#245 Is Ecommerce Still Worth Starting in 2026?

Hey guys, so is e-commerce still worth it? That's the big question for today. And is it dead?

Is e-commerce dead?

I know that this is a question a lot of people I've been seeing ask online, especially in 2026 due to tariffs and changes and world economic powers and war and other fears and platform changes. And honestly, I think most of the answers I'm seeing are wrong because I think they're coming from extremes. So e-commerce really isn't dead, but it is the version most people are trying to build in 2026 that doesn't work anymore. What versions are those? Those are the easy money versions of 2016 and earlier, the ones I still see people talking about all the time. They're copy a product and throw it up on Shopify kind of stuff, run a few ads and hope it works. Or they use basic Amazon search tools like RumbleShout and Helios 10. Yes, I'm making up those names. They're actual products, but they're outdated and they're getting everybody to basically find the same $27 product that's not profitable, ending up in saturation and low profit opportunities or no profit opportunities. And those models are outdated, guys. You've seen the ads, right? The dropshipping ads where the gurus are like, hey, make $50,000 last month, right? When in actuality, that person's $50,000 came after 18 months after getting their product online. Did they hit their first $50,000? It's very misleading. And, you know, that might be the right timeframe for that product to actually hit $50,000 a month. And that's actually not terrible if you can get that done, as long as it's profitable. But the flip side is that you're hearing the warnings and founders are saying like things, you know, don't get into e-commerce.

It's oversaturated. It's expensive.

It's not 2020 anymore. You'll fail in 6 months like most people fail. So it's actually true in between those extremes. Let's get into the middle, right? I always want to keep it real. So let's figure out what we know that is going on. And since I've been in e-commerce since 2012, let me help to try to put some context around this because I build brands. I've helped brands scale to $15 to $20 million a year or more. I've watched big brands fail. I've watched mid-sized brands fail in those processes.

I've watched startups fail, of course.

And there's a lot of things going on in the industry right now that we need to talk about. So in this video, I want to pack exactly what's working right now, what's not working. Okay. And the specific conditions that you need to be in place before you spend a single dollar on your store, your product, or your brand. So because e-commerce is such a huge opportunity and it can become a real business in 2026, but only if you follow a model that gets you through all of that fluff. And let's talk about that, what that actually means, because there is a market reality behind all of this, like the numbers. What are the numbers actually talking about? In the reality of the market. So let's start with the data. Fact-check me, guys, go ahead. Global commerce on track to hit $6.88 trillion in 2026. That's trillion with a T. Doesn't sound like any losses happening to me in that space. Online shopping making up 21% of all retail sales worldwide, and that number keeps climbing every year. Now, more than 3 billion people have made an online purchase in the last year. You're probably one of them. And that's not a shrinking market. That's one of the biggest and largest and fastest growing commercial opportunities literally in human history. And no, the answer is e-commerce is not dying. The pie is bigger than it ever has been, but a bigger pie doesn't automatically mean you get a bigger slice of it. So let's stay within the realities of this. And let's stay to the point where in this section, why are beginners getting confused right now with so much information online? And the reason that so many people are questioning it and it's worth it is because of the playbook that they learned in 2017 to 2021, and it's no longer effective. Effective. The last 6 years have been dramatically different, both online and offline in our world, geopolitical and everything. And that playbook looked like this. It was a cheap product on AliExpress, run a few Facebook ads, throw it up on Amazon, maybe make 3 times the profit. And some people did very well for the few years that that was an opportunity, but that window closed. It closed in 2020, 2021. Ad costs have gone up, consumer expectations have changed. Competition has obviously entered the market during that period of time, and people are still running a model that are grinding for margins and barely justifying the effort, almost turning what they hoped was a business into a job. And that's even wholesale, you know, wholesale retail arbitrage and all of those models, which just gets you running like a hamster on a treadmill. You don't have a market problem. You got a model problem. So let's talk about that, right? People get those 2 things confused. Understanding the difference is the first thing that separates people from who, you know, those who build the real e-commerce businesses and from people who are just burning money on their stores. So the things you need to know before you start, guys, is e-commerce is changing drastically every year. And here's the 3 things you need to realize before spending any time on it. The first 3 things, okay? Consumers got smarter. All right. In 2026, almost half of all consumer digital dollars now describe themselves as value seekers. Consumers are getting more deliberate with their purchases, and it makes sense that when you're looking at the world, the tariffs are up, energy costs are up, inflation has hit in some impacts, taxes are, you know, changing, gas prices are changing, and a lot of people have been hitting, you know, hit hard with that. But buyers are more careful now too, right? They have more information. They're spending more time figuring out where their money goes, and that's probably not gonna be changing anytime soon. So what does it mean for you? It means the customer you're selling to in 2026 is doing their homework. They compare, they research, they have AI now. They read reviews. They can tell the difference between a real product and something someone found on Alibaba and just slapped a logo on it and never took time to actually develop the product. Which means if you're selling something that 40 other sellers are also selling, you don't have a business, you have a commodity. And commodities get comp— you know, completed and competed down to zero. But there's a way to do that process with the way the platforms are changing to validate the market before you do the product launch. So let's get into that in a minute, but Platforms have changed. And that's the second thing I want you to understand. Here's a number that you should go by in 2026. Roughly 87% of e-commerce revenue now runs through marketplaces. That's Amazon, Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, and others, not just through a Shopify store or an online website. So that's big. Platforms have moved extreme and extremely fast. Okay. So if you're building a standalone store and no marketplace presence, you're fighting for 13% of the market and spending a lot more time to acquire a customer than you ever have. So this is the thing, shop, you know, shop operators, Amazon operators, smart operators in 2026 are meeting customers where they already are, not just by finding them through a website. It's called the halo effect. You're going to hear me talk about that a lot more, right? We have to consider all channels as one part of an e-commerce company, not just individual channels as a business. Having an individual channel does not necessarily make you a real business. I know that's going to argue, some people are going to argue in the comments about that, but feel free to do it. AI changed the cost. This is number 3 of entry in both directions. What do I mean by that? It's good news on the first side, which means AI tools have made it dramatically cheaper to enter the market, copy a product, build the email sequences, the creatives, the listing, the Amazon listing images, the copy, even handle the customer service. It's all faster and more affordable than it was just 3 years ago. A solo operator today can do more than an entire team. In fact, I have 16 brands. And only 4 operators who are able to all manage them at scale. So the bad news, that's true for everyone. So the baseline level of execution has gone up and a mediocre store that would've survived in 2020 doesn't make it in 2026 because your competitors have the same tools and the good ones are using them better than you. So here's the part that most people aren't talking about yet, and this is gonna go and change a little bit more over the time. I'd say the next 2 to 3 years or so. Don't quote me on that because it'll change fast and it's going to change a lot of things that are on this list. And that's AI agents. All right. They're starting to change how people shop, not just how brands operate. And buyers are finding and purchasing products across them. And we've already seen AI assistants browsing, comparing, recommending products on behalf of the users and even completing the purchase. So people are really starting to use AI to do the research for them. I don't see that slowing down at all. What does that mean for your brand? If you have weak product data, no reviews, no clear positioning, an AI agent isn't going to surface for you. It's going to surface the brand that has all of those things already locked in. It's going to be harder for you to be found. Okay. That means brands are winning in the next wave of e-commerce. They aren't just optimizing for human buyers. They're building for machinery. And that's the thing I want you to understand. That opportunity didn't disappear. It just means the skill floor went up and it's still going to continue to rise. So when does it work? All right. So when does e-commerce actually work in 2026? Not as a philosophical question, specifically, what do the businesses that are winning have in common? In my experience, working across dozens of brands, it comes down to 5 things. You have real margins, not 20%, not 30%. If you're selling a physical product, you need to be looking at 50% gross margin minimum to survive paid acquisition, returns, platform fees, and fulfillment. And if that math doesn't work before you spend a dollar on ads, it won't work After, which means for us on Amazon, for example, on that platform, no products less than $12 in net profit per unit. Just don't go there. Okay. If you're solving a product problem and for a specific reason, that means the brands that are growing in 2026 are not trying to be everything to everyone. They're going narrow and deep. A product for a left-handed woodworker, a supplement line for a postpartum woman, a skincare brand for men over 40. Specificity is what's going to allow you to charge a premium and build loyalty. Okay. So you understand your customer acquisition before your cost of scale. Most brands fail because their product isn't bad. It's just because they never modeled what was actually going to cost to acquire that customer at scale, customer advertising costs, all right, or customer acquisition costs. They hit their first $10,000 a month, pour money into ads and discover their profitable unit economics at $5K in revenue don't hold at $50,000. in revenue. Very important you understand that. Everybody wants to scale, but they forget that there are problems when you scale with the wrong acquisition costs. So if you have a reason for customers to come back, one-time buyers are expensive. You must have a reason for them to come back. Repeat buyers are going through businesses that actually make money because they have repeat purchases. They actually track the repeat purchases and they look at that lifetime value as a customer as a core metric. of their relationship strategy with their customer, which then in turn becomes their retention strategy. So if you're on a treadmill that gets faster and more expensive every month, it's probably because you're not getting a lot of repeat customers. You're building a brand, not just a store. Okay. A logo and a color palette are not a brand. A brand is a reason someone chooses you over a cheaper alternative. It's a point of view. It's a customer relationship. And stores can become commoditized and brands will get loyal customers. All right. So before you launch anything, ask yourself the 3 questions. Can I explain in one sentence who this is for and why'd they choose me over Amazon or TikTok Shop or Shopify, et cetera? Do my margins actually work at realistic volume with realistic ad spend? And what brings someone back to buy a second time? If you can't answer all of those in clarity, You don't have a business yet. You have an idea and that's fine, but don't spend money on ads until you can answer that business question first. So who should not start e-commerce? Okay. For those of you paying attention, I'm gonna direct this to you here because I think you deserve a straight answer more than a motivational speech. E-commerce is probably not the right move for you right now if you're expecting to make significant money in the next 90 days with minimal investment. The timeline exists, but it is exceptional, not the rule. And chasing it now will have people end up in credit card debt with a garage full of unsold inventory. If you don't have a product advantage, meaning if you're planning to source the exact same product as 200 other sellers and just run ads to it, you're not going to be building a business. You're renting market share that someone else can take the movement over and the momentum when they outbid you. Use it as a market test opportunity, but then consider the brand building and product launching the real activity of the market of that product. Once you've done a test, testing is different than expectation of that product winning a home run and turning out to be a $50,000 a month product. Those are two very different things. If you're not willing to learn the economics or unit economics, this is going to be difficult for you. Okay. E-commerce is a numbers game. Contribution margin, LTV, CAC, CAC, and ROAS, return on advertising spend. They aren't just jargons. Okay. You also need to learn the word tacos, tacos. Total advertising cost of sale, important metrics, more important than advertising costs of sale on Amazon. You need to go after those gauges on the dashboard, but you also need to know what metrics are the most important to move the needle at net profit and not just follow the revenue vanity metrics that so many people talk about. If you're making $50,000 a month, but you're spending $55,000 a month, that's not really sexy, is it? If you're making $50,000 and only netting $5,000, that might be okay for you, but I bet you could do a lot better than that. So you need to be willing to learn how to run the business, the fundamentals of the business, or you'll just crash an opportunity and not even realize what you've done wrong. We call that experience, and it's not always bad, but there are ways to avoid some very terrible experience while learning to do things imperfectly. So none of this means don't do it. Just be clear. It means go in with your eyes wide open. The people who succeed in e-commerce in 2026 are going to be the ones who treat it like a real business from day one, not a side hustle or a hobby business, and certainly Not like a lottery ticket. So guys, the verdict is e-commerce still worth starting in 2026? Yes, but with the right model, the right margins, and the right business approach. Okay, learning the business first and then approaching it to the brand and then down to the product level is where you get the most enormous opportunity in a growing market that is going to be huge. Okay, huge. The tools available for small brands today are better than what enterprise companies had 5 years ago. And consumer behavior has permanently shifted towards online purchasing. That's just not going to be reversing. That's going to be switching. Bank of America and Forrester Research predict the significant change between retail and online is going to be shifting as fast as 2030 to 2040. But the people willing to do this are not the ones who launch a store or a business or even an Amazon and hope For the best. They're the ones who understood the numbers before they spent a dollar. They're the ones who built a specific customer objection to a specific problem, who treated their business like a business from day one. The opportunity then becomes real. The bar is higher, and that's actually a good thing because it means that people who do the work and get the fundamentals right have a genuine advantage over those who do not. And if that's the kind of e-commerce business you wanna build, then you're in the right place. In this channel, I'm gonna walk you through all of that. There's a bunch of videos in here, podcasts and other things, but this particular series, as you're watching video number 1, is what I want you to pay attention to as we continue discussing this over this next part of the series. There's gonna be about 8 parts where I'm gonna unbreak this, and it's gonna teach you a lot about the fundamentals and growth of business. Now that we've spoken about the opportunity, you'll catch that on the next video. But before I go, if you're serious about building a real e-commerce business, guys, that actually works and isn't another YouTube video where you're trying to get from the YouTube University everything possible to learn as much experience as those have already walked it multiple times, then you need to get clear on the specific product idea and brand and put the fundamentals in place. And it's the speed to market that comes through experience right now in this ever-changing market of AI and this ever-growing competitive market of the physical product world from Amazon to TikTok Shop to Shopify. And that's exactly why I keep a no-pressure discovery call calendar available in the link below. I look at the model of your interest. Okay. I look at your current models. You're already selling your margins, your market, even your plan, tell you exactly what's working and what isn't and what needs to change before you spend serious money. There's a link in the description to book that no-pressure call with me. You will speak to me because what I do is an invite-only thing called Voltage Business Builders. It is a small group that has been working for quite a long time. through very large movements in the business and the growth and what of the business itself to an exit. And what we do is focus on the time, energy, attention, and money required to actually build a 7 and 8 figure brand and turn it into a going concern that has an exit opportunity that could be a generational and life-changing opportunity. If you're a beginner and the time, energy, attention, and money are not near you, this might not be the best model for you. So that's something I want to keep very clear in transparency. Your opportunities and your next steps will be at the link below if it's something that you're of interest, or keep watching the video series until you feel confident that it's something you might want to do. And remember, as always, if you found this video useful, tap that subscribe button or that like button with a purpose-driven confidence. The rest of the series is going to go over exactly what you need to know to build a profitable e-commerce business from the ground up. And I hope that you'll come along with me on this ride. To get notifications that the next video will be released. Remember to subscribe, like, comment, or share this video so you get notifications. Subscribing would be the preferential way to get the updates when the next video is released. And I'm going to walk you through a journey and a session that will see you come to the conclusion, I hope, of understanding the opportunity that is e-commerce and understanding the business model that we have in place that will grow and go all the way through to an exit. I'll see you all on the next update.

Let me ask you this. If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one? To execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand. Plus, how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us. If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 1-417-413-4209. 413-4209, and I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click get started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders podcast.