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Ever since I started working, back when I was 15 years old, I would tell myself that I'd be my own boss. I always hated working for others, the idea of busting your ass to make others rich is just dumb. I'm proud to say that I became my own boss at the age of 23. I've owned a small storefront since 2011. I sell cellphones and cellphone accessories. The business at first was doing great, but now, unfortunately, I'm starting to feel the e-commerce effect hitting my business really hard. We've all witnessed the disappearance of retail stores in our neighborhoods. Anything from Sears to Blockbuster being replaced by easier and more convenient online stores. No one really wants to get off their ass to get in their car, deal with traffic, find a parking spot, wait in line, and drive back home for a cell phone case anymore. They would much rather go to Amazon, purchase a case and have it delivered in 2 business days if you're a prime member or, if you're lucky and live near one of the Amazon warehouse locations, receive it within 4 hours! How am I supposed to compete with that shit? So if you're stuck in a position similar to mine, put on your thinking cap and figure out a way to adapt.
I figured if the e-commerce industry is expected to grow, I need to move over into that space and cash-in while I can. So, what I wanted to begin with were businesses that didn't take as much capital to start up. So this is what I came up with...
MERCH BY AMAZON
Amazon offers a platform that allows people to upload t-shirt designs and sell them on their site. The cool part about it is that you don't have to deal with fulfillment or customer service. Amazon takes care of it all! You are allowed to price the shirt to your liking, you'll receive a percentage of that order in royalties. MBA was initially created to cater to app developers to create shirts for their apps but shortly after independent designers started flooding in. Amazon soon realized they couldn't keep up with the sales coming in from both the app developers and independent designers, so they made the program invite only. Unfortunately, now if you go to their website you must request an invitation into the program. From personal experience, it can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months before you get accepted. It is definitely worth the wait though. In the meantime, I suggest learning how to use photoshop or illustrator and start making your designs. I'm partnered with someone in this business for 50%. I would consider it to be passive because all you need to do is create the designs and optimize the listings and that's it, Amazon takes care of the rest.
Designs uploaded: 355
Estimated monthly royalties: $2,048
Estimated net profit: $716.8
Seller Central Amazon
Seller Central is a platform that Amazon offers where you can list items for sale on their site. You can either fulfill the customer's order yourself or you can send your products to an Amazon warehouse and have them take care of it all, this method is called Fulfilled by Amazon. They take a bigger cut from your profit but they take care of mailing out orders and customer service, plus it also makes your product listing available for prime shipping. I create the products I'm selling myself, most of my listings on Amazon are merchant fulfilled and my best sellers are FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). If you have products that you sell already or are looking to sell online, I highly recommend you list them on Amazon. Yes, they do take a chunk of your profits for listing them on their site, but Amazon is already an established e-commerce site. Anyone that goes on that website goes with an intent to purchase something. Amazon's organic traffic is crazy if you optimize your listing properly you may start seeing sales without advertising your product!
Products listed: 180
Products sold: 820
Estimated net profit: $2,947
Etsy & Ebay
I also created two stores around the same brand for the products I sell. They don't bring in as much as Amazon when it comes to sales, but anything helps so chyeah. When I created these stores I didn't really work on the SEO (search engine optimization) as much, so this month I'll be working on that to see if it affects sales at all. I'm sure you are all familiar with these sites so I'm not going to in depth with them.
Products listed (on each, Etsy & Ebay): 180
Products sold: 38
Etsy estimated net profit: $65.95
Ebay estimated net profit: $47.40
Cryptocurrencies & STEEM
I'm not sure if I should include this one on the list because I haven't really cashed out anything from this. But I'll mention it anyways. As you know anyone has the chance to make money by typing blog posts onto steemit.com. It's all about the steem power and getting upvoted. The more steem power you get equals more influence on the site. Cryptocurrencies and STEEM are both long-term investments and hold extremely high potential for profits in the future. If you want to get started with cryptocurrencies I suggest you read my previous post HERE
Estimated net profit combined: $3,777.15
I can tell you right now that my online business does not in any way relate to what I'm doing in my storefront business. I decided to go some other direction. I wanted to create a product that was easy to make, no electric or moving parts, and a novelty gift -like product. I figured this way customers know right off the bat what they are getting when they look at listed product images. Also, this way I don't get any complaints or have to deal with customer service as much. I'm a bit of an introvert so I want as little interaction as possible. I'm aware I can outsource this so I have someone else deal with it but I'm not at the point where I can do that yet. Right now it's a two-man team working on creating the product, creating the listings, optimizing them, and handling customer service. I have my younger cousin helping me out right now. I managed to build these businesses in 3 months and are somewhat established now to bring in about $3,000 per month! My next goal is to have my online business bring reach $5,000, so make sure you stay tuned. I'll be posting my journey to this point via steemit if you would like to follow me, make sure you do. Don't forget to comment if you have any questions or anything to add. Thank you for reading.
Until next time, deuce.
