Dropship Sporting Goods
This is a story from our case study series. The case studies section grows with every passing week and it is a good source for persons who need some practical tips from those who are experienced in this business: find info on relations with merchants, customer service, traffic sources, advertising costs and channels, etc.
The new case study is intended for those people who believe that they can set up reliable and long lasting relations with dropship merchants and not for those online entrepreneurs who are certain that dropship business is scam.
• URL: SportsmenExpress.com
• Established: 17 Nov 2004
• Uniques/Month: 20,660
• Page views/month: 60,794
• Monthly Revenue: 5,000 average
• PageRank: 3
• Listed: 28 Dec 2007
• Winning bid: $17 500
Description:
Sportsmen Express offers a large selection of camping gear, hunting gear, firearm accessories and law enforcement equipment.
I’m selling www.sportsmenexpress.com for the sole reason I do not have time to take it to the next level. 95% of the business is totally automated and you don’t have to do anything, it’s that 5% customer service that I don’t have time for. We are partnered with a Sporting Goods supplier that “blind” drop ships all of our orders. If you’re not familiar with the term, blind drop ship just means our supplier put our company information on the package so the customer has no idea it wasn’t shipped by us.
Please note that if you want to continue selling sporting goods from the current supplier, you must set up an account with them. This requires a Retail Sales Tax Certificate and setting up an AHC Direct Debit account with them. I will provide serious buyers with the contact information.
In August 06 we invested 20k to have the website completely redone with many automated features to help us manage the business and promote the website. Active Media (www.activema.com)was the company that did the work and SE is listed on their featured projects portfolio. The website is php based and runs on a linux box with Apache.
Website Features:
Sends Confirmation Email to Customer & Admin when order is placed.
Sends shipping confirmation email when order is shipped.
Google Base/Froogle Feed generated and uploaded weekly. (15,000 products in Google Base)
Sitemap generated weekly (over 19,000 pages indexed in Google)
Auto Out Of Stock Notification- Customer can request to be notified when an item is back in stock, website sends email automatically
Ability to send promotional emails to customers (3500 customers listed in database)
Ability to set up discount codes & promotions.
Setup customer groups for discounts.
New products automatically downloaded into database from supplier.
Apache Rewrite installed so all keywords are in every products url.
Ability to set keywords, description for each product for SEO.
Website has a Forum, but is currently turned off due to no time to control the spam.
Many more features that I will be happy to show a serious bidder via phone call guided tour.
We currently do around $5-6,000 a month in sales with ZERO advertising. Profit runs around 15%-20%. You have the ability to set the markup for any single item or category to whatever you want.
Expenses:
The website runs on a VPS server though WiredTree.com for $89 a month. There is an 800 number I will tranfer to you through gotvmail.com that usually runs $30 a month if you want it. SE has a Yahoo Directory subscription that is paid until July 08 ($299).
Potential: If your savy at website promotion and know how to drive traffic, this website has a ton of potential. I never promoted the phone number on the website as I wasnt available to take phone orders. If you put the phone number in the footer and had someone available to take calls, sales would increase dramatically. I have received numerous emails from potential customers saying they didn’t buy because they couldnt find the phone number.
We do not have a BIN in mind, though would like to at least get back what we invested in the websites makeover.
Also included in this auction is the domain name sportsmAnexpress.com, which just redirects to SportsmEnexpress.com
Revenue Details:
The website currently does around 5-6k a month in sales on average. December blows that out of the water with 10-12k but that is not the average. Our profit margin is between 15-20% which can be adjusted to any level. With no advertising profits are around $600-1000 a month after expenses.
Traffic Details:
90% of the traffic is organic from search engines, 85% is from Google.
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