get Ahold of you?

Kaleb Ufton: [00:25:36] Yeah. E-commerce Wizards Club club is the main site. You can find me on either LinkedIn or Facebook. Uh, Caleb with a k Hufton you a uniform? Foxtrot. Tango. Oscar. November ufton. Uh, and we just chat. We just chat with people. That’s the easiest thing to do is just have a quick conversation, figure out where you’re at. Um, we do challenges as well. So we do like a seven day revenue challenge. We run that, um, last month and a lot of people will hear that and they’ll go, there’s no way you can do that. Yeah, sure. Um, one of the people who haven’t worked with us before joined the free challenge. Had a 43% increase in revenue during the, um, as a result of the challenge. And then another woman who is in the mastermind, uh, one of she set up another experiment during the challenge just to take part and be part of the community. And she had a 212% increase. So it’s not impossible. It’s just a different way of thinking. It’s a different way of approaching it. And I would encourage anyone that’s interested, you know, reach out to myself or go to the website and drop a drop us a message and honestly join a challenge, get get the experience of what it’s like and then make an informed decision.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:02] Good stuff, man. Well, thank you so much for sharing your, uh, knowledge here today. We really appreciate that. And, uh, one more time, the website, ecommerce, Wizards Dot club. Uh, Caleb Upton, thank you so much. Thank you. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.