The Changing eCommerce Landscape and Where eCommerce Is Heading with Jordan Gutierrez, COO @ Wishpond

GUEST BIO:
Jordan Gutierrez is the COO of Wishpond, a B2B business that builds complete marketing funnels that get leads and customers for eCommerce businesses. He started his business career by buying a coffee machine and selling coffee and donuts on the streets of Mexico City and has now helped Wishpond grow into a 120 person company.
Jordan now focuses on the operations of Wishpond and most importantly, pivoting to the wants of their customers to continue to provide the products and services they need to grow their own businesses.
SHOW SUMMARY:
Jordan is the COO of Wishpond, a campaign builder for eCommerce businesses. Since joining the COO team during its start up phase, he’s helped the company grow to employ 120 people and work with Fortune 500 companies to create their marketing funnels.
In this episode, we talk about Jordan’s first experience with business, what makes products sell on Facebook, and how chatbots and Facebook Messenger are changing the marketing industry.
This is The Lean Commerce Podcast.
TOPICS:
How did you get into eCommerce?
2:15 Moving to Canada from Mexico City gave me my first introduction to Amazon and Best Buy. That summer, I went back to Mexico, bought a coffee machine, and started to sell coffee and donuts on the street. My customers were mostly doctors and I found out they were in Mexico just to buy medical books. I sold my coffee machine and started to sell the books they wanted online.
4:08 I decided that I needed a website and built an eCommerce website in 2007 selling medical books. At the same time, I came back to Canada and was studying in university. This was obviously really chaotic and when I was approached by a dropship partnership company, I agreed.
6:42 I started posting memes related to the medical community on Facebook, I interviewed doctors, and started to get some traction.
8:32 Then, I created a medical case page on Reddit. People could post symptoms and other users would diagnose them. This continued to grow and I started to expand to medical equipment, soaps, and tools. We started some campaigns, sold apparel, anything that medical professionals would want to buy.
11:46 Ninety percent of medical professionals in Mexico know of us and 70% have purchased medical equipment from us at some point. We have over 2,000 Google reviews and a 4.5 rating.
It would make sense that adding to cart on Facebook was a seamless, easy decision—but it’s not. Why?
19:42 Trying to promote a simple medical book on Facebook is really difficult. On Facebook you need to build a dream and then you need your landing page to have absolutely no distractions. The main mistake people make is they send people to a landing page with too many CTA’s. Facebook is extremely distracting and it’s hard to choose where to click when you can click anywhere.
22:40 At the end of the day, if your landing page looks professional, has a nice video, and looks authoritative, it builds people’s confidence.
26:52 Once a week, we have a special product offer and we use it to grow our Facebook audience. We have contests and in order to be entered you have to get ten people to sign up. We started to just follow the market and got into more content marketing strategies.
Do you operate as a SaaS company?
30:56 We are mostly a technology company but we see the need in clients needing a campaign. We have the software to build campaigns and so we offer that to our clients too. We also want to make it super affordable for small businesses. The idea is that you get the same resources as a Fortune 500 company (we work with both types of clients).
How has Wishpond grown since you’ve been added to the team?
32:01 The company now employs 120 people. We’ve grown because we just focus on where the market is and then create products they want. We fix the problems our customers are having.
What are some of the most interesting trends you’ve seen in the past year with conversion rate optimization?
33:19 For B2B, Facebook Lead Ads are doing really well and so are Chatbots. And of course, mobile.
Do you see a massive difference in value between email and chatbots?
36:49 People have said that eCommerce is going to take over retail and every year it is increasing. Now, the same is happening with email and chat tools. I think the only difference is chat tools are going to be here to stay and it’s important to start using them as early as possible.
41:08 It’s important to note that you don’t control your data on Facebook. Facebook will tell you to pay for likes and followers and then a few months later tell you that you have to now pay to get in front of those followers. We have to be careful of this. You might build a list on Facebook Messenger and then Facebook is going to ask you to pay to access that list.
Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:
[Wishpond](https://www.wishpond.com/)
[Rework by Jason Fried](https://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745)
[Good To Great by Jim Collins](https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996)
Contact Jordan:
[jordan@wishpond.com](jordan@wishpond.com)
[Jordan on Twitter](https://twitter.com/jordangk?lang=en)
[Jordan on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordangk/?originalSubdomain=ca)