A quick new case study for all perfume and fragrance lovers - make money dropshipping the products you enjoy (this is not the first dropship perfume case study on our website: check this one and this). I guess it is the first case study that uses Yahoo! Store Merchant platform, so it makes it really interesting as an opportunity to explore new sales channel.

If you would like to see what other products are successfully dropshipped online or learn how to market your dropship business – our dropship case study category is a great starting point.

Product sourcing – no changes here – check the top players in the market, but keep in mind that directly set relations with some local distributors and dealers are likely to be more profitable for your business.

Nonetheless, it is a good idea to start dropshipping business with some merchants from those lists and with some experience gained switch to some local dealers later.

Perfume / Cologne Yahoo Store - Established 2005

• URL: www.skinfragrance.com
• Established: Sat Nov 26 2005
• Page views/month: 7,000
• Monthly Revenue: 1,000
• Uniques/Month: 2,000
• BIN: $7900

Description:

www.Skinfragrance.com

Offered for sale for the first time is online retailer Skinfragrance.com. Skinfragrance is an online perfume/fragrance retailer. The site has been online for since Nov 2005, and with little promotion has done around 38K in sales over that period. (Read more in “Why am I selling” below)

Skinfragrance.com targets the high end market of Perfume / Cologne. Site currently carries around 5000 to 8000 products at any given time.

We are ranked for numerous terms:

#6 Google - best selling perfume
#9 Google - best selling cologne
#9 Google - top selling cologne

Numerous other (higher traffic keywords) – a few pages deep. Skinfragrance.com can pass other sites fairly quickly based on Domain Age alone….combined with a few quality links.

What’s Included:

• Domain Skinfragrance.com
• Current Customer List/Mailing List (Opt In)
• Web Design / Content

Why is Skinfragrance for sale?

I started this ecommerce site in Nov of 2005 with the intention of letting the domain age. Sales started coming in quickly and I did initial promotion (link building etc) Domain is still currently included in BOTW directory among others. I have since started many other projects and have a very demanding job within the Ecommerce industry. I do not have time to take Skinfragrance.com to the next level.

I simply have not had time to update products. I have had to cancel orders because of stock issues. New owner would need to put in the 15-30 minutes a day to update products.

Skills Required:

Site is run on the Yahoo Store Merchant platform and has been since the beginning. I would expect the new owner be familiar with ecommerce sites, have some Excel Skills (loading csv imports) – some degree of programming would be great but not necessary. You will also need your own Merchant Account.

Revenue Details:

Products are drop shipped and no inventory is maintained. There is much room to grow profit margin simply by moving to a inventory & fulfillment model.

Revenue is nearly all credit card based at this time.

Unexploited revenue opportunities for this site include advertising of course, but also there exists a great customer interest in up to date information. Revenue can greatly be increased with simple link building, comparison engines, PPC, etc.

- I have briefly advertised with Nextag and Shopzilla and Yahoo Shopping. Good Results but I have not tracked well enough.

Generating around 10K plus a year in Revenues - Profit Margin ranges from 15% to 90% based on price of item. Most products are currently at about a 25% to 30% markup.

Profit /month – Ranges from $150 to $400 (Potential is with Aged Domain) Traffic Details:

Traffic is generated via:

• Google Organic (Product Search) - I have problem with showing images in Product search and have not had time to fix. This along would probably double traffic from this source.
• Around 1500 – 3000 Uniques per/month - Dec much more – See Graphic
• Organic traffic via viral word of mouth on forums, etc
• Newsletters utilizing Opt-in subscription tool to capture browsers and push for increased conversion.
• Repeat Buyers

What would I do to take Skinfragrance to next Level?

• More Promotion (Via Link Building) - Would not take much – I was ranked for term “Discount Fragrances” after getting to links with correct anchor text.
• Automate Inventory - Take Supplier XML / CSV file and automate inventory levels. This takes a little programming knowledge or outsource the work.
• Start Stocking Products
• Better Analytics – Install Google Analytics with Revenue Tracking

Expenses:

• I have run a few campaigns over the years on Yahoo / Google but nothing more than a few hundred bucks.
• $39.95 Month Yahoo Store
• $19.95 Merchant Acct. / Month

Revenue Details:

95% of Sales Driven from Organic Traffic
Revenue Per Year $10,000

Traffic Details:

95% Organic - Google

Here comes another dropship business case study. The website was successfully sold for $35 000 – there are people confident that dropship business is a lasting business model to invest funds into a website like that

As always I recommend going through our dropship case study category – more products ideas, more techniques how to promote those products.

To tell the truth, I am impressed with the dropship site in question performance. Launched just 10 months ago and with min paid advertising it shows great results. If we assume tat all information is authentic then probably the success keys are proper product research and quality SEO.

Swords are not high price tickets most comes in the range of $20-80.00: so one needs to sell LOTS of swords to make 7K monthly.

And what about the targeted audience? Fast check shows us that top audience is females (58%) aged under 18 (25%). Well I guess I need to better follow what products teenagers and kids find interesting nowadays…

Sell Swords Online - $7k+ Revenue/month

Strong PR4, 1,670 Indexed Pages, Many Top 10 Keywords

•    URL: www.heavenlyswords.com
•    Established: Sun Sep 30 2007
•    Uniques/Month: 20,000
•    Page views/month: 155,000
•    Monthly Revenue: $7,716.98
•    Google Pagerank: 4

Description:

You do not want to miss this outstanding opportunity! It is 100% dropship business.

This terrific site opened its doors last October and since then it has continued to increase its revenue.

The site ranks very high in Google for dozens of terms; I’ll list a small portion of them here:

# 2 for Bleach Swords
# 3 for Anime Swords
# 3 for Fantasy Swords
# 5 for Video Game Swords

Many interior pages carry Page Rank, some of which are PR3.

Expenses are very low, July’s expenses were $294.53 which is broken down below:

AdWords $119.53

Toll Free Answering Service $175 (they answer the phones, take orders, etc.)

Of course, Cost of Goods Sold is also an expense. My markup is about 50%.

Visitors since the beginning of the year are as follows:

Jan. 9,979
Feb. 12,651
March 15,795
April 16,496
May 23,065
June 23,536
July 22,948

As you can see, this site has a steady income stream and huge potential to make even more.

Why am I selling? I am recently engaged; planning for the wedding is taking up a lot of my time so I do not have the capacity to keep growing the business. And since we have to pay for the wedding ourselves, I really need the money.

Revenue Details:

Jan. $2,555.91
Feb. $2,411.36
March $4,597.29
April $4,148.04
May $7,382.83
June $7,296.99
July $7,716.98

Traffic Details:

The site has many repeat buyers!

11.26% Direct Traffic
26.77% Referring Sites
61.97% Search Engines

Dropshipping market is attractive and we witness how top players progress (Doba is on Inc.com 500 list, for example) and try to differentiate their offers for current and potential customers.

It is becoming hard to follow all those innovative features added nearly on a monthly basis. Just a couple of weeks ago we have reported about Worldwide Brands re-branding and new offers, now it is time to inform you about the changes that another strong market player has to offer – this time it is Shopster. Though not all below features are new, but they give a better idea of how the service works:

Increase your inventory through one product source
- Over 1,000,000 products are available through Shopster’s virtual warehouse.
- Drop ship products from over 130 suppliers.
- New suppliers and products added every week.
- Warehouse pricing on all products.
- Many of the same suppliers used by eBay PowerSellers.

Optimize your time by managing only one professional relationship
- Shopster manages relations with 130 suppliers for them.
- Shopster processes payments and manages order fulfillment.
- Your customers can spend more time focused on selling.

Sell on eBay, other websites, or their own online storefront easily
- eBay integrated platform
- Set up multiple listings at the same time.
- Custom data exports.
- Products are directly integrated into a Shopster storefront.

Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Shopster works closely with suppliers to ensure customers receive their products quickly.
- Shopster Customer Support is available to them and their customers.
- Live order tracking and order history.

Feel secure using Shopster
- Shopster offers Supplier Fraud Protection.
- Shopster is one of only 30 eBay Certified Solution Providers.

Unlike Worldwide Brands and like Doba, Shopster offers allow you to manage your relationships just through one channel – definitely great for those dropship affiliates who sell a wide variety of products as it is a real pain to keep proper relations with a number of merchants.

Also Shopster is a certified eBay solution provider – that allows integrating their system into eBay platform. It is not a secret that most dropship affiliates do their business primarily and solely on eBay.