Ask me anything about eCommerce (2012)

[Israel@zoom]

Hello Everyone,

First post here. I have been building sites for over ten years and am a partner is a design and development studio.

Re Magento: We have used is for many websites, it is great for larger stores and can handle many retail locations if that is the goal. The learning curve is higher on Magento.

Hosting for Magento, is more resource heavy on servers, so we always host Magento sites on high end servers.

There are several other solutions in place like PrestaShop and WordPress. We are now launching a competitor to Clearlycontacts using an advanced WP eCommerce site.

Please feel free to ask me any questions you have and i will be glad to add my 02 cents.

Thanks.

 

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[biophase]

I appreciate it. do you ever import? id prefer to stay in the us because I dont want to sell junk. thanks again

Yes I import all my products.

 

[GravyBoat]

Yes I import all my products.

Bio,

When first starting out, how did you monitor the quality control of your products? I assume you ordered samples from different MFG's until you were satisfied? Can you throw out any tips and tricks about this to avoid problems with MFG's? What would you do if you got a nice sample, then 6 months down the road they started shipping lower quality products?

Thanks again!!

Gravy

 

[McCoyH]

Yes I import all my products.

I appreciate you replying so fast man, thanks!

When importing, I figure I need to find a manny in asia (probably on alibaba), contact them, dig in deep and find out who the real manny is and contact them. I figure I'll ask them what are all of the products they can export to me with a price and MOQ list...

Is this a good way of going about this?

 

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[eroos2188]

Hello everyone,

I am new here I have decided to get in the Fastlane. A few months ago I started Dane Maxwell's program (the Foundation) on starting a SaaS business. I am really interested in the eCommerce market and want to build a tool to help eCommerce businesses. I have been trying to learn as much by reading threads like this, but really need to talk to some successful eCommerce business owners to get a better understanding of the problems and frustrations they face on regular basis. I am struggling to find owners that are interested in helping. Are there associations for specific niches? If anyone is interested in helping, I'd love to have a quick chat.

 

[Ajita]

Hi Biophase,

Thank you for sharing so much knowledge on this thread. Here is a question I have:

How do you determine how successful/in demand a current product on the market is? For example, I am interested in modifying an existing product to address flaws in existing products. Since I'm not completely reinventing the product, simply modifying it to offer increased value, I feel like I can get a decent idea of demand based on what the market currently has to offer. The only statistic I have to judge this with is the amount of Amazon reviews a product currently has. What is the best way to do this?

Thank you for your time.

 

[chrisbiz4444]

I don't know about this. I only use Paypal's standard payment method. I don't know if Paypal can even do what you want. I'm thinking that you need a real payment processor.

You will need a license and pay taxes.

I don't know what the proper keywords would be either. Sorry.

Is a license required to start a eCommerce store ? I know some company's require it to get product... Also tax needs to be paid even though the business is online right? and when should you register your eCommerce store as an actual business? If so when, I know some stores just don't pan out.

 

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[wilddog]

Biophase,

You said you channeled all your 1800 numbers to your personal phone. What did you use as a voicemail greeting? I'm going to assume a generic greeting that doesn't mention the business name?

 

[Phones]

Biophase,

You said you channeled all your 1800 numbers to your personal phone. What did you use as a voicemail greeting? I'm going to assume a generic greeting that doesn't mention the business name?

This. Unfortunately Android doesn't have the capabilities to have an IVR or own VoiceMail system.
I need to have three numbers for my country (one for each main mobile network), I already have a raspberry PI so I think I'll set up my own Voice System when I have the time.

 

[jpa0827]

Bio,

Do you still think it is best to have a new website built around a specific type of product and eventually expand vertically into a market if possible? For example: Lets say we are picking a niche in outdoor products. I know a lot of sites are consolidating into the Wayfair type model as previously mentioned here. What is your opinion in regards to starting extremely niche over maybe somewhere in the middle?

For example:

General Category: All outdoors (skiing, snowboarding, camping, hunting, fishing, snowmobile...etc.)
Niche 1: Complete outdoor sportsman (fishing gear, hunting gear, camping..etc.)
Niche 2: Camping gear (tents, firestarters, camping grills...etc)
Niche 3: Tents only

Which level do you like?

 

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[chrisbiz4444]

Bio,

(Or anyone else that has experience)

If setup on big commerce how much does the average eCommerce store cost to start-up? Also, how much time on average will it take to manage the store per-day if started using only drop-ship? I plan on starting this while working and then eventually devoting full time as it grows. Unrealistic? Or possible to start and grow a eCommerce store while working a "job".

 

[Nebojsa]

Bio,

(Or anyone else that has experience)

If setup on big commerce how much does the average eCommerce store cost to start-up? Also, how much time on average will it take to manage the store per-day if started using only drop-ship? I plan on starting this while working and then eventually devoting full time as it grows. Unrealistic? Or possible to start and grow a eCommerce store while working a "job".

The cost varies from 500$ or maybe less for a wordpress store, which is easy to setup, easy to play with, manage, etc.
I'm running a store on magento and I charge clients around $2000 for setup. You need experienced guys to make changes to the store,
it might take a while to get a handle. Once you learn it, you'll not want to settle for any other solution, either prestashop, oscommerce.
It is robust, can handle lots of products, has integrated optimizations, easy to scale it.
The partner spends around 6 hours every day to manage the store, which I find a lot, but she's not skilled. There's always a way to optimize your working habits.

It should be possible to start and grow ecommerce, even if you have a job (it's all about automation and systems).

 

[3things]

Bio,

(Or anyone else that has experience)

If setup on big commerce how much does the average eCommerce store cost to start-up? Also, how much time on average will it take to manage the store per-day if started using only drop-ship? I plan on starting this while working and then eventually devoting full time as it grows. Unrealistic? Or possible to start and grow a eCommerce store while working a "job".

On the latter part of your question, before I got into affiliate marketing, i worked roughly 10 hour days at my job, but also owned two ecommerce sites that were doing ok. One sold a specific brand of knives, the other a specific brand of laptop bag - about 25 items for each site, so 50 in total. Combined they were doing around $6k-$10k/month in sales just from organic traffic.

I stocked all of the inventory for both sites in my house, and used to go home from work, print off all my orders for the day, process the payments (by hand, i had a cc terminal as i got processing through my hsbc biz bank account) and pack the orders up, ready to take to work with me and ship the following day.

Other than the packing/shipping of orders, after the initial setup neither site was labour intensive - just the usual couple of emails a day about where's my order, this broke, etc etc. With the fact most of those processes can be made much more efficient these days, I'd say you should easily be able to run a single ecomm store in your spare time outside of work - dropship is easy as all you're doing is emailing orders each night, you don't even have to pack/walk to the post office like i was doing!

 

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[ddzc]

Hi Kenric,

I have a few questions;

1 - What photography set up do you recommend and use as the bare minimum for high quality photos of your products?
2 - Do you individually shrinkwrap (if applicable) and prepare the shipping and boxes yourself for each individual product sold and shipped out? I'm assuming you get massive quantities from your factory so your products don't arrive to you single packages and ready to be shipped out the way you received it from the factory. Where do you recommend purchasing shipping material and boxes for a relatively cheap price?
3 - What machines, equipment and software programs do you recommend for shipping labels and UPC label makers and machines?

Thanks!

 

[biophase]

Bio,

When first starting out, how did you monitor the quality control of your products? I assume you ordered samples from different MFG's until you were satisfied? Can you throw out any tips and tricks about this to avoid problems with MFG's? What would you do if you got a nice sample, then 6 months down the road they started shipping lower quality products?

Thanks again!!

Gravy

It's tough to monitor your stuff because you get it all in one shipment. So you hope that the shipment is good. You should open up each box and make sure the product is to your spec each time. I don't go through each one, but I randomly check some from each shipment.

You sort of get screwed if the product is not to spec. I just ask for some money back. You can ship it back to them, but they don't want. If it's sellable, I still sell it.

 

[biophase]

I appreciate you replying so fast man, thanks!

When importing, I figure I need to find a manny in asia (probably on alibaba), contact them, dig in deep and find out who the real manny is and contact them. I figure I'll ask them what are all of the products they can export to me with a price and MOQ list...

Is this a good way of going about this?

This is answered in other threads. I believe it's discussed in a few importing threads on the forum here.

 

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[biophase]

Hi Biophase,

Thank you for sharing so much knowledge on this thread. Here is a question I have:

How do you determine how successful/in demand a current product on the market is? For example, I am interested in modifying an existing product to address flaws in existing products. Since I'm not completely reinventing the product, simply modifying it to offer increased value, I feel like I can get a decent idea of demand based on what the market currently has to offer. The only statistic I have to judge this with is the amount of Amazon reviews a product currently has. What is the best way to do this?

Thank you for your time.

I would use Amazon's sales rankings. But it's still hard to tell. Some products can rank #1 in a small niche and not have alot of traffic. For instance, my soap thread, I got the product ranked #1 in Amazon for a certain search term and I was only seeing 100 visits a day. That's a tiny niche.

 

[biophase]

Is a license required to start a eCommerce store ? I know some company's require it to get product... Also tax needs to be paid even though the business is online right? and when should you register your eCommerce store as an actual business? If so when, I know some stores just don't pan out.

You don't need a license. Some wholesalers don't ask for one. You can run the business through your social security number. You still have to pay taxes. I would register a business once it started making some money and you think it's going to succeed.

 

[biophase]

Biophase,

You said you channeled all your 1800 numbers to your personal phone. What did you use as a voicemail greeting? I'm going to assume a generic greeting that doesn't mention the business name?

The 800 numbers rang to the cell phone, but if I didn't pick up the cell phone they went to their voicemail. Not the cell phone's voicemail, but the phone number's voicemail. That way you can have different greetings for each phone number.

 

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[biophase]

Bio,

Do you still think it is best to have a new website built around a specific type of product and eventually expand vertically into a market if possible? For example: Lets say we are picking a niche in outdoor products. I know a lot of sites are consolidating into the Wayfair type model as previously mentioned here. What is your opinion in regards to starting extremely niche over maybe somewhere in the middle?

For example:

General Category: All outdoors (skiing, snowboarding, camping, hunting, fishing, snowmobile...etc.)
Niche 1: Complete outdoor sportsman (fishing gear, hunting gear, camping..etc.)
Niche 2: Camping gear (tents, firestarters, camping grills...etc)
Niche 3: Tents only

Which level do you like?

I think the niche 3 would be the easiest to get started. You'd ideally have the word Tents in your domain and you can concentrate alot of content into a site like that. You could probably get sales within a month.

Niche 2 would be tough because you begin to spread out your SEO, PPC and content work. I think sales would start slow, but you could have a nice store in a couple years.

Niche 1 is like competing against Cabela's or Bass Pro. I think it would be almost impossible without funding.

I don't know what I'd do. I know that I could do Niche 1 easily, but it's limited in products and potential. Niche 2 would probably be more profitable in the future, but would take more work to get off the ground.

 

[biophase]

Bio,

(Or anyone else that has experience)

If setup on big commerce how much does the average eCommerce store cost to start-up? Also, how much time on average will it take to manage the store per-day if started using only drop-ship? I plan on starting this while working and then eventually devoting full time as it grows. Unrealistic? Or possible to start and grow a eCommerce store while working a "job".

If you know some coding, you can get a bigcommerce store up for $25/mo within a day. You would use their SSL and Paypal for checkout. There would be no other costs. If you just managed orders, it could be less than 10 minutes a day.

The hard part is all the work you put in to get a decent looking store and adding good content and then promoting it.

You can easily do this while working full time.

 

[biophase]

Hi Kenric,

I have a few questions;

1 - What photography set up do you recommend and use as the bare minimum for high quality photos of your products?
2 - Do you individually shrinkwrap (if applicable) and prepare the shipping and boxes yourself for each individual product sold and shipped out? I'm assuming you get massive quantities from your factory so your products don't arrive to you single packages and ready to be shipped out the way you received it from the factory. Where do you recommend purchasing shipping material and boxes for a relatively cheap price?
3 - What machines, equipment and software programs do you recommend for shipping labels and UPC label makers and machines?

Thanks!

First, let me say that Fotofuze is awesome and you just need an iphone to get good pics.

Bare minimum, assuming you have small products. You basically need a white background and white lighting.

For the background, you can use just plain printer paper. Tape it to the wall with the bottom curved so there's no bottom corner.

Get 1-2 good quality lights with a white bulb.

Get something to diffuse the lights, like a white photo umbrella, or white cloth.

Use any decent camera, iphone, point and shoot.

Put it into Fotofuze to remove the background.

 

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[biophase]

Hi Kenric,

I have a few questions;

2 - Do you individually shrinkwrap (if applicable) and prepare the shipping and boxes yourself for each individual product sold and shipped out? I'm assuming you get massive quantities from your factory so your products don't arrive to you single packages and ready to be shipped out the way you received it from the factory. Where do you recommend purchasing shipping material and boxes for a relatively cheap price?

3 - What machines, equipment and software programs do you recommend for shipping labels and UPC label makers and machines?

Thanks!

You try to get the product from the factory packaged so it's ready to ship when it arrives. All I do is take it out of the box from China and put it into another box. I don't repackage anything.

Uline has decent prices, but a local company here beats them in prices so I use them. For shipping labels, I use a Zebra printer (the one that JasonR threw off the balcony) that prints Fedex and USPS labels. But you can use a laser printer or inkjet.

 

[PHD]

Fotofuze is awesome, thanks for the recommendation!

 

[ddzc]

Thank you sir

 

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[ddzc]

Kenric,

I wouldn't mind asking you for your opinion for a starter.

I'm looking in to a niche. This niche has thousands of different types products. There's a particular type I'm aiming towards and there's maybe 50-60 different models for this type...I would like to test out. I've done some analysis on ebay and it's quite popular but there's also quite a bit of competition also by big players with tons of feedback who's been around for a while.

I can get the product for about $20 and it resells for $40+. I found a really good supplier in this industry overseas and I wouldn't mind testing an order. They want $500 to test 3 products out but they advised it's refundable if I order again and hit their MOQ The MOQ is 100 pcs, I talked them down to 50. I wouldn't mind testing 4 models of the same type of product, but that's a 4K risk, so I might test 1 which is 1K. Would you take a risk in this situation? I obviously can't set up an ecommerce store, so I would be testing the sales of this product on ebay and maybe amazon. I'm not sure if people would buy off me from Amazon if I'm a new guy in town with 1 product in store. I'll create a brand name from the beginning but nonetheless, I can't start an ecommerce store and would have to start off on ebay and amazon.

What are your thoughts and suggestions for the situation I'm in?

Thanks

 

[GravyBoat]

I can't start an ecommerce store

Why can't you start an ecommerce store?? Just say "Out of Stock" until you get more in?

 

[chrisbiz4444]

If you know some coding, you can get a bigcommerce store up for $25/mo within a day. You would use their SSL and Paypal for checkout. There would be no other costs. If you just managed orders, it could be less than 10 minutes a day.

The hard part is all the work you put in to get a decent looking store and adding good content and then promoting it.

You can easily do this while working full time.

Do you think using WordPress is a bad idea? Or should I actually have a website built?

 

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[biophase]

Kenric,

I wouldn't mind asking you for your opinion for a starter.

I'm looking in to a niche. This niche has thousands of different types products. There's a particular type I'm aiming towards and there's maybe 50-60 different models for this type...I would like to test out. I've done some analysis on ebay and it's quite popular but there's also quite a bit of competition also by big players with tons of feedback who's been around for a while.

I can get the product for about $20 and it resells for $40+. I found a really good supplier in this industry overseas and I wouldn't mind testing an order. They want $500 to test 3 products out but they advised it's refundable if I order again and hit their MOQ The MOQ is 100 pcs, I talked them down to 50. I wouldn't mind testing 4 models of the same type of product, but that's a 4K risk, so I might test 1 which is 1K. Would you take a risk in this situation? I obviously can't set up an ecommerce store, so I would be testing the sales of this product on ebay and maybe amazon. I'm not sure if people would buy off me from Amazon if I'm a new guy in town with 1 product in store. I'll create a brand name from the beginning but nonetheless, I can't start an ecommerce store and would have to start off on ebay and amazon.

What are your thoughts and suggestions for the situation I'm in?

Thanks

Honestly the only thing I thought of when reading your post is that I would never import something for $20 that sells for $40.

The margins are too low. Can you sell it for $80?

 

[biophase]

Do you think using WordPress is a bad idea? Or should I actually have a website built?

I would go with a real shopping cart? Why so you want to go with wordpress?