I have been asked this question many times so today I thought I would write a quick blog about it.
Step 1 – Find a product Source: This is the most obvious advice. You cannot sell something you don’t have a consistent source of. So this would be your first step to figure out what you want to sell. Find a product that you use or know that a lot of people use and then find a supplier that can provide consistent stream of that product whenever you need it.
I would advice against finding a single lot of product and based on that start your e-commerce business. Obvious question is where would you find suppliers that give you good enough price so that you can make margins. This is a tricky one since till you start doing a consistent volume most suppliers would want you to pay upfront and may not provide their lowest price to you. There are many drop ship vendors who aggregate the inventory and then sell it for individuals who want to showcase their products. This is not a vey good way to start since the drop ship vendors do this for anyone who would pay them and you can imagine the same products with the same prices are sold by 100s of vendors online and you have room to compete and establish you business. Instead what you should do is contact eh manufacturer directly and get them to commit to you that you can procure their product and establish a longterm relationship.
Step 2 – Logistics: Once you have a supplier in place now you have to work on you logistics as to how you would get the product from the supplier to end user. This may seems simple but is the most difficult part of starting a business. Supplier may say that they can drop ship the items to the customers for you.
This is sometimes good and other times not so good. Since supplier is shipping many packages for you they will most likely have some fat built into this process. Since shipping is the second largest cost of the process after the cost of the product itself it is critical that you work as hard as you can to minimize this cost. Get the whole process down and know what kind of boxes you will need what are the dimension what is the weight and ultimately what is the cost to get a product from one location to the customer. Shipping companies are notorious to charge overages for address correction, mis quote weight or dimensions, for residential vs commercial address, for signature and the list goes on and on. Keep in mind that shipping cost also varies based on the distance the box has to travel. If the vendor will ship the product to you then you need to factor cost of shipping the cost of product. So that at the end of the day there are no surprises.
Step 3 – Where to Sell: Once you have the product and logistics ironed out you need to decide where will you sell these widget. Conterery to conventional wisdome most people go right to starting a webside. Even though that on paper or computer sreen sounds like a good idea but return on investment in this edevour is minisquale. Instead I would advice start selling items on existing platform right away. Every day when you are not making a sale you are loosing money literally you need to focus on selling sucess as quick as possible.
So list you item son eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Arceto.com, Google Shopping, Wish.com, Newegg, Sears, Etsy and Bonanza. You can also start with Facebook if you have a ton of freinds selling to them may be the low hanging fruot tha you do not want to missout on.