20-Plus Years Later - What has Changed in eCommerce

I started this ecommerce blog in 2009 to document the steps my wife and I used to build a successful ecommerce, an effort that we started early in our marriage and that got our family off to a great start.

We build a sporting goods store, RobbinsSports.com, that (after five years of hard work) was netting us over $1m annually in sales, and producing an annual income that was over $200k.

During the process of building our sporting good store, we added two children to our family, and we learned how to balance our time between raising these kids and continuing to build a business that would provide for them and others to come.

In 2009, we sold RobbinsSports.com. Shortly after that, went to work I spent two years working for the LDS Church doing search engine optimization and helping with other marketing and consulting roles.

Fast forward 20 years from when we started our first successful ecommerce drop-ship business in 2004. Much has changed about the industry.

With our non-compete agreement long since expired, and now with six sports-loving boys in the household, it made sense for us to pick back up on sporting goods and team sports equipment. In 2023, we created RobbinsAthletics.com, a resource for athletes, coaches, and parents to learn and to buy sporting goods. Over the first half of 2024, we decided to start making significant efforts to make RobbinsAthletics our main family income, specializing in, among other (sometimes random) things:

• Custom Sports Uniforms - A couple of our suppliers now offer design tools that allow customers to do custom jersey and other designs to make their uniforms
• Portable Bleachers - These are not so easy to ship, but our supplier has a deal with freight that makes shipping somewhat affordable despite high gas prices and a bit of a breakdown of the overall logistics system in the US.

But much has also stayed the same.

Here is a quick list of what has happened with things that affect ecommerce drop-ship businesses like ours over the past 20 years since we started our first online business, including things like:

• Google search algorithm updates
• Link building
• Content
• Shipping and Handling Costs
• Suppliers and Supply Chain
• Amazon's Impact

Google Search Algorithm Updates

Google has always been the fountain of traffic for our businesses. When I first got into internet marketing, I didn't have a budget for paid search, and I wasn't interested in spending all the time required to do the attribution required to make sure paid search is being profitable.

20 years later, I still use organic search for 90% or more of the traffic to our new sporting goods store

Here's a rundown of the major updates that have turned the search engine landscape into a rollercoaster ride:

1. Panda Update (2011)

• Purpose: Targeted low-quality, thin content, and content farms.
• Impact: Many sites with large volumes of shallow content saw massive drops in rankings. The days of churning out keyword-stuffed articles just to rank were over.
• Frustration: Years of building content strategies around sheer volume suddenly felt wasted as Google pivoted to favor depth and quality.

2. Penguin Update (2012)

• Purpose: Penalized sites using manipulative link-building strategies.
• Impact: Many SEOs who had invested heavily in link schemes saw their efforts decimated overnight. The update focused on the quality, not just the quantity, of backlinks.
• Frustration: All those "perfect" backlink profiles you painstakingly built? Google just decided they were spammy.

3. Hummingbird Update (2013)

• Purpose: Improved Google's understanding of search intent and the meaning behind queries.
• Impact: Content had to become more contextually relevant rather than just keyword-focused. This shifted the focus toward more natural language and user-centric content.
• Frustration: After years of optimizing for exact match keywords, SEOs had to rethink content strategies entirely.

4. Mobilegeddon (2015)

• Purpose: Gave a ranking boost to mobile-friendly websites.
• Impact: Sites that weren’t optimized for mobile took a serious hit, leading to a mad scramble to redesign and rethink user experience.
• Frustration: All those beautiful, detailed desktop designs? Google just decided that if they don’t look good on a tiny screen, they’re not good enough.

5. RankBrain (2015)

• Purpose: Integrated machine learning into the search algorithm to better understand queries.
• Impact: This AI-driven component made search results more dynamic, focusing on user satisfaction and relevance rather than static factors.
• Frustration: The unpredictability of an AI-driven algorithm meant traditional SEO techniques started to feel like shooting in the dark.

6. Medic Update (2018)

• Purpose: Focused on health, wellness, and YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) content, prioritizing authority and trustworthiness.
• Impact: Sites in the medical, legal, and financial sectors saw wild fluctuations, often without clear reasons.
• Frustration: Years of solid, authoritative content-building could be upended overnight by an opaque update with no clear guidelines.

7. BERT Update (2019)

• Purpose: Enhanced understanding of context in queries, focusing on natural language processing.
• Impact: This update improved Google's ability to understand the nuance and intent behind user queries, affecting nearly 10% of all searches.
• Frustration: Yet another reminder that keyword optimization alone isn’t enough; Google’s increasingly nuanced understanding of language means content needs to be more sophisticated and user-focused.

8. Core Web Vitals (2021)

• Purpose: Prioritized user experience factors such as load time, interactivity, and visual stability.
• Impact: Pages needed to be faster, more responsive, and stable to maintain or improve rankings.
• Frustration: After years of content and backlink optimization, now every tiny UX detail matters too.

9. Helpful Content Update (2022)

• Purpose: Aimed at promoting content that is genuinely helpful and written for people rather than search engines.
• Impact: Sites with content perceived as primarily search-driven rather than user-centric saw declines.
• Frustration: If you thought you had finally cracked the content code, Google just moved the goalposts again by emphasizing user-centricity even more.

10. SpamBrain (Ongoing)

• Purpose: Google's ongoing AI-powered fight against spam, which targets various manipulative practices, including link schemes and keyword stuffing.
• Impact: More sophisticated detection of spammy tactics, even those previously considered safe.
• Frustration: The lines keep shifting, and tactics that once worked might now backfire due to constantly evolving spam detection.

11. Continuous Core Updates

• Purpose: These periodic, broad updates to Google’s algorithm adjust how various ranking signals are weighted.
• Impact: Rankings can fluctuate unpredictably even if you haven't changed anything.
• Frustration: The constant tinkering means that SEO feels like a never-ending race where the finish line keeps moving.

The Bottom Line:

Google’s relentless march towards a better user experience and more sophisticated search has forced SEOs to continuously adapt, often feeling like they’re running on a treadmill. Just when you think you’ve cracked the code, another update comes along to remind you that the only constant in SEO is change. The challenge is not just keeping up but anticipating where Google will go next.

Shipping and Handling Costs

Shipping costs have soared over the past 20 years, especially as a percentage how much customers spend on any particular product they buy from our store.

It used to be that we were able to have a $20 jersey or shorts shipped for $3.95 from several of our suppliers. 

Now, it's impossible to get anything shipped for less than $15. For expedited products, the increase in price makes it cost prohibitive in many cases. Our conversion rates are much lower than they were in 2004 - 2009, when we were building our first online drop-shipping busienss

Suppliers and Supply Chain

Especially since the insane years of 2020 and 2021, where the COVID situation shut everything down and messed up the economy permanently, suppliers have been much more difficult to work with in terms of getting discounts and even being in stock with products.

One of our suppliers, SanMar, used to have hundreds of almost every style in every color and size. Over the past 2-3 years, they have been woefully out of stock on things we used to not have issues with.

Amazon Impact

Many people begin their shopping experience by going straight to Amazon. We don't currently sell any products on Amazon, so this leaves us out of that opportunity all together.

Amazon clearly gets a sweetheart deal on its shipping costs (no doubt there is conspiracy, with small businesses and taxpayers subsidizing Amazon's shipping and other costs), which makes it even more difficult to compete. When people can go to Amazon and get a product delivered in a couple days as opposed to a week later, and they get free shipping instead of having to pay at least $10, the trend toward Amazon gets more tilted.

Can Ecommerce Drop-Ship Business Still Thrive

The short answer to that question is: Yes. Although it's not as easy as it once was, our business is still thriving.

However, ecommerce businesses must be more clever, more creative to thrive. It's critical to find voids in the competitive landscape and target those to make a match between a Google searcher and someone who decides to buy your product so that you can make a profit.