Mastering E-Commerce Growth: Key Strategies for Success and Sustainability

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining E-Coffee with Experts. My name is Victor, your new co-host. And today, not only do I have an amazing person to talk to, but I also have an even greater professional who’s been through a lot. Rush here with us. Rush, thank you so much for joining us. Please feel free to give the first 10 seconds of who you are, and then we can start off the meeting.

Sure. First of all, Victor, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I’m really excited to be here. My name is Rush. I’m the founder and CEO of Sell the Trend. Sell the Trend is like a complete all-in-one drop shipping app. Basically, you can start your entire business from just Sell the Trend. Really looking forward to talk marketing and any other topics you want to talk about.

Amazing. I think once people first understand who you are and try to come up with the idea of why you’re here, they’re going to see the music path that you went through in the past, the music career, everything that you had around it. The audience wants to know how that rush from drop shipping came to be since he was working with music before.

Sure. I look at drop shipping and I look at sell the trend as really my second career, so to speak. Nice. Before Before starting sell the trend, I was a music producer. So did music for Netflix and records on billboard and stuff like that. And through just life and the way life turns sometime, I basically had to go do a career shift. And we can talk a little bit about why. But I had to do a little career shift and wanted to keep the passion that I have for creating things. And that’s really where Celda Trend came about. It’s just, think of it like, I’m still producing, but I’m producing something else. Instead of producing music, now we’re producing solid trend.

Amazing. The music part about it, the production of music. I have several, let’s just say, amateur DJs who are my friends. Of course, they’re not producing entire music from scratch, but I do understand their pain of getting a mix, going to a nightclub, making sure that they stand out. Standing out is something that you definitely need to do when we’re talking about drop shipping. It is one of the key aspects to have a good website, have a good support. For anybody starting today, 2025, another quick reply, if you can. What would you ask them to do about starting dropshipping here?

Sure. Obviously, in any business, not just dropshipping, in any business, you have to stand out. You have to do… Success really only happens when you really put in all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, and really commit to something. When you do that, you also have to, like you said, stand out. Everybody likes to copy. It’s easier to just copy somebody, copy somebody’s success, copy somebody’s name, which has a place for it, as they say, great artists steal while mediocre artists borrow, that thing. But the idea is you have to add your own spark. You have to add your own little thing to anything for two reasons. A, you need to stay motivated. If you’re just copying somebody, there’s got to be a loss of motivation there. You’re not really adding anything of yourself to something, and people can see that. Even if you are going out there and starting a brand new e-commerce business, and we do recommend that you follow best practices, which is, in a sense, a little bit of a copying. You’re following the best practices. You’re creating your pages in a certain way. You’re picking products that are proven to have some success.

You are copying to a certain extent. But then how you dress that up, what are you creating as a business, that is really where you can put in your flavor. You can create the page with your own little flavor. You can choose your logo, you can choose your name. The way you interact with your customers is really also part of what you want to add to your business. There’s a lot of best practice that you can do as a dropshipper, but there’s also obviously some mistakes you don’t want to repeat, and that’s really where the best practices come from.

No, that’s an amazing point because as you said, it’s not only about dropshipping, everybody needs to stand out. I think one of the biggest keywords I’ve heard and read this year is scale, to scale up. Everybody wants to scale up. I even say that myself. Whenever I go talk to somebody, Hey, do you want to scale up something? I’m a victim to this, or am I the true issue and the problem around? I don’t know. But what I do know is that everybody goes through the same step of scalability, scaling up the company, the project, the product, and everything else. I imagine you had some issues while scaling up. But if you did not, please let us know how you did not. If you did, I think everybody would like to understand how you overcame them.

Sure. Here’s one of the challenges that sell the trend. When we first started sell the trend, it was an instant hit, if you want to call it that. We didn’t really have any the… Some of the issues that you hear with SaaS products is like, Oh, you got to achieve product-market fit and all these buzzwords. But the reality is, if you understand the market just from a basic perspective and you’re creating an application that is in demand and you are able to add what we talked about, the differentiation factor, adding some of your own into it, then the product market fit is not an issue. I’ll give you an example. When I first saw the trend, I realized that one of the most important parts of any drop shipping business is product selection. You got You got to have those winning products. You got to have the products that everybody’s looking for because that’s what people are buying from you, ultimately. They’re not buying your website, they’re not buying your ads, they’re not buying you, they’re buying the product, ultimately. Having those products is super important. Realize right off the bat that if we can find a way to decide what those products are or to use data or some other method to figure out what those top products are, then we can have a valuable application.

Now, obviously, when we started to sell the trend in 2019, we weren’t the only app providing trending products. Every day there’s brand new apps coming up that want to show you the best product. There was already competition. But what we did and what we continue to do is provide something different than everybody else. When we started to sell the trend, the way that we did our data analytics, and we were using AI before AI was a buzzword. The way we did our data analytics was different than everybody else. Everybody else at the time was showing you, Oh, these are the top products on Shopify. These are the top products on AliExpress. But what we did is we brought all of those different platforms into sell the trend, Shopify, AliExpress, CDD drop shipping, Amazon, Facebook ads, all those things into one cohesive application. At the end of the day, when you go to sell the trend to find a product, you know that that product is also popular on all of these platforms. You’re not just finding a product that is popular on Shopify or AliExpress or any of those platforms popular across. That’s what we built our nexus, which is our own proprietary algorithm.

What we built our nexus around is finding the best products on those applications together. Having that product market fit was never really an issue for us. Now, in terms of the challenges, you asked what about the challenges. The challenges that we’re having now is that over the years, we’ve continuously added to what sell the trend was. When we first started sell the trend, it was just a product discovery tool. Over the last five years, now, Sell the trend is really an all-in-one application. You can come to sell the trend and you can start an e-commerce store without having to do Shopify or any, or a Woocommerce or any of these other applications. You can start an actual e-commerce store using sell the trend. You can find the best products. You can fulfill your orders. You You can connect with quality suppliers. You can do everything with just a sell the trend. Now, the challenge is, and the challenge, I think, is that for any application that has already created a name for itself in one thing is allowing people to see that, Hey, we also do all this other stuff. It’s still shocking where we still have people come to us and saying, Hey, I want to find the best products.

We’re like, Okay, cool. Okay. And then they’re like, But I want to connect my Shopify store. I’m like, Yeah, of course you can connect your Shopify store, but you can also use sell the trend. They’re like, Oh, really? I didn’t know that sell the trend did that. That’s really our challenge right now and what we’re working really hard on. You’re going to see some things in the new year where we’re going to really turn the corner on that. But that’s one of the challenges. It’s just changing the narrative a little bit when somebody already has an idea of what you’re all about.

So everybody, you see we have to keep tabs on Celda Trend to see the new updates coming. Santa Claus is coming with more Celda Trend gifts for us. This is amazing.

There you go.

Yeah, there you go. Now, still on this subject, I did, back in the day’s own, a virtual store back in Brazil, where I resold iPhone and Apple products. The reason why I created that store, this was, I think, in the second year of COVID. But the reason why, specifically, was because we had a lot of demand, of course, because Brazians have a pretty big capitalist side. But the prices of iPhones back in Brazil are one of the worst in the world. There is a huge market, a gray market, let’s say, of providers selling iPhones with cheaper prices that come from different countries. I can’t explain myself more before I get into trouble with the Brazilian government, but I’m not just saying this out loud for nothing. I remember that I created the store, Lithium, in Brazil because I wanted to give an option that was cheaper to my friends and colleagues and everybody who trusted me while at the same time making sure that they were safe because Brazil has a lot of security issues. They weren’t afraid of going to stores, getting an iPhone. It was all about that. But what about you? Why did you start the trend?

What was the bit?

Obviously, once I realized that I couldn’t continue making music because I had some medical issues where I really just couldn’t really actually physically do it anymore, unfortunately. But I also still had the passion to create. After transitioning from music, I worked with EMI Music Canada, which was a good transition for me because it was still in the music business, and we created this. It’s like an American idol, I don’t know, or whatever, the X-Factor, whatever country you’re in. There’s something similar to that. Like a music competition. We did it online. It was get a recording contract with EMI Music Canada by going online and basically promoting yourself and joining our website. The winner was going to get a recording contract, and we did award a recording contract to the winner of this competition. But everything was done through the website. People would be voting, they would be interacting, would be downloading. That basically was my first foray into going from music into creating a big data type of platform where we are really doing basically what we’re doing right now, which is analyzing data, putting all the pieces together, and then presenting data to people.

But after that, that was a project with EMI Canada, and it was amazing. But after that, I really wanted I wanted to create something that was my own. I wanted to transition from that, and that was done with a big group of people. But I wanted to create something that was my own, and I was always interested in e-commerce. E-commerce wasn’t a brand new thing for me. Oh, let me see you. I was always interested in e-commerce. Just the whole entrepreneurial push that e-commerce gives you. You can just find something and sell it. It’s the basic… That’s the basic, right? Yeah.commerce, right? Buy and sell. You can’t get any more basic than that. That’s what’s so exciting about it. You can really build your own business on your own in your basement, so to speak, with just a laptop. You don’t need a whole infrastructure. But for me, I didn’t really want to sell items, but to me, it was, how can I create something that people can use to improve their lives and improve their experience with and basically find success on their own? That’s when I put together a team, find amazing dropshippers that were hitting those numbers, work with them to create the algorithm and put the entire platform together.

That really was really what the transition was. When you ask me why create Celder Trends, it’s because it’s a passion. Sell the trend to me is a passion. It’s not a job, it’s not a thing. That’s really why it’s so important to have passion in whatever you do. Talking about e-commerce entrepreneurs and dropshippers, you have to have a passion for it. It’s really like any job. Ideally, it would be amazing if you loved it. You can do it. You can still do it if you think it’s something that you want to try. Absolutely. You don’t have to be in love with it to start. But as you start doing it, if you can start to love it and love the process, you’re going to find success.

That’s amazing. I grew up with my grandma always saying that her food was the best because it had love in it. I resonate with what you’re saying. It does make sense when we have love, things just they go better. They organically go better. We were talking about organically, we were actually mentioning data right now. Data, as you said, and as everybody knows, is also one of the main keywords of 2024. Everybody’s more concerned about data, especially with AI. It is data-driven AI. Sometimes everything is either data-driven or AI-powered. But in terms of overall trends, not in a drop shipping market, but in the market overall, the e-commerce one, do you see anything new for next year? By new, I don’t mean something that hasn’t come out, of course, but do you see something that was introduced this year that can grow exponential in the next one?

Sure. I think the thing that you really got to invest more in 2025, if that’s what you’re asking, is social selling. It’s good to have your sell shop, your sell the TransCell shop or your Shopify. If you’re on Shopify, it’s good to have those. But it’s super important to really engage with social selling. So creating your TikTok shop, for example, sell on Facebook marketplace. Social selling is definitely going to grow, going to continuously grow in 2025. And it’s something that we recommend to everybody that comes through the doors as a solid trend to invest more time in it. Because think of it this way, social platforms are never going to go away. It’s proven since the early days of the first explosion of these social platforms, whether it’s MySpace or whatever was, Frenster, whatever the hell it was before that.

That was one of the biggest in Brazil as well.

Exactly. It’s only going to grow. And think of it this way, in these social platforms, they’re only going to be adding more and more e-commerce features into them. Tiktok Shop has been a huge success for TikTok. But Instagram, you can sell on Instagram, you can sell on Facebook, you can sell on any of these things. So besides complementing your own brand, it’s super important to really put your stake in the ground and create your own brand. Have your own store. It’s important to have your own store because think of it this way, your own store is yours and nobody can take it from you. Tiktok shop, it’s great, these social platforms, but at the end of the day, they own the platform. At any point, they can shut down your store, and then you’re starting from zero. Again, you have to start from zero. It’s important to have your own store, feed the traffic back to your own store, sell on TikTok, but also always feed the traffic back to your own domain, to your own store. So you always have that channel, build your email list. But definitely social selling, I think, would be something that everybody should really be investing more time in 2025.

I’m not even in the space that you’re talking about, but even I, as a salesperson on LinkedIn, always hear about people saying the importance of social selling on LinkedIn. As me being the product, me being around Instead of just calling people, knocking in their DMs, like actually putting myself out there, the social selling part of it, so that I build authority. A lot of things that us SEO lovers enjoy, we can easily obtain with social selling, and I 100% agree. I would even ask you for the holiday season, the upcoming now, like Christmas, if there were any… Or out of the ordinary strategies that you would recommend for e-commerce. But then again, everybody’s using AI, everybody’s using as many tools as possible. Everybody just knows that they need more ads, more SEO, more everything. We all need more everything. But then again, not everybody has the will or the power or the financial status to have everything. So any entrepreneurs wanting to scale from drop shipping to build their own brand, which happens a lot. They go out from just reselling being the marketplace, they own everything now. Especially back in Brazil, this is ever growing.

People want to become the owners of everything as much as possible. They don’t want to depend on corporate jobs or governmental jobs. For those people who want to do the job, and with you knowing several stories regarding drop shipping, anything in particular that you’ve seen being done over and over and over that should be avoided at all costs?

Yeah. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people come through the sell the trend doors. We’ve seen super successful stores. We’ve We’ve seen stores that are not super successful. We’ve seen dropshippers. We’ve talked to hundreds of thousands of dropshippers. We know what the challenges are and we know what the successes are. We know what works and what doesn’t work. If you’re talking about some of the mistakes that we’ve seen dropshippers do, just off the top of my head, product selection. Choosing the wrong products. Choosing products that were popular maybe a year ago and expecting them to work again. There are certain situations, evergreen products. Some products will work every single winter. They’ll work every single summer. But I mean, those are specific products. Pricing. I mean, we’ve seen so many dropshippers price items the wrong way. That’s why on sell the trend, we have a recommended price. Unless you know better, it behooves you to use that price that we recommend. We know what the sweet spot is for the price. But we’ve seen people try to take, let’s say, an AliExpress price or a supplier price and add maybe $2 to it and they expect it to earn a profit.

Because they’re thinking, You price it low, you’ll get more people. What the reality is, that is 100% not the right strategy. It’s not the right strategy. You need to have margins. You need to have enough money that when you sell that product, you need to have enough margins because you need to advertise that product. Now, whether you’re going out there and paying money for Facebook ads or influencers, or you’re literally doing SEO, right? You’re writing blogs, you’re creating all that infrastructure, you need a margin. You need a margin, right? You need to be able to be making a profit, right? So another important one is talking about how to scale. Going back to that, it’s super important to make sure your customer service is impeccable, right? So that can make you or break you, right? So customer service. And people forget about that because they’re thinking, I’m What are you just going to sell. Let me sell 100 items a day. First, I sell them at handle. I don’t care if customers complain. Forget about the emails like, We’ll deal with that tomorrow. A customer is complaining about their product. I don’t care. That can absolutely ruin your business.

Because listen, customers love to do one thing more than saying singing your praises, they love to complain about you online, right? So you don’t want to. That’s why we’re proud of our online presence because you go online and you go on Trustpilot and any of these other things, and we have an excellent reputation because we take care of our customers. We take care of our customers for two things. A, we want to build a proper business because we love to sell the trend, and B, we want to take care of the people that are paying us money. That’s the key. That’s the same thing with you. You need to take care of your customers. They’re the ones who are allowing you to buy a car or food or any of that stuff. It’s super important. There’s no reason to scale unless you have certain things in place, making sure your customer support is perfect and making sure your supply chain is perfect. If you’re trying to go from a store to a brand, you need to make sure that you’re able to satisfy the demand. Making sure you pick the right suppliers. We have some resources for that on Celetron as well.

Do you see, in no way whatsoever, I want this conversation to be about it, but do you Do you see SEO as a possible option or path for these entrepreneurs for a long-tail result? Because as we all know, SEO is not for tomorrow. Links are not for tomorrow. Things take time here in our market. But I imagine that you yourself went through SEO already, had some SEO efforts, links, articles. If you could just easily tell us how is the life of a dropshipping SaaS in SEO terms, that would be fantastic. Out of curiosity, again, feel free to share whatever you want.

Sure, absolutely. Just to, talking about sell the trends, SEO efforts, and I can also talk about the dropshippers, what they should be doing for SEO. Please, you have the stage. For sell the trend, I mean, so put it this way, in any business, you can only focus on certain amount of things. We need to get good at certain things. You can’t just dabble in a bunch of things and say, Oh, we’re going to do a little a little SEO, a little this, a little that. You really need to take a channel and really knock it out of the ballpark. For SEO, same thing with SEO channel, you really need to be creating content. Seo is about two things. You got actually three things. You got the website, the way it works, functionally, the way it works. You got the inbound links. People are talking about you. Are they not talking about you? And obviously, the content that is on the website. What are the search engines coming to your website for? There’s There is almost unlimited strategies, and I know you’re a bigger SEO, and there’s unlimited strategies for SEO. It’s all about picking the ones that are going to produce you the results.

You can write a billion blogs, but if they’re all terrible, then nobody’s going to want to stay on the blog to read them. And then those signals come back to Google easily saying, Hey, they’re writing terrible blogs. Nobody cares about these blogs. So it’s super important if you want to boil it down, to invest in something and do it the best that you can. It’s not good enough. It is not good enough to just write blogs. If you say, Oh, I’m just going to write Crab blog, and I’m hoping people are going to… Like, Google is going to send me all this traffic. And now pivoting to dropshippers, if you have a passion for something, let’s say you have a pet niche store, you really want to be talking about pet products, right? You’re writing blogs about what are the best beds for Christmas for your loved dog or something like that. You can be elistical, right? It can be elistical about all the different things. And all these products will back to your store, right?

Exactly.

But it’s important to be writing great blogs. Now, with the rise of AI, you can obviously argument that. We don’t necessarily rely on AI for writing our blogs, but you can definitely cut some corners there. As long as you’re having an actual real person read through the content, making sure that it’s not garbage. Or if you have some super prompts, please send them over. But making sure that- I’ll share it later. Yeah, perfect. Amazing. So making sure that you have… Listen, at the end of the day, garbage in, garbage out. You put in garbage, you’re going to get garbage results. And if you can’t write the blog yourself, you have to hire somebody. You don’t have to make a million dollars. You can get really good writers that are not going to break the bank and just include that as part of your budget. That’s why, going back to what I was saying, you need to have a buffer of revenue and profit margins when you’re selling these products. You don’t want to just price the product $2 over the cost from the supplier. You want to put some buffer there so that you can pay a writer to write some amazing blogs for you so you can get some of that SEO traffic heading back to your website.

Definitely recommend it to do SEO for your drop-through. Great.

You hear everybody, wasn’t me who was telling you all to do SEO. I was for us here. I didn’t say anything at all. Now, to wrap this up, and I wish I didn’t because I’m loving this conversation, and I genuinely say that thank you so much for being here again. Absolutely. Thank you. I’m actually living a childhood dream of talking to people like you because I always wanted to be a YouTuber. I never had the effort put into it. It was those back in our mind projects, if everything fails, you start your YouTube channel. The inner kid inside of me is really glad and happy to be at this conversation. But what about your inner kid? Is there something in the personal rush, in the kid rush, that you would like to share? Maybe some traits you had as a kid that, I don’t know, got you into music production and then later into the trend or anything in particular you might want to just take a look back?

Sure. I’m trying to get deep here. I do this conversation. So think of it this way. I love it. No, I absolutely love it. So think of it this way. At the end of the day, what are we all doing here? We are always… Listen, you can… How can I say this? I don’t see myself ever retiring because what the hell am I going to do with my time? I see people like… The whole idea is you want to wake up in the morning and feel like you are doing something worthwhile. You are doing something worthwhile with the time that we have here. Whether it was music, I remember a comment that was on one of the forums that somebody, when I was doing music, somebody said something like, I wake up every day and I play this one song, which was one of my songs, and it’s like how I start my whole day, and it just puts my whole day in the right frame. That’s really what I did music for at the end of the day. I did it because I had a passion for it. I wanted to show people what I’m capable of doing.

But at the same time, it’s what are we doing it for? We’re doing it for people, for the effect that we have on people. Same thing with Celta Trend. Listen, I could do anything. If it wasn’t music, I could be doing something else. But I wanted to create something that is going to have a positive impact, the same way that my music had a positive impact on people. Since my music is still on Netflix, on a TV show, people are still engaging with it to this day. It’s not even something in in the past. Every day, there’s more messages about it on social media and stuff like that and people loving it. Same thing that I have with sell the trend is I want to create something that people are going to find value in, something that is going to actually change people’s lives and not just something that is going to generate money because you can generate money with almost anything. But that’s really what it comes down to is, if you go back, what does the kid of me thinks is that I’m still doing the exact same thing, still doing the same thing that I was doing when I was a kid, 15 years old, making music until now.

It’s still doing the exact same thing, just trying to create something that people are going love and people are going to really find value in.

Well, I don’t think I can top up my question after the reply you gave me. Okay, so if you don’t mind, I think this is it for today. Rush, this is the third time that I’m going to say thank you so much for being here. I do have actually one last question which might be the most important one in this entire conversation. Favorite genre of music of yours?

Of course. Listen, I love all types of music, even country music. To me, that was not really something that I gravitated towards. If you listen to some country music, it’s pretty great. There’s some really great songs. But to me, think of it this way, I also have data going through in the back of my mind. My choice of music has always been electronic music. I love electronic music because it’s got that perfect… Provided that it’s a great song. You got to have a great song. It can’t just be… Of course. Or a great beat. A beat can tell a story in itself. So electronic music for me, and if you ever want to come to Toronto, we will definitely go out for sure.

Go out. This is the best invitation ever. I’m actually keeping an eye, not on Toronto, but now I will, on Rome for next year because on June, Rufus Dussault, an Australian band, one of the biggest. They’re going to be doing an European tour, and after, they’re going to be doing an American tour. Do take a look at their website because they are coming to America and Canada.

Absolutely. That’s awesome. I love Rufus.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, same. Everybody talks about Inner Bloom. Yes, their most favorite their most well-recognized song. But I always recommend always from the last album, The Last Music, it is such a piece of art.

I love it. Got to check it out. Got to check out their last album for sure.

Yeah, check it out. Check it out. I’ll leave you to it then once again. This is Victor. Thank you so much. With coffee with Marta. Thank you so much for this. With experts, this is Rush. You’re the best.

I really appreciate you being in this, Rush. It’s my pleasure. My pleasure.