Starting an ecommerce store

[Monts]

I have an idea for a certain design that I want to sell. I have bought (though never got) this design in a Kickstarter campaign. I have yet to see it elsewhere around the web. Over the last two weeks, I have been bringing up my technical skills in design. Need to figure out manufacturing. Getting ready to put together a store. And I have read the full crash course. I am ready to start a journal.

 

[Samwise89]

Cool story bro. Did the Kickstarter fail to get funding or did they cheat the buyers? If it failed to be funded is that because there's not enough interest or because they suck at marketing? Things to think about.

 

[rigby]

I love scouring Kickstarter to get new product ideas. I also love to go here ( remove spaces and add https, sorry admin, just a useful link myip.ms/ view/ ip_addresses/400762368/23.227.38.0_23.227.38.255 ) to see all websites hosted on shopify. If you rank them by popularity, you get the chance to study what the kings have been doing and if you scroll down to less popular websites (those can potentially be your competitors or newbies like us that just stumbled on an idea and made it work) you can pretty much work out how much traffic these websites are getting and roughly from which sources (Similarweb), and then you can work out through SEMrush how they're getting (if any) traffic from search engines.

I love SimilarWeb because they give a lot of (very reliable in my opinion) literally for free.
SEMrush is a bit on the expensive side of things (low tier starts at 79$. Ugh!), but as a freemium, can be still used for light research (just remember to change browser or clean your cookies when you ran out of free queries) and when you get more serious about it, you can decide to pay for a month and put together all the data that you need to grow your website.

This is the method I have used to research one niche of non-electronics consumer products (very recent trend, >6mo old) and a single product that fits in the range of the electronics accessories and will go straight into my amazon FBA account as soon as I find a reliable manufacturer (gonna take a while).

Over the last two weeks, I have been bringing up my technical skills in design. Need to figure out manufacturing.

To be honest, I'd wait for some chinese manufacturers to just copy the design with slight changes and then buy off them or use Aliexpress as a low term dropshipping solution.
They will catch up anyway, wasting months of your own R&D.
I'd rather focus on selling solely : for example, I know that I can sell profitably the range of niche product I've found through PPC and I know by previous experience (been selling on FBA on and off since 2014) that my other product has chances to perform decently on Amazon.co.uk.

If you are from UK (I'm not, but I happen to live here since September) or another country in Europe, you can also exploit the weaknesses of the smaller Amazon markets compared to Amazon US to dominate the search page :

Amazon US has bigger depth, but has also more fierce and well-funded competition. On the other hand, the smaller Marketplaces are slower to catch up (meaning that you just need to sit and see what's going on with the us market to know what's gonna happen in the other marketplaces), has a LOT less competition (less reviews, low ppc competition, easier to rank faster).
I also have a feeling that UK resellers have been using just eBay for all these years and aren't all that keen on changing (people get lazy and I might be wronng, this is just a feeling that is not backed up by data).

After all, good luck on your journey, we seem to be on a similar path, altough geographically distant LOL

 

[Monts]

@rigby this was amazingly insightful. Thanks. I have been toying with Shopify and ASimilarWeb is extremely useful.

First week update:
I have improved the design process a lot. I think I can now build a custom-version of my product without much hassle. My plan is to offer custom-made designs to customers and then, once made, put them up for sale. I also plan to ask with each request for a story from customer on why this design to add a more personal touch to each design.
As for manufacturing, for testing, I think I am going to experiment with 3d printing (I have free access to a plastic printer at work), high-cost though, until I find a reliable lost wax casting manufacturer.
As for a website, I decided to go with a wordpress site instead of shopify to keep costs at minimum as well as have more control. Being a developer helps. Also, I got a free theme from work that does the job. The website is set up and is in development at the moment.
As for marketing, I am going to start on reddit in some communities I am actively part of to test out the process. I am going to focus on facebook and instagram outside of reddit. I need to work more on branding of the website. I have an idea for a competition around the theme of the website.
For this week, I am going to get the website complete as well as test out a couple of base-designs. And work more on the messaging and branding. I also plan on making my first post on reddit to get some initial response.

As a side note, I have been propositioned by a co-worker to co-found something together. I gave him another idea inspired by the process of building this. The idea is more localized and having a partner with complementary skills will definitely help (a marketer with some technical chops that likes to talk to people ). I don't want to be stretched out thin on projects, but I expect that by the time we get the ball rolling on that, this one has been front-loaded (and profitable).
Edit: clarification

Cool story bro. Did the Kickstarter fail to get funding or did they cheat the buyers? If it failed to be funded is that because there's not enough interest or because they suck at marketing? Things to think about.

It did not fail. It succeeded with enough interest and margins to make this a worthwhile project. I never got it because first it got lost in the mail and then again did not get a replacement because I left the country. But the designer does not seem interested in expanding the project to a complete store.
Sorry for the late replies. I thought the website would automatically watch any thread I made.

 

[rigby]

@rigby this was amazingly insightful. Thanks. I have been toying with Shopify and ASimilarWeb is extremely useful.

First week update:
I have improved the design process a lot. I think I can now build a custom-version of my product without much hassle. My plan is to offer custom-made designs to customers and then, once made, put them up for sale. I also plan to ask with each request for a story from customer on why this design to add a more personal touch to each design.
As for manufacturing, for testing, I think I am going to experiment with 3d printing (I have free access to a plastic printer at work), high-cost though, until I find a reliable lost wax casting manufacturer.
As for a website, I decided to go with a wordpress site instead of shopify to keep costs at minimum as well as have more control. Being a developer helps. Also, I got a free theme from work that does the job. The website is set up and is in development at the moment.
As for marketing, I am going to start on reddit in some communities I am actively part of to test out the process. I am going to focus on facebook and instagram outside of reddit. I need to work more on branding of the website. I have an idea for a competition around the theme of the website.
For this week, I am going to get the website complete as well as test out a couple of base-designs. And work more on the messaging and branding. I also plan on making my first post on reddit to get some initial response.

As a side note, I have been propositioned by a co-worker to co-found something together. I gave him another idea inspired by the process of building this. The idea is more localized and having a partner with complementary skills will definitely help (a marketer with some technical chops that likes to talk to people ). I don't want to be stretched out thin on projects, but I expect that by the time we get the ball rolling on that, this one has been front-loaded (and profitable).
Edit: clarification

Sounds you got your chops together already bud
As of Instagram : you can search around for sellers in the same niche that are already buying shout outs (and you can see the best performing influencer before putting money on the table).
Once you've found the IG of a few competitors, search up on Google for

 site:instagram.com "@name_competitor"

Most of the results will be shout outs and you'll find easy to spot exposure opportunities.
Hope it can be useful.

I haven't really used IG as ecommerce channel (just been growing some accounts with Massplanner and own content).
But lately I've been looking at a few webmasters using IG + Aliexpress + Shopify :
they seem to generate ok traffic with low effort and low risk (due to the distribution model ).

 

[Monts]

@rigby thanks. This will definitely save me some time. Instagram is a tough one to navigate.

 

[Monts]

2nd week update:
Site is now at 80% ready. Most of the work left is going to be on product presentation: photos, product descriptions, messaging... There's some technical stuff left: setting up google analytics, mailchimp, etc..
I made contact with the manufacturer I am most interested in working with. They will be handling shipping, packaging and delivery. They made me chose between "regular boxes" without any of their branding and "nice jewelry boxes" with their branding. I chose the latter, though asked for more details on how my branding will be added.
As for design, I tested out a basic design in plastic at work and it turned out just fine.
For next week, I will continue talking with this manufacturer. If it's all set up, I will be ordering my first sample from them, which I will probably use to create many photoshoped images of different designs. I will also be digging more into the marketing. I have a fun idea for an essay/story competition around the theme that could kick things off nicely. The challenge with my ideal customers is that they come from many different backgrounds. Might have to think about how to target one group at a time or many different people at once.

 

[Monts]

I should probably move this to the journal section, but I need one more like.
3rd week update:
This was a down week for me that I spent most of my free time in bed watching Futurama and eating crap. But I got access to the manufacturer's sandbox and production environment. I just gotta figure out how to use it and make my first order.
I worked on the site a little bit, but there's just stuff to be done.
I started reading more into copywriting and guerrilla marketing.
Slow week.

 

[fastdreamer]

By now I guess your site is running on 100% What is the price range of your product - are they a luxury high priced or mass low priced items? Sill sticking to 3d printing?