New to E-commerce

Welcome,

Yes, a daunting task, where to start. I'm sure many will tell you differently but I believe the easiest for most would be email marketing.

Usually, people get into this either with affiliate marketing, where you get paid a small commission for driving people to another person's site to buy, or through straight ecommerce where you sell the products, yourself. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

With affiliate sales, you don't have to worry about customer service, processing orders, shipping orders, sending tracking information or dealing with complaints/returns. This is traditionally a more competitive environment than straight eCommerce because there is less work involved and the vast majority of people take the lazy way out. It's also not nearly as profitable as real eCommerce.

There are two eCommerce methods where you ship direct to customers and they are almost always considerably more prfoitable than affiliate sales. There's more work involved, though. With one model, you buy the products yourself and ship them yourself. There is naturally more risk to this model since you have to lay money out for products and then hope they sell. The other method is dropshipping where you never really handle the products. You have suppliers who dropship them directly to customers for you. We tend to advocate the dropship method when possible.

You will read all kinds of threads about how dropshipping is not profitable - mainly from people who have no clue what they are doing and who do not know how to negotiate great wholesale prices from the right suppliers. We have more than 50 profitable dropship eCommerce sites of our own that we operate in addition to teaching our eCommerce course.

You can always swing by our free course (listed in my signature) and see what works best for you. We show you how to do all three methods.

If you need to start making money quickly without a large investment, my advice would be to get a job (i'm serious).

When you are in a position to be able to spend more time and money, my advice would be to look at selling on amazon, first. Then, once that is up and running, moving to a second channel, your own shopify site.

That should occupy for at least the next two years.

Good luck with things.