How To Build A Niche Online Store And An Introduction To Ecommerce

hi and welcome to my free six day mini course now in this course i'm going to provide you with a high level overview about what it's like to start your own niche online store and give you a high level introduction to e-commerce so what are you going to learn so first of all i'm going to teach you about all the different online e-commerce business models and how they work then i'm going to teach you how to evaluate profitable products to sell online how to find your wholesale vendors with which to stock your goods and then i'm going to teach you how to create a great looking website without any technical experience whatsoever and finally i'm going to go over everything you need to create a niche online store including all the setup how to accept credit cards how to design your site everything you'll also learn how to drive traffic and get your first sales now who's this course for now this course is for you if you are a parent who wants to work from home to take care of your kids this course is for you if you want to replace your income and quit your job this course is for you if you want a flexible schedule to do what you want and spend more time with your loved ones now here's what you want to keep in mind it does not matter if you don't have any products to sell at all or if you're not sure what you want to sell because i will teach you how to launch a profitable online store for complete scratch without any previous knowledge required now before i begin i just want to talk about a small sampling of the students in my class who have gone on to create very successful online stores first off my student abbey she started vivianlu. com she sells high-heeled insoles for shoes and she makes over a hundred thousand dollars per month selling only on her own website and once again her website is over at vivianlu. com by the way all the shops that i'm going to show you right now are live and you can literally type them into your browser and check them out for yourself angela started a six-figure business selling jewelry without paying for advertising over at azurajewry.

com through instagram marketing alone amanda whittenborn she makes seven figures selling her own cards in her own invitations print on demand over at amandacreation. com and then finally joel charico is a student that sells his own hand-thrown pottery over at cherokopi. com and he makes a mid six figure income online so who am i my name is steve chu and i run the popular blog mywifequitterjob.

com now presumably you guys signed up for this six day mini course on my website so you are probably already familiar with the website but i also run a popular podcast called how to quit your job and you can actually go on itunes and check that out i interview bootstrap business owners and basically delve deeply into how they got started and how they grew their businesses and finally i run an annual e-commerce conference called the seller summit and basically i bring together a whole bunch of people who are selling online and we share our secrets on how to be successful now before we get into the guts of this mini course i want to take a step back and talk about the early days of my own ecommerce store i actually got into entrepreneurship way back in 2007 and i actually remember that year very clearly because both my wife and i we were stuck in a rut now we both worked full time and we both made six figure salaries but here's what our life consisted of we would basically wake up go to work come home eat dinner watch tv go to bed wake up the next morning go to work come home have dinner watch tv go to bed and this cycle repeated itself over and over and over again basically we were stuck in a run we weren't going anywhere with our lives and it was just the same routine night in and night out now this lifestyle wouldn't be so bad but my wife really hated her job so every single morning on her way out the door she would pull me aside and she would say with a pitiful looking face okay honey i'm off to the hellhole i call my job now now if you can imagine i had to watch her go to work every single day i had to watch her long face every morning and it was actually quite depressing and deep down i knew that she needed to quit her job i knew that we should start our own business but we could never get the courage to start not only that but we could never find the time to begin either but then something happened my wife became pregnant with our first child and everything changed overnight and i actually remember that day very distinctly because i was super excited and terrified at the same time on one hand i knew that this was the perfect excuse for my wife to quit her job but the problem is that we live in an expensive area almost everyone around us works full-time like both spouses work because it actually requires two working parents to get a good house in a good school district so that your kids can actually get a good education so what ended up happening is that we started brainstorming different businesses that we could start so that my wife could stay at home and that's how we stumbled upon e-commerce and so that year in 2007 it's actually a long story but i'll tell it really quickly here we started an online store selling handkerchiefs and our store can be found over at bumblebealins. com feel free to check it out we've been running it for over 10 years now and we decided to sell handkerchiefs because when my wife and i first got married she knew she was gonna cry at the wedding and we paid a lot of money for photography and she didn't want to be seen on camera drying her tears with a ratty tissue so we looked all over the place for handkerchiefs couldn't find any and finally we found this vendor in china but they were only willing to sell us several hundred because they were a factory so we ended up buying a whole bunch of these handkerchiefs used maybe six or so and we sold the rest on ebay and they ended up selling like hotcakes so when she became pregnant we actually got back in touch with that vendor and started bumblebeelinens. com and within that first year we managed to make over a hundred thousand dollars in profit and replace my wife's six-figure salary now as i mentioned before we've been running this store for the last 10 years and it's actually grown in the double and triple digits ever since 2007 and today it is a seven figure business but more importantly my wife is just so much happier now and here's a picture of my beautiful family both my wife and i have the freedom to spend all of our time with them i never miss a soccer game i'm there for all their school activities and the lifestyle is just so much better for us anyway that is just a quick story about how my wife and i got started in e-commerce now before we begin with the tutorials i do want to talk a little bit about my philosophies for this course so first of all what i'm going to be teaching you today is not a get rich quick scheme it is also not about starting the next amazon.

com or the next facebook or the next google we are here to start a business that suits your lifestyle running a business that allows you to spend time doing the things that you love or hang out with those people that you love and a business that also allows you to set your own schedule now what sets my class apart from the others is that i'm actually going to teach you how to start a long-term branded business there are a lot of business models out there on the internet that will teach you how to make a quick buck but i'm going to show you how to create a business that lasts the test of time and allows you to hang out with your family as well as i mentioned before we've been running bumblebee linens for over a decade now and we anticipate running this business for another 10 years now what are some of the advantages of selling online some of my readers on my blog come to me with brick and mortar stores and they want to take their operation online well the beauty of selling online is that you actually don't need to be physically present to make money your computer takes orders for you while you sleep and there's actually very little overhead to actually maintain a website most of the software is already written for you and basically you just have to customize it to your particular business and brand now the number one question that i always get asked is hey steve why should i bother starting my own online store when i can just sell on ebay etsy or amazon now let's just take amazon for a sec the problem with amazon is that they don't have your interests in mind their primary concern is with their own growth and their own stock price they can raise prices at any time they can change their algorithms and make your products harder to find and in fact amazon routinely changes the rules in just the past year they've raised their prices significantly changed a lot of the rules that have made selling a lot more difficult also when you sell on platforms like ebay or etsy or an amazon they don't allow you to have any sort of design flexibility every single prac listing follows a very similar design template and it's very hard to stand out from the pack and when you can't stand out from the pack that means it's very difficult to establish your own brand not only that but these marketplaces charge a huge percentage of your sales so for example ebay will take maybe 11 to 15 of your revenue if you're selling on amazon and amazon is fulfilling your orders via fba amazon will take between 15 and 35 of your revenue now these marketplaces are actually a great place to start out and validate what you're trying to sell but in the long run you're going to want to have your own branded website after all you don't want your business to be at the mercy of someone else you want complete design flexibility in order to stand out from your competitors and you want to be in control of your own destiny and most importantly you don't want someone else calling the shots on your business and your livelihood you want to establish your own brand and you want to future proof your business now i thought i'd just take a couple of moments to dispel some of the common myths of small business ownership because i know that when my wife and i first started out we were terrified we were scared about all these statistics online now one of the statistics that i actually hate is the fact that nine out of ten small businesses fail and the reason why i hate this stat is because i believe that these nine people who are failing are jumping into their business without any training and without any prior knowledge they're basically just bumbling their way through it and of course when you do it that way most of the time you are going to fail so the first myth i wanted to spell is that starting a business is too risky so first of all my wife and i started our store on the side while we both worked full-time jobs and we actually risked next to nothing to start the business because we used an open source platform to run our store which is 100 free there were no programmer costs there were no real development costs and we basically did everything on the side when we got home from work so basically we worked nights and weekends and made things work so you absolutely do not have to quit your job and i would say that you should be at least willing to devote at least five hours per week to your business now another common myth is that it costs too much to get started now back in 2007 my wife and i actually started bumblebeelines. com with only 630 dollars our main cost was a digital camera a computer and 300 worth of inventory that we got from china now let's say that you don't even have 630 to start well if you go with one of the lowest cost business models out there you can actually get started for five dollars a month the overhead for maintaining an online business is so low that today even if our business were to grind to a halt it would actually only cost us about 80 a month to maintain our store now another myth is that you actually have to carry inventory but you don't one you can drop ship and how drop shipping works is that you take orders on your own website and then you make an arrangement with the vendor well they'll actually ship the goods to the end customer so they hold all the inventory and they are responsible for fulfillment you are responsible for collecting the money making the sale and then you pay your supplier also if you don't have room to store inventory in your house there's a whole bunch of third-party fulfillment services out there that act like warehouses you basically send them your goods and as soon as you get an order you tell them and they ship it to the end customer and finally there's also amazon amazon will take your inventory and ship everything to the end customer as well now one of the most common fears that i get from the people who read my blog is that they think that starting a business or starting a website is just too hard and let me tell you that starting an online store today is so much easier than back when my wife and i first started in 2007. first of all you don't need any technical knowledge to begin all the software is written for you there's a bunch of open source shopping carts out there that are completely free and all the code is written for you and all you have to do is install them on your web host there are also fully hosted platforms like shopify and bigcommerce which basically handle all the heavy lifting for you and all you have to do is list your products now a lot of the fully hosted platforms which i'll introduce to you in the next couple lessons they offer drag and drop interfaces so you can customize your store without knowing any html or any code whatsoever now the next few lessons of this mini course will present you with different options depending on what you're comfortable with in terms of technical skill so for example if you are a little bit tech savvy i'll probably point you over to the open source shopping carts where you actually own the platform but if you're totally tech averse i'll probably point you over to platforms like shopify or bigcommerce to keep things simple the key thing to keep in mind here is that i've done all the shopping cart research for you now a lot of people complain to me and we actually had this excuse too is that you don't actually have enough time to start a business now if you look at my life back when i first started my businesses i was running a blog i was running a store i had two young kids i was running a training class a podcast and a conference while working full-time as an electrical engineer now i'm not superman and in fact i consider myself to be quite a lazy person the key to productivity is to break your tasks down into small pieces that can actually be accomplished in 20 or 30 minute chunks what you want to do is you want to work your businesses into your routine do a little bit each day and think in the long term now let me just give you a quick example when i started my ecommerce course i actually started with no content at all but what i did was i told myself that i was going to put out one or two pieces of content every single week now i started this class back in 2011 and fast forward to the day i actually have over 300 videos spanning over 100 hours of material so just by working on it a little bit on a steady pace every single week i eventually grew to something much much larger that is the mentality that you have to take with your ecommerce business because after all you can't wait for a big block of time especially when you have kids big blocks of time do not exist you basically have to work everything into your routine now one thing i do want to tell you though is that once you get your business started it is really exhilarating i still remember back when we got our first sale my wife and i were just so thrilled we were so happy because there's something to be said about making your own money and making our own sales versus working a full-time job it is a very rewarding experience and i guarantee that you will enjoy the experience if you just take the chance so now i want to switch gears and delve into the guts of e-commerce and the first thing i'm going to talk about are the different e-commerce business models to choose from so one business model i want to talk about is drop shipping as i mentioned before the way drop shipping works is you have a storefront and you take orders and then you have an arrangement with a supplier where the supplier actually sends the goods to the end customer you don't have to hold inventory at all and basically the money you make is the difference between what you're charging and the wholesale cost you can also start an online store and sell other people's brands and other people's inventory there's a lot of examples like this so for example target carries very few of their own brands and they primarily sell other people's products and then finally you can sell your own branded products which is actually the best long-term solution this is basically where you go out and you have your goods manufactured and then you put your own brand on your own products and finally you can sell as an affiliate and the way affiliate marketing works is that you refer a sale to another business and then that business pays you a cut of the referral so to help you decide which ecommerce business model to choose from i'm going to evaluate these models based on three parameters the first parameter is effort how hard is it to get started the second factor is sustainability what is the long-term potential of this business model and then finally i'm going to talk about all these business models on a profitability scale how much money can you make and please note that all these factors will be rated on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the best so let's start with drop shipping with drop shipping because you don't have to carry your own inventory because you don't have to source any product it's actually one of the easier online store business models to have as a result i give it a 7 out of 10 in terms of effort however in terms of sustainability i give it a 4 out of 10 and here's the reason why when you are drop shipping you're selling other people's products and the margins for drop shipping are actually quite low they're often on the order of 10 to 25 and what that means is that you're going to be making much less money and you're selling other people's products and you're going to be going up against other people who are carrying inventory and they'll have better margins than you will because you don't have that much flexibility in terms of price and because of platforms like amazon where manufacturers are selling directly on amazon and basically bypassing the drop shippers it's going to be very difficult to compete on price so that's why i believe that drop shipping out of all the online store business models is not very sustainable in the long run in terms of profitability as i mentioned before drop shipping gets 10 to 25 margins now if you compare that to 50 to 90 margins for some of the other business models and you realize that you have to make a lot more sales to make the same amount of money let's talk about a traditional online store next a traditional online store sells other people's products and you carry inventory now because you have to go out and contact vendors and store your own products i give it a 5 out of 10 in terms of effort to get started in terms of sustainability i give it a 7 out of 10 because you're establishing your own branded store with inventory and fulfillment and in terms of profitability your margins are going to be on the order of 50 so you're going to be a lot more profitable than a drop ship store now the next business model is selling your own branded goods now in terms of effort i give it a 3 out of 10 which means that it's harder to do and the reason for this is because you actually have to reach out to manufacturers build your own products and put your own brand on them but the best thing about selling your own branded products is that it's the highest sustainable business model out there because you actually own your own brand and you own your own goods in terms of profit your profit margins can be 90 plus which basically means that you get to keep most of the money that you're making online as a result selling your own goods is probably the most long-term and the highest profitable business model out there and then finally the last business model is affiliate sales and once again that's basically when you're referring someone else to another company and you basically get a cut of the sale now effort level wise affiliate marketing is the easiest because you don't have to do anything to get started and it requires almost no upfront cost all you got to do is point your customer to a different website where they take over and then they're in charge of closing the sale in terms of sustainability i give affiliate marketing a three because of lack of control a lot of companies when they're first starting out and they need customers they're all about attracting affiliates but once these companies become more established they don't need their affiliates anymore and oftentimes more established brands will just flat out cancel their affiliate programs over time so in terms of profitability because you're not doing any work the payout for the referral is often pretty low so you actually have to refer a lot of sales to make a good living in any case that is just a high level overview of all the online store business models out there and i hope you enjoyed this first lesson keep in mind that you're going to have new lessons coming to your inbox every single day and they are going to be sequentially numbered one two three four five six seven eight in the event that you miss a lesson or for some reason a lesson doesn't get sent to your inbox send me an email over at steve my wife quitter job.