Internet Marketing Magazine

Ezra Firestone is an eCommerce expert with a highly successful track record having sold many millions of dollars in products online. Ezra has managed over 22 eCommerce properties and is now a partner in the highly successful Boom! by Cindy Joseph. Greg: Ezra you have quite an interesting origin story, very unique actually. Can you please tell us a bit of your history and how you came to be doing business on the Internet? Ezra: I grew up on a hippie commune actually in Berkeley, and on the north shore of Oahu. This was a group of people with an alternative lifestyle experiment where these people were experimenting and talking about different things about relationships. I found that all that mindset and strategy and relationship information has actually served me really well with my business life. When I was 18 years old and I left home and I moved to New York city, and I began playing poker for a living at these underground clubs. In 2004 met a guy who was making his money as a life coach, he was selling information on the Internet teaching people how to become a life coach – this is before the life coaching and wellness coaching and health coaching space really blew up. He was using search engine optimisation, which was really easy at the time to generate leads for his business. His lifestyle looked really interesting to me because I was staying up all night at poker clubs and sleeping all day and spending all of my time with men, and it was a degenerative lifestyle living under these fluorescent lights in these poker clubs with these Mafia guys. So we struck a deal and I said, “Hey man, teach me search engine optimisation and I will teach you how to play poker.” So we kind of just went from there. I ended up taking over the marketing of his company and once I got into it I just dove head on and put my 10,000 hours in and really learned about traffic, and learned about conversion, and learned about business and landing page psychology and all this different stuff. Once I figured out how to do it I started doing consulting. Then I realised that it’d be better to use the skill set that I developed to market and retail my own products, my own things, and build my own businesses, rather than do consulting. Now I’m kind of back to doing both, but that is how I got into it.   Greg: Ezra you are particularly strong in the eCommerce space. There are many common mistakes that business owners make in eCommerce – What are some guidelines that you stick to when choosing or establishing an eCommerce business in a new market? Ezra: Yes, eCommerce and the retailing of physical products are what I specialise in – I like eCommerce because it is scalable and the businesses are liquidatable; it’s a real legitimate business model where you’re shipping someone a physical product that they’re actually looking for. You don’t have to persuade them or convince them to buy your stuff – they came looking for it. I found it to be the best business model, once you figure out how to generate leads and how to get them to take you up on the offers. Here’s some of the main market criteria we look at when you want to look at when we’re considering getting into a market. One of the things that you want to look at is the average order value of your products. You want your average order value to be between $75 and $200.The product itself doesn’t have to cost $75, because perhaps it’s a product line where people buy multiple accessories and the main product is only $30, but by the time they’ve added on all the accessories it is a $75 order.The reason you want it to be $75 is because generally in the drop-ship market you’re getting a 20 percent to 30 percent margin, so you never want to make less than $25 in your pocket on any one given sale, because you just can’t really afford to buy traffic and run your company if you’re not making more than $20 a sale. The reason why I like to keep it under $200 or $300,

Mal Emery is a master of direct response marketing. Originally with a background in buying and selling businesses Mal went on to specialise in direct mail, followed by selling from the platform, mentoring, and mastering many other digital and print med...