I have mentioned in another automotive dropshipper business post that auto parts are not on top of products for online sale, but despite the fact this is one of the most popular categories on our dropship case studies list.

To tell the truth, I have never heard of the HID kits before, so it proves that market research is a must for any sort of business including a dropship venture.

I have mentioned a few sources of ideas to discover popular products that sell online via dropshipping – eBay popular products & Amazon top sellers. A few more sources that I have recently applied – Shopping.com top searches & Internet Retailer 500 list of top US online stores. These sources are just a starting point – get a vague idea about products you feel inclined to promote & sell online, then make sure you see some space for your dropship business on the market (demand, competition, etc).

Once you are certain about the product category to test for dropship business – turn to the product sourcing (free trial is the cheapest way) & run your test on eBay on a shoestring – will those products really sell before you invest more time into them…

Now I suggest you to have a look at another dropship business case study (you can find the entire list here) to learn what it takes to run & promote a dropship project.

Automotive Parts — eCommerce Dropship business

$1100/month Profit for October 2008

•    URL: www.blindinghid.com
•    Established: Mon Apr 07 2008
•    Uniques/Month: 3,300
•    Monthly Revenue (USD): 1,100
•    Google Pagerank: 2

Description:

General Information

I am putting my automotive part dropshipping business up for sale. We sell HID kits (kits that convert halogen headlights to HIDs). Customers find our business through search engines, select the kit that fits for their vehicle and order the kit via paypal. We take our commission and forward the rest to a dropshipper.

Dropship Information

We use a USA dropshipper that provides constant e-mail support for the products we sell. If you are unfamilar with dropshipping the concept is basically getting wholesale rates and having the supplier deal with shipping your product. You don’t need to do anything except forward paypal payments to his e-mail with the order information and address.

Website Details

Registered for another year and a half throuh GoDaddy

Pagerank 2

Runs off of Wordpress with a complete admin backend.

I hired two professional SEO experts who are currently in the process of achieving high SERPs for other keywords.

Revenue Details:

$1100 profit in October, strictly organic google/yahoo/msn traffic. Check attached screenshots for paypal.

Traffic Details:

September: 3000 UV
October: 3300 UV

There was some research published early this year where car parts and accessories were obviously at the end of the list of popular products to sell online. So, I am a bit surprised as our auto parts dropshippers category grows so fast. A possible explanation might be that there is a lower level of competition in that industry (along with lower demand). But I might be wrong.

The best way is to test the niche yourself (FREE TRIAL is the cheapest way I guess) to get the feeling of the demand/ supply, market competition and if this is your kind of products to deal with. Is it a male oriented product category?

Huge Car/ Truck Accessory site. $237K in last 8 months!

With 8,052 Unique Visitors/ 32,000 page views PM. Site could easily be converted to a pay per click referral site.

•    URL: www.dieselpro.net
•    Established: Sat Sep 30 2000
•    Uniques/Month: 8,052
•    Page views/month: 32,635
•    Monthly Revenue (USD): 3,500
•    Google Pagerank: 3
•    Min Bid: $45 000
•    BIN: $95 000

Description:

With the industry specific targeted traffic this site receives it can be purchased and used as is, or easily converted to pay per click referral site. Average pay per click for automotive keywords we are found under exceeds $1 per click. Selling 8000 clicks a month at $0.80 per click will net $6400 a month. PM me for a list of the top 50 keywords we have been found under in the last 12 months

Selling site to start new business, well established auto accessory site www.dieselpro.net DBA AllTimeAuto and multiple domains, www.Alltimeauto.com, ALLTIMEAUTO.NET, ALLTIMEAUTO.ORG, PERFORMANCE-EXHAUST.NET, TPPACCESSORIES.COM, TRUCKFITTINGS.COM, TRUCKPERFORMANCEPLUS.COM, and TRUCKSUPERCHIPS.COM. This business is a drop ship company I currently spend around 4 hours a day processing orders, and doing customer service. Never deal directly with the product simply process orders and submit purchase orders to our warehouse distributors.

Site programming has been fully customized and streamlined with an owner admin center to manage all aspects of site including customer lookup, shipping tracking system, site content management system etc. Site has a fully functional dealer registration center and dealer account site with dealer pricing and has 80 registered dealers nationwide.

Business sale includes Amazon.com retail account (we are the largest Amazon.com automotive retailer) and all tools we have developed for maintaining products on Amazon, well established purchasing accounts with the best negotiated product discounts from 3 of the nation’s biggest warehouse distributors (these distributors have around 15 shipping locations so you never have to see the product and it gets to the customer quickly), Also includes 4 master distributor accounts with direct buying from 3 major manufacturers.

Site also includes installed Affiliate program made by Post Affiliate Pro software with 77 registered affiliates.

Site generates 32,635 page views, and 8,052 unique visitors per month. And has established first page rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN

2007 Gross sales were $361,732 with less than $1,000 spent in advertising in 2007, I currently net $3,500 a month with dedicating 4 or less hours a day 5 days a week. With some dedication this site can easily gross $500,000+ plus a year.

Revenue Details:

Our site earns its revenue through a combination of avenues, direct retail sales on the site it’s self, wholesale sales thorough our dealer network and retail sales through our Amazon.com seller account. There are two screen shots of the revenue screen shot one shows the date range we are looking at and screen shot two has the totals. The list is to long to fit all in one screen.

Traffic Details:

Or site gets it’s traffic from natural listing from all major search engines, our affiliate program, links from forums, and auto related sites. We have done $0 in pay per click advertising and have spent under $1,000 in 2007/2008 for other advertising. The traffic I have quoted comes from three different domains with www.dieselpro.net getting the majority of the traffic. All domains are being sold in this sale.

We have recently covered a large scale auto parts dropshipping business case. And today we will have a look into another auto parts dropship site.

To tell the truth, I have never had success with online auto parts sales. You need to deal with enormous catalogues; there are many details with auto parts that you simply can’t manage. And auto parts are not the product that most people go online to buy. Added to that be prepared to a quite high percentage of returns (like with online shoes sales).

On the other hand, online auto parts space is much less competitive than, say, books. Even number of nation recognized auto parts sellers is quite limited. Who should we mention? Autopartswarehouse, Partstrain, and a few more…

If you are passionate about cars and everything automobile related then it is probably your cup of tea – you can (and probably should) choose some auto parts niche like the below dropship business. And if you browse catalogues of dropshipping wholesalers you will run into a number of auto parts dealers.

For those who are not so passionate about these products – explore our case study category for more product ideas

Automotive Performance and Racing Parts Online Store with VP-ASP Shopping Cart.

• URL: www.500ms.com
• Established: Sun Nov 28 2004
• Page views/month: 13,500
• Monthly Revenue: 1200
• Google Pagerank: 2
• BIN: $12,000

Description:

Automotive Performance and Racing Parts Online Store with VP-ASP Shopping Cart. The shopping cart is easily edited and adding or removing items is a breeze.

This site was created November 2004 and has been in constant operation since. The site has over 500 pages of unique content and thousands of products listed by major manufacturers such as: Autometer, Bell, Clevite, Edelbrock, Fram, Isky Cams, K&N, MSD, Optima Batteries, RJS, Simpson, and Warn. The site is the online side of a Motor State Distributing dealership. All part numbers listed are Motor State numbers. I highly recommend the purchaser of this site become a Motor State Dealer. Motor State can drop ship straight to your customers.

This auction includes the site with content and domain names only, a Motor State Dealership is NOT included.

500ms.com, 500ms.net, and stevesperformanceproducts.com domain names are included with this auction. We have promoted the 500ms logo and you will find that a search of “500ms” on all the major search engines will list 500ms.net and 500ms.com as the top two listings.

The site is currently hosted on a Alentus.com server with a Comodo ssl certificate. Buyer could use the same services for roughly $250 per year.

We also have approximately $25,000 of parts and accessories in stock that would be available to the site buyer at or below wholesale prices. The inventory is an excellent mix of in store items for walk in customers.

This is a great opportunity for someone that wants to get into the performance parts business or add a new line to an existing business.

Revenue Details:

The site has never accepted advertising and most of our sales are over the phone, so the $1200 per month revenue is a combination of automated orders and phones sales from website leads.