And let’s start with a little testing – what are your chances of creating a successful online store? Or maybe you should immediately choose a different direction of activity?
A Simple Test – is it Worth Opening an Online eCommerce Store?
We live in a world where you don’t need to rent premises, invest in goods, or hire employees to create your dream eCommerce business. Everything can be done remotely via the Internet.
But for all its apparent simplicity, only a very small percentage of online stores “live” for more than one year. In order to create a successful online eCommerce business that will bring you income every month, you need to think differently.
Here is a small test that will help you determine if you have the qualities necessary to run a successful online store. Please answer the questions honestly.
- If you lived in ancient times, who would you like to be – a hunter or a farmer?
- Hunter – 0 points
- The farmer – 1 point
- Are you a sociable person?
- No – 0 points
- Yes – 1 point
- Do you like doing home bookkeeping, working with numbers?
- No – 0 points
- Yes – 1 point
- You enter a small pedestrian crossing. Red light is on for you, but there are not many cars at all. Your actions?
- I’ll run to red – 0 points
- I’ll wait for green – 1 point
- Which is better – 50 thousand a month passively or 300 thousand a month actively?
- 50 passively – 0 points
- 300 active – 1 point
Test results: If you scored 3 points and above, then most likely you will be fine when opening your dream eCommerce store. If you have less than 3 points, get ready to face some serious problems.
Test Explanation
Question # 1 . An online store is more like a farm or garden. First, you need to “cultivate” it for a rather long time before you see the first results. And hunters are very impatient people. They are ready to risk their heads so that there is something to eat today, but they don’t think about tomorrow. If you are closer in spirit to hunters – maybe you should start a direct selling business, maybe even in b2b .
Question # 2 . If you do not like and do not know how to communicate with people, it will be difficult for you to own an online store. Because you have to constantly deal with customers – who have received their goods and who did not, and why. And also – to communicate with suppliers. For the introverts, the service business is probably more suitable (maybe even freelance).
Question # 3 . The success of your online store depends on the numbers. You will need to constantly analyze everything – visits, conversions, bounce rates. And all this from different sources of traffic. And it will be necessary to do continuous split testing in order to improve performance. If you do not like numbers, then probably the online store is not for you. Engage in the info business, create useful content and sell it.
Question # 4 . Crossing the road on red is also a sign of impatience and willingness to risk your head for the sake of dubious momentary benefits. But it also indicates whether it is important for you what people around you think – other pedestrians and drivers on the road – or not. The success of an online store is its reputation and customer reviews. You need to be very responsible so that your reputation is good.
Question # 5 . An online store is an active business (at least in the beginning, until you reach a certain turnover). And it will be necessary to work there a lot. And the only motivation for this will be money. If you have enough “tits” in your hands, just to not work – it’s better to promote a content site in a couple of years and earn 50 – 100k per month passively from advertising.
Of course, this is a very conditional test. We came up with this in order to show what you will be dealing with when running an online store. But in any case, you can cope if you have the right step-by-step plan on hand. So let’s get to it and move on.
How to Open an Online Store from Scratch in 5 Steps
Step # 1 – Choosing the “Perfect” Product – 5 Tips
Before choosing a niche and product for your online store – think, why do people even buy something on the Internet? After all, there are many “live” stores around where you can see and feel your goods before buying.
In fact, there are two main reasons for shopping online. The first reason is the price. The online store does not bear the overhead of renting premises and salaries to sellers. Accordingly, on the Internet you can almost always buy cheaper.
The second reason is a wide choice. In “live” stores, there is simply no way to have the entire range available. And on the Internet you can always find something that no longer exists anywhere. And at the same time you will not need to wind circles around the city and visit hundreds of shops.
Hence the conclusion. In order for your online store to be successful, it must offer something much cheaper than offline stores. Or you should sell something that is not so easy to find in ordinary stores. These can be exclusive products, narrow-key products, or simply rare products.
Tip # 1 – Trade What is Hard to find in Regular Stores
For example, ask yourself – where would you go right now if you suddenly wanted to buy a pram? Probably in the nearest children’s outlet, everyone would run around to find what they want, even get tired looking and then make a decision.
And where would you go if you suddenly wanted to buy a replica (exact replica) of the PhilippPatek Swiss watch? You can’t just say that. And most likely you will have to buy such a rare thing on the Internet.
Tip # 2 – Love Your Product
It is very important that you like the product that you sell in your online store. And so that you are well versed in the range, characteristics and more.
So you will be able to better understand your target audience – what they want and why they buy your goods.
Tip # 3 – Target for Repeat Sales
It is now very difficult to earn from direct sales. There are more and more competitors, and the audience of customers is growing not so fast. Therefore, it will be great if you can not just make one-time sales, but accumulate a customer base, so that later they can offer more and more.
You can, of course, engage in one-time sales, but then your product should be either very expensive or in great demand. But very expensive products are difficult to sell over the Internet. And huge demand is, as a rule, a one-time phenomenon, and then demand will decline.
Tip # 4 – Sell What “Nobody Needs”
There are two categories of products. The first is goods in steady demand. That is, people themselves are looking for these products, and know why they need them. It’s good to advertise such products through search contextual advertising such as Google.
The second category is goods with unexpressed demand. That is, people may not even know about their existence until you offer them to buy them. For example – the same replica watch, or a simulator for straightening the spine at home.
Now 90% of online stores are fighting for the attention of buyers in search contextual advertising. It is very simple to sell there – people themselves are looking for these products. It’s enough to just pay a little more per click than a competitor – and drive those potential customers to your store.
Such a constant increase in prices has led to the fact that now a click in Google for almost all popular niches costs crazy money. And you can get around all this wild competition and sell your goods, creating the need “from scratch”. We will talk more about this below.
Tip # 5 – Take Any Product
Get everything out of your head what you just read above. Take any product and just try to sell it to someone online. This will bring you much more benefit than if you choose the “ideal” product for the online store for years.
You need to develop skills – attracting visitors to your sites, and sales to these visitors. And this can only be done by testing with any product. You can then change the niche at any time if you want. But the skills will remain with you forever.
Step # 2 – Make a website that sells
We are not a supporter of immediately investing a lot of money in creating a real huge online store, with our own paid “engine”, a lot of pages, built-in CRM, and other things.
This is all very useful, but not necessarily required at the initial stage. First, you can create a small “online store” in which you will sell one or two products. That is, you will first make a one-page landing page , and will offer one or two products on it. The advantage of this landing is that it can be done quickly and for free.
This also has a high conversion rate (much higher than a regular multi-page site). All these multi-pages on the “search engines” and CRM are made exclusively to make it easier to manage a large assortment. Add product cards, change descriptions, monitor stock balances and more.
If you don’t have such problems right now, do the usual landing pages. But in order for them to really sell – your landing pages must be optimized. There are only 9 main blocks that you need to insert on your landing page in order to see good conversions.
We specifically do not pay much attention to the site’s design, because this is not the only most important thing. For some reason, novice Internet sellers often think that they need to make a very cool website that will sell better than their competitors. And then all their problems will be solved.
But actually it is not. The design quality of your eCommerce store is just 20%. The conversion rate of an online store is 80% completely dependent on other things.
Step # 3 – We Focus on Attracting a Sea of Traffic rather than the Targeted Traffic
The quality and quantity of leads are what you should have a headache about. That is, you need to be able to attract a lot of targeted traffic from different sources to your selling sites.
If you can do this, then you will always win. Your sites may not be the most converting. And your products may not be the highest quality and cheapest. But you will still bypass the competition if you can attract a lot of targeted traffic.
Focus on the following three things if you want to win.
The First Source is SEO
Today, among webmasters, it is customary to “blame” Google for not letting all of us live and forces you to abandon SEO (promotion in search engines), and switch exclusively to paid advertising.
But this is not entirely true. No matter how hard Google wants its advertisers to pay for advertising, it still needs to show some sites in the search results for queries such as “buy iPhone Tomsk” or “Moscow price car seat”.
Yes, it’s probably no longer possible to make SEO the main source of traffic, but this does not mean that you need to refuse it. The main thing is to understand the rules of the game.
Everyone thinks that search engines love a lot of original content- and then they rank the site in the first place in the search results. And so it is, if we are talking about information requests such as “how to choose the right child seat.” And if we have a commercial request such as “buy a child seat” – then the content plays practically no role.
In fact, search engine relevance is much more important. That is, the visitor from the search engine must find what he is looking for – this is the most important thing. And if he is looking for a product range with an indication of the price, then Google will put such sites in the first place.
But, you need to understand the rules of SEO – games. And we highly recommend at least diluting paid traffic with free visitors from search engines. You can read more about this in the article “Some quick SEO tips for your online store“.
Second Source – Google Display Network
Remember, in the paragraph about choosing the “ideal” product. We talked about the fact that it’s better to sell such a product that does not have a steady demand – in order to move away from huge competition in search contextual advertising. Now we are returning to this.
In addition to search contextual advertising, there is also the so-called “teaser” contextual advertising. This is when ads are shown to you on various sites, even if you are not currently looking for anything specific.
Teaser ads can be given through various networks. The most common is Google Display Network. Google clicks will cost you more, because there is higher competition. But there is a CCM in which you can pay 5-10 times less than in Google.
In the CCM, competition is much less, because this network is more difficult to configure so that it gives you a return. But if you know how to do it right – you will get a sea of really cheap traffic.
Third Source – Content Marketing
Direct advertising today is getting worse day by day. Your potential customers have the whole Internet before their eyes. They do not have to buy here and now. They may well first wander around other resources that offer similar products – to learn more about it.
And do you know when and where they will place their order? Where the store inspires them the most. Because online shopping is always a lottery. Will I receive what I ordered – or not? Will they be delivered in working condition or broken? Will they be delivered in 4 days or in a month?
Trust is the cornerstone of internet marketing. And you can easily gain the trust of your potential customers simply by telling interesting and useful things about your product. For example, you can write articles or do video reviews. That’s how you market your content.
Then you will distribute this content virally through social networks , and attract new customers who will have high confidence in you in advance. And so it turns out that people will find out about the product on the websites of your competitors, and they will come to buy it from you.
So, combining the three main sources of customers – SEO, CCM and Content Marketing – you will have a lot of targeted traffic for a penny (because two of the three sources are free, and the third is very cheap).
But even with the perfect product and a lot of traffic, you can easily “burn out”. This is the main disease of online stores today.
Step # 4 – Winning What Ruins 95% of Online Stores Today
With all the variety of problems associated with maintaining your online store, the main trouble is the need to deliver the goods sold. Selling, in fact, is not so difficult. But to establish a high-quality and uninterrupted supply is much more difficult.
Your parcel may go to some village on the outskirts of Brazil for several months. In the end, the product ends up being un-delivered. Or there is an address mismatch or the customer was not available. There will be many such situations.
Roughly speaking, there is a company that has a lot of goods in warehouses, and which itself is engaged in the delivery of these goods. And you just sell it through your one-page accounts, and throw off the finished orders to them. The rest is not your problem.
It sounds much better than it really is. Because the work on the dropshipping system is far from the solution to all problems. Below, in the section “FAQ on opening an online store”, we will tell you more about what pitfalls are there in dropshipping.
For now, we agree that in the beginning, in any case, you will most likely have to work through dropshipping. So you at least get rid of 80% of the problems associated with the delivery of goods sold.
And now we move on to the final step – doubling the profits of your online store.
Step # 5 – Doubling the Profits of an Online Store – an Easy Way!
Of course, this step can and should be done constantly. The more often, the better. And the easiest way to do this is to re-sell to the same customers.
Today, online store owners pay little attention to their customer base. Just because they don’t know how to work with them properly. To send notifications about promotions for any holidays is the maximum that they have enough time and energy for.
But your customer base is a real “golden asset”. These people do not need to attract, persuade, inspire confidence. They already bought something from you, which means they have the highest possible level of trust in you (if the experience of the previous purchase was successful).
Correctly working with a client base – this simply means from time to time to remind you of your existence, and to do it in an interesting and enjoyable way. You can communicate with them through emails or organize your own groups on social media channels. This is also “content marketing”.
And to have someone to work with – from the very first day, collect your customer base. Let it be an excel file, if you have not got your own CRM system yet. But you must have at least something. Your customer base will “feed” you even in the most severe crisis, when your competitors will be closed in batches.
And in conclusion, let’s put together a small “FAQ” on opening an online store.
FAQ’s on Opening an Online Store
How to open an online store without investing in goods?
The easiest option is to work on a dropshipping system. This is when you are engaged only in the sale of goods, and a separate specialized company is engaged in the delivery, storage and other things. Then you do not have to invest a dime in working capital.
What should you be wary of when working through dropshipping?
There is nothing to be afraid of, but some features must be taken into account. For example – you will almost certainly have higher prices than competitors who purchase and deliver the goods themselves. Because drop shippers overcharge shipping fees.
And often you will have to work with several companies at once to collect an order for one client (a laptop delivers one drop shipper, a laptop bag – another, and a mouse – a third). Accordingly, you will have to include triple the cost of delivery in the price.
In addition, many drop shippers still have poor stock inventory accounting. That is, you will sell goods that are indicated “in stock”, but in fact they will no longer be in stock. And you will have to communicate with the client.
In other words, working through dropshipping saves you from delivery problems, but 2-3 times increases the work of communicating with customers, finding lost goods, and everything else.
Do I need to Register my Company?
For a starter, NO! But you will need an official registration at least in the course of time in order to accept payment by bank cards. If you are not sure yet that you want to open your own full-fledged business and register a legal entity – look in the direction of “soft” options for entering the Internet business.
What is the Alternative to Opening your Online Store?
Opening a full-fledged online store, if this is your first online business, is not a good idea. It is very likely that you will be lost in a pile of small problems, and you won’t be able to earn anything.
We would recommend that you first work through partnership programs with the same dropshipping companies. You just bring buyers to them, and they deal with the delivery and all other problems themselves.
Yes, this way you will earn less money, but you will not have any risks, and you can easily hone your online sales skills and save money in order to create your own online business.
You can also buy our readymade micro-niche stores that are pretty much cheaper than establishing your eCommerce business from scratch.
How long does it take to reach an income of 1 Million per month?
To get one million per month on income (turnover) is not difficult. It’s hard to get a million per month in net profit. That is so that you have this money left after deducting the cost of goods, advertising costs, delivery, and everything else.
We would advise you not to listen to gurus who sell their training on launching online stores and promise huge profits for almost a couple of months. In fact, 99% of Internet businesses never see a million profits a month.
Set ambitious but real goals. For example, doubling profits for a quarter or half a year. So you will grow much faster.
Can the Store Work on Full Autopilot?
Theoretically, yes. In practice, we have never seen such a thing. Maybe this is possible, but only at later stages. When you have your own big team, your managers and a lot of money for long-term investment.
But even in this case, you, as the owner of the company, will have to periodically make strategic decisions that no one will take for you. And for this, you need to still be aware of what is happening in your business.
For beginners, we do offer ‘managing your online store’ services, you can contact us by simply filling out the form in the About Us page.
Conclusion – What do you need to do Right Now?
If you have seriously decided to open your online store. Jump to our section of BUY READY-MADE STORES, and we can take it forward from there.
Take the best decision of your life today.
Invest your time for good.
Give your dreams a path.
&
Make your family & friends proud and happy.
Feel free to start your very own brand and consider the offer you are getting now. Maybe you won’t get it again. So, don’t let it go without giving it a try.
We are offering the best deals, right here, right now, only for you.
Maybe today is the day when you get a spectacular, blazing new, and a high converting Dropshipping business of your own.
A business that produces huge sales and increases your business at a fast pace.
This may be the first and your last chance to prove yourself and let your dreams speak for themselves.
Grab the chance while you can, and when you can.
DO NOT DELAY!
GET ON BOARD NOW and make everything easy, simple, and successful.
