Building Your First E-Commerce Website with Blockbeta

MADE Apparel Services Podcast

Host Heather Zager welcomes Robbin Block, the Creative Marketing Strategist at Blockbeta Marketing, to the show to explain the ins and outs of building an e-commerce website. Robbin has an MBA from Boston University and a BA in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany, and through her more than 30 years in the industry, she knows exactly what is needed to start marketing and selling your product effectively.

Heather asks Robbin some of the basic questions she gets asked by her clients so Robbin can weigh in from an experienced professional point of view. The first question everyone asks is which website platform is best for selling products. Robbin answers that question with examples and information on options for differing experience levels. There’s a solution for every question.

Heather and Robbin dig into the topics everyone who sells online needs to know. The difference between a full website and a squeeze page, what a landing page is and why it’s important, the advantages and disadvantages with platforms like Etsy and Amazon, and all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and keywords. Robbin Block offers what is essentially a crash course in E-Commerce 101 in this interview. It’s a vital discussion for everyone who wants an online sales platform and needs marketing advice to drive those sales.

About Robbin Block:

Robbin Block is the Creative Marketing Strategist at Blockbeta Marketing. She has an MBA from Boston University and a BA in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany, which enables her to deliver marketing solutions focused on an entire business, not just a particular marketing tactic.

During her more than 30 years in the trade, she’s developed a unique perspective, having worked with almost every niche business imaginable, from cannabis to mobile tech, and creative makers and designers. This helps her get right to the point when guiding clients through the increasingly complicated online marketing space, from developing high-converting websites through concepting media strategies

An experienced speaker, she’s also the author of “Social Persuasion: Making Sense of Social Media for Small Business” and various marketing ebooks. A background in economics and an MBA are the foundation for her big-picture approach that gets her clients results.

Robbin excels at explaining marketing in a way that makes total sense, so business owners can make better decisions about how to spend their marketing resources.

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Contact Heather Zager | MADE Apparel Services:

• Website: MADEApparelServices.com
• Facebook: MADEApparelServices
• Instagram: MADEApparelServices
• Linkedin: MADEApparelServices
  
  

Contact Robbin Block |Blockbeta Marketing:

• Website: Blockbeta.com
• “Social Persuasion” by Robbin Block
• LinkedIn
• Facebook

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Transcript

Heather Zager: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to today's podcast. My name is Heather Zager. I am the host of this podcast series and founder of Made Apparel Services. In today's episode, we're going to be talking with a marketing and website expert. She has worked a lot with new designers selling product, so she has a lot of good answers for some common questions about building your first website and how to drive traffic to it, how to engage your social media and establish a strategy around that. Also, she'll talk a little bit about some of that background stuff, like SEO and keywords and analytics and how to read those. So stay tuned. We hope you enjoy the show and let's get started.

Heather Zager: [00:00:41] Welcome everybody. We are here with Robbin Block with Blockbeta Marketing. And she's going to talk to us a little bit today about websites for emerging designers who are just launching new product and trying to get the word out there and gain a following. And we have a few questions lined up for her. But first, Robbin, welcome and tell us a little bit about what it is that you do.

Robbin Block: [00:01:03] Well, I've been in marketing for quite a long time and I focus on providing creative marketing strategy. Everything from helping companies figure out what their strategy should be overall from a business perspective, then working with them to develop websites that are high converting and then amplifying their information out to the public so they can drive more business and interest in what they're doing.

Heather Zager: [00:01:30] Okay, perfect. Well rounded. So the first question I have for you is a very common one that I get from my clients all the time, and they ask which website platform is best for selling my product.

Robbin Block: [00:01:42] And everybody asks that. I don't care if you're selling product or driving leads, but if you really want to do e-commerce, which means selling a product directly from your website, a lot of it will depend on how many products you actually have. So if you're launching just one hoodie or a line of hoodies or a line of clothing, for example, the line, you probably want to use something like Shopify. There's a bit of a learning curve, but you could do some of it yourself. You could get help building it. It's a very robust, well-used, trusted platform for hosting your products, building pages at the front end so you can build up your business as well as the products themselves, takes care of all the transactions, the taxes and everything else. So Shopify, if you have several products to sell, I think it's a great way to go. There's a fairly low per month entry fee for the hosting and the building. I mean, you build it yourself, but it's got a builder tool, right?

Heather Zager: [00:02:43] Okay.

Robbin Block: [00:02:44] If you only have one product, there are simpler ways to go.

Heather Zager: [00:02:48] Okay.

Robbin Block: [00:02:48] Where you might want to use something like Squarespace which is more like brochure-ware. And then you can use their e-commerce or use another very simple plugin to deal with the e-commerce piece.

Heather Zager: [00:03:01] Okay, perfect. And I actually know a manufacturer that I work with that integrates with Shopify, and you have to have Shopify to use their actual services if you want them to handle that part of your production factory. Yeah. So once something is developed and they've sewn it and they're ready to ship it for you, they're going to take all your orders through Shopify. So it seems like it's not an uncommon platform for manufacturers also.

Robbin Block: [00:03:30] Yeah, they have a much more robust version of Shopify for bigger companies, too. It's really expensive though.

Heather Zager: [00:03:38] Right. Okay. But that's good to know. An...