Gretta Van Riel is one of those eCommerce gurus that actually has the credentials to back up her training programs. She has achieved some eCommerce awards, one of them being the “Shopify Build A Business” award, and is responsible for some of the more successful eCommerce brands. She also claimed to have generated over $600,000 from her first eCommerce business in just 6 months, which is already considered impressive. And now, she’s offering an online course that allows her students to duplicate her success in eCommerce. Sounds interesting, right? Let’s find out about it in this Start And Scale Course review.
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A little background about Gretta Van Riel first. Gretta is a native of Australia, and has already claimed success at eCommerce despite her young age (meaning she may very well be earning more than some of the older, higher-positioned people in the corporate world). She’s also responsible for several brands prevalent in eCommerce, including SkinnyMe Tea (focusing on healthy tea supplements), DropBottle (a “fruit-infuser” bottle), The 5th (focusing on watches), and many others. Her success can be attributed to her strong social media marketing presence, which she says is in her expertise.
Gretta claims that the secret to her eCommerce success is that she’s just using only one strategy for all her eCommerce brands. She aims to teach that same blueprint to people who want to achieve the same amount of success that she had. And this is how the Start And Scale online course is born.
Start And Scale is an online course that aims to help people build an eCommerce business of their own. Unlike most online courses of its kind, it claims that it’s not a course about dropshipping, wherein they tend to teach you how to build a dropshipping store and sell low-quality products. This business model, they say, only lasts for a few months because of bad products and customer reviews.
Start And Scale, meanwhile, claims to be different. It teaches you how to build a sustainable eCommerce brand from scratch. What it means is that your online store will last for years and would be able to generate a steady stream of passive income for you. You’re going to learn how to create your own brand and market it. It’s a more sustainable business model because you would be building a long-term asset. Also, with a trademarked brand, other people can’t copy you and take the business away from you.
The course comprises a total of 8 modules, which take you step-by-step from starting your online store, how and where to source your products, to scaling it (hence the name). There’s also training on how you can market your store and build your leads using social media. A particular thing to note here is that you don’t get any training to use paid ads here. Instead, it focuses more in “influencer marketing”, which I’ll talk about a bit later.
One of the more interesting things about Start And Scale is that it also has a module on how you can reach out to various social media influencers to help promote your store. While it’s not really something new, it’s something that isn’t usually taught in some online eCommerce courses. And after all, Gretta is also an expert in influencer marketing, she also has a course called “Hey Influencers”, which teaches you even more things about influencer marketing.
Aside from the main training courses, Start And Scale also contains a few “bonuses” of their own. The first one is the Ecom Mastery Series, a collection of video interviews from the founders of other million-dollar eCommerce brands. Their experience-sharing might serve to give you ideas or inspiration if you want to learn more on how to succeed in eCommerce. The second bonus includes case studies from various Start And Scale students, that deal with how they manage to keep their business profitable and sustainable even when facing the ongoing pandemic situation. Finally, you’ll also be given access to a private Facebook group, where you can interact with the instructors and other students of this course, and share your experience with the course.
It costs $997 to enroll in this course, which is reasonably more affordable than other eCommerce courses. Overall, it seems to be a decent enough eCommerce online course, and Gretta seems to be pretty much legitimate. However, I don’t really see any outstanding qualities that set it apart from the other online courses circulating on the internet today. It might be better off if you first start on free educational material first, before paying off a mentor. This would help you decide for yourself if eCommerce/dropshipping is a good business model for you.
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