Your Ecommerce Coffee Break Newsletter ⭐

Hey, Claus here,

Happy Thursday to the to 6,404 Shopify Merchants, DTC Marketers & Founders reading this newsletter.

And now grab a Coffee (or Tea) and enjoy your Ecommerce Coffee Break. 👇

🎙️ ECOMMERCE COFFEE BREAK PODCAST

This week's podcast was packed with content, so here's a quick recap!

On Monday, Larry Kim, CEO of Customers.AI, discussed why first-party data is the new must-have for DTC marketers. 🎧 Full episode at [Open Episode Page] [Listen on Apple Podcasts] [Listen on Spotify]

On Wednesday's archived episode, Bostjan Belingar, CEO of Hustler Marketing at hustlermarketing.com, shared how to set up a creator funnel and produce insane amounts of UGC ads for cheap. 🎧 Full episode at [Open Episode Page] [Listen on Apple Podcasts] [Listen on Spotify]

Subscribe now and listen later:

300+ episodes of free content. Listen in your favorite podcast app or directly in your browser: https://ecommercecoffeebreak.com

❤️ If you like the show leave a review. I read every single one of them.

📰 SHOPIFY & ECOMMERCE NEWS (Handpicked Finds of the Week)

• Sell and retain subscriptions with ease. Juo lets you create any subscription experience you imagine and retain customers with delightful incentives. [Link]*
  

• Shopify Vs. Amazon (2024 Comparison) [Link]

• 4 in 10 Ecommerce Marketers Use AI for Customer Service [Link]

• Shopify Acquires Checkout Blocks for Custom Checkout Solutions [Link]

• How to use AI to market your small business [Link]

• Facebook Marketplace Surpasses Amazon in Users [Link]

• Shopify drops the Shopify Plus brand name [Link]

• One third of shoppers abandon ecommerce purchases [Link]

• Instagram is testing unskippable ads [Link]

• EBay to drop American Express over fees [Link]

PREMIUM MEMBER EXCLUSIVE NEWS

• Google has released 10 free courses to master AI.

• 5 most common reasons that Fashion brands are unable to scale their Meta ads

• Top 25 Best Selling Products on Amazon in June 2024

• Amazon Sellers Turning to Google Ads to Reach Shoppers

• Google Performance Max For Marketplaces: Advertise Without A Website

🔐 Upgrade to a Premium Membership to unlock daily news alerts. (Already a Premium Member? Login Here.)

📊 STATS OF THE WEEK

• E-Commerce To Hit $6.8 Trillion By 2028

• Global ad spend is expected to grow 5% in 2024, up 4.6% from a previous forecast, for a total of $754.4 billion worldwide.

• U.S. consumers, just 4% of the global population, account for nearly 25% of the $2.3 trillion global media spend. In 2023, they spent $1,552 per capita vs. $387 globally.

• Mobile media led at $544.48 billion while wireless data led at $283.75 billion.

• One-seventh of the $5 trillion worth of retail goods sold in the United States in 2023 were returned, according to the National Retail Federation.

🆘 OVERWHELMED BY ECOMMERCE? LET'S SIMPLIFY IT TOGETHER

How's your online business going lately? Having trouble getting started? Feeling overwhelmed or overworked? Finding it hard to stand out from competitors?

These days, the internet is flooded with businesses. It's easy to get lost in the crowd. You might be working hard without good results.

If this sounds like you, I have something that can help. It's called the "Founder's Sidekick Program".

The Founder's Sidekick Program provides private business support. It assists aspiring entrepreneurs to start and grow an online business.

Sound like something you could use a little (or a lot!) of help with? Check it out here.

🚨 LIKE FARMS EXPOSED: THE DARK SIDE OF #INFLUENCE

Social media influencers are paid a lot of money by brands to promote products. But some influencers form "cartels" where they artificially boost each other's engagement numbers by liking and commenting on each other's posts. This makes their accounts look more popular so brands pay them more.

Today's article examines if these influencer cartels are good or bad. It found "general" cartels where any influencers join are usually bad - they generate fake engagement from irrelevant audiences that don't care about the product. But "topic" cartels focused on specific interests can be good by boosting real engagement from the target audience.

The researchers used machine learning to analyze the actual posts and measure how relevant the cartel engagement was to each post's topic. General cartels provided engagement as irrelevant as random people. But topic cartels generated pretty relevant engagement.

So while general influencer cartels reduce value for advertisers, topic-focused cartels expand reach to the right audiences which could increase sales. The article recommends regulating general cartels, avoiding pay-per-engagement models that encourage faking it, and instead compensating influencers based on the real value they provide to brands.

Want to learn more about how influencer cartels game social media algorithms? Read the full article online at here. [Link to article]

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