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If I had to start an e commerce business in 2026 completely from zero, no products, no email list, no audience, nothing. Starting from scratch, I have no idea, no niche. Feel like I have no competitive advantage. Here's exactly what I would do. Hey there. I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband, dad of three and the founder of Everbee. Ever Be. Everbee, Everbee, where we serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human is a creator and I believe every single creator should own a. It isn't that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built Online is where creators, entrepreneurs and leaders get real insights, real stories and the edge to build something that actually lasts. This is where the next generation builders get built. If I had to start completely from zero, here's exactly what I would do. Three moves in a very specific order. Most people get this wrong and then they end up quitting after three months and then they wonder why it didn't actually work. So hopefully this will help you get it right. Because the reality is a million dollar brand is not magic, it's actually just math. And anybody that has this is their first time here to the podcast. Welcome. And welcome back to the folks that have been here with me pretty much every single week. Just as a reminder for anyone that is is new or maybe someone that doesn't know, the Built Online podcast is more than just a podcast. It's a part of Everbee, which is an e commerce tech company serving over a million digital entrepreneurs across the world, helping them generate over $3 billion, which is insane to say in revenue for their online businesses. We've been around for over this is our passion, this is what we do. And Ever Be has two main products. Ever be Research, which is a product research tool that helps people find the best products to sell on the Internet, Amazon, Etsy and any other marketplace. It helps them basically understand what is actually selling so that can actually go sell things that people actually want. And the second product is Ever be Store. It's an AI native e commerce platform. That is where you describe what you want to sell and what kind of niche you want to want to sell to. And it generates your storefronts, it generates your, your marketing flows, your funnel analytics and to where you could actually get up and started with your online brand very quick, quickly. It's basically replacement of Shopify, wix, Squarespace, Klaviyo, kind of all that entire E commerce stack. It replaces all that inside of every store. So super excited to be here. Let's jump back into the actual meats of the episode. How would I start an e commerce business in 2026 if I had to start from zero before I really get into this, right? Jumping back into kind of my story. I've personally built over multiple e commerce brands myself, right? And before ever be, I was doing this, I was trying drop shipping on Shopify, I was doing Amazon fba. We had multiple, multiple products. We were doing launches on Amazon fba, sourcing products in China, importing them, doing all that stuff, right? The private label game. Some of you shaking your head because you understand this game. I would own websites sold on Etsy, sold on ebay, kind of all of it. Kind of tried so many things. Starting an online, online business. I have personally been on the other side of this podcast. I would listen to multiple podcasts similar to this and I got immense value out of them, right? Like they changed my life, I would say. And I'm grateful for all those podcasters that actually helped people on their journey for free, by the way. They didn't get anything out of this, right? And so now, now I run Ever Be again. We have over a million users on, on the Everbee platform and ecosystem and they crush it. And we're so grateful to do all this. And I'm not saying this to brag what I'm saying this why I'm saying this is because what I'm going to share with you is not just based on my personal experience. It is based on leveraging the ability to see so many, literally, you know, over a million other e commerce sellers and stores across the world. And so fortunately I have this opportunity that I get to study what works and what doesn't across e commerce brands, understanding why people give up, why people succeed. And I just get to watch it, all of it. And I get to actually coach sometimes a little bit. I don't actually do that for a living. It's not what I just do that because it's fun to talk about e commerce, it's fun to talk about online business, it's fun to talk about entrepreneurship, right? So when people ask me, Cody, if you were to start all over, what would you be doing right now if you were to start an e commerce business? And that's what the mission I want to start an E commerce business today, in 2026, maybe 2027. If you're listening to this, what would you do? So this is it, right? Not guessing. Ideally, it's not at all like just theory. This is exactly what I would do. Okay, so before that, I want to start with what I would not do. Okay, this is what I wouldn't do. I would not just open an Amazon business quickly. I wouldn't just open up an Etsy shop and call it my business. That's not what I would do. And there's nothing against Amazon, there's nothing against Etsy. I love Etsy. I love Amazon. They're critical point points in my, in my journey. But Etsy is a sales channel. Amazon is a sales channel. Walmart is a sales channel. That is not your business. You don't own the customer, you don't own the email list. You don't own the traffic. You, you're just renting space on someone else's, on someone else's land and they can change the rules on you anytime. So I would not do that. I also would not build a general store. You can, there's people that do it and that, you know, they sell to different types of people and they just sell shirts to a bunch of different types of people or sell candles to a bunch of different types of people that I've seen it work, but usually the likelihood of that working is significantly less because it's much harder because you don't have the one specific person that you're actually serving. So I would not build a general store. Right. I sell candles, mugs, some pet stuff, some shirt. You have no idea who you're selling to. Right? And so you're not going to build a million dollar brand to selling random things to random people. That's just not how it works. You might make a couple bucks here and there, but you'll end up, you know, in this circle again. Back to probably listening to this podcast and wondering what you did wrong. I'll come back to that in a minute. I wouldn't chase passive income. I wouldn't chase it. People come into E Commerce thinking, I want to, I want to set something up and I want to kind of set it up and forget it. I would not do that. You will be disappointed. E Commerce is an active business. It's not a passive business. It can be automated over time. Like lots of this stuff can be automated and it's. And it can feel semi, semi passive, semi passive when it's. Once it's running. If you're looking for that set it and forget it type of thing, you are in the completely wrong industry. You're not going to get what you want out of this podcast or out of me or anything that you follow around me. This is not that business. Right. There's places for that passive income, put in interest, put it in a savings account, you know, and you get your 3%, you know, annual APY. That's passive, you know, But E commerce is not passive. So anybody that says that it is, I'd argue with them personally. And I wouldn't obsess over a logo. I wouldn't obsess over a perfect domain or a Pinterest worthy Instagram feed that, you know, before it had like a single sale. Personally, when I was starting my first stores, I thought that you needed a big Instagram following to start an E commerce business, but you needed that. So I would basically try to like find ways to hack through building an Instagram following. And it just that stuff I would do today. So stuff doesn't really matter yet. And it might never really matter in the way that you actually think that it does. Okay, so jumping into it, what were the things that I would actually do? And I have some notes here that I'm kind of making sure that I stay a little bit more organized with this one. Three moves. Okay, move one. I will pick a niche, a real niche. I don't mean like pet stuff or home decor. First niche, I think it was, it was going to sell and it was going to be drop shipping years and years ago. Women's apparel. Those are categories. Those are, those are categories. They're product types. They're not niches. Okay. I would sell something like doodle moms, women who love their golden doodle or their labradoodle. Right. Christian dads who are into woodworking or 12 hour shift nurses who need something specific for that life or they want to. Yeah, right. Buy something. What I'm talking about with a niche, maybe women who go to, go to church, you know, actively on Sunday, but also they contribute to their church throughout the week as well. Right. People who are obsessed with their state. For example, I live in Texas and a brand that is obsessed with, you know, Texas pride. Right. And they're proud to say it. Those are niches. Okay. People hate this advice, by the way. You with me? People hate this advice because it feels limiting. It feels like you are, I'm putting you in a box. But it's actually the opposite. The cool thing about it is like the more specific that you are, the higher your conversion rate will actually be and the more connected your buyer will feel to you and to your brand, to your, to your store. It's really powerful. And so when you do all this, it actually helps everything. Your Cheaper. Your ads are going to be on meta because the meta knows exactly who, who's who you're targeting or if you sell on Etsy or Amazon. Etsy and Amazon know exactly who you're who they need to show your, your products to. The algorithms they want to make sure they're matching the right buyer with the right store always. And so if you can make that clear and reinforce that you're actually making everything easier and making everything better and it helps everything actually build that brand that people feel really deeply connected to. And the cool thing about this is you don't actually. You could always broaden this later, right? Million dollar brands, once they get to a million, they start expanding a little bit more, but they start narrow always, every single time. Okay, that was move one, right? Pick a niche. Move two, I build a standalone store that I own, okay. So that means I'm not picking just, I'm not just sell on Etsy real quick and selling on Amazon, not just TikTok shop. Those are again sales channels to think about that they are sales channels. You need a home base. Those sales channels are fine. You could use them, that's fine. I'm not saying to not use them, but then they cannot be your home base cause you don't own them. Your home base is a store that you own. Your domain, your email list, your customer data, your brand. You have the ability to put upsells, downsells, order bumps. I know those are all complex things right now if you've never done this before, don't worry about those things. But the point is, is you own the home base. Okay? And the thing that people don't actually think about enough is the real money in e commerce isn't about the monthly sales, it's not about the monthly profit, it's about the exit. It's about actually selling the company. You don't have to do this, but this is where the actual real money is actually made. Monthly profit is awesome, that's cool, that's great, you know, but the real life changing money is in the exit. And the exit by the way, if nobody's ever thought about this or heard about this before, it's basically it's like selling your house. You're selling a business, you have an asset, you build this asset and somebody else wants to buy that asset to take it to the next level or they're looking for maybe just something else bolt on to their business. There's people out there buying businesses like yours, but you need to make sure you're in a position to where you actually have a brand or actually have a business that people would be willing to buy. People don't want to buy a cute little Etsy shop. You can't even sell those things. Etsy doesn't even want you to sell those things. But people do want to buy an asset with an email list that has a solid conversion rate, that has repeat customers, that has a good email system with good convert, good open rates. Like these are things that may be a little bit more advanced, maybe that you're used to. But for the folks that understand this, you're shaking your head yes. This is the way. If you build a brand doing a million dollars a year with healthy margins, let's say 20 to 30% net margin means profit. That brand is. It's probably worth somewhere between 700 to a million dollars in a lump sum, right? Roughly two times the top line. Probably one, one to two times top line revenue. Okay, it depends on the niche and all this stuff. But that's the ballpark for a solid E commerce brand with real margins. And this by the way could work for print on demand, it could work for physical products, it could work for lots of stuff. If you have a subscription aspect to your business, it's probably even better. That's called enterprise value. Enterprise value just means like the value of your company. Look at like selling a house. It's kind of the same thing. Like your house has, has a value to it, right? The business has a value to it. Might be worth nothing if you build it, you know, on someone else's land. Yeah, of course it's worth nothing. But if you build it on your own land, you actually have a good, you know, you know, a funnel that works with products that you know people want and you have good retention and stuff like this. That's, that's worth something. That's life changing money. It's only possible because you actually own it. That's the important piece. You cannot sell your Etsy shop for that. You can't because it's not really yours. And I know people that have. Some people have like figured out ways to sell their Etsy shop. But if you ask any of them the truth, they had to do it in a hacky way that wasn't really against it was kind of against Etsy's terms of service and you risk being shut down after you sell it, which would be terrible for the buyer. And yeah, that could change the rules at any time. So from day one I'd build something that I actually own, something that I can Actually sell in three years if I wanted to. Two years if I wanted to. One year if I wanted to. Okay, that was move two and move three. I'd run meta ads and then I'd capture emails and I'd basically retain those customers over and over again, all three at the same time. And this is what I like to call the flywheel E Commerce flywheel. Okay? Again, meta ads to your site to capture the email. Then you keep emailing them, staying in touch with them, connecting with the person, and eventually they buy and then they buy again and buy again and buy again. Okay, all three of those, that's, that's called the flywheel. Again, traffic comes in, you capture the email, you make the sale, you retain the customer by just re emailing them or over and over again. And then that customer becomes repeat traffic, repeat buyer, over and over again. If you repeat this, that is the entire business. It's actually very, very simple. So breaking down a little bit more Meta ads, Facebook, Instagram, that's your traffic engine. This is what I would use for my traffic engine. 3 billion people on these platforms right between Facebook and Instagram. The targeting is the best in the world. Meta ads has been around for a very long time at this point. The machine learning algorithm they have is better than any other platform there. You don't, and the cool thing is you don't actually need 3 billion buyers. You only need a few thousand of them. And they're all on meta, Facebook and Instagram. People were scared of meta ads because they think it's too technical, they think it's too expensive, or they think that it's, it's too complicated and you have to hire an expert and they're probably gonna waste all your money. But that's actually not true anymore. That used to be true. Yes, but it's not necessarily as true anymore. You could start with five, ten dollars a day. You'll learn fast. And meta gives you the fastest feedback, feedback loop in E commerce. And so you'll know within like a week of what's working and what's not. And typically what I would personally do is I would probably just, if I have a, you know, after I have my products, I would go to catalog ads. That'd be the first thing I would do. I would launch a catalog ads campaign in meta. $5 a day, get it, get it rocking. And that's essentially what I do. They're gonna, people are gonna see that catalog ad, they're gonna click on that, they're gonna come to the landing page, they're gonna collect, you're gonna collect an email, they're gonna shop around, they may or may not buy. That's what I would do again, lands on your store, you capture their email and that pop up that you see, right, that says 10% off your first order. That's the thing I'm talking about when you capture an email. That's it. Industry standard is about 4% of visitors will actually give you their email. So that's, that's when you go capture them. Imagine sending for anybody that sells on Etsy right now, you know, you understand exactly what I'm talk. You, you have an Etsy ad, you send them to your Etsy Etsy listing. You get a chance to capture the email, answer that, let me know in your head. No, you don't. In fact, that person will come to the listing, they'll probably scroll down, they'll probably see a competitor listing on, on their Etsy shop, on your Etsy listing and they'll probably click off to off of your listing to another competitor's listing because they actually like that one better or the price is different and they'll buy that one you paid for that ad to drive them to there, right? But when you're sending directly to your store, to your listing on your store, you're capturing that email and they're not going to any competitor because they're in your, your store. Okay, so then you retain them, right? Retaining, what does that look like? So after you capture the email, you have a welcome series, right? You have email one on day one, email two, email three, four and five. And then of course you have abandoned carts, bandit cart emails. So when they actually, you know, put something in their cart and they don't actually buy, you have series of emails that go out, post purchase flows. After they purchase, get them back to purchase again, actual campaigns around Mother's Day, Black Friday, Valentine's Day. You have control of all this with your store. And if you're doing this right, 20% of your revenue, maybe even more should come from your email marketing alone. 20%, it's massive, right? So that means if you're doing a million dollars a year, $200,000 of that should be coming from your email marketing flows. That's the difference between like a, what I call like a, a one hit store and actual real brand. So the rule of thumb is typically with email marketing is a healthy email list does about a little bit less than a dollar per subscriber per month. So if you have a thousand subscribers on your email list, you Build a list of a thousand people. That, that, that thousand people. That list should be generating about a thousand dollars a month for your store. Just through email alone. 10,000 subscribers is 10,000, $10,000 a month in revenue. That's what we're building towards. Okay? Traffic capture, email sale, retain, repeat. That's the entire game. This is what I would do. Okay, so most people skip this next part. Okay. And I skipped it too. I didn't even know it. So hopefully this will help you out. Before you do any of this, you have to do the math. And nobody likes to hear this by the way. And most of you will not do this. Probably 99 of you will skip over this, be like, oh yeah, yeah, cool, cool. But you won't do it. But most e commerce brands don't fail because the product was bad. They fail because their unit economics don't actually work and the owner of the brand never actually even realizes it. They don't even do the numbers. Okay, so I'm gonna share with you a couple three numbers that are important for you to understand. You don't need to understand them right now. I don't. You don't get overwhelmed. It's, it's okay if you don't know these things in and out depth right this moment, but pay attention to them. After you listen to this, ask yourself, do I know my aov? Do I know my gross margin? Do I know my conversion rate? I'll say them again, don't worry. So again, three numbers. Number one, average order value. What is the average customer spend per order? I want this personally if I'm going to do this again in 2026, 2027, I want this around $60 or higher. I want my average order value to be $60 or higher. If you sell a $20 shirts, you need bundles upsells cross sells something to get that average order value up. So I would probably sell my shirt for probably $30 at a minimum and know that probably I want to get an average about of a two. Two orders per order, two shirts per order. Otherwise the math math just doesn't really work out the way that you want it to when you're paying for ads. Okay so and you could always chat GPT what average order value is and all that stuff like you'll. It'll do a better job explaining that I will even. But average order value. Number two, I'd be paying attention to my gross margin. What do you keep after you fulfill the order? For me, I want about 58 to 60% or higher for Physical products. Okay. And I'm telling Digital products, I want about 90% plus for digital products, 87 to 90%. If you're selling a $30 product, $30 shirt, for example, and your cost of goods is $20, then you don't really have a business. Right. You have kind of a hobby and you can't really scale that. So you have to reprice it, renegotiate with your supplier, pick a different product, figure it out. Right? So for example, if I'm selling a $30 shirt, the shirt costs about 8,59 bucks. And then I want the shipping that's going to cost you probably five, 55 bucks. That's a good business. You have something there. Number three of the people who visit your store, how many people actually buy? 2% is kind of the baseline, right? 5% is a super, super strong store. If you're below 2, something is broken in your funnel. It's not that it's bad, not that your product is bad. You just need to optimize, you need to figure out your niche a little bit more, figure out your funnel a little bit more. Okay, we can go in depth on that and probably another podcast episode, but you want to fix, fix that stuff as you're kind of spending on ads. If those three, three numbers don't really, don't really really work, then you need to kind of keep massaging it a little bit more. Okay. So again, if I, if I had to start over, this is how I would be thinking about it. And this is the kind of the part that probably most, most people miss. The biggest thing I kind of bring with me is it's not really about like just the tactics. Like these are all kind of like things that we would do. But this stuff will change, you know, over time. This is, this could mean 2027, 2028. If you're listening to this, maybe things are a little bit different. But the one thing that doesn't actually change is your, your belief system. You need to actually believe that it's possible for you to actually build something worth something. I know this kind of sounds a little soft or maybe sounds a little bit woo woo. But if you don't have beliefs that you can actually do this, then you for sure will not be able to do it. That's true. People don't feel fail in E commerce because like the strategy doesn't work or it's like it's E commerce is dead or it's oversaturated. The strategy works like it, it is proven over and over and Millions of times. There's online businesses that work and they crush it. I've seen it work for tens of thousands of people and I've also seen probably more than tens of thousand people fail. And they don't fail just because the e commerce is bad and dead and broke and oversaturated. They fail because they start to, they start to lose belief it's actually possible for them. So if you can get yourself to believe that this is actually possible for you, maybe not probable yet, maybe not inevitable yet, but it's just possible for you and you just work at it long enough and you listen to the right people and you're around other people making it happen, trying to make it work, you'll get there. And this isn't just, this isn't designed to just be pep talk. I understand how this probably can sound to some people, but this is just pattern recognition across thousands of brands I've, I've watched up close. So Those are my $0.02 if you're asking me, right? And I know this podcast episode is going longer than I planned, but to recap this, I would niche down until somebody says, you know, that's me. I would find a niche, serve somebody. Then two, I'd build a store that you actually own. I would run the flywheel for that traffic, email capture retention, that flywheel from day one. And I'd run the math. I'd always be thinking about the math. Aov, gross margin conversion rate, know the numbers. And I would stay in the game long enough for it to work. I would figure it out. That's how I would start an e commerce business in 2026 if I had to do it from zero tomorrow. If you are, haven't, haven't, haven't done it yet. And if this, if this hits for you, check out Everbee IO. Lots of free resources in there, some low cost paid ones in there that could help you on your journey. Obviously this podcast is completely free, so hopefully this is helpful. Check out the ever be every be YouTube channel as well. Again, just a bunch of free information to help you on your journey and let me know if this is helpful. Was this helpful for you? Let me know in the comments because we haven't done a lot of these solo episodes like this and frankly I don't really know if this is helpful and I certainly don't do this for the money. Podcast is definitely not. It's not something we generate revenue from or you know, we choose to take sponsorships. This is because we enjoy talking about capitalism. We enjoy talking about entrepreneurship. We enjoy talking about online businesses and you know building a life of freedom time freedom, location freedom and financial freedom. And this is our, our ways one of our ways to kind of do that to kind of give back to to the industry and people that were like us, you know, not that long ago. So it's helpful if this is helpful let me know wherever you see this if it's in YouTube or if this is on I don't know, Apple podcasts or Spotify things like this and if you have any something specific, a question let me know. Also because we actually look at our comments and we're building our we build our content and we build our our episodes based on questions that we actually receive from the community. So if we're not getting comments from you we don't actually know if this is helpful and we actually don't really know what questions you may have otherwise I will leave it there. See you on the next.