$5000 to $30,000 per month - eCommerce Progress

[SparksCW]

Hey SparksCW,

I was looking at this tread (great one by the way), and realized that we are kind of the same. The way you word your words, tells me you might of got your knowledge, the same place I got mine. I feel above average in my knowledge about buisness, ads, and marketing. Just one thing... I never actually went through it yet, so I have no experience. Just knowledge. I know I need to start executing, but with a budget of only $440, I am doing alot of thought about how I am going to spend my money and what product to invest my time in. That said, I have a few problems that come into my mind. Can you or anyone else reading this help me answer a few questions?

Thanks, budget is irrelevant to get going for a lot of business, I started my company with nothing. Originally on a paid monthly e-commerce package and that was it. I bought goods when I sold them. It was painfully slow going, but at the time it didn't matter as it was just a bit of fun.

(In the US by the way... CA)
-I read that you have a distribution deal with one of your suppliers. That's a nice deal, but if you didn't have that option, how would you distribute your goods to the customer? I was thinking about using the US postal mail or UPS, but is there a better, more professional way to go about it?

By distribution I mean I stock and sell their products so get better margins. I don't know about USA. We ship items out direct from our warehouse or from other distributors using various services, mostly Interlink & Royal Mail

-What is your thought about a warehouse, office, and house, all in one?? If I were to start off, could I store shipments at my house (dont own a warehouse), and run a website at m house? or do you think its alot of hassle?

Rome wasn't built in a day and you can't run before you walk. My business started in my spare bedroom, I'm not ashamed of that. Early last year I had a packing bench that took up over half the room and could barely sit at my computer. Aim to move into a small unit as soon as you can though, they aren't necessarily really expensive. Again, don't know about USA but there are some really cheap easy in easy out places in the UK. We're in an easy in easy out but it's a higher end one so a lot more expensive, but much better facilities.

-Is amazon and ebay and pain when it comes to fees? I know traffic is higher on those sites, and that a big deal, but is FBA and selling fees costly? I read that one should start off with their own site, then work up? I feel like you would need to be proficient in selling your product, before using one of the sites, because after paying the supplier, your website subscription, and amazon FBA, plus selling on there site (if fees apply), it seems like your profit margins are not worth the profit. I mean maybe if you had a good product, but If I were starting off?

The most successful businesses sell.... EVERYWHERE!

Ebay, Amazon, Own Site(s) with traffic generated from all manner of social media, PPC, remarketing etc. This is the hard bit, being everywhere. But don't rely on one thing, i'd rather have a well spread $500k a year business than a $1m ebay only business, don't think I'd sleep at night!

I know a business that has high overheads and they only sell on Amazon, he said he has sleepless nights worrying what would happen if his account got blocked!

People moan about eBay fees, but it'll cost you far more than the fees to drive traffic to a website unless you're 1) very lucky or 2) very good. Ebay and Amazon fees aren't too bad in the grand scheme of things. But it's not as simple as listing some stuff and it'll sell.

If your product doesn't have enough margin to cover eBay/Amazon fees then it's not worth selling, after fees you have staff, overheads, etc etc... if you drop ship and sell items that everyone sells the margins will be rubbish, you have to commit and take risks. I bought $50,000 of stock paid upfront last year just to get a better deal! I had to sell my Range Rover to pay for it!!

-One more question, is my age (19) going to play a huge downside in tying to run a successful business? I feel like suppliers would not take me seriously, and no one would want to work for me. I get that most people my age are not that bright, but I am the .001% of people.

It all depends on your outgoing image, which is also very important to your customers. A professional website with decent content, contact numbers, addresses, tax and company details etc will portray a good professional image. Make sure you have a good email footer with well written emails etc. It won't be until you're on the phone/in person that someone will be a bit surprised that you're young, by which time they should be confident with your business based on the image you've portrayed. It's just branding and marketing essentially.

Hows this month going? I am mainly interested in your business progress, a kid like me, with no bills, one employ, and 25k+ in sales (netting 20%) a month; that would be awesome. I know running a business involves risk and is not just fun and games, but there is nothing I rather do with my life. No friends, huge chance I will never get a GF, nothing to live for. I have all the time in the world to keep trying in life until I have a successful business.

Finished month at just over $45,000, was very busy and I hope it continues, pushing on with more content, more unique stuff to make the site harder to replicate and to increase brand confidence. Hopefully sales will be good with the continued effort.

 

[SparksCW]

I only have a few days left in my slow lane job and then I am full time on my own fast lane ventures.

I haven't posted in this thread for a couple of months but we've been pretty busy and just about keeping a steady $25-30,000 p/m revenue.

We've taken on a couple of other brands and put a lot of work into the site.

• Streamlined and removed certain products as they just caused clutter as they weren't the items I want to be selling.
• Added some much needed product up sell options as customers kept asking on the phone for them but no ability to buy directly on the site
• I have employed the services of a copywriter to do 2 blog posts per month and to gradually re-write the guides, create an e-book and eventually re-write the product descriptions
• I have employed an eCommerce consultant with proper industry experience, in my own industry which I'm really, really hopeful that this will be a key success move as he has run adword campaigns generating $3-400,000 revenue per month - this is verified as he comes from a recommendation and he is currently working for one of my key suppliers.
• Increased website traffic, not significantly but it is going in the right direction
• Increased phone orders
• got a semi-exclusive product deal
• got my own product ready to be manufactured!! I utilised an existing company and they have agreed to build their existing product into a different format with some key changes and in a new box.
• got a deal with a foreign manufacturer who wants to bring their product into my country.

In the coming months, now with my full attention we will be doing:

• product videos
• general videos
• blog posts
• a major SEO push
• a major adwords push
• further conversion optimisation - if you properly look through analytics you can start finding out where people drop off the site.. I've just noticed that more than 50% of traffic is going to a certain set of pages that are poorly designed and offer no value, and thus have a 70% bounce rate.. so these are first on the list for major improvement.

I have been struggling to increase the sales as you can see from the relatively flat turn over from past months.. always around the $25-30k month. But I am very hopeful that by Christmas this year we'll be smashing the $25,000 revenue mark.

Keep plugging away!

 

[SparksCW]

So it's March, another quick update.

Business is still growing, almost at end of financial year and we're set to almost double last fiscal year (turnover)

Things I've noted.

• We are now buying more profitably but it's causing major cash flow issues, something I've never had to deal with in this business before. We're buying in 50+ units of an expensive product that we used to buy in 3-4's at a time. Making an extra 10% margin so technically making more money but we're buying faster than the money is coming in from payment processors which is starting to cause me some stress. We're also selling more in general so hitting supplier credit limits in the first week of the month. Not ideal.
• Low daily order volume (of high value products) make it hard to employ additional warehouse staff. Must find lower priced items that sell faster.
• More staff needed. Seriously, I've said this numerous times in this thread, but it needs to be actioned. And it will be. Just wait and see...
• Content is king... having done a complete analysis of how we can grow as a value add eCommerce business, it all comes down to content.
• All my goals have INCREASED.
• Throw excuses out of the window, everything is possible if you work harder/smarter.
• I've realised that the technical aspect of our products that's been "worrying" me is actually the moat around our castle if we play it correctly.

So all in all much of a muchness. Bit of a plateau but with lots of positive stuff in the makings.

I can sense a massive breakthrough coming soon though, something to smash the $100,000 / mo mark.

Hopefully next time I post it'll be because we've broken the £100,000 / mo mark which is $140,000 dollars.

 

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[SparksCW]

May Update!

So turnover is steady, nothing too exciting, just steady and increasing. This month is set to be our best month ever as we are almost even with our current best month and its only the 18th!

Since the beginning of the year we've been buying in bulk to save a percent here and there, we've been a bit more careful with how much discounts we give and we've been trying to maximise profits where possible whilst offering great value to the customer. All in all this year every month has been far more profitable than previously, we're not making loads of money just yet but certainly doing better than we were.

I employed a new team member in web design and content creation, let's just say that our website has improved significantly since he started!

I have been working on streamlining the website, conversion optimization and getting the business running smoothly with the aim for it to run with very little of my input as well as providing tangible assets (with view to an exit in a few years time...)

Small changes can make a big difference in sales. Hard to show it in full context but some checkout simplifications and tactical addition of trust badges have had a positive effect (See image, the figures are percentage increases from the previous period.)

So I would recommend instead of always chasing new traffic, it's worth having a look at your existing metrics and see if you can easily and cheaply convert more of your existing traffic or increase average order values/repeat custom etc.

Work to our product pages and our help pages has helped decrease bounce rate and increase time on site.

Now we are going wider by adding more relevant categories and products.

Still determined to break that first $100k month but at least I know that my margins are improving which ultimately is the most important thing!

My main take away from the past couple of months is:

Employing and expanding the team is a bit scary and is hard work if done properly to get the best candidate, but the right team member can accelerate your business forward.

My recommendation is to embrace it and don't see that person as a cost, as a liability, that person you pay X amount could help generate Y amount or make life 10 x easier so that you can be more productive and turn X into Y etc..

 

[SparksCW]

Still determined to break that first $100k month but at least I know that my margins are improving which ultimately is the most important thing!

Another month over and.....

$103,000 in May! (margin target also met)

Finally.

A lot learnt this month, will put it into a post at some point.

Next target is $140k /mo and to do this consistently. A lot of things going on at the moment....

 

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[SparksCW]

I can't believe it's nearly been a year since I last updated this thread despite being relatively active on here.

We are still not in the big leagues, our best month has been $101,000 revenue which was nearly a year ago. However the past 4-5 months we've been making more profit from a lower turnover, so whilst the revenue isn't there, the profits improved despite employing one additional staff and paying myself a steady basic wage. This is mostly down to watching costs, buying smarter and being more conscious of the figures.

So, a year on and we're still only hovering around the $70,000 / mo range.

Competition is hotting up and some are catching up / overtaking.

Main brands we've worked with from day 1 have been outgrowing us and making things "difficult" - one in particular makes up the majority of our revenues but they are growing significantly, making a lot of money, going worldwide, taken on a lot more resellers and moving their product supply to a large distributor which caused us a lot of problems. I am jealous in a positive way, I'm happy for them and am trying to learn from them as we get on really well still.

Our main brand has BIG potential as a top retailer (in our opinion anyway!), but we're not doing it justice and I'm struggling to get any momentum going. Our smaller brand is doing much better, but it's a smaller niche of the big brand...

So why aren't we growing?

If I knew the answer perhaps I wouldn't be so stressed.

Some of it is down to focus, I started another company and built a web app - the product is good but we have no time or money to market it. Should never have built it! It's genuinely a good app, maybe I'll try to sell it off as a business-in-a-box, not sure! It doesn't cost a lot to keep ticking over so may just leave it on the side. Takeaway = Don't get distracted.

Whilst I'm still "free" working for myself, I'm not making a great deal of money and I work a lot.

We're currently upgrading our websites, they'll be faster, better looking, better features, better payment options and better on mobile. I'm hoping this will increase our conversion rate thus increasing sales "overnight".. but we'll see... Takeaway = keep up with technology and customer expectations.

I've deleted most of my mini-sites and binned off side projects. We're all in on our main two brand websites which go hand-in-hand. I'm finding it hard to bat off distractions, but so far so good.

We're kind of in limbo right now, we can't do too much until the new sites go live, developer is taking way too long. Hoping to be live by the end of this month. Once live we'll be focusing on growing our product range and content.

Other than that I'm not sure. Doubting myself a bit lately!!

According to my extensive spreadsheets using a cost of goods sold method we're making okay money each month. But we're still negative overall on the balance sheet and if sales drop we're in trouble. However cash flow is good and we barely owe anything on loans/credit cards.

Which leaves me in a position where we're obviously doing something right, but we've not enough money to do anything interesting or take any risk.

I guess it's either get funding or find "free" ways to increase traffic and sales.

I'm tired and need a holiday with the wife and kids (which I can't currently afford) We are mostly just getting by and surviving whilst trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong (or what I'm not doing!) on paper we're making money yet my personal credit cards are getting higher and higher as I daren't take too much cash out of the company despite making enough on paper.

So yeah, still here, still going.

 

[SparksCW]

September since my last post, and September is where it really started to go downhill.

Since September our traffic and sales have dropped by 50%, we ran out of cash and I used a PayPal Working Capital Loan to cashflow us, however paying back up to $6000 a month when we're not making much profit has soon got us back to the no cash situation only now we also owe PayPal $22,000 from the $40000 borrowed and we're paying back way more per month than we were three months ago. Oops.

So tip 1. Don't use working capital finance for anything but stock purchases and make sure your repayment percentage falls well within your profit margin!!

Now both our websites are better than ever and we're working on SEO as paid ads are almost impossible to break even on with low margin competitive top brands. We're only getting around 20-25% margin on a lot of top branded products but at only $50 for some there's just no money to advertise, ship it, support it etc. It's a pure volume game and the volume isn't coming our way right now.

I still have all my staff, although we're currently top heavy, if we don't get sales back up to at least where they were I can't keep throwing money away on staff if they aren't needed. There is one person that we don't need right now, if we can't get sales back up then I'll have to make the difficult decision.

It's weird as we're still a small struggling company but our competition is the largest players in the UK. There is no middle ground. (probably because it's so hard!)

PLANS THIS MONTH

1. Not make an operating loss like the last three months
2. Refinance the WC loan and credit card into a $40k bank loan over 36 months to ease the cashflow or bust issue.
3. Building more bundled products, if we can't compete on a product for product basis then let's bundle them up into useful logical single product listings to increase AOV and thus net profit amount
4. Trying to sell my truck. It's a shame, but I don't want to go bust when I can share my wife's car whilst we get back on our feet.
5. Continue trying to figure out how to get our website traffic up when we 1) can't afford PPC and 2) can't afford a content writer to blast out consistent content for SEO.
6. Work on my personal finances, it's double hard when the business is broke as am I. I'm not sure how but I am going to put some effort into improving my personal finances without using the business. I've shuffled some credit cards to ease the interest paid each month but really need to hustle to pay some of these cards off.
7. Plan more. I'm struggling with focus and stress causing in-action. This week I've started planning on a Sunday night what we all want/need to achieve and it's making things a bit easier.
8. Move more. I need to do some exercise, it'll help everything but still seems so hard to start.
9. Find a way to make it more fun for everyone, we might not be millionaires yet but who says it has to be stressful and boring?

I'm not going to lie I've considered making all my staff redundant and selling the core products alone whilst I catch up, sure it may solve short term cash but I can't give up the big dream.

Where we're going we need staff and the hassle that brings so let's embrace it and push on.

Home life is suffering, my marriage is suffering, my kids are suffering but I feel like we're so close to breaking through and to be fair we're one paycheck from broke so can't give up or let it slip now even if I wanted to. All or nothing!

Thanks to @amp0193 you may not know it but reading your threads is inspiring! We're both trying to build something more than "just a business".

 

[SparksCW]

Hi,

Thanks for the post. I'm interested in your methods of driving traffic to your site? Would you be so kind as to share a few? For example did you use facebook ads? Word of mouth? Etc.

I noticed you said that you're now ranked top 3 in google for certain niches but how did you get there?

Hi, the well ranked site was my second foray into e-commerce, I'm not professing to be an expert at SEO, quite the opposite as I know my site has some key SEO issues that need fixing, but the particular product that we rank top 3 for is very niche, we managed to secure a really good deal with the distributor at the time, and now we're working very closely with them and have OEM'd the product to our own name. We have an exact match domain which I'm sure helps, although everyone says that exact match domains don't add any weight any more.

The low competition is a big help, but essentially the site is well structured, features the brand/product on every page/product page, all the usual SEO titles, well written unique product descriptions, good pictures etc. We have all the technical manuals in PDF format on the site/products, various help and support pages, a blog etc etc.

I do think we can increase sales by increasing exposure, more blog articles, more help, more content, more value. And by good old fashioned going out and finding customers.

The main site I am working on now, which is the focus of this thread, I'm finding a LOT harder! It's a broader niche with more competition, some of which are very well established, and more potential customers. I'm still on page 2/3 for most products, but I'm competing with someone who's been doing it 10+ years and is very, very good at SEO. Our best selling items are on page 1 for the product term but this is an area where people will be searching by need, not product, which I'm finding a bit harder to get my head around.

For example my usual SEO is based around...

Customer: Hi Google UK, I want to buy a Samsung XYZ123 TV please.

now I'm going for this.

Customer: Hey Google, I fancy a new TV, what you got?

TV is just an example, I'm not crazy enough to try and compete in that market!

We're catching up slowly, this is from well written descriptions, SEO titles etc, well structured categories with decent descriptions with information on how the products used etc. Even so there are still more products to write unique descriptions for etc.

Now I am trying to get up to page 1 for the main products and for much more competitive terms it's getting harder which is why this years focus will be on content - I have lots planned, it's just going to cost a fair bit of money in Magento modules.

I don't want to post links to any of my sites on here so my apologies as the thread would be better if I could show you the physical changes, but I will definitely keep up to date on what we've added, how it's worked and how that monthly t/o figure is affected!

I'm a bit worried that this month will be quiet compared to the others, we've already done $4000 this week but I just have a bad feeling, not sure why!

 

[SparksCW]

How long were you working on your product/business before it took off in October?

How did you find your product?

Is it something you have experience in?

My company was a sole trader for 1 year, then a ltd company (LLC) for 3 years till this date, so 4 years in total. It was always a passive sideline with little effort, it's only been since about June 2015 that I started trying to increase it with a different niche. So it's not an over night success, it's not even a full success yet in my opinion but I now definitely see it as a viable business.

The original niche product I found at a trade show relating to my primary job. I saw that it wasn't really advertised well but had really good uses for a niche audience.

The product does relate to my trade so I knew and understood what it did and what it can be used for, despite it being slightly outside of what my trade background is. The newer niche I'm focusing on, again it's not my primary trade but it's closely related and I know a lot about it and enjoy it so writing content, blogs etc should be a bit easier. Plus it means I can answer almost any question relating to the products and/or installation!

 

[SparksCW]

Couple more questions.

Did you had a phone number for customer service when you started?
Did you had a registered company when you started in ecommerce?

And last, have You had any success finding dropshippers and supliers at esources.co.uk? All I seem to find is different ecommerce websites, that are just there and does not dropship.

1. Not when I first started, I barely even showed an address. The original site I started didn't do very well, when I created the niche site I listed my office address for my day job (funny when people used to turn up asking for my product!) I started showing full phone numbers and addresses about 1.5 years ago and to be perfectly honest I don't think you should run an e-commerce site without a very visible address and phone number as it instills a lot more trust than not having one. Plus we get phone orders which is always good, it's even more important for technical products which may mean people want to ask questions before buying.

2. No I started as a sole trader, however as it started doing okay I realised that I was better off in a ltd for tax purposes. Now I wouldn't trade any other way.

3. I don't do drop shipping in that sense, all of my products are either bought, stocked and sent or are sent direct from my distributors because we've worked with them for so long and spend so much money with them. You'll be surprised how many distributors will send items direct to customers with your paperwork for you.

The problem with drop ship companies is they provide products to you and anyone else who asks them, so it usually means low margins and high competition, and no control!

Find a good product that isn't widely "drop shipped" then get on the phone and make deals or buy small amounts of stock, or back to back orders if you can get away with it.

 

[SparksCW]

I guess I'll just have to get back to drawing board and think of some ways to make it work.

Don't give up, find work arounds.

You can get a UK address for £10-£30 a month that will forward mail. Google them, plenty available throughout the UK, just choose a location, avoid London as it's a bit too obvious.

You can get a UK local phone number that diverts to any number (VOIP) or a free 0843 number. We do have a landline local number (VOIP) but we use a £9.99 per month 0843 number that re-directs to any number we choose (landline, then forwards to mobiles)

If you buy physical stock you can put it in a UK fulfilment centre or FBA for not a lot of money. Just make sure you pay your taxes

Problem solved

 

[SparksCW]

1) Print out in big letters and tape to the wall: NO MORE DEBT

2) You have a weekly cash flow for the next few months? Do you know when you run out of money completely? If not, you need to know. That knowledge will prompt action and help you prioritize. You can't operate in the dark.

3) Then figure out what you can do to not run out of cash. Re-finance with a bank. Work out a payment furlough with Paypal (I got a 30 or 60 day reprieve... don't remember, just by calling and asking).

4) Time to take outside investment?


It is not worth losing family/kids/everything/health. Your #1 job as CEO is do not let the business run out of money.

You may feel like giving up. Don't. Every successful business person goes through a time like this. Those that make it didn't give up.

You got this brother.

Thanks Amp!

I've let one of my staff go today, long time friend who introduced me to my now wife 10 years ago. But it was the right thing to do. She wasn't working out any more with where I'm trying to take the business and coupled with the money issues it just had to be done. Kept me up all night worrying about doing it but she was a star about it and is looking to the positives about a new career break and getting back to being friends rather than "an employee". Every cloud and all that...

Monthly expenses now reduced by $1500

Next step is to sort the loan and sell my truck, already have replacement car lined up, it's by no means luxury but it's free!

Personally I have three credit cards, 2 of them are now interest-free for 9 and 15 months respectively. I have a plan in motion to pay 1 maybe 2 of them off in the next few months. Also started work on a longer term side hustle, amazon affiliates in the same niche as my main business, I'm doing it as a no pressure long term SEO strategy, monetisation from Amazon Affiliates and referring people to buy from my main business. Currently keeping this away from the main business though as I want to start building separate, relevant, streams of income.

Sales and website traffic are picking up, some ads back on and working so now the race to make a profit this month, currently were about $3000 away from break even and it's only the 10th, so far so good!

@Andy Black have started walking with podcasts on, done a few miles sine last week and it definitely helps so going to try and keep this up every other night at least.

 

[SparksCW]

It's March already! And we have a positive update!

Last month was great, we beat Feb 2019 and we actually made a decent $xx,xxx profit. We also got a LOT of new stuff done, we have a bit of a system going on between the three of us here and it works quite well.

I let my office manager go, not simply for cost reasons but mostly because we were on different paths and it was affecting the business. It had to be done. My workload has now increased, but I feel a lot better despite that.

Currently writing up processes so I can get a part time administrator then employ a full time marketing assistant in the next month or two. Next hire definitely has to be revenue generating and the business will be a lot more streamlined and efficient before then.

Cash flow issues currently solved with a bank loan, we've actually managed to put $10k aside as we had a good month, I'm going to sit on it for a month or two and if we keep building a cash flow buffer I'll pay it back to the loan to reduce the monthly rate. When I first took it out I was really worried it wasn't enough as I can't get any more without putting my house on the line, luckily last month was much better than the few before it. If we do need to dip into it then, that's what it was there for, but it's a nice challenge to not touch it.

Need to keep focused, keep the expenses low and the revenue/margins high for a few more months before we can "relax" but if it continues like February we'll be back to full strength in no time. We are now increasing eBay sales without worrying about that PayPal ball and chain that was killing our cashflow.

I've set a personal challenge to clear down a $4000 credit card this month, without taking any money from my wages or business. So it has to be all new money from selling things etc. Will update on this on 1/4/2020 to see if it was achieved! (or before if I smash it!) might even get my eldest son involved and teach him how to hustle at boot sales etc! (he's 5).

Booked a long weekend away in a luxury lodge with my wife and kids at the end of April (also end of tax year) so planning on being in a better financial situation by then so I don't have to worry about the cost of it quite so much. We need a break either way.

Tempted to put a weight loss challenge out but I'll leave that one until next month

I've also set a 14 month goal to buy our premises which will significantly reduce our monthly outgoings.

So last month, all good. But very focused on making March just as good or better.

 

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[SparksCW]

Can't believe it's been two years since my last post on this thread.

It's been a roller coaster of a couple of years.

Gone from five staff down to two staff + me, one of which is my wife who's now working pretty much full time for the business after we lost our customer support operative and our marketing manager earlier this year.

Revenue is stable around $180-$200k a month but profit is up and down so still trying to get consistent profits and growth, at the minute we grow in revenue but increased advertising costs soak up the difference.

Overall we are profitable and cash flowing well so it's just fine tuning really.

Biggest Mistake

I've realised the biggest mistake I've ever made in my (small) business is having multiple brands and websites, two of the websites overlap a lot too and both websites want to be "big" so we're not talking two easy to run <25 product niches.

We don't have the resources to run everything and it causes a lot of conflict of interest, what blog goes where, what brand do we push here, managing multiple listings, pricing etc etc.

Life would be so much easier if we just had one website, one brand, one product set. Or at the very least distinctly different websites with very small numbers of products.

Easier said than done though.

Positives:

• Our processes & systems are now pretty slick
• We're good at what we do and we're ready to scale
• Building lots of reviews on our main brand

Challenges:

• I can't go on being the only point of call for everything. No time off, no time to think - tired and fed up and spend most of my time dealing with customers - mostly problems, faulty goods, etc etc. Likely holding back the growth of the business at the minute but don't feel we're quite making enough to comfortably take on more people right now. I miss being able to go off for lunch with my wife whenever we wanted. Now I can't leave the office as no one left to answer the phones!
• Advertising costs are too high and reliance only on Google - need to explore other options.
• Not very good at product sourcing so our Amazon box shifting has slowed right down, really want to get this to a decent level but really lack in finding good products that work for Amazon (wholesale)

Q4 Plan

1. Actually make a plan! Write clear business growth plan for the next 2-3 years rather than winging it.
2. Focus on our main website & Amazon only - this is where the profit comes from.
3. Get back into blog writing and SEO
4. Get back on the email marketing
5. Explore at least 2 new marketing methods (no.1 is getting listed on a price comparison site called idealo and I have a meeting with my ad agency tomorrow to look at getting on Bing and Facebook retargeting)
6. Plan for growing the team next year - complete process manual, tidy and improve the office / computers etc. Write up job descriptions and ensure we know what everyones job role is.
7. Rebrand our trade website to our main website brand, either rebrand the existing website under the existing brand or build it into our existing Shopify brand. Either way it's one less brand to think about and a much more focused B2B offering.
8. Package one of our micro brands into its own website and try to find a buyer - won't fetch much but also doesn't make much money, no longer makes sense in our business so would be nice to lose it. One less thing to think about.

 

[Michał Kóska]

You can use Amazon FBA and sell in the US using this platform. Very convenient.

 

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[iAmTrade]

I have a theory...

People who are successful do not really go about looking for "how to make money" or "how to grow an eCommerce site" or "business forum for entrepreneurs" or ....ANYTHING in my opinion, that would lead you to join The Fastlane Forum... But perhaps it just happened, and I can understand that.

So... there you have it, I don't believe it. Anyone could post anything...but who cares what I think, you know what I mean?

You went from $ 5,000 to $ 30,000? Congratulations.

All businessmen in my opinion need to concentrate 80% of their efforts on sales and 20% on everything else. Heck, I believe all business owners need to do that until the business really reaches $ 1,000,000 a year in sales. Only after such I see a business needing to make tweeks to quality, to making things perfect etc and then having to figure out how to grow exponentially.

So...my question is...

Your goal is $ 75,000 a month in sales. The only way you'll make it happen is if you can get people to your product, and sell them on such product.

What is your unique selling proposition?
What is your optimal selling point?

Answering those two questions, having answers to such questions, would be in my great opinion the ONLY WAY you will reach such amount of sales. Those two questions answer soo much about a business and what it needs to do in terms of sales.

No sales = NO $. No $ = failure.

An idea is garbage unless they can get it sold.
An idea is garbage unless action is taken...but I need to extrapolate on that-

AN IDEA IS GARBAGE UNLESS ACTION IS TAKEN, BY THE OWNER TOWARDS A SPECIFIC GOAL, TO INCREASE SALES! NOT TO FIX A SITE, NOT TO TWEAK A PRODUCT THAT IS ALREADY BEING SOLD BY THE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR IF YOU POSITIONED YOURSELF CORRECTLY....

THE PRODUCT, IN MY OPINION IS PERFECT AS IT IS, SINCE IT ALREADY HAS A MARKET EXISTENT. I KNOW A TOOTHBRUSH SELLS AT 100 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, THE MOST SIMPLE ONE. Can't you sell a simple toothbrush?

Sure make improvements to your product... but I said sell..if you can position yourself correctly. ...

So...my other question is simple... after you have made improvements to your site, as you are NOT CONCENTRATING ON SALES, do you honestly think you will sell more, ONLY because you made the product?

I hope you can answer me without getting stumped, I want you to succeed. Heck maybe I can see your warehouse in person when I go to Europe this summer.

 

[Tiger TT]

I think you really need to attract more visitors
to your site.

These may help:

https://yoast.com/product-page-seo/
https://yoast.com/product-page-ux/
https://yoast.com/basic-seo-training-product-page-optimization/

Moz also has a very good blog. Especially you should watch
the Whiteboard Friday video series which are
regularly posted on...you guessed it... Fridays

Here's the Moz Blog:

https://moz.com/blog

I hope you get successfull man. I currently sell my ebook and
I'm writing another one, but I sometimes just think
about opening an e-commerce website and to sell physical
stuff.

 

[Smoothsailor]

I've had a proper look and the conversion rate is actually 0.6% not 1.6% so it's not as good as I thought, but it's a bit more realistic now. I consider the traffic to be really low on this site so you're right that I need traffic really. Most of my sales are still coming from third party (eBay and Amazon) and from my other niche site but this site is growing in direct sales so it's getting there, but I would really like the site itself to be doing a lot more sales.

I need to drastically increase quality traffic.



This is really where I'm struggling, I do a bit of adwords but it's not working that well if I'm honest. The products on this particular site require installation at the right time when someone is remodelling their kitchen so I think a lot of people do a lot of researching before buying. The average product price is around $450 so it's not an impulse buy.

Which is why I think you are right in that partnerships with bloggers, product reviews etc are a good way forward but I struggle to find these types of link ups. I need more exposure from relevant blogs and websites. I need more non-paid exposure.

I wouldn't do anything that's gray side really as I don't want to risk Google penalties etc. I would rather try to think outside the box and target different audiences for the same products but in different situations. I have a few ideas, but again struggling to get out to people. This is easily my biggest downfall, sales and marketing, this is what I need to work on the most. I'm currently reading "Cashvertising".

We closed March at $28,000 t/o so not a bad month, I'm trying to make April a bumper month, I'd like to hit around $35000 and ideally want to be averaging that or more every month by the end of the year.

My net margin after all bills and staff seems to be fairly steady at 20%, we're still paying off some debt so I'm not paying myself and haven't been for a few months, really desperately want to get caught up so I can start paying myself again! My day to day involvement in the company is zero. I have a staff member who deals with all order fulfilment, telephone and email enquiries and she lists lots of new stuff, so my job is to improve the site, marketing etc and once we get to a more steady level then I can do as much or as little as i want. So I'm happy that we're heading in the right direction all round.

0.6% sounds more market standart.
I know what you mean, it's always the though part to get quality traffic/liñks/blogger attraction. My experience with bloggers, there are two types; 1)the cannibals, they wont do nothing without trying to overcharge you 2)laid back types, these are trying to deliver good value to readers and not as capitalistic.
-are you reaching out/cold calling big number of bloggers, in order to discover type 2 bloggers for collab?
-did you identify links to your competitors? So you can reach expand to same people/blog/organixations
-instead of adword, which is usually overpriced, did you discover any focused cpc/cps partners (might find this inur competitor link analysis). I.e. i had an experience with a small focused listing website to have cpc priced at 9 cents while adword was charging up from 30 cents. Even at 9 cents i was at breakeven because my conversion rate was 0.4%, that means i sell nearly 4 product to 1000 visitors (1000 visitor will cost 9 cent*1000 =90 usd, 22.5usd marketing cost/sale)
It's crazy right, even with such cheap cpc, imaging if i was using adwords... Simply out of money!
-how about cps affiliate agreements? Did you try any? That one you only pay a commision if there is a sale. (Usually near 10% of sale price).
Bottomline, there are some things you can try to exploit, especially cold calling bloggers might help a lot if you can get a few of them to help you for free or a small favor.
Ps: overall ur company sounds healthy, keep up the good work! Fingers crossed for ur sale target!

 

[Smoothsailor]

I too want to get into the e-commerce world, i find it fascinating and really fun. I would love to start with amazon since its such a huge site and it has alot of visitors every month so i know my product would be seen by some people.

Right now im waiting on some samples from china but just testing the waters, thankfully i found about a guru of this stuff that can mentor me and knows alot of stuff about amazon.

Sounds cool buddy.
Amazon, etsy etc. Makes sense for the beginning to start experimenting. I wouldnt worry about a few k capital. Simply start with tiny product selection and improve your marketing skills and product selection skill. After good experience when you feel confident you can step up gradually. If you're successful capital won't be a problem..

 

[JordanK]

How has the month being going for you?

 

[SparksCW]

Just a few things to think about:

Can you outsource more of your responsibilities to free up time to grow the business?

What is stopping you from doing the same thing as the other brands to grow?

Normally I would say that the problem is money and resources.

But actually it's "Audience / Traffic", we have low traffic and no real audience (on our main brand, our sub-brand is doing much better and makes up most of our current revenues) - it does take money and resources to build that, but that's not the actual cause of our lack of sales.

A lot of our products are top brands and margins can be as slim as 10% making it impossible to run ads for. We need good organic traffic to make this work and a better paid traffic strategy to create "customers" rather than sales - probably through decent content and education.

We've (I) have been focusing so much on revenue, gross profit and net profit - and yes they have improved since I've been monitoring them. However, I think I'm focusing too much on the "event" rather than the "process" of getting sales.

So today I have created a new monthly tracking spread sheet and set new KPI's for our team. We'll still keep an eye on revenue, GP etc. but our main sheet now includes traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, transactions etc.

My theory now is to focus on growing the number of people visiting the site whilst improving the content and conversions. The sales, revenue, profit etc should all follow. It's not rocket science, I just need to go back to basics on this.

I'm also breaking our main categories down to 50 primary keyword terms, I'll then start tracking these to monitor where we rank and then we'll use them to create all the landing pages, category descriptions etc. Further breaking down into sub-categories with longer term keywords.

I've found a content writing company that can help with creating all the content, I'm going to give them a test piece to make sure they're as good as they appear to be.

Back to basics..!

 

[SparksCW]

June update.

Last couple of months have been quite hard with sales averaging around $60,000 / mo, especially compared to the first few months of the year as they were really good. I've been quite down about it all, complete lack of progress, almost going backwards to be honest.

But I've realised that this is just gearing me up for scaling. Instead of being down about it all I've now realised that I've had the best lesson ever in what to/not to do and I feel so much more confident about turning this all around.

The thing is, I came from an on-the-tools trades background and moved into ecommerce with no education, experience or training other than what I could find on the internet. I learnt as I went along and have hit a ceiling which has been stressing me out.

I read a lot about funnels, and conversion and SEO. Which is great, but I was learning about individual pieces without learning the core foundations or how to tie everything together.

I read a book by Tanner Larsson (Build Grow Scale) called "Ecommerce Evolved" and it's every bit as good as I hoped it was is changing my business as we speak.

The book has enlightened me into what a CEO SHOULD be doing to grow their ecommerce business (well, any business to be fair) it brings all the pieces together into a meaningful foundation, rather that just teaching just the individual components alone.

So now we are plugging all the holes and reinforcing the foundations ready to scale. By next year we should be seeing consistent $100k+ months.

Progress / To do

• So far we've deleted three micro sites that just distracted me and provided no results.
• We've replatformed (nearly finished) one of our small brand websites from Magento to WooCommerce - the idea was just to keep it easy as it's a very small store, but I'm quite surprised at just how good WooCommerce is - we've created a better looking, faster, easier and more conversion optimised store than our Magento sites in less than 3 days, in house!
• I've signed up for Klaviyo, firstly on the small store mentioned above - setting up flows for welcome series, abandoned cart, winback etc. Starting on the small store to learn but this will all roll out to our main brand shortly.
• Put in place new KPI's, score board in the office, new company values etc. to keep my staff motivated and engaged.
• Started putting in place a wholesale side to our main business, time to start selling our products to people who will sell to their customers. Leverage. In hindsight this is probably going to make up the biggest part of our revenues plus it's consistent and "safer". It'll solve a lot of my worries as it brings in some consistency to sales, improves order volumes with brands, profit obviously and is harder for my competitors to compete with, they can't simply drop the price online and affect my sales any longer.
• Making plans to slightly broaden our niche, this will give us more relevant products to sell to existing customers in the future of their customer lifecycle. We've tried to do this before but always done it half-hearted and wrong, this time it'll be fully built out and "proper" before it goes live.
• Implementing new order management and shipping software, once in place this will aggregate all our orders and making shipping easy for my warehouse team (ready for lots more orders!!)

I realise now that we've been focusing/stressing on getting every new sale individually when in reality there is a whole lot more we need to do and build upon to turn this website into a machine that can scale.

If you focus on each new sale then you'll be chasing your tail forever. I can easily see now that this is the thing I've been missing in this business and in my previous employment.

So bad month for sales but great month for learning.

 

[Paul David]

I’ve just read through the whole thread and its extremely similar to what I went through with my e-commerce/eBay/amazon business. Stock issues, good months, sales dropping for no reason, cash flow issues. Then the dreaded PayPal loan.

I hope it works out better for you than me. That company closed in 2018, I owe Funding Circle £148k, bank overdraft £50k, PayPal £12k and Amazon £8k.
Funding circle and the bank are personally guaranteed by me so I’ll be going bankrupt shortly as there’s no way I’m paying them back.

I tried to spin too many plates at once and reinvested loan money into the wrong stock.

Good luck mate, hope it works out for you. It also caused me massive issues at home. Just be careful with borrowing anymore money.

 

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[David4431]

Just wanted to leave some encouraging words from one ecommerce business owner to another: You've done an amazing job turning your business around and you should be proud of yourself! I've had plenty of ups and downs as well so I know how difficult and dark some of those days must have been.

You mentioned in one of your updates that you were going to start designing your own products. I think this is the way to go. Design an amazing product that your customer can immediately see is superior and you'll have a much better time competing for sales. I've messed up a bunch of times in my own business and having a clearly superior product is what has allowed me to endure and overcome those mistakes.

Consider raising your prices. You have good sales but you can make a lot more profit if you carefully raise your prices when it is appropriate. From reading your thread, the sense that I got at multiple points was that you were chasing a high monthly sales number. This doesn't make sense in my mind. For example, if you sell 100 units of a product for $50 each and make 10% margin on it, you have sales of $5000 and a profit of $500. If you increase the price by $5 so that the product costs $55, you might only sell 80 units. This would mean sales of $4400, but your profit would be $800 (80 units x $10 profit / unit). You've increased your overall profit by 60%. This is a simplified example and I am sure you are not new to this concept. But I still wanted to stress this to you since I think you can squeeze a lot more profit from your business. From my own experience, sometimes raising your price does NOT have a negative effect on sales. We can speculate why this is the case but I know that this does happen.

Anyway, I hope this was encouraging and helpful for you! Best of luck!!

 

[SparksCW]

Oh yeah, I remembered I have the .com for my domain and my top products aren't sold in the USA. Interesting....

To be honest at the minute my site is probably much more geared to the US anyway, the UK market is only just catching on!

Watch This Space. (might be a while, I have no idea how to set up and sell to the USA!)

 

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[nomeus]

it's just going to cost a fair bit of money in Magento modules

Why would you use Magento? Do you see any specific advantages? I use opencart right now for my site, its free, with lots of resources and easy to create custom modules for it.

I started with magento, but even the basic install on (poorly configured) VPS was quite slow, so I looked for something else.

 

[happybhoy]

Great man. Competing on value can't be a bad thing in the long run.

 

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[DWX]

Are you dumb or just pretending to be dumb?

How is not fixing site, therefore increasing conversion rates, not increasing sales? Did You know that 3% conversion rate is better than 2% conversion rate? Do you know what conversion rate is? From your progress thread, its clear that you didn't even got that far. 1000 visitors with 2% CR is 20 sales, same visitors with 3% CR is 30 sales. That means increasing sales.
Engaging in social media is getting more traffic, therefore MORE SALES.

SparksCW just increased the revenue by 270%, and you, someone who doesn't know how fixing site might help increasing sales, say that SparksCW will not increase his sales? WTF?

I agree with this.

Any form of optimization that improves conversions is always worth spending time, energy and even money on. Testing and tweaking is the name of the game.

 

[Fernando Cordero]

I too want to get into the e-commerce world, i find it fascinating and really fun. I would love to start with amazon since its such a huge site and it has alot of visitors every month so i know my product would be seen by some people.

Right now im waiting on some samples from china but just testing the waters, thankfully i found about a guru of this stuff that can mentor me and knows alot of stuff about amazon.

 

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[Tallphil]

A lot of my products are sent direct from distributors, however I only have a few key distributors and they only send direct as we've worked with them for a long time so I trust them.

The biggest problem we get is selling something that is out of stock at the distributor, its very rare for us due to the above, but with other companies it's a lot more common and that's the biggest issue you'll have with inventory. We do stock a lot of the most common sellers and we buy in clearance/bulk stock if we can save money.

If you are importing then you have no choice but to hold stock, and I would suggest keeping good stocks and making sure your inventory is accurate so if it sells out the customer either can't buy it, or they are warned that it's out of stock and there will be a delay.

Just wanted to say that you're doing a really great job! Thank you for the value provided in this thread and best of luck!

 

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