If I had to start an e-commerce business all over again, starting today, I wouldn't look at the tools, I wouldn't pick a product first.

I would start with these three things.

Lesson number one.

The first thing I would start with is audience, not product.

We talked about this in another recent episode, but if you don't deeply understand who your ideal customer avatar is, you're just guessing what they'll buy.

Most e-commerce sellers and business owners try to find

what's trending instead of asking, who do I care about serving? What do they already spend money on

and what pain point or emotion are they chasing? If you pick a target customer first before

opening Helium 10 or Jungle Scout, you're going to set

yourself up much better to build a brand instead of just a product listing. Again, the most

successful brand owners and clients that I have personally worked with started with the customer

first and then built a product catered for them. The brands and products out

there with no clear target customer or audience are just waving their hands on the Amazon

marketplace in a sea of other identical competitors. The second thing I'd do differently

is I would nail the offer down before worrying about optimizing anything

else. There are way too many bad offers out there. You can't outrank your competitors or

out-advertise them with a bad offer. To have a strong offer, you need a clear value proposition.

Why would someone buy your product instead of someone else's? Or who would rather buy your product instead of the competition? There needs to be clear

visual differentiation. This is something that can be really difficult for a lot of products.

In fact, I just had a call the

other week with someone who was selling a product that's nothing groundbreaking or new,

but it is a better quality than the competition. However, when I looked at the product listing

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