Your ecommerce business doesn't need more tactics. It needs the right next move.
There are probably dozens of things you could change in your ecommerce business.
The difficult bit is knowing which one actually matters now.
The Next Stage helps you work out what is holding the business back, fix that first, and then decide what comes next.
The right advice depends on where the business is now.
A business trying to prove repeatable sales should not be making the same decisions as one that is ready to scale.
The Next Stage helps you work out where the business is, what deserves attention now, and what can wait.
You're probably not short of ideas.
The things you could be doing
Run more ads.
Improve the product pages.
Change the offer.
Send more email.
Work on retention.
Increase AOV.
Redesign the site.
Post more content.
There is always something else you could be doing, and that is exactly the problem.
When sales slow down or growth gets harder, it is very easy to start changing things simply because they look like sensible things to change. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they have almost nothing to do with the problem that is actually holding the business back.
The question isn't "What else could we do?" It is "What needs fixing first?"
That is the question The Next Stage is built around.
The right next move depends on the stage you're in.
A business trying to prove it can generate consistent sales should not be making the same decisions as one trying to scale from £100k a month. Yet ecommerce advice has a habit of treating them as if they should. The Next Stage uses four stages to put the advice into context.
PROVE IT
You have a product and some sales. Now you need to prove there is a reliable route to more of them. The priority is not scale. It is evidence.
BUILD IT
The business works. But growth is still too dependent on you, individual tactics or things going unusually well. Now the job is to strengthen the commercial foundations and make good months easier to repeat.
SCALE IT
You know the business can sell. Now you need to work out where more investment will genuinely create more growth - and where it will simply make existing problems more expensive.
LEAD IT
The business is bigger. The decisions are different. Now the challenge is building the commercial systems, team and direction that allow the business to keep growing without everything relying on the founder.
Different stage. Different problem. Different next move.
Start with the problem you can see.
You don't need another ecommerce course telling you 47 things you could improve.
You need to work out what is getting in the way now.
Each £7 Next Stage product starts with one visible problem, helps you diagnose what is most likely causing it, and gives you a clear next move.
Pick the problem that looks most like yours.
Why aren't they adding to basket?
They're looking at the product. They're interested enough to visit the page.
But something is stopping too many of them from taking the next step.
The Add-to-Basket Formula helps you work out what's getting in the way - and what to fix first.
Why are they adding to basket but not buying?
They've already shown buying intent.
So why are so many of them disappearing before the order is complete?
The Basket-to-Buyer Formula helps you find the point where confidence drops - and what to do about it.
Should I spend more on ads yet?
More traffic can grow a healthy store.
It can also make an expensive problem bigger.
Before you increase the budget, use the Scale Readiness Check to find out whether the numbers suggest you're genuinely ready.
The Next Stage came out of doing the work.
I've spent around 25 years in marketing, but most of what matters here has come from being inside ecommerce businesses and dealing with the same decisions you're dealing with. Why aren't more people buying? Should we spend more on advertising? Is the problem the traffic or the website? What should we fix first? What actually caused last month's growth?
And, perhaps most importantly, which of the ten sensible things we could do next deserves the money and attention?
The Next Stage is my attempt to turn that experience into a practical way of answering those questions.
Past results are examples of work inside real ecommerce businesses, not promises of what every business will achieve.
SEE THE RESULTS
I'm Rob McNicoll.
I've worked in marketing for around 25 years and I'm a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. My experience has covered a much wider range of marketing and commercial work than ecommerce alone, but these days most of my time is spent working directly with ecommerce businesses.
That means getting involved in the numbers, advertising, product pages, email, offers, merchandising and the decisions that connect them. Over time I've become far more interested in understanding why something is happening than simply reaching for another tactic to try.
The thing I've learned is that most established businesses aren't short of ideas. The difficult bit is deciding which one deserves attention first. That is why I built The Next Stage.
Sometimes you need to look at the whole business.
A weak Add-to-Basket rate is a specific problem, and so is losing too many people between basket and order. Sometimes that is exactly where the work should stop. But established ecommerce businesses are rarely that tidy.
These things don't operate independently. Conversion affects what you can afford to spend on advertising, email changes what a customer may be worth after the first order, and the offer can affect both. One number starts affecting another, which is why looking at one in isolation can lead you towards the wrong conclusion.
The Next Stage Accelerator is for businesses that need help joining those pieces together. Over six weeks, we work through the commercial priorities, make focused changes and build a clear 90-day direction for what happens next.
For when you want the thinking - without joining a programme.
There is no shortage of ecommerce content. Most of us could probably stop reading it for a year and still have enough tactics sitting in bookmarks, inboxes and saved posts to keep us busy. The newsletter isn't about adding more noise.
Each month, I take a commercial ecommerce problem, decision or idea and work through how I think about it - what matters, what probably doesn't, what the numbers can tell you, and where I think businesses often get distracted.
Monthly commercial thinking for people running real ecommerce businesses.
"When should you actually spend more on ads?"
How to think about the commercial health of the store before assuming more traffic is the answer...
Tell me where you're stuck.
Sometimes the problem is obvious and sometimes it isn't. If you're not sure whether you need one of the £7 products, the Newsletter, the Accelerator, or something more involved, tell me a little about the business and what's happening.
I'll take a look at what you've sent over and point you towards the route that makes the most sense. If one of the £7 diagnostic products is all you need, that is what I'll tell you. If the problem looks bigger and a proper commercial diagnosis would be more useful, I'll tell you that too.
Rob McNicoll, FCIM
Founder & Commercial Adviser
This first step is simply to work out what kind of help makes the most sense. It might be one of the £7 diagnostic products, the Newsletter, the Accelerator, or a more detailed paid diagnosis.
I'll use what you send to work out the most appropriate next step.
This is not a free commercial audit or detailed diagnostic.
No need to diagnose the problem before you get in touch.
You don't need to fix everything.
You need to fix the right thing.
There will always be another tactic, channel, campaign or idea you could try. The challenge is working out whether any of them solve the problem the business actually has.
You don't need to fix everything at once. You need to understand what deserves attention now, make that improvement properly and then use what happens next to decide where to go from there.