eCommerce Store Startup & Scale Strategies GSDdaily

Today we’re going to talk about the eCommerce store. A lot of people don’t know this, but when I was 18 or 19, so this was actually before Pepsi, I started an eBay business. It was an interesting business because eBay was kind of just getting started, not getting started, it had been around for a couple of years. It was where power sellers really started moving a lot of products.

I was really into cars at the time, car stereos, actually. I was paging through a magazine of Truckin’, it was a Truckin’ Magazine. In this magazine, there was an ad. There was a six-page ad of all the car parts that you could put on your truck. On the very bottom, it said, “Wholesale accounts can apply here.” I was like, “Well, shit. Wholesale accounts. Does that mean that I can actually buy product wholesale and then it to somebody like they are now a supplier for me?”

How I started my first eCommerce Store

I applied to be a wholesaler. Then, I started taking their product shots, putting them on eBay, and then just marking up the bumper, or marking up the hood scoop, or marking up the whatever for the truck that we were trying to sell for. That worked really well, I mean, I was at Mercer Northeast at the time. Actually, so I was in the Northeast here. I was selling quite a few bumpers. By quite a few I mean 10 or 12 a month.

Basically, I would take the money from eBay, and then I would give it to the wholesaler. The wholesaler would then drop ship it. This was 22 years again, 20 ish years ago. It was a really long time. At the time, I think I was working for Pepsi. I haven’t thought about this in a long time. I don’t know, that’s probably where my love of the internet came from, that and blogging and all that other stuff.

Anyway, so what happened was, is right around that time, shipping got really expensive. So FedEx, UPS, all that got super expensive. You just couldn’t do anything with it, it jacked the shipping rates up. The wholesaler was charging me shipping rates, and then my shipping rates got crazy because it’s oversized bumpers and stuff, so it was $40, $60, $80 to ship it, and that was all my profit. That was the profit margin on a wholesale good.

I wasn’t good at it, so I ended up just kind of pausing that thing and whatever. That was the first e-comm physical product business that I ever worked in, which is cool. There were a lot of learned lessons. We were doing about, I think the very last month that I was doing it, I did $16,000 in revenue or something. Most of that goes right back out the door because it’s wholesale. It was an interesting learning experience, let’s put it that way.



Now fast forward to today, and we work with a lot of e-comm stores that are selling a lot of different products. So most of the e-comm stores are set up in Shopify. Some of them are using other platforms like WordPress and WooCommerce, but most of them are Shopify.

I wanted to talk about a few things. First of all, I want to talk about sourcing products.

Two Ways of Sourcing Product

I want to talk about specializing in something and then also running traffic and scaling stores.

1. Find stuff that you’re going to sell yourself.

It could end up being a whole course all unto itself, but I want to give a couple of nuggets in each scenario.

First of all, sourcing products. There’s a couple of ways, there are two ways you can source a product. You can either find stuff that you’re going to sell yourself. It might be something you design in CAD, or there’s all kinds of really, really cool 3D CAD drawing kind of apps for iPads and stuff.