Original subtitles

In this lesson, I'm going to take you through choosing the right

idea for your e-commerce brand.

This is important because not every idea will be viable for an e-commerce

business, and this is why in our first lesson I asked you not to

choose one idea to focus on yet.

So that you don't become too attached to the idea before you do

your research around whether it's the right idea for your brand.

If you don't find this out now, you may find some problems a little later

in the course that you mean you'll need to start again from scratch,

and we definitely want to avoid that.

What I don't want is for you to end up with an idea that's gonna

make things really hard for you.

So I'll start with some of the things I did right and wrong with my brands.

With that said, this lesson's not here to put you off or slow you down in any way.

So all I want you to do is a quick check for some of your main ideas and don't

go into too much research or detail yet.

We'll come back to a lot of these topics later in the course.

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to see which ideas

you can keep on your list and which you might need to cross off or put

in the two hard basket for now.

So these are the questions that I ask myself when I'm evaluating whether

my seemingly amazing light bulb moment of an idea is actually going

to work for an e-commerce model.

I've come up with these questions based on what I've done right and

what I've done wrong in the past.

So I'm really happy that I get to share these with you so that you can avoid

some of the mistakes that I've made.

So the questions that I ask myself to help me choose the right idea to go with

are, is there a market for my product?

Is there demand for my product or is my product trending and is

my product viable for e-commerce?

Is it relatively lightweight and easy to ship, or is it extremely heavy,

fragile, or even dangerous to ship?

So let's start with my first question.

Is there a market for my product?

What I want you to begin to do here is start researching the market size of

the industry you're looking to enter.

This will be in terms of the revenue that this industry made as a whole

in the previous year or even back a few years, if no data is available.

This is usually relatively easy to research by doing a quick Google search

around your industry or product, and should reveal how much revenue the market

has made in the previous year or so.

So for skinny tea, for example, I've done some searches around global

market size of the tea industry.

Global marketed the weight loss industry and global market

size, the detox industry.

For example, if your product is a lot more niche or intended for one

specific audience in particular, try to do some research around this as well.

You might find it written about in articles or in industry reports.

Just make sure that the sources are credible.

Like I said, this should be a quick preliminary search to show you if

your market size is large enough.

So moving on to the next question, which was, is there demand for my product

or ideally, is my product trending?

A really easy place to take a quick look at this is via Google

Trends, which identifies upward or downward trends in search volume.

For specific terms or products, simply visit trends.google.com and

enter a search term or product.

You probably wanna switch the search to worldwide and search over the last

five years for some comparison, which you can do via the dropdown menus.

If we take skinny meat tea, for example, we might wanna begin with

the term detox, and then we can even add other terms to compare,

like detox tea and weight loss tea.

This can even help you choose the keywords that you can use to describe your product

based off search demand for that term.

Or maybe you're tossing up between some very different ideas like metal

straws, keep cuts, or reusable razors.

You can compare all of these terms against each other and see if any

really stand out from the rest.

So we can see right now that the term metal straw is dominating,

keep cuts and reusable razors.

At the end of this, you might still choose to enter a less saturated

market, but either way, now you know there's actual demand for your

product and whether that demand is increasing or decreasing over time.

There are a few more ways that you can research demand for your

product, like keyword volume research and social media validation.

But we'll get into these further in later.

Lessons on validating your idea.

Remember, right now we just wanna skim the surface.

Now we're moving on to what I see as our biggest make or break question.

Is my product viable for e-commerce or is it extremely heavy, fragile,

regulated, or dangerous to ship?

So the number one thing here that's going to determine whether your product's going

to be viable for e-commerce or not is whether it's able to be shipped worldwide.

It needs to not be too heavy, or your shipping will cost a lot.

It needs to not be too breakable, or you'll be issuing a lot of

refunds and it needs to be able to be shipped in terms of regulations.

Something to keep in mind here when it comes to shipping is that ultimately

we want to be able to cover the cost of shipping into our product cost so

that we're able to offer free shipping on the product, which will ultimately

increase our conversion rates.

A perfect example of a mistake I've made with one of my

products is with drop bottle.

Our drop bottles are made of thick glass, which makes them both breakable

and heavier to ship, which means that we can't offer them at an accessible

price point when selling online.

So they need to be priced at the higher end luxury price point of over 40 US

dollars per bottle, plus $5 shipping.

Shipping our bottles to some countries from Australia costs over $20.

So we need to keep stock in multiple locations, which would

put a lot of pressure on us if we were first starting out.

I know founder found this out the hard way for themselves with

their first e-commerce product, which is a big, thick, heavy book.

So try to find a product that's relatively lightweight and easy to ship.

One more thing to take into account here is whether the product is

regulated or even dangerous to ship.

Okay.

Items considered dangerous to ship, include flammable products

that contain some kinds of lithium batteries or aerosols.

So if you think your product might fall into that category, I do some research at

your local post office or online first.

Regulated products are products that may or may not be allowed

to be shipped into some regions.

Skinny meat Tea is a good example of this because some of our active ingredients

and the claims that we make around weight loss are actually regulated by

the Therapeutic Goods administration in Australia or the T G A, which is

a little like the F D A in the us.

So we found out after starting that we needed to get t g listed.

I actually received a letter from the T G A saying that they could find me up to 12

million, and I was scared outta my mind.

Of course, we did end up getting T G A listed, but it was a really

expensive and time consuming process.

So be careful if you're thinking about entering the health and

wellness space and want to make specific claims around your product.

In fact, if this is your first product, I'd avoid the vitamin space, for example,

entirely to avoid the headache unless you have some experience in this space

or a lot of capital to play with.

I'd even begin by doing a quick Google search around your product idea to

see if it's highly regulated or asking the question in the Facebook group.

So now let's take our example of our reusable straw product idea from the

last lesson into account here to see if it's viable for an e-commerce store.

Is it relatively lightweight and easy to ship?

Yes.

Plus it's reusable, so you'll only be needing to send one or two items

at a time rather than in bulk.

Is it breakable?

While this would depend on what the straw is made of, there are two main kinds

of reusable straws, glass and plastic.

For e-commerce viability, let's stay away from glass as it's far more breakable.

Plus it could actually be quite a dangerous product if it was to break

in somebody's mouth, for example.

And is it a highly regulated or dangerous product to send?

No.

So a reusable straw is a viable e-commerce option.

So as an action item for this lesson, I want you to fill out the worksheet to

answer each of these questions for each of your five potential product ideas that

you came up with in the previous lesson.

Just a sentence or even one word answer will do for each, for now.

This way you'll be able to quickly see which of these

ideas is viable for e-commerce.

Then I want you to rank them from most to least viable and scrap

the bottom two ideas so that you've only got three remaining

before you start the next lesson.

So go ahead, do that now, and I'll see you in the next lesson.