Featured Listing: eCommerce Business in the Design and Style Industry, Selling Women’s Skirts and Accessories

About the business

Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you start the business?

I am a product manager and former software developer, who has been an entrepreneur since I was 7 years old. When I went to start looking for something to itch my entrepreneurial scratch, I was doing research and came across Ali on Reddit, offering his services for Amazon product research. I replied to his post and we started talking. This was over a year ago. Since then we have created multiple websites (three of which are for sale) and have continued working together!

While researching items in various overwhelmed product categories, we realized how many opportunities there were for us on niche clothing websites. We did more research, and found that skirts were widely available, in a huge variety, and that we could tap into that specific niche. From there, for fun, we added a site all about plaid items (because I love my plaid shirts).

As an eCommerce business, where are your products made?

Our products are all made in China, and available through various reliable manufacturers and sellers. We have spent more than a year cultivating our list of sellers and products, pulling any seller or product from the site that was not of the quality we wanted. We only kept the sellers who had good products and shipped quickly. Everyone else was unceremoniously removed from our site.

What can you tell us about your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Our current CAC is near zero because we have stopped all advertising for more than 6 months. Our SEO and Social channels currently bring all of our traffic. The only place we spend on ads is to protect the “Must Have Skirts” keyword, making sure our ad is the first result. This costs just over $300 a month.

CLV averages $52.42 right now (according to the Lebesgue app for Shopify).

How have you marketed the product and where are your customers originating from?

Most of our customers come from our social channels, our email or SMS campaigns, and regular organic SEO-based traffic.

We have created a HUGE following on one of our channels that results in 10+million impressions within Pinterest every month, and over 90% of our traffic and sales.

Spending more time here, at least a couple of times per week to share more will result in more traffic and more sales

Is the asset on your listing owner-operated, how much time does it take to run the business, who else is needed on the team, and what is automated?

We spend roughly 1 hour total per day on the site to process orders, handle any support questions (we get relatively few per week), and update the site or post to social media.

What does someone need to do to continue operating the business in its current form?

To run the business in its current form, handle the orders as they come in, and monitor the support helpdesk or email accounts. It’s not much work!

Growing the business

Can you list a few opportunities for a potential new owner to continue growing the business?

Any of these items listed would help to grow the site. We are focused on one of our other businesses and so we don’t have the time to continue to do this on these sites:
A new owner will find new products to add to the sites
post to social media on a regular cadence
create content for the blogs
possible even advertise

Someone who is more marketing savvy than us could also create a regular email marketing campaign.

We have been doing the bare minimum for some time because the rest of our business has consumed our attention. It would be relatively straightforward to kick these sites into another growth cycle with some minimal attention.

What has been the evolution of this asset since its launch?

We had our first sale within 2 weeks of launching the sites and putting up social channels. We tried social, advertising, and basic marketing efforts upfront. Early on, we drove tons of traffic with advertising, but because we were new we basically paid to build up our data. While we did that, we also were building our social channels.
The organic social traffic quickly outpaced our advertising efforts on social channels, so we stopped running ads (except on the Must Have Skirts keyword with google) and spent more time and effort on quality products, vendors, and social posting.
At the same time, we had another site in a completely different vertical that took off on us. So, we moved to minimum effort for the clothing sites and focused there. That was about 6 months ago and how we got where we are today!

How does this business make money? What are the current revenue streams?

We sell clothing through Shopify stores. That’s it!

What marketing channels are most profitable for the business?

Pinterest drives 90% of the traffic for all 3 sites. Any additional, consistent, effort there will continue to grow these sites. We have created a great foundation, it just needs tending.

How does the business currently acquire customers and what is your breakdown for marketing costs?

We get 90%+ from Pinterest. Everything else is either return customers, their friends, or organic traffic from Google or Bing.

How big is your current team? How many people does it take to run this business?

The team is me and Ali. Between us we spend 1 hour a day on the site most days, just processing the orders.

What’s the reason for selling your business on Flippa?

We spend the majority of our time on our other business that took off about 6 months ago, we want to continue to spend our time and efforts there, so it’s time to sell the assets we cannot spend the time on that the assets deserve.

Our clothing sites would be a great initial business or additional asset for someone who has more time to spend on them. We don’t, so we’re sending them off into the world, like kids going off to college!