E-commerce site journey from 0 sales to £20k this year

[Darkdamon]

Have been away recently but still very much active. I've got some massive news on the go.

The articles I got written? All indexed into google, giving us traffic converting into sales, in an average week we're getting 3 sales now, selling about £200 per week give or take, Its wonderful.

Google has blessed us with over 300 daily keywords and at least 22 clicks per day as well. Traffic has been increasing rapidily without the need for facebook advertising into groups, although I'm still doing this.

Better targetted traffic, better sales, without the need for email marketing or such and we've had a 'free month'.

We're about to depart to italy to go get some more stock, ironically, we're running out now and have a lot of space. This is the first time my dad has seen the cellar so empty.

We went away this week in England with the entire family, while away I sold 11 bottles of wine to 3 customers These was all local sales, so very happy with how it's going.

With the other business' also, I've had to take my time to them, as we own around 16 flats / business' units and we've had to do some work on them to get them more profitabile as well, it was in dire need of help. The property business' will never be a wage taken business but it provides some form of money for us. It's been in the shit for years.

I've just helped my dad to get the tenants on side .

Not that much of a long update but just letting everyone know that I am still alive

 

[PhillipCharlson]

Good Luck On Your Journey, Hope You Will Reached In Your Success.

 

[Darkdamon]

Thank you.

Another sale today, was a small one but they’ve brought from us before. I gave them two “sample” wines for free. Only a small win £36. But still. It’s very good for us.

Google is rocking for us at the moment. I need to work out where I’m going to be spend the extra money. Finally. My dad has a business and not just a hobby…

 

[Darkdamon]

This year has been absolutely crazy for us, it’s been a while since I’ve done a post but the fortunes of this business have been overturned now.

I’ve been constantly chipping away at trying to make bigger sales; and it’s definitely worked.

Over this last weekend we had our biggest since I took over with 9 orders in total. Sounds small but for us this is huge.

Over the last month we’ve done 40 cases of wine, or 40 orders to be exact. Since October our sales have increased by the following;

October £998 income
November £1150 income
December we’re at approx £2200 so far and still growing.

Lots has changed. We’re just testing the waters now with different parcel carriers, and should be dropping our shipping price in the new year. Not yet though as it’s our critical Christmas sales!

Our prices currently
1x case of 6 = £10 we pay £8.15 to ship
1 bottle = £7.50 - we pay £7.15.

In the new year we’re going to be focusing on DHL to do our domestic shipping

We should be able to drop the rate to £6.95 for 6 and around £4 for a single, should get more people through the door.

We’ve expanded our offering by around 75% this year. In October me and my dad drove to Italy to pick up 2 pallets of wine, this is nearly sold out now, we’ve had 4 additional pallets arrive during the last 2 months.

This year has been absolutely huge for us as we’ve been able to reduce costs and hire a marketing expert to sort the social media out.

For google, we’re now getting anywhere from 50-70 clicks a day and at least 1 sale per day which is perfect..

Google merchant is about the same.

On average consistently for the last three months we’ve made anywhere from 1-3 sales.

The girl who is doing the social media only charges £100/month but the amount of stress she has taken away from me is huge lol..

In the last 6 months we’ve increase what we’re spending on advertising. It seems to have been the best choice for us.

A lot of more local sales are coming through as well, which was nearly unheard of last year as we was struggling to get any local sales..

This year has been huge and it isn’t finished yet. Our end of year is around April time; we’ve made around £18500 odd this year (haven’t got exact figures.) but Dry January is going to be the killer.

 

[jamie3000]

Great to see a fellow Brit doing well! I remember seeing this journey ages ago so it’s nice to see you’ve kept it updated and are making good progress towards your goals.

Have you considered doing more outbound marketing to try and get some b2b sales? Wines for event venues etc.

 

[Darkdamon]

Great to see a fellow Brit doing well! I remember seeing this journey ages ago so it’s nice to see you’ve kept it updated and are making good progress towards your goals.

Have you considered doing more outbound marketing to try and get some b2b sales? Wines for event venues etc.

Hi!

Thank you very much for the kind words, it’s not the fact we don’t want to do b2b but we’re not allowed to and the licensing required form HMRC is absolutely mind blowing!!

Thanks!

 

[Darkdamon]

Back for the end of January update,

dry January has actually been extremely different this year. We’ve actually sold wine. Not as many as the last few months but January has definitely picked up for us. Selling around 18 cases of wine. Considering last year we never really sold much of anything….

We’ve upped our SEO on the website now and maximise on this. Yes we could’ve kept going slower on it but it’s the right time now.

We’ve also ordered another £2500 of wine form Italy now due to arrive at one point in the next few weeks…

this year we plan to double what we sold last year at any cost; it’s getting busier and functioning as a proper business now!

 

[jamie3000]

Back for the end of January update,

dry January has actually been extremely different this year. We’ve actually sold wine. Not as many as the last few months but January has definitely picked up for us. Selling around 18 cases of wine. Considering last year we never really sold much of anything….

We’ve upped our SEO on the website now and maximise on this. Yes we could’ve kept going slower on it but it’s the right time now.

We’ve also ordered another £2500 of wine form Italy now due to arrive at one point in the next few weeks…

this year we plan to double what we sold last year at any cost; it’s getting busier and functioning as a proper business now!

What sort of SEO strategy have you implemented? Great to see you doing well mate

 

[Darkdamon]

Okay,

Half way through the year and we hit the 20k annual about 3 months ago which was nice, this year I’m looking to double this.

There has been a few changes to the website to allow for this, for some stupid reason I never optimised any of the product listings. I have gone and changed this now.

Our local competitor went out of business and this is how we managed to archive this. We actually suppressed it by around 13k in this year, which was nice.

so we’ve ramped up deliveries of wine and we’re now as a minimum selling around 8 parcels a week, hoping to slowly increase this now I’ve actually optimised the product listings haha

 

[mrhamyou10]

have you tried other gray traffic sources? Some of my friends are making $500+ a day using a special funnel with gray traffic source

 

[Darkdamon]

So new years and new excitement, we had a mentally busy christmas period and I am so thankful that we have finished that now. We have exceeded expectations from the last year and we just touched £40k from January - December, plus lots of stuff I've changed within the year like I removed the platform we was using as it was absolutely terrible and moved it over ot something less walled, I am fixing up the SEO on the site now.

About 14 pallets arrived last year give or take, we filled our very small warehouse extremely well, and we now have ordered 2 to come in shortly...

Everything is STILL on the up but the biggest thing was the website transferring it from something terrible to something usable, the increase in sales mental.

We're going to branch into food this year, me and my dad are growing some vvegeitables to pickle, the veg goes in on the 10th, (peppers, need the long season)... in my makeshift grow box...

Extremely excited about this year!

 

[SMMGlory]

Nice, The journey I will follow and marked as watch threads

 

[PeceKargo]

Interesting journey so far, I'll be following!

 

[Darkdamon]

So growing the veg is going to plan and hopefully going to pickle about 2 weeks time.

We've definitely grown, I can safely say now we have fully reached 20k/year in takings.... including the wholesale side to the family restaurant.. It's going pretty well, we're now on the way of trying to figure out how to expand while the UK doesn't allow or appreciate growth, so we're taxed to shreds...

So, our way if any one in the UK knows the largest 4 supermarkets have refrigeration vans, thinking about buying 1 or 2 of these, insuring them and then putting them on SORN, keep them at my house or something... just to get more storage space while not massively increasing costs...

 

[Adsmith2026]

@Darkdamon the SORN van idea is proper scrappy, i respect the hustle. just watch out for the neighbours though, if you park a couple of massive supermarket rigs on a driveway or garden, someone is bound to complain to the council about running a commercial site from home. also how are you planning to run the chillers? if they need to be on constantly, running generators or hooking them to your house mains is going to cost a bit, not to mention the noise.

on the pickled veg, just heads up that UK food standards are a massive pain compared to importing sealed wine. once you start processing and bottling stuff yourself, environmental health will want to inspect the prep area and check your HACCP plans. might be worth outsourcing the actual pickling first to see if it sells before you get bogged down in council paperwork.

 

[andracs]

Which niche are you in? Have you tried Google Shopping Ads? It has by far the best conversion rate.