From the course: Ecommerce Fundamentals

How to choose an ecommerce model

From the course: Ecommerce Fundamentals

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How to choose an ecommerce model

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- Running an online store can be incredibly exciting. You're sending products directly to people who want them so they can enjoy them and make their lives richer. But before you open an e-commerce store, you need to do three things. You need to choose an e-commerce business model. You need to choose who you're going to sell to. And based on your previous choices, you need to choose a specific product to sell. The best place to start is by evaluating different business models. Some of them, like drop shipping, are very easy to get into and require zero startup capital. Others like manufacturing require a huge investment of your time and money upfront, but give you other advantages down the line. My goal is to help you find the model that works best for you. This could be about maximizing profit, about defensibility and building a business to last decades, or about how easily and quickly you want to get started. It's easy to copy what someone else is doing, but that doesn't mean that you're going to build a business that you want. So by really digging into a few different business models, we should be able to find the one that's right for you. In this course, we're going to look at these models: drop shipping, reselling, white labeling, manufacturing, digital products, and making it yourself. As we go through each of these models, we're going to look into some of the advantages and disadvantages, specifically how easy it is to get started. Some models take a lot of time or capital to get started. And if you don't have those, you might have to look at transitioning, which is the next point, how you can transition from one model to a new model and why you might want to do so. Lots of these models are compatible with each other and there is some overlap so you can start your e-commerce journey with one model and end somewhere else. Lastly, we're going to talk about how defensible the business is. It takes a lot of time, mental energy, and money to start a business and some business models are easy to copy. So if you go down a particular route, you want to know how to defend it so a bigger company doesn't copy what you did and take your market share. I know, I looked at a ton of business models before I started selling online, and I'm really glad I did because I found one that works for me. Let's look at different business models to find the one that works for you. In the next video, we'll explore drop shipping.

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