Established web site for sale

Hi mkassest,
I apologise if there are some forum rules I haven't followed, but I wasn't aware I had to state if it was an auction or not, but it is not. I'm not interested in having an auction.

Regarding sales for April, it is low compared to March, and as you rightly point out, we are almost half way through April. However there two things I should point out.

All three months of Jan Feb and Mar 2007, are up on 2006. Secondly, last April (2006), I had $120 in sales, from 3 sales. Whos to know if I don't get another two sales in the next two weeks.

Take march for example, by far a lot bigger than last march, over $300 yet this came from 5 sales. I don't know for sure, but it was the same time I added an entire new line of products, AND added my product list to Froogle (which is now Google Base).

The other thing is Easter, many people went on vacation.

I wouldn't say there is a slowdown in conversions, in fact that's consistent, but there is a definite decrease in people looking for gifts around this time, it then picks up in the next couple of months, takes a slight breather after summer, before going nuts around Nov -Dec!

If you want more traffic though, just market more.

Lastly, I don't agree that $5000 is steep. I'm sorry.

Best Wishes
Dean

 

Dean,

Ok, I understand.

Thanks for the info and good luck with the sale!

Regards,
mkassets

 

Hi All,
I thought of another option too as I feel people have a lot of questions which can be difficult to remember etc.

I have an MSN chat (windows messenger) account, so I'm more than happy to get on live with that and answer questions that way.

Just let me know

Cheers
Dean

 

Hi All,
I just wanted to add a sale I just had this morning to demonstrate the value of customer service.

This customer first bought last year, and their order was $24.42. Since then and up until this morning, they have spent $335.64 at my web site.

This is the value of customer service. When they requested info, I gave it. When they made an order, I dealt with them in a timely fashion, and then followed up after to ensure they received their order, and were happy with their shopping experience.

Apparantly (according to many of my cusomters emails, this does not happen to often with other sites)

I have blocked out any inofrmation that pertains to the cusomter themselves for privacy reasons

Here is the email of my order



Here is the order form on my supplier (dropshipper)



And the receipt they sent me




And here is my after sale email to them.

 

My highest offer so far has been US$2500

 

Thanks for the offer Dean. You sound like a reasonable person from your responses here. I did look at the site, and it has a nice little niche.

You've said that the average NET income is $138 / month. That's $1,656 per year. You're asking, $5,000, which is 3x Income. That's a P/E of 3, which is fairly reasonable for a business that is to scale. Is my math correct here? This is an organic business, so it could probably be said that you ARE to scale.

Also, are you disclosing total revenues so we can see the margins?

A few questions:

1) Any worries that the customer base would change / shrink after you sold the business?
2) Anything particular in how you run the site that would be challenging for another person to take over?
3) Anything you see in the outlook for this niche that is particularly negative and should be disclosed (like, a major competitor just moved into this space...)

Thanks

 

Hi purdue512,

The NET income of $138/month is calculated from the time I had my first sale on 29th Nov 2005.

At that time, my site had only been live for a few weeks, and I was really only in the baby steps of building my linking campaign, submitting to directories and articles sites, press releases and so on.

But when I take the average NET income of the last 12 months, it comes to $157, and when I take it from the last 6 months it comes to $197.

(My spreadsheet from my original post 'income and traffic report' shows total revenue and total net profits - however PM me as I have compiled a very thorough report and screenshots with much more information - and you'll also need to PM me your email address.)

I put this down to the increase in traffic from Yahoo and Google as my link building campaign starts to pay off. Originally, all my traffic was from MSN because they are the easiest to rank highly in, and it wasn't just home page, it was main category pages such as 'eagle figurines', 'elephant figurines', 'dolphin figurines' and so on. There is a long list of these category pages that get plenty of searches that I rank high in MSN for.

So... I believe that the traffic will only increase further due to the increase in Google rankings for more of these big category search terms. I would say that Yahoo is inbetween, in that I rank in top ten for some (such as giraffe figurines), and not yet for others.

1) The customer base isn't going to be concerned with a change of ownership, and this is mainly due to the fact that most of them are seekers of gifts. This is the primary reason someone comes to my site. Email campaigns are not a big thing with me and I think I have only ever sent 3 or 4 in the business's history. All they want is good service.

in fact as I am writing this I have received an email from a customer who order two days ago, and this is a reply to my email thanking them for the order

Dean

Your ordering page asks for my name as it appears on the credit card. That person is our administrator who is Guy (surname withheld by me for privacy reasons), but I am the one actually placing the order as Guy has nothing to do with our orders other than being the name on the credit card. Maybe you need a line asking for name of person ordering if other than name on credit card. So please put down Paul (surname withheld) as the name on our account if possible.

Thanks for all the new additions to your collection. Looking forward to ordering more as time goes by.

Also noticed you were using the pictures we sent from our library display on your home page. Looks almost as good as it does here in person. Your figurines are part of our permanent decorations and we hope to continue to order more and expand our display in the days ahead.

Paul (surname withheld)
Bellevue Library


It's pretty simpe really.


2) I have my site set up through a host with Cpanel. I built my site using X-Site Pro (in fact I use this to build all my sites) if you need more info you can
visit http://www.thedropshippingcourse.com/Finding_a_Host.html,
If you don't have X-Site Pro (although I highly recommend it), the web site can be exported out of X-Site and into Front Page or Dreamweaver or any other site builder.

I use paypal's shopping cart, I just found it the easiest for my level of knowledge in all that technical stuff. You can use any other cart if you want, it will just take time in setting up.

The ordering process is extremely easy - no probs there.
The only other thing required of you is to monitor suppliers for items that go out of stock or are discontinued. One supplier does this for you, by sending you an email for any product in your list (you set this up on their site) that goes out of stock or is being discontinued. I then just go to my site and change the buy now button and code to a 'out of stock'. or if the item is being discontinued, I just remove it from my site. This may happen a couple of times a month.

I submit most of my products to Froogle (Google Base), and so also have a stock list of my major suppliers items.

( if you have children pay them to go through your suppliers stock lists)

Another supplier has no intentions of going out of stock for the items I sell, and this supplier makes up maybe over 50% of my orders. The good thing about what they sell is that most of my competitors don't sell them either.

Time commitments for this site is probably 1-3 hours a month, however if you plan to marktet even more, you may still continue on with some link building such as writing the odd article, and finding some linking partners and so on.

3) I don't see anything that would be negative. In fact I have seen many come and go in the time I've been doing it. There are about 3 or 4 major competitors that I have kept my eye on thew whole time and I just try and do something that they do not. It may be offering slightly cheaper shipping, slightly cheaper product, a guarantee, a better and more efficient web site (some web sites are very poor for naviagation) etc.

I also find that with a competitor that ranks higher than me, I just find out how they are doing it (keywords, links baks to them from other sites etc) and then try and copy it or better it. This is how I got #1 on all 3 engines for 'wildlife figurines'. Do this for all other major terms (categories) such as the ones I mentioned above, and your traffic could easily increase 5 to 10 fold.

I hope I've answered all your questions but
PM me if you need more info as I said above, and include an email so I can send you the compilation.

Best Wishes
Dean

 

$68.10 - 3 orders, Net profit (after ALL costs)
$7.50 - Text link ads
$6.36 - Adsense
$2.50 - Art.com
------------------
$84.46 - Total Net Profit to date April

 

I've decided to throw in some extras here, as we really want to shift focus on to other projects.

So far I've offered
www.wildfigurines.com
There is also a Blog http://wildfigurines.blogspot.com/
and squidoo lens http://www.squidoo.com/wildfigurines that comes with it.

I'm also going to throw in
http://www.thedropshippingcourse.com/

This is how I built Wild Figurines, step for step. This site started 4th Oct 2006 and up until now has made $47.10 in adsense, $49.25 from affiliate commissions. I have paid $5.82 in PPC in this time period. I have not had any time to do anything with this site, but I'm sure with decent amount of traffic it can do well. Currently it probably only gets 50 visits a month

I am also going to throw in the following domain registered until 26th Oct 2010.
www.thescentedcandlemall.com
There is no web sitre attached and so this is just a domain, but there is a huge demand for scented candles with little real competition. I did all the research late last year and was going to start it with a partner but the partner fell through.

Finally, I will throw in X-Site Pro. Not my version , but I will deduct the price of X-Site Pro ($197) off, as I have built all my sites using X-Site Pro and it would make the whole process much much simpler if the new owner had X-Site Pro.

If anyone would like ot discuss through MSN chat, or Skype, please PM me. I live in Australia, so I am 13.5 hours ahead of New York

Dean

 

I have sold another Text Link Ad on my site. The beauty of earning income from Text Link Ads is that it is PASSIVE income.

Here are some screenshots.







As there are 8 of these spots available, you can see potential of having a good PR and good traffic. People are prepared to pay to have their links on your site.

This site is still for sale, read above to find out what else you get

 

Dean,

All I can say is good luck, great website - love your business idea and business model. I am sure you will reach 5000$ for this business (not just a website).

I myself will venture into this type of business and I think your business model is a great example of how Ecom websites should be.

Regards,
RJ

 

I would like to just add that I have four orders now (3 since the quoted post by mkassets), at total of $139.40, for April. I hope this clears up this concern.

To add to that, I have also sold a second text-link ad, which also adds income.

Dean

 

I'm based in the UK would your suppliers ship here? I would be looking to employ someone for the US admin if your current employee is interested.

 

Hi Paul,
I'm a bit confused.
My suppliers (well at least the main ones), only ship to the US, but that's OK, because over 90% of my traffic is from the US.
I don't see any point in targeting overseas markets.

Now with that said, I live in Australia, and if your question was more based on whether you can open accounts with my suppliers because you're based in the UK, then YES, you can.

Finally, I don't employ anyone, although I do have someone in India who I thoroughly recommend for any admin work. He comes at $5/hour but is worth it. I have used him for many jobs outside of Wild Figurines

Best Regards
Dean

 

A sale on the last day of April brings income for Arpil to

Gross sales - $171.10
Adsense - $ 9.06
Text-Link Ads - $ 9.20
Art.com - $ 2.50
-----------------------
Total $191.86

Less
Wholesale $ 74.82
Paypal fees $ 7.31
-----------------------
Total $ 82.13
-----------------------
Total NET Profit $109.73

Time allocated to sales and maintenance for the month of April - 2 hours.

Highest offer so far US$2500

 

Sorry to confuse you, I was wondering about expanding to the UK market as well as continuing the US business since figurines are popular in the UK.

I would want to continue in the US but also look to widening the customer base. If your suppliers would not ship to the UK then I would struggle with this. I just wanted to claify whether I woudl be able to.

Paul

 

Hi Paul,
Ok, I understand now.

There's three ways to look at this.

First of all, there is a supplier in the UK called Country Artists. There is not much competition for their products in the US because they are based in the UK. Meaning, only those with the capabilities to buy stock themselves can sell them. You can use them for sure.

I would also suggest there would be other suppliers based in the UK based on this, plus based on the fact that you said figurines are popular in the UK

Second, I use seven drop-shippers, and of those, there are at least two that I know of that ship overseas (there may be more), however I simply do not exercise that right. I just keep it simple and say to customers - US only.
I also have a dropshipper based in New Zealand that ships all over the world.

Third, there are plenty of dropshippers of figurines that I haven't even touched yet, as dropshipping is becoming big business. I have simply not been able to expand due to other commitments.

One thing in my favour with my web site is that it is established in the search engines, and this means you can basically do what you like because you know you'll get traffic. Find more suppliers - buy your own stock - etc

If you want, PM me and I'll send you a list of the suppliers I use and you can contact them if you wish.

Best
Dean

 

Here is an updated profit statement including April.

May's sales are not included