Hello, My current situation is that I have some money set aside that I could use to invest in a venture that could hopefully earn income, income that I hope will enable me to survive. The plan could be to start small, bootstrap, and then reinvest my earnings to make for a bigger site (or other venture), to get a loan to help me, to maybe share profits with the programmer, etc. However, before I get started, I have several important questions: 1) If you own an e-commerce site, how much does it make? (Or, alternatively) 2) How much money would you expect to make - for perhaps a typical run-of the mill site? 3) How much would it cost to set up a site with interactive graphics - e.g. Flash, Javascript - for e-commerce purposes? 4) Can you potentially get a loan for starting up an e-venture? 5) Would it be acceptable to give the programmer(s) a down-payment, and then split the profits between us - or would programmers generally be unwilling to do this? 6) Could you advertise your site in your signature or elsewhere on various product-related forums - or is that considered spam? Answering any of these questions would be helpful, but if you have any tips or anything else to add, I am more thean willing to listen. Thank you.
How long is a piece of string? This is pretty irrelevant to you as a question. It makes no difference to your potential business for anyone to tell you how much their business makes. It all depends on the popularity of products, the audience, the location, the customer service, the delivery options, the price, the market, the competition, the SEO ability of you and staff, cost of hosting, cost of supplies... there are so many variables that this question is really completely meaningless. You need to consider - and research - how much money your business can make given all the data you have available to you. What is your target audience? How large an area are you covering? What's your competition? Will you rely on SE position or will you be able to seek out that audience in groups or through targeted advertising? Again, there are a lot of things to consider. Someone selling hunting supplies in Alabama might be making $500k a year, while someone shipping iPhones around the world from New York might be making $100k. I did everything for my online store myself, and still do. It's fun, I enjoy creating graphics. But, don't get caught up in flashy nonsense. People are not that inclined to click on something just because it winks at them. If anything, I would suggest that people are more inclined to ignore these things just out of pure frustration with the pointlessness of it all. Think about this for a moment... if you are targeting people in the age group of 18 - 30 for your products, are they even going to see the flashy ad you spent $300 designing and implementing? Millions of people now use ad blockers, and this kind of thing is far more prevalent in the younger generations. So, the chances are good that more older people - and therefore not your target audience - will be seeing an ad that you're wasting money on. The same applies to on-site content. If you spend eight hours creating a great flashing image on your site, is it time worth spent when that image will probably slow down your page load times, and probably not give the audience anything more than a standard image would? As with the first question too, the cost all depends on the work and who is completing it. You might find someone out there willing to do your entire site for $100, someone else might charge you $1000. Potentially? Yes. Do you actually need to? No. These days you can probably find a dropshipper in almost any business giving you access to the products you want to see, without the headache of storage and stock management. I would look to that option first and foremost. Remember though, a dropshipper that demands you pay them anything upfront to be a seller for them is not making enough in sales alone, why is that? Only use dropship suppliers who are willing to give you access to their services without any monthly "fees" or supposed "admin costs". If their products sell and they are making money, they wouldn't need to charge their sellers for selling their products. I view most of those who request payment from the seller as scammers, and many others in the business do too. What else do you need to invest in? You can get the domain for $2, hosting for $10, a free shopping cart, connect it to your PayPal account and you're done and ready to go. You really don't need a programmer at all. I have never used one for any aspect of my business. Help is out there for everything from creating site hierarchy to implementing PayPal. Most shopping carts come with everything you need to be up and running within 24 hours. It all depends on the site and the community. Over the years I have found some great communities that allow me to link out in the sig. This is a great way to promote your business if you can find the right audience. You should probably think more about how you can sweeten the pot and make it better for them and the community though. If you find an excellent source of traffic and potential buyers then why not approach the forum admin and tell them you can give all their members 10% off with a discount code branded to them? Why not ask about making a partnership with them for the future and promoting each other to your own users? It makes them look awesome, makes you look great, gives you sales and profits, and is far more effective than a link in a sig. As for other advice, through my own experiences, I would say start off by keeping costs as low as possible. This should be common sense, but it's easy to get carried away. You can create a site and be selling products within a week, and with only $30 invested, but you need to really focus on how to get the most out of every $ you put in. Don't use a "managed solution" for a shopping cart. I made that mistake and I'm living with it now. Companies that offer a shopping cart with a domain on a shared system are generally harder to work with than just buying your own domain and hosting and installing a cart on it yourself - that goes for everything from accessing the server to SEO. Oh, and of course, being in the business I am in I would say always, ALWAYS write unique content, informative, in-depth, interesting and compelling. Never, ever, paste in descriptions for products from somewhere else. You are doomed to failure the moment you start pasting in content. The most important suggestion I can make is do your research. Using Bing webmaster tools you can search on keywords related to your business and narrow it down by country, and by time frame. Using this you can get a very rough idea of how many people are searching for what you plan to sell. Then you can calculate the profit you would expect to make on each item, and calculate how much of an income this would generate for you over a month. Then you need to work out how competitive the business is, and consider that it could take you three years or more to reach their level. Can you manage this business making only $100 a month for a year, selling those products, battling the competition? What can you offer that they can't? I know it's a lot to take in, it is a very strange learning experience, but it can be very rewarding if you're willing to work hard and invest over the long-term. Don't expect to be making a full-time income from this in the next year, or even the next two years. It takes time and dedication. Good luck, I hope some of this has helped at least a little