 Common mistakes that cause e-commerce stores to fail. Okay, you're excited. You started an e-commerce store. You want to do good. You want to make millions of dollars. You're still tons of products. That can happen. But also, you could fail miserably if you make these common mistakes that a lot of people make when they're doing their e-commerce store. Stick to the very end. I'll show you what all they are. And it'll save you a lot of time, money, and hassle. And you won't fail if you know what not to do. The first one is thinking that everybody is in your target market. That's not true. You need to figure out your niche. You got to figure out who your target audience is. You got to find out where do they buy stuff? Where do they go to? What social media outlets are they on? What groups are they in? How old are they? What's their income level? What's their demographics? What part of town do they live in? You got to know all these things about them. If you just try to market your products to everybody, you're going to be marketing to nobody because you're not calling out those specific pain points, the specific needs of the people that are in your market. So that's the first thing that we'll call you to fail is thinking everybody is your customer because they're not. The next thing is thinking that low prices and great customer service set you apart. It doesn't, unfortunately. I mean, you think about it nowadays. You can get some pretty cheap prices. You look at Amazon. You can find some good deals. Now, granted, they have a lot of things there that are way more expensive than you could just buy at the store, but sometimes the advantage they have of delivering it to you really fast makes you buy from a many how. Isn't that true? So what do you do? If you can't compete with low prices and good customer service, how do you compete? You compete by doing things out of the ordinary. Maybe you support a particular charity. Maybe you're giving money to a charity. You'll see this a lot now on a lot of big sites where they give a certain amount of money to a particular charity and people who like that charity will then be drawn to you to buy products from you. Maybe you're a local business. Maybe you're selling locally in your town or your state and you let them know, hey, we're locally operated in Texas, our company is in Texas. So if you wanna buy from a Texas business, you would buy from us. That's another thing you could do. The other thing you could do is you could have lightning fast free shipping. Now, that's something that a lot of people, like I said, have become accustomed to because of Amazon. So maybe you can do lightning fast free shipping. We just went to free shipping on our survival site where over a certain amount of money, everything's free shipping and quite honestly, if you buy pretty much anything on our site, you're gonna be over that amount of money. So free shipping is almost for everybody. So that's something else to think about. And the last thing, and we definitely do this one here, is that your branding implies that you have super high quality products. Our survival foods are super high quality foods. My courses that I teach on how to make money online are super high quality. They really work well. Anybody can buy one of my courses and do really well online because they're super high quality. I put a lot of effort into those. So you need to differentiate yourself from somebody else by having one of these other factors. The next thing is thinking that you don't need to market your site. I remember when I first started out and I had a survival cave food site and I put up the site and I sat back and I was like, okay, by tomorrow I should have some sales. And then I got to work and there was no sales. And I said, well, probably next day it probably takes some time to find the site. And the next day I didn't have any sales. And the next day I didn't have any sales. The next day and the next day and the next day. And guess what? I wasn't marketing my site. You've got to market your site. You got to get it out there. You can market it through ads. If you run ads, run it to a particular product that don't run it to your site because once people get there, they don't know what to do. So what you have to do is run ads for particular products and have a sales page for that particular product. That can be on your site but you have to run ads for particular products. You can put particular products on social media. You can post there. You can get your website out there. You can have a blog post on your site that draws people in. But there's things you have to do to market your site. Nobody's going to find your site otherwise. I don't care how good your SEO is. The odds of you making it without marketing your site are slim to none. The next problem I see is that e-commerce websites assume that people will know how to navigate their site. They don't. You have to explain everything to people. You need really good descriptions of your product. You need to explain to them what all your policies are. You need to let them know how they can navigate their site. Navigation's got to be super easy. I like using a dropdown. Like we have our canned meats. They can click on the dropdown. Select the flavor they want, the size can they want. Make it easy to navigate your site. People don't like trying to figure out stuff. I've been to sites where I'm there for like 30 seconds. I'm like, I can't find anything I want here. I'm out of here. Make sure you have a search box on your site too so they can type in that search box and find the products they want. Which means you also have to tag all those products with the right search words in there so that they do pop up when people search those products. That's another thing you're going to need to do. But make sure that your site is easy to navigate. That's one big thing I see with people in brand new sites. They assume everybody knows how to work with site. They don't. There are companies out there you can hire that will actually go to your site and shop your site and let you know where the problems are. If you don't want to hire one of those companies, that's fine. Get some of your friends and relatives and say, hey, shop my site and try to buy some stuff and tell me what problems you see. And they'll let you know too. But I have as many people do that as possible. If you have a list, you can ask your list. Say, hey, I'm going to give you a $50 certificate or $10 certificate. Do me a favor, navigate my site, and give me a one minute video on what you thought of the site and how easy or how difficult it was. That's a great way to figure out if your site's working or not. Now, initially, you will think that you don't have a lot of good ideas and you're just going to go copy somebody. Oh no, I see this happen all the time. They find another e-commerce site that sells similar products to theirs or the same products they do. And they pretty much just rip off the whole site. People don't like, number one, I'm going to give you a lot of reasons for this, but people don't like if they can't connect with a brand. If your brand looks identical to another brand, you haven't differentiated yourself. That's the key to really building an e-commerce store is to differentiate yourself. By doing so, they're going to have more of a connection to you, more of a connection to your products, so you really want to differentiate yourself. And there's a lot of different ways of doing that. You can talk about the sourcing of your ingredients or parts. We sell survival food. I have a company called Survival K Food and we sell canned meats. And those meats are only sourced from four farms in the United States of America. So those four farms have been supplying us meat products for years and years now. So we get that across to our customers. We also have very pure ingredients. So on every can, there's an ingredient label, obviously, but it only has two products in it. It has the meat product, which could be beef, chicken, turkey, pork or ground beef, and a trace amount of salt. That's all we put in the can, nothing else. So we have very pure ingredients and we source from very good sources. So if you have something like that, you can say about your product, that's a great thing to share on your site. Next thing you can do is you could share why you got into that particular business. Now, I sell survival food for years. I was an EMT on the rescue squad in Virginia Beach, Virginia. And I saw a lot of people during, because I would go out during storms, right? And hurricanes and all that, we had to go out, people got hurt. And I would see people that weren't prepared. They just weren't prepared. They weren't prepared, you know, bandage-wise, they weren't prepared, you know, flashlight-wise. They weren't prepared food-wise. So I went the food route and we sell survival food now. But I saw that and I can share that story with people so that they can get good results now too and they'll be protected. So that's my story behind my site. What's the story behind your site? Why did you start your site? What is the story behind you? Next thing you can do is, of course, like I mentioned in the beginning, you can support some type of a charity. You know, maybe your site supports a charity that people are interested in. If you can do something along those lines and you put that on your website and people see that, that can wholeheartedly increase your sales. I do want to add something else to the end of this. When you are out there and you're building your site, if you copy somebody else's site, there's a thing called duplicate content. If you, even if you grab two or three sentences from somebody else's site and you put it on your site, that's duplicate content. And when you do that, the search engines will find it. Yes, they will find it. And when they see that you have duplicate content, they will blacklist your site because you haven't put something new online. And you think about this. This is pretty smart, really, of the search engines. If I were to type in best survival food in Texas, and I put that on my site, and somebody else then put best survival food in Texas, and somebody else did, somebody else did, and I put a whole article about it, and they copied the article, the next person copied the article. When somebody went to search for something like that, they're gonna get 10 sites with the same exact thing. The search engines don't want to do that. They don't want to give people duplicate content. So what they do is they figure out who had that content first, and they get rid of all the other sites. That way they don't show up in the search engine, and the end user finds products from a whole bunch of different sites, finds articles from a whole bunch of different sites, and they don't get a bunch of duplicate content. You don't want that, right? If you type in that you're gonna get, I don't know, a couch from Walmart, you don't want to get 50 results from Walmart. You don't want that. You want to get what you want to get. Maybe there's couches from other furniture stores. Maybe there's couches that are made out of the country. Maybe there's couches that are made in the USA. Maybe there's handmade couches, whatever it is. You want a variety of results from your search, and that's what the search engines do. They get rid of duplicate content. So please, please, please, don't copy another site. I hope this information was helpful to you. I hope you got something out of it. And if you did, do me a favor, subscribe. There's a big subscribe button down there. If it's red, click it, turn it gray. Since you click it, it'll turn it gray. You try it and you'll see what I mean. And then a bell's gonna pop up like this, and I want you to ring the bell. The way you ring the bell is you click the drop down and you select the one that says get all notifications. That's what you want, get all notifications. Thank you so much for listening to this video. I also have a free course below you can grab. It's a $97 course. It's click and learn, no credit card required. Grab that course while it's still free. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you in the next video. Every time I do a new video. Also click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.