Another stream of passive income I’ve been looking into is building an online retail business/store. Something that has always put me off however, is that I know very little about product manufacture, distribution and sales. I am after all uncomfortable with things I don’t know about. I have been looking into how you can create an online shop without needing to own your own products – or make them, stock them etc.
I came across a webinar of a guy selling an automated technology platform in which he talked about how to sell products without even seeing them. His technology took the hard work out of setting up a commerce website for beginners but given I have skills in this area for me it filled in a lot of blanks about the product side of things.
Essentially the key steps selling other people’s products online are:
- Set up a Shopify store (website)
- Find some products on a distributor website such as AliExpress
- Run some targeted advertising, such as PPC or FB ads
- Drop your ad click throughs on a landing page and then up-sell other products through checkout
As you would imagine, if this works, you can easily repeat or scale up the process. A friend of a friend of ours, knows a multi-millionaire who cashed in on the 50 Shades of Grey popularity a few years ago by setting up an online shop that just sold butt plugs…
Questions I have:
- How do you deal with the customer service aspect? Presumably they are my customers and I need to look after them. How do returns work etc?
- How many conversions can I expect for spending a very small daily test budget of say £5?
- What are the fees on Shopify?
- Does this work in the UK?
- Is this the same mechanism people use to sell on Amazon? (i.e. instead of having an online store)
Risk level: seems low – time spent and only outlay is marketing costs, should I choose to pay for marketing
