How Start Your Own E-commerce Website Create For An Passive Income
Start Your Own E-Commerce Website
Ecommerce, also known as electronic commerce or internet commerce, refers to the buying and selling of goods or services using the internet, and the transfer of money and data to execute these transactions. Ecommerce is often used to refer to the sale of physical products online, but it can also describe any kind of commercial transaction that is facilitated through the internet.
Whereas e-business refers to all aspects of operating an online business, ecommerce refers specifically to the transaction of goods and services.
Types of Ecommerce Models
There are four main types of ecommerce models that can describe almost every transaction that takes place between consumers and businesses.
1. Business to Consumer (B2C):
When a business sells a good or service to an individual consumer (e.g. You buy a pair of shoes from an online retailer).
2. Business to Business :
When a business sells a good or service to another business (e.g. A business sells software-as-a-service for other businesses to use)
3. Consumer to Consumer :
When a consumer sells a good or service to another consumer (e.g. You sell your old furniture on eBay to another consumer).
4. Consumer to Business :
When a consumer sells their own products or services to a business or organization (e.g. An influencer offers exposure to their online audience in exchange for a fee, or a photographer licenses their photo for a business to use).
Examples of Ecommerce
Ecommerce can take on a variety of forms involving different transactional relationships between businesses and consumers, as well as different objects being exchanged as part of these transactions.
1. Retail:
The sale of a product by a business directly to a customer without any intermediary.
2. Wholesale:
The sale of products in bulk, often to a retailer that then sells them directly to consumers.
3. Dropshipping :
The sale of a product, which is manufactured and shipped to the consumer by a third party.
4. Crowdfunding:
The collection of money from consumers in advance of a product being available in order to raise the startup capital necessary to bring it to market.
5. Subscription:
The automatic recurring purchase of a product or service on a regular basis until the subscriber chooses to cancel.
6. Physical products:
Any tangible good that requires inventory to be replenished and orders to be physically shipped to customers as sales are made.
7. Digital products:
Downloadable digital goods, templates, courses, or media that must be purchased for consumption or licensed for use.
8. Services:
A skill or set of skills is provided in exchange for compensation. The service provider’s time can be purchased for a fee.
Getting Started
Before you build your online store you need to know what to sell and how to source it. Firstly you need to find a niche, for example, fitness, technology, bodycon/summer dresses, pet products, and baby products are very popular right now.
You can also go on Instagram and see what all of the popular Instagrammers are promoting to get an idea of what you should sell. Detox and weight loss teas as well as backless, strapless bras and clothing seem to be popular.
Another site where you can do some research is Amazon, you just look at the top-selling products in a particular category and write them down. This trick is well known but since you will be selling these products on your own site and not on Amazon you do not need to worry about any direct competition.
Finally, you can go on YouTube and type in “fitness tracker reviews”, “summer dress review” or a review of any product you have found for additional inspiration.
Setting up your store:
After doing your research, create a list of at least 20 products you want to source, next: Create an online store with SHOPIFY, it is free for 14 days and no credit card is needed, however during the trial you should have made enough sales to get you started and keep your store going. You can choose from a range of free and premium themes to help you bring your store to life.
Once you have signed up you can use the powerful Oberlo plugin which is available through the store builder, this will take care of the storing and shipping by allowing you to automate the fulfillment process.
Oberlo is a dropshipping plugin which means that you will not have to physically store, pack and ship any products. You simply import products from Oberlo into your store and start selling, the suppliers do everything else, and this is the beauty of drop shipping.
If you plan on just using Oberlo then you can skip the “The Finishing Steps (Alibaba)” section after reading the “The Finishing Steps (Oberlo)” section.
Setting up your store: The Finishing Steps (Oberlo)
- Next, you need to set up a payment processor on your Shopify store, you can use Shopify Payments or a third-party solution like PayPal and Stripe.
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- Create an account on AliExpress and use Oberlo’s chrome extension to import your chosen products in a few minutes.
- First, set up a payment processor, either Shopify Payments or a third-party processor like PayPal or Stripe, you can see a list of supported payment gateways listed by country on the platform.
- If you don’t mind fulfilling orders yourself you have some startup money you can go to Alibaba, search for the products you listed, find 2–3 suppliers, and order a sample, then once you are happy, you can order your first batch. It is best to start with smaller quantities for your first batch:
- 100–300pcs for really cheap products (less than a dollar)
- 100pcs for cheap products ($1 — $9)
- 20–50pcs for expensive items ($10 and above)
- Shipping doesn’t take too long so you can always top up your starter batch when sales pick up.
It is best to start your first batch simple, for example, if you are selling fitness trackers, start with one color and 50pcs, if you are selling dresses, start with 2–3 colors in 3 sizes (S, M, L) and 20–50pcs each.
Driving Traffic To The Store
Once you’ve set up your store, you then need to think about how you’re going to get people to actually visit your store.
Driving traffic to an e-commerce store can be a lot of fun and there are a lot of different things that you can experiment with.
- Before you think about driving traffic to your store, first sit down and get really clear about who your customer is, What influences them and what demographics do they occupy?
- When you know that kind of information, your marketing efforts will be better off and it will be easier to spot viable opportunities.
Taking that into account…one traffic method you can experiment with is Facebook Ads. Setting up Facebook Ads is easy and 2.5 million advertisers use the service.
Provided that you do the due diligence I just mentioned (relating to knowing your customer), you should be able to take full advantage of the powerful targeting features provided by Facebook.
You can also consider sponsoring posts on social media sites, such as Pinterest and Instagram.
- To do that, all that you have to do is find profiles that cater to the demographic you’re trying to go after.
- Then, send them a quick message and let them know that you’d like to sponsor a post.
- When sponsoring a post, you can’t be too pushy with your sales message. You’ll want to rely on your product images to do a lot of the selling for you.
Luckily, however, by this stage, you should already have some great-looking product images that you can provide when running sponsored posts.
As well as that, you can even use Google Product Ads.
The setup process for Google Product Ads can be a little bit complicated, but don’t let that keep you from using them.
CONCLUSION
In This article I’ve explained in detail 4 recommended ways you can make money online, I strongly encourage you to start from somewhere because there’s no better time to start than now.
Based on my experience and review as a blogger I strongly recommend you to start with content creation (BLOGGING) as a beginner from there you can now introduce affiliate marketing and freelancing.
If you want to host your blog I strongly recommend Bluehost for you, because they’re very good WebHost for high blog traffic and for starters.
How to Get Started: Pick what you want to do and start slow. I recommend using a platform you’re familiar with when you’re starting out, especially eBay or Amazon.
If you really want to get into selling physical stuff with arbitrage, a product research tool like Jungle Scout for Amazon can give you behind-the-scenes data to make more educated selling decisions.