Should You Start an eCommerce Business in 2021 [LNIM209]

Does it make sense to start an eCommerce Business in 2021? Is Dropshipping viable in the current economic climate? Is Kibo Code a good way to learn Dropshipping?

Show Notes

Is 2021, the post-pandemic era (wait, not post-pandemic yet, but you get the idea) the right time to start a dropshipping business?

Back in March and April, I did a couple of episodes focused on dropshipping. Links are below if you want to check them out to get some context on the topic as I break it down from the very basics.

There was a lot of excitement around this during the time that I imagined this was a real viable business model. There are several things about the dropshipping business model that I really like and one of them is that it is dead straightforward and simple for beginners.

If you are relatively new to marketing, it’s really easy to understand — you get a relationship with a supplier, you advertise their product, you sell the product. And when you make a sale, you ask that supplier to ship the product and you keep the difference.

That’s really the fundamentals of this business model so it’s really easy to understand. It doesn’t involve having a warehouse somewhere or a spare bedroom full of stuff. It’s completely electronic and because of that and the nature of its simplicity, it’s easy to outsource, making it really attractive.

It made me think, is this a good time for me to try dropshipping in again? Is this really the right time?

If you look at the data, e-commerce has grown at an amazing rate over the last year due to the pandemic. The pandemic has made people comfortable, out of necessity, with doing business online and buying things without actually touching them in a way that they’ve never been before. That growth for e-commerce and people’s level of comfort with e-commerce is here to stay. That’s a very strong endorsement of e-commerce so I believe in the power of e-commerce going forward.

Now, there are still some things that you need to watch out for when you get into an e-commerce business:

Use suppliers that are in the country that you’re doing business in. I think that the days of being able to drop ship something from China (unless it’s really something special for them) and have a customer wait for 12 days are behind us.
Manage your fixed and variable costs. Is this product profitable? You need good tools or at least a really good spreadsheet so that you know exactly what’s going on inside your business. This is not a business that you can be lazy with as the margins are a little bit too tight in a business like this. You really need to pay attention. You got to know your numbers as they say.
You’ve got to have some traffic sources that make sense and that you can afford.

My recommendation if you’ve got an interest in e-commerce: 2021 is a great year to explore that interest. A place to start is Steven and Aidan’s course on Kibo.

In this version of the course, they’re going to have free traffic, help with product selection and they have gotten rid of Shopify. They have a proprietary platform that they’re providing as part of the course where you can set up your store on their platform with their integration so no more Shopify fees.

This is a great time to get into e-commerce — the supply chain is back and the potential for e-commerce has been accelerated at an unbelievable rate. I believe that the sea change is here to stay.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

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