E-commerce Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

I love the movie Moneyball, watched it several times and it was one of the instances that a movie made me read the book.

For those who haven't watched it, It has a simple and true story. It goes over the story of Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics, in face of real harsh competition and having a lower hand on almost all aspects of the game, used data to his advantage and built a franchise that out-performed competitors and gained success.

⚾Moneyball in e-commerce

This is a concept with most e-commerce businesses too.

🥈You have a lot of NY Yankees e-commerce businesses. large marketing budgets, massive amounts of money to be sprayed for their promotions and will sometimes buy your talent because they are the Yankees and to be honest, Yankees do have the highest winning percentage, so there's that. Most of the e-commerce Yankees will have the highest revenue after all.

🥉 There is lots of San Diego Padre's e-commerce solutions too, Which to be honest is not the sort of e-commerce you want to be running. rebuilding year after year with nothing in sight. I would like to call this business the vast majority of the 80% of the e-commerce businesses that fail.

🥇But here's the thing, you can always be the 2002 A's if you commit to it, You can have a lesser budget than your competitors, you can have your best team members headhunted. But if you just try to stick to your data and not what your friends or gut tells you, you CAN win!

Yes, so if you've thought to yourself: "Hey! many people are buying fertilizers now that gardening has got hot" and your friends were like yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
There may be a higher chance of your e-commerce failing than a guy who looked into thousands of data sets and has made a list of how they are selling and marketing their product and came up with a product that has a lesser competition and has been growing interest every year.

Not dismissing the fact, that even by just some gut instinct you could build a fertilizer mogul, but chances of you actually making a profit is a bit higher.

The same reason that most of the time in Fantasy leagues, the statistician who knows nothing about any player, wins in long term compared to me who just feels like my player is gonna make a splash this week.

So there's that, as jack Youngblood calls it "Good luck is a residue of preparation."

📊💹 We created Shopgram.io a while ago for those who want to know about any data they need from their competitors and their products. They can come in, grab a store and read through their work while sipping their coffee. It's all there free now, a library of e-commerce data.

We are talking to e-commerce owners right now, to see whether this theory applies to their progress and where their success and failure came from.

P.S. If you are interested in how we can improve these data, or even talk about how you do e-commerce, I'll be glad to have a talk, just message me to have a talk.