Welcome to YourMarketingPodcast – How to Start a Successful eCommerce Business in Less than 30 Days. This is your step-by-step guide to quickly launch an eCommerce store and start seeing those sales roll in!
Hi Everyone! Welcome to our first podcast. I’m your host Ishani DePillo.
I’m going to start with some background on myself and the hardworking team behind this new podcast – yourmarketingpodcast. I have been in the marketing industry for over 10 years now and I’ve actually been working with the yourmarketingpodcast team for almost just as long. In 2017, I started a digital marketing agency, called “Your Marketing People” with this same exact team. Talk about a crazy and long partnership and friendship! And since our inception in 2017, we have been handling digital marketing for a range of clients – from small budgets up to multi-million dollar ones. And we’ve been fortunate to have a lot of experience working with eCommerce clients.
And to branch out our skillset, even more, we just recently launched, in January 2020, to be exact, an eCommerce store called Roam Often. And boy did I wish there was a podcast out there to help us get started with that new venture.
Especially because this year has been a very strange one.
We’ve seen first-hand the devastation and turbulence that the COVID-19 also known as CoronaVirus has caused for many businesses across the world. It’s been quite uncertain, which is another reason why we wanted to start this podcast – to help store-front retailers successfully transition into an eCommerce store to help generate sales right now, during shutdown, and in the future.
Everyone benefits from having an eCommerce store.
I’m a big fan of podcasts and I have wanted to get one started since 2017. Finally, after 3 long crazy years, we are here today! To talk about how you can get an eCommerce store up and running in less than 30 days and how to successfully sell online. With this podcast series, my hope is that you have a much smoother process than I did in launching an e-commerce store. We will walk you through every step of the process, from deciding on a product to sell to creating your eCommerce website, to marketing your product successfully, and if you have questions at any time, feel free to email us at [email protected].
So let’s jump right in with today’s topic: Discovering a product to sell.
First thing’s first, what are you going to sell? It’s the big Kahuna of questions and makes all the difference in everything you do moving forward… like who is going to be your target audience or customer? What is your brand going to look like? Will it sell? Will it generate enough revenue and more importantly, profits? It’s so important that you spend a lot of time figuring out the right product to sell.
It’s no secret that You have to sell a product that customers will want to buy, a product that has demand, that is different from what is currently on the market, and a product that will sustain profitability long term. That last one – sell a product that can sustain profitability long term – is important and one that we will cover on our upcoming podcasts.
But first, let’s start with how to generate product inspiration. There are 3 main ways to do this that we’ve discovered.
One way to garner inspiration is to use an application that predicts upcoming trends out there. They call this “trend hunting.”
Let’s go over a couple of our favorites:
So those are the four “trend-hunting” applications I’m going to cover in this podcast, but there are definitely more. Head to yourmarketingpodcast.com/trendhunt to get an even larger list. And happy trend-hunting!
If trend-hunting isn’t your game, another way you can discover a product to sell is to draw from your own experiences, passions, interests, and pain points.
This is actually how we came up with our eCommerce store.
We had the mindset that we wanted to create an eCommerce store, but we weren’t quite sure about what we wanted to sell. We brainstormed ideas and asked ourselves, “What problem have we experienced?” That we wished there was a solution for. On a recent trip to Napa, one of our team members experienced having a tangled necklace that made her really late to dinner. She was frustrated and determined to find a solution, so it would never happen again. After much research and finding that she didn’t like what was currently on the market, she suggested creating a product to solve the issue of tangled necklaces. so we designed our own travel jewelry case. You can find this new product “The Wanderer” on Roam Often.
Skip to: 14:46 To create a product using your own experience, write down:
Skip to: 15:51 The third way to discover a product to sell is to actually start with an existing product and seeing what improvements would you make to this product to make it even better. So let me explain.
You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel.
Building off an existing product and finding ways to improve it, like upgrading the functionality, design, adding new features, or repurposing it for another benefit, is okay.
If you decide to go about improving an existing product, start by listing out:
And coming up on the last topic we will go over during this podcast – reselling.
Sometimes you don’t even need to start from scratch, you could just resell an existing product.
Maybe it’s hard to find a product in your area or in your country? Maybe you see the potential to resell an existing product with a different value proposition?
We spoke with Charith, the co-founder of the largest automotive performance parts eCommerce store in Canada. He was able to discover a missing piece in the automotive market and here is his experience:
“We felt like there was a whole segment or a whole sector where their needs weren’t being taken care of. A lot of the Canadian consumers were ordering from the US retailers, and we decided, ‘hey if we created a store, was upfront about the total cost, and made it free shipping, no customs, and duties, that you know, people would buy the product.’ So we built it.”
Okay, so once you know the demand is out there, then what? How do you choose what products or brands you want to resell on your eCommerce store? Charith from TDotPerformance reveals his strategy in brand selection and I think you might find it super helpful.
“So we’d simply looked up the search volume. We looked at which products had high demand, low competition, good margin, and good supply. And if we found a particular brand that had all four of those, we would focus on that initially. Nowadays it’s time to find something that’s all 4, so you may find some that are 3 out of 4, but that’s how we focused on what to upload in terms of priority. Then we also looked at the competitive landscape to see who’s focusing on what and how can we enter the market. Being a company that doesn’t really hold any inventory and we’re dropshipping, we had a large array of different brands that we can look at because we weren’t limited to a specific few brands.”
Reselling provides many benefits such as you can typically get up and running faster since you aren’t waiting for research and production phases, you can purchase products at wholesale prices (depending on quantity), and you may not need to house or store any products if there are drop ship options, which saves you on cost and hassle. Plus, the product is currently selling elsewhere so it gives you an idea of how it will perform and there are typically assets already available to use, so you may not need to take photos or videos to start selling. A topic we will cover in another podcast.
The cons to Reselling are that your margins are typically smaller and can be tight, depending on the product. And there might be restrictions by the seller like you can’t offer promotions or sell below a certain price point. Additionally, the product isn’t truly unique. Meaning, your customers will probably shop around, so it’s essential that you’re price competitive as well as building brand loyalty. Because you want them to buy from you over the other guys. A great customer service experience can go a long way in getting repeat customers.
So we covered a lot in our first podcast of the Series. And there’s a lot of information here for you to digest. The most important thing to remember though is that you need to find a product that has demand and will be profitable for you to grow your new eCommerce business, which leads into what we will cover on our next podcast, next week – Do your research to evaluate product profitability. Because a product without profitability is not worth the effort.
If you’re just starting out on your eCommerce journey, we urge you to sign up at yourmarketingpodcast.com/letsgo to receive email alerts with daily check-ins. It’s so easy to get distracted and derailed. And we want to see you launch your eCommerce store and crush your goals! These email alerts will keep you on task and come with even more resources because we can’t just cover it all on here. Thank you for listening to yourmarketingpodcast. See you next week!
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