This post was written by Jim from Moogento.com  - they make extensions designed to help in the real world of eCommerce, connecting offline and online brand identities.

It’s too easy to focus on the direct profit per product and follow a simple ‘let’s increase sales’ mantra on the path to increased revenue. But if you’re already generating some impressive sales figures - this may be not as effective, as focusing on the customers you already have (or soon will have).

Let’s take a look at the customer acquisition cycle for your product.

  People find out about your company. Typically as a result of you paying for marketing or advertising.

  They go to your website and see if they can find the thing they were looking for. By this time you’ve paid for web design and web development. And you will likely pay for those services again.

  They add a product to the cart and pay with Stripe/PayPal/Credit Card. You pay the commission. For every transaction, forever.  

  The customer checks out and waits to see what happens next. Savvy online shoppers know that it’s probably a hit or a miss, if they get any communication from the website after paying. If they decide that the communication has been spotty/ irregular, they may be worried and send an email. In this case you pay for the time and effort of the people, who are responsible for your communications and respond to those emails.

  You ship the item, paying for postage, packing, and staff to pack it up and deal with the shipping companies.

  The customer gets the item.

The last step in this list is the only one that hasn’t cost you any money at this point.

Let’s now take a closer look at these costs, in this case - marketing. If an item is worth $100 dollars to make, it’s not uncommon to markup the retail price to up to 150% of its original value to introduce a possible profit to the price and cover any possible marketing costs.

We can then leverage the price, as a marketing tool, by lowering it. This can go all the way down to the point of zero profitability. And even in this case - we’ve increased revenue and gained a new customer, without any actual profit. This is great, if you’re planning to sell the company at some point. Bigger numbers = bigger final stake.

But what if we’re talking about real profitability?

Let’s say we’ve spent $40 on marketing the same $100 product, which costs $150 for the buyer. After all of the expenses, our final profit equals to $10. The new acquired customer comes as a cherry on top. But this ‘cherry’ is actually pretty crucial - if we get this customer to come back and buy from us again, the next sale won’t have any (or relatively minimal) marketing/advertising costs associated with it.

So if they come back and buy the same product again, our profit, instead of being $10, is now $50 (add those $40 that we spent on marketing the first time). Yes, we’ve increased profit to 500%! We would have made the same profit by going through the hustle of finding 5 first time buyers.

No need to spend time persuading this customer to buy our product or service - they already know. They’re sold. This is not only a much more profitable sale, but it’s a much easier sale - we’ve basically created time that we can spend expanding the business... or down the beach!

Anything else that we’re getting here? We are now making more sales, so our payment processing fees should go down - we’re making more profit off of more sales. It’s a win-win. With our extra income, we now have the extra time to spend increasing the conversion rates on the site, potentially increasing the sales even further.

It all comes down to making the repeat sale. So let’s check out one way of increasing them.

Image source 

Have you seen or bought an Apple product? They don’t just roll around at the bottom of a crappy box with a torn-off bit of paper describing what’s inside. They have a beautifully-designed package, reinforcing the entire reason you’ve bought this product - it’s well-made, well-designed, in the ‘Apple font’, the ‘Apple colors’, and even before you turn the thing on - you’re excited. You may even film it (check out the unboxing Youtube hits).

They reinforced their brand, the customer is not going to jump online and leave a bad review if there is something wrong - they believe in this company and believe that they don’t just have the ‘shame publicly’ option to get a response. They believe that if even packaging is so important for the company, then its reputable and will try to deal with any issues.

None of our businesses represent Apple, but we can all benefit from this kind of brand reinforcement. We all know the impact of a bad review on Amazon or eBay. We can cut the chance of that happening, by just packaging a product well, including a nicely printed packing sheet. It shows that we care, we’re not flogging something out the door and as soon as it’s gone, cackling at the profit we’ve made. We genuinely care about this customer and what they’ve bought.

All of this is shown by nice packaging with a well-designed packing sheet. How can we make this packing sheet really help us? How about printing an image of the review form, specific to the channel that this has been sold through, with a note showing that “a 5 star review is great and if you are thinking of leaving us with a lower rating - please get in touch, as we want to make our products better” or something like that.

We’ve all had a 3-star review from someone who thought that was a good review -  a short visual reminder (the 5 star note, mentioned above) can both help avoid those and actively encourage people with actual issues to get in touch and sort out their problem - you now have a bonus chance to stop negative reviews before they happen. You’re again increasing sales, and reducing the time you need to devote to things *which are not improving your business*.

Before you know what’s happening, you’re on a rollercoaster of increased sales and increased profits!

How can you send a packing sheet like this? At Moogento.com we make an easily-installed extension called pickPack, which allows you to do all this. You can brand it with your business identity, and include custom messages for each channel that you’re selling through. It takes minutes to install, a short time to configure and you’re all set! You can also print these out with shipping addresses on them, so if you’re using integrated labels, you win again. More time saved.

There you have it - you can easily improve profitability and sales with your printer!

What kind of other neat tricks can you offer when it comes to cheap and simple ways of increasing your sales and revenue? Share them in comments below!