Despite investors throwing millions to fund ventures in almost every possible geography and consumer category, it is actually tough to catch profitable online retailers out there. Yes, Ecommerce is growing, but it still only represents around 5% of total sales and, for those 5%, there is a myriad of player fighting, all mostly obsessed by their top-line (but for how long?). So far, E-commerce has been better at slashing traditional retail jobs than at creating value for itself…

The company I work for is selling third-party products, which means it has to directly compete with the Death Star, aka Amazon, so huge and powerful that it can destroy competition in the wink of an eye.

Nobody can contest Amazon´s attractive pricing and spotless customer service. Therefore, to have a chance, every Luke Skywalker out there needs to focus on Amazon weak points and attack surgically.

Our take was to focus on experience and assortment for a niche category (cooking): we managed to have deals with most of the re-known brand in our category, mixed with a zest of celebrity-influenced shopping.

Our offer seems to get some traction from customers: sales are steadily growing and our net promoter score is positive. Even though we are still struggling to bring a positive bottom-line. Paid marketing is expensive…

Content = Happy ? (everything is nicer in French)

Content, that’s cool. Let’s do it too!

So how to reduce paid marketing expense? By getting free traffic, obviously.

At the end of the day, customer acquisition cost is the nerve of the war for most start-ups. Therefore an optimal use of alternative channels is essential to ensure profitability.

That said, it´s difficult to be active on social media – and acquire cheap traffic - when you don´t have anything to talk about. This probably explains the current trend for a lot of retailers to heavily invest in content (a good example is Net-A-Porter).

So we decided to do the same, and created our own content magazine next to our shop, hoping that this would allow us to free up capital to boost margins and invest back into the business.