The E-Commerce Reality Check: Having the Conversations Small Business Owners Actually Need

The E-commerce Reality Check: Having the Conversations Small Business Owners Actually Need

Presented by Adelaide Business Hub with The Australian Government Digital Solutions program and facilitated by Steve Davis, founder of Talked About Marketing.

Let's address the elephants stampeding through the e-commerce room—the ones most workshops pretend aren't there. While everyone's busy promising overnight success with drop-shipping and viral TikToks, we'll spend three hours having genuinely useful conversations about selling online as a small business, without the sugar coating or the doom and gloom.

Can you realistically compete with Amazon's logistics, or is there a smarter game to play? When marketplaces control your customer relationships and take their cut, are you building lasting value or just paying digital rent? And in a world drowning in AI-generated product descriptions, what actually makes customers choose your carefully crafted words over the competition?

We'll explore the real questions that matter:

• The shipping dilemma: why perfectly reasonable costs send customers fleeing, and what you can actually do about it

• Platform politics: when joining marketplace giants is strategic leverage versus slow strangulation of your brand

• Social selling sanity: finding the sweet spot between authentic engagement and desperate digital busking

• Content that converts: why your product descriptions might matter less than the story around them

• Promotion without prostitution: marketing tactics that work without making you feel like you need a shower

• The independence question: building your own digital home versus thriving in someone else's ecosystem

No magical thinking. No "weird tricks." Just honest exploration of what actually works when you're not a venture-funded startup but a real business selling real products to real people. We'll uncover surprising opportunities hiding in apparent obstacles and discover why some traditional "disadvantages" might be your secret weapons.

Because sometimes the best e-commerce strategy isn't about competing on Amazon's terms, it's about creating something genuinely worth talking about.