Lesson 3 | Choosing Products | Create Your Online Store | Wix eCommerce

Hi, I'm Melissa, head of Ecom Content. Now that you've gotten done with your business plan, let's talk about how to find products to sell for your online store. There are many ways that you can do it, whether you're choosing your own products that you have, or dropshipping, or going with a print on demand service. So in this lesson, we'll talk about how to source products with dropshipping, how to create your own products with print on demand services, as well as how to determine your pricing and revenue. First off, it's really easy. If you have your own products, you just upload them to your product catalog and that's basically it. WIX has a CSV file that you can import your entire product catalog directly to the WIX store's back office. Alternatively, if you want to go with a drop shipping service, we have an integration with Modalist so you can source from millions of high quality products from reliable suppliers. Dropshipping is a great choice if you want to expand your product offerings. So for example, say you have a gym, but now you want to start selling weights and other products to go along with it. Dropshipping is a great option for you. Dropshipping is also great for those who don't want to manage or have the hassle of an inventory. So how does drop shipping work? Basically, you find products to sell from reliable wholesalers, you post the products on your WIX store's site, and then when a customer comes to your site, they choose the order, they choose the item that they want, and then they check out on your site. Then you forward that order to your supplier and then your supplier basically fulfills your order and you get to keep the profit. Dropshipping is great for those who don't really want to sell or manufacture their products. It's also good for those who want to expand their product offering or say that they have a service business like a gym, and then you want to sell weights and towels or other types of products related to your business. Dropshipping is a great way that you can then expand your product offering. What's great about dropshipping is you don't have the hassle of inventory or managing your shipping and fulfillment. Also, you have complete control over your price markups. So what does that mean? Is you pay your supplier the wholesale price and your customers are paying you the retail price, so you get to pocket the profits. Also, many of these suppliers let you ship white labels. So basically your packages will go to your customers with your own businesses, branding and everything. Your Customers never know that there's this third middleman involved. Some cons to dropshipping is it does require a lot of marketing efforts. So you really need to make sure that your business is going out there and you're staying relevant to your customers and your target audience. Also, there's a lot of competition because a lot of other dropshippers may be choosing the products that you're choosing. So you need to make sure to really choose a niche audience so that you, you're really targeting a very specific audience and their needs with your products. With wix, we have an integration with Modalist, which is our drop shipping supplier. So with them you just add it to your site and you have access to over 1 million high quality products from reliable sellers across the world. Many of the Modalist suppliers even offer white label shipping like I said before, which means that your products will get shipped directly to your customers. So with your own branding. So now I'm going to show you how to add Modalist to your online store. From the dashboard you're going to click Store products and then under Store products you'll see find products to sell and then you'll see Modalist and then you're going to click Open app. This will add the Modalist app and take you through the connection process of how to add it and connect it to your online store. Another way that you can sell products with WIX is with Print on Demand. With Print on Demand services, they'll actually print or embroider your design your logo on whatever products you choose and then ship and fulfill these orders directly to your customers. So Print on Demand is considered a form of dropshipping because the supplier, or in this case the Print on demand service provider takes care of the shipping, the ordering, the fulfillment, all on their end. So basically all you're doing is putting in the order with the Print on Demand service and they are fulfilling the orders on your behalf and sending it directly to your customers. Print on Demand is a great option for say artists or designers. Or maybe you have an event coming up or a concert, you're a band. It's good to put your brand's name or your event's name and then promote it across the board. You can sell it at your event and have other customers promoting you and your business. With Print on Demand there are great pros and limited cons. Pros, it's really good if you want to have your own custom products that look professional with your own branding, your own designs, your own logo, they're really great for artists and designers, bands, events, what have you. Also, what's great about Print on Demand is you don't have to worry about shipping, inventory, fulfillment. That's all handled for you by the Print on Demand supply. And you get to also just like dropshipping, you can control the price markups for your products. The cons for Print on Demand is you do need some kind of design background. It would really help at least. But many of the Print on Demand services that we have, you can also create the product in their mockup generators. You can see what it's going to look like before you actually print your products. With wix, you have two Print on Demand service options that you can go with. You can go with either Printify or or Printful. With Printful and Printify, you can choose over 200 products to customize and make your own. Lots of times they offer the printing option as well as embroidery as an option. It depends on the product that you actually want to work with. And like I said before, if you're not an artist or maybe not as design savvy, these services have an online mockup generator where you can then use their own clipart images or upload your own files to then make something your own. So let me show you how you can add Printful or Printify to your WIX online store. From the WIX dashboard, you're going to click Store Products and under the Store Products menu you're going to click Find Products to Sell and then you'll see Printful right there. And then you'll click Open App and just start going through the flow to add Printful to your site. So let's talk about pricing. Pricing is important because it's how you make your profit with your business and how you control the profit margins for your business. With Modalist Printful and Printify, you can set your own pricing rules on their side of the app and control the percentage of your price markups. But let's just go into some theory for how to do your own product pricing. There are several ways that you can approach this. The first theory that we're going to talk about is cost plus pricing. Basically, this is the most simplest way that you can do your pricing is you take the cost of the product, whatever price you paid wholesale, plus the market percent, whatever you decide your markup percentage is, and that's the price that you're going to charge your customers. Another approach that you can take is market oriented pricing, which takes the product's cost plus other factors such as additional costs that you may have to account for the quality of the product or situations or contexts that have to do with your customer. So with this approach, there are three ways that you can take it. You can either price it above the market. In this case, you want to position your product as something that is more high quality or high level. Another approach is you can copy the market. This is a great way for you to stay competitive. You're right on par with all your other market competition. The third approach you can take is pricing it below market. So the only disadvantage with this is maybe it makes your product seem a little bit lesser quality than your competitors offering the same product. Another approach you can take is dynamic or demand pricing, where you're basically very flexible with the way that you approach your product's price. And this is going to fluctuate depending on the market. So if there's a high demand for this product, maybe you'll raise the product's price because a lot of people want it, so they're willing to pay for it. Whereas if there's an influx of this product and it's saturating the market, then you might want to lower the price so so that you have a good deal. Another approach you can take is penetration pricing, which basically is you're setting your product at the lowest price to be very, very competitive. This is really good if you want to enter the market. And another approach is psychological pricing, where basically it's pretty simple, like you're charging $99 instead of $100 or $199 instead of 2. And then lastly, you can also do something called Bundlink, where you can kind of lump together related products that go together and one random price. So, for example, lots of times Xbox, they'll bundle together an extra controller, some games, maybe a rumble pack or something, and then you bundle it together and sell it at a slightly cheaper price than if someone bought all the items separately. So now that you have a few ideas of how you want to approach pricing your products, let's go into actually planning your finances for your business. So financial planning for your business basically is balancing your expenses with your projected revenue. When we're talking about expenses, we're talking about fixed costs as well as variable costs. Fixed costs are costs that don't change. They're going to be pretty much the same throughout your business. Variable costs are costs that'll change and fluctuate that you can't really control. So with fixed costs, we're talking about rent and utility. If you have a brick and mortar store, maybe legal bills or salaries if you have a team. Variable costs can include stuff such as your cost of your goods, which can fluctuate depending on the market. Manufacturing costs if you are actually making your own products, packaging, shipping costs, labor costs, customer service or different type of marketing campaigns that you may do throughout the year. When you're forecasting revenue for your business, you need to kind of approach it with a range. So think of like the conservative case how much you're expected to earn, as well as an aggressive case how much you're expected to earn. Things that you want to consider are price point, how you're pricing your product, the marketing channels that you're going to use, and how much it costs to advertise on these channels the sales staff if you're projected to grow throughout the year, or if you're going to have to cut back and if you're going to be offering new products or services, there are many other things to consider when it comes to planning the finances for your business. So download our template to help you really organize your thoughts and jot down your key projected revenue as well as your key expenses. Now that you have a better understanding of how to source products as well as a foundation of pricing strategies, check out our next video on how to create a brand identity that your customers will really love.