Selling anything under $100 online? You're running a charity for Meta and Google
About $50 of ad spend per fashion sale on Meta, about $32 on Google, a third to a half of a $100 order gone. Stop shouting and start talking to the 100 customers who matter.
If you sell anything for less than a hundred dollars online and you pay Meta or Google to find your customers, congratulations: you're running a charity for Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, and neither of them is going to send you a thank-you card.
We built a calculator to prove it, at getvia.xyz/adspendcalc, using industry averages for fashion and apparel.1 In the US a sale through Meta ads costs you about $50 in ad spend. Through Google Shopping it's about $32. ChatGPT's shiny new ads are running at well over $100 an order on the early numbers. Europe's a bit cheaper and Southeast Asia cheaper again, and it still adds up to the same thing.
So on a $100 sale, somewhere between a third and a half goes to a tech company before you've paid for the product, the packaging, the shipping, the returns, the staff or yourself. On a $60 T-shirt you're paying to lose money, and the more you sell, the more you lose.
It gets worse every year too, because you're bidding against everyone else for the attention of people who mostly aren't looking to buy anything. You're paying for clicks from people scrolling past on the bus.
With numbers like these, a shop on a high street can be cheaper to run than a website. The rent's the rent. It doesn't go up every time a competitor raises their bid, and people actually walk in wanting to buy something. Online, every customer comes with a toll, and you pay it again next time, because they didn't remember you, the algorithm did.
And the daft part is what all that money buys you. Reach. A hundred thousand people saw your ad, a few hundred clicked, a handful bought, and next month you pay again to find them all over again, because nobody remembers you, they don't even remember the feed.
A hundred good customers are worth more than a hundred thousand viewers.
I'll keep saying it until people get bored of hearing it: a hundred good customers are worth more than a hundred thousand viewers. The ones who come back and drag their mates along. You don't find them by shouting louder than everyone else on somebody else's platform. You find them by getting closer to them.
That's what we built VIA for. It's a network of like-minded brands, retailers and shoppers. A shopper's Personal Shopper tells you exactly what they're after, and you pay a minimal amount to answer, so you only ever talk to people who actually want what you make. Rooms take it further: small, private spaces where a brand, the shops that stock it and the people who love it can talk and make things together, without an algorithm deciding who gets to see what.
So stop shouting at strangers and start talking to the people who matter. Work out what the shouting is costing you at getvia.xyz/adspendcalc, then join at app.getvia.xyz.
