Ebiz Store “H”
April 18th, 2011 by KenricSo what do nerds get for Christmas? They get domain names, that’s what.
I remember this clearly, because it was Christmas Eve in 2010 when I bought my domain name for Ebiz Store “G”. I remember thinking that I got myself an $8.99 present.
Over the course of a week, I created a new store which opened on January 1st, 2011. I talked about this store last month but I never really talked about it.
As usual, I’m not going to mention the product. But this store was started because of my competition. I don’t want to go into details in case they happen to read this. But basically, they were doing something I didn’t agree with and I was going to get an attorney to write a letter to them. They have a bunch of other stores so I was clicking around looking for some of their address information when I came across a good product idea for a store. Then I thought, why waste money on an attorney letter. Use that money to open up a new store instead. So that’s what I did.
So it’s April 17th, 4 months later and this store is doing pretty level. With consistent SEO, it’s at number 1 on one of the keywords and between 3-4 on the others. It also ranks for alot of longtail keywords.
It’s first order was on Feb 23rd. It went almost 2 months without getting a single order. An ebiz novice may have been frustrated and given up before then, but I know better now.
So from February 23rd to April 17 it has received 27 orders grossing $11,400 and profiting about $4,000.
My out of pocket costs were, $300 store, $9 domain, $50 SSL, $1400 SEO, $300 misc., totalling $2059.
Total profit of $1941.
Going forward, I this store will not have expenses more than $60 a month, so the profit should start to look pretty good.
Posted in Ebiz | 6 Comments »
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Hey Kenric, You mentioned in your post that you paid $1400 for SEO. I was wondering, did you do the SEO yourself or did you outsource it? If you did outsource, can you shed some light as to who you used to do it? Thanks!
By Landlord Success on Apr 18, 2011
+1 to Landlord’s question
Also how you are generating all the content for your stores such as unique product descriptions? I imagine it can take quite a bit of time.
By Sean on Apr 18, 2011
I outsource the SEO but I still do some of it myself. I find my SEO work on the Wicked Fire and Warrior Forums. Alot of people to sort through but also very good pricing.
I create all the content myself through research and physically having the product. I order the product and take my own photos and make my own descriptions.
I’ve found that doing so really helps your site rank alot faster. It does take alot of time but is well worth it. I see huge differences between cut and paste descriptions and stores done with care.
By Kenric on Apr 18, 2011
I know you won’t share the products your store sells, but it would be great to see a sample, either of an old store, or one you decided not to go ahead with for some reason.
For those of us who follow you, I’d love to see what choices you make when choosing a niche.
By Boston on Apr 19, 2011
Hi Boston, At this point I feel like I can pretty much get into any niche. The fear of competing is gone. But now the issue is which niches are better. I don’t want to jump into a store and spend 20 hours a week and make $30k in a certain niche if I could make $60k in another.
In fact I’m going into a whole new ballgame, which I’ll post about tomorrow.
The main thing I concern myself with is price point. This new store as you see in the above post, I had 27 orders and $11k in sales. This means my average sale is $422. So my average profit per sale at 20% is $84. I would much rather do this than to have a $50 product and 220 sales to make the same amount of money.
With that said, inventory is a bitch because the average wholesale cost of this product is about $500. So if I carry 10 of one item, that’s $5000 inventory sitting in my house. I would imagine that I need to have about $100,000 in inventory (200 units) to be able to comfortably and smoothly process orders during the busy season.
That is good and bad. It’s good because the barrier to entry is high. It’s bad because I need to spend $100,000.
By Kenric on Apr 19, 2011