The 48 Most Important eCommerce Books For Hyper Growth

Success doesn’t come to the ignorant. Success is often dependent on your ability to learn from your own mistakes, and perhaps more importantly, from the success and failures of those that have gone on before you. These are some of the best books about making money online. If you are own an eCommerce store, you should at least be aware of these books, read them, and ideally — study them.

General eCommerce

Get Rich Click!: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet — Marc Ostrofsky

eCommerce marketing doesn’t do a whole lot of good if it doesn’t generate ROI. And by return, we mean cold hard cash in yo’ pocket. Through the clever use of real-life examples from every walk of life (guaranteed to be at least ONE that fits you), and step-by-step guides this ebook will have you walking away knowing how to turn hashtags and digital goodies into real profit.

One-click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com — Richard Brandt

One of the great pillars of eCommerce, Amazon has touched almost everyone’s life, and I don’t mean in a creepy way. Want to find how they went from online bookstore to eCommerce giant? This biography/how-to-dominate-the-world ebook will walk you through the game-changing website Jeff Bezos unleashed on the internet using five simple words: Buy Now With One Click.

The Handmade Entrepreneur — How to Sell on Etsy, or Anywhere Else: Easy Steps for Building a Real Business Around Your Crafts — Dani Marie

Have a trendy, knit, handmade, decorative thingymabob? Awesome! Want to successfully sell your vintage shabby-chic table instead of keeping it in your house for the third week in a row? Better follow the advice this ebook has. Whether it’s taking better photos, making your own lightbox, or just getting your account set up, Dani Marie will get you on the right foot.

The advice is wonderfully comprehensive, covering everything from the nitty gritty on getting your product ready for market, to basic SEO and branding so you STAY in the market.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — Brad Stone

Hey look it’s Amazon again! Maybe it has to do something with them setting the bar on what it means to be in business online. With unprecedented access to the history and workings of Amazon, this book (also available on Kindle — shocking, I know) gives a blow-by-blow account of how an empire was built on relentless ambition and secrecy.

Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula To Sell Almost Anything Online, Build A Business You Love, And Live The Life Of Your Dreams — Jeff Walker

This book is almost a step-by-step guide on how to print your own money. Legally. Grab your product, plug in his formula and hold on for the wild ride. This book will give you the rundown on pumping your business with adrenaline using great real-life stories and its fair share of acronyms. Go 0–60 in 179 pages.

DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online — Russell Brunson and Dan Kennedy

Slow website traffic can mean the death of an eCommerce site, but it also means there is a bigger problem. Fortunately a fixable one. Going above just driving traffic to sites, this book runs through how to build reliable funnels pulling in your dream target market and leading them over and over to the checkout page. Plus this includes handy illustrations for you visual folks!

How to Make Money Using Etsy: A Guide to the Online Marketplace for Crafts and Handmade Products — Tim Adam

Another great resource on bringing your handcrafted whatchamacallit to market. This book has super helpful broken-out sections on each social media channel (though Pinterest seems to have missed the boat) and how to use them to convert on Etsy, along with blogging tips and basic SEO.

Small Business Big Money Online: A Proven System to Optimize eCommerce Websites and Increase Internet Profits — Alex Harris

It’s quite true that you can have all the traffic you want and still fail if you’re unable to convert them. This book runs through how to make everything from fitness classes to fast food profitable through data collection, quantitative analysis, A/B testing and actionable advice on how to make this work for your business.

 

Content Marketing

Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less — Joe Pulizzi

Most of our days are filled with brands yelling at us from every direction: Buy this! No, Buy THIS! This book encourages a different tone of voice to stand out in the crowd. With case studies from LEGO and Coca-Cola (a requirement for any good business book), this book walks you through how to not just attract people, but your people through epic content.

The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand — Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio

The human eye processes visual information thousands of times faster than you can process this sentence. This book is a complete roadmap to leveraging visual content of all shapes and sizes.

 

The deadly sins of content marketing — Oracle

There are 7 ½ deadly sins in the marketing world, and we’ve all been guilty of most at some point. Keep this book by your side for when you fall (because you will) so you learn how to pick yourself up and not do it again.Want a freebie? #1: Making it all about YOU! Instead, ask yourself what you can do for THEM.

Data Driven Content Marketing — Hana Abaza

Data is the ultimate language of “feedback” and in this world where some things work (or fail) “epically” and some just do “ok”, data can give you a clearer answer on what your content marketing is doing besides just a “yes” or “no”. We’ve found this ebook to be an incredibly useful resource using data to fuel the initial content creation process and use it again when improving performance and building strategy.

Showing Real ROI For Your Content Marketing — Top Rank, Curata, Content Marketing Institute

This ebook has great advice and insight from real brands who use content marketing as a core part of their marketing strategy. If it works for places like Dell and Kraft Foods, it’s a teaching point for you, and these very candid examples will help you translate their advice into your own context.

A Practical Guide to Killer Marketing Content — Hubspot

This ebook is a fantastic intermediate resource for those who have good understanding of basics but needs more complex examples of content marketing. Tons of helpful tips on building out your content calendar and mapping your content to buying cycles, with an emphasis on “practical”.

 

How To Create a Well-Oiled Content Marketing Machine — Kissmetrics

Content marketing is not a one-off project. Nope, not at all. Content marketing is a machine that keeps churning and (hopefully) reeling people in with incredible content translated into the voice of “them”. And they’ll love you for it, over and over. This ebook will teach you how to build, promote and maintain a well-oiled stream of profitable content.

 

The Ultimate Guide to Medium — Greg Muender

Medium can turn your writing into whatever you need, as long as you do it right. Want to raise money? Read this book. Want to land a book deal? Read this book. Want to write in a way that you can turn a few paragraphs into a story that inspires? You know what to do…

 

 

Management

The 4-Hour Work Week — Timothy Ferriss

The great trailblazer of hacking life in the name of working less and living more. Whether you’re just trying to escape the cubicle you’re sitting in right now, or feeling the travel bug and don’t know how to itch it, the stack of practical tips will get you well on your way.

 

 

How to Win Friends & Influence People — Dale Carnegie

The gold standard of books you should read (see, your mother was right!). This timeless classic is a blueprint for encouraging change, winning people over to your way of thinking, and handling people without making them feel like they’re being handled.

 

 

Think and Grow Rich — Napolean Hill

Another classic, this is the essential 13-step guide to thinking like the rich in order to join them. Countless stories, examples and wisdom from the great names in history over the past century make this an inspiring read that will make even the doubters ready to make a change in their lives.

 

 

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change — Stephen R. Covey

A B-school staple and a personal favorite. This is the ultimate guide in both creating and maintaining an effective edge. This book will completely transform the way you go about your day and offer a new definition of what it truly means to be organized. Not to mention this is the best use case of “synergy”!

 

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses — Eric Ries

Most startups fail, though from preventable issues. This book provides entrepreneurs with a method of surviving in an age where continuous testing and improvement are needed just to keep afloat. A company needs to be agile, ever-changing and adapting. It needs to be lean.

 

SEO

The Beginner’s Guide To SEO — Moz

The ultimate guide to the basics of SEO from the gurus over at Moz. They are a great resource across so many topics, and this is no exception. Whether you don’t even know what SEO stands for, or dipping your remaining 9 toes into the marketing world, this is the perfect place to start.

The Advanced Guide To SEO — Neil Patel

Once you’ve gotten the basics, this advanced guide will take your content strategy to the next level. Whether you’re building a new hierarchy for your website or wrapping your brain around the finer points of SERP mechanics.

SEO Now. 2015 — Linkdex

Want to understand the most recent issues and topics on SEO? Want to know why organic search is so vital to the success of your business? Want to know how you can be there right when your customers are looking for someone just like you? Check this book out and you might just be in luck.

 

 

Ecommerce SEO: An advanced guide to on-page search engine optimization for ecommerce — Traian Neacsu

Cover to cover this is the most complete and authoritative book on SEO from an eCommerce perspective. It walks you through the why, the how, and all of the nitty gritty details so you can get it right the first time.

 

 

A/B Testing / CRO

Convert!: Designing Web Sites to increase Traffic and Conversion — Benjamin Hunt

There is a giant conversion gap between an “ok” website and a “great” website. Only a few design, copy and targeted testing changes stand between you and a high converting site. It only takes a few seconds for a customer to decide the effort “isn’t worth it”, so eliminate the hurdles on their path to purchase and you should see the orders start to roll in.

Don’t Make me Think, Revisited — Steve Krug

This book is one I would recommend most for web usability and navigation. Keep to the rules of being self-evident and removing all moments where thought is required on where to go next. Thinking means effort, and effort means frustration, and frustration means bounces.

 

A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers — Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen

Incredibly approachable, with concrete examples and readable in an afternoon, this is the ultimate guide on finding out what version really does better. You can’t always be right, but with A/B testing, next time you can be less wrong with a few new customers in tow!

 

Boost E-commerce Sales and Make More Money: Three Hundred Tips to Increase Conversion Rates and Generate Leads — Alex Harris

The name says it all: Three hundred ways to make your new website not cut your conversion rate in half (he fortunately learned from his mistake). With breakdowns of all key pages and improvements to hammer into each one, these are helpful tips to retune how your web experience works together.

Customer Engagement (Social Media and Customer Service)

Return on Relationship — Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose

This is a book for everyone who has questioned whether a social media channel was a worthy investment of time and money (read: everyone). This book will clear the air on maximizing relationship and how much impact building community through conversation can have on your business growth. Hint: it’s exponential!

 

Like, Follow, Share: Awesome, Actionable Social Media Marketing to Maximize Your Online Potential — Suse Barnes

Now that the menu of social media options has exploded, it’s up to books like this to help you understand which channel is best suited for your business along with maximizing impact on some of the major channels. Like, follow, share, and don’t get left behind.

 

Ask : The counterintuitive online formula to discover exactly what your customers want to buy…create a mass of raving fans…and take any business to the next level — Ryan Levesque

Want to know exactly what your customers are looking for, and also know how to give it to them? Sometimes the quickest way to figuring out what John Smith surfing around on the interwebs is looking for is by simply asking.

 

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World — Gary Vaynerchuck

Every social media encounter is an opportunity — unfortunately most companies take each opportunity and try to land the “knock-out punch”. People didn’t come to Facebook to be hammered with sales ads. You didn’t get on twitter to be bombarded with flash deals (you came for cat videos, duh). This book sets things right and outlines strategies for tailoring content to each social channel that will pull people in and build relationships, so that when the time is right, that knock-out punch will hit them square in the wallet.

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users — Guy Kawasaki

Full of tactics, practical tips, and the roadmap for when there seem to be too many options to choose from, this book will show you how to get the most bang for your social media buck. You’ll find a step by step guide on how to build out your social media foundation, grow a following and integrate blogging and content marketing into the mix.

 

Our Best Twitter Tips: 33 Ways to Get the Most From Twitter — Buffer

No surprises here — just a lot of helpful tips from the folks who make it possible to schedule out weeks of social posts at a time. Thirty three helpful insights on things like when the best time to tweet is, how to attract your most valuable followers, and how to tweet for maximum engagement.

Logistics (Warehouse, Shipping, Inventory)

5 Signs It’s Time to Outsource Your Fulfillment and Shipping — Rakuten Superlogistics

Fulfillment issues may seem bad in the moment, but they can have devastating issues in the long run. This is an incredibly helpful ebook on how to leverage fulfillment providers with multiple locations and scale by outsourcing. Know what to look for now before problems become death sentences.

 

Inbound

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly — David Meerman Scott

When you leverage online tools and media, you can engage with customers at a fraction of the cost for a typical ad campaign. New world and new rules calls for a new rule book, and this is the one to take you through and come out the other side with millions of brand evangelists.

 

Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today’s Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth — Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown

Want to see how companies like Uber, Yelp, LinkedIn and Evernote grew exponentially? From the growth hacks they used to get things rapidly off the ground, to full growth playbooks they are now employing, learn how to generate billions of dollars in value in a fraction of the time.

 

100 Days of Growth — Sujan Patel and Rob Wormley

An excellent compilation of actionable steps you can take to implement growth hacks. You could read the billions of blogs, books, papers and scribblings about how to grow your business, or you could take the next 100 days and actually take your business there. Day 1? Start sending out T-Shirts and see what happens.

 

 

50 Shades of Growth — Sid Bharath and Danny Halarewich

An excellent free book from LemonStand. Containing 50 easily implemented growth hacks that you can do without too many resources. It’s growth hacking from a purely eCommerce frame of view. Plus it’s FREE, so you have no excuse.

 

 

Email

The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Apps — Zapier

The name says it all. Email marketing is an incredibly effective strategy when you use it correctly — you’re competing with a whole bunch of other inbox clutter. Check out this guide to segment, A/B test, grow your email list and set up transactional emails like a pro.

 

 

The Smart Guide to Email Marketing Conversion — Unbounce

A quick and effective read and my go-to resource on convincing people that an email is much more than an email. Treat them like the content marketing pieces they are, and that email will be shared around for the next decade.

 

 

 

Analytics

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives — Steven Levy

Google has firmly taken root of our day-to-day. You’re probably using it right now. How has this invasion happened? Check out this look into the machine that drives almost everything on the web in unprecedented clarity.

 

 

Google Analytics Universal Guide: Best Practices for Implementation and Reporting — Eric Fettman

What is the end game of analytics? To get more numbers? More reports on those numbers? How about actually improving the customer experience? This ebook gives a comprehensive rundown on implementing Google Analytics correctly and pulling actionable insight out.

Branding

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding — Al Ries and Laura Ries

The definitive work and step-by-step guide to establishing a brand. Rule No. 1? The power of the brand is inversely proportional to its scope. Define what the brand is clearly or be at risk of having no brand at all.

 

 

The Lucky Brand — David Brier

Proven brand strategies that are exceedingly easy to implement that can reinvigorate a brand that has been drowned out by the noise of a new era.

 

 

 

 

Personal Branding for the Business Professional — Chris Brogan

There used to be business cards. Now we have LinkedIn pages and Instagram accounts. Want to make sure you’re making the right impression and making it clear who you are even if YOU aren’t even in the room? Check out this quick read and make sure your bases are covered.

PPC

An Introductory Guide to Paid Search — Hubspot

A very helpful beginner’s guide to PPC metrics, tracking, optimizing ad copy and keywords, along with setting the budget. Want to maximize your inbound ROI? Make sure you have all these basics covered and you should be well on your way.

 

 

Adwords eBook — Wordstream

This is actually a whole library of helpful resources on making sure your Adwords efforts and dollars are being used effectively. Eliminate negative keywords, ad poaching, and some great tips on picking the best PPC tool or agency based on your needs.

Conclusion

If you actually read this post until the very end — then I know you must be a good reader, so go read these books. If you like math, then you probably counted them and found out there are actually 48 books listed here instead of 47 — and you’d be correct. That’s my gift to you, a numbered post that has the wrong number of books listed just to see who actually read all the way to the bottom, counted them, noticed, and commented to tell me that my math is wrong.

This post originally appeared on the LemonStand blog.

William Harris is the VP of Marketing for a large eCommerce store.  He's a top contributor at Search Engine Journal, Social Media Today, LemonStand, The Next Web, and Sellbrite. 

You can follow him on Twitter (@wmharris101) and Google+, or subscribe to his blog on Elumynt.