 How to build an e-commerce website step by step guide. Hey guys, JR Fisher here. In this video, I'm going to walk you through building an e-commerce website. You've heard about it. You've heard about all these people making money online. And you've probably wondered, can I do it too? Absolutely you can. I've been doing it for over 12 years now. I have several e-commerce websites. We do millions of dollars a year from those sites. So, I would suggest you watch this to the very end. I'm only going to give you good information, stuff that's proven, stuff that we actually do. So, let's jump right into this. Before we do, don't forget to subscribe, though. Hit that subscribe button. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. All right. Let's jump right into it. I've got several steps I want to walk you through. And by the end of this video, you're going to know how to make an e-commerce website. Now, the first thing you're going to want to do is pick your platform. There's a lot of different platforms out there. I use WordPress and I also use Magento. Let me tell you the differences. WordPress is a great site. If you want to build an e-commerce website and you want to sell products there to one group of people. If you want to have different levels of purchasing, I use Magento. Now, what's the difference? Magento, I can set it up to where I can sell to the public. People can come there and buy products from me. But additionally, I can have my retailers, people who actually sell my products to their audience. So, it works like this. They sell one of my products on their website. Then they log into their account on my website. They put in that order on my website and they're going to see different pricing because they get a wholesale pricing and then they can pay for that order and then we can actually ship it out and we didn't even have to talk to them. This was all automated. Another great website would be Shopify. I like Shopify a lot. That's a great place to do an e-commerce website. So, that's the first step is figure out what platform is going to work for you. The next step is to purchase a domain name. A domain name is going to be the name of your website. In other words, I've got survivalcafefood.com. I've got jrfisher.com. And I've got a bunch of other websites too. But the point is that is your domain name. You have to buy that first and you're going to have to renew that on a regular basis also depending on how many years you buy it for. I will tell you, it is pretty important that you buy a domain name and you have it for at least, let's say five years. In other words, you pay out five years. If you buy a domain name and you only pay for one year at a time, Google is going to look at that and say, well, that website may not be around very long. We're not going to send any results for that search. So, we want to make sure you have a long expiration on your domain name. Now, along with that domain name, you also need to have website hosting. So, I would recommend if you're using WordPress, Bluehost, I'll have a link below. You can use that for WordPress. There's a lot of other hostings out there. And hosting doesn't cost that much. But that's where you're going to park your domain. That's where people are going to have to go to see your website. Now, we're down to number three. Number three is going to be to pick a developer. Somebody to build it for you or build it on your own. That's entirely up to you. If you're using a platform like Shopify, it's extremely easy to do. You can do it on your own. If you're doing something, let's say in Magento, I would highly recommend you hiring a developer. I have to have somebody do that because it's very complicated as to what we do online. So, I always have a developer on, you know, calls so that they can fix things and do things for me. WordPress is kind of in between. It's kind of in between Shopify and Magento. Some people like to do their own. Some people like to hire that out. But you've got to make that decision. So, that's our number three. Number four is pick your e-commerce theme. Make sure your theme actually matches with your type of product. So, you know, if you're selling, you know, flowers and real frilly things and female-type things, don't have a black or brown or dark theme. It's not going to work, okay? So, you want to have a theme that's going to match up with what your brand is. You've got to look at that. You've got to see that. And a lot of these themes out there, they'll tell you a business theme or consulting theme or whatever it is or recipe theme. And they pick those colors for you so it makes it a whole lot easier. Now, number five is to customize that theme. The themes are nice. Don't get me wrong. But everybody has to do some type of customization. It's not going to be perfect to your business right out of the box. It is a theme. It's a template that you're going to probably have to alter a little bit. So, you need to decide what type of customizations you need to do to match up to your products. We sell survival food at survivalkfood.com. That's our Magento site. You can see a link down there if you want to check that out. And our theme is a nice theme, but we had to do a lot of alterations in it because we wanted to do certain things to make it look good, to make it look appealing. So, that's what we had to do. Number six is to add your products. Now, this can be overwhelming for people because they say, oh my gosh, I want to put a thousand products on there. Slow down, slow down. You can add products to your site, but you would do better off to add fewer products and do it properly. That means the right SEO, the right descriptions, the right photographs, the right videos. You do a whole lot better to have fewer products. Start with fewer products and get them optimized the way you want. Get them in there properly. Once you get those products in there, then you can add some more products. It is a time-consuming process. You may want to hire somebody from, you know, Upwork or Fiverr to do some of this stuff for you, or you may want to do it on your own depending on your time limitations. Number seven is you want to add your payment options. What do I mean by payment options? Well, are you going to have them paid by credit card? Are you going to have them paid by PayPal? Are you going to offer payments on your product? I do all of that. I offer PayPal. I offer most credit cards. And I've also partnered with a company where they can make payments on something because some of our survival foods are very expensive. So if they can make three payments interest-free, that's a pretty cool deal. There's several companies that will do this for you, but they're going to charge you a fee. They charge us a fee. We got to pay a fee for that. However, you know, somebody may not have bought $2,500 or $3,000 worth of food if they had to pay all of that up front. Maybe that split up of three payments would get them to buy that product whereas they wouldn't normally buy it. So I think it helps us. We don't have too many people doing it right now. We just started that probably about six months ago, something like that where they could actually make payments. But the cool thing is if you put one of those on there, then you don't have to worry about collecting the money. They have to worry about collecting the money. Once they've done the sale and that company has approved them, we get our money within a day and we're out of the picture. So if they don't make their payments, that has nothing to do with us. Google Pay is another good one. Apple Pay is a good one. The point is you want to have as many payment options as possible. If you have a lot of payment options, you're going to get more sales. Number eight is to set up your shipping options, okay? This is very, very important guys. We only ship our products at Survival Cave Food in the continental US, in the continental US. Now why do we do that? Well, there's all kinds of custom problems with bringing food into other countries. We sell canned meats and they're very heavy. So it's very expensive to ship them out. So we don't want to do that. We will ship to Hawaii or Puerto Rico but people have to call in to get those rates. So you want to make sure you dial that in. How much is it going to cost? Maybe you're going to offer free shipping. A lot of sites offer free shipping now. You know, Amazon kind of started that and a lot of sites offer free shipping. We actually offer free shipping at Survival Cave Food dot com. So people can buy whatever they want and get free shipping. You're going to have to adjust your price to cover that, right? You can't ship something out. You know, you can't sell something for $100 and your shipping's 40 and you give them free shipping and your cost is 60. It won't work. So you got to figure out what it's going to cost you. Now, some of you may be saying, well, JR, you know, I don't know. Sometimes it's more to Florida than it is to Oklahoma than it is to Washington state. What you want to do is take an average of what it cost you and put a shipping, you know, price in there of that amount or add that to the price of your product so that you can cover it for your free shipping. But you got to decide that. Now, the next step is to preview it and test it and publish it. Okay. That's the scary part, right? When you hit that publish button, you know, what are people going to think? Am I going to sell anything? Along the way, you know, building a website is funny because I know in the beginning when I started 12, 13 years ago, people would say, well, I've got a website now. I'm like, great, but that doesn't mean a whole lot. It doesn't mean a whole lot because nobody can find your website if it's not SEO'd properly. Nobody can find your website, you know, if you don't advertise it. Nobody can find your website if you're not posting. It's a constant thing. A website is an always evolving animal. I'm going to call it, okay? It's something that you've got to constantly work on. Don't think that you're going to build a website and you're going to build it once and for all and it's done because software changes. There's updates and that's another thing. You want to update your website on a regular basis. If you don't do all these updates, if you don't keep your website updated, things are going to break. That's why I really suggest hiring somebody. In the beginning, I didn't. In the beginning, I did everything myself and that was very time consuming. But that's how I got started and that's how you can get started too. But understand that once you start this website, that ain't the end, okay? It's going to keep coming. It's going to keep coming. There's going to be more and more things you're going to have to do. Check out all my websites. Check out Survival K Food. Check out JRFisher.com. In addition to that, I have a free digital marketing course below. It's Click and Learn. You don't have to pay anything. That's a good deal too. I have a lot of links below to different products that I use. My reading list, I would also suggest you check that out. That reading list is pretty amazing. Check out David Goggins. I really like his stuff and I think you'll enjoy it. If you don't like cursing, you won't like him. But if that doesn't bother you, you're going to enjoy David Goggins. He's a really great guy. Thanks so much for watching this video. I really appreciate it. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up. And if you give me a thumbs up, I'm going to show you a really ugly website. Okay, you ready? Here goes. Pretty ugly website, right? Okay, so I did what I said. Give me a thumbs up if you don't mind. Do me a favor. Hit that subscribe button. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell because if you subscribe and you don't turn on all your bell notifications, I'm not going to be able to notify you when I upload a video. It's going to save you so much time because when I do a new video, I can just notify you. I can say, hey, there's videos up. You don't have to come back and search for it or do any of that. So make sure you do that. Turn on your notifications. I want to hear your comments. Did you enjoy this video? Did you get something out of it? If so, post below. You may have more specific questions about building a website. If you do, put them in the comments section below. I'll be happy to answer them for you. Been doing this for many years. We've sold millions of dollars online. So I'd love to help you out. Thank you so much for watching this video. I really appreciate it. If you like this content, share it with a friend. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.