How I started my ecommerce side income

Some of the readers have been asking me to share how I started my ecommerce side income after I shared that it my previous post on how I'm getting $1500 per month from my side income. So in this post, I will share how my little ecommerce side hustle actually started.

My ecommerce journey begin with helping my friend setting up his ecommerce store on Lazada and Shopee. My friend was already selling his product in a physical store and just before Covid hits Singapore in late 2019, he decided that he wanted to extend his reach online. He was casually mentioning about paying someone to help him with it and I told him why not I help him for free. For me I just wanted to understand how the platforms work so I'm ok with helping him for free. He was cool with it but he insisted on paying us a commission on any sales made if any.

On hind sight, it was a good decision for my friend to move online because his physical store had to close due to the Covid lock down mid-2020. His ecommerce stores helped to extend his reach during the lock down period to make some sales. Eventually, his online store did starts to make sales especially during the lock down period and I got a small cut on those sales which I really appreciated.

After a few months of managing his online stores and equipped with some knowledge on how Lazada and Shopee works, it gave me the confidence to start my own Lazada and Shopee stores with another friend of mine. The first thing we did is to register for an account with Lazada and Shopee. It's free, so if you are keen, no harm registering for an account to just explore how it works.

Next is to determine what to sell. For us, we went on AliExpress to see what are the top sellers in the various categories to get some ideas. We also got products ideas from what we actually use and needed ourselves. With those products in mind, we did some research on the various online ecommerce platforms to see what they are selling for and how many are being sold per month. After that we will shortlist some products that has a large numbers of sales per month and at a price that we feel that we ourselves will pay. Eventually we found 2 to 3 products that meets our criteria and went on to Alibaba to source for them at a lower wholesale price. Fortunately after sometime, we are able to find producers that can gives us a reasonable profit margin and low enough Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) and so with the commissions I got from helping my friend, we brought in those products and listed them on Lazada and Shopee.

Well I guess we are lucky to start our store during the Covid period because we made some sales pretty soon after we listed the products. It wasn't a lot of sales but since we totally didn't expect to get any so soon, we were happy to be even making 1 sales. Of course not all the products we brought in was selling. Some wasn't selling at all and we had to write them off. This was definitely not an easy journey. There was a lot of sourcing and negotiating with supplier for lower prices and MOQ. A lot of trial and error of pricing the product and bringing in products only to find out that they cannot sell. Now, we are fortunate enough to have a couple of products that are selling on both platforms to give us some side income. We are also re-investing these profit to try new products and increase the range of products that we can sell to hopefully push up revenue.

Through the 1 year plus journey, I would say that you can read all about ecommerce on blogs and watch tonnes of YouTube videos on ecommerce (which I did by the way) but until you really take action and experience it for yourself, you don't really know what it is like. It is really all about taking that first step to start and after that keep trying, keep making mistakes and keep learning from them. If you persevere long and hard enough, you are bound to see results. We are also still learning now and making mistakes along the way. Hopefully all these small little steps taken consistently over time will eventually lead us to success.

As always, thanks for reading and do support me on my referral page. Stay Safe and Happy Hustling!