 Seven things you need to know before you start an e-commerce business. Hey, 206 million people are going to be buying in the US this year alone. Don't you want to get part of that? You deserve a share of the e-commerce business. In this video, I'm going to tell you the things you need to know to start your e-commerce business and be wildly successful. And we're starting right now. Hey, I'm J.R. Fisher. I do e-commerce. Hey, what do you know? I've sold millions of dollars' worth of products and digital services all online. On this channel, I'd like to share with you the things I've done, the tips, tricks, secrets to make all this money, and hopefully you'll get the same result. I started in 2009 and sold all kinds of stuff, all kinds of stuff. And I almost forgot I have a course for you. It's $97. But you don't have to pay for it. You get it free. Go down in the description. Click the link and learn no credit card required. I really would appreciate while I'm thinking about it, if you would subscribe to my channel, if you're new here, hit the subscribe button, ring the bell, turn on notifications, and become part of the VIP group, the Fisher family who gets notified every single time I do a new video. Also, if you've tried to sell stuff online or you got questions about selling stuff online, put that in the comments too and I'll be happy to answer any of your questions. Okay, number one, going to start with a business name. Super important. You know, I own a company called Survival Cave Food. And that name now is a search term, which is great. It's awesome. I think it's a terrible name. I don't know. I was sitting there one night and I was selling camping products at the time. And I came up with the name Survival Cave, a cave for people to hide in so they could survive. And that became the name of my company. And then we became a food manufacturer. And with all my wisdom, I added the word food to it. So it became Survival Cave food. So not a lot of thought went into that. But I think it's something you should think about when you start your business. Everybody wants to have a business name that is incredible, that is so cool, that means so much to everybody. And I don't know if it matters. I mean, we have tennis shoes that are Nike and Adidas. I'm not quite sure what either one of those names mean, but they're super popular. I know they're popular. So, you know, I think your name of your business, if it can describe what you do, that's really cool. And they want to do that. But more importantly, you want to do a corporate name search and make sure you're not calling your company the same name as another company. Can imagine this now. You start a company and you have a really cool name and you operate the company for five years and you build up tons of business and goodwill. And another company comes along and says, we had that company name in our small town of 200 people and we had that name a year before you and you have to cease operations. Oh, no. So, that's the important part. Okay. So, whatever your name is, is what your name is, but make sure somebody else didn't already grab it. If you're going to need to trademark it for products, make sure you trademark it. We have trademark survival pay food. Nobody else can use that, not without a lawsuit. So, make sure that that's the important part of really naming your business. Number two, secure your domain name and website. That's really important. Now, you can get a domain name from so many different places. I like to use GoDaddy. I have an account with them, so I get some little discounts every now and then. But if you go to GoDaddy and you type in a domain name at the top of their search bar, it will not only tell you if that domain is taken or not, it will give you some alternatives below that. Now, what you're going to find is the alternatives will have a different extension. So, .NET is not so bad, but .business, .secure, .whatever, don't get those. You only want .com. That's really all you want. You only want .com. If you can't get the name you want for the .com, think about switching around the name a little bit, rearranging the words a little bit. If, you know, flowersbycaron.com is gone, maybe it could be floralarrangementsbycaron.com or Caron's floral arrangements. Think about just moving around the words a little bit. They will give you some suggestions when you type in a term at the top. But make sure you get that domain name. That's super important. Domain names are cheap. So, you normally pay for the year. If you go to Godaddy.com and you pay $8 or $10 for a year and you only use it for two months, or you buy eight of them and you only need two of them, you can always refund the other ones, and you only pay for the portion that you used. Number three, select a business structure. I had somebody send me a message on YouTube the other day, and they said there's so many people selling stuff online they can't possibly all have business licenses. Do I need a business license? Now, I don't know about all those other people, but yes, you need a business license. It's super important that you have a business license, because you're illegal otherwise in the United States. Now, you do have to decide what type of entity. Is it going to be a sole proprietorship? Is it going to be an LLC? Is it going to be a corporation? Is it going to be an S corporation? All these things are super important. I'm not your accountant. I'm not the person to tell you how to do that. But you can consult with an accountant, get that information. I think it's important to do that anyhow. You're going to need an accountant for your business, and they can give you the pros and cons of incorporating your sole proprietorship in your particular town. But you want that information, and you need to decide what you're going to do there before you go down and get your business license. Number four, get your employer identification number. Better known as your E-I-N. This is required. This is a federal thing. You're going to need this number over and over and over again, unless you're a sole proprietorship. So make sure you get that number. You can file for it online. It's very simple to do, not difficult. Now, even though it's called an employer identification number, it's not needed because you have employees. So even if you don't have any employees whatsoever, you still need your E-I-N number. Number five, apply for your business license and permits. And that varies from state to state. I can't recommend, you know, what you have to do in your state. But I know in California, I have a local business license in San Diego. I have a state incorporation license. Then I got my federal E-I-N number, and I also have a corporation in Virginia. And it operates as a foreign business in California. So I don't know. It gets complicated. The accountant works out all that stuff. But the point is you got to have this stuff in place, guys. Don't go out and start a business and not be compliant. You don't want to do that. Number six, find the right vendors. Now, if you're thinking about doing a drop shipping business, it may be AliExpress. It may be that's going to be your vendor. You're going to have to find manufacturers in there. Maybe you're shipping out of the U.S. and you're going to find people a drop ship for you in the U.S. Maybe you're actually buying inventory. And if you're buying inventory, make sure it's proven inventory. Make sure they have a supply that can feed your sales because nothing's worse than saying, hey, I want to buy 200 of your widgets a month. And they're supplying them to you and everything's fine. And all of a sudden your sales go to 1,000 widgets a month and they can only make 400 and you can't make any more money. So you're stunted there. So another caveat to that is don't just have one supplier. And I know certain products are only made by a certain manufacturer. So my other suggestion is don't have one product. One product is not a business. It's just a product. You're going to need multiple products. And I don't care if it's digital products. I don't care if it's physical products. One product is not a business. Number seven, start marketing early. Really important guys. You don't want to wait until your business is open up to start marketing. Imagine it this way. A restaurant basically has to do that. They can't really go out and I guess they could go out and give food to people and give samples and say, we're going to open soon. Not many of them are that smart. But you can go out and give samples of your business. So maybe it's a digital marketing business and you sell courses. You could go out and give samples of those courses. You could go out and do videos like I'm doing right here. I'm doing a video and I have courses. But you could go out and do videos like this and talk about your business and talk about the opening day and talk about the launch date and get that energy built up way before you actually start the business. Number eight, get more productive with the right software. If you're selling online, hands down, hands down, the best piece of software you can get is Cartra. And I don't have time in this video to explain to you why. But down in the description, there's a free video you can watch and it tells you how to get Cartra for a dollar or something like that. You've got to watch that video because it does emails. It does memberships. It does products. It does sales pages. It does all this stuff for you. It's going to save you a ton of money. You need marketing software if you're going to sell online. You just need it. You know, I know a lot of you are going, well, don't I just need an email provider and a sales page? Just go look at the Cartra video. Trust me on this. We're just going to do that. Number nine, stock your inventory. Now this will not apply if you're selling digital products because your inventory is limitless. I have digital products. I have physical products. I have books. I have PDFs. I have courses. I have survival foods. So I've got all these different entities out there. And I got to make sure I have inventory now. Right now we're in the middle of a pandemic. So we sell survival food. So that's a great thing. That's a great product to have in a pandemic. The number one most requested product is toilet paper and food. Okay. So and I think they go hand in hand somehow. But the point is we're selling a lot of survival food right now. That's really, really cool. But we have an inventory problem because we can't make it as fast as we can sell it. So that limits the amount of money I can actually make in the market right now. Unless somebody's willing to wait four to six weeks to get their order, which, you know, there are a lot of people are, but a lot of people aren't. I miss those sales because I can't deliver in the five to seven days I would normally deliver in. So that's going to cost me money. It just is not complaining because we've done very well. However, you've got to think about that for your company too. What is going to be your inventory supply? And number 10, the final one, make sure your business stays compliant. This happens in many, many, many ways. It's not just your business license. It's not just your filings or anything like that. It's everything. There's so many things to stay compliant. If you're processing credit cards, you're going to have PCI compliance issues with your website. If you are selling on other websites, you've got to be compliant with how you're listing the products there. There's so many things to stay compliant with and to do properly. And if you're not good at that, get somebody who is, you know, hire somebody who can look over all this stuff. I think having an accountant is super important. I don't get as much feedback as I want from my accountant, but I get enough and he files my taxes and you make sure I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do and that I don't get in trouble. And he'll let me know about certain things the other day. He called me about a program that the government had having to do with coronavirus. I don't know if it would qualify for anything or not, but he was nice enough to call me and let me know about that. So you want to make sure you're compliant. You want to make sure you don't break any rules. You want to make sure, you know, you got copyright rules. You can't use certain images off the internet. There's so many things that you can be out of compliance with. And the deal is if you have a question about it in your head, you probably shouldn't do it. Okay. If you think it's a questionable practice, you probably shouldn't do it. Just err on the safe side. And that goes with everything with your business. You know, even if it's, you know, refunding a customer and you think, well, should I or shouldn't I, you know, if you think you probably should, then you should probably refund that customer. We don't have many refunds in our survival food company. We have a lot more in our digital products, which is to be expected because people will get a product and we see this all the time. They'll buy a course and they don't complete the course. They don't go through the course. And then they'll say, well, the course didn't work for me. And it didn't work for them because they were lazy and they didn't do anything and they didn't apply anything. And that's the problem with selling courses is they don't necessarily use the product. They don't put forth the effort. Now, we also sell food and we have no refunds because Americans will certainly eat. Okay, that's not a problem. When you give them food, they're going to eat. They're very compliant of as far as eating goes. So you don't have that issue there. So all in all, these 10 steps are things that you're going to want to do. Super important. You can't skip any of them. There's none that are negotiable on there. Okay. All these things have to be done. I hope this helps you out. If you're starting your e-commerce site and you're selling products, I want to give you a free course. It's a $97 course. It's down in the description right now. All you got to do is click to learn. Pretty simple, no credit card required. Check that out. I really appreciate you listening. If you have questions about this, I know some of this is kind of complicated. Put it in the comments below. I'll be happy to answer you. I'd love to get comments. Give me a thumbs up. I'd really appreciate that. Don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell. Turn on all notifications so that you know every time I do a video. You become part of the notification gang and you will be part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that gets notified every time I do a video. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you in the next one.