Prebuilt business/website thoughts and opinions

Hi guys,

Not sure if im posting this in the correct place but I wanted to get everyone's thoughts and opinions on prebuilt dropshipping/ apparel websites that can be found and purchased on the marketplace.

I've seen many posts offering pre-built dropshipping sites or t shirt printing businesses set up and ready to go. What's everyone's thoughts on this? Do you think it's a plug and play business? I can't imagine purchasing one and just expecting it to run on auto pilot and making some money, but what if you were to really put effort into to marketing this site and turning it into a proper business, do you think that's possible?

Or do you think its better to start something yourself from scratch? Learn, build something, market it and watch it grow?

Or should you be aiming to be one of the guys who sell on the marketplace and have put processes into place and can sell their services?

Anyway let me know what you think

The starting point for any profitable business is first determining what your target customer needs/wants.

To do that you first need to figure out how are you going to access the market.

Only after you have figured out who your market is, how you are going to access it and what your going offer should you bother about the technical aspects of implementing it.

Thats the point of having a business and marketing plan.

If your out of the box solution does not have that, or you have not developed your own, there is little point buying one until you do.

prebuilts are a good starting point to help you figure out what you need.
I've bought some that worked out of the gate but there was little care used in selecting the products so it didn't stand up to scale.

I certainly wouldn't just purchase one and publish it out of the box unchanged, because it was sold to you and sold on a marketplace it is probably already published several times over on several different domains with exactly that content and wording, as one of the main bonuses of the business model of selling out of the box websites is that you can buy a product once and sell the exact same thing a million times over without ever having to worry about buying new stock, you're just selling another digital copy of it.

That said, the benefit of this sort of purchase would be more along the lines of organization and a starting point as was said earlier. I guess the more helpful way to think of it would be more in terms of being the same thing as choosing a theme on a major web builder site. The conveniences being able to have a clear visual of where the content can go but obviously you want to substantially change the existing out of the box content, all of the images the wording of everything and perhaps add as much helpful additional useful content as you can do it and sort of use it as a wire frame. Hope that makes sense and helps you out

They are useful if you are lazy or lack the knowledge to create a website yourself. Depending on your investment they can become a secondary income.

But if you want a more serious project, the ideal would be to make a unique, special and personalized site, your way.

Your best bet is to build up until you get some traffic => then sell (or maybe at that point you wouldn't want to sell).
If you are looking for an stable business from sites without traffic, it won't work.
Take a look at the Shopify marketplace to get an idea.

GenesisOne said:

Your best bet is to build up until you get some traffic => then sell (or maybe at that point you wouldn't want to sell).
If you are looking for an stable business from sites without traffic, it won't work.
Take a look at the Shopify marketplace to get an idea.

Click to expand...

Hey thanks for the idea. I'll check out Shopify for some ideas, I'm looking to create something myself but I'm not sure what just yet

Monzani said:

They are useful if you are lazy or lack the knowledge to create a website yourself. Depending on your investment they can become a secondary income.

But if you want a more serious project, the ideal would be to make a unique, special and personalized site, your way.

Click to expand...

Yeah I agree I think creating something would be the better option

If you are in a hurry and want to get fast results, then you could go with the prebuilt solution as there you will have everything set up and you'll just need to add a few modifications to fit your needs. But, in a long term, and if you want to create a quality brand with a good online reputation, I would recommend that you create a site from scratch as here you will have the liberty to adjust everything according to your wishes and to give it more personalization. So, basically, both solutions could work, just depends on what your goals are and how big expectations do you have.