Welcome to episode number 105 of The Growth Booth, where today I want to talk about e commerce in 2024. Now, ecommerce without doubt is my favorite online business model of all. I absolutely love ecommerce. I love it because the market is massive, I find it very easy, simple compared to other business models out there. It really is just simple commerce done online where you're buying and selling physical products. I know that when I got started online, I liked the fact that it felt very real, as opposed to an affiliate marketing business. Now, I don't think this is a problem. I just remember that when I was telling people what I was doing when I was getting started, if I tried to explain affiliate marketing, no one could really understand what it was, it always sounded a little bit shady, whereas with ecommerce, it was so simple to explain and understand. When I was then able to show people the type of products that I was selling, it really felt real, and I liked that about ecommerce. 

But when I say ecommerce, I'm casting a pretty wide net because there are lots of different types of ecommerce. So what are the different types of ecommerce that you can dive into? There's a bunch of them that I'm going to walk through on this podcast episode today. I'm going to leave you with my recommendation for what I would do if I had to start from scratch again, what I am recommending that my friends and family members do to get started with a new income online, and it might surprise you, because it's not something we've spoken about in quite some time. I'll get to that at the very end. 

First, let me walk through some of the different types of ecommerce that you may have heard of. Hopefully this will give you a little bit of context and background before I get to my favorite type of ecommerce at all and what I think is the biggest opportunity in 2024. First, though, the first type of ecommerce that I want to talk about is called Print on Demand. Print On Demand is as it sounds, you can you can sell products that don't exist, and when people buy the product, they are printed, or they are created on demand. So say for example, you've got a store, and maybe it's a Cartzy store and you're selling coffee mugs. You could sell a coffee mug with a unique image or slogan or text of some coins on that coffee mug. You could be running Facebook ads, you could be running ads on Etsy, different places, and if someone purchases the coffee mug from you, at that point, you actually physically create the coffee mug. The way that it's created is the image or the slogan is printed onto it, that coffee mug can then get sent out to the end customer. 

The things I like about print on demand are that you only pay for inventory once it's actually sold. You're not buying thousands of coffee mugs in advance, you're not buying any of them in advance. You're only paying for the coffee mugs after someone has paid you for them. You can make thousands of designs at no cost. So imagine you've got an ecommerce store, I'm using mugs as an example, but it could be something else, it could be T-shirts, it could be linen, it could be lots of different things, basically anything that you can print words and images onto serves itself for print on demand ecommerce. So imagine, you could have an ecommerce store with 1000 different products on it, maybe you've got 10 categories, each category has got 100 products, and you could be up and you'd be set up with that without needing to buy any products whatsoever. 

The downside of print on demand is that you've got relatively limited product range, for starters, I mean. If you wanted to go out and sell a remote control, you wouldn't be able to do that with print on demand. If you wanted to go and create your own product and sell that, maybe you want to manufacture a special widget of some kind, put your brand name on it, you can't do that with print on demand. So the product line is fairly limited. The other thing that I think is a bit of a downside, and this creeps up with almost every on my business, is traffic: how you're going to get the traffic, how you're going to be paying for the traffic. You won't be able to get traffic for free. I don't think so. Traffic is a bit of a downside and a consideration at least anyway. 

The different tools and resources that we use for print on demand, first and foremost, a store. You have to have a store website. So we will build that using Cartzy. And then you need to tap into a print on demand provider. There are a bunch of them out there. We've used Printify, Teespring is for T-shirts, and Printful. So these are some of the tools and resources and some thoughts around print on demand. 

The second type of ecommerce that I've got for you here today is dropship ecommerce. Dropship ecommerce is where you set up a website, you start selling products, and again, only once someone actually buys the product from you, you contact the distributor and you say, "Hey, Joe in San Francisco bought this pot plant, send it out," and you'll pay the distributor after Joe has already paid you. Joe's paying you $50, let's say, for a garden gnome, you then go to the distributor or the manufacturer of those garden gnomes and you pay them whatever the cost of the garden gnome is, maybe it's $25, and you pocket the difference. So that's what dropship ecommerce is. 

It's been huge for us. We've done a lot of dropship ecommerce, we've done courses on dropship ecommerce that you may be familiar with as well, such as the Kibo Code, and it's a really great business model. You will normally be using paid traffic for it. The positive of paid traffic is that you can you can turn it on in a single day. Another positive of dropship ecommerce is that there's almost a limitless number of different types of products you can sell. I mean, virtually any product you can imagine could be sold through dropship. And again, you're not buying any inventory until you've actually sold an item. So you sell an item, and then at that point, you go and fulfill that. You buy the product and you send it on and you pocket the difference. 

The cons for this one, I think traffic is probably the biggest one because there's no existing traffic ecosystem that you can tap into. There are for some of the different ecommerce models, which we'll get to in just a moment. You do need a store, I don't think this is a huge con, but it's going to mean this a little bit more in relation to day-to-day operations for handling logistics and processing orders is something that you would be doing or you'd have to set up for your store to do for you. So dropship ecommerce is a good one. You could use different platforms to sell, and you could use Facebook Marketplace, you could use Facebook, you could use Google Shopping, Walmart, so on and so forth. You would need a store, so you could get that set up on the likes of Cartzy. 

The third type of ecommerce is arbitrage ecommerce. This is where you buy products offline, and typically in sales. So you'll see that Walmart is having a big sale on some certain product, let's say it's a speaker, they're having big sales on speakers. A speaker that normally costs $200, you can now get it for $100. You go and you buy that speaker or maybe you'll buy lots of them, and then you publish that to sell again on the likes of Amazon and maybe other marketplaces as well. So it's very, very simple. You buy, you sort of hunt around and find special deals offline, you can buy products and you sell them online on the likes of Amazon, it's very simple. It's probably my least favorite of the ecommerce models though. It's not scalable, there's too much running around hunting for deals. It just seems like a lot of work for little gain really compared to the others because with dropship ecommerce, you could build a multi-million-dollar business per year from that same with print on demand, but with arbitrage ecommerce to do that, you would be doing a lot of running around and also you're buying a product that you may then have issues selling later. If you're buying a speaker, then you may run into issues actually trying to sell that. Maybe the price that you're trying to sell that on Amazon turns out to be a price that everyone's selling it at, or maybe your price is too expensive. There are lots of little issues that can creep in. I think the downsides for that one outweigh the upsides in my opinion. 

Now, my fourth and fifth ecommerce models that I want to talk about here today, related to Amazon, selling on Amazon is massive, and there are two different sides to it. There's the private label part, this is where you create a product of your own differentiated, it's got your own brand on it, you buy inventory upfront, and you're really building a brand. This is something that that we've done, we started with on Amazon probably 10 or 12 years ago, we've had multiple brands go live, and we do tens of thousands of units sold every single month on Amazon, I mean, you can do the math on that. We're trading it well into six figures per month. Our Amazon business has transferred nicely into an offline business as well. We were sold in thousands of different stores online. That online Amazon part of that is what we call private label; we're selling our own branded products that we have designed and manufactured ourselves. 

The other side of ecommerce on Amazon is what we refer to as wholesale. I'll explain what Wholesale is in just a moment. Now, there are three massive advantages to selling on Amazon. The first is that Amazon has just a boatload of traffic. I mean, we're talking 65 million daily visitors, and these visitors are there to do one thing: to buy products. You don't go to Amazon for the most part to research to see, how product works, you don't go to learn about things on Amazon, you go to Amazon to buy products. Most people don't even need to get their credit cards out or saved on file. People know that they buy on Amazon, they're going to get the product in a couple of days. So it's huge. I mean, Amazon also solves the ecommerce complications that an entrepreneur typically has with these other models that I've been talking about. So for example, Amazon handles the shipping, Amazon handles the customer service, Amazon handles receiving payments, and a whole lot more. They do charge a fee for doing that, but I think it's a pretty good deal for people who want to start an online business because Amazon just takes care of so many of the headaches. I think the other thing, which is really amazing about Amazon, is that people trust them, and people know that they're going to get their products quickly, then they can return the products without any issue, and that their data is secure. What this trust results in is very, very high conversions. 

So essentially, when you leverage one of the two different Amazon ecommerce models that I'll dive into in a little bit more detail here shortly, you're able to piggyback off of their logistics, their brand power, and their credibility, and this can massively accelerate and make so much simpler building a business. 

Let's talk a little bit more about the models. Amazon private label, I mentioned a little bit about what it is. But again, just to reiterate, it's where you come out with a product of your own. So for example, maybe it's a remote control, and that remote control has got your brand on it. It's different and it's unique to other products out there on the market. I guess it doesn't have to be different and unique. That's typically a best practice. But it's got your logo on it, it's got your brand on it, and it's unique to you. That's what Amazon private label is. There's massive upside and that you are essentially creating a playing field on your own. 

Now, if you're selling remote controls, you're going to be competing with other sellers of other similar remote controls. But your remote control can be different. Maybe you've got the only pink remote control on the market, and there's demand for that and you can tap into that. Or maybe you've gone and found a way that you been able to dramatically improve on the remote control. This provides a lot of different upsides when it comes to your marketing. 

The cons with Amazon private label though are that it can be quite costly to get started. Typically, if you are manufacturing your own product, you're going to have to manufacture 1000 of them or 500 of them, and that could cost anywhere from a couple of thousands up to tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture products before you've even had the opportunity to sell them or let alone get them on a marketplace. It's possibly the most difficult of all. There are big upsides, and that can be very lucrative, but it's possibly the most difficult of all, because you're really engaging in marketing and branding when you are going into Amazon private label. If you don't take marketing branding seriously, then you're probably not going to be able to compete and win the game of Amazon private label. You don't need a website for Amazon private label, you can sell everything on Amazon and you can leverage the Fulfilled by Amazon system to have Amazon handle all of your logistics. So that's the first way of selling on Amazon, and it has been a lucrative business model for many people who have tried it. 

The second way of selling on Amazon is what we refer to as Amazon wholesale. Now, Amazon Wholesale is where you buy products at wholesale prices, and you then sell the products at retail prices on Amazon. So you're buying low, and you're selling for a higher price. In my opinion, it's the simplest of all the different ecommerce models that I've discussed. You're using free traffic as well you're tapping into this free traffic ecosystem, where you're able to collect the revenue and the profit and scale up. So some of the things I love about Amazon wholesale, first and foremost, the traffic is sorted. It's not quite the case with Amazon private label, because with Amazon private label, what I was speaking about a moment ago, let's say you've developed a pink remote control, you create a listing on Amazon. That listing is your listing, the product has never existed before. So it's a brand-new listing, and maybe people are going to come to it or maybe they won't. You need to try to feel that demand. But with Amazon Wholesale, the product listing is already out there because you're not selling something new, you're selling products that other people sell as well, you're selling generic products. 

Maybe I'm selling a green coffee mug, and maybe there are three other people that sell that exact green coffee mug, it's the exact same green coffee mug. If I start selling that green coffee mug, then I go to Amazon, I find that listing that's got the green coffee mug already. I say, "Hey, I've got one of those that I want to sell as well," and I share the same Amazon listing. So with Amazon Wholesale, I don't even need to create a listing. I'm simply sharing a listing that already exists. Now if that green coffee mug has got 100 5-star reviews, then that's going to be on my listing as well. What Amazon does is it rotates who the seller is of that green coffee mug are at any given moment in time. Let's say there that the green coffee mug is doing $40,000 in sales in revenue per month. Now, if there are three sellers, they're going to be splitting that $40,000 3 ways. They're going to be getting $13,300 approximately each. If I come along and join, and I start selling my green coffee mug, which is exactly the same as the others, and I'm selling that the same price and I'm also leveraging the Amazon Fulfilled by Amazon system, then we've now got $40,000 in revenue, that doesn't change because the demand hasn't changed, but there are four different sellers, I'm the fourth seller, so that $40,000 is split between four different sellers. This is really where the magic happens. On one hand, you've got a proven product with lots and lots of reviews, sales history, and established rankings and traffic on Amazon. Secondly, you're able to analyze the amount of sales that it's currently doing and you're going to be able to see how many different sellers are currently selling it. You can then simply add your product on the same listing and get your slice of the pie. It's really, really effective. 

This is why it's, I think, the most exciting way to sell with ecommerce and 2024. The traffic is sorted, the demand is sorted because you're only selling products that you know, before you get going, are already in high demand. You don't need a website. You can tap into compounding growth, which is not something that you can easily do with a lot of the other different ecommerce models that I've spoken about. The way Amazon works is you could sell out your products every couple of weeks depending on how you set things up, but you could aim to do that you could aim to sell out of your products and replenish them every couple of weeks and reinvest the profits into your business, and when you do that, I tell you what, the speed at which you can grow is phenomenal. 

Now, the cons of all the downsides, I guess you could say, of the Amazon wholesale model is, it can take you, you know, potentially a few weeks to get sorted, or a couple of weeks to get sorted. It's not like you're going to start today, and you can start selling today and start making money today, it's not like that, because it's going to take a little bit of time to make sure that you've got products that you can sell and then get set up on Amazon. It doesn't take a long time. I mean, in the scheme of things, we're talking about a couple of weeks, maybe a few weeks, but then you're good to go. I was trying to think what are the downsides of this, and I really couldn't think of any other than that. I think if you're someone that takes business seriously, then it's not really a real downside. There's plenty you'll be able to occupy yourself within the first couple of weeks while you're while you're getting going, like Amazon private label, Amazon wholesale, also uses FBA, which is fulfilled by Amazon. So they handle all of the logistics for you. In terms of products, typically, you would go out, and you would find distributors that have got catalogs of tens of thousands of products. You would then need a way of scanning through those products. 

In the past, I think that's the reason why Amazon wholesale isn't something that we've spoken about a lot, because in the past, it's been quite challenging. We've been working pretty hard over the past year to make sure that this is incredibly streamlined for people. So in the past, what you would do though, is you'd go out there, you'd find distributors for products that you want to sell, and maybe you'd find a distributor that's got a catalogue of 10,000 different products. You scan through those products identify which of those products are the ones that tick the criteria and make sure there's demand, make sure there's availability, and then you would be able to start selling them. We've been able to set up a system whereby you can bypass that because we've gone out there and created lists of millions of products and identify thousands of products that tick all of the boxes. This is something that we're going to be able to extend to you as well. I'll be sharing more about how we can help you with that in the weeks ahead. 

Now, Amazon wholesale, without doubt, when you are leveraging the different shortcuts that that we've built, is the best ecommerce system hands down. A ton of pros to it, not many cons. The good news that I've got is that if you want to start an Amazon wholesale business yourself, then this is what we're focused on entirely in 2024, it's the model that we are going to be teaching people, it's not just Amazon wholesale, it's selling in other places as well but starting out with Amazon wholesale. We've taken a pretty hybrid approach to it. We're going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Imagine if you could be given a product or multiple products, and you knew that those products were going to make you somewhere in the vicinity of $500 to $1,000 per month, all you had to do was get the products and get them up on Amazon. That would be like giving you an income stream of $500 to $1,000 profit per month. Well, that's something that, as you're going to see in the weeks ahead, I think we've been able to absolutely nail. In fact, last year, I rented a 40,000 square foot warehouse in Texas. I'm going to share why I did that and how that might impact you, by the way, not just the warehouse, but I've set up a whole team of staff in that warehouse in Texas. In the next episode of The Growth Booth, episode number 106, which is coming out next week, I want to be sharing exactly why I did that, why did I go out there and get a five-year lease on a 40,000 square foot warehouse in Texas. It's far too big for what I need personally, however, there are some enormous upsides to having that warehouse that you're going to be able to find out about in the next episode of The Growth Booth. So tune in next week and I'll be talking more about this warehouse and more about some of the shortcuts and ways that I think that I can help you get started with building an ecommerce business in 2024. 

So that's a wrap for this episode of The Growth Booth. As always, you can head over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 105, and these are the different ways that you can make money, the different business models related to ecommerce that you could potentially use in 2024. My favorite hands down is Amazon wholesale, we'll talk about this more in the weeks ahead. So head over to thegrowthbooth.com, episode number 105, view the transcript and get the other good information there that we shared today, timestamps and so on and so forth. Make sure you tune in to the next episode of The Growth Booth because I'm going to be talking about the 40,000 square foot warehouse in more detail. See you next time.