For those who do not feel that product approach described in our previous article is their way with online business we add a new case study – this time we will have a look at the car audio (plus other electronics) dropship website for sale.

The goal of this post as well as of all those articles that you can find listed in our dropship case study category is:

• to show what type of products other online entrepreneurs dropship and what hot is right now
• to learn how dropship affiliates efficiently market those products online
• to understand how to build proper long term relations with customers to build a lot of regulars
• to get an idea how to build proper long term relations with the suppliers to cut returns, get better prices and improve fulfillment

Completely finished dropship business for sale. Already generating traffic and sales

Sells car audio, home audio, and marine audi equipment plus more. Already signed up with supplier. LLC Legal Structure

•    URL: www.dominantcaraudio.com
•    Established: Sun Aug 31 2008
•    Page views/month: 30,000
•    Monthly Revenue (USD): 400
•    Google Pagerank: 0
•    Uniques/Month: 3,000
•    BIN: $4 000

Description:

Search Engine Optimized
Submitted to all major search engines
Submitted XML sitemap to google
Submitted to over 100 directories
Many press releases released
About 20-25 articles have been written
Over 4400 products in inventory.  It took me 2 weeks alone just to add all of those products.  All of the prices are competitive.
Merchant Account setup
Authorize.net account setup.
Been Posting on forums and at answers.yahoo.com

Traffic being tracked by google analytics.

-1600 visitors so far this month alone
-Bounce rate is 25%
-9-10 pageviews per visitor
-Average visitor time on site is 5-6 minutes
-15,500 total pageviews so far this month

I launched it last month on October 2nd and made $400 in net profit that month.  I’m sure with an experienced web marketer you can easily double or triple that.  I’m open to offers and I can prove all of those statistics that I just mentioned.  I’ve put so much work into this website and I’ve simply run out of money.  The amount of debt that I put myself into must be paid off before I spend any more time or money advertising for this website.

Revenue Details:

It is a dropship business.  Once someone places an order, you place an order with the supplier.  The supplier ships the product straight to the customers house and you keep the difference in price.

Traffic Details:

carstereo.com ppc account
google ppc
google organic
yahoo organic
answers.yahoo.com
wikipedia.com
ezine.com
freepressrelease.com
direct traffic

Everything sells online – I guess I have read this in the preview to Top 500 Guide (list of top US online stores, see the complete list here). And I share this point when daily I come across e-commerce stores and online auctions that sell stuff I could never think about promoting online

Dropship neon sings – I doubt that you can do full time living off that, but I am unfamiliar with the market and can be wrong. The fastest way to research a market online for free is with Google Adwords Keyword Tool – you will learn about demand as the service now shows search estimates and you will learn about competition – as the service indicates how much it costs to get certain positions in Adwords listings.

On the other hand it is that sort of niche stores that are focused on very narrow product category that allows them to relatively cheap advertise their product line on the Internet and helps to gain excellent search engine rankings – as a result they get highly targeted and free organic traffic.

Neon Sign Ecommerce Site – Dropshipping

•    URL: www.neonsignoutlet.com
•    Established: Sep 30 2007
•    Page views/month: 250
•    Monthly Revenue (USD): 0
•    Google Pagerank: 0
•    Uniques/Month: 100

Description:

Ecommerce site for sale that sells neon signs.  All items are dropshipped so you have nothing to stock.  All the hard work is done and all you need to do now is drive traffic to the site.  For anyone that has built an ecommerce site you now how time consuming and tedious the listing of products is.  Well…all that work is already done for you.  All the site needs is traffic.

Most items have a 30% markup or more.  I will provide the dropshipper company information to the buyer.

Cost include $50 per month for hosting of the Shopsite ecommerce platform with Lexiconn.com.

Site has had about 100 visitors so far in October, most of which is organic traffic.

Revenue Details:

Site has not made any sales yet

Traffic Details:

Around 100 visitors a month, mostly organic traffic.

This new case study goes so deeply into the detail how to run and market dropship business that it can be applied as a sort of dropship manual.

a. Choose your products to dropship
b. Test the market for sales potential
c. Develop a fully automated profitable online dropship business

Averages $13,000 in sales per month. 30 Distributors, 100% Dropship, Minimal Work.. Fast Growth.. 100% Natural Traffic..

• URL: starmarkelectronics.com/
• Established: 29 Apr 2007
• Uniques/ Month: 6,000
• Page views/ month: 331,975
• Monthly Revenue: 13,000
• PageRank: 2
• BIN: $75,000

Description:

This website sells consumer electronics, plasma tvs, computer components, home audio and cctv cameras, accessories and equipment. There are currently approx 22,000 products in the store and approx. 30,000 images. It is based on a VERY popular open-source shopping cart. However it has been extensively upgraded and all upgrades were documented. It can be upgraded even more. There are INCREDIBLE possibilities and growth with this site.

* It has not been seo’d
* I have only paid for about $100.00 in Google Adwords..
* There are approx. 10 different shopping comparison sites that the site could be advertised on that would literally make it a $3,000,000 Million business within 6 months with a moderate marketing budget.

All potential bidders please re-read the last sentence. I have already done very extensive research into marketing the site. With a very moderate budget. This business will do $3,000,000 Million plus before the end of the year.

We are not getting a ton of traffic, however we maximize each visitor with a clean site, fast loading pages, live chat, toll free numbers and a vast selection. On some days we are doing 4% and 5% conversion rates… Which for online retail and especially for consumer electronics is a very high percentage?

All Distributors will be provided… Getting accounts is very easy and the sales reps are great. I have approx. 30 distributors that are all multi-billion dollar distributors. They inventory on average approx 50,000 products each. There is MINIMAL product knowledge needed because most customers have already researched the products prior to coming to the website. They usually call to see how many you have in stock… Inventory levels are controlled by distributor’s inventory levels and are updated daily. Same distributors for Amazon, buy.com, walmart,bestbuy, tigerdirect and newegg.

The plus to having multiple distributors is that you have lots of product availability and you can ship out of warehouses that are close to your customer.

Prices are very competitive to competition but there is still a comfortable net profit on products. Average net profit is 20% per product.

Not many customers call. Maybe a handful. Most email and chat or just buy directly. I have included some detailed monthly financials stats are included..
* Please remember that it is not often that electronics websites are sold..

Reason #1- The barrier to entry is not easy.. Distributors are hard to locate initially, inventory feeds are nearly impossible to hand-input. Site-design for electronics websites is fairly complicated.. Its better to buy an existing electronics web-business that is already growing.

Reason #2 – Profitable electronics websites are bread and butter.. They keep making money on their own and they grow really fast..

Reason #3 - Not many electronics websites are profitable because they focus on low-prices and low margins.. I focused on product know-how and having a great selection. There is an opportunity to expand to 100,000 skus but I will leave it the new owner.

Notice on the financials that we did over $300,000 in sales.. However if you notice.. We only authorized and charged $116,000 in sales. Reason*** Some days there were so many orders coming in that I could not handle them all because I had other obligations (work, family). Not to mention a new marriage and the birth of a child… The new owner would be able to increase revenues just by processing the orders.

The total of $300,000+ is the total number of Transactions.

$116,000+ is the total number of transactions that were processed and shipped..

There are so many areas to expand the site for free (eBay, Amazon, buy.com marketplace ect.)

Growth is not difficult.. Many times corporate customer order thousands of dollars on an initial order and then return for additional order of larger volume.

Why am I selling.. I was offered a position w/ a fortune 500 company that would leave me no time to even operate the business.. So its forcing me to sale..

Uploading products is very easy..

- On a shared server you can upload approx. 2000 products at a time
- On a Dedicated server approx 25,000 at a time.

Editing products is very easy. You can upload online from the backend or download a csv file, edit , then re-upload. A good seo could take this site very very far. There has been no linking, or adds to directory.

I will transfer:

Domain name, emails, list, customers, website, data feeds, list of distributors.
Fraudalent Credit cards are a minimum. maybe 1-2% per month. There is a script in the backend that shows if an order is fraudulent

I am starting bidding at $65,000 which is a reasonable price considering the rapid growth that it has had, documented revenue, free search engine placement and the continued revenue and growth it will continue to have. Also, site has had zero paid marketing. I will show buyer where I advertise for free that generates sales. I will show buyer where to advertise for paid placement to explode sales.

The site handles uploads to datafeeds automatically.
It would cost more than $65,000 to start this business before your first sale.
Also I will provide the buyer where I purchase the datafeeds for about $300.00 per month. This information alone is worth $10,000.

Why?

Cnet channel (owned by cnet.com) is the company that provides walmart, tigerdirect.com and a few other heavyweights with their data, images, and specs for products. They charge $85,000 just for 1 year of datafeeds and images. We only spend a fraction of this per month

This is a real business and an opportunity to take over a thriving business that has not even seen 1% of its potential. Please keep in mind that we only processed $116,000 in sales out of a possible $300,000.00

Below is the sales breakdown for Online Sales Only. Does not Include Phone orders.
Actual Processed Website Sales BreakDown:

June 2007 – $5163
July 2007- $8261
August 2007- $1265
Sept 2007- $15380
Oct 2007- $9992
Nov. 2007 – $7804
Dec. 2007 – $19934
Jan 2008 – $19741
Feb 2008 – $3995

Second Profit. Margings are on average about between 18%-20% of monthly sales … On more high ticket items ($500+) .. profit is approx. 20%-23%.. The reason that the site enjoys such healthy profit margins is because I negotiated very good prices with my distributors, plus we specialize in some harder to find items so we can make more on them…. There is Minimal Fraud on the site just because the system flags any suspicious orders. I would account less than 1% total monthly sales to fraud.

Tax Id for distributors. Yes its required. But they are easy to get. And free. You can go to irs.gov to get one..

Revenue Details:
Approx. 90 percent of the orders are online orders and the rest are telephone orders.. Revenue is increasing on its own. All it needs is some paid marketing to see the full potential..

Revenue has statisticly been on average 20% of monthly sales. I will post actual monthly sales in a few.

Operating Costs.

Hosting is $15.00 with Hostgator.com (very reliable, with tons of bandwith left)
Marketing. ZERO. I havent paid for marketing in over 70 days…
800 Number – $25.00 per month
live chat – $10.00 per month

Individual Monthly Profits for transactions that we processed…

June $980.00
July $1569.00
August $478.30
Sept. $3,076
Oct. $1898.00
November $1638.84
December $3986.80
January $3751.00
February.. Not finished yet..

UnProcessed Documented Monthly Sales

June $550.10
July $3,976.37
August $ 11,026.70
Sept. $ 42,239
October $ 8,866.50
November $ 6,090.39
December $ 84,198.35
January $33,856.72

Traffic Details:

google, yahoo, msn ect.