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Alex Fortin

Investor, Entrepreneur and Developper

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Step by Step Guide to Create an E-Commerce

April 17, 2015 By Alex Fortin 2 Comments

How much better would you sleep at night with a business that make you $120 000/month? beardbrand.com is a successful e-commerce store that grow their website from 0$ to 120 000$/month in less than a year. Today we will go over everything you need to know to create your very own e-commerce store and make it successful. You will learn:

  • All the step you need to create your brand new e-commerce
  • How to get your product idea manufactured
  • How to generate traffic to your online store

How to evaluate market fit for your product

First, find out if your e-commerce idea will sell. Is there enough people looking for what you offer to sustain your business. You want to keep profiting from your e-commerce for many years to come so make sure that what you choose is in an upward trend and has enough potential customer.

Listen to what people say

Put your ear to the ground and listen. Go on forums, groups and social media pages and listen to people comments. Are people saying things like: “where did you find this?” or “I have been looking everywhere but never can find this” or “where can I buy X item” If you hear any of this, you might have just found a market that is under serve. This is exactly what you are looking for.

The more specific and niche you go the better it is usually. Take beard brand for example. http://www.beardbrand.com/ They are in a very niche market, the beard grooming product for men. His store has been growing very fast thanks to is social presence on youtube and facebook. He is now grossing over $120 000/month.

Once you know what you want to offer, you need to do some keyword research to make sure that enough people are looking for your product.

To find this out I use those 4 tools

  1. Keyword planner
  2. ubersuggest.org
  3. google.com
  4. market samurai (free trial)

Method 1 (using tool 1, 2 and 3)

I usually start out with keyword planner. I will have a few ideas and I will type them in to find out right away if my keywords are getting any searches. In the following chart, you can see the popularity of the word “selfiesitck”. It is trending quite a lot on google so it looks like a good keyword to start with.

Keyword planner

Once I have a few good keywords I start digging deeper. I go on Google.com and type those keyowrd in to see what google auto-suggest will give me. I put myself in the shoes of someone looking for my product and ask myself what would i type in the search box? things like “selfiestick review” “where to buy a selfiestick” etc… Google will auto-complete with words that people search often.

google search

Now that we have a few solid keywords I go on ubersuggest.org It’s a free tool that allows you to enter a keyword and it will returns hundreds of long tail keywords suggestion. Ubersuggest is a really great tool for keyword research and its free. So I take the list that Ubersuggest give me and put it into keyword planner to see how many searches they are having. You can enter all the keywords and put them into the keyword planner and see which one is generating more traffic.

Method 2 (using Market Samurai)

Now you can do all the above step manually or you can just use my favorite tool when it comes to keywords research. I love using market samurai when doing keyword research. I use it for product idea and for all my blog post. It shave hours of my keyword research. It will save all your keywords for you in different campaign so you can access them anytime. It is one of the only piece of software that i keep using again and again so it is worth the investement. You can download market samurai for free here

Creating your online Store

If you have a lot of times, and no money at all, I’d suggest you to open a WordPress website. It’s free and you can quite easily setup a paypal button on your page. WordPress is design for blogging but it can accomodate an e-commerce if you know what you are doing. If you have a lot of experience with wordpress and know what you are getting yourself into, you can give this a go. But you will have to spend time or hire someone to customize your site to make it look professional and keep it updated.
The easy solution
If you are like me and you’d rather spend time working on your business than in your business, I’d suggest you to open a shopify website. It is the easiest way to get up and running fast. I had my store ready to receive credit card order 45 minutes after buying my domain name. I setup a wordpress site before and it took me a few days to get approved. The main reason is that shopify will process your payment for you so you dont need to get approved by any third party. You just go through their step by step guide guide and you can start accepting credit card right away and have a professional looking site. Also, Im sure that my site wont stop working because a plugin is mis-configured. They have been doubling their users every year and they processed $3.8 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume last year. Here is a link to try shopify for free.
I personaly use them for my selfiestick store but you can use any other platform you want. Below is my pro’s and con’s of shopify:
Shopify Pro’s and Con’s
Pro:
  • Its easy to use
  • No technical skills needed
  • Look like a professional e-commerce out of the box
  • Always up to date
  • Customer support available
  • Let you focus on your business instead of technicality of the website
Cons:
  • Not free
  • Cannot be customize as much as wordpress
  • Most good plugins are not free

How to get started with Shopify?

I personaly use shopify on my snapcane.com website. It is really easy to get started and i had a professional looking website instantly after registering. You can grab your free trial here and click on get started.

How to have your product manufacture

Now that you have a store you need to buy product and sell it for a profit. The best way to go about it is to buy in bulk from Alibaba.com Alibaba is the leading whole seller platform. If you want to buy any product in bulk or you need a manufacturer to build your product idea, alibaba is the place to go. They had 8.5 millions active sellers last year (source) For my selfie stick store I found someone that was selling the selfie stick and made them do custom made sticker to add on the selfie stick so i can have my own brand. Im also having custom made packaging done. I will be working on adding some modification to the selfiestick or create a brand new one in the near future. The possibility are endless.

The 3 Alibaba rules

Alibaba sell anything, you can purchase anything from golf ball to powder juice. You can get anything custom made as long as you have the blue print. To choose a good manufacturer there is a few things to look for.

  1. Always use the Alibaba escrow service
  2. Only deal with sellers that have good communication
  3. Contact a lot of sellers to find a good one

 

Rule #1 Always use Alibaba escrow service.

Some sellers will ask you to pay them before delivery directly via paypal or wire money via western union. DO NOT send any money unless it is with the escrow service of Alibaba. You can stay away from that rule if you dealt with the seller before but if it involve big amount of money, always use escrow. It is worth paying the small fee than losing all your money.

With the escrow you are 100% protected. Once you have placed your order with the seller, you will make the payment to Alibaba escrow service. Alibaba will charge a small fee, hold the money and act as a third party. When the goods are deliver to your warehouse or wherever you receive them and you have verify the quality of the delivery, Alibaba will release the fund to the seller. DO NOT go without it.

Rule #2 Look for seller that have excellent communication
Because you might want to have a custom made box printed or hold your inventory for a few days until your warehouse is ready, It’s important to have a great communication with your sellers. Look for fast response from the seller when first interacting with them. Also, if they have a hard time understanding your inquiries or not giving you the information you ask, the problem will most likely stay and get worse over time. If that happen just go to the next seller, which lead me to the last rule.

 

Rule #3 Contact a lot of seller
A lot of time, people are advertising themselves as the manufacturer but in reality they are only a “middle man” and will take your order and then order to another company. So you end up paying more then what it is worth. Contact a lot of sellers and find who really manufacture the goods. Usually the one that have a longer track record on Alibaba (1 year+) are a safer bet.

 

How to get started on Alibaba
Create an account with an username. Once you are loggin, you can start browsing the different category or search by keywords. Once you have found a product or a manufacturer, you can place an order. If you need to make special modification to the product, contact the seller and ask for a bid. Once they sent you a bid you can accept or use another seller. (the bid usually always include shipping to your warehouse)

 

Where to stock your product

Home
The easiest place to get started is your home. You can pile everything in your basement, your garage or even your bedroom. Im sure you can tolerate a bit of a chaos until your e-commerce is generating enough income to move to a warehouse.
Warehouse
Another choice is to start with a warehouse in your neighborhood. The main downside is that you will have to pay a rent and it might be hard to justify it when your e-commerce is not generating any revenue yet.
Fulfillment by Amazon
Fullfillement by Amazon (FBA) will let you stock all your inventory in their warehouse for free! Thats right totally free. They currently hold around 100 units of my selfie stick and the only cost I have is 1$ everytime I sell something and they ship it out. So it is completely free until i sell something then it is only 1$ per item. The only downside is that unless you sell a media product like a book you will only be able to ship within the USA. But it can be good because it forces you to focus on one market and dominate it, then you can move into other market and use other warehouse when you are successful in the USA.
How to get started with F.B.A.
Go to this link http://services.amazon.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm and click  on “get started”. If you get stuck anywhere call their customer service. Fullfilment by Amazon have a special line to help people get started with it. They have one of the best customer service out there. They will walk you through every step. If you plan to sell outside the USA from the get go, this option  won’t work for you. You’ll need to bootstrap from your bedroom or get a warehouse somewhere in your neighborhood.

Getting people to your store

Getting people to your e-commerce is the most important part. No customer no business. There is a lot of ways you can get people to your site. here is just a few:
  • paids ads
  • social media
  • cold calling on business
  • passing flyers
  • friends, family and word of mouth
  • door to door
 Online Advertising (PPC)
A great way to start generating traffic is to advertising. Online ads are a very effective way of generating traffic and it should be part of the customer acquisition of every e-commerce. The first thing to do is to figure out what is the lifetime value of a customer for you.
If your product sell for 25$ and your expenses including production, shipping, warehouse and taxes  is 10$ You are left with 15$ profit per product sold. Let’s say you are selling an organic coffee bean and based on industry average, a customer ordering coffee online will become loyal and re-order 20 times. That means you can spend up to 300$ to acquire a customer (15$ profit X 20 times = $300) . You can see that knowing the lifetime value of a customer is very important.
That’s not all!
Its not because your store front is online that you should limit your advertising to online. You can ring the door bells of businesses or neighbors, pass flyers or cold call on businesses. Once you become the talk of the town, you can to expand to other city in your area.

 

If it work for me, it will work for you!
On Snapcane.com I was able to get my first 2 customer through google ads. I ship them the snap cane and they are super happy. So obviously this is working great. My cost per acquisition was around 108% my profit so im planning on tailoring my website to USA a little more. It should increase conversion by a lot. I will give you an update on my e-commerce on a future post. If you have any question let me know in the comments below!

Filed Under: e-commerce

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. stephen says

    June 17, 2015 at 6:38 am

    Hi Alex, your a great inspiration as I’m looking to follow in your footsteps.
    I’d like to know why did you keep your e-commerce and blog separate? wouldn’t it be more practical to merge both blog and e-commerce?

    thanks,

    Stephen

    Reply
    • Alex says

      October 5, 2016 at 8:21 pm

      Hi Stephen

      That’s an option for sure! But your blog needs to be in line with your product. If they are, you can keep them together for sure.

      Reply

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