Published on March 8th, 2020 | by Bibhuranjan

The Easiest Way To Start A Successful Online Business In 2020

One of the most common questions that I get asked is what business should I start?I decided to answer that question today with my best tips to start a successful business in 2020

I know that what is considered cheap and low cost is relative. However, when you think about it, in the past if you wanted to take control of your financial future you, would usually have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month renting a store or a building and then you would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a day hiring staff members to run it and then you’d have to spend thousands of dollars on purchasing products in bulk to resell – all before you had sold a single thing.

Nowadays, thanks to the internet, we can sell products and make money doing so online 24/7 without having employees. Thanks to digital storefronts it costs just $29 a month to run and thanks to the internet as well as we will discuss we can now say goodbye to having to buy products in advance to sell for a profit. In fact as you’re going to see, thanks to the internet we can now sell products that don’t even exist yet.

Something I want to keep in mind is that these businesses, they do have startup and registration costs and if you’re going to focus on selling aliexpress best sellers – then the start up cost will be quite high. However, if you’re in a tight spot financially and it would be better for you to start with something that’s free, then there are indeed free ways to get started which I talked about in this article, and sure those methods will definitely take longer to get traction, however, it is worth taking into account that business isn’t a sprint – it is a marathon.

So, don’t feel like you have to spend any money or put yourself in financial strain to start a business. There are plenty of ways to get started for free. However, if you do have some money to invest to start a business and you’re like some ideas for what you could do, then this article is for you.

Etsy

I honestly think that Etsy could very well be the most underutilized third party platform for making money online right now. There are so many opportunities that many on Etsy and yet everybody shines away from it and I’m honestly not really sure why. I suspect it could be because the fact that there is a 20 cent per item listing. Although it does last for four months, but then a lot of people look at eBay and they go: “Oh on eBay It’s free to list items for up to 50 items.” The thing though is that as you’re going to see – Etsy has some major advantages over eBay.

There are two major ways be making money on Etsy that are currently under utilized and the first one I’m going to talk about is digital downloads (and the second one is high ticket dropshipping).

Etsy is an online Marketplace that has over 35 million people visit each year, where anyone like me or you can list that products for sale. It’s just like eBay: With eBay you can list products for sale and when you do anyone can come and buy them, so if I come to the search bar and type in “funny t-shirts” – eBay will show me a bunch of funny t-shirts that third-party sellers like you or me have listed for sale. In that sense, Etsy is the same. If we come to Etsy and type in funny t-shirts will get a bunch of funny t-shirts that people are selling on Etsy.

So, when you come to a T-shirt and buy it, you aren’t buying it from Etsy. You’re buying it from a 3rd party seller who is most likely just operating out of their house. Etsy initially used to be a Marketplace just for handmade products, but it’s completely evolved and now you are allowed to sell lots of different products.

And there is one major advantage to selling on Etsy compared to eBay. You see, unlike eBay, Etsy has marketed itself as a premium buying experience. Because of that as you can see, on average the t-shirts on Etsy are priced fifty to a hundred percent higher than what they go for on eBay. https://tools.joinflyp.com/etsy-fees-calculator will give you a better idea of the fees and potential profit you can earn by listing your products there.

Once, when I was browsing through Etsy I was looking for some new t-shirt mock-ups for a store my e-commerce portfolio. If you don’t what a t-shirt mock-up has it is a photo that has a blank t-shirt that t-shirt sellers like me can place our designs onto and use for marketing.

As I was after a very particular type of mock up photo, I decided to check on Etsy. The main way that customers find products on Etsy is with the search bar. You will then go through its listings and see which ones are relevant, with matching keywords and then give you results. So I did a search for what I wanted “canvas 3005 mock-up photos” and look through the different results until I found this one here, which was exactly I wanted:

and after the purchase I was automatically sent an email that contained a direct download with the mock-up photo, and oh my goodness me – have they sold a lot of mock up photos. So I switched the currency to United States dollars and check this out the store here. They’ve been on Etsy for less than two years and yet they have sold nearly fifty seven thousand photos.

So if we take out a calculator and average three dollars fifty per photo, since as we can see they do sometimes put them on sale, that means that in less than two years, selling automatic digital downloads, this store has made just under $200,000.

I just want to be clear, this is not to minimize the work that the store has put in, but as you can see, putting in real work to actually create real products that people want to buy, rather than chasing after get-rich-quick schemes – it literally pays off and you know, I’ve seen even simpler more creative ways that people are making money on Etsy, with automated digital downloads. I mean take a look at this:

This is a sizing chart picture that you could get a graphic designer or fiverr to create and people are buying these sizing charts for five dollars. And the amazing thing is that there still opportunities to make money in the mock-up photo business on Etsy. So for example this store here:

I was thinking about how I’m going to expand its product line. Perhaps croptops could be a good option? Crop tops are becoming increasingly popular with print-on-demand stores like mine. So I went to Etsy to do a search for nice mock-up photos for this crop top and to my disappointment the options were extremely limited to say the least.

No one has taken this opportunity to create nicely laid out crop-top mock-up photos. So that is one semi passive underutilized way to make money on Etsy, but there is another semi automated way to make money on Etsy and it’s with print on demand .

Tags: business, dropshipping, ecommerce, Etsy, platform, retail, sales

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.