Have you been working on an ecommerce business plan? Are you still unsure whether launching an online store is the right business move for you?
I get it. In 2008, I took a risk. I had never sold anything online before. I was helping my son’s youth football league build a custom golf cart and had sourced some of the parts from a manufacturer in California. I had a light bulb moment! If I was having difficulty finding golf cart parts online, other people likely wanted these parts, also. I signed up with the manufacturer as a dealer and began listing golf cart parts on EBay.
I will never forget my first sale. It was a golf cart steering wheel. The profit was $18 and I was thrilled.
I remember doing the math: If only I could sell 100 steering wheels per month x $18= $1800 in steering wheel profit.
I loved the challenge of finding the right audience and growing my email list.
Related: Grow your ecommerce email list by 300% using giveaways.
EBay was fun back then and pretty simple to master. Within three years, my golf cart parts store had grown to nearly 10,000 parts and was grossing an average of $50,000/month with an 15% profit margin. I had accomplished three main objectives:
- Identified a niche.
- Developed a supplier network.
- Established a target market.
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I Packed Up My Ecommerce Store and Left EBay
As the years went by, EBay got tougher. Up until around 2014, I was a huge fan of EBay. I was even an EBay University instructor and held in-person EBay classes in my office space. But, things began to change.
The first change that made me question EBay was that their fees jumped from 8% to 13%. This drove my profit margin down to 8%! I was forced to raise my prices a bit and settled on a 10% profit margin. The biggest change was to their seller ratings. Becoming a Top Seller, which I had been for 5 years, was becoming impossible. The few negative reviews my store received began to weigh more heavily and EBay allowed them to overshadow years of positive reviews. And EBay sellers are now held accountable when UPS and FedEx failed to deliver within their estimated delivery times. Because of delivery delays which were outside of my control, I lost my Top Seller rating. I grew very frustrated and no longer enjoyed my business. I considered selling it and even spoke to a few potential buyers, but instead, I decided to transfer my store to Shopify.
EBay drove a ton of traffic to my online store, but I was at their mercy and paying very high fees for the traffic. With Shopify, I could have more control over my store, I could add a blog and generate authentic, organic traffic, and at only $29/month, my profit margin soared to 20%. Even with a bit of extra paid advertising, I was working less and making more. I was so relieved that I no longer had to lose sleep over FedEx delivery times and EBay’s strict rules and regulations.
Shopify has grown tremendously since I started with them. They listen to their customers and have made updates that are helping me to grow my business even more. The ability to have a blog allows me to provide value to my customers and drives free, organic traffic to my online store. My blog posts average over 2000 views per month, every month.
Related: Learn how my blog posts drive over 2000 visitors to my ecommerce store each month.
Excluding EBay and Amazon From My Ecommerce Business Plan
Shortly after I jumped ship with EBay, I left Amazon, also. My Amazon fees rose above 15% and I hated the lack of control over my product descriptions and interactions with my customers. When online sellers list and sell their products through platforms like EBay and Amazon, your business is not your own. Think about this: If EBay or Amazon makes the decision to shut down your selling accounts, your whole business is ruined. It happens to sellers every day. It happens so often that companies have formed for the sole purpose of helping sellers regain their Amazon and Ebay selling status. It causes me great stress to think about the income that supports my family disappearing one day because of an automated decision by EBay or Amazon. Since I transferred my ecommerce business plan from EBay and Amazon to Shopify, I don’t have this stress anymore.
To give you an idea about what I sell, here are my two Shopify stores:
Developing Your Own Ecommerce Business Plan * Free Ecommerce Video Series
Starting a business is the fun part: Coming up with an idea, building an online store, and imagining all the things the business will become once it takes off. But without marketing knowledge, driving traffic and making sales can become an ecommerce owner’s greatest challenge on the road to success.
Luckily, there’s a simple solution: Shopify offers lots of great content written by experienced online sellers. Now they even offer a course on how to get your first sale on Shopify!
Ezra Firestone owns and operates one 8 figure ecommerce store on Shopify that is set to earn $17 million this year. He also owns two other 7 figure ecommerce stores and has trained thousands of online sellers. He is offering this free video course, which has 20 video modules, to show you how to make your first sale on Shopify using Facebook Ads. Covering everything from brand differentiation to pixel placement to campaign optimization, this course is designed to show you how easy it is to start and scale your business with Shopify.
This is the kind of video series that entrepreneurs pay hundreds of dollars for to help them develop their ecommerce business plan. But, it is free. Even though I have been selling online for nearly a decade, I still learned several tips from this video course that helped me to increase my Shopify sales.
The video series includes the following modules:
- Welcome
- What to Expect
- Where We Are in the World of Ecommerce
- Faceless Ecommerce Stores
- Infrastructure
- Offer Pages
- Third Party Apps
- Shopping Cart Checkout
- Facebook Pixel Intro
- Add Facebook Pixels to Shopify
- Advertising Roadmaps
- Facebook Placements
- Who is Your Audience
- Saved Audiences
- Video Best Practices
- Video Ad Reviews
- Campaign Set Up 1 & 2
- Optimizing
- Beyond the First Sale
- Outro
Here is the video series:
The Short and Sweet
Switching my online business from EBay and Amazon to Shopify was very freeing and was an excellent business decision for me. Taking control of the presentation, customer service, organic traffic, and marketing has helped me to better understand my customers and provide better service without the constant fear of EBay punishment. I hope that you find the free video series as helpful as I did and that you feel comfortable taking control of your business, too. Take the leap, like I did in 2008. Start your free Shopify trial and create an income earning opportunity.
Do you have questions about developing your ecommerce business plan? Email me at Julie@allaboutselfemployment.com with your questions about choosing a niche, finding suppliers, or just to say Hi!
I am constantly learning new ecommerce tips and tricks and I would love to share them with you as we grow our businesses. Complete the simple form and I will send over new tricks as I learn them.