 How can I start a successful e-commerce business today? I get asked this all the time. How do I start an e-commerce business? What do I do? How much can I make? When will I make money? Well, in this video, I'm going to demystify all that, and I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do, how you need to do it, and when you need to do it, and we're starting right now. JR Fisher, welcome to my channel if you're new here. Don't forget to subscribe. There's a big subscribe button down there. Hit that subscribe button, and then you've got to hit the bell next to it. It's going to sound like this. There's a bell right next to it. Then you want to turn on all notifications. When you turn on all notifications, I can let you know when I upload a new video. When I go live, and heck, when I go live, we can talk live, one-on-one online. I've been selling since 2009 online. I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products, and on this channel, I share with you exactly what you need to do to start, run, and grow your online business. Now, in this particular video, I'm going to talk about starting your online business, but I also want to help you out by giving you a $97 e-commerce course absolutely free. All you've got to do is click the link in the description. You can click and learn. Okay, so let's get started. Now, I've been selling since 2009, and I actually have my own branded products. These products are actually listed on thousands of websites and Walmart, so there are a lot of different places, and we ship them out every single day, but I've got to tell you, I wouldn't do today what I did in 2009, so I'm going to show you the updated version of what I would do today to make money online in e-commerce. Now, when I first got started, I looked for the best-selling item on eBay. eBay was the thing back then. eBay was huge in 2009. Pretty much everybody went to eBay. Things have changed a lot now. eBay is maybe not the best place for you to sell your products, but let's just look at some other alternatives that I would definitely do today. Back then, what I did is I found a site, and that site actually explained what products were selling on eBay, how much their volume was, how much they sold for, that type of thing. When I went to the site, one of the number one products selling was cell phone cases, and cell phones had just really become very popular at that time. There were all kinds of different cell phones. I thought to myself, well, everybody's got a cell phone, so that's got to be a great product to sell. Now, the problem with selling cell phone cases back then is there was no such thing as drop shipping. That just wasn't going on unless it was in a very, very small area. But you had to actually buy inventory. You had to actually physically buy 50 cell phone cases or 100 cell phone cases of the same type. Now, the problem with this was I would buy these cell phone cases, and some people would buy some of them, but the people that did buy, you know, I would only make maybe 50 cents or a dollar, and I would have to package it up. I'd have to put a label on it. I'd have to get it in the mail. And then what would happen is I would sell a few of the 100, and then people would switch their phones and get a different kind of phone, and I was stuck with the leftover. So I'd take the leftover cell phone cases, put them in my closet, and then go buy more. And I found after a while I had too many cell phone cases in my closet, and the majority of them weren't selling, so that was a huge failure. However, I did learn how to sell things online. Now, nowadays, it's entirely different, and I want to show you different ways of going about it nowadays. You can actually start your own online business nowadays with zero inventory, which means you don't have to invest in anything because there's dropshipping out there. You can actually use AliExpress and find top products and actually sell them from AliExpress and deliver them directly to your customer, and you never have to touch them. Now, what I'd like to do is actually take you over to AliExpress and show you how to use the site, how to find hot products, and you won't have to invest in inventory. Okay, I'm over at AliExpress right now. Now, this is the home page where you'll end up. You will have to set up an account. So once you set up your account, I'm going to go ahead and sign in. Okay, I've signed into my account now, and they're going to give you some suggestions on this home page here of different stuff that's selling, and right below them you can see how many of them sold like this one here sold 356. Let's just scroll through here. Let's assume that my niche is going to be cooking and we'll say it's even more niche down. We'll call it barbecue. So let's look at BBQ. I'll put that in there. Okay, I come to this page here and there's a whole bunch of items for barbecue. So how do we decide what we're going to sell? That's the important thing because we want to pick some good product. Now, keep in mind when you're first picking your first products, I would suggest that you're trying to sell something under maybe $20. Okay, you don't want to go real high end in the beginning because in doing so, you're probably going to be targeting a cold audience and cold audiences aren't going to spend, you know, $50 or $100 or $200 with you, but that doesn't mean you don't want to have other expensive items that you can put in your funnel to offer them when they buy the initial product. So let's see what all we got here. Okay, right now I'm not quite sure how these are sorted, but we're going to go up here and we're going to sort it by orders. So we're going to pick the things that are selling the most. So there we go. Now, we can look and see what's selling here. The first thing we have right here is it looks like it's a Majuna barbecue grill mat kitchen tool. Okay, and it's cheap. It's sold $6,047, which is pretty good. Let's just look at this item. On the surface, I would say this thing looks boring to me, but knowing that they sold $6,000 of these, that does peak by interest. So let's take a look, and I'm going to go ahead and play. They've got a little video here, and it shows the mat on a grill here. It just won't stick. So it's a non-stick mat. Now, I am curious why you would have a mat on a barbecue grill because we want the grill marks there, but anyhow, it is selling. People are buying a lot of these, and I just want to look at all pictures they have available here. They have the thickness of it. Okay. They show how it can go in the dishwasher. The grill just looks boring. It just looks boring. It's got great reviews. People love the product, but it just looks boring. I don't think it's something that, you know, you're going to be able to sell to a cold audience. So we're going to skip that one there. This one here looks like silicone stainless tongs. There's more of these mats. A baking brush oil liquid. That's kind of interesting there. Let's just scroll through it. What I look for when I look in here is I look for something that looks interesting and kind of cool. So, you know, so far, you know, like this here, I could get this anywhere. I could get these brushes anywhere. Let me just scroll through here. Now, this one here is kind of interesting right here. This is a barbecue fan grill blower. So let's click on that and see what that is. This is pretty interesting here. Let's take a look at their pictures here and see what they've got. So what this does, basically, you're going to get your charcoal going. It's going to, you know, blow some air out and get that charcoal going. It shows it right here. Okay, it looks like it's a decent item right here. So once we've narrowed down an item, now my niche is going to be barbecue. Okay, that's what I've decided I'm going to do because I know there's a lot of other items I can sell in barbecue. You just said cooking. That's pretty broad because people bake, you know, and they saute and they barbecue and, you know, is it going to be Asian food? Is it going to be Mexican food? So that's a pretty broad one. You know, if you're going to do cooking, you know, and you want to just do cooking and recipes and all that and, you know, things that go along with it, I would pick a cuisine. I would say Japanese or Chinese or Mexican or Italian, something along those lines. In this case here, I'm picking barbecue, so let's say barbecue southern. And so the first thing I'm going to do is look up here. I'm going to see if it has reviews. It does have reviews. It has 339 reviews and it has 812 orders and it has 4.7. So I can look down here and I can see when I hover over it, it's 4% of the people are one star. There's no two stars, 3%, 3 stars. So 80% of them are five stars. So that's a pretty good rating right here. So that's the first thing I'm looking for. The next thing I'm going to look for is Does It Have E-Packet? Now on the other page it actually showed me that. And when I click on E-Packet, you can see the free shipping is this China Post Ordinary Small Package Plus. You don't want to pick it. It could be weeks and weeks and weeks before that ever reaches your customer. I don't want to pick AliExpress Standard. The only thing I want is E-Packet. This is the only thing I want. Now remember this is going to up your cost here. If you notice it's $2.52 for E-Packet. They've got EMS here which is $22. DHL is $31 and FedEx is $47 but I just don't know who would be crazy enough to do that. So if I click on it here and I click Apply I can see what my actual cost is going to be on this particular product and I can see the total cost which is what I'm actually going to have to pay for the product. So let's take a look at that and we've got here $252 shipping and $461 right here. We've got $6 a little over $7 and some change here for this item. So this could easily be a $19.95 item $25.95 item and then below here we can see some other items they have it looks like this company's got all kinds of different items I could get. So this may be a good product here. Now if I want to dig a little bit deeper and I want to look at these reviews I can click on the reviews right here and I see these are all pretty good looking and the other thing you want to look at is this here is USA they loved it it looks like it came pretty quick this is Russia this is USA so all these look pretty good and people are pretty happy with it. Now I may want to just click on this 1 star 3% here to see what people were upset about. Now first off I noticed these aren't USA this looks like Pakistan here this person didn't like it, Russia didn't like it this looks like I'm not sure if that's Turkey but I don't see any USA ones that are disappointed here these are all looks like Russia different countries here so that's a good thing for me so it looks like it's pretty good they also have a 60 day buyer protection right here and they have a lot of sales right here which is good looks like they got some decent pictures of it right here which is pretty cool I always recommend once you figure out an item you could sell it and go ahead and take your own pictures but this looks like this would be a good item so I could save this one here I could add it to my cart if I add it to my cart I can always check out later on and actually buy this particular item so now let's go to this page here again and if you notice when we scroll through here there's lots of other items that we could use as upsells here's a cleaning brush so if somebody buys this blower here they may need a cleaning brush this is one of my upsells here and if you notice this is a little bit more expensive because maybe I'm going to sell this for $29 or $25 let's just scroll through here and see what else we can find because we also want to have some high end stuff to offer these people there's a little bit more expensive alright let's look through here what else do we have that looks cool this actually looks very cool right here to smoke or barbecue started growing but look at this now let's me know if there's an e-packer or not I would not want this item there's no e-packer it doesn't matter how cool it looks none of that matters ok if it doesn't have an e-packer do not pick it this is pretty cool here it's got a utensil set here and it sells for anywhere from $17 to $91 that's a pretty big spread ok let's just go a couple pages into here let's see what we can find that's a little bit more expensive that we can use for an upsell this is a gas stove plate grill pan barbecue it's kind of cool what else do we have in here I'm trying to look for some higher end items I see a lot of items that look cool and they're really interesting but I want that higher end ones that's going to make me a little bit more money so let me scroll through here and see what we've got this one here is $72 now this is actually a rotisserie and I probably would never offer that and the reason I wouldn't is it's going to probably only work on certain grills so that's going to be kind of a pain even offer that to people what else do we have in here a lot of brushes you'll notice that that's a very popular item I'm going to page three here see what we can find here now here's another blower and it's similar to the one we're selling but look at this one it's a hand crank so that's kind of interesting too you may want to try something like that but that's kind of a neat take on that blower thing is to actually have a hand crank so you don't have to worry about the batteries we've got what else we've got down here that looks good this rack is kind of interesting right here this is a grilling rack looks like rib shelf let's just click on that so this could be a good upsell for us we could be selling this for $25 $30 right here $29 it does have free shipping e-packet right here which is nice so that's a good inexpensive one and don't forget to also look off to the side here because there's a lot of good suggestions so that's all we have to do is go through here pick out 9 or 10 different products go ahead and start running our ads see which ones work and then take it from there now the next thing you want to do is you want to check out your competition out there if you find a product I would go ahead and take that product and search it online and see if other people are selling it it'll also give you an indication as to how much to sell it for what they're selling it for if it's selling okay if there's a lot of people selling it that could be a good indicator next thing I would say is ask yourself is it seasonal now you would initially think well barbecue equipment in general is seasonal but it is only seasonal in certain places now I know I lived on the east coast for years and in the wintertime it got really really cold and yet I would still go out in barbecue so some people will still go out in barbecue no matter what but if you live in some place like San Diego now people barbecue year around so it's really not a seasonal item so you do want to look at that seasonality is it certain times a year it's going to sell certain times a year it's not going to sell we know our survival food sells better in the winter months than the summer months people are on vacation they're not thinking about survival foods but in the winter months we do real well with it so keep that in mind that some products that you sell you may do really well with but at some point the sales may drop because it's just not the time of year where somebody is going to buy that keep in mind even if you find a great product that's cool but a product is not a business okay a business is a whole bunch of different products okay so we have survival food but we have two different size canned we have five different kinds of meats that we sell so there's a wide variety there we have you know freeze dried dehydrated buckets we have those there too you know we have a course on survival so there's a whole bunch of different products there you know I wouldn't just say one product is a business and you'll find that with just about any business they'll start out with one product and they will branch out into many things we have one of these ring doorbells and they initially came out with a ring doorbell and then they had you know ring cameras for inside your house and then they had the ring cameras and lights for outside your house and they kept expanding that base of products and you'll see this with everything you know the companies that sell you know the razors by mail you know then they start selling the shave creams and they start selling the other toiletry items so keep in mind when you find a product that sells well that's great but it's not going to end there okay you need to constantly add new products and new offerings there even in my courses you know I started off with one course and I have several different courses now that teach Shopify you know that teach integrations with Facebook you know all kinds of different things that will help somebody make money online and you don't just stick with one product because that product can die out right if it dies out then so does your business or other things to lean on now what platform would I use nowadays well what I would use nowadays has vastly changed from what I used years ago I used to have just a website and ebay now I have websites and they're not even on the same platform I have WordPress now I have Magento now Shopify and I didn't use those back then I also recommend Cartra now Cartra is amazing it's the best place for you to build your online presence if you don't initially want to build your website you can put some sales pages in Cartra and build those out and have upsells and downsells and test all these products without having to build a complete website I highly recommend it I'm going to put a link in the description below there you can go there and watch a free video absolutely free and if you like it it is our affiliate link but you can actually get a trial for one dollar at Cartra so you want to check out that link go there check out Cartra and look at all they have to offer there and I got to say it's much easier nowadays sure there's more competition nowadays but you have other factors that are actually going to outweigh all that competition like the fact that people aren't afraid to buy online now they've come accustomed to buying online so it's much easier to sell somebody online than it was 10 or 15 years ago nowadays they trust buying online they know that if somebody steals their credit card number or something happens that their bank is going to give the money back to them they don't have that issue anymore they used to worry that somebody would charge up a bunch of stuff on their credit card but that just doesn't happen anymore so you don't have to worry about that so that's my recommendation to get started nowadays online it's very easy to do nowadays you can integrate a Shopify store with AliExpress when people buy all you have to do is click a button that you accept the order and they will actually ship it out to your customer I hope you enjoyed this video don't forget put your comments below what parts of this video really helped you out what did you like put that in the comments below if you have any questions whatsoever please put those in the comments below now if you haven't subscribed you've got to do that right now go down and hit that subscribe button check out the bell next to it it sounds like this when you hit the bell next to it and then turn on all notifications when you do that you get to join the Fisher family you'll be part of the VIP group of people that I personally notify when I do a new video when I go live so make sure you do that thank you so much for watching this video this is a free e-commerce course it's a $97 value all you have to do is click the link and learn no credit card required I'll see you in the next video hey thanks for watching my video don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video also click on one of those videos there keep watching on my channel