Men Apparel Dropshipper
I am not an expert in UK online business, but from what I have read I know that it is much easier to run one there – primarily due to a much lower competition.
Dropship business model allows you to run your business and sales from anywhere in the world. Probably, it is high time to turn to Great Britain? Change the currency on your website, get and locally promote .co.uk domain… Stuff is much more expensive in the UK than in the States right now though the British economy is also on decline…
Dropship business is also quite popular in the UK – I remember a few case studies in some niche listed on our website.
What I like about our today’s case – the site gets organic traffic, it is the only traffic source. It is very expensive to bid for selling keywords with AdWords, MSN AdCenter, etc – you have to compete with top e-commerce stores. When it comes to organic SEO – it is also hard to rank for buying keywords for the same reason, but the site in question is likely to get so called long tail traffic (ranking for low demand keywords).
What I dislike is the site age – it is hardly possible for a few months old site to get decent organic traffic…
The owner is happy with his men apparel dropshipper’s service – and this is not always the case. Either he has found the contacts through one of the reputable dropship lists or was lucky to set relations directly with the supplier – reliable dropshipper that keeps you updated of the stock changes, promptly ships your orders and handles returns – is a crucial part of any dropship project.
UK Dropship Business For Sale with Huge Potential
• URL: www.sentientclothing.co.uk
• Established: Tue Sep 09 2008
• Page views/month: 1,400
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 533
• Google Pagerank: 2
• Uniques/Month: 458
• BIN: $3 000
Description:
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 men’s range, but could also sell women’s and children’s.
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 customized, 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 continued 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 optimized 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.
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