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Original Post Here - First Part Here - First and foremost: thank you all for your kind support in the past two posts... not only the responses, but the dozen+ messages. Some of you just wrote to say you're interested, some even offered to help out. I'm grateful and hope you all keep along with me on the journey - rain or shine.TL;DR from the past: I'm hoping to make the step-up to stop thinking and start doing. I'm going to start a dropshipping e-commerce website with a large number of items & a (hopefully) unique value proposition.Most importantly: I'm not now, nor plan to, sell anything or benefit from this directly by any means. I won't be posting my website, linking to my blog, or offering a course at end (if I start making money). The reason for these posts will be: to gather my thoughts into words, to regurgitate what I'm learning (teaching is the best way to learn new concepts, etc etc) and most importantly to get input from you guys. I'm hoping people may learn from what I do, mistakes I make, things I read/summarize, etc. and that I can learn from your guys' experience.1 - Where We Are NowThe Website: is more or less finished. I have about 20 products left to finalize (choosing pictures, editing description, etc.) & finalizing some of the categories.The logo: I took a lot of your guys' thoughts from the last post and I decided on not spending much money or time on a freelancer. Instead, I DIYed my first logo. It's not great, and it's not going to be my everlasting logo but I think it's good enough for now. A simple picture with text - nothing fancy. When I start turning a profit, I will spend a good amount of money on a nice sleek logo.. but for now, I just want to get going. A special shoutout to all of you guys who took the time to offer your services and time, as well as your advice. Some of you guys that offered your help in design may hear from me in the future :)The website/homepage: Here are some examples to show you what the pages will look like: Homepage 1 Homepage 2 Homepage 3 Homepage 4 As mentioned, there will be lots of adjusting of the categories & information as we go. The categories in particiular will be slimmed down a little as I feel there are maybe too many options at the moment.The products: we have 245 products on the website. As mentioned in previous posts, these have all been vetted for high selling & high rated items/vendors so as to avoid problems as much as possible. Some items only have "details" from the vendor, and some have a few sentences of SEO information from me. At the moment it's about 50 of those done with verbage and the rest with just details. I started with planning on putting verbage on them all, but it was taking too long so I will be launching with just vendor details and adding those individual SEO keywords & descriptions as we go. For example, here are two items: Item 1 Item 2. For your reference, here is the aliexpress link for the first item: Elephant Tapestry take a look at the seller rating, the description, the feedback, etc.The Legal Stuff: This is the major sticking point before I'm ready to launch. A lot of you guys mentioned that my idea of using an LLC & a DBA was overkill and I looked into it further. I decided on bypassing the LLC for now, and just starting as a sole prop w/ a business bank account & credit card and using a DBA. When/if we start making some money, we can move to an LLC (not a single-member one though because it's pretty useless, as far as I've read). I decided against an LLC due to the tax, record keeping, etc. & the fact that in my state the fees for an LLC are about $500 minimum.If anyone has input on this, i'd GREATLY appreciate it.My remainder for this:Decide on a name for DBA & register DBARegister for EINRegister for sales tax in my stateUse DBA to get a PO boxGet bank account & credit creditThings I need to look into:Charging for sales tax -> as far as I've seen I only have to charge sales tax for people who order in my state. I need to make sure it's an origin sales tax state (aka I charge MY rate, no matter where the customer is).Charging for duties/tax? I am planning on starting with the US only as to avoid these problems, but eventually when I go worldwide I will need to figure all this out. Shit is confusing, guys. How the hell do people do al lthis2 - Marketing PlanFirst off: I made the social media accounts. I don't have much going on, but I did focus on using Instagress at the beginning just to get some stream going. All my 10 followers on Instagram say hello ;) As we ramp up with more pictures, I plan to use Instagram the most so that's what I'm worrying about. Later, we can get into Facebook & Twitter. Lastly will be Pinterest, simply for the reason that I've NEVER used it before and it will have the largest learning curve.Instead of explaining all of it (Adwords, facebook ads, bing, whatever.) I'll go into a few avenues that I'm in particular looking forward to:Instagram Influencers: This is the one I'm looking most forward to. I had a fellow redditer reach out (/u/saintsintosea) offering to help me with this with his company Mightyscout. I hope that sounded like a paid advertisement because it felt like it, but I really appreciate the help & offer to work with me on the cheap to help us launch & get started. Give a little get a little, ya know. With sites like this (I know there are a few out there that I plan to look into), as well as my own personal reach-out to 'social media influencers' (that sounds so weird to write) I can get some cheap traffic. My ideas:1) Offer a set amount of $$ for a link/shout-out. This is the most common AFAIK, and if doing this a few times provides a high return, I'll keep going.2) Offer the social media account a % of items bought with a discount code. I know this is super popular in the fitness industry, and I can see why. Offer a user the chance to give something to their followers, and only pay them from the profits. Win-win.3) Make a customized collection for the social media user. For some of the trendy accounts that would LOVE to say "I'm so important that this website featured me" is enough, and I hope to use that as a way of getting free advertising. Maybe throw in a lower amount of % of the profits if I find it difficult to get people to agree for free.4) Offer people coupons for tagging their friends. "If you tag your friend, we'll send you BOTH a 20% off discount" or something.5) Allow users to make wishlists and share. This would encourage people to make wishlists and send it off to their followers (maybe requiring a little $$ like number one) and make it seem less of a paid advertisement. A user I follow sometimes does this in a really humorous way (she posts a link to her wishlist and says something like "boy wouldn't you HATE IT if I used my followers to link to a wishlist like www.xxxxxxxx.com and asked them to buy me stuff. Wouldn't that just be such a sell-out move" but, ya know, with her humor. Followers like it because it's part of her shtick.Facebook Video Ads: I've heard/read that this is probably the most undervalued marketing tool right now. I can definitely see the value of it, and so I plan to make a video of some of the products and throw together an ad campaign. This is probably something I'll have to hire a freelancer to do. Any advice would be appreciated.3 - What's NextSo, we have the website almost ready to launch. I'm thinking all the legal paperwork (DBA, EIN, PO Box, etc.) will take about a week - so I hope to launch in around a week or so. I'm looking forward to it. However.... as some of you mentioned, and as I was looking into, Chinese New Year starts soon. For those who don't know, it's a holiday where Chinese factories are off for about a week, and lots of people are off for anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks. I've looked into and while lots of manufacturers still take orders, their processing time & shipping time is greatly slowed. For this reason, I will launch as normal, explain my shipping time in bold, and see what happens. If we get sales, I'll feel comfortable that they're OK with the shipping times and I'm not fooling anyone. I expect there to be a large amount of errors, returns, refunds, etc. in the first few ~100 orders anyways so this will be par for the course. We'll know that things will only get easier from here on!My next update will read: "website launched, lets look at the traffic"4 - FinancialsRevenue - $0Next post will have expenses to date since not much has changed from last time. Including paperwork fees, ad fees, etc.P.S. I will respond to posts & messages as fast as I can, but please be patient. Thanks. Thanks for your kind words, thanks for your help, and thanks for your love.

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