One thing is to run a dropship business that gets 500 unique visitors monthly and another – 50,000. There are certainly other important metrics when you analyze online businesses:

• average order amount,
• page impressions,
• conversion rate,
• return rate,
• SKU number,
• and more…

But my point is that you earn as much as you aim at. Yes, eBay market is great as you can tests products and reach customers there in no time compared to running your own website:

• Marketplaces has approximately 83.9 million active users worldwide.
• Marketplaces net revenues totaled a record $1.48 billion in Q1-08, representing a year-over-year growth rate of 19 percent. With 45 percent from US operations and 55 percent from our International business.
• In Q1-08, gross merchandise volume [GMV], the total value of all successfully closed items on eBay Inc.’s trading platforms, was $16.0 billion. [Total GMV for the full year 2007 was more than $59 billion.]
• eBay.com users worldwide trade $2,040 worth of goods on the site every second.

Nonetheless, my personal opinion is that eBay loses its attractiveness due to high seller saturation and rates (from my personal experience) and should be just ONE of your sales channels.

Final goal of any online business incl. dropship should be something like below case study. I still believe that it is possible to achieve that scope starting with any of the listed dropship merchant list sellers (they cost a few dollars and if you can’t afford that then you are destined to run 500 uniques per month business) and after careful analysis of many case studies published on pages of our website.

Below come the details of really BIG drophip business:

Work from anywhere in the USA – No auto experience needed

• URL: www.partsgeek.com
• Established: Mon Mar 31 2003
• Uniques/Month: 43,279
• Page views/month: 4,000,000
• Monthly Revenue: $141,000
• Google Pagerank: 0

Description:

Here is your chance to purchase a Virtual Auto Parts Store and work from your home or office –even if you have no prior automotive experience. The owner’s spouse has become ill and he can no longer dedicate himself to operating his business and needs to sell the business.

What you are buying:

1. A turn-key, Active Business that in 2007 had sales of $1.7 million at 30% gross profit. (Sales and profit are increasing each year)
2. 53 domains (.com’s and .org’s) with May’s 2008’s actual Unique visitors registering at 43,279 that month. Averages between 40 – 60k per month of uniques. 4,000,000 (million) hits per month is a rounded down estimate. Only 14 active sites are active, others are ready in waiting to open up.
3. Database of over 132,000 customers – nearly 30% are wholesale (dealerships and repair shops)
4. Gain of nearly a dozen different Internet Catalog Licenses that are not avaialble to the public.
5. Gain of our eBay and Amazon stores
6. Ownership of two established US trademarks
7. Owner will train on-site (I will travel to you) and via remote computer and phone and make transition smooth (assume 30 – 60 days to learn business and advertising; with one year of phone support afterwards).
8. Owner will sign a non-compete agreement
9. 3 dedicated and protected servers in 2 different states
10. Customer retention rate of 20% (this is incredibly high considering we do not market to our customer base)
11. Web design staff, tech support, IT support, cart support and all integration is seamless and included in the sale
12. An Advertising spend of 12% with Google and Yahoo (industry average is 20%) that has been operational since 2003 and Google algorithms always like the older ad campaigns overt the new ones.
13. Optional Bonus – One part time (30 hours per week) sales rep who works from her home 50% sales and she handles 50% of the customer service. She has been employed over 3 years with us and is a 1099 sub-contractor.
14. Optional Bonus #2 – One part (30 hours per week) employee 1099 sub-contractor, customer marketing, order sending, order sourcing, etc.
15. This is not an affiliate deal, or a franchise offer. This is a one of a kind, fully operational business for sale with the owner leaving the industry. The owner averages about $10,000 per MONTH in draw salary, and the growth potential is incredible.

Revenue Details:

$1.7 Million per year in sales @ 30% GP.

This is not an affiliate deal, or a franchise offer. This is a one of a kind, fully operational business for sale with the owner leaving the industry. The owner averages about $10,000 per MONTH in draw salary, and the growth potential is incredible.

Traffic Details:

Domains (not all are live, but all are owned) included in sale: 53

For those who just test dropship waters with eBay sales or run online dropship business – we all need new dropship product ideas as air.

One can go by trial and error just testing this or that product online sales. Or you can make a more educated guess – this should save you both: time and money – and see what your competition does and dropships.

Just read about a successful online business dropshipping auto parts and accessories

Great Monthly Income, no answering phones, just process orders

•    URL:  www.trainhorn.org
•    Established: 1 Aug 2007
•    Uniques/Month: 7,500
•    Page views/month: 12,500
•    Monthly Revenue: $4700
•    BIN: $75 000

Description:

Simply awesome business for sale! This is a REAL company, selling real products, with REAL sales and stats!

NO inventory to keep, it’s all drop shipped! No phone to answer, it’s all done via email.

The website sells trainhorns online, these train horns come in kits and can be mounted virtually on any car or truck and sound like a real train horn! It’s a very cool product and a fairly untapped market! I have worked very very hard to get amazing rankings for this product.

It comes up 2nd on google when you search for train horn or train horns. Comes up under a few other keywords as well like air horns. It’s well ranked in Google, Yahoo, MSN

Also starting to find people linking to the site in message forums too, it’s poised to grow by leaps and bounds!

The site is only about 6 months old at this point.. But I have absolutely no time to work on my bigger projects, and would like to use this to fund the bigger projects as well!

Average sales is approx $12,600 a month
Average profit is approx $4700/month
Profit margins range from 35% to 45%
A big seller the level 4 kit sells for $499
And nets over $200 every sale which is nice.

Asking for 18 months, but will consider reasonable offers.

Have some extra cash laying around, or pull out a line of equity and put this to work making money for you every month!

You get the Domain, Website, Info on the vendor where you buy the kits as you get the orders and they drop ship them directly for you, viral videos we created but did not release yet, and any help you need from me for 4 weeks

Revenue Details:
Revenue listed is NET / monthly

Traffic Details:
Natural rankings google, yahoo, msn, word of mouth..just started working on viral videos but has not taken effect yet should double traffic

While adding this new case study to our growing list I have made two notes in my to-check-later list:

- The guy sells auto parts, products supplied by a direct dropshipper. I have just recently read a few articles in Internet Retailer reporting that auto part e-commerce is on the rise though my opinion was that it is not the best products for selling online – it looks I was wrong.

- The owner marries dropship business and AdSense as an extra revenue for his e-store. Certainly, top e-commerce retailers will never add AdSense as they do not want to lose their traffic clicking on AdSense ads. Common dropshippers can hardly compete with top retailers and AdSense as a method to convert your traffic into some cash is a good solution if you get this traffic for free or for very low cost. Anyway I think it is a good idea to give a try to add AdSense adds to those dropship stores that get some organic traffic AND do not convert into sales properly.

So, here come the details of our latest case study for you to make conclusions:

1. if dropship business is a good fir for you or not
2. what products sell online with drop shipping
3. how much can you earn
4. how much do you need to invest
5. what time is required to keep your online store running properly
6. what pitfalls to expect
7. what marketing techniques are effective to promoe your dropship stores
8. etc…

• URL: eclipsecartuner.com
• Established: 20 Mar 2007
• Uniques/ Month: 10,615
• Page views/ month: 237,000
• Monthly Revenue: 3,500.00
• PageRank: 4
• Listed: 21 Nov 2007
• Min bid accepted: $3500
• BIN: $7500

Description:

I am selling my e-commerce website that generates revenue by selling Mitsubishi Eclipse aftermarket parts from a reliable dropshipper and through the use of Google AdSense. The contact information and website of the dropshipper will, of course, be given to the winning bidder. The site is a PR4 site that is almost one year old as of date.

What is the Amount of Work Required to Maintain?
To properly maintain this site it usually takes about 2-3 hours a week to process orders and maintain customer service. The most time consuming part of maintaining the site is updating prices, adding new products, and removing products that have been discontinued. The site uses the CRE B2B shopping cart and the drop ship supplier gives out datafeeds with all the products to easily upload them to the cart. However, it is not actually that easy. You have to modify the datafeed if you want the products to look nice and if you want customers to be able to pick options on many of the products like colors and stuff. Otherwise, you have a separate product for each color or attribute assigned to the product, making it difficult for customers to navigate.

Why Are You Selling EclipseCarTuner?
I’m selling this website because I’m currently working on my bachelors degree and don’t have the time necessary to keep the prices and products updated in the store. Furthermore, I have lost many, many potential sales because I don’t have time to answer customer phone calls or inquiries. This site has a lot of potential and should maintain $4,000+ in monthly sales if the owner has the time to answer phone calls and maintain the site properly.

What Kind of Experience is Needed to Run this Site?
I would recommend you have prior experience with the CRE B2B shopping carts, datafeeds, and/or oscommerce. Or, if you don’t, at least know someone who you can pay to do the updating for you. If you need help, my supplier has many 3rd parties that can keep the datafeed updated for you for around $50-$100/month. I can help you get in contact with these people.

Why the Sudden Drop in AdSense Revenue in October?
I switched the layout of the website and removed 3 adsense text ads from the top of the site to try and increase sales. I did not experience an increase and sales and the ad revenue dropped from an average of $7-$8/day to about $1.50/day.

Will You Help the Purchaser Transfer to Another Host?
Yes, I will help with the transfer process and I will offer 30 days of help (from the purchase date) in assisting you in learning how to run the site.

Revenue Details:

Adsense (screenshots posted):

For a few months I had 3 adsense ads on the website. One small text ad with 4 text links on the top, another with 4 text ad links on the left top-side, and one in the footer. From these ads I was able to average between $5-$14/day. However, I removed these ads to see if I could increase sales, and left only the ad in the footer. After doing this on October 19th, I reduced my adsense revenue to an average of $0-$3/day. My sales have seemed to increase very little if any from this strategy. I would likely suggest to the winner of this auction that they place more ads on the site to generate more revenue from adsense.

Over the past 3-4 months I have averaged about $120/month in AdSense revenue. Feel free to verify this via the AdSense thumbnail on the top right.

Gross Sales (Screenshots will be posted):

August: $4,072.89
September: $3,562.00
October: $2,749.28

I would say that the average sales for the past 4 months is around $3,500+ but its hard to estimate because November is not yet over. I get to keep about 17% of this, as that is my profit margin after paypal fees. This amounts to $595 a month in profit from sales. The average profit from adsense over the past 3-4 months has been about $120 a month. The total average profit between adsense and sales is about $715 a month. I would say that since 10Xmonthly revenue = $7,150, and the site requires a bit of work to maintain prices and datafeed that it is worth slightly less than this. The site is probably worth about $6,000 – $7,000, but it is hard to estimate because AdSense revenue has declined after October.

The site has had sales revenue averaging about $3,500. Paypal screenshots are provided along with scanned checks and money orders paid from customers. Most of the sales revenue (about 80-90%) was paid via PayPal and the rest through money orders and checks.

The profit margin of the products I’m selling with the site’s current pricing structure is about 17% after paypal fees or 20% before paypal fees. The site does enough volume that I receive the products for cheaper from my supplier (wholesale discount). With an average sales per month of approximately $4,000 that’s an average profit of $680 per month after paypal fees. Total fixed costs are insignificant: $4/month for hosting from GoDaddy, and $30 a year for SSL.

Traffic Details:

According to Google analytics between Oct 20th and Nov 19th (last 30 days) I received 10,519 unique visitors. In the last 3 months, the site has average at least 10,000+ unique visitors a month.

Last 90 day statistics (averages):

Bounce Rate: 28%
Avg Time on Site: 00:05:42
Average Pageviews: 16.04

The traffic is 100% organic from all 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The site is ranked high for the following terms:
- Mitsubishi Eclipse #3 on Google
- Mitsubishi Eclipse Parts #4 on Google
- Mitsubishi Eclipse Body Kits #1 on Google
- Eclipse Body Kits #2 on Google
- Eclipse Parts #9 on Google

The traffic was generated from one-way and reciprocal link exchanges. These links have been up for months now and the site will likely maintain its rankings for a while.

I ran a small PPC ad campaign (about 7 months ago) when I first started the site but only for about 30 days, and the campaign brought little traffic.

[tags]dropship aftermarket auto parts, dropship turnkey website, drop ship, wholesale, ebay, e-commerce, dropshippers list[/tags]