Marcy McKenna Demystifies Live Shopping (wegginar® 5/7/25)

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Think Live Shopping is for you and your business?  Find out from the pro Marcy McKenna, Founder and CEO, The Live Shopping Academy, when she discusses, "Live Shopping Demystified:  Unlock the Hidden Power of Today's Fastest Growing eCom Marketing Strategy," Wednesday, May 7th at 11 AM CT.

Here's what you can expect:

• Discover the five biggest reasons ecommerce brands are diving into live shopping in record numbers.
• Find out if your product is right for live shopping and what the potential could be for your bottom line.
• Learn the hidden benefits of live shopping that you can start taking advantage of today
• Get step-by-step guidance for getting started with live shopping.

About Marcy

Marcy McKenna is an accomplished product innovator and entrepreneur having successfully designed, developed, marketed and launched over 40 products via live shopping, ecommerce and big box retail.

With over 14 years of experience in the Live Shopping space–both as a brand on HSN, QVC, and Amazon, and as a product spokesperson/influencer on today’s most popular live commerce platforms, Amazon Live, Pinterest TV, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Grommet Live, etc., Marcy has seen firsthand the power live shopping can bring to product based businesses, both big and small. With that in mind, she recently created and launched The Live Shopping Academy with the goal of teaching ecommerce brands, Amazon Sellers and product entrepreneurs how to harness the power of Live Shopping to build their brands to heights never before thought possible.  And there's more ...

To register (free of charge) for this extremely popular wegginar®, visit here.

Alibaba Goes From a 1 Million Goal to 2,000 Small U.S. Businesses Per Year

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Alibaba is going through a major transformation – transformation these days means cutting budgets, firing people and running a much leaner ship.  Also with the transformation comes a more realistic goal on their future performance.

History:  Alibaba launched its B2B eCommerce site, Alibaba.com, in the U.S. three years ago and set a goal of adding 1 million local businesses and global reach, but the company has fallen short of those targets in the ensuing years, the report said, citing three people familiar with the operations.

The majority of U.S. sellers cancel their subscriptions after a year, past and current employees said in the report. One person said Alibaba.com is now looking to sign up 2,000 small U.S. businesses per year rather than the 1 million goal.

Read on to see how the efforts of Alibaba to rival Amazon are falling a bit short.

Does Amazon Want to Eat Your Global Small Business For Lunch?

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Amazon claims "they are making things cheaper and easier so consumers should be content."  But while Amazon’s prices are cheap, the way it siphons and uses information from its sellers is not.

The article below purports:

“If you sell on Amazon, you’ll be handing over the fate of your business, your livelihood, to your biggest most aggressive enemy — an enemy that has every intention of eating your lunch.”

Join the debate:  Is Amazon good for global small business?

What's Your Side Hustle?

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From copywriting and consulting to social media management or private-labeling, side hustles give people a leg up in an economy that has had very little growth for the middle class in the last 40 years.  

What's the growth now?  As of January, 2021, 34 percent of Americans have side hustles.  

Starting a side hustle is extremely easy if you know what you want to do. But if you're not sure where to start, The 2021 Complete Amazon Dropshipping & Private Label Master Class Bundle is something to consider provided you have some extra change to put toward it. 

Global Small Businesses Must Determine Whether Amazon is a Hero or Villain

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There are plusses and minuses to selling on Amazon.  Here's a minus.

The e-commerce giant may depend on its merchants in the aggregate, but individually they don’t have much power. Sellers say Amazon effectively punishes them if they’re found offering their items for lower prices on rival sites such as Walmart, dropping them lower in search rankings for instance.

Many feel Amazon also pushes them to pay for Fulfillment by Amazon and advertising. Even larger companies such as Tumi, a luxury bag maker, and PopSockets, which produces cellphone grips, have described Amazon as trying to control what they sell as well as how and where they sell it.

That said though, in a recent report (pdf), Amazon indicated over the course of 2019 and 2020 it invested more than $30 billion in logistics, tools, services, and employees to help small and medium-sized businesses. It also provides assistance such as technical support, loans, and credits for its cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services.

Read the entire article on big changes are afoot for global small businesses, especially when it comes to Amazon.

Can Big Global Companies Conduct Themselves in a Neutral Way?

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Heads of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google testify on big tech's power in the online global economy.  Can big global companies, when the pressure is on, conduct themselves in a totally neutral way?

Read more.  See what you think.  I wonder... are they squashing competition, especially the little guys, in favor of their own service?

Being on Amazon is a Huge Visibility Boost for Small Businesses Who Desire to Go Global

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John Leslie from John Leslie Studios recommends Amazon to any small business, saying, “My sales have steadily increased on Amazon year after year. Last year my sales on Amazon alone were over $150,000. Simply being on Amazon is a huge visibility boost because Amazon is often the first place people go when seeking to purchase almost anything.”

According to CBS17.com:

An amazing variety of small and medium-sized businesses now boost online sales by selling in Amazon’s stores, reaching more customers and bringing their business to a whole new level. More than half of the items sold in Amazon’s stores worldwide are from small and medium-sized businesses. And the number of small and medium-sized businesses exceeding $1 million in sales in Amazon’s stores worldwide grew by 20 percent last year, to more than 25,000.

To succeed online, businesses oftentimes need a partner to help them reach a national – or even global – customer base, and to support them throughout the process of building their business and fulfilling increasing demand for their products or services.

Learn more about how small businesses are mastering the art of selling online.

Turning Small Indian Firms into Global Entrepreneurs

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Many home-grown Indian manufacturers and sellers are profiting from the business models and facilitation offered by India-focused multinationals such as Walmart and Amazon.  Mumbai-based Indo Count Industries is one of them -- considered the fastest-growing suppliers of home textiles in the US and European markets.

Walmart, with its sourcing model, and Amazon, by offering a Global Selling Programme, are raising the aspirational bar on small Indian businesses, elevating them to earn the coveted tag of ‘global entrepreneurs’.

Additional points highlighted in the article below:

• Walmart sets up global sourcing centre in Bengaluru that sources India-made products for catering to 14 foreign markets; it procures over 95 per cent of the goods sold in Best Price stores from local companies.
• Amazon takes ‘Make in India’ to the world, bolstered by its Global Selling Programme; it is empowering sellers from small towns in India by scaling up their businesses and leveraging the digital economy.

Read more about how Walmart and Amazon are turning small Indian firms into global entrepreneurs.

Jeff Bezos on Global Business Strategy: Big Things Start Small

Market Domination: Amazon or Google?

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Google has disrupted an area which Amazon dominates with its alternative e-commerce platform, Google Shopping.

Is this good news?  According to Kyle C. Murphy, practitioner faculty of strategy at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, who knows e-commerce inside out, it is. 

Below he offers insights as to how smaller companies can profit.

Learn more about how Google and Amazon's competition is a win for smaller e-commerce companies.

Squash Etsy? Amazon Makes Its Move

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Amazon is making a big play to squash Etsy — and using artisans and gadget makers as the face of a $1 trillion company.

We'll let you be the judge.

Amazon launched a new section of its site called Amazon Storefronts on Monday morning, a space that looks remarkably like the handmade e-commerce giant Etsy and offers customers access to “over 1 million products” from 20,000 “small and medium-sized” US businesses.

Read more about Amazon, the friendly corporate giant, one which encourages entrepreneurship and the revitalization of small businesses, will start serving small businesses, defined as basically anything less than a publicly-traded global brand.

From Cadabra to Amazon: A Star is Born

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Jeff Bezos decided back in the early 90s that online shopping was about to boom and that he should ride the wave.

Books were the way forward, the hedge fund executive reasoned, because an online bookstore could stock all three million titles that were in print at the time, whereas the biggest physical bookstore could hold only about 150,000. In July 1994, Mr Bezos moved to Seattle with his new wife and, from his garage, set up Cadabra.

He sold his first book in 1995 under the new company name, Amazon.

Read more (with limited access) about the dizzying rise from humble bookseller to global retail behemoth.

Amazon Prime Day Ignites Global SME Sales

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Data from Statista show that Small Business Saturday in 2017 generated around $2.43 billion in ecommerce retail sales in the U.S. That figure doesn’t get further broken down by the actual size of businesses that generated revenue, or by ecommerce platform, so it’s fair to assume that it includes all retail activity on that day.

"Prime Day [Amazon] is just getting started for us, but we're already seeing 10 times our average day sales," Kelly Fedio of One Savvy Life, a small business that sells on Amazon, said in a statement.

Learn more about how global small-, medium-sized business sales eclipse $1 billion on  Amazon Prime Day.

Setting Up a Company Culture That Serves the World

Luring Customers From Around the World

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From a rummage sale of obscure products to 36 hours of discounts on major brands such as Samsonite luggage, Callaway golf clubs and General Mills cereals, Amazon.com Inc.’s fourth annual Prime Day event lured shoppers from around the world.

The promotion was the biggest shopping event in the company’s history, surpassing Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the previous Prime Day. Members bought more than 100 million products, Amazon said in a statement.

Small businesses also got a piece of Prime Day.  Amazon has millions of merchants selling goods on its marketplace, mostly small and medium-businesses that had sales exceeding $1 billion during the promotion, Amazon said.

Read more here.

Today in Global Small Business: Mid-Market Companies Can Make a Global Impact

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• American Express to offer credit cards to small businesses (about time); it will be co-branded with Amazon.com.
• Big global brands such as Nestle, Qatar Airways, and Microsoft, are recruiting Irish suppliers to win war for talent.
• Seven (7) keys to global e-commerce success.
• Globalization for the little guy -- there is such a thing.
• To accelerate your growth via cloud computing and at the same time find out key growth lessons from more than 50 startup owners using cloud computing, join the WEGGinar™ 7/11 with IBM experts.  It's free of charge and you can register here. 
• Where (and how) mid-market companies can make a global impact.

Enabler of Global Reach

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How do you shine online to survive or thrive in the global marketplace?  You take it to either Amazon or eBay.

As one business owner puts it about eBay:

Selling on the eBay platform is a natural complement to your small business, your brick-and-mortar store. And it's an enabler of global reach. And so immediately, you go from being just, you know, a store maybe based in Akron [Ohio] to a store that people can see anywhere around the world.

As national public radio station WKSU reports, the eBay Retail Revival is a new project designed to help give local brick-and-mortar businesses, like the Akron, Ohio-based business owner, a global boost and eBay a new way to take on Amazon.

Read more about how eBay trains Ohio retailers to take on the world.

The Huge Power of FANGs

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Rana Foroohar, in the Financial Times, cites the McKinsey Global Institute in writing of “the huge power of the Fangs—Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google—which now dominate not just the digital business, but the entire economy.”

“Eighty percent of corporate wealth now resides in 10 percent of companies rich in intellectual property, of which the platform companies are the richest.”
And, what is it that these companies control?

The currency of the digital age -- data.

The Seller Summit

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What is the Seller Summit?  It's tricky.  Amazon recently ran an event, referred to as a Seller Summit, attended by 500 interested in selling via the soon to be launched local version of Marketplace, the third party selling platform which generates more than half Amazon’s total global revenue.  The 500 who attended the event will be on a priority list of those to get an invitation-only to sell via Amazon Marketplace.  (Gee, sounds a little bit like the old Gilt business model where you had to wait to be invited.)

Amazon plans to launch in Australia with both a direct retail presence and an Amazon Marketplace offering of local sellers.

“We held the Seller Summit to encourage and educate Australian businesses on how they can use Amazon Marketplace to take their products to a global audience,” says [Rocco] Braeuniger [Amazon Australia country head].

Read more about how Amazon is quietly building a supplier network for direct sales in Australia.

Today in Global Small Business: PayPal Marketplaces Goes Global

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• How do you create a workplace that works?  Joselyn DiPetta at Google, and Managing Partner, Present Possibility, will address that topic in the next WEGGinar™ held on Wednesday, December 6 at 11:00 a.m. Central time. WEGGinar™ is no charge but you must sign up to attend: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/1837790091765976835.
• Alibaba sets up a hub for small businesses to go global.
• E-commerce offers significant opportunities to the logistics industry. 
• PayPal Marketplaces goes global.  What is PayPal Marketplaces and how does it differ from regular PayPal?  Find out here.
• Learn how two e-commerce giants -- one being Amazing -- are trying to export their success.
• Discover not 1 but 27 social media tools that will help you become a savvy global marketer.