How long does it take to make money with e-commerce? There’s many different e-commerce businesses you can use to make money online. Whether you have a Shopify store, a drop shipping business or an affiliate business, your main focus will be on acquiring customers.
Your ability to do this will largely be responsible for how well your business goes and how long it takes to build. How you go about it will depend on the money you have already invested and have to invest. If you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on building a brand based website, you’ll have a lot more catching up to do than someone who’s only invested $80 on a Shopify store. So when you’re starting out, it’s wise to be careful with your spending. If you have money to invest in marketing, it may be more prudent to acquire the skills of a professional marketer since many new businesses spend a huge amount on their marketing to no avail.
Or, if you’re determined to become a “solo-preneur” at least get some training so you can follow the advice of the experts. How long it takes to start breaking even and running into profit will depend on a number of things. Generally speaking if you’re not at least breaking even within a year of being in business, you should try something different. That doesn’t mean quit, it just means try a different marketing method, product or approach.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-Commerce?
Your marketing method is key to making money with pretty much any business model you choose. So whatever business you decide on, you’ll need to promote it in order to make any sales at all. Depending on your situation, you may be in a position to run a daily marketing budget. The more you have to spend the faster you can build your business to be profitable. That doesn’t mean it will be profitable! Far from it.
Many new businesses go under because the owner has no experience of marketing and spends a tonne of marketing budget without earning a single customer. Initially then you’ll need to test and measure a marketing strategy until you find one which works for you. This costs money and so you need to be prudent with your marketing budget. Test with a small budget initially and only increase your marketing budget once you hot on a advert which works.
If you’re on a very low budget, you’ll need to work much harder to gain traction with an e-commerce business. Blogging, video blogging or any kind of content creation is a supremely slow strategy for marketing but it can and does work over time. But you’ll need to put the work in and keep putting it in. With blogging or vlogging, you can spend months or years creating enough content to get the required traction you need to build a business. (See blogging vs vlogging).
Making Money With E-Commerce: Save Time, Get Educated
Needless to say e-commerce is not for the faint of heart. If you’re not prepared to take some risks with your time and/or capital, it’s probably not for you! One of the main problems new e-commerce growth is distraction. Owners jump around from one “shiny object” to another, forever looking for the magic pill which will take their business to a new level. But there’s so many platforms you can advertise on that this is a bad strategy. Instead, focus on a single strategy you can get very good at over time.
Once you have your e-commerce store or affiliate website set up, you need to focus on a marketing method which drives traffic to that store. This should be carefully understood so as not to waste time or money.
Learn about your customer avatar so you understand the pains and problems of your ideal customer. When you understand your customer better than they understand themselves, you’re in a much better position to clearly communicate to their needs. Unless you do this you can easily fall into the trap of trying to sell to everyone; and not everyone is interested in your e-commerce store! You can waste a huge amount of time trying to bring the wrong customers to a store. Learning about your target market will save you heaps of time.
Your digital marketing education is the “bedrock” from which you can build a sustainable and profitable online business. Without it, it’s very likely your e-commerce business will fail!
Within A Year You Should Be At Break Even
Within a year of business you should be at break even, if not in profit. If you’re not, you’re doing something wrong and should get help and/or change direction. Of course this is different if you can can only give a few hours a week to your business. Or, perhaps you’re taking the much longer route of blogging or building content? Or perhaps you only have a tiny budget, which means it will take much longer too.
Whatever your strategy you should become a master of it.
Blogging can be a waste of time if you’re not doing it right. Paid ads can be the same if you don’t know what you’re doing too. There’s just no guarantees with an online business and the potential high reward or e-commerce means high risk too!
If you’re using paid marketing to drive traffic to your e-commerce you can be in profit within a few months with a large enough budget. But if you’re a content marketing, it will take much longer – years. Blogging as a strategy is a slow one but ultimately it can give you a passive income if you go about it right and create enough content. But will you be able to stick at your strategy for that long? Ideally choose a strategy which suits your personality and budget. But if you’re not prepared to keep creating content for at least a year, blogging probably isn’t for you!
Summary
How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-commerce? Everyone’s experience is different when it comes to building an online business. For some, it’s a few months and for others it’s years. Your marketing budget and method is probably the biggest factor at play when you want a timescale for success online. Those who achieve it more quickly tend to use paid marketing which is much faster and more scalable. But if you’re on a tight budget and need traffic for free, expect a much longer journey.
Think about your business model and how you attract customers. To get more business means getting your marketing message in front of more of the right kinds of people. Paid marketing is the fastest way to do this but there are other ways too. They just tend to be much slower and far less scalable.
See also fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing.