E-Commerce Specialist - Digital Marketing & Web Design & Development. If you need my expertise let me know.

The quickest path to cash is almost always consulting. Be very specific about what it is you can offer. Don't just offer "business consulting". Find a niche and serve it. Reach out to your network, including friends and family and ask if they need or know of anyone who might want to hear about what your consulting has to offer. That will be way faster than trying to go at it from scratch or cold calling. If you call 100 people in your network this week, you will have a consulting gig within 3 weeks. Good luck, and let me know if you'd like advice on entering a digital marketing/lead generation consulting niche. I've grown from zero to $8,000 of monthly recurring payments in the last 40 days! Dave

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.

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

This really depends on the type of e-commerce platform and the platform on which it is built. For my e-commerce clients, with less than 1,000 products, the best business plan reference book would be The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. However, you must first understand the triggers you would need to captivate and persuade your audience to purchase. For that, I would recommend Fascinate by Sally Hogshead. When you start to get into the larger e-commerce retail websites, you run into more dynamic data and database strategies to ensure that your website runs smoothly and can be indexed by the search engines properly. The book recommendation would depend on what platform your website is built. However, Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug would be a good starting point as the business plan would be contingent on the flow of the website and customer purchase power. If I can further help you in any way, contact me. I'm always here to help.

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.