 In order for a business to succeed, it needs to be selling online. The old school way of doing things and just having a traditional brick and mortar store is no longer enough. That's why in this video, we're going to cover everything that you need to know in order for you to be able to get started in the world of e-commerce, starting with some of the different methods of selling online to how you can get started and some of the best products that you can offer. We're going to cover all of that and more so that way you can get started selling online. Let's go ahead and run that intro and let's get started. What's going on, everyone? Mar here with out of DS. And if you haven't done so already, please make sure to hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos on this channel. We cover everything and anything dropshipping related, starting from some of the best tips and tricks to help you start and succeed in your dropshipping business all the way to some of the best products that you can offer for maximum profitability. Now, if you want to learn more about selling online and how you can get started in the e-commerce world, then make sure you check out the description down below. I'm going to have a link to the relevant article down there. Now, before we get started, I want to know one thing. Do you want to start an e-commerce business? What niche have you been thinking about starting and what steps have you taken in order to get started? Let me know down in the comments below. I want to know exactly how you're planning on doing this. All right, so let's go ahead and get started and to start things off. Let's talk about the different methods of selling online. So in this case, we have four different ways of selling online that we're going to cover. The first one is going to be print on demand. Print on demand is a service which you use a website such as Printful or Printify where you can print your own custom products so you can print your designs on t-shirts, tumblers, mouse pads, shower curtains. There's tons of different items that you can print on, which makes print on demand ideal for trying to start your own brand, let's say, or if you just have tons of different ideas for designs that can go on different products, then you can use print on demand. The other method of selling online is drop shipping. Now, as we all know, drop shipping is a fulfillment business model, meaning all we have to do is fulfill orders. So simply put, whenever we receive an order on our online store, all we do is instead of packing and shipping the item, we reroute that order to our suppliers and our supplier takes care of everything from shipping to tracking information. Another option you have is white labeling. Before you take a product that's already manufactured, you rebrand it so that way it looks like you made it. And the last method we're going to cover is the subscription service method. In this case, you offer a subscription service, which could be something like a monthly box that includes a monthly t-shirt or a monthly cup, whatever it may be. But it's something that works on a subscription month to month. Now, what are some of the benefits of actually selling online? Well, for one, it has pretty low startup costs. Regardless of whichever method you choose, the startup costs are going to be minimal. Sometimes you can even start with zero dollars. Take, for example, dropshipping. When it comes to dropshipping, you don't really have to pay anything until it comes time to actually purchase the item to send to your customer. Now, some people might argue that you have to pay subscription services for something like, let's say Shopify, but there are alternatives as well. For one, you can sell on eBay. There are no fees associated to getting started selling on eBay. You are going to get charged a transaction fee once the item sells, but that would be after the fact that you get your first sale. You also have a pretty huge customer reach. You have the ability to reach tons upon tons of customers, a lot more than you would if you had a brick and mortar store. Think about it, you're online. Who isn't online these days? Get on TikTok, make a couple videos of certain products. If they go viral, you can reach potentially millions of people. How many times are millions of people going to come into your brick and mortar store within a few days? You also have the ability to work whenever you want from pretty much wherever you want. Since you're working online, all you really need is your laptop or sometimes just your phone. So as long as you have your phone or your laptop with you, you can get some work done. Also, your store never closes. It's not like a brick and mortar store where you're only going to be selling between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. If you're selling online, you can sell online 24 seven round the clock year round. And probably the best part is the fact that you can easily scale your business, especially with something like automation. When you automate your business, let's say, or dropshipping business, you're pretty much taking a couple steps back and letting the business run itself at this point. With automation, you can automate certain processes so that way you can start to become a bit more hands off. This gives you a lot more time to be able to reinvest into your business to continue scaling. How do you actually start selling online? Well, the first thing that you need to do is find the products that you want to sell, not necessarily find the products that you want to sell, but find products that are currently trending that people are looking for and are willing to purchase. Now, when you set up your online store, there's one thing that you need to figure out before any of this. Do you want to have a general store or do you want to have a niche store? If you have a general store, then you're going to be selling a little bit of everything. You can sell things from, let's say, phone chargers all the way to shoes. But if you have a niche store, then you're only going to be selling in a particular category. So you can have a shoe store or you can have an electronic store, something along those lines. Now, when it comes to finding some products that actually sell, well, we call that product research. When it comes to product research, there's a few different ways for you to be able to find some best selling products. This way that I'm about to show you right now is actually my personal favorite, and that's using Google Trends. Now, when you're using Google Trends, you're going to be looking for particular items or particular niches. So what I like to do is go by seasons. So let's say winter starts in a few months, the cold season starts in a few months, then I'm going to start looking for cold weather related items. So, for example, here I'm already at Google Trends and all I have to do is search for a particular niche or a particular product. In this case, I'm just going to look for, let's say, leggings and explore. Now, when it loads up, it's going to give you the search history for the past day. Really, this is not going to help us. What we want to do is look for the search history within the past five years and the past year. So to start, let's go ahead and switch this over to the past five years. And as you can see, at a particular time throughout the year, it starts to spike. This is when you want to start selling your products or a little bit before that. So you can already be ready for that spike. So as you can see here around the time of August, that's when the spike starts to happen. That's when people start actually searching for this particular product. Now, this was in 2018. Let's check out the next year in 2019 around the same time between June, July and August, it starts to spike again. Then it peaks around the end of November beginning of December. And that's when people kind of stop searching for it already. Now, the following year, you can see that it starts to spike once again in August. And once again, around the end of November, beginning of December, it starts to go down. So this is the perfect indicator that tells us that we want to start selling leggings around the time of August. When do we want to have it in our store? I would say maybe once in two months beforehand. So start stocking your store with this particular product about two months ahead so that way when the busy season comes, you're ready. Now, another option you have is the AutoDS winning product section. So here I am logged into my account over at AutoDS.com and I clicked on over to the winning product section. On here, you can find tons of winning items that have been proven to sell are currently trending and have been trending in the past. As you can see, there's tons of different products on here, all in various niches. And if we click into one, let's say this one right here, you get some exclusive analytics such as profit analysis, a Facebook ad that's currently promoting this item so that way you can get an idea on how you can structure your own ads, the target audience for that particular Facebook ad and a link to a website that's selling this actual product. So you can get an idea on how you can structure your own website. Another option that you have for product research is social media. So you can go on something like TikTok and search up the hashtag TikTok made me buy it. Once it loads up, you're going to get tons of different videos with trending products. Now on here, the best thing that you can do is look for the most recent videos with the most views. So try to stick to videos that released within a month and are typically within the 50,000 and up views. And the last option that I'm going to cover is the AutoDS sell these now playlist. On this playlist, we have an endless amount of videos with the top products for you to start dropshipping. These can range from monthly product videos to niched specific videos. Now, the next thing that you need to do is find where you can actually get a source your products from. So you need to choose a reliable supplier. Now, when it comes to actually choosing a supplier, these are some things that you need to look out for. So for one, you want to make sure that they have global warehouses so they can ship around the entire world. Sometimes you don't want to be limited to just selling in one particular country. So finding a supplier that can ship around the entire world is beneficial for you so that way you can reach a broader market. You also want to make sure that your supplier has fast shipping and delivery times. So this is actually really important because this day and age in the day of Amazon, people want their packages literally tomorrow. But of course, that's not always possible. And customers know that customers are totally OK with that. But they also don't want to be waiting an entire month for their products. So you always want to make sure that you choose a supplier that can get your products to your customers at least within one to two weeks. Another thing you want to do when you find a supplier is for one, check the reviews. So look at the reviews, make sure they have multiple reviews in a lot of their different products. So that way you can make sure that they actually have people that are purchasing those items and using them, confirming that they are quality products. You also want to make sure that these reviews are kind of specific. If you start to see that they have very generic reviews, like let's say most of the reviews just say, my mom loved this product, my grandmother loved this product, I love this product, my dog loves it. And it's not specifically talking about a particular product. Be wary of those. Sometimes those could be fake reviews. Now, that's not always the case, but just be careful. Also shop around. You want to look through different suppliers that sell the same items to see who has the fastest shipping and some of the best pricing. We don't want to source that item for $19 or $20 because we're not going to be making any money. If anything, we're actually going to be losing money. So always shop around and make sure you get the best price for your product. Make sure you're not paying too much. But at the same time, make sure you're not paying too little. Because a lot of the times if you're paying too little for a particular product, you could potentially be sacrificing quality. But in this case, it's always super important that if you are curious about a particular item because of the price, just order a sample, see how it is, and then make your decision from there. And when you finally do find a supplier that you want to go with, send them a message, ask them a couple of questions and make sure that language isn't an issue. A lot of the times most of our suppliers are going to be overseas. So you want to send them a message so that way you can make sure that you can efficiently communicate with them. Remember that the customer service that we receive from our suppliers is essentially going to be the same customer service that we provide our customers. So when our customers have a question, they're going to ask us. If we don't have the answer, we're going to have to reach out to our suppliers and we're going to have to wait for their answer. So you also want to make sure that your suppliers reply back within a timely manner, typically between about 24 hours. Now that we know the products that we want to sell and where we're going to source them from, we have to figure out where we're going to sell our actual products. So where are we going to set up our shop? For one, you can set up shop on either your own website or on a marketplace. Now, here's a few key differences between the two. So when you have your own website, you have just that your own website. So people are going to be going to www.mystore.com and they're going to land on your products page or your homepage. Now, when you have your own website, you can structure it however you want. And you can pretty much sell whatever you want. Now, of course, that doesn't mean sell literally anything because you do want to sell trending products. And you also want to stay away from, you know, certain illegal products. But at the end of the day, you are going to have your own website that you are going to have to maintain and update occasionally. So if a new product comes out, you want to add it to your site. You want to add it as a featured product, maybe, so that way people can see it as soon as they land on your homepage. Now, when it comes to having your own website, you don't have organic traffic. So people aren't going to know that your website is existent. You're going to have to find ways to get people to click on your links, to go to your website and to just gain some recognition. There's a few different ways you can do this. From one, you can use things like Facebook ads or you can use something like influencer marketing. Now, there's a few different ways for you to be able to market your store. And if you want more information on that, just check out the link down in the description to the relevant article. Now, the other option is setting up shop on a marketplace. So in this case, what you're going to do is you're going to open up your store on a marketplace like Etsy, eBay or Amazon. Now, when you have your own website, for the most part, you are also going to be paying subscription fees on either a monthly or yearly basis. When you sell on a marketplace, you don't have to pay those kinds of fees, but you are going to have to pay transaction fees or something like a final value fee. Pretty much whenever you make a sale, that's when you're going to pay your fee. Now, a huge benefit to selling on a marketplace is the fact that you have already organic traffic. People are going to Etsy or eBay.com with already something in mind that they want to look for and purchase. Now, on the topic of making your store, you also need to import your products. Now, to do this, it's also super simple. There's two main ways to do this. For one, you can do everything manually. So you can type in your title, your description, add all of your photos and your variations all by hand. This is perfectly fine, especially if you're only doing maybe three or four different listings. But once you start to scale and you really want to start adding more, maybe 20, 30, 40 listings every single day, that can really start to take a lot of time. In this case, your best bet is to implement automation. So here I am logged into my account over at Autodesk.com. And in order to automatically import your product, all you have to do is click on add products up here and choose whether you're going to import just one product or if you want to import multiple products. For this demonstration, I'm just going to import one product and I'm going to import these leggings right here. These are from AliExpress. So all I have to do is go ahead and click on the link and copy that over, paste it in here. And now I have the option to either publish it directly to my store or edit some of the details. My personal recommendation, click on edit now and optimize the title, the description and make sure all the images are the way that they're supposed to be. Now, once your product is added as a draft, then it's going to take you to the draft section. And on here, you can actually edit everything that you need. You can edit the title and you can even optimize it with AI. So AutoDS actually just came out with a feature that optimizes your titles as well as your descriptions using AI. So you don't even have to come up with the titles or the descriptions anymore. But aside from that, if you're selling on a platform like let's say Shopify, you get the option to be able to add it to any one of your collections. You get the option to change the shipping method in which your product is going to be shipped. So in this case, you can do either cheapest, cheapest with tracking or fastest with tracking. My recommendation, always go with cheapest with tracking because the cheapest most likely will not include tracking. And we all know that our customers want to know where their product is. Then on the next tab, you have the description. You can go ahead and edit it from here. You can edit all of the different variations as well. On this page, what I use it for for the most part is to just select everything, edit and adjust the price. So I can adjust the price and set everything to one single price so I can charge $50 or I can increase the price by a certain percentage or a dollar amount. Then you also have the images tab where you have all of the different images as well as an image editor. Once I'm ready to import this product into my store and have it go live, all I have to do is click on save and import and then it'll be ready to sell within minutes. Now, the next thing you need to focus on is fulfilling your customer orders. So let's say you're dropshipping and you receive an order. Now what you need to do is make sure that order or that item gets to your customer. How do you do that? So just like the import process, you have two options. You have the manual way and you have the automated way. When you do things manually, all you have to do is simply go to your supplier's website, add the item to your cart and pay for the item. Now, as for the shipping details, all you have to do is put your customer's information. Then once you get the tracking information from your supplier, you have to go ahead and update your customer with that as well. Again, that's perfectly fine if you have a couple of different orders, but if you start to have maybe 10 or 20, that's also gonna take a long time. So in this case, your best bet is to use something like AutoDS and automate the entire process. Now, when it comes to automatic orders, you have two different options. Now, when it comes to automating your order fulfillment, you have two different options. You have automatic orders and you have fulfilled by AutoDS. When it comes to automatic orders, AutoDS is gonna go ahead and take your order and it's gonna reroute it directly to your supplier. It's gonna place that order on your behalf using your account credentials. So it'll log in to, let's say AliExpress, using your account credentials and make the purchase using your credit card or your backing details. Now, with fulfilled by AutoDS, the same thing happens, except instead of using your account details, AutoDS is gonna use its own AutoDS account details. AutoDS has its own buyer accounts for all these different suppliers. And when it comes time to actually paying for the item, it's gonna use a balance that you top up. Now, the last thing that you need to focus on is providing exceptional customer service. When a customer has great customer service and they feel valued by the company, they're more likely to return and make another purchase. Now, some of the top product categories to sell online are gonna include health and beauty. Health and beauty is a huge market and it's constantly selling, it's constantly updating. And the best thing about it is that it's evergreen. So a lot of these products people are gonna purchase, use and then repurchase it again. Home Decor and Garden is also another great category because everyone is always trying to spruce up their homes and make it feel a lot more comfortable. And the best thing is, is that this is also an evergreen niche because these trends change by the season. So every season people are purchasing something different to make their house or their living space match the current season. Consumer electronics is absolutely booming. It's huge, it's always evolving and people's electronics are always breaking and they're always losing certain things like their chargers. So this is definitely an evergreen niche that is not going out anytime soon. This is something that's constantly evolving and people are always wanting the latest tech. Kids Toys is a huge industry and another awesome niche for you to start selling. People are always having kids, kids are always gonna be around and kids are always gonna get bored of the same toys over and over. Which makes it a bit easier to sell new and unique items to new parents. Just like there's people that love their kids, there's people that absolutely adore their pets and they're not shy about spending money for their comfort which makes pet supplies a very lucrative category. Lately the Sports and Outdoors category has also been trending because people just wanna get out of the house and be a bit healthier. They wanna start walking around and they wanna start exploring new things. So Sports and Outdoors is another great category for you to start selling. DIY right now is also huge. People love doing things themselves and that also includes doing things yourself around the house. So home improvement items is a must. Now one category that is always gonna be evergreen and is always gonna be constantly recycled is the office and school supplies category. In this category, you're gonna be selling a lot of things like papers, notebooks, pencils, binders. These types of items are always constantly used and replenished. So this makes it an evergreen market and very lucrative. For the main reason that your customers aren't gonna be one-time customers. They're gonna be repeat buyers. In the e-commerce world, one of the biggest categories is always gonna be apparel and accessories. You're always gonna find some sort of store that has their own type of clothing or their own type of apparel or their own types of accessories. For the main reason that these trends are always changing and people all have their unique styles. So if you have a unique idea for certain designs or certain types of accessories or a certain kind of store that encompasses both apparel and accessories, then this category can be a very lucrative one for you and you can potentially make some pretty good money. Gaming equipment is also another huge market. Games, video game systems, computers and tech again is always constantly evolving which makes this niche also an evolving and evergreen niche. Once again, everyone wants the newest tech and everyone wants the newest system or the newest game. And that is everything that you need to know on how you can get started selling online. If you enjoyed this video, if you found it helpful, if you found it informational please make sure to smash that like button and while you're there also make sure you navigate to that subscribe button and click that as well. Make sure you ring the little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. And remember that if you want any more information on anything that I covered in this video then just go ahead and check out the description down below. There's gonna be a link to the relevant article down there. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS and I thank all of you for being here especially all the way to the end and catch you all next time.