 Hey, John Crestani here. Now I'm going to show you how to start an e-commerce brand. I did this last year. I set up my own e-commerce brand and sold over 20,000 units of my product online and I'm going to show you exactly how you can set up your own e-commerce brand in this video. The first thing when you're looking to start an e-commerce brand is you want to look at trends and one of the best place to look for trends is look at Amazon's trending products and dive into a category such as electronics or health and beauty, define products that are trending and are popular and hopefully you can find a product or a product type that syncs up with your interests because you should only be promoting products that you personally care about and can stick with even if they're losing money after a few months. Remember a business is a long-term activity. It's a long-term goal that will sustain and bring you income for you and your family for many years but you've got to treat it long-term as such if you want to build a long-term income. So marketing a product that you personally can get behind and you endorse and you like will be very helpful for you to mentally stick with the business even if it's not making you money the first hour you set up your store, the first day or the first week or the first month. Now one distinctive trend I saw was that these assistant devices, the Amazon Alexa, the Google Assistant are very popular right now and having products that are integrated with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa can be very helpful for you to sell things online right now. It's a good trend. There's also these fitness devices that go on your wrist to track your activity or even your track your sleep and drones are very popular. There's a lot of popular trending categories. Look to those first in order to find things that you're going to sell. The second thing to look for is a product that you are comfortable selling for 50 to 100 dollars. Now the reason 50 to 100 dollars is a good area is because that's the sweet spot for when you're advertising products of what you can get people to pay. Generally I'm assuming you don't have any social media following whatsoever and I'm assuming that you're just starting out in business here. People aren't going to generally spend more than 100 dollars unless they're a bit more familiar with the brand or you're an expert marketer whereas 50 to 100 dollars is good for a newbie marketer or really any advanced marketer newbie. This is just the sweet spot you want to stick with and to find products you want to find a product that costs 5 to 10 percent of what you're going to sell it for. That gives us just doing some quick math on my calculator right here. Basically you want to spend something like you know $2.50 to $10 on the actual product so if you're buying a product for $10 you want to sell it for $100. Again you should always be working with a 10x markup no matter what you're doing think about having a 10x markup but John isn't that evil to mark up a product price so much? I mean I'm going to go to hell for that or something right? No actually a 10 to 20x markup is standard for products because we haven't factored in all of the additional costs yet such as warehousing, packaging, shipping, marketing, advertising costs, website setup, customer support, refunds, charge backs, all of these things factored in most businesses that are selling at a 10 or 20x markup are actually only netting about 10 to 20% profits at the end of the day so you actually need to have a big markup in order to just sustain the business and not lose money. Now there's some important tools you need to know about in setting up a brand and an e-commerce store. First is Alibaba. Alibaba is a drop shipping site it's the biggest company in China or something like that. They sell most of the products that you buy online you can find they were originally sourced from China and Alibaba. Okay so Alibaba you can buy things in bulk for cheap and this is where you are going to look for products that you can buy for anywhere from $2.50 to $10. Again this is what you're looking for $2.50 to $10 to pay for the actual product and there are many products on Alibaba that are I mean most of the products are in between this range because most of the products sold the cost is actually in this range so this is the space you want to stick. The second important tool you want to use is Shopify. Shopify is software that shows your products and sells them and you can charge money through Shopify they do merchant processing they do tracking and analytics and they connect with Alibaba so or whatever you're using to buy the products from to ship the products out. This is what is called your CRM. This is managing everything for you. This is the technology that will run your store and this Shopify is what I used to run my online store when I was selling my products. Now in my case I was selling my book. Now when I was selling my e-commerce product I used Shopify to set up my online store and to manage the processing and orders and all the support tickets for my product. I did not use Alibaba because I actually wrote a book. I wrote a book and I decided to sell that so this is my book right here as you see I sold over 20,000 of these books we were using TV advertising and my cost of goods sold was $2.79 and we sold the book for $40 so our cost was $2.79 and we sold it for $40 that's the cost of printing a book if you can sell books it's it can be very profitable if you self publish them now the next step that you're going to need to do is you're going to need to reach people one of the most effective ways to reach people right now especially with any sort of physical products is Facebook ads everybody's using Facebook everybody's addicted to Facebook Facebook kind of yeah I don't I think it's a pretty evil corporation frankly but it's great for advertising I don't go on it socially but I do use it to advertise to people and this is how you will reach people and if you're looking to learn more about how to set up a Facebook ad how to look at the Facebook data how to optimize or what to write in the ad check out my video on Facebook advertising I've spent millions of dollars on Facebook and it's a great way to advertise to folks so you can check that out and it's fairly easy to I advocate other advertising places such as YouTube but do you really want to put your face on camera do you want to shoot a video my assumption is not so Facebook ads the way to go but John you told me I could start a brand how do you start a brand in e-commerce man slow your roll man I'm getting to that you need to set up branding guidelines and have brand colors I'm going to show you how to do that right now so in order to set up your brand we're going to use fiverr but first the question that should be posed is what is a brand a brand is consistency a brand is consistent colors consistent text a consistent logo consistency of product you go to McDonald's it doesn't matter what McDonald's where in the world you go to McDonald's their burgers are going to taste basically the same anywhere in the world yeah there might be slight variations it's the same thing same level of quality same expectations same arches red and yellow logo you know what to expect and I go to McDonald's oftentimes when I'm in new areas just because I know it's going to be fast it's going to be cheap and I'm going to get exactly what I'm expecting now to set up your brand we're going to set up some consistent fonts a logo consistent colors just like here I have my brand colors we have blue gold and white we have a gold wall we have a blue wall when you get to fiverr the words you want to search for is brand guidelines or you want to search for brand style guide and you'll find a number of sellers on fiverr.com that will offer you to set up your brand and create a image pack and logos and you want to save these files somewhere safe and in multiple locations because you want to use your logo and your fonts and your colors consistently across all your properties so that return customers can get used to seeing your brand and the products you are selling to them now a few advanced tips for using your brand is your even your emails you want to try to use the same colors throughout what we did with my my book work at home secrets because this was a line of products included an audio cd a video program and all that stuff is we even had video transitions we had our emails all had our brand colors and our brand imagery on them images that we created and and testimonials and everything around it use the same consistent colors i've been using the blue gold and white for years in my own personal brand since 2013 when i had my branding guidelines created and i've built up a strong personal brand and company brand to this day but john how much does it cost to start an e-commerce company the cost you can expect to pay starting an e-commerce company you want to budget at least about two thousand dollars for inventory now the way it works with olibaba is the more money you spend the more quantity of products that you buy the less the price per unit comes goes down but two thousand dollars will get you maybe about you know maybe two hundred and fifty units of a product whatever product you're selling you might be selling a uh a phone charger that also has amazon alexa in it or google assistant you might be selling a sleep tracking device and for two thousand bucks you can get roughly about two hundred and fifty units of inventory now you'll also want to budget about two thousand dollars for facebook ads to test out uh two thousand dollars will give you a good amount of data in order to optimize and facebook the way facebook advertising works is you have to train the pixel so it might take two thousand dollars before you start seeing assuming that you've done good marketing until your pixel gets trained if you want more in-depth information about how facebook ads work again check out my video on facebook advertising elsewhere in my channel i'll try to link to it in one of the cards up here and the third cost is just i say budget at least a thousand dollars is good for other other software or training course or website will cost you some money and if you want to buy a website you're going to need a website no matter what you do online whether it's affiliate marketing whether it's e-commerce and i have a link down below which will give you a free website as long as you pay four bucks a month for hosting that is a link down below get your free website and training you might want a training course again there's a number of good training courses out there there's amazing selling machine which is a very popular training course which costs a little bit more but there's a lot of people who have sold on amazon that talk about it here on youtube and some of these things may help you get ahead two other notable softwares that help you in the product research and finding trending products and categories you can get into very easily are helium six and jungle scout these are both software specifically focused on selling products online and you can use those softwares to help you find products for amazon or for other just any other purposes as well hope you enjoyed the video and if you got a lot of value out of this just give me a big hoorah and give this video a like and subscribe because i'm coming out with lots more content breaking down marketing i've made over 21 million dollars in marketing and paid out affiliates that have been working with my products over four and a half million dollars over the last few years if you want to learn more about working with me and my training systems or my software check out marketing tech that is my company that is my software you can sign up for free and earn money from your local community by helping sell online ads to them or you could also learn how to become an affiliate marketer which is how i earned my first 15 10 million dollars and there's a link down below i have a training program called the super affiliate system and we've trained thousands of people to become affiliate marketers and earn their first dollars online so that's down below check it out in the description number one money method looking forward to seeing you on future videos leave a comment leave a question i love seeing all of your interaction and i'll talk to you soon have a good day