 Here's why most online businesses fail. Okay, you're concerned. You're gonna start an online business or you already have an online business and you're worried that you're gonna fail. You should be because most online businesses fail because of some very simple reasons. In this video, I'm gonna share them with you so you can learn from them so that you don't fail and we're starting right now. Hey, thanks so much for visiting me or my channel. My name's JR Fisher. I've been selling online since 2009. I have sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And on this channel, I answer those questions. This channel is for you. This is your channel. This is the channel you come to to get answers to online sales, whether it's digital products or physical products. I've sold them both and I share with you how to do it. If you have questions about any of these things, put it in the comments below. Let me know and I'll try to get those answered for you and help you out. If you've had some successes, also put that in the comments below so that you can share with other people and they can be successful too. Don't forget, if you haven't done so, make sure you subscribe and turn on bell notifications. Turn on all bell notifications. You'll become part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that gets notified every single time I do one of these videos. Now let's jump right into it. You know, businesses fail every day. And according to some of the statistics here, 42% of all startups fail because they failed to analyze their actual needs of their customers. And another 28% of startups fail because they burn through all their cash. So there's a couple of things to be learned from this. Number one, make sure there's a real need for whatever you're doing out there. And it's pretty simple to figure that out by just looking around, look at social media. And number two, don't overspend. Don't go and hire somebody to do everything. I didn't hire anybody to do anything in the beginning because number one, I didn't have money, okay? And number two, I wanted to learn it. Make sure you wanna learn these things, stay inquisitive. Now, how do we avoid some of these things? Let's jump right into this. The number one reason that people fail online is because they didn't analyze the needs of their customer. So it's so super important to do this. And it's really easy to do too. You not only need people who need your product, you need enough people who need your product, okay? That's where some people fall down is there's always gonna be a need for almost anything out there. You know, maybe it's how to make a stock on a shotgun, okay, out of wood. Well, there's gonna be some people who are gonna wanna know how to do that. I don't know if there's enough people that wanna know how to do that to where you could put a business around that. You'd have to sell other products. You'd have to do other things. So you wanna go out there, whatever your idea is, whatever your product is, make sure that you find other companies that are doing well at it, okay? A lot of people are like, no, I wanna find something that nobody else is doing. I'm the only one. If you're the only one, you know, you may be a super genius or everybody else has tried it and it doesn't work, okay, so don't think you're super genius. It's better to start off with a product that a lot of people are selling and having success with because at least you know there's a market out there. Number two is not having a user-friendly website. Oh my God, I have gone through so many websites over the years and different levels of websites and we use WordPress and we use Magento and I've used Shopify before too and I also use Cartra. Cartra not really being a website but I put sales pages there, sales funnels there, that type of thing, my courses. So I still use all of these things and if it's not user-friendly, if it's difficult to navigate, you've got a problem. I have a friend who is in the financial advice industry. She's been in it for years and they had somebody do her website the other day and they were supposed to be the financial experts on doing websites and lo and behold, when they got the website, it didn't work on mobile. Huh? Yeah, it didn't work on mobile and I was like, well, I don't wanna say her name but I said, hey, this is where 70% of the people are operating now is on mobile. She says, yeah, I know. And I said, and this is also one of the reasons I like to do a lot of my own stuff and I have knowledge in those areas because I know what to ask people before they work on something. She didn't know to ask if it would be mobile-friendly. I'm sure they're gonna get it fixed but I'm also sure they're gonna charge her more money because she didn't ask this question upfront. So it's really important, guys, that your user experience is really good. During the pandemic, Yelp came up with something and we ordered from a lot of restaurants and there was a little button at the bottom there and it says, order from this restaurant. It was really cool when you click the button, it says, order for delivery, order for pickup and I think it was through Grubhub that did it and it's really seamless. You can just do a few clicks, the menu's there, click, click, click, click, use your Apple Pay, use your credit card, whatever and you can put your order in. They were on top of stuff. They made it easy and I'm sure that really propelled Yelp to the next level because nobody was using that before and then when coronavirus hit, everybody wanted everything delivered and they were smart enough to react to it. It's those businesses that are smart enough to react to make that user experience easy for the customer that do well. Don't have a crowded website. Don't have a bunch of stuff all over your website. Have a few simple things on your website just to get people going and they can click on menus and categories to go to other areas. Make it simple. Number three is not having excellent customer service and I don't mean customer service. I mean excellent customer service where the person will go overboard to help the customer. That's what you wanna do. I know Zappos started off with that and they ended up selling out for, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm just crazy man. But they were a shoe website and they would do things like tell all their employees that they could talk on the phone as long as they wanted to a customer. People would call up and say, hey, I just watched this soap opera and in this one scene, this lady was wearing these shoes and they were beautiful. I don't know where to get those shoes. Would you happen to know? And that person in customer service would actually look up that particular episode of that particular scene and look at the shoe and find the shoe with the customer online, locate the shoe and say, here's the shoe I can provide it to you. Now that's customer service. That's customer service. They weren't worried about just selling that customer at the moment. What they were worried about is the overall customer experience and that's what you need to be worried about too. Number four, not having a good social media presence. And when I say good social media presence, there's a lot of prongs to this. It's being there. Number one, you gotta be there. It's engaging with your customers. My wife does dog training and she has a great group. You may wanna check that out. The art of pet parenting. That's on Facebook so you can check that out. But she's really good about interacting. People ask her a lot of questions and she's really good about answering those questions. And she genuinely cares. Don't fake caring. Don't do that. Make sure you really care. And then your social media presence is also important in as much as you don't wanna post anything controversial. Don't post your political views. Don't post your religious views. Don't post any of that stuff. There's no point in it. There's no point in it, guys. All you're gonna do is get into conflicts with other people, I promise you you will. And you'll be associated with that and your business. Do you want that? I know I'm not gonna name them, but a couple of major businesses have posted their political views online and it's come back to bite them, okay? So you don't wanna do that. The next thing is not effectively managing your company money, okay? If you are spending too much, if you are buying too much. Understand, if you're on a job, you know that you're gonna get a paycheck every week, every two weeks, once a month, whatever it is, you're gonna get it and you know it comes in like clockwork. It doesn't come in like that online. I know I've had a lot of dips in my income and a lot of peaks in my income. And since I know that, I always keep a few months, probably a lot more than that, a couple years of income so that I know, or at least access to income, credit, whatever, so I know that I will remain in business. Don't spend everything that you make. If you make $100,000 this month, don't spend it. Still live on that 3000 that you've been living on, okay? Now once you've got some months built up, some years built up of income, then you can spend a little bit more. To this day, I don't spend that much. I mean, I'll splurge every now and then go to a nice restaurant and do something like that, but I try to watch my money. It's so, so very important. Now, if you've got hundreds of millions of dollars and it doesn't matter, enjoy yourself. Buy whatever you want, okay? Most people don't get to that level and they do have to at least watch their money. The next reason they fail is because of their team, okay? If you've got a bad team, and I used to manage car dealerships and I had managers that worked for me, I was a general sales manager, and they would often come to me and tell me how bad their salespeople were. They said, I have terrible used car salespeople. I have terrible finance people. I have terrible new car salespeople. And I would just look at them and go, well, then it's your fault. I mean, if you manage people and they aren't good at what they do, whose fault could it possibly be? It's probably theirs. They hired wrong, they didn't train right, they didn't manage right, they didn't motivate correctly. So when you're thinking about the people that are gonna work with you, whether it's virtual employees, which we have some virtual employees, or whether it's people that work with you every day, you know, you've got a number one, hire right. You've got to hire correctly. You've got to train correctly. You've got to give the right expectations. You can't get mad at somebody when they didn't perform and you didn't tell them how to perform or you didn't train them correctly. You didn't tell them how to perform or you didn't train them how to perform. Okay, so that's super important to know that and you've got to motivate them correctly. And motivation comes in many forms. It comes with compliments when they're doing a good job. Don't be afraid to compliment somebody. It comes with pay. You've got to pay, you know, the people what they're worth or more than what they're worth, okay. That'll make them reach a little bit. Bottom line is, if you've got a bad team that can tear you down, if you've got a great team that can help you build up your company. The next thing is not watching your product price and cost, okay. This is so very important. I know I need to adjust some prices on some of our canned meats and our survival food company, but look at the pricing, look at the cost. If you're, I'll give you an example here. Let's say you're selling a course for $497. It's a digital course and nobody's buying it, but you're selling it for $497. What do you think the first thing you should do is? Maybe reduce the price, okay. You know, I was talking to my wife the other day and we had a funnel we were thinking about and she has in place and she's selling her front-end product but the upsell is not selling. So, you know, my immediate thought is reduce the price of it. Just reduce the price of it. It's a digital product anyhow. It's not making you any money if nobody's buying it and if you lower it and some people buy it now you've got money coming in. Now it will make all your ads profitable. So guys, think about this. Also on the flip side is maybe you're not charging enough. A few years back I wasn't charging enough for my survival food. I started doing, you know, penciling out all my costs and warehouses and back then I had a huge warehouse that I was paying for and you know, I looked at it and I'm like, well I can't make any money. I'm not charging enough. I've got to up my prices. So I up my prices. Now it's been like five years since I've up my prices and I think it's time to do it again, okay. I've done it on one of the products and it's selling fine. So I might as well do it on all of them. I just haven't gotten around to it which I've got to, no excuse. But that's something that you really want to think about. Make sure you always analyze your cost and your pricing on a regular basis. If it's not selling maybe you need to lower it. If it's selling really good maybe you need to up it. Test these things and check your cost and pricing. And the last one I think is the big one and that's lack of commitment. Lack of commitment. What is commitment? Commitment is saying I'm gonna make this happen. Period. I'm gonna make this happen. If you're running ads on YouTube and they're not doing well then you need to read another book. You need to take another course. You need to try another ad. You need to do a different video. You need to try a different audience. You just keep doing it over and over and over and over till it does work, okay? Commitment is not starting a business and working two hours in the morning and then going to the beach surfing all day. Now that is a lifestyle and that can be achieved by selling stuff online. However, you can't start off with a lifestyle. You start off with a business. On down the road, if you've got enough money coming in and you're happy and you're safe and you're secure, yeah, go to the beach, enjoy yourself, okay? I have, I think, enough money but I wanna have enough money for years and years and years and years and years, okay? So I'm gonna keep working. I'm gonna keep working hard. I'm gonna keep doing things and I'm committed to making that happen. Even on the days, I don't feel like it because here's the truth. Most days, I don't feel like it. And, you know, my son did personal training for a while and he said he would get people. He got so frustrated because some people would come in and they would say, you don't understand. I really like to eat. You don't understand. I don't like working out. I don't enjoy it. And he would just laugh and say, yeah, I like eating too. And I don't really wanna be sore and have to work out either. However, I'm committed, okay? To this day, he's still committed to that, still in good shape, okay? So you've gotta be committed. That lack of commitment will kill a business quicker than anything you've ever seen in your life because you could have everything else in line and lack of commitment, lack of just saying, I'm gonna make sure this happens. I'm gonna do whatever it takes. If it takes two hours fine, if it takes 24 hours fine, I'm gonna make it happen. You can't put a price tag on that, but that will make you successful or kill your business. I hope you found this video helpful. If so, give me a thumbs up, thumbs down if you didn't. But put it in the comments there, what you think of the video. Put it in the comments, what you'd like to see a video on. Don't forget if you haven't subscribed yet. Hit that big subscribe button down there next to it. Ring the bell once you hit the subscribe button. It's gonna change colors. It's magical. Watch it, click it, watch it change colors. And then a bell will magically pop up next to it and you'll wanna ring that bell. You'll wanna turn on all notifications so you get notified every single time I do a new video. You don't miss out, you're part of the Fisher family. The VIP group, I think it's notified before anybody else. Yeah, you'd be in front of the line. How's that feel? Feels pretty good, doesn't it? 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