E-Commerce

Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws of eCommerce

Sarah Tavel and Jeremy Levine, of Bessemer Venture Partners, published them in September and October 2010, one blog post per law, on the model of Bessemer’s laws of cloud computing and SaaS. The original series is still online on Sarah Tavel’s blog; the PDF copy once linked here, a Princeton course handout, now returns a 404.

• Introduction and table of contents

1. You must build a brand, but not through brand advertising
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) is your new pulse
3. The 6 “Cs” are your vital signs: ignore them at your peril! Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, conversion rate, churn, and cash-conversion cycle with return on invested capital.
4. Your goal: cheap, fast and free
5. It’s the service, stupid
6. Only lemmings focus on last-click marketing
7. Affiliates are risky. Don’t let them pick your pocket.
8. WWAD (What Would Amazon Do)?
9. Identify your best customers, encourage customer loyalty, and motivate the evangelicals
10. Keep it social, but keep your data too

Getting customers

• Inbound: What Is Inbound Marketing? - HubSpot, which also sets it against outbound: permission-based versus broad audiences reached whether interested or not.
• Outbound, a.k.a. interruption marketing: Permission marketing - Wikipedia, Seth Godin’s 1999 case against it, and why permission campaigns still often start with an interruption.

See also

• Marketing
• Traffic Acquisition and Lead Generation
• Metrics and KPIs