Day 1

So once I had settled on an online business I found the website Shopify. I quickly went to work watching multiple Youtube videos and began working on my site. The first thing I noticed was that it was free to set up and that I got a 14 day trial. This is great! I began working and found add-ons such as Oberlo. After working on the site for two days I had come up with bare basics and had four items added.

In order to get this far I had watched various videos from people such as Tobia Wilson and Sarah Crisph as well as others. They covered topics such as how to build a Shopify store, how to find items to sell on AliExpress for dropshipping and even how to find free images to use for my site. I began picking out items and had four items set up but I was now torn on exactly what kind of business I wanted to start. I also ran into the worry that what if I set all this up and then got a bunch of sales. I didn't have the cash fund to order those items, wait 4 to 5 weeks for them to arrive and then to get paid. (It seems the payments would usually come faster than that but I saw that Paypal could hold funds for longer than that.

Considering that I began to doubt that this was the option for me. I could see where the potential lay but did not feel I could risk it at this time. It was around this time that I also began to realize one thing that all the success stories had that I did not. That was a following on social media. Up until his point, I had barely dabbled in face book and only had a handful of friends on my account. I had never even logged into or looked at a twitter, snapchat, tiktok or instagram account let alone thought about writing a blog. So I realized that I would have a huge issue finding people to market to. I considered the Facebook adds I had heard about but again had that nagging concern that I might spend money on the adds trying to drive traffic and then not make any sales ending up further off than I was to begin with.

At this point, I considered that maybe there was some company out there that had automated the drop shipping process to the point that they would take the customer's payment, ship the item and then send me the money. I noticed that Amazon had a setup similar to this but the thought of dealing with Amazon at this point over whelmed me and I felt it was something better left until later if at all.

I slowed down on my design of the Shopify store and decided to take half a step back and look at all of my options. I considered that I could list limited amounts of items for sale on my site and that way minimize how much money I had to front, I also considered a one item store as I had seen several videos that indicated how to go about that task.

This is where this post ends as the next one begins a slight direction change in my journey. If you have undertaken a similar journey how did you go about it. Do you see places I could have done better or things that I did you wish you had done. Feel free to comment so that we can help others who chose to travel down this road.