Looking for thoughts on new ecommerce store I'm setting up.

Hi Guys. After trying some CL stuff on here a couple years ago and failing, I started an Amazon/Ebay business selling local products from local distributors. After a couple years of making scraps I am now making enough to get by. I sell about 250 items on Amazon a week and 100 on Ebay. It?s all low margin stuff that I self-fulfill.

Amazon and Ebay both have pretty high fees. And I have really been put off by a case I lost with Amazon where a customer claimed they didn?t receive an item and later admitted they did. Amazon would not give me my money back even though the customer admitted they had the product. Anyway, it was a long battle that I lost that makes me rethink doing business with Amazon. Even though it was for a relatively small amount of money I?m really disgusted with Amazon at the moment.

My frustration with Amazon coupled with the little bit of extra funds I have from holiday sales, I have decided to have an ecommerce site built with all of the products I sell on Amazon and Ebay. I am going to work hard to pull as many customers as possible to the new site. I will be throwing fliers in with orders, emailing old customers, and mailing postcards.

I would also like to start a weekly opt-out/unsubscribe type marketing email for the email addresses I have collected so far. Any recommendations on a good company or software for this?

Besides pulling my current customers from Amazon/Ebay what else should I be investing in to make money with my site?

Any thoughts or personal experiences with this would be great to hear. If you have done anything like this please let me know how it went. Thanks!

Good luck, I'm currently using Amazon and like you, my e-commerce site is slowly being built. Not because I'm disgusted by Amazon but because why not have more then one source of profit?

You can look into Infusionsoft or Aweber for gathering e-mails and sending a weekly/bi-weekly/daily e-mail. I'm not too familiar with plug-ins but I'm sure you can get a good amount of data by searching the forums here.

Good luck, and don't give up!

I used amazon, when I was done tweeking I was on my way to a 4k a month income when they banned my account. So I went the ecommerce route that I started working on earlier. It's been nine months and its an uphill battle. Because you are competing with amazon.