 How anyone can start an e-commerce business. How to build, launch, and grow an online store. Hey, the future of e-commerce is pretty bright. I mean, there's a lot of people making a lot of money, but it can be kind of intimidating to start one because there's a lot of steps you gotta do. There's a lot of things you have to go through to make your store work. So what I did in this video is I put together all the steps. I've been running an online store for over a decade now and we've made millions of dollars at both digital and physical products, but running e-commerce requires a lot of work and a lot of steps, but if you know the steps, all you gotta do is follow this guide and you can be successful too. Hey, if you haven't done so so far, make sure you subscribe. Hit that button down there, turn it from red to gray and don't forget bell notifications. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. If you don't miss a single video. Okay, let's get started. Now the first thing you gotta do, obviously, is pick a product. What exactly are you going to sell? Now I will tell you this, the product that you sell today may not be the product that you sell years from now. I originally started with cell phone cases that has nothing to do with selling survival food, which is what I do now in some survival products. So don't really worry about this, don't overthink this, but what you wanna do is select a product and be able to source it. Figure out where you're gonna get it from. Now you wanna make sure you research and prepare. What does research have to do with? It has a lot to do with checking out your competition. Now checking out your competition not only will allow you to see what they're doing, but it also may give you some really great ideas as far as products that you may not have thought of. Now let's start with the real beginning. You gotta name your business. What are you gonna call your business? You have to be kind of careful with this because you wanna have something that is search engine friendly. In other words, it's gonna pop up if somebody types in some words, but you also wanna have something related to your product. So you wanna be very careful about naming this. Now when I first started, I didn't know what I was doing, I started with the name Survival Cave because I had a lot of survival products. Now the name of my site is Survival Cave Food because that is the main product. So think this out, but don't overthink it. Next thing you wanna check out is making a logo. There's so many logo makers out there that are free now, there's software that can make them. You could go to Upwork, you could go to Fiverr, you could go to Freelancer.com and hire somebody, but please don't overthink this. I've seen people working on logos for weeks or months or they really never get past getting a logo created. And the thing is a logo is not that important. People don't notice it that much. If you look at something like Nike, they just have a swoosh. So it doesn't matter as much as you think. Don't overthink it. Don't make it too complicated. I do see people do that. They have a bunch of words on there and things and you just don't need all that. Now one thing I didn't know about but I'm gonna suggest to you now is understand search engine optimization or SEO. As you build your store, you want to make sure that the search engines are gonna be able to find that. So I have some videos on this channel that you can watch on search engine optimization but you definitely, definitely wanna make sure that you're doing this correctly and that you understand what search engine optimization is. Watch one of my other videos on that and I'll explain all of that. But get that set up early, it's super important. And it's free advertising too. When somebody types something in the search bar and your store comes up, that didn't cost you anything. The next step is choosing how to build your store. This is super important. If you're doing e-commerce, I really like Shopify a lot. I'll put a link below so that you can get some freebies from Shopify. But check out Shopify. It's a great e-commerce store. It's probably one of the best ones in the market right now. But you can also use WordPress. You could use Magento. You could use a number of other ones. But make sure it matches what you're doing. Don't just go for price. I see so many people looking for these cheap website builders. And later on, it won't even do what they need. So don't do that. In the beginning, spend a little bit of money. You know, if you were to open a store in a mall or a shopping center, you'd have to spend thousands of dollars. Usually these things are $20, $30 a month. So it's not a lot of money. Now, I wanna tell you something that a lot of people don't understand. But a product is not a business. A product is something that a business sells. Now, that may sound kind of silly to say, but let me explain it to you this way. With only one product, it's tough to grow your company. If you look at any big businesses now that have grown, they've probably started out with one product, but then they grew into a whole lot of other areas. We started off with one product and now we have, you know, just in our canned meat line alone, we have beef and chicken and turkey and pork and ground beef. We have all those. And then we also have 28 ounce cans and we have 14 and a half ounce cans. We come in and out of freeze-dried food because of the market and trying to be able to get things during the world illness. Freeze-dried foods are really great too. And we're gonna be adding another line next year. I almost said this year. It seems like the year is almost over with. But next year we're gonna be adding another line of freeze-dried food too. So we're constantly looking at new products. Now, that doesn't even mention a lot of little survival gadgets, the book I've written, several other things. Don't think of your business as a single product. That product that you have may do really well right now or it may not, but the point is you need more for backups because that one product is not a business. Please remember that. Now, I want you to also think about inventory. How are you gonna do this? Are you gonna be doing drop shipping? In other words, are you gonna have the manufacturer actually send the product down to the customer? Or are you gonna actually get the inventory and send it out yourself? Now, there's probably three ways to actually do that. And I've done all three ways. The first way is drop shipping. Drop shipping is good. Nothing wrong with drop shipping. The cool thing about drop shipping in the beginning is that you don't have to tie up your money in inventory. You can just take an order, collect the money from the individual, send that order to the manufacturer and have them ship it out for you. That's model number one, okay? Model number two is to have the product shipped to you and you physically ship it out. And that's the way I actually started out originally. I didn't do any drop shipping. We actually manufactured the product which were survival foods. We had them shipped to our location. I had a smaller warehouse and then a bigger warehouse and we were shipping them all out. So that meant we had to package them. We had to put them in boxes. We had to put peanuts in there or whatever our packing was. We had to put a label on them and we had to ship them out. This took a lot of time not to mention the expense of the warehouse. The warehouse was incredibly expensive. Our first one was in California and with the employees there in the warehouse, I was spending $20,000 a month, which was a lot of money. I, after I did that for a few years, I finally figured out that I could use what's called a 3PL, 3PL. That's a third party logistics. Now what a third party logistics does is they actually ship out the product for you. So you buy it from a manufacturer. That product is then shipped to that warehouse somewhere in the country. And I do want to talk to you about location in just a second too. But somewhere in the country and then they actually ship it out for you. So you once again are out of the loop of actually physically touching the product. I like that business model a lot. I think a lot of businesses probably use that and there's a lot of good warehouses out there. I do want to warn you, there's a lot of bad warehouses out there too. There's warehouses that will overcharge you. There's warehouses that will cheat you on the charges. There's warehouses out there that will break your stuff, that will lose your stuff. It is difficult to find a good 3PL. And you just have to do your research. There's no way around that. There's nobody who's going to give you one list because each warehouse kind of specializes in different products. Like there are warehouses out there that specialize in very small products. And I have one of those warehouses, you know little bottles of vitamins or protein powders or whatever. And it didn't work out because we sell cases of meat and they're big and they're heavy and they're bulky. And that situation didn't work out. So I've moved to a different warehouse now that specializes in larger objects and they have a bigger warehouse and they can store all this stuff. The next thing I want you to think about is the location of the warehouse. Now people at these warehouses will tell you that they have a great location. No matter where they're located, they're going to tell you they have a great location. I don't know about your country. I know I have a lot of people from India who watch my videos and the U.S. But the majority of the people actually watch my channel are from India. I don't know if you knew that or not. The majority of the people that watch my channel are from 18 to 24 years old and the rest are from 24 to 35. And almost nobody else does. It's that age group, okay? But that's a side note. You want to make sure that your warehouse is as close to the orders that are getting shipped out as possible. Now why is that? Well, because you have a shipping cost. Whether you charge your customer the shipping cost, whether you absorb it yourself, you want to keep that as low as possible. Now in the United States, we try to have our products as close to the customers as possible. But how do we do that? Since the United States is so big, we originally started in Virginia, which was on the East Coast. Very expensive to ship something to California or Washington State. Then we moved our warehouse to California, which is on the West Coast. Very expensive to ship something to New York or Virginia or North Carolina or Florida. Very expensive to do that. Our warehouse now is in Utah. So it's kind of like in the center of the United States so that when we ship it out, it kind of evens out. We're gonna be a lot closer to both coasts because we're in between both coasts, but we also have all the people in the middle. So you want to think about the location of your warehouse. Now when you're building your website, you want to make sure all of the products on your website are as descriptive as they possibly can be. Now what do I mean by this? I mean all the details you can give. You can't have too many pictures. You can't have too many details, but you can certainly have too few pictures or too little details. So that's something you want to watch for. I also want to talk about money. Money is so very important. I see a lot of businesses go out and take loans. Loans are so expensive for your business in the beginning starting out. Now if we go out and take out a loan now, which we have for like inventory or something like that, we already know that if I take out a loan for inventory or I put it on a card or whatever I do, I know that that product's gonna sell because we've had years of experience at that. So it's not so much of a problem. But if you're starting a new company, I would recommend that you don't use any credit whatsoever. No credit whatsoever. Because if you do that in the beginning, you're not sure what's gonna sell. You may buy a whole lot of inventory in product A and not much in product B. And product B is the big seller. Now you're stuck with all this product A. What are you gonna do with it? You also, in the beginning, want to make sure that you start a list. Have a way for people to opt in. This is not something I did in the beginning, but I should have, okay? If you have a list, you can send out emails to your list and automatically make money. Now I do this every day of the week. Emails go out and it sells my products. However, in the beginning, I didn't have a list. There was nobody I could email to. You also want to brush up on all these skills, like email skills are so very important. We use a program called Cartra. And I will put a link below where you can actually get Cartra for $1 trial. So you do want to check that out. That is a great software for marketing. You're gonna have to do some marketing, okay? You're gonna have to do some selling. If you're going to sell products in e-commerce, you're gonna have to market to people, right? They're gonna have to know about it. So what we've just talked about is details of your product, very detailed, very, very detailed, and marketing your product. Now, if you don't know how to market your product, you don't know how emails work, look on my channel, you can type in their emails or email marketing, you can find out how to do that. There's a lot of videos on my channel. I mean, we've got over 1,100 videos now. There's a lot of videos on the channel that'll tell you all about marketing and sales and that type of thing. And no matter what your occupation was before, you may not understand all this online stuff. I had a deep appreciation for sales before because I was in sales. I had been in sales for many, many years, but selling online and selling one-on-one to an individual is vastly different and I had to learn those skills. So you're gonna need to learn those too. I would highly recommend you go through my channel and watch some of those videos. This channel is made up of things that were successful for us online. In other words, we did things and got success and then I do videos on them. So it's a free way for you to find out more information and to get your business started. I also have courses. You'll find some links to those below and I also have a free course. Heck, there's one below right now that's a $97 course. You can get absolutely free. All you have to do is click and learn. And the last thing I'm gonna tell you is you wanna stay on top of this stuff. There are so many softwares. There's so many methods that I use now that I didn't use in the beginning because they didn't exist or I didn't know about them. So you need to really study your market. Figure out what other people are doing. Go to conventions. Go to meetings. Do some meetups. Whatever it takes, you wanna stay on top of the market. You wanna be cutting edge because there's so many new automations coming out. There's so many new softwares coming out that will help you immensely if you take advantage of them but you do have to take advantage of them. I hope this video helped you out. If you have any questions, I would really appreciate if you put them in the comments below. Maybe you have suggestions. Maybe you just wanna say hello and tell me what's going on in your neck of the woods. You can do that in the comments section too. I really appreciate your input guys. Do me a favor if you would, give me a thumbs up. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. If you haven't subscribed yet, hit that subscribe button down there. Super important that you do that. Thanks so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Thanks for watching on my channel.