How to start an e-commerce store that doesn’t dropship

Might be worth staying that this is an AD you’ve built the store to advertise Hubba wholesale service which you’re working for as “growth”. You didn’t start a store to start a store. You started it to market Hubba.

Congrats on your launch and success, and thanks so much for sharing a lot of useful info, apps, and stats! Appreciate it.

I'm about to launch my 1st Shopify store in a very niche market. Some questions for you in that context...

1. When you came up with the idea for selling your products -- and it looks like you invested about 8K in initial inventory -- did you do any kind of research to see if there might be a need and it would take off, or did you go with "gut feeling" ?

2. How many days from the site going live did you make your 1st, 10th and 50th sale?

3. Did you spend any time at all "evaluating competitors" / existing ecommerce sites that sell your product(s) or things close to your product(s)?

4. Did you do any pre-launch marketing either offline (by way of flyers) or online (by way of ads) before the day the site went live?

5. Did you use any copy editor or stock images for your products, or did you do both copy and images (photos) of the products on your own?

6. How important is it to have a supporting blog / news section? Do you do it to drive traffic?

7. Any "hacks" you can share to acquire new customers and retain existing customers? What worked for you, what didn't?

Thanks again!

EDIT: Needed to see this in your conclusion.

> On Instagram, you will see stories of millionaire dropshippers and other lies.

>> Shopify is the best

It depends on the size of your store. Once you get to a certain size (5-6M) it makes sense to build your own that matches your company’s internal business processes.

Shopify is also very US centric and most of the channels don’t work outside the US. Eg eBay, Amazon, Twitter etc.

Happy to answer any Qs. Retail is def more fun than dropshipping :)

Do you have a open a LLC for it? If so, just one member? Did you get the EIN from IRS? Sales tax?

Are you only accepting buyers with legitimate business licenses? The sign up page seems to allude to that.can I register with my gmail address?

Could you please describe how and why you use Hubba when you're not able to buy there? Asking from Germany where I couldn't buy there, neither.