Converting clicks into customers: founders discuss effective e-commerce | business.connected

Описание: This is business.connected, the show for small business founders from Vodafone, The Nation's Network.

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EPISODE FOUR

How do you sell your products online without burning cash or your sanity? In this episode, three small business founders share their hard-won lessons on running a successful e-commerce business, the smart way.

Lorna Bladen is Chief Marketing Officer at Enterprise Nation, a support network for SMEs, providing resources, guidance, and community for entrepreneurs at all stages.

Lucy Hitchcock is the founder of Partner in Wine, a social-driven brand, selling insulated wineware & picnic essentials.

Giles Atwell, the co-founder of Russell & Atwell, a business that offers premium, fresh chocolate made using sustainable ingredients

In this episode, they discuss:

● What you really need to start an online shop
● Product-market fit first, fancy website later
● Zero-cost validation: polls, calls, pop-ups and the tools to connect you with consumers
● How to leverage email over algorithms - from flows, to tone, to segmentation, and everything in between
● The ups & downs of seasonality and cash flow, and how to plan for everything
● Pricing your products with confidence
● How & why you should “Launch ugly”
● Turning slip-ups into the kinds of stories customers remember
● Practical automation and AI for support and operations, so you can focus on the stuff only you can do
● End-to-end experience thinking: from source to unboxing and beyond

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introductions
01:58 - What you actually need to start an online shop.
03:26 - Tooling reality check: Shopify, DIY builds, keep costs sane.
04:24 - Product–market fit and telling the right story.
06:19 - Validating demand: polls, scrappy research, in-person feedback.
08:06 - Watch users, not guesses: Hotjar and simple tests.
08:56 - Building an email list that prints revenue. Kickstarter, swaps, GDPR.
12:11 - Email to social: automation, tone, segmentation, list hygiene.
16:59 - Make it personal at scale and why it works.
17:20 - Seasonality and cash flow in the real world.
19:18 - Smoothing the dip: new markets, test-and-learn expansion.
21:57 - Keep a North Star goal so you don’t stall.
22:44 - Pricing that holds up: costs, time, margin, positioning.
25:17 - Spreadsheet mindset: bake in discounts, raise prices when needed.
27:35 - Ops wins: packaging tweaks, small automations, where to keep it human.
31:06 - Launch ugly. Speed and clarity beat fancy UX.
32:52 - Not everyone’s built for it: confidence, community, outsourcing.
35:44 - Build-in-public content: video-first storytelling that converts.
38:07 - Startup chaos into content and revenue: mistakes that became assets.
44:33 - Practical AI: customer-service bots, human oversight, smart tools.
47:02 - This is not a get-rich-quick play.
48:10 - Think end-to-end customer experience. Final takeaways.