Hello, I have been a fan of online e-commerce stores for some time now. The great thing about them is they are cheap to start and can potentially earn you a lot of cash!!!! In my experiment I am going to see if its possible to generate $5000 in sales a month, starting with only $150. Now, first thing is first I need to chose a niche to go in. From what I have learned in the past, anything that women buy, will do pretty good in the web simply because Women love buying stuff. I thought that fragrances would be a great niche to start in. I started off heading to godaddy.com and trying to get the best domain I could (not much in the fragrance niche) and ended up finding www.cologneandperfumez.com - I thought this was a good domain because it has my two main keywords in it, "cologne" and "perfume". Next I needed to find a good e-commerce platform to hold the structure of my store. I have used many e-commerce solutions from aspdotnetstorefront to oscommerce. One that I havent tried was volusion so I headed to www.volusion.com and chose a plan. Now, their prices are a little high for only a $150 investment, but I thought I could start out small and maybe expand if I needed to. I ended up buying the bronze package which allows 100 products (good start). The bronze package was $90. So that puts me at $60 left in my budget. Now that I have my store, I need products! I found a great wholesaler of designer fragrances and got the top 50 mens products and top 50 womens products. I easily downloaded the products and imported them into my store. Since this wholesaler was so good, the prices were amazingly low. I was able to add 20% to the cost and still have the lowest prices out of all my competitors. Most people know that without traffic there are no sales so i need a way to get some decent traffic to my site to start making some cash!! I headed to yahoo products and set up an account for my store. I put $50 in the yahoo account to see if I could get some good qaulity traffic from that. So $90-$50= $30 left in my budget (getting low!). The rest of the $30 was used for adwords advertising which as you can see from the screenshots below didnt really do crap. This is probably my fault because I am not to good with adwords advertising. It has been about 2 weeks since I started getting some traffic from yahoo and here are some stats for my store. I have easily already made the $50 back from advertising along with a couple hundred more. Here is a recent screenshot of my sales. Here is a screenshot of the stats from yahoo search marketing (yahoo products) sales. Not bad conversion ratio! Here is a general look at my ROI tracking. As you can see I have done some craigslist marketing (didnt seem to work or be effective. I also wrote a couple of articles about buying cologne and perfume and some reviews of cologne and perfume. So far these have not been effective but I will keep writing articles to gain some SEO for my site. I will be updating this thread periodically and updating you on my challenge and whether I can do it or not.
Ok, I think its time for an update on my ecomerce store Cologne and Perfume. I have completed my challenge and just passed the $1000 mark today. Below is a screenshot of my orders for feburary and you can see my sales reached $1004 or so. I am happy to break my challenege and have set a new challenge of $2000 in sales a month. Since my last post I have upgraded my store to hold 1000 products. The sales have been lower than before when I had the top 100 products sold by my wholesaler. I dont think this is why my sales are low because I ran all the products from the wholesaler through the amazon api and grabbed the top 1000 selling products from amazon.com. I have also funded my yahoo products account more money to keep gaining sales from them since my conversion rate has been so well with them...why change it! In the future I plan on adding more sources of traffic like shopping.com, pricegrabber.com, etc. Here is the screenshot of my orders for feb. Here is a screenshot of the analytics for the site.
This is a great thread and very timely as I have just set up my own store. Will be watching it very closely.
Ok, its time for an update. Since my last post I have been very busy with the site. My sales are soaring and the site is soaring as well. I have been getting lots of traffic from google and other sources. If anyone would like to blog about our site, please feel free to PM me if you have any questions. My story is pretty amazing as I am only 22 years old and still in college and have started many online business, this one being very successful. I have since starting advertising on shopzilla.com as well as still advertising on yahoo products. I am now averaging about $1000 in sales a day and loving it! I am now making this post from my new XPS laptop that I got from my new business - I will post some screenshots once I download a screenshot program. I have also added all my products to Amazons seller central and doing good there too. CologneandPErfumez.com has become a huge success and I would like to thank DP and all its members. Visit www.cologneandperfumez.com for cheap cologne with great service!
Ok peeps. HEre is a screenshot if my orders so far for march. As you can see, its a huge improvement from last month. Hopefully next month will be even better!!!
That's really awesome! Do you add product from the affiliate wholesaler? I used to do the affiliate all of them need to redirect to their store. But I had visited your site, it looks like people can complete their checkout in your site. I think this is very good. How can you do that?
Hi, Really great work, i will try to do it and will see the results. Thanks for sharing it Regards, Srinivas.
That's great work thor22. Are you stocking and posting the products yourself or is it a dropshipping arrangement you have with the wholesaler?