Smart Financing in eCommerce with Aidan Corbett – The Ecommerce Growth Show Ep. 9

Hi guys! It was a rainy week here in Romania however we have sunshine in our minds and hearts as we are very close to the official launch of our new software Reveal.

Yesterday we had another amazing episode of The Ecommerce Growth Show and our special guest was Aidan Corbett CEO @Wayflyer.

If you are an eCommerce manager and you want to learn more about financial possibilities for your marketing activities this episode is for you.

Aidan Corbett

Aidan is serial entrepreneur and MBA from London Business School, Aidan leads the day-to-day operations at Wayflyer, which provides affordable revenue-based financing to D2C brands.

Key Takeaways

Ecommerce Financial Challenges

We find that e-commerce businesses have two big challenges. The first challenge is how do I deploy my marketing spend. And the second challenge is how do I get the capital that will fund my growth. Primarily a marketing spend. And we really combine those solutions to those two problems. So our customers share data with us from their ad platforms, their website but also from their e-commerce store. We take all of that data, predict their sales over the next three months and then we also give them tips to help them optimize spend and essentially then we give them the money over it.

Diminishing the Ratio of CAC vs LTV

A big challenge is conflicting data sources. Google tells you one thing, Facebook tells you something, Google Analytics tells you something else and then Shopify gives you what’s actually in the backend. So one thing that I would do is really focus on getting that one single source of truth from a data perspective so that everybody in the company is aligned and they also believe the data.

Because when you do that and you suddenly get confidence to start making investment decisions and create new products and new marketing campaigns and it’s hard to get that confidence until you have really trust in the data that you’re capturing. So that’s the first thing to do. 

The second thing that I would do is really focus on email personalization.It has a really quick payback period. Well we see a lot in our companies is an underinvestment in email.

Emails are good at acquiring new business and they do end up getting repeat purchases.

If you send everybody in your CRM the same email you’re not going to get a lot of revenue but if you actually look back through the data and use personalization it can really drive the majority of your subsequent sales and it works really well.

Direct To Consumer Industry

I think it’s a fantastic space for bootstrapped entrepreneurs once they reach a certain scale. 

I think the challenge when you’re doing DTC or e-commerce is that you have an ability to scale a business without having a lot of staff but it’s difficult in the beginning, given the cash flow profile of DTC, because when you design a product you then need to pay for the inventory then you receive the inventory then you gotta pay for marketing and only then do you get the revenue. 

So you get to spend a lot of money before you see any revenue.

And that happens all the time because then you make your revenue and then you pay to buy more inventory. So if you’re in a position where you’re scared and quickly accessing funding just gives you an incredible acceleration and that doesn’t need to be funding that basically takes your equity.

And that’s really what wave flag is all about; it’s about providing you with financing that allows you to quickly scale while keeping ownership of your business. 

Join us next week on two amazing events!