How to Become a Digital Nomad with E-commerce

Live Anywhere and Work Anywhere

All e-commerce entrepreneurs have two dreams in common; they want to be independently self-employed, and they want the flexibility to operate their business anywhere, and anytime. One of the great advantages of increasing your sales and profitability, is that one day (if you invest the time and effort) one or more drop shipping stores will be able to create the freedom to live anywhere you want.

Why does that matter so much to the contemporary e-commerce entrepreneur? When you consider that where you live is determined by traditional employment, you start to realize how geographically trapped we can be by the regular 9-to-5 job. Are you living in a city in a high-rent apartment, simply because the time and cost of commuting doesn’t make sense? Or maybe you are currently commuting 1-2 hours each day, to live where housing is more affordable, while you keep your day job?

Not of that sounds fun or sustainable, and that’s exactly the conclusion that many smart entrepreneurial minded folks have figured out. There is a better way to earn the income you need to have a great business that prioritizes your need to have a real life too. That’s the reward of making drop shipping and e-commerce work for you, so let’s take a closer look at some of the advantages.

Lower Cost of Living

Escape the city to the suburbs and live anywhere you want to. Have you checked out rental rates lately? From apartments to renting homes, the cost of residential rent is going through the roof, and cost of living is rapidly outpacing what individuals are earning in their day-jobs.

Talented professionals are caught between a rock and a hard place; you can move somewhere cheaper to live and suffer a blow to your income with salaries that are not comparable to what you could make in a big city. Small town = lower pay, right? In almost every part of the world, this is true.

Or you could stay in the big city (or near to it) with hyper-inflated cost of living. Whether you rent or own a house, the costs will kill you in geographic regions that offer higher employment and higher paying jobs. Neither choice in our opinion, allows average folks the opportunity to really get ahead in life.

And that’s why e-commerce (fueled by AliExpress) is exploding. The people who have figured out that the real trick to achieving their dreams of self-employment and the unlimited potential to grow their personal income, starts with mastering the e-commerce business model.

Eliminate Transportation Costs

Many people escape the torture of high-cost residential rent, by heading to the suburbs. Sure, you may be saving hundreds of dollars each month on rent, but when you add up the cost of gas, wear and tear on your vehicle or the increasing costs of public transportation, are you really saving any money?

You may be singing Carpool Karaoke to keep from losing your … mind when you are driving one or more hours to work each way (every day) but it’s not saving you any money. Worse yet, the little free time that you do have is quickly eaten up by the time you spend in bumper-to-bumper traffic, or on buses, subways or commuter trains. What would you do with that time every day (an average of 10-15 hours a week for most people) if you could work exclusively from home? Eliminate the commute, the incidental costs associated with that commute (travel, food etc.) and suddenly the balance sheet shifts in your favor allowing you create an income that doesn’t cost more than you earn.

Low Start-Up Costs

If you are a real entrepreneur, you’ve probably looked at a variety of different self-employment options. Franchises? Well, they tend to work really well for people who have an extra $250,000 to $500,000 lying around. That’s not the reality for the average entrepreneur, and borrowing money to finance a franchise that may (or may not) be successful? Frankly, that’s more than a little scary.

What exactly do you need to start your first e-commerce shop?

• A subscription to a proven drop shipping platform like Shopify, Woocommerce or CommerceHQ. There are many others to choose from.
• Small one-time purchase or recurring monthly memberships for apps to help you manage your product research, discovery, and order fulfillment like AliExtractor and Dropified.
• Other productivity, promotional and marketing apps provided by your shop platform, including software for customer review management, email list building, cart-abandonment and retargeting tools etc.
• Some allocated budget for pay-per-click and sponsored advertising on social networks like Facebook, Instagram or through Google AdWords.
• Remember that with your drop shipping business, you get paid first by the customer, and use those funds to proceed with order fulfillment from the vendor. You don’t have to purchase products to make sales, allow you to focus on Revenue Generating Activities (RGA).

One of the great things about the era of e-commerce is that all the tools you need, and training are available online (and in most cases, they are free resources). Don’t be intimidated by what you might not know about digital marketing. If you can read, you can learn. Start by checking out online e-commerce and pay-per-click advertising courses (starting from under $20) on Udemy.

Buy. Click. Learn and start growing your e-commerce revenue. Don’t forget our support team is available to help you master every single tool provided in AliExtractor to help you save time (and money) as you build your drop shipping business.

Becoming a digital nomad doesn’t mean you have to become a beard-oil using, patchouli wearing hipster parasailing in Thailand.

Okay wait, that actually sounds pretty cool… we digress.

What it means is that you can build an effective exit strategy plan that prioritizes your quality of life, instead of being trapped on the treadmill of 9-to-5 helping someone else grow their business. You can do it for yourself and create your own schedule by scaling up your e-commerce drop shipping businesses as a side-gig, until that part-time income becomes a full-time wage and provides you the flexibility you want to live the life YOU design.

E-commerce will help you get there. Watch our blog and subscribe to our email list for more actionable insights, competitive marketing tips and hacks you can use to scale up your sales every month, with AliExtractor.