Anyone own a succesful E Commerce business?

PreacherJesse said:
I'm gettin tired of my 9-5 and I wanted to get more sleep so I decided to venture into e-commerce.

I targeted a small, non-competitive niche that also captures my interest and my advocacy so I won't get bored with it. Actually, I'm planning to make it one of my lifetime advocacies.

Anyway, here's what I have so far:

> Established a contact overseas for the products. I buy the product from him at wholesale price and will be selling here in my country in retail mode. Price is still competitive even if I double the price of the products that I buy from him.

> set up the website. got free 6 months hosting from site5 thru a coupon and then paid for the domain. my basic strategy is a "Blog with a Store Section" kind of thing. used fantastico to install wordpress as a platform. Not really an expert on coding and shit so I went for it. Will try to learn html along the way. I can write about the target keywords that I want to rank the site/blog for and then hope to bring my readers at the top of my funnel.

> Site's about 60-70% complete now. need to write content for the products and set up the payment with and without CC and shipping. Using credit cards is not too popular in our country so I'll have to set up other payment gateways as well.

> i use woo commerce for my shopping cart and product management. I'm actually impressed that it's kinda easy to handle. will try to learn more of its features so I can unleash its full potential.

> i know a bit of seo but I am not focusing on that as of this moment. Currently focusing on content that can capture my reader's interest first and then SEO later.

do you think my strategy will work guys? :)
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Exactly how we started and we were doing $4k+ per day with Woo and WP
 
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I own 3 eCommerce sites 2 related to the automotive niche and one that's a general niche. The best thing I did was advertise or offer a sample product for a review. I choose very specific niches because I believed in the product and saw that there was a need for it. My biggest site is seasonal, but during my season, I can make a decent amount. I also wholesale out to large retailers that makes up almost 50% of my income, so that helps. I've done PPC and it was ok, but my profit margins on 2 of the sites are thin and I wasn't seeing a ROI.

My advice is to find a niche, build a solid site and then find other sites like forums that you can either offer a product for review or buy advertising. For example, my bigger seasonal product can be used during the winter, so I advertised on Snow Plow forums to the guys who run snow plow companies. I gave a coupon code for free shipping and that was 3 years ago and I still get orders today from it. (I have a great markup on the product, so free shipping was no big deal. But I also own $30K in inventory because no one drop ships in this niche.) Because of the forum advertising, the amount of traffic that comes to my site and a little seo, im on the first page for about 8 keywords.

Hope that helps.
 
I might have missed it, but why don't you utilize Amazon (asking anyone who cares to answer).
 
el_capitan said:
I might have missed it, but why don't you utilize Amazon (asking anyone who cares to answer).
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I have used it before for a previous employer and do plan to use it on my own site in the near future. Got a good percentage of sales from Amazon, but had to reduce my margin slightly to compete.
 
amazon and ebay ask for a huge cut of sales, 19% and 14% respectively (or close to that)... eComm doesn't have the margins that services have. Especially, if you get into a high volume eComm niche with potential 200-400K uniques/month. Your best bet is cheap PPC opportunities and SEO.
 
Amazon is for straight up chumps. And eBay is for house wives. Worse yet those people are doing free SEO for Amazon and eBay like idiots and making the playing field harder for the rest of us with a brain. SEO is a bitch of a game these days.
 
ThopHayt said:
Amazon is for straight up chumps. And eBay is for house wives. Worse yet those people are doing free SEO for Amazon and eBay like idiots and making the playing field harder for the rest of us with a brain. SEO is a bitch of a game these days.
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Would you care to elaborate? I've used both Amazon and eBay in the past and both avenues increased my bottom line.
 
ThopHayt said:
Amazon is for straight up chumps.
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Just because of your bad experience and assumptions doesn't make SEO a bad thing or eBay for chumps. You obviously have not succeeded in this category and it isn't right for you.
 
I have been checking sites sold at flippa. 90% of them close within months of being bought/sold indicating that seller was a fraud.
SEO, link buidling, IM are buyable goods folks, anyone with money and some common sense can get the job done, i still think in th eend it is the product and price that matters. So the question is can anyone give specific examples of successfull e commerce sits or specific products that are selling very well?
 
A lot of the posts on here claiming success seem awfully suspect. Advice on BHW is deep and powerful but to any newbies, be warned, eCommerce sites which actually make money are super rare. You need to do loads of testing and getting traffic to your site is not just about keywords and writing a blog. Most sites have pretty large outflows of PPC. I speak from experience as an under capitalized eCommerce site owner, without paying for traffic, I have almost no sales.
 
It all depends on your niche and how you promote it. I had an eccomerce site, did seo and a little bit of paid advertising in and got a decent amount of sales. Even did a special launch and made big sales.
 
Our niche is a little different, there is very little ppc. What I mean by that it the niche typically does not allow ppc but now and again google makes a mistake and approves a campaign for a week or so.

You are right media buying and such may include some outgoing costs but most of our sales are indeed organic, and recently we added affiliates who have a number of unique ways to drive traffic to your sites. If you own the product you can afford to cut in affiliates.

We have 1 affiliate converting at something like 15%+ but they have a job in a similar niche in the offline world and a website. For instance we are in the weight loss niche and our top converting affiliate is a personal trainer in real life, so they drive traffic via web traffic and of course sending personal training clients to their site who then visit ours.

Dont get me wrong, if we could by PPC we would, we just are not allowed to do so. And the owner HATES pay per impression advertising, he simply wont do it. He has tried it several times and it has never worked out well for him.
 
it looks like my question is off topic, but what ecommerce scripts work best for Digital Downloadabe Products
A few options I have in mind:
Prestashop, Custom Developed Code Igniter App, Magneto, OpenCart.
Custom script looks most tempting to me, but I don't want to waste a lot of time coding it (I'm a developer myself, want to sell my own digital products), whereas PrestaShop, OpenCart, etc are too bloated for Digital Goods and user has to make a lot of clicks to buy and download the stuff. (And I as the seller also has to make a lot of clicks to add a simple downloadable product)

If there are some other options, please reply here or PM me.
What are your views on Physical Products with the above scripts?

Thanks :)
 
khoosat said:
RBKing
Dont get me wrong, you have noble intentions to post here but without naming what products sell well, it is not of much use to know how to sell. I have found thousands and thausands of pages on forums like DP all talking about every little aspect of business but there is none that talks about what sells actually.
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I'd imagine that's because no one wants to give away what actually works for them, you can put me in that category. I only know the business that I am in and I know it sells. I don't have any experience with anything else so I wouldn't be able to answer your question, but there is a buyer for everything... right?

Being part of my eCommerce platform's forums I come across all types of businesses selling goods online, how successfully I don't know. I think whatever you decide to sell, you need to know your market and your prices need to be competitive or you need to offer something unique.

And that's all generic advice probably not worth reading, but the fact is a profitable business isn't something you can just pick off the shelf. It takes time, research and usually a fair amount of capital.


peglegtrading said:
I've been selling my chosen products offline wholesale for more than six years. I sell unbranded accessories for game consoles and iphone/ ipad stuff. It's a huge market with enormous demand. Don't think it's my niche. I think it's more of the fact that the pie has been split into 1000s of pieces in the past few years. Anyways, would be happy to hear how you might approach my situation.
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Sorry I don't have a more helpful answer, please see above.
 
RBKing said:
Would you care to elaborate? I've used both Amazon and eBay in the past and both avenues increased my bottom line.
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Because you're paying fee's out the ass with Amazon & eBay. That's money right off the top there. Compared to the percentages people pay for traditional ecommerce you're getting bent over. Plus you're putting your sweat and blood via SEO into strengthening up Amazon, which only gives them more leverage in the future if they want to INCREASE that huge ass fee structure.

You're the digital equivalent of a 1800's share cropper. Making "the man" rich while you struggle and work your ass off for less than you should be making if you didn't owe them so much money and link juice.
 
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