 How to start your own e-commerce business from scratch. Starting your own business can be an extremely difficult task, whether an online business or an offline business. But if you have the right tools, the right knowledge, a computer and a Wi-Fi connection, then the skies are the limit for you. You just need patience to learn, a little more patience to implement, and you'll find your way to success. That's why in this video, I'm going to share with you the exact steps that you need to take in order to start your own successful e-commerce online business. So watch this quick intro and let's begin. Hello everyone. My name is Liran from AutoDS. I'm the content producer. I've also been dropshipping successfully for over three years now. So let's get on with the show and see exactly what we need to do to start your own successful e-commerce business. So the first thing that you need to have in mind is to know exactly what niche you are going for. If you don't know which niche you're going to go for, try to think of something that you have a passion for. For example, if you like dogs, go for the dog niche. If you like cats, go for the cat niche. If you like outdoors, go for the hunting or camping niche. So once you find the niche that you want to go for, you're going to have to search to see if there's an active market around this niche, if there's any demand, and if there are products which you can sell. For example, since we have Halloween coming up, let's say I want to go for the Halloween niche and create a Halloween themed store. So I'm going to head over to Google trends and see if the word Halloween has any rising interest in it. So for this example, we're going to search for the past 90 days because it's more relevant because it's a seasonal niche. And as you can see in the past three months, especially in the past month and a half, there's a huge increase in the interest in Halloween because people are already searching online for Halloween products. So this is a perfect time to create a Halloween themed store, take the Halloween niche and upload all kinds of products that are relevant to Halloween. So here's how you can check if your product, if your niche is relevant. Next, you're going to have to check if there are products around your niche. I know for a fact that there are, but if you're going to search your suppliers like Amazon, Aliexpress, Walmart, whatever supplier you're working with, search for the niche related products and see that they exist. So once all of the above are true, then you can move on to the next step, which is product research. Now product research is a very essential and crucial part of running a successful online business because if you're not doing the product research part correctly, then your products are going to be irrelevant. No one is going to buy them and you won't be making any significant profits. So know how to conduct product research. It really depends also which supplier you're working with, but there's a lot of online paid software to help you conduct product research to see what products are selling and which are more and which are less. But you don't have to use online paid software in order to find the hot selling products. It's just one of the shortcuts that are available to do it. If you're working with suppliers like Amazon, just check out their best seller section and learn your way from there. If you're working with suppliers like Aliexpress, they also have a best seller section, but even better, they have a drop shipping center which helps you analyze the products even more. For example, let's take a look at Aliexpress, the drop shipping center over here. So as you can see here are all of the products that Aliexpress recommends us to sell right off the bat since they're all trending and selling hot, but it has nothing to do with our niche. So let's search for the niche that we're going for in this example, Halloween products. Now I'm searching only for Halloween, so it's going to be a very general search result. But as you can see, here are all of the products that have been selling well for Halloween, the number of orders, out of those how many orders are drop shipping orders, the overall product rating, its sales performance. And if you click on analyze, you can really analyze how much each product has been selling and the dates and everything. For example, I clicked on this one. So you can see that this whole month it's been selling well, a small decrease and then an increase, but all month this product has been selling. And it's one of the products that I would recommend to upload to your store if you're going for the Halloween niche right now. You can start to micro niche it by going for example, Halloween masks, Halloween candy, Halloween decorations and so forth. So if I search for Halloween masks, as you can tell this cool Grinch cosplay mask has over 2,000 orders. It has a very good sales performance rating. As you can tell, I analyzed it and really only since the beginning of this month this product started selling. So this is another thing that I would truly recommend to upload if you're going for the Halloween niche. So this is an example of how you can conduct product research and really sell the most trending and relevant items. So we found our niche, which is the Halloween niche and we know how to conduct product research on the Halloween niche and find the best products to sell on our store. Now let's move on to the next step in starting your own successful online e-commerce business. So you found your niche, you know how to analyze the market and you saw that there is a market around it and you can find products for your niche. The third step is to know how to identify your competition and your competitors. There's always competition, there's always competitors, but there's always something that you can do about it to stand out and sell the products instead of having them sell them. So I suggest a site called Uber Suggest. Let's just go inside that site for a second and see what it gives us. So Uber Suggest is a good site to find more keywords for your niche, to analyze your niche and to see what your competitors are doing around that niche. So for example, let's go with the niche that we chose for this example, Halloween. Search that up and see what Uber Suggest gives us. And here's our search result for Halloween. As you can see last year, it rose really around September, which is around this time this year, which it's not showing the graph yet for September, but it will soon. So moving further below, you can see that a lot of people are searching for Halloween. You have Halloween costumes, Halloween stores, people are searching for Halloween stores. They won't be able to find so much because of the COVID situation. So this is exactly where you come in as the drop shipper. People are looking for Halloween movies and Halloween stores near them once again. They won't find too many once again. This is where you come in. Here you can get all kinds of ideas for content, that people are writing, articles and blogs, around the Halloween subject, Facebook Pinterest. So you can get ideas here of what goes on around the niche that you're trying to sell. So use Uber Suggest to see what goes around your niche when it comes to keywords, articles and products that people are selling, your competitors and your competition. This is how you're gonna be able to stand out from that. Okay, so we found the niche. We found the market around the niche. We found competitors and the competition also surrounding the niche. Now it's time for the fourth step and it's an interesting one, creating your own website. I know you've been waiting for this. So if you wanna get 14 free trial days on Shopify with no credit card required, this is especially good for beginners who have no experience and want to experiment before they have any expenses, use the link in the description below this video to get your 14 day free trial. You'll be taken to this site over here. All you have to do is enter your email address, click on start free trial enter your password, whatever password you want for your account and your designated store name. You can name it whatever you want as long as it's not already taken but it's gonna look like this. For example, let's call this one Halloween sale. Nevermind that it's already taken but let's say I went for this name. This is how your URL is gonna look like. Halloween sale.myshopify.com. So this doesn't look so good especially with that My Shopify in the middle over there but you don't have to worry as soon as you create your Shopify account, you'll be able to buy your own domain name, it costs around nine or 10 bucks a year and then you can have whatever name you want, www.whateveryouwant.com. It'll look much more serious, it'll look like a real store and a real business that way. So don't forget to get your 14 day free trial on Shopify. Once again, just use the link on the comments below this video. Okay, so once you created your store, you have your account, you have your 14 day free trial, it's time to start building your website. The first things that you're going to need is a store template and a store logo because these are the first things that the customer is gonna see when entering your shop and you're gonna want him to stay in your shop and not leave on the first two seconds that he stays there because when a customer first enters your shop, the first two seconds are really critical to whether he's gonna stay or leave. So getting your own theme is not hard, you can do it through Shopify's website. Okay, so at themes.shopify.com you have a whole bunch of themes that Shopify can either give to you for free or sell to you for a few bucks. So if you click on explore themes over here, you'll be taken to the next page where it's kind of like an app store. You have your free themes and you have paid themes. The free themes are enough to begin with, you can definitely generate sales with free themes so you don't have to worry about that. Just choose a free theme that looks good with your niche, start with that and it'll work. Once you start generating sales and profits and you have more money to put on themes and extra stuff like that, go for it. But in the beginning, the free is more than enough. That's regarding the theme. Regarding your own unique logo, you're gonna have to have this done for you. So either hire a freelancer like from 5RR.com, for example, 5RR, search for Shopify logo and you'll see all the freelancers that are going to give you the service. Let's just change it to dollars since it's more relevant. So as you can see, you have many plans starting at $10. I'm pretty sure that you even have plans at $5. Here we go. I will design an e-commerce online store logo for Shopify websites starting at $5, 4.9 rating out of 760 ratings. I will definitely go for this guy. So your store logo doesn't have to set you back too much, five, 10 bucks through 5RR.com. You can also check out Upwork.com or other freelancer websites. So your theme is gonna come from Shopify for free. Your logo is gonna cost anywhere between $5 to $10. So now you have your store, your store name.mineshopify.com which later you will transfer to your own domain name for nine bucks a year. Your theme, which will come free from Shopify, your logo which will cost between $5 to $10. And now already you're gonna have a store that looks good and all you're gonna need to do is upload products. So this is how you create your own store and have it looking good already from the start. Okay, so by this point, you know how to find your own niche, you know how to identify your competitors and your competition. You know how to conduct product research and I hope that by this point you found at least 10 to 15 or 20 items from AliExpress to upload to your shop. You know how to create your own shop on Shopify.com, find your own logo, find your own template. And now you have a store that's ready to be worked on. Now the next step, if you're only in the beginning is to create an AliExpress account. So if you haven't done so yet, it's very self-explanatory. I'm not gonna go into details too much. Just log into aliexpress.com. On the right you have the join button, click on that, enter your registered details, create your account. And that's how you can have your own free AliExpress account. Obviously it doesn't cost any money. Every dropshipper in the beginning should start with AliExpress and learn his way from there. So once you have your AliExpress account, the next thing that you have to do is connect your Shopify store with AutoDS so you can completely automate your business and have a full business overview all the time. So all you have to do now is connect your Shopify store with AutoDS. So just head over to autoDS.com. On the top you'll see the Shopify link, click on that. And here you'll have the link to start now for free. Now what do we mean by free? If you scroll down, you'll see the subscription plans for the AutoDS Shopify service. The starting plan starts at $0 per month. Yes, it's completely free. You have the AliExpress supplier. So for starters, for beginners, we really encourage you to start. We want you to pay nothing until you start getting some sales, earn some profit, and then you'll be able to afford starter, warrior, and king plans in the future when you'll really start to be making good figures. So the free plan, you'll have AliExpress as a supplier. You can list up to a hundred different variations. You have orders management, draft management to upload products and work on the products before you upload them, the smart filter system, bulk changes, and so forth. All of this for free. So once again, beginners, this is your chance to join the dropshipping world and try it out with minimal expenses. And only when you start generating sales and profit should you start to expand and multiply your business and success with better subscription plans which will help you profit even more. So the next step, after you've created your AutoDS account and you have your Shopify store and you've connected them both, the next step is to start uploading products to AutoDS to your store and have all of your prices and stock monitored. So let's see how you can add products to AutoDS. This is how the AutoDS platform looks like once you sign in. I'm not gonna get into the details because I'm really trying to keep this video as short as possible and it's not short at all until now. So just click on add products on the left side. So the first step is to obviously tell AutoDS which products you wanna upload to the system. So you can do that by either entering the buy URL or the product ID on the source site or by uploading a CSV file and uploading products in bulk. So let's see how we can do that. Let's head to Aliexpress and continue with the niche that we were working on, Halloween. So pretend that you already did your product research and you found these one, two, three, four, five products that you wanna upload to your store. I opened them all in new tabs. So the first thing that you can do is take the URL and copy it over here, finish each one with a line break. So that's the first one, second one, third one and so forth. So this is one way to upload the products. The second way to do it is once again going with the CSV file. So you click on upload as CSV and here the auto-DS system will need the CSV file. So you can get it either by creating your own CSV file, you can download an example CSV file to see what it looks like where you need to put the product ID, the source ID, the region, the supplier and so forth. Or you can use the auto-DS Chrome extension to quickly grab all of the items on one page and upload them all in bulk by exporting it as a CSV file. And then you'll have to drop that CSV file over here. Let's see how that works for example, really quick. So let's go back to the Halloween search that we made. Let's say I don't want to take each product one by one like we did up until now. I want to take all of the products on this page. So the first thing that you need to do is download and install the Chrome extension, I already did it. So let's head back to the page. I want all of these items. I have the extension here on the bottom right. So just click on the extension and when you're on the product page, click on extract. As you see, it took all of the product IDs from the suppliers page, 50 products it took. So now after extracting all of your products, click on export as CSV. It will export it as a CSV file and downloaded onto your computer as you can see over here. Now all you have to do is head back to autoDS, drag and drop that CSV file. So go to wherever downloaded to, drag and drop that CSV file, processing CSV. And the file is uploaded successfully. Now whether you went as uploaded CSV or by the buy URL or ID, once you click on next, you'll have the same options to continue uploading the product. I'm not gonna go through that now. If you want all of the details on how to upload your product, just check out section number eight on the full article below this video, how to upload products to your store or check out the help videos that we have on the Shopify subject in our help section on our website. So the next step to creating your e-commerce business is knowing how to market your store because up until now you've done all of the hard work of finding your niche, creating your store in Shopify, connecting it with autoDS, doing product research, uploading all of the products to your store, getting a logo, getting a billboard. Now you need to work on how to get your store in front of your target audience because nobody knows that your store exists out there. The first step is to have people subscribe to your newsletter. Every person that subscribed to your newsletter, you're gonna have their email address. The more people subscribe, the bigger your email database is gonna be and then you're gonna use that database to target people to your shop. So on Shopify for example, you have to subscribe to our newsletter option. It's easy to add it to your shop, just check Shopify's help section on it. But you can also use the Shopify app center to find apps that help people subscribe to your newsletter by offering them discounts and all kinds of things. So it will definitely convince them to subscribe to your newsletter and that way you can start building your email database more and more. So once you get your email list, you start with email marketing. Keep in mind that running successful email campaigns doesn't cost you any money at all. You can even do it for free on the Shopify platform. Just make sure you have a couple of hundred subscribers before you start. So email marketing is the best way to get people to your site because it doesn't have to cost you any money once you have enough email subscribers on your list in your email database. You don't have to pay any ad agency to create ads and try to guess who your target audience is and pay too much money on that. So email marketing is definitely the best method. It's hard to create it, to create the base and start building it slowly, but in the long run, it's definitely, definitely worth it and it's the best method to bring traffic to your store. The next method to bring traffic to your store is by using influencer marketing platforms. We already have a blog, a full article about it. So you can go ahead and read that in our blog section. But briefly, influencer marketing platforms are websites, platforms that have a lot of influencers. They have a large database of influencers with all of the data where they come from whether Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram or YouTube and whatnot. Their target audience is how good, how strong they are in the influencer world, how many followers they have and so forth. So using influencer marketing platforms, you can easily find an influencer, reach out to them, negotiate a little bit, get your price for a shout out and try that. You should try at least three to five influencers before making a decision which one was worth it and which one was not. If you're only gonna search for one influencer, it's probably not gonna work out and you're gonna think that it's not an effective method but trust me, it is. The next method after influencer marketing platforms is using ads like Facebook ads or Instagram ads or Pinterest ads and so forth. All you have to do is sign up with one of them, check out their business center where you can create ads, pay money for it, start with low $5 budgets when you begin. Don't start with 10 or 15 or go straight for purchase conversions. First, try it out a little bit, $5, $10 day ad sets, see how that works for you and continue from there. So now that you know how to market your store, whether you're going for ads or influencer marketing platforms or creating email campaigns, the next step is creating your SEO, your organic SEO, much, much better so you can rank better on Google search engine. SEO stands for search engine optimization. So you're gonna have to hire someone to do the back work for you. Once again, I encourage going to 5rr.com because you can really find them relatively for cheap on this site. So just search 5rr.com for SEO and check out your results. You don't have to start with high expensive, $350 packages, $250 packages and so forth. You can even find them for much cheaper. So you need to find people that will do the SEO work for you. Just remember that SEO, it might not be so cheap at first but in the long run after two, three months when it really starts to kick in your website and you will rank first on Google search engine, you will notice a lot more traffic and a lot more sales to your store. So that pretty much wraps up all of the information on how you can have a structural order in your mind of how to create your own e-commerce business step by step without skipping under any important and crucial steps before and really rise your way to the top slowly and carefully. Now don't forget, there's a full article below this video on everything that I just talked about which gets more into detail. So if you didn't get everything that I said in this video, read the full article below. I also highly encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay updated on all of the cool stuff that's going on in the dropshipping world and on the AutoDS platform itself. So until the next video guys, bye-bye.