Unrealistic Online Business Pitch

Not sure if you seen it, but recently I have seen a ton of ads by a quick talking guy on YouTube trying to convince the viewer that they can hop right in and start their own online business very easily.

His idea is that you go to Walmart and buy something for $10 and then turn around and sell it online in your store for $30. He recommends buying a Shopify website to do this on.

He’s very convinced that this is an easy thing to do and that you’ll have sales right away. He pulls up examples of people have gone through his course who are supposedly getting sales within the next several days after the class.

Let me explain to you why this is not a good idea. Now I can’t say it’s a bad idea for everyone, but I can say it’s a bad idea for the majority. You see, it’s extremely difficult to get people to come shop a brand new website who have no idea about it.

Especially if you’re not planning on putting any money in the marketing at all. Your website will be like a desert and no one will be coming through that thing to buy off of it.

Why should they? Especially since you’re taking an item that they could have bought themselves at Walmart for $10 and trying to sell it to them for $30.

Now if there wasn’t any start-up cost involved (including whatever he is charging for his “master” class), this might not be too bad of a wait and slowly build type of strategy. But unfortunately, Shopify is a very expensive shopping cart solution that I wouldn’t recommended to anyone who doesn’t have a currently established business with cash-flow.

Shopify websites can go for around $80-300 a month and will be a contract that you’ll be stuck in, not to mention other cost like domain registration and any type of marketing like Google AdWords or Facebook ads that are required to get traffic to the website.

Now this isn’t to discourage people from starting online businesses, I’m simply here to bring the voice of reason. It bothers me when evangelicalist-like people like this on YouTube just want to sell you a business idea claiming that you’ll be rich overnight if you just throw up some products on a Shopify website and call it a day.

There is so much to a successful online business and it does not involve just simply picking up products and selling them on your own website in a couple days when you have no experience.

The road of online business is littered with people who thought they could do this and have failed over and over and over again. Yes, I’m in the business of selling people websites, but I only am interested in doing that if they can be successful.

A client of mine who is successful with their business represents a long-term sustainable relationship with my company, and that’s what I’m looking to build. Plus, I care about people and that’s why I do what I do, so it’s important to warn people of these get rich quick schemes that can come to the web design world.

So the next time you hear someone trying to hype you up about how to do your own online business when you have no clue how these things work, either do your research and work on it for the long haul or simply avoid this blasphemy.