Want to know how to start an E-commerce business in 2022?
This article will go over the best ways to get started and how you can begin making money.
Pick a Niche
The first step is to pick a niche that you want to sell in.
There are two ways to do this and we will discuss both below.
Go Broad
One method is to pick a large general niche like ‘dogs’ or ‘cooking’. The positive with this approach is that you will have a much larger audience to market to. When you find winners you will be able to scale and make more money.
The negative is that it will be harder to advertise and will require more testing to find those winning combos.
Niche Down
When you niche down you choose a topic that is more specific…such as a breed of dog for example. So instead of targeting dogs you would focus on Dobermans.
It’s much easier to find your ideal audience with this approach, but its harder to scale because the number of people that like Dobermans is much less than dogs in general.
Decide What to Sell
There are many different e-commerce models but we recommend focusing on just one, and these two listed below are the best to get started with and have the least amount of risk.
Dropshipping physical products
Let’s stick with the dog example and say you are building a general store for dogs. You would choose different dog related products like dog toys, dog bowls, and other supplies.
When you dropship, you do not have to carry physical inventory. A customer places an order on your website and you send the order (usually automatically) to the supplier to be fulfilled and shipped.
The beauty of this is you do not have much risk as you don’t pay for any inventory until a customer buys.
Print on Demand Dropshipping
This is similar to physical product drop-shipping but instead of regular products you are taking a custom design and getting it printed on t-shirts, mugs, hoodies, and many other types of apparel and home goods.
You partner with print on demand companies that will print merchandise for you and ship to the customer. This model is even better than traditional drop shipping because the margins are often better and you are creating custom products that are unique.
How to Build an E-commerce Website to Sell
The next piece of the puzzle is creating an online store to drive traffic to and sell your products.
The most common ways to build a store are with an online platform like Shopify, or with a self hosted WordPress solution combined with WooCommerce.
Each method has its pros and cons but over time it is recommended to go with a third party specialized software like Shopify to make things easy for you.
To get started you just need $29 a month and you can build a store quickly.
There are apps you can add to the store both free and paid to improve the functionality and add marketing features for your site.
Traffic for Sales
The final task that you have is to drive traffic to your store to get targeted people interested in your products.
It is not that difficult to get traffic but converting it into sales can take both time and money to test and get right.
For fast results most people use either Facebook Ads or Google Ads to get visitors.
Free methods include posting to social media, creating YouTube videos, and SEO to grow organic traffic over time.
Final Thoughts
Creating an e-commerce store is not the easiest business model but can be the most rewarding if you are consistent and have great products that match your target audience.
Pick a niche, build your site and fill it with products, and try driving traffic to see the results you desire.