I wanted to start a thread somewhere about running a multichannel ecommerce store, and since this is running your own business, I decided to put it here. This is part AMA, part KB, part sigh... idk, blog?

Can I make a million dollars? If you start with $999,999 you'll have a cool mil in 6 months.

About me: I have a multichannel store. I do not wish to share the url or specific details about the money I am making.

I opened this up a few months back, but because of two 1,000+ mile moves, life drama, a major programming project, and so on, I haven't done as many sales as I'd like. I've finally been able to focus on this, and I've done more sales in December than I have over the prior 3 months.

My working background is in promotional products (B2B), multichannel selling (B2C), and programming. These 3 items come in handy and you'd need all of them to be better than the 500,000 other sellers out there.

Half a million sellers? Yeah, don't worry about it, it's the Pareto principle all the way down.

What is multichannel selling? This means that you have an online store that sells across at least 2 channels. For example, you may be selling on eBay and Amazon. At the very least everyone has their own online store and eBay.

Beyond eBay and Amazon, you can add many other channels. There are too many to list, but each one has their own nuances and headaches and I'll be willing to go into detail about each of them if you all want.

I don't want to make this OP too long-winded just in case there isn't a lot of interest in this topic, but I can discuss channel providers, software, sourcing, marketing, getting started, when to get an office, when to get a warehouse, hiring, and so on. I really do know a lot about this topic and I'm quite passionate about it.

I will say that this is far from a passive income. It's very difficult, tedious, and time-consuming work, especially when you are just starting out.

How much do I need to start?

At the very least, $200, but you probably want something closer to $5000. It's hard to say because each business is different and each person has different potential.

Are you selling in any of the Amazon foreign markets? If so, any tips?

Any tips on selling and shipping to Canada? I have lots of demand from Canadians but have never been able to work out reliable affordable shipping to Canada.

My online store is built on wordpress & woocommerce and it's long overdue for an update. Are there better platforms out there that are easy to use? Any tips on hiring someone to rebuild the site? My concern is allowing anyone to mess with it since I can't risk someone screwing it up.

I've never looked into selling online through Walmart. Is it worth expanding into?

Do you have any podcasts or other online resources you recommend?

Woah, hitting heavy here. I don't know the answers to all of this, but I'll do my best.

My information is potentially outdated, but as long as you own the ASIN, you are good to sell on a foreign market.

For Europe, you have the option to send your product directly to the Amazon warehouse in England where they take care of it for you. When I was dealing with this before (3 years ago), that was the only option. It's a good option for lighter and small objects, but not good for heavy items.

My memory is fuzzy on this, but I think you just write to them and they tell you what products they want, and then there is some templates they send you and so on. Amazon changes things so fast that I really don't want to say what we did back then. I'd just contact them and get the proper instructions.

For Canada, I can only say "good luck." You have be very careful about how you package and label things. When we were dealing with Canada, I took one look at the shipping times, stoppage at the borders, shipping costs, and closed it down immediately. Getting shipping times to Amazon expectations is very difficult / impossible wi/o paying out the nose. I think we were dealing with a 75% refund rate on top of that.

If shipping directly to Canada, I would put a 30 day lead-time on sales and hope for the best. I'm guessing you've done more recent research than I did, and it doesn't sound the like the situation is any better. The only way I'd sell to Canada or any foreign market is through the Amazon warehouses.

Personally, I refund all orders from overseas.

I'm on Shopify and I hate them. They aren't difficult to use, but they are so large that they don't have any problems throwing you under the bus either. Unfortunately, everything is GUI-based. They do have file loading available, but to put it lightly, it's very flaky. I actually blew up my entire store and had to re-import everything after using it.

The only reason I'm sticking with Shopify instead of moving to BigCommerce is because I have a UPC exemption via Amazon, and Shopify is the only ones who can handle that situation. If I moved over to BigCommerce, I'd have to use a channel manager and I'm not in the mood for that right now.

WooCommerce is a perfectly acceptable solution to use and if it works for you, I don't think that moving to anyone else is going to make a difference. (for those following along, WooCommerce is built on WordPress).

If you were on anyone but Woo, BC, or Shopify, I'd suggest moving to one of those three. I often help others with there stuff, and it's just awful considering they charge the same prices.

For customizations, I'd just use the official stuff:

https://woocommerce.com/customizations/

I would not trust any of your local dev houses with this work.

Yes.

You won't do Amazon-level sales, but they do open up a whole new class of people that don't use Amazon. I don't recall any real problems working with them.

I don't listen any podcast at all, unfortunately. I also don't know of any good online resources either (don't get me started on the YouTube people).

I'm sure you've experienced many things that you'd never find out about online and you understand that there are very good reasons for that.

I feel like I didn't say anything that you don't know already, ha, but hopefully it helps.

I do want to add a little bit more about Walmart and adding channels in general. The more channels you add, but more tracking inventory becomes an issue. The problem with channel managers is that they say "yes, we integrate with Walmart, Rakuten, Overstock" and so on, and that's a kind of a lie.

Many channels don't have APIs to integrate with them, so you'd have to export the csv daily and upload into the CMs. In theory, you don't have to fix the default csv file... key words being "in theory."

Walmart is a bit more relaxed than other online sellers, which is why I think they are good to work with.

The channels I'm working on is Shopify, eBay, and Amazon. I also have a Facebook store and Rich Pins, which are really nothing more than a redirect to my Shopify store. For this moment, I'm not selling on any other channels. Where I used to work, we sold on eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Overstock, Rakuten, Groupon, and a few others. Due to the inventory issues, we generally put lower velocity items on the channels that didn't have API support.

What is a typical day?

Nothing but ****ing problems. One would think that all of this is just chillin' out, finding a bunch of stuff on Alibaba and sending things out to Amazon FBA (must. not. start. on. YouTube. guys).

One would also think that selling involved concentrating your efforts on selling, which in theory is a high hourly rate. Reality is that selling online is 90% dealing with ****ing problems and 10% selling.

I wake up yesterday (Sunday at 7am) to about 5 customer emails. They all are "interested" in buying a product but want to know details. Some are typical like "do you ship right away?" Yes, of course.

Others are asking for specific details that I'm not really able to answer. I only hold some things in stock, and the rest are one-off items that don't really sell, so I drop ship them. Other things are hand-made to order, so same deal.

A slew of listings is showing the wrong image and I don't have the correct image at all. I contact the maker and they are too busy to take new photos. Write back to the customer, go on to the next email.

I sell mostly women's fashion, and I get quite a few emails from some dude explaining how he wants to buy some object for his mother. This is rather typical. Guys are more comfortable buying women's stuff online, but I still get a lot of emails asking questions; these questions are sort of covers for the purchase, like "hey, I'm not weird."

Guys, you ain't weird, okay? Most sellers of women's clothing, jewelry, and perfume I met are men. Facial creams, make up, and that sort of stuff is dominated by women. High-end Mideast soap is all men.

We understand that half the population is women, that 100% of them like gifts, and that the other half the population enjoys buying those gifts. It's all good. Besides, we are too busy with things to check names of customers.

Hooray, some orders come in and Shopify obviously integrates perfectly with everything I need...

Nope. I look into a supplier and none of my orders are showing up. I send off an email and wait for a response. "Sorry, we just did a bunch of updates, broke everything, and you have to manually enter all your orders." *

So, I been spending most of today manually entering orders into 2 dog-slow websites, then I have to wait for the tracking to pop up so I can manually enter that information into 2 more sites.

Now I just have to wait for the next ****ing problem.

* rant!

I've used a ton of software in B2B and B2C space, and nearly every single product does the exact same thing: HUGE update that breaks the workflow that was just fine the day before. On top of that, the update is full of random bugs like orders not importing, tracking not showing up, buttons that no longer click, products disappearing, inventory not subracting, 10x slower, and so on.

I get that everyone can't be a professional, but I really do wonder why testing a product for 3 days before releasing it to the end-user isn't standard practice. We are trying to sell product, not be a software tester!

If any of you are software developers, or you are a business person, wondering what business you should try, the entire ecommerce space is ripe for disruption. It's mind-boggling how bad it gets.

How much advertising do you do? What methods have worked the best? Do you advertise through the Amazon platform? If so, anything you've found worked best?

Advertising is a touchy subject, lol.

Regarding Amazon ads, I tell everyone the exact same thing. If you don't use flat files correctly, you are losing out on a ton of money. So, make sure the flat files are done correctly. The Amazon search engine reads keywords under keywords, title, and bullets. Set that up first, see the ROI, then think about ads, but you probably won't need them.

Make sure you have good images. People don't really read anything at all, as I'm sure you are aware from the emails you get.

I've never worked with anyone who has had a positive ROI with Amazon ads. In my space, the big advertisers are China-made companies who sells clothing that is 30% fabric / 70% inflammable chemicals. I'm guessing with a profit base of 80%, a positive ROI Is possible.

I sort of see advertising as a break-even outcome for the initial order. The real value is reselling, which is not easy to do with Amazon. In my experience, return Amazon customers are arbitrage sellers (sort of). The normal buyer is barely aware that they aren't buying from an Amazon warehouse, and they aren't aware of 3rd party sellers. Of course, if you are selling something that needs to be bought over and over again, then advertising may be good for you.

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Facebook ads are still something I'm figuring out. Overall, I have a bit of a loss with them, but I'm still trying to shape my audience, what day's work best, and so on. I've figured out that weekends, targeting women 18 to 34 is the sweet spot for me. Something targeting "friends of women with upcoming birthdays" is a total bomb for me. My best response is to products around $40, and certain product types. Shirts are horrible, but boots and dresses do pretty good.

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Google ads have a decent ROI, though nothing amazing. Definitely get your stuff on Google Shopping (which is free).

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Here's the thing with social media, which I suppose is restating the obvious; no one cares about your company very much.

They want to see interesting / real photos. While I do post some product photos, I get the best response from the real-world photos I take and post. Those photos generate shares and visitors more than running ads. If I had about $3k / month to spend advertising, I'd use very different strategies than spending money on ads.

**

Overall, there are quite a few free strategies you can use first, then worry about getting advertising. I think also, make sure you have a decent web funnel / conversion rate. I'm at about 1%, which is okay. Kind of a chicken-egg problem, but advertising and funneling go hand-in-hand.

Discounts have done absolutely nothing for me. I used to offer discounts for signing up to mailing list, following my social media, and so on. I got free names and followers, but no sales, so I decided to stop with that. I once ran an ad for 15% off the entire order. Got a ton of shares and likes, but zero sales.

My best conversions have been from Google Shopping, Rich Pins on Pinterest, and Facebook. Email blasts also generate visits, shares, and sales. I know that's all free, but it really just comes down to searching and sharing more than anything.

The bulk of my sales are coming in from eBay right now. I'll be focusing on getting Amazon loaded up this week.

What platform are you using for email marketing?

Do you do that whole annoying strategy of following up every sale w/ annoying emails to the customers asking for feedback? If so, how profitable has it been? I just haven't been able to bring myself to do it. I hate receiving those emails.

I was using some bot called Kit, which compiles a few products and sends out an email once a week or so. It does okay, but I can't send that to eBay customers, so I have to be in more control. I also have a better sense of what products people respond to now.

I was using a platform called Campayn, which is pretty minimal but gets the job done. No HMTL required. I use it because it's based in Canada and isn't beholden to US snooping laws.

Ugh... no. Like you, I have difficulty doing things that bother me. Pop up boxes can die.

As a general rule, I ask "are you awesome?" This means you've had at least 1000 orders and every single order was correct, in stock, and at the door within 5 days. If not, then there is a very high chance this can blow up in your face. I've seen it happen, where unhappy customers want to move on, but that "please rate me" email just pisses them off: they leave a negative review when they wouldn't have otherwise.

I have been thinking about emailing for abandoned checkouts. I know a lot stores send a follow-up offering 10% off the order, for example. I think a lot of people sort of expect that to happen, but I'll probably A/B with discounts and no discounts to see how it goes.

Do you mostly dropship? How many (if any) products are your own?

Right now, I'm all drop ship, and I plan to change that towards the beginning of next year.

When I was selling on my own a few years back, I was buying from China and holding all of my own inventory in my bedroom, which had its own set of problems.

sourcing anywhere other than alibaba?

Ack! I actually answered that and deleted it in the last post.

I don't source from Alibaba. It's not totally out of bounds to do so these days, since ePackets make shipping cheap (and cheaper than the shipping I pay, ugh).

Shipping direct from China presents a load of problems one has to deal with. For one, shipping is a lot slower, two, China doesn't have the same QC standards as the US does, three, good luck dealing with returns, and four, there is nothing stopping the Homeland Security from holding your product for months.

I only deal with US suppliers. There are a few supplier networks and I have some personal relationships as well. I don't want to get into too much detail about all of my sources.

When I was selling out of my bedroom 3 years ago, I didn't drop ship. The technology simply wasn't there to handle inventory at all, and there was no way to make a profit with most of the available options I had. I did have an option to dropship directly from a supplier, but I didn't take them on it even though it would have been fairly exclusive to me.

Hey man,

Thanks for starting up this thread!

I've been thinking about starting a small poker blog that would have a small poker store attached to it (three or four items only) I'm not looking to do this as a fulltime job, but I play a lot of poker and think it would be cool to make a small profit (if possible) in this endeavor. I'm looking into a godaddy hosted/wordpress site as I'm not a developer, and as I said I'm doing it (partly) for fun.

Basically the question is how would you recommend getting exposure. I'm certainly not opposed to spending money, but want something worth it. Or would it be doomed from the start? I'd obviously be wearing it myself, promoting on instagram, but are there any other efficient ways?

Thanks in advance.

I like this question.

I guess you understand that printed shirts are dime a dozen. You can go on zazzle and it's 500 clones and see all sorts of user-created tshirts. This is called "print on demand."

Really, there are only 3 ways you are going to get people to buy printed shirts these days:

1- People want to support you or your brand.

2- Stand outside and physically sell the product

3- Create the epic 3 Wolves Tshirt.

I would not suggest going with GoDaddy unless you have a tshirt supplier you are working with a local friend or printing your own. Granted, you will be able to buy 100 tshirts for a good price, but you are holding onto inventory that may not move. Since it appears you aren't sure if you have a market, I'd suggest taking a lower-risk route.

Each of the major 3 stores have direct app integration with print on demand services:

Shopify:

https://apps.shopify.com/search/quer...rint+on+demand

BigCommerce:

https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/

WooCommerce:

https://woocommerce.com/product-cate...%20on%20demand

All of the print on demand companies generally carrry the same brands. I'd read this as well:

https://www.laprintanddesign.com/top...lity-t-shirts/

Everyone carries the Gildan brand. They aren't very good quality, and quite often, they are more expensive than the other and better brands.

You also care about color variety, price, lead time, and if they sell women's tshirts. They all do, but some will stick you with Gildan for women's clothing for some reason.

Finally, you care about print quality. I think Represent is the best for printing quality. They aren't much more expensive than others, but they don't have a large variety of shirts and colors either.

So, all you have to so is upload an image. If you aren't familiar with how vector graphics work and how printing works, you may want to buy a sample shirt of your design before pushing out to the public.

The basics are pretty simple: You want all of your lines to be thicker than you think they need to be. If you think they are large enough, probably go larger. The appropriate tool for vector graphics is Illustrator, though I suppose you can use inkscape. Raster graphics (png and jpg) are okay as long as they are huge, like 5,000 x 5,000. This is a probably a good time to either experiment on our own or hire a some cheap help. Alternatively, the print on demand shops do have premade designs and fonts you can use.

Single color is going to be cheaper than multi-color.

There is screen printing, laser printing, and heat transfer. Please do a bit of research on this, but in general, screen is okay for 1 to 3 colors, laser printing is expensive but high quality, and heat transfer is basically a multicolor patch that is printed and ironed on to the shirt. The risk with heat transfer is that it peels off. In general, screen printing is standard.

Back to the main question: are you doomed?

Well, the beauty of the above plan is that it doesn't matter at this point, does it? If you have an audience, you can take a few lifestyle photos, and so on, you may sell some stuff, but as you said, you aren't planning to get rich, and that is a good expectation to have.

I don't want to say that you are categorically doomed because I truly don't know. I was selling tshirts during the first half of this year and I did very bad with it, but then again, the site it was associated with was an utter mess of ideas.

People like to see humans wearing clothes, and they should care about your brand. I don't want to risk projecting my own experience as typical because I know quite a few people who are doing great with it. One of my clients pays me good money to maintain his site of tshirts for his local brand, so I'm guessing he's doing pretty good with it.

If you really want to go with GoDaddy, you can, of course, go to https://represent.com/ and sign up for an account there. Either buy in bulk or just buy per piece. A reasonable price is about $25, but I've seen these shirts going for up to $40 and selling.

But really, without much more detail about your following, audience, connection, and so on, it's hard to answer how well you will do. I feel like you already know these answers, but I think it's good to just focus on building up your brand and taking the slow pony to success. The more you focus on you, the money will follow.

Thanks Dave!

I really appreciate the response, and was not expecting such detail. This will be quite helpful going forward.

Another day of problems. eBay is on fire this week and that's a good thing right?

Well, yeah, of course, until I figured out that one of my suppliers aren't syncing inventory, aren't syncing orders, adding duplicate item listings with different prices and inventory counts, and for some stupid reason, they now only accept PayPal, which is just fine... except that it takes a week to transfer funds. Good thing eBay uses PayPal or I'd be utterly screwed this week.

How to fix? Of course, I have to delete all the products from my store and from eBay, reimport, and do all of this while the internet is running like ****. Shopify is taking its sweet time importing products, isn't syncing with any inventory or orders, and keeps randomly disconnecting from channels. To make life even more enthralling, there is no longer a good way to automatically sort products into their appropriate menu sections because that helpful piece of information no longer exists! I'll be spending the better part of this week fixing that as well.

eBay shrunk by 75% today, which is just beautiful. Nearly all the products that sold are erased, and that's just grand.

Finally got the supplier and eBay situation straightened out (mostly). I was working with two clients over the past 2 days, plus putting out my own set of fires. eBay is back up and running and orders are coming in at a nice velocity today. I've also been getting positive feedback and that's probably helping with listing status and customer trust. Keeping my fingers crossed on this.

Now I have to fix the store. I have a bunch of auto-sorting rules in place, but they are no longer valid and they need to be rewritten. The sorting pushes my products into the correct sub-menus, so that shoes shows up under shoes. The entire store is filled up, but the navigation is mostly blank. I swear I should just go full-on minimalist and make my home page a giant search box, lol.

What's funny about ecommerce, and really business in general, is how counter-intuitive results are. Not only is it counter to what I believe, but it's counter to what I observe, and even counter to what customers say they want. Granted, I haven't been going out and interviewing 100s of women asking what they'd like to buy online, but one would guess certain things would do very well while other things would do horrible, if one considers their own generalizations, research, and so on.

Basic shirts around $15 each. For all intents, this should be a fairly simple low-risk purchase, right? Quite contrary, I've never once sold a shirt. That section of the site isn't even looked at at all.

And then what about dresses? Even though I am allowed to sell dresses on Amazon, this is considered their most difficult section to get into, and that would be because it is in very high demand. I do okay with them, but they aren't hot sellers.

Jewelry does very well, which I suppose isn't too surprising. The general sale point is around $20 / pc, which I suppose is pretty good. I have pieces that are on sale for over $1k, $5k, and even $10k. They get a lot of looks, saves, and shares, but of course, I don't ever expect to sell one.

The real shock is that about half my orders is from shoes, boots, and sandals, with an average order of about $40. I guess $40 is a reasonable "meh" price to pay for shoes. At that price, I'm buying something that gets the job done. I don't expect high style, amazing comfort, or long-term use, but I have to try shoes on before I dare buy a pair. I don't think I've ever bought clothing online, but if there was one item I would NOT buy, it is shoes, yet shoes are my anchor product, more or less.

What's not surprising is that I never sold a men's product. I have quite a few listed, am I'm not really sure why at this point. Interestingly, a decent percentage of my customers are men, which I wrote about above.

The challenge is, in many ways, managing the size of the store. If i have too many products, too many categories, and so on, it looks messy and overwhelming. I'm counteracting this is by keeping about half the products outside of the general navigation (while still searchable), and showing them on the various channels. Of course, eBay is a similar challenge due to their selling limits. It's a constant journey of optimization.

I hate Christmas. I think every seller hates Christmas. Yeah, sure, you may do better during Black Friday / Cyber Monday / [buzzword day], but reality is that the sales aren't that much better, unless you go viral. What's the hot thing to have this year? I don't even know.

I guess everyone is wondering "do I actually earn a profit?" Well, yes, but it's complicated. Let me break down the fees I pay, and you'll see how it ends up being a constant dog-chase-tail. Numbers are round because I don't feel like looking up the precise numbers.

Shopify basic store:
$30 / month

Supplier networks:
$45 / month + 2% / order
$30 / month
$40 / month

Shopify addons (to make life easy):
$5 / month -- sitemap generator
$5 / month -- facet search (not sure if I'm still using this)

Amazon:
$40 / month + 10% / order

eBay:
12% / order (this should be dropping soon)
I'm considering an upgrade to a professional store, but haven't really decided on this yet.

PayPal:
3% / order

Stripe:
29c + 3% / order

How much do I have to buy / sell for?

If you only look at the initial split, you may think I'm out ripping people off, but the reality of any supply chain is that it gets very expensive very fast, and those fees can convert that split into a money loss. I have a spreadsheet with equations to help me with pricing. I don't sell any loss-leaders.

The dirty secret of ecommerce is that many companies are working in the red. Credit and net terms is the modus operati of the industry.

I got an interesting feature on Instagram. I guess they let certain stores link to their websites. It's pretty neat, a little quotation icon pops up and displays the product name and price. If you click that, it goes to the product page.

As far as I know, this wasn't available before, and I haven't seen this on any other store, so I'm not sure why I got it. I know darn well I searched high and low to find some way to do this a few months back, and the only way to "link" to your store was via your profile and hope that someone who likes your product is willing to use the search bar.

It also seems that these posts get a lot more visibility, judging by the uptick in likes, link clicks, and follows I've gotten over the past few days. Well, not precisely, I guess. Certain kinds or products just do a lot better than others on Instagram. Once again, a totally counter-intuitive result.

Good thread, was thinking about doing one myself.

I too own and run an e-commerce store too and do it full time (~18mths) - and although we are somewhat seasonal, its getting better month on month and we are doing pretty well churning a decent profit etc. Again I'm not going to say the URL. Its a niche though, and is also somewhat bespoke and hard to replicate.

I started off organically using influencers on Insta and built up a large following etc and then gradually built up to where im spending >$5K/month on Fb/AdWords and seeing a very positive ROI. But in slow times the spend can be scary, and it's always very tempting to ramp it up, feels like a punt most of the time.

I am in the UK but we fufill the items ourselves, globally - some of our inventory I could get fufilled but the main pull of traffic is our bespoke items which can't be bought anywhere so I'd rather just do it all in house. I also sell some of my items across Amazon/eBay etc

My advice for anyone starting an ecomm business and *not* dropshipping (which imo is no way to build a brand or sell something original, I could be very wrong about that) - is to use Shopify, learn about all the apps/addons you can, research your niche, make sure you have unpaid traffic too, learn the intricacies of Facebook ads and hustle for every single £.

I absolutely love what I do so I think that helps putting in the long hours at night and constantly learning and adapting seems like fun to me (I've never said that about anything else I've ever done, including poker).

Happy to share ideas, apps, etc. I'd advise using a group like Shopify Entrepreneurs on FB as you learn a tonne all the time.

Reading some of the above posts, I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table. People dont get all that bothered by review requests, if they do they ignore them - doesnt mean they dont order again (we have people that have ordered >5 times and havent left a single review and I can see theyve read the automated email). Reviews are so important, when we get left them its almost the same feeling/if not more gratifying than a sale - people read reviews. They get used by FB ad campaigns etc. I don't purchase anything or eat anywhere without reading them.

Also you have to use cart abandonment emails, you'd be surprised even without offering them a discount how many come back and convert. I think you can't afford to just leave people be, if they visit they came because of some interest in your product, if they dont convert fine, but out of 100 ppl that abandon a cart you should be getting around 7-10% that convert later if they are sent cart emails, thats a lot of money being left for the sake of worrying if your annoying someone.

Then again alot of this depends on the demographic of customer, mine are mainly women >30yrs old so they tedn to be more tolerant/nicer than if I was trying to sell to mid twenties men, or men in general actually.

Are you using any of the various overseas shipping services that Amazon and eBay offer for this?

How does shipping work from England to the rest of the world? I'm guessing Europe would be fairly easy, but what about the US, etc?

Upthread, we were talking about shipping to Canada. I recently had a request from a Canadian to buy a dress. Shipping would be $75.

Quite a few brands start out as dropshippers or selling other people's stuff, but are correct that you can't really be a brand if you don't have your own stuff. You are a storefront at that moment, and there's nothing wrong with that, IMO.

Can you get something original? Well, it depends on who you source from. Some suppliers are more wide open than others. I think it's a sliding scale, but I suppose if you go to page 5,000,000 of AliExpress, you are more likely to find a unique product than you would if you took everything from page 1.

The supplier / distributor model of selling is very complex, and it really just depends on your strategy. I'm not planning to open a brand anytime soon (I'm totally bootstrapped).

Oh yeah, be prepared to put in the work and love what you are doing.

I'll point out another counter-intuitive thing here. I find that drop-shipping is far more difficult and time-consuming than importing and reselling.

Thank you for joining the thread!

What apps can you not live without?

My two lifesavers are "Out of Stock by Goivvy" and "Sitemap Page Generator." I'm always running out of stock, closing listings, and opening new ones. If I didn't have these two items, I'd be in so much trouble.

My advice was under specific conditions. I've seen review-requests blow up in people's faces many times, and I'm just advising to temper the requests. I suppose if you want to start early, then make sure you only ask those who are loving you.

I recently installed a cart abandonment app. I'll let you know how it goes when I have more working data.

Not using any of those providers in the US, issue is our primary product is a kit of sorts and we have to compile it here, it could be done Stateside but I think it would require a fufilment house and I've looked into it and if they get it wrong it could decimate my business. Currently shipping overseas to US/CAN/AUS etc is expensive (Europe can be eye watering too), some are happy to pay it - it doesnt help that its a low priced item, and I lose alot of customers at cart but at the moment I dont know what else I can do. Who/what were you thinking of? Would love an alternative to provide cheap shipping, only other thing I can do I thin is set up an office and have someone do what we do there, but seems like a headache! Currently our overseas orders account for 30% of orders so I'd love to increase this by reducing shipping costs etc.

Noted on the apps. I would advise using ReCart for abandoned carts that you wouldnt have usually got, its quite clever. Shopify plan has an abandoned cart feature that we use too. I think Judge.Me for reviews is awesome. I have loads of apps, upselling ones, ad ones etc Too many to list!

Yeah, I get this concern!

I'm wondering how much of the $5k in advertising can be allocated to a good US-based person. If you are doing all of this out of your home, then it seems that you can possibly find someone who can do the same in the US. You can send the product directly from your source to her and she just has to put it together and have USPS come by every day at 4pm. A decent full-time or part-time employee can be had for about $15 / hour (convert from Pound to USD).

Unfortunately, I'm not too well-versed in fulfillment houses. I only work with one larger supplier and they screw up all the time.

I know a lot of these subscription box of [whatever] per month startups are using remote fulfillment and packing services, so maybe see if you can figure out what they are using.

If I knew someone you could really depend on, I'd offer to put you in contact, but can't really help with that.

I keep a pretty simple-looking store. I'm using it, more or less, as a hub to other channels. It's funny because I go to some stores and see all of the stuff happening and I'm like "that's a Shopify store!"

My big challenge is finding good facet-sorting w/o searching. That's a total PITA, and even BC charges $250 / month for a store with that baked in. Algolia Search is amazing, but that amazing doesn't show up unless someone does a search. I wish I could have Algolia on each page without a search.