Does your Website Make You Cry?

What’s Your Why Behind Your Website? 
Everything in life starts with a “why.”  

Several businesses we work with decided to get a website because they wanted to expand their business and make it shoppable 24/7 in all states and countries. They wanted to increase their revenues by adding another store but without the added cost of another lease & all the expenses of an additional brick-and-mortar.   

They purchased their websites but then didn’t follow through. Why? Well… that’s the question and the answer. Their Why wasn’t strong enough.  When we worked with each owner to rekindle their original Why behind getting their websites in the first place, they started to make it a priority again and several of these clients are now earning 6 and 7 figures just from their website sales.  

If you have a website and it’s not going well for you, chances are your why isn’t strong enough, and therefore it’s always going to be last on your list of things to do.

Your Why is your conviction for why you do something. If you have strong convictions, you have a strong sense of discipline to persevere and reach your goals. Without strong convictions, you tend to make more excuses for why things aren’t working out.  

Let’s talk about limiting beliefs for just a minute.  

How many of you buy into the belief that “J months” are slow months? Do you believe that it’s impossible to make J months strong income months? If everyone else believes J months are slow months, does that mean it must be true?

How many of you believe that “no one wants to work? I can’t find anyone good to hire?”  What if I told you that 97% of the population is currently employed? Would that change your mind about “no one wanting to work?”  

There are two things that no one can take from you: your breath and the words you tell yourself in your head. You are today, living out the thoughts and things you believed yesterday, last week, last month.  

We don’t realize how many negative or let’s call them “limiting” beliefs we let slip through our minds on a daily basis.  

Here is a challenge for you this week: Every single time you have a limiting belief stop… and think the opposite or at least, turn that limiting belief into a limitless belief.  

In other words…  

“I don’t have the money to hire a photographer,” becomes: “I’m going to create the money I need to hire a photographer.”  

“I can’t find anyone good to work for me,” becomes “I have a loyal, amazing dream team with a waitlist of people who want to work at our store.”  

“I am not tech savvy,” becomes, “I easily and effortlessly adapt and learn technology.”   

“My team hates doing LIVE selling on social media,” becomes, “My team is rocking the FB LIVES and I have hired amazing new team members who are crushing it on FB LIVE.”  

“My website sales suck,” becomes, “My website sales are growing weekly and monthly to highest-ever numbers.”  

“I hate my website,” becomes, “I love my website.”  

To help you re-ignite your website fire, let’s pour some gasoline on it to help turn it into a huge raging bonfire with these  

14 BIG REASONS WHY YOUR RESALE BUSINESS SHOULD HAVE A SHOPIFY WEBSITE:  

• Make sales while you’re asleep.  

• More people can find you.  As customers are searching the internet for items you have for sale on your website (this is why having your titles written out starting with a brand name first is important,) more people will find your items and shop with your online store. 

• Information & Education. People can get their questions answered about Consignment, Selling, and Shopping. You can teach people how to fill their closets with Resale items, how to create a beautiful living room filled with consignment store finds, and how to clean out their homes and closets and earn cash when they sell to you or consign with you.  

• Build your Email Database.  A website is a GREAT way to build your email database with a chance to win a gift card as your pop-up, but you’ve got to have a lot of products on your site or people won’t sign up. 

• Credibility. Today’s savvy shoppers look to websites as their first impression of your business. It’s their primary deciding factor (along with reviews) of whether or not to drive to your store or to do business with you. Shoppers like to see contact information and the names and faces behind the store name.  

• Lower operating costs with high revenue potential. It’s simply the lowest barrier to entry in the resale marketplace being that you own it, you can sell what you want on it and very low overhead compared to a brick and mortar. You can also use a lot of virtual staff to run your online store. You need someone local to take in the merchandise and confirm its condition and take pictures and also do the shipping, but other than that, all other tasks associated with your website business from listing items for sale to marketing, SEO and maintaining your online business can all be done remotely. 

• More marketing power. There’s only so much marketing that can be done without a website. Today’s marketing is about driving traffic to some online location where people can see your business, your products online and buy them or even decide to come to your store. Emails without a fully stocked website behind them only get so many click-throughs, add a buy now button and watch your revenues soar to new heights. Google ads and FB ads need to be able to drive traffic somewhere. If you don’t have a good website with lots of products, you’ll be spending money to drive people to your website but there isn’t much for them to see so its kind of a waste of ad dollars.

• Connect to multiple platforms. Using List Perfectly you can easily cross-list every item on your website to eBay, Mercari, Poshmark, and more. Imagine if your items were listed in more places than just in-store and on your website … they had eyes on them from multiple platforms? Those higher priced items, unique items that have a more selective buyer – you can get in front of more people when you have them on your website. 

• Sell more items. With more items of all price points on your website, you can increase your Avg. sale rate. When a customer finds at least one thing to put into their shopping cart from your website they get excited and think “What else can I find?” It’s a shopping psychology where a little thing in their brain clicks on when they find one thing and then a little dial turns up to want to find more. 

• Higher sell-thru rates. When you have your items online, you’re no longer dependent upon the traffic in your store to sell all the thousands of items. You can drive traffic to your website to see all of your items and shorten up your sell-thru rate. The more eyes on your items, the higher the sell-thru rate. 

• Move sale merch faster. By the time something hits the sale rack or hits its first or second markdown, it’s eaten into profits because it’s now selling at a reduced price and chances are your staff has touched it multiple times. Get more eyes on your sale merchandise by having it on your website as opposed to only being able to have clearance sales or end-of-season sales online only.

• Customer retention. If you currently only sell via a third-party platform, having your very own website allows you to build relationships with your own customers. Third-party platforms limit the amount of contact you can have with your customers and limit the relationship you can build with them. With your own website, you’re in control and you can collect emails and build a relationship for more repeat business.

• Showcase New Arrivals. Create that shopping frenzy and tap into the psychology of FOMO by driving traffic to your New Arrivals category on your website. Every item added to your website will automatically fall into New Arrivals so customers can see in real-time what’s new that’s been added. While items will also go into the category you place them into the New Arrivals keeps customers coming back repeatedly and habitually to see what’s new.  

• Your competition is online. Maybe not the store down the street or even in the city next to yours, but that’s all the more reason to be online. Be that store that pops up when customers search with the “near me” feature on Siri, Alexa, Yelp, Apple & Google. And when customers get into their cars and put use near me to find consignment stores or resale stores don’t you want to be the store that comes up? You need a great website, fully stocked with products so you can have great SEO, so you always come up in these searches.  

Look – thousands of people are in the resale game who do not have a brick-and-mortar store. They are making 6 and 7-figure incomes online only. If you’re not moving forward you’re really going backward because other people are passing you up and when someone passes you, you’re now behind them. See how that works?  

Even if you have a store that’s doing really really well… it’s so risky for the day when it’s not doing well because then you have to wait until your revenue slows down to do something about it. The time to build your online game is when your store sales are strong because then you’re growing strength in your entire business. The time to build online strength isn’t when something goes wrong… it’s when everything is going right… capitalize on that strength. When something goes wrong, it’s sometimes too late to start something new, or maybe it’s not too late but it’s so much of a struggle.  

If you build another part of your business when your business is strong and healthy then you have the money and resources to put into the growth and you become a much stronger overall brand and business. By the way – if you plan on selling your business as your exit strategy, you can get a lot more money if you have a big email database and a good website business as well as just your store sales. 

I hope you rekindled your conviction for building your website business. And if you’re still finding excuses instead of reasons … keep examining your why for your online game.  

Our beliefs really dictate our future. We can’t predict the unpredictable, but we can build our own strength and foresee our success. Every single choice we make is either a choice toward our goals or away from them. Every belief you have in your head is either a limitless belief or a limiting belief. And by the way, while we’re talking about websites today, this self-talk exercise is applicable to all areas of your life. So practice positive self-talk this week and only think and say limitless beliefs.  

DM me how you changed your life this week. I’d love to know what changes you made this week because you changed your thinking and the words you tell yourself.  

Interested to watch the brief summary? Click here.

For the complete training video, tap here. Be sure to join the Consignment Marketing FB Group to have access!