How can I use e-commerce with the customers money when they make a sale instead of my own?

Yes. https://docs.woothemes.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/

It's very important. (first, read this article by Josh Breinlinger - http://acrowdedspace.com/post/47647912203/a-critical-but-ignored-metric-for-marketplaces) The way you achieve success in a marketplace is by driving liquidity for both your supply & demand. Demand-side Liquidity = When users come to your marketplace, they can achieve their goals. Supply-side Liquidity = When supply comes to your marketplace they can achieve their goals... which are almost always to make money. If you're making a large amount of your supply-side users a full-time income, then you're helping them achieve liquidity. Now it's not so black and white and it doesn't always have to be a "full-time income." It depends what their goals are. E.g., 1) At Airbnb, renters aren't looking to quit their day jobs and become landlords full-time... they're just look to earn a substantial amount of income to offset their rent, mortgage, etc. So in this case, I would probably goal on # of renters that earn >$500 / month... and (in the first 1-5 years) try to grow this number by 10-20% MoM... and maybe by just 5% once you're in the mid-high tens of millions in yearly revenue. 2) At Kickstarter, the goal of the supply-side is to get their project successfully funded. They don't care if the project creator is "full-time"... they just want to make sure they meet their funding goal. This is why they talk about their 44% project success rate all the time - http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats 3) At Udemy, our instructors want a substantial amount of their income to be driven from their Udemy course earnings... so we look at how many instructors are earning >$2k / month.

Hi, I specialise in eCommerce strategy and marketing, helping eCommerce people make better decisions, and run more efficiently and effectively. The short answer is 'no'. Your target market isn't "subscription buyers" it's "cigar lovers". So unless there's a lot of subscription programs targeting the cigar lover, you're fine. However, if your market strategy is to go after people who like subscriptions - then I think you're not going to do so well! A cigar is a tough first sell! If you're coming at this from the "I love cigars" point of view first consider if Subscription is the best way to serve that customer base. If you're coming at this from the "I want a subscription business" point of view - then make sure you've researched cigars thoroughly before going down that road. Not least the legal restrictions on advertising - these differ from country to country, but it can be pretty hard to market tobacco online. Hope that helps. Chloe

I'd ask Rocco Baldassarre. He is the best online marketing consultant I've ever seen and can surely give you concrete advice. Said that, my advice would be a) your own e-commerce store so you can drive traffic to it without losing money on commissions b) learn from best selling products (you can see sales ranks of competing products if you register as an amazon affiliate marketer; it's free) and copy their structure, split test regularly Hope it helps!

Hi, Thanks for clarifying your business model. This helps me help you better. So, as part of strategy, I would suggest you to begin with global e-commerce giant, Amazon. Furthermore, I would suggest you to keep it exclusively on Amazon. You can tell your existing customers to purchase your products on amazon and give them a coupon which they can use to get a discount. Also ask for their reviews (there are multiple ways to do that). This helps you keep up the numbers that acts as a social proof on Amazon. People looking for the products you sell will find you product in the search results. Since you have taken care of the numbers (sales & reviews) Amazon will promote your product to the top of the search result and hence increase the sales. Meanwhile, I'd suggest you to create your own website and market it across all marketing channels like search engine, social media & email. This includes bringing in customers via blogging, content marketing, videos, social media posts and newsletter. Once you have a decent number of user base, you can then shift your focus from amazon to your own website. The reason why you should consider your own website, is that Amazon is only getting 30% of every sale it makes (which is also the main reason why you should build your own website), so Amazon will increase its margin by selling same products as their own and rank it atop. At the end of the day, you don't own the customers on amazon, or any platform for that matter. So in order to reach global customer base and increase profit margins, you should rely, invest & take very seriously on your own e-commerce website. You can do that using shopify or Woocommerce+Wordpress. This is a 10,000 feet overview how I would get started with e-commerce business & this is how I have helped many of my clients. If you need any help, feel free to book a call & I'll help you strategize in detail.