In this video, today we’re going to talk about how to start an online store right now how’s our online store today! we’re going to talk about the different types of online stores the different places you can start an online store this is going to be a really quick overview on everything you need to know on how to
start an online store so first off there’s a few different platforms you can go if you go with Shopify you can go with Amazon you go Etsy and there is a few others we’re gonna get to the pros and cons of all these but I think the
first thing we need to talk about is what are you going to sell now there’s a
few different options you have you can create your own product which I highly
recommend if there’s a lot of benefits to do than that you can white label a product and if you don’t know what white labeling is it’s basically where you
have a product that’s already made in China that that’s already been done over
and over again and you just stick your brand on it so an example of this might
be a handheld fan so if you have a handheld fan and it’s the same handheld
fan everybody has but you specifically stick your logo on there and the benefit
of that is it’s your brand basically now I don’t recommend this because it’s not
a huge competitive advantage another example is reselling you can buy products in bulk and can buy the products at wholesale for about half off and sell them online and try to make up that margin the last option I’ll talk about and it’s very popular right now it seems like a lot of people are interested in this is drop shipping so what drop shipping is basically people come to your website
purchase something and then you send in the information to the manufacturer who
makes the product and the manufacturer would send down so the example I would
give is you might have a website called the kayak camp and you are the kayak
king and you sell kayaks on there and a manufacturer might sell a kayak for $500
to the general public but for you you get a 20% off discount so you’d sell
that kayak for $500 and say someone comes and purchases it and then the manufacturer you’d say hey manufacturer here’s four dollars I’m going to keep a
hundred here’s four for you can you please ship this out to John Smith over
here so the good part is you get you don’t have to help carry any inventory with that so there’s a lot of benefits with it it’s not my favorite and I get
criticized for not liking dropshipping but I have very good reasons not to like drop shipping so you can use any for the all four of these business models on Shopify on Amazon or on your uh net see your own site all that kind of stuff so let’s go over first off on Shopify so if you have a Shopify site and your you’ve created your own product that is the best-case scenario in my opinion because it’s your product nobody else can sell a product like it it allows you to have a huge competitive advantage and I’ll talk more what I mean by this later in this video but when you have your own product it’s special and people can only buy it on your website and wherever you want to sell it that makes you your dink and
that’s the big thing in the game of selling anything is you need to be special the example I give for this is I went to Thailand and I went to the floating market and it’s like a big tourist attraction there and every single vendor there’s probably three or four different things that every single vendor was so and I don’t want to buy any of that stuff because it wasn’t you think like it wasn’t different enough if some of them are selling something extremely special like a handcrafted thing I heard it in much more interested in fact they probably would have gotten more of my money if everyone was selling something
different but because everyone was selling similar things I don’t want to buy any of that stuff and that’s what you’ve got to think about with your
company is you need to be special you need to be unique so by creating your
own product you do that it’s also much harder for someone to compete against
you because it’s your opponent so my example again with this one more example then we’ll move on its performance nut butter it’s my newest company and it’s a
macadamia coconut cashew blended nut butter comes in little pouches now
there’s nothing I mean it’s unique because there’s nothing else like that out there but then nothing stopping someone else from creating a similar product except for it’s hard work now remember this the harder work something is the less competition you’re gonna have in the long run so let’s contrast’ that with white labeling so white labeling has some barriers injury if you’re going to be white labeling a product you do have to go to get to talk to someone in China
you have to buy a thousand handheld and your logo on it likes nothing makes
you that special there’s nothing stopping someone else from doing that
same thing except for monetary reasons so you might have to spend $5,000 to
initiative maybe is only $3,000 to get all those handheld things to get a
thousand handheld fans so there is that barrier to entry it’s not just anyone
has three dozen dollars lying around so there is some barrier to entry but
there’s nothing that makes you that special so there’s someone that if they
see you being very successful they’ll come in and they’ll steal your lunch
money so keep that in mind with white leg length now there is a benefit if
you’re doing it on Shopify do you don’t have to sell it you don’t have to pay
all the fees but it’s harder to get traffic to your website I know I’m going
over a lot of this stuff I trust me it’ll make more sense by the end of this
video so the next thing we’ll talk about is wholesaling product I do not
recommend doing this especially on your own Shopify website but really anywhere and the reason is if you’re selling someone else’s product on your website
there’s nothing stopping that company from selling it on their own website for
cheaper and undercutting them and once again there’s nothing that really makes
you special now the one exception that this might be if you’re branding yourself as the kayak king or some company like that you’re the expert on kayaks this might have a benefit whether you’re reselling a product or you’re doing drop shipping now I made a video a little while ago on why I think drop shipping is a waste of time
and it got got a lot of heat people were very upset about that and I think Joshua
Lee makes a lot of sense for people that are new to e-commerce that have never
owned a business before they’re a little bit nervous about doing it it makes sense because you can get your feet wet and you can have some success I do have
a few friends that are making a decent amount of money doing drop shipping
that’s something to keep in mind when you watch YouTube you hear all these
people talking about how much money they’re making doing drop shipping what
they don’t tell you is how much money they’re spending on ads and the only way that I know I mean probably the best way in the way to the most dropshippers make
a lot of money drop shipping is spending a lot of money on ads specifically
Google Shopping has a gay product listing ads so keep that in mind if you’re young or you don’t have a lot of money and you think you can just start a drop shipping
site and you can become a millionaire in a year it’s probably not likely not
impossible I mean feel free to prove me wrong I love I love that but it’s hard once again what makes you special now the only way I think that you can do drop shipping is if once again are the kayak king and you have a website or you review all the kayaks you have a YouTube channel where you review kayak so you talked about which kayak is best for what kind of person all the different stuff and then people want to buy from you because you’re the expert that makes sense then a drop shipping
model makes sense then doing a resale, model makes sense but in a lot of
circumstances it doesn’t so this is everything we’ve been talking about was
on Shopify but a lot of the same principles apply to selling on Amazon if
you’re doing drop shipping on Amazon my fear is what makes you special what’s gonna stop the manufacturer from coming on there and I’ll add a caveat note to drop shipping amazon’s taking over a lot of the e-commerce market they are the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner and drop shipping there’s not a lot stopping someone from a manufacturer from listing their product on Amazon and cutting you the middleman out now if you do like I did I created my own product that performant snuff out a product I can sell on my own website and I can sell on Amazon and
Amazon loves at me for it they want me to sell them their platform because they get a cut of every item I sell they get 15 to 30% of it depending on a few different things paying on fees apply so Amazon is really where the future’s headed unless you can have a good reason someone wanna come to your website once again the kayak king is a great example because people would go to that website to re reviews to find out what the best product is and then they might just buy from you just because they like you or they’re just because it’s so much easier than having to go all the way to Amazon so those are some of the things just some quick thoughts on Etsy I think
that’s makes sense for certain types of companies if you’re a small company and
you have a lot of handcrafted goods sure go ahead and put it on I don’t think a
lot of multi-million dollar companies are running on Etsy anymore in fact it’s
kind of counterintuitive to what Etsy is all about very small businesses so
I think it’s fun you can want to get started start on Etsy it’s I think it’s
free to get started and then you they just take a percentage of sales so
definitely recommend starting there on top of that Amazon is an easy place to
start as well starting your own Shopify site can be a lot of work but the reward
is worth it because in the long run you have you have something you had a real tangible thing probably with Amazon is they can kick you off whenever they feel like it so if an Amazon gets upset at you or Amazon just decided something
you’re too much competition if for whatever reason they can kick you off
and you have your own Shopify sec you own it so that’s really important so if you’re actually looking to start and as I mentioned this video is about how to start today highly recommend building a shop five you can also look at Woocommerce makes sense if you are highly technical if you really know how to do a lot of stuff it’s a little bit cheaper but it’s self posted which means you have to pay for hosting you have to do more of the setup work there’s a bunch of negatives to it for
99 percent of people watching this video highly recommend going to Shopify I do have a link up here to Bluehost which is the hosting service you would need if you want to do what commerce but more important they have a link up here to Shopify and I’ll link down below the show notes to Shopify or you get a free 14-day trial and if you use my link for blue hose or Shopify I get a small kickback so as a thank you I will give you a free 30-minute consultation session to help you set up your store so get started it’s really easy I have another video where I set up a Shopify site in four minutes the performance stuff on our site I set it up in four minutes super easy to do very intuitive and I do have a bunch of tutorials on it I’ll put a link up here to the four minute Shopify set up and down in the show notes that’s pretty much it like I have a ton of other videos if you enjoyed this video make sure you click
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Thank you for watching this video