The other day I was talking to a businesswoman who was selling her products on eBay and Amazon. Her business is going well, but she would really like to get to $10K per month in sales without taking too much of her time, as she believes in multiple streams of income and wants to expand those other business models as well. My suggestion was to constantly introduce new products, but strategically. Okay, so let’s talk about this.
Have you ever looked at a product life cycle chart in a business textbook? Well, if so, what you saw was the traditional ‘product life cycle’ teachings taught in MBA school, retail merchandising, and marketing classes. Still, we can take this concept and use it for online sales and new product programming, consider this concept.
Now imagine the ‘mound curve’ and as it starts at its steepest, that’s a good time to introduce a new product and start because eventually the first product will level off. If you do it right, the new product will start to go hyperbolic and dissect the peak of the first product’s life cycle. If you want to stay hyperbolic, you have to continue to introduce products this way, which is what companies like Procter and Gamble and GE are trying to do.
A particularly interesting case study would be that of INTEL and Apple as they try to stay in the high yield sweet zone, which does wonders for their share price. If you have a great product that’s really cooking but has a shorter life cycle (examples: cell phones, chips, and maybe a social media plugin or new features), then you can keep the price up and go for the “first users”. ‘of technology or companies that buy their products so they can stay ahead in the case of AMD or INTEL.
Looking at that concept, you can see that it works for someone who sells a lot of different products online. Maybe you can tell when you have a meteor product that will move fast, but will sell out, so you launch your new product when your sales are running low, because it will soon sell out and you don’t want your monthly sales. to the tank, and leave you in a cash flow crisis. See that point from a strategic point of view.
I think you can use some mathematical formulas to figure this out, and I imagine one day some Oracle or SAP software connected to a corporate digital nervous system (Bill Gates book; “The Road Ahead” reference) where an AI system that tracks across all outlets and sales, real-time inventory will be able to do this with 90% accuracy, giving executives the information they need to plan and strategize capex, innovation feats, and flow. of box. But you can do it by hand using the same math, since your small business is not that complicated; even.
Best of all, you can break your business down into components and product categories and then you’ll have a great picture of what you’re doing and chart a course for EXACTLY where you want to go; Where will you go! Think about it.