Does this sound stupid?.. Need your opinion.

I run an ecommerce site in a niche market.

I'm probably in the top 5 retailers of this particular product. But I want to take over more market share so I want to start another website to gain more customers.

I grew my main website to over $150k in sales in the first year and I'll probably double or triple that this year.

So my plan is to start another website as well. I will use a lot of the same techniques I used to grow my customer base for the main site. Particularly FB ads.

The other website will just have basic products, nothing as drastic as my main site. The difference is that I'll be able to cut my prices on my new site by 50% because I found a new supplier with better prices. So basically prices will be cut in half on the new site. My customers will love to this!

My concern is that I'll be taking customers from my main business and have them buying from the other site. They won't know because I'm going to run them as two seperate companies.

Anyone have experience running two sites within a niche market?

 

Just off the top of my head.... If its a totally different brand, has a slightly different ethos if you will, it should be ok I guess.

On one hand you have way better margins there. On the other hand, you sort of wind up competing with the yourself for SERPS. In and of itself its not really a terrible idea as they are both your companies.

Its not really an issue of brand dilution if you are doing something on a new domain with a new name.

Hope that helps a bit but out of the gate or without seeing the first one and knowing a few things I seem to have the same question you do.

Nigel

 

I don't think that sounds stupid at all. If they don't buy from one site, they will buy from the other. Either way, you make money.

Sounds like a great idea to me.