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Class 11: Popular E-Commerce Platform: Opening an Online Store
Starting online businesses aren’t hard nor expensive and the opportunities are endless. Let’s talk about a few different business models. There are many free ways for teenagers to start online businesses offering products or services. Most of these can be started for a fraction of what it would cost to open up a physical business (brick-and-mortar businesses like a local florist, computer repair shop, clothing boutique store in your town, convenient store, etc.). The first one here does have a small cost.
Shopify.com is one very popular e-commerce platform that can be considered if one wants to sell physical products. It’s used by hundreds of thousands of businesses and is a platform where an online e-commerce store can be created within hours of registering an account.
Most people use Shopify to dropship items directly from a manufacturer to their customers. What’s dropshipping? When your customer purchases an item from your store, you would then order and pay for the product from the manufacturer and enter the customer’s address. The manufacturer then fulfills the order and ships it off to your customer! You never have to touch the merchandise. And you keep the profit that is between the cost of the item and the price charged to the customer.
With just a few clicks, many manufacturers in the US, UK, and in China can be easily integrated, for free, into your Shopify store. Then you can find products and easily upload them to your store. Again, finding products is simple, exciting and fun, but the tough part is sending traffic to your site. This is why focusing on great content is crucial to the success of your business and using your social media accounts to begin generating sales.
Don’t even consider Shopify unless you have a very good idea of what type of products you’d like to offer in your store. I mentioned earlier in the course that many people try selling products in all different niches (called a general store). This is a terrible idea, especially for beginners. Some of the most successful Shopify stores in the world just sell 2 to 5 items and many generate millions of dollars per year. Why? Because these are the products that are usually the most recommended on their blogs, websites, and social media accounts. These are highly targeted stores with very high profits.
If you don’t have a physical product to sell, you can find one from a manufacturer's website, import it to your store. Most Shopify business owners who use the dropshipping business model use a website called AliExpress. AliExpress is considered the Amazon of China. It hosts millions and millions of products in just about every interest you can think of. You may be asking; “how do I import products from AliExpress into my Shopify store?” Great question. Shopify offers app integrations. One app that easily integrates into Shopify is called Oberlo. Oberlo was built to easily import products from AliExpress with just a few clicks, importing images and descriptions. There is a learning curve but nothing you won’t be able to handle. My advice though is to be sure to change the titles and descriptions to be coherent. Many of the item titles and descriptions that transition from AliExpress to Shopify are not formatted well at all. I’ll discuss this at a later time.
Shopify is not free, however (if you want to go the e-commerce route) opt in to the 14 day FREE trial and go nuts! Learn all you can about the site, download Oberlo, and start importing products all for free. No worries if it turns out to be a mess, your store will not go live during your trial period. I’ll be running a Shopify tutorial soon which will help you create a beautiful Shopify store.
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