Hi,
Can you upload a screenshot of keywords that are used to find your site?
Kind regards,
Daniel
UK Dropship Business For Sale with Huge Potential
Fantastic looking site
http://www.sentientclothing.co.uk/
Closed
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- Bid History:
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- Offer History:
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- Listed:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:09:42 GMT
Accepted Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal, Escrow.com
Description
Hi
It is with great reluctance that I am putting this site up for sale, as it has only been up and running for a few months.
SentientClothing is a UK based (although can ship all over the world) site using probably the best dropshipper in the country, Devilwear. Devilwear are fantastic - if you order by 3.00pm they will ship the same day, and will handle all returns. They are currently expanding their range even further. At the moment, SentientClothing only sells the mens range, but could also sell women's and childrens.
The site itself is PR2. It is using the latest and greatest open source shopping cart, http://www.magentocommerce.com/. The site has been heavily customised, as you can see. Just the Manufacturers section in the left hand column took a programmer three weeks to develop, but is worth it for the shopping experience for the customer.
The site is currently setup to take Paypal Payments Pro (so the customer doesn't leave the site - this costs £20 per month, so up to you if you want to keep it), Paypal Standard and GoogleCheckout. Again, this was all set up by a programmer I employed. Most of the sales have been through Paypal, a couple through GoogleCheckout.
There has been very little promotion of the site until recently when I have started building backlinks, yet it has still made over £1400 (over $2100) in sales. I did a bit of PPC for a week shortly after the site went live to see if it would convert, and made a couple of sales. Otherwise, the site has generated 1835 organic visits alone, never mind referrals.
The site was live to take sales from 10th September (although development work contiunued into November), but because the domain had been sitting there "live" on the web for a couple of months, I think this helped with getting organic traffic.
The problem with the site is that the stock on there is not particularly up to date. I was badly let down by a programmer who was supposed to be setting up a feed from the dropshipper to the site so that the inventory was updated as close to live as possible. The programmer kept promising that it was nearly ready, the disappeared.
I would estimate that it would cost between $100 / $150 to set up a feed (using http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento_core_api and the dropshippers feed) and would be happy to pay half the costs of this).
Without this, the inventory does need updating. I have had to turn down £229.35 of sales so far because of this, which is very frustrating, but I don't have the funds to pay for the feed set up.
If you would like me to host the site for a year, then you would need to add $125 to the total price. If you are going to arrange your own hosting, ensure that your hosting company can handle Magento, as it needs an optimised server to run quickly.
The shipping has been set up to deliver worldwide, and has made sales to Europe, so the potential is huge.
Profit is estimated at around £350 so far. The markup on the products depends on the package you sign up for with the dropshipper, and can range between 20% and 90% (excluding the cheapest package).
The site has huge potential - it has shown that it can convert, has made plenty of sales for such a young site without promotion, and just needs a bit of marketing for it to take off, and the inventory bringing up to date.
The ONLY reason I am selling, is because I very much need the money. I run several other sites, and this is probably my most saleable asset.
Revenue Details
The revenue is generated through selling the products on the site, placing the order with the dropshipper with profit on the difference.
Total revenue is £1418, but over £200 of orders has been turned down because the stock on the site is not up to date.
Traffic Details
Organic traffic as detailed (one week of PPC at the start). Some referrals from other sites, but almost all organic.
Questions 16 public, 1 deleted
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:53:57 GMT
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:52:49 GMT
Hi Daniel
Thanks for your interest. Not sure it's a great idea to put the keywords in public display, so I can email you a screenshot if you want to PM me your email address?
What I would say is the majority of the top 100 keywords are product names, or designer names eg. the phrase "von zipper digitalism belt" got 15 hits, with bounce rate of 40% and avg time on site of 3:16 mins.
There's three terms that have had a three or four hits each which are what you would consider more popular search terms (along the lines of designer clothes for men) so it's starting to get that kind of traffic.
What I think that shows is that it's managed to get 1800 visitors purely on the site actually existing - just imagine if it actually gets marketed properly, with targetted keywords. I was holding off the SEO work until I got the products up to date, which never happened. There are still over 300 inbound links, and I have been working on these a bit more recently (including some PR4-PR9 links, we'll see if they have any impact!).
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other queries.
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:55:00 GMT
Sorry, just to add to the above - I did have some basic SEO work done (in October I think) tidying the site up and submitting to directories, which is where a lot of the inbound links are from - I can send spreadsheets of these plus keywords suggested by the SEO company who did it to the winning bidder. But I stopped the SEO work whilst I was waiting for the programmer to sort out the feeds for the product update.
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:01:55 GMT
please verify site access
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:54:18 GMT
It's now verified!
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:32:12 GMT
how much does the feed set up cost? that you mentioned you don't have the funds for...
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:09:18 GMT
Hi Sam
Originally my programmer was estimating $200 (which I had at the time), but as it turned out he didn't know what he was doing and tried to do it from scratch rather than using the built in system that Magento has combined with the dropshipper feed (http://www.devilwear.co.uk/store/dropship_export.php) he was probably overestimating.
I would expect someone on Rentacoder to be able to do it for $100, or max of $150 (that is my estimate, doesn't mean it's correct). Once the sale went through, I would be happy to pay half of the costs for it, if that's what the buyer wanted.
The clothes and accessories were originally input manually by someone in Romania I paid to do it.
The sunglasses and ski goggles were uploaded via CSV, which would also be an option in getting the clothes on there.
Of course, the products could be updated manually. The dropshipper sends out a daily email with new products, temporarily out of stock products, and permanently out of stock products.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you need any other information.
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:14:54 GMT
What is the percentage profit on the goods you purchase from the dropshipper?
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:17:54 GMT
Send the PM to you for some queries.
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:17:35 GMT
Hi mittmoo
The profit depends on what package you sign up for with the dropshipper, and what price you actually set on your site. I set the price based on the price that it is for sale on the dropshippers website http://www.devilwear.co.uk/store/. The package that you sign up to gives you a discount on this price:
STANDARD - Pay a £9.99 refundable deposit. You pay the advertised prices.
GOLD - Pay £30 a year for a 10% discount.
PLATINUM - Pay £50 a year for a 20% discount.
ULTIMATE - Pay £79 a year for discounts of 20% or more.I am with the Ultimate package, which I would recommend, and get between 20% and 90% discount on each product. I would say on average it's about 30% profit I'm making. The site could be marketed better with a "Sale" section etc, and the shopping cart has a facility to send a newsletter to customer which I haven't used either.
If someone purchases at the BIN price I will pay for the Ultimate package for them for a year and give them a years free hosting.
Any other queries, let me know.
fakhir - I will respond to your PM now.
Kind regards,
Dan
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:27:31 GMT
Please e-mail to daniel webinvestnetwork com
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:05:38 GMT
Email sent
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:43:29 GMT
Could you please explain what advantages one would have purchasing your site as opposed to buying the £299 ready made website that devilwear supply which is fully automated and set up to sell all their products using the same ultimate package, while yours at presnt is broken with only a manual update.
Thanks -
- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:36:21 GMT
Mittmoo
Thank you for your query. Not entirely sure by what you mean by my site being broken - it needs it's inventory updating, that's it.
As a very happy Devilwear customer, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them, in fact here's their demo store: http://v-c-d.co.uk/demo/.
I personally think SentientClothing looks a lot more professional (therefore better at converting into sales), but I'm bound to be biased. It's also already a PR2 without too much effort - search engines like unique sites, rather than duplicated ones.
I'm not going to list lots of reasons. Suffice to say, a custom built store is better than one that hundreds of other people have got, and Magento has a lot more powerful features that can be optimised to improve marketing (take a look here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/features ).
Whether you manually update my store, or have a feed connected, you can customise product descriptions, meta tags etc. What this means is that you can have unique content, which Google likes, rather than duplicate content, which Google ignores.
I personally would never tie myself to a hosted ecommerce solution - to have the control, security and flexibility to do what I want with my own site (not to say the money I would save on having hosted where I choose, rather than pay £10 per month) is important to me.
The Devilwear site package is great for new entrants to ecommerce. I think the difference is whether you want your site to be a business or a hobby. How do you differentiate yourself from your competition if you're all the same?
Hope that helps. Feel free to PM me with any other queries.
Kind regards,
Dan
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:42:09 GMT
Thanks for your reply Dan
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