How To Start An Ecommerce Business For Beginners 2021

 

How To Start An Ecommerce Business For Beginners 2021

A complete checklist of everything that you need to know when you're going to start an e-commerce business especially as a beginner.

 Two Types of E-commerce

 

Traditional E-commerce

 

Buy Bulk Products

Higher Risk

Higher Upfront Costs

I had to purchase all products from China import them into Australia and then pay taxes on them and all these different insurances and stuff and then I just have to pay to get these packaged it was just a lot of wasted money and time and it was a lot riskier. Because you have to buy all the products first to even start with.

Dropshipping E-commerce

 

Buy when Customer Orders

Low Risk

Very Low Upfront Costs

 

 But then I came across dropshipping e-commerce and that is so much better what we do with this is we act as a middleman and when someone purchases from our website we send it directly from the supplier and why this is so good are low risk.  We don't have to put money upfront you want to put little money upfront as possible so you can. Have more money behind you to grow your business.

Let's look at your product

Product

 

Aliexpress.com

Should sell it for $20-$50

Impulse buy

Solves a problem – Helps a lot!

Not available locally

 

We want to get our product from Aliexpress.com. Aliexpress is basically like a wholesale supplier so just a website and there are all different categories here.  It's like a big warehouse or a big company that has all these different suppliers that supply products so if I click women's clothing there might be a hundred thousand different suppliers that sell different types of women's clothing and then we want to work with one supplier.

The amount of money should be $20 to $50 and then that is how we make the profits by doing volume so we do a lot even though we make a small amount for each product if we do volume that's how we scale.

The product must solve a problem very very crucial so if you look at some of the biggest companies out there it was like that the teeth whitening trend the IPL device trend and all the face care and all the face care companies reason why these companies went so well was simply that they solved the big problem.

We want to make sure that the product isn't available locally so if you want to go up to your local Bunnings Warehouse Kmart or if you're you're in the US if you want to go to Walmart and you want to make sure that you can't find the products there so they want to be unique.

Supplier

 

Can negotiate with them.

We use software to automate the delivery of the product.

 We want to make sure that the supplier we work with is good, so we want to check out their reviews on Aliexpress. It's pretty and we want to negotiate with the supplier and try to get the prices cheaper, so whatever the prices normally are. Don't just accept them we want to try to negotiate and get them cheaper.

 We can use software to automate the delivery of the product so that's what I was stating how this works,  so a customer comes to our website and then they purchased the product, and then we use specific automation tools to send communication to the supplier and then the supplier will shift the product to the customer and then we can just auto-charge that here, so it's an automated process why I like this process is I believe that business is about freedom it's not about working.

Register your Business

 

Ask your accountant for advice. (ABN sole trader) vs PTY LTD Company)

Generic business name

 

 My advice is to ask your accountant they're going to give you the best advice. If you are in Australia you do have two options, so you can register the business as an ABN sole trader or you can register that as a Pty Ltd company so they're your two options.

 It's important to come up with a generic business name and this is important because what if you want to branch out later what if the first product you decide to change something up, and you want to make sure that you're not stuck with one name forever so if you're doing an online business.

Banking

 

Business account + card

Keep all incoming & outgoing transactions there

 

 Banking is very important so I would advise that you open a separate bank account for this and keep all the expenses or the incoming and all the outgoing transactions in that one bank account. Also, you want to get yourself a card whenever you buy anything that could relate to business.  These things can be claimed on tax so make sure that you speak to your accountant and you talk to them about all the different things that you can claim you can claim. Being successful in business isn't just about making money it's about being able to keep track of everything look at your numbers analyze things.

Accounting

 

Keep track of all expenses in a spreadsheet weekly or monthly.

Keep all receipts.  (Physical or take photos)

Domain

 

Register your domain. (Should be .com ONLY!)

Privacy

Create an e-mail that matches your domain

 

Some people call it a URL. A domain name on your website link.  We have to register a domain for a specific e-commerce store so we've got a business and that business can have 10 different stores. We've registered our generic business now we can look at the different names for the business. Look at all the biggest companies in the world most of the time they are .com google.com, Facebook.com, so we want to be like the big companies out there.

We are registering the domain we want to make sure that we select privacy on and why that's important is that's going to allow people to not search up who the owner of the business is.

 Logo

 

Keep it simple

Black/White is best (can always change)

Can add one color / 2 maximum

More horizontal than vertical

 

It’s important is your logo like you've seen this everywhere, every brand out there that you interact with has a logo. The logo is a representation of the brand. It represents that beliefs the values of that brand, so it's important that you do need a logo.

Platform

 

Many platforms out there

Shopify.com

Process + fulfill orders

 

 Our website is hosted on a platform, so we register our domain, and then we want to host our e-commerce store. Our website on a platform that can sell it so there's a lot of different ones out there.

Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, so there's a lot of different ones,  but we're going to focus on Shopify it's quick, it's simple, it's fast, it's easy to get a website built on. There's a lot of great apps that can help with sales and it's the best platform for processing and fulfilling orders for dropshipping.

Traffic

 

Refers to people visiting your website.

Facebook and Instagram ads

We want to get targeted people to our website.

 

Marketing is all about showing the right product to the right people.

Interests (apps, movies, public figures, hobbies), shopping behavior, browsing behavior, etc.

Age, location, gender.

 

Traffic with regards to online business refers to getting people to visit your website it's more like a general term and the way that we do that is using Facebook and Instagram ads. This is paid marketing we spend money. We give Facebook money to show our ads to people that are going to likely buy our products there's a lot of other different ad platforms that you can do you can do Snapchat,  YouTube, Pinterest, but we want to keep our focus on just Facebook and Instagram they're the most effective and that's what's going to get us the best results.

We want to get targeted people to our website and marketing is all about showing the right product and to the right people.  Facebook knows how to show your thing to people, so Facebook does interest-based targeting so if people are interested in specific apps, movies, public figures, or have specific hobbies we can target them based on their shopping behavior their browsing behavior.