- good idea to have your own website, and whether you use shopify or wordpress/woocommerce, or or or, for this, is up to you... I personally prefer woocommerce, but sometimes shopify is more convenient if I just want to quickly test some products, woocommerce store setup can take a bit longer...
I would strongly suggest you have a .com, or .co.uk, or whatever your country's extension is...
or actually I cant remember all of the domain name extensions, but please be aware that there are a LOT of domains NOT accepted by social media like facebook, etc.
For example, .co is not accepted. For whatever sad reason.

These days you CAN have your ecommerce store just on social media... no problem... but always better idea to have both your own website AND a solid presence on social media too...

- then, your product or service MUST have a big enough market/audience/interest. Otherwise you wont get any sales, or very few sales at best...
this point should be common sense. Make sure your product/service HAS a damn big enough audience/market/interest. Not because YOU think so... TEST it. research online. make 100% sure. dont waste your time!

- then, once you've done the above second point(because the website you do after all this actually), you need to answer the following question:
how much competition do you have? If you have a LOT of competition, then are you prepared for the fight to bypass/beat all your competition to get a lot of clients/customers/sales?
The more competition you have, the more difficult it will be to get sales, even if your product/service is fantastic and has a huge market...
So, IDEALLY you want to sell a service/product that has low to medium competition, but medium to high DEMAND... OK? Got that? Understand? Comprehende?
Low-medium competition, but medium-high DEMAND.

- marketing... you need to know WHO to market to. WHO is your target market/audience? Who has HIGH DEMAND for your product/service? Target them.
How? Well, social media, google ads, youtube ads, your own website, other (ecommerce) platforms like ebay, amazon, etc.
Free marketing: takes longer to get results, because you have to put in a LOT of work, on a daily basis...
Paid marketing: much quicker results, not as much work as with free marketing, but still a lot of work to make sure you dont waste your money on ads...
So, you can use both google ads and facebook ads together... one example: you can target your audience with google ads, and then just RETARGET the website traffic you got from your google ads, you retarget those website visitors with facebook retargeting ads... between $5 and $10 per day max, unless you feel brave..and have the budget for higher..

OR, you can just use facebook ads, without google ads... daily budget should then start off slowly/low and slowly work up to between $10 and $20 per day max, per ad, until you start getting results, only once you start getting good results/sales/conversions, then only can you think about increasing your daily budget over $20/day... although, if your ad is optimized and conversion rate is very high, then you can probably stay under $30/day... but then again, if you've got the budget, you may as well test higher daily budgets, but the conversion rate must not decrease...

So, accidentally I taught some of you some valuable information about marketing... it wasnt my intention for this video, oh well, lucky bastards...

so, you're either going to use a website and/or social media, for your ecommerce store... you will be careful about what domain you use...
you must make sure about your product/service... dont try to sell something that has ZERO interest/demand...duh...
or too much competition....

marketing... make sure you have a clear strategy that makes sense to you... you need to target the RIGHT audience who has a high demand for your product/service.
then, you need to make sure you understand the difference between COLD and WARM/HOT traffic... go google that...
think about setting up a sales funnel... at some point... the whole purpose of a sales funnel is to turn COLD traffic/leads into HOT traffic/customers...
And that is also linked to building trust and social proof... again, google these too if you dont know what they are...

aim to build your own email list... capture the emails of your website/social media traffic by offering them something valuable for free... maybe some free content, etc etc...
that way you have the email addresses of COLD traffic... now your job is to turn that COLD traffic email list into warm/hot traffic, otherwise known as customers...
that could require an email campaign that can last for a couple days, or even a couple weeks/months... just depends...
also a great idea to try to sell some cheap quality product to cold traffic, and try to sell your HIGH TICKET expensive items to warm/hot traffic... cold traffic will only buy THIS if they are drunk...
dont believe me? go try it...

you must make sure your delivery/shipping is sorted out. your payment systems, how will customers pay you? you can use stripe integration with both woocommerce and shopify..

your ecommerce store DESIGN needs to be OK enough...

leverage other platforms like amazon/ebay/etsy, etc etc to help sell your stuff... they do marketing already... you're just piggy-backing your products on those platforms...
but for your own platforms, your own website, you will have to send traffic there... free traffic/marketing takes MUCH longer...
paid traffic can get you results very quickly, the bigger your budget, the more testing you can do with ads, and the quicker you can get to GOOD sales results...

ok, so woocommerce is a free plugin that you install on your wordpress website... an ecommerce plugin for wordpress...
shopify comes ecommerce ready....

wordpress+woocommerce is generally around $10-$20 cheaper PER MONTH than a shopify store...

If you want to know more, check out my full courses where I show you how to set all this up...
ask me if you dont know where to find them....

I might have skipped something here...
But I think I've covered the bare minimum for the topic... except for the marketing, you lucky bastards!

See you in the next video...
cheers
Jerome

Link to video:

https://open.lbry.com/@JP-COURSES:6/how-start-ecommerce-store:4?r=Ca4We77t7EPmasJ7r4J7i3ggVxePoJKB