[Journey] Launching a digital product store and taking it to $500+/mo

Quick introduction:​

I'm Mahdi, a freelance web developer from Iran. I have experience with PHP, JS, Node.js, C#, .Net, Wordpress, HTML, CSS.
I'm trying to become a game developer, for a while I decided to stop working on web dev projects full time (I was only working enough to pay the bills) so I can focus on game dev and making my first game, but the world had different plans!

Why is it harder in here?​

I don't know if anyone's following the news about the war but it was rough especially on economy, so there are not much projects. they're usually priced very low and the competition is high, so I don't get a lot of projects. currently I can make around $5-10 a day and it takes all my time and it's not scalable at all.
Iran is under sanctions so I don't have many options, my country's banking system is not connected to rest of the world. I can't have paypal, stripe or any other type of payment gateways for my website except for wmtransfer and crypto.
The internet is also terrible, it was gone for almost 90 days, they've created a whitelist system which is still not fully gone. VPNs don't work or you just get disconnected after a few minutes.

The idea:​

I found a good source that has thousands of digital products like accounts, game keys, licenses, etc and they accept crypto payments, so I decided to create an online store to resell them inside the country.

The plan summary:​

1. Complete the website design, I'm using wordpress and woocommerce to get it up and running fast
2. Add 5000+ products to the website ASAP
3. Set up the payment gateway
4. Register the website on Torob (which is a price comparison website, people use it to find the best deals)
5. Sell the products with a profit
6. Make $500+/mo while working part time
7. I can finally work on what I actually want to do, making games

What I've done so far:​

1. Analyzed some of the competitors, I've found some websites having 500-1000 sales in the past 3 months based on Torob's analytics
2. Got the host
3. Installed wordpress, woocommerce and some other plugins
4. Installed a fast theme, did some design changes and optimizations for a smoother checkout (because woocommerce is terrible in that)
5. Scraped 6,800 top selling products from the source, the goal was 10,000 but I got blocked. I'll get the rest later

Any suggestions on how to do it faster and better is appreciated. also if you know any legit sources for licenses and accounts please let me know.

Good luck for your journey.

Which type of products you want to list on your site? From which source you are getting digital products?

I'm wishing you the best of luck. Keep going, you'll reach 500$ per month and mooore.

l3est said:

I can't have paypal, stripe or any other type of payment gateways for my website except for wmtransfer and crypto.

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For this, try creating an LLC in USA, you'll be able to have Paypal, Mercury, Stripe ....etc.

l3est said:

VPNs don't work or you just get disconnected after a few minutes.

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and for this, try using proxies, maybe they'll work in your case better than a vpn.

seoworld983 said:

Good luck for your journey.

Which type of products you want to list on your site? From which source you are getting digital products?

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Thanks mate
Anything really, trial/group paid accounts like canva, semrush, chatgpt. game keys, software licenses, gift cards.
Sorry I can't name the source yet, someone might try to do the exact same thing in my country I don't want more competition while I'm just starting the thing.

Danki said:

I'm wishing you the best of luck. Keep going, you'll reach 500$ per month and mooore.

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Thank you, appreciate it.

Danki said:

For this, try creating an LLC in USA, you'll be able to have Paypal, Mercury, Stripe ....etc.

Click to expand...

Can Iranians do that? don't they need passports or other IDs for verification? I've seen some people on fiverr doing that but when I asked some of them if it's ok for Iranians they didn't seem to know what I even mean.

Danki said:

and for this, try using proxies, maybe they'll work in your case better than a vpn.

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It doesn't really work like that. they bought these complicated blocking systems from China, it either blocks or throthles any VPN/Proxy people use automatically within minutes.

l3est said:

Can Iranians do that? don't they need passports or other IDs for verification? I've seen some people on fiverr doing that but when I asked some of them if it's ok for Iranians they didn't seem to know what I even mean.

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for Iranian specifically, no idea to be honest, but sure you'll need a government ID (just so they can know who you really are). Also, I wouldn't recommend Fiverr, never send your sensitive information to someone in Fiverr, use known registered agents in the US (example of the one I used: northwestregisteredagent. com). send them an email and ask them.

interesting journey, following

Since wednesday I did these:

1. got the eNamad (which is required for anyone who wants to sell things online in Iran)
2. submited a request for a payment gateway
3. submited the website on Torob
4. added some products
5. made some changes to the website
6. analyzed some similar websites and realized some of them are selling 500-1000 products every 90 days, with just 30-40 unique products. so the plan's changed I'm not going to add 5000 products right away. I'll just pick the top selling ones and try offering competitive prices, for now.

l3est said:

Since wednesday I did these:

1. got the eNamad (which is required for anyone who wants to sell things online in Iran)
2. submited a request for a payment gateway
3. submited the website on Torob
4. added some products
5. made some changes to the website
6. analyzed some similar websites and realized some of them are selling 500-1000 products every 90 days, with just 30-40 unique products. so the plan's changed I'm not going to add 5000 products right away. I'll just pick the top selling ones and try offering competitive prices, for now.

Click to expand...

I live in Türkiye and I am not in a country affected by these restrictions. Perhaps we can discuss this. If we help each other with how to sell to Iran, maybe we can do something together.