You could have made a fortune in online furniture. If you invested $10,000 in the online furniture company Overstock.com at the beginning of COVID - right before 40 million people lost their jobs and a global pandemic shut down the world in March - it would have been $100,000 just 3 months later. Not only has everything ecomm been crushing it, the massive shift in the selling environment has helped many home goods brands turn online $GMV into a very, very sizable part of their biz.

Overstock isn’t the only one having a good time. If you invested the same $10K in these companies pre-COVID, here’s what it would be worth right now: Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), $16.3K and Shopify (NYSE: SHOP), $28.2K.

The ticker: Very relevant reads 🔥🔥🔥

• Great 14min clip on the rise of Wayfair (CNBC)
• Work from home is dead, long live work from anywhere (TechCrunch)
• Meet our new CTO, Ed Robinson (Bear Blog)
• We can learn a thing from the humble & modest Dutch PM (NY Times)

Wayfair.com is also having a lot of fun lately. Yes, they spend $1B on ads each year and they’re still on route to profitability, but the growth here speaks volumes. Big volumes.

Wayfair US sales:
Q1 2019 - $1.94B
Q1 2020 - $2.33B (+19.8%)

This is massive! And no signs of slowing.

Creating a flywheel is easy, if you pull the right levers. It all starts with incredible, super-duper, crazy optimized product data. For example, the avg Wayfair product listing requires 300+ data points (this is similar for other top channels). Most SMBs only have ~30 data points in their own internal systems, if they’re lucky. Here is why good data and ecomm focused content matters:

1. Deploying good data = really great & compelling product listings
2. Great listings will help you show up in searches
3. Once you’re found, eyeballs looking at your listings will digest super-duper data & content
4. Finally, this helps transact your listings, leading to 💰

To see what this looks like in practice check out this live listing we created.

*FYI, there’s a lot more to the flywheel than simply setting and forgetting really good listings. There’s a bunch of other key things you ought to be doing, like inventory via API, review capture, unpaid/paid ads, etc.

The online retail & marketplace landscape is complicated. So we built a simple Google Sheet to help companies understand how each platform works. Check it out. It’s totally free.

5 bad reviews are better than none at all. The complex algorithms that help determine how a product trends on Wayfair, Overstock, Amazon, and others takes reviews into account. SKUs with 5 reviews see a 30%+ increase in conversion when compared to items with 0 reviews.

In fact, a handful of subpar reviews is more useful than none at all. If you’re not employing review capture programs to drive $GMV to new listings or under performing products, you need to chat with me right now about doing this.

Don't forget to subscribe to our recliner email club to stay up to date with all the things you need to know, every month. Also, we choose a lucky subscriber every month and give them an Amazon gift card 💰

Happy 4th and Canada Day everyone!

Sam Vlessing
Founder & CEO | CommerceBear

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