Ecommerce is evolving, and it's making building a profitable ecommerce business harder than ever.

What worked five years ago is now a dead end. Digital marketing today is lazy. It prioritizes paid users even though every entrepreneur knows organic users represent a much higher lifetime value. But attracting paid users is so much faster and easier, and entrepreneurs are blinded by the FOMO of short-term crutches like discounting to boost sales at any cost. That cost is often nonexistent retention rates that bleed your profits and only creates more desperation for quick conversions. Most retailers end up trying to compete on price, a game you're always going to lose, and get trapped trading their time for money, the same rat race most entrepreneurs started their own business to escape.

There is a way to stop micromanaging your business and focus on scaling it: You need a brand.

Consumers always buy for the same reasons, whether online or offline, but ecommerce has profoundly changed buying behavior and the typical buyer's journey. In the early days of ecommerce, having a good SEO strategy and attractive website design was enough to generate sales, so brand development was largely seen as an unnecessary expense.

With the economic disruption from social distancing, more demographics are shifting to online shopping, and it's accelerating ecommerce's evolution exponentially. Consumers expect a seamless experience that reflects their values and offers more than a transaction. To achieve this, what you need today is an approach that marries the customer insights and the strategic direction of branding with the tools of ecommerce. After every category has been disrupted and saturated with DTC offers, building a strong brand is quickly becoming the only way to differentiate your business amongst competitors.

You need the 7C's.

In Checkout: The eCommerce Branding Book, Neil Verma, a former corporate brand executive and ecommerce entrepreneur, introduces the 7C Method, an end-to-end brand strategy designed specifically for ecommerce. The result of an exhaustive study of the top 100 ecommerce brands blended with blue-chip brand secrets, it's the only branding book of its kind. And the 7Cs aren't another growth hack: This is a holistic brand strategy that eliminates guesswork, optimizes resources, and gives you back.