Despite the financial crisis we buy products and services. Probably we buy less, but we do buy. Auto accessories are no exception – can you imagine your life with no cars?

With a wide variety of auto accessories available on the market – tires, car care, glass care, mats, air fresheners, tools, replacement parts… – you just need to choose the category where there is some space for your niche focused dropship business.

You know there are tools and services that should help you to make the right choice, but it is not always 100% correct, you need to try the market first to feel it…

There are tons of legal dropshipers of auto parts and accessories (along with that you can spot a number of successful auto part dropship cases in our archives), but as I have already mentioned in other posts auto stuff is not a popular online seller. Yes, people buy it, but they buy it 5-100 times less than they buy digital cameras, buy ipods, buy shoes, buy bags, perfume, watches, jewelry, etc…

Below you will find the latest dropship business case that deals with horns.

AUTO ACCESSORY DROPSHIP BUSINESS/WEBSITE

Lots of room for growth – Easy to maintain – Nice Design

• URL: www.trucktrainhorns.com
• Established: Mon Jan 28 2008
• Uniques/Month: 3,107
• Page views/month: 20,299
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 652
• Google Pagerank: 1
• BIN: $ 5 000

Description:

For sale is a site that’s been online for almost a year now and averages $652 a month in profit (after PayPal Fees). The site sells complete train horn kits for trucks and cars.

Revenue break down:
Feb – $151.80
Mar – $712.02
April – $695.04
May – $683.74
June – $1283.01
July – $793.32
Aug – $451.79
Sept – $839.34
Oct – $87.16 (See below)
Nov – $859.19
Dec – $620.64
Average = $652/mo.

The reason I had only one sale in October is because I was ripped off by someone (shipped to unconfirmed address.). That would have brought revenue up over 400.

The reason for the up and down sales is because of my rankings. I did a lot of link building for this site at first but haven’t done any in the past 4 months. Sales were down a bit in December due to my supplier being low on stock.

The site is very easy to run. All you do is process payments via the dropshippers website. They normally ship same day and provide you with a tracking number from UPS.com. This business can be ran from anywhere in the world.

On average you’ll make $90-$180+ per kit profit.

Why am I selling?

I really don’t want to sell this site but I need to focus on other ventures. If you look at December stats, you’ll notice three pages of transactions, that’s my new business, and it’s doing well.

Potential Growth?

This site can make a lot more money if you know what your doing with SEO.I did what I could, and ranked okay, but I never ranked at the top, and I still make decent sales.

800 Number

The 1800 number is a voice mail we purchased through FreedomVoice. We probably get 2-4 calls a week from people wanting to purchase a kit. The price per month is $10. I don’t think you can transfer the number but it wouldn’t be hard to change the header with the new number.

Payment

PayPal is preferred but I understand if that’s not an option.

TrainHornKits.co.uk is also included in this sale to help you promote products to people in the U.K.

Revenue Details:

See Above.

Traffic Details:

Traffic comes from other sites and Search Engines. The rankings fluctuate from time to time. There is no PPC traffic whatsoever. I do spend approx. $25/mo advertising on this small forum, but I’m not sure if it helps or not.

Special occasions and holidays are great time for online retailers (as well as for offline). And your dropship business is no exception – you should follow the same steps as big and reputed online retailers make to get ready and benefit from holiday season – the time when 90% internet users are in a buying mood and commercial intention tool is not needed to gauge that.

Another to approach this is to run some holiday website combined with party supplies sales. You have a far better chance to achieve great search engine rankings with this store and save or spend less on PPC and other sort of advertising. The drawback is that you are likely to get enough sales for 2-3 months – then the traffic would dry out.

A seasonal project similar to this is ok if you have other dropship portfolio – or probably it is a cool idea to build your entire dropship portfolio around holidays? You are likely to use the same party supplies dropshippers for all occasions so it would be easy to manage your merchant relations. I think this is worth to think over.

Now it is time to get acquainted with our latest dropship case study and see how to make money with Halloween costumes and party supplies droship site…

Halloween24.com ($70,000 sales in 6 months)

PR3, dropshipping site, 46K revenue in October, high potential

•    URL: www.halloween24.com
•    Established: Mon Jun 30 2008
•    Uniques/Month: 20,000
•    Page views/month: 80,000
•    Monthly Revenue (USD): 10,000
•    Google Pagerank: 3

Description:

It is a dropshipping site for halloween costumes and party supplies products. The custom design and all the integrations with the supplier were done by our own team of professional web developers.  We have also done unique product descriptions for all costumes (3000+ products).  We have invested more than $4000 on these descriptions alone.  It took more than an entire month to develop the site which is fully integrated with the supplier’s system.

The domain name is 8+ years old.  We paid a substantial premium for it on sedo a year ago.  For what it’s worth, the price of the domain name on www.dnscoop.com is $33,000.

The site is very easy to run.  The stocks are automatically updated.  The orders are automatically passed to the supplier and the response with the delivery info comes directly to the system.  The email with the shipping info is automatically sent to the customer.

We will help the buyer move the site to a different server and will help with any additional technical work you may need (up to 40 hours).

The party and costume industry in general is huge, so there are still lots of potential. Here is an extract from one major web site:

“Want a piece of a 7 billion dollar industry? Costumes are not just for Halloween. We operate successfully all year round, and so can you! Christmas, birthdays, Mardi Gras, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, 4th of July, themed parties, conventions, theater productions, and more . . . “

Why am I selling?

We are working on another big project right now and need to redirect our attention from maintaining this site to developing our other work.  Also, we need to generate capital for a new project, so we are parting with this site because it is one of our strongest cash-flow generators.  We believe it should have a good market value.

Traffic Details:

All the traffic is generated 100% free from Google, Yahoo, and Google Products (Froogle).  To increase traffic, we implemented a strategic link building campaign with other SEO work.  The search engine positions and number of pages indexed have been growing steadily, so even if you don’t do anything, you are looking for much higher traffic and a much better Halloween season this year than 2008.  Here is a breakdown of the website’s traffic by month:

2008.08 – 8, 157 unique visitors (40,600 page views)
2008.09 – 23,731 (114,819)
2008.10 – 119,548 (551,012)
2008.11 – 17,077 (73,910)
2008.12 – 13,864 (50,707)

Revenue Details:

We launched the site in June, 2008 and expected minimal if any revenue for that year.  It was a big surprise how fast the site grew; between June and the end of the year we got about $70,000 in sales.  The Lion’s share of the sales was in October, of course. Here is a breakdown of revenue by month:

2008.07 – $1493
2008.08 – $2083
2008.09 – $10213
2008.10 – $46556
2008.11 – $6178
2008.12 – $3221

The current profit margins are about 20%.  We have chosen a competitive pricing strategy.  We could sell the products for higher prices but we believe we would probably see a slight reduction in total sales as a result.  Industry-wide, profit margins are typically higher than 20%, but as a drop-ship retail site, this site is doing quite well.  This site lends itself well to taking and supplying direct stock of some of the more popular items, whereupon profit margins would be around 80%.

Traffic Details:

see above

Choosing the right product line to dropship is not an easy task – you should consider lots of variables to make (or at least to try to make) the right choice.

Are these products good online sellers? How tough is the competition? How targeted is the niche you choose? Does the industry grow or is it shrinking? Do you feel personal liking to this sort of products? These are just a few things you should keep in mind in the process of researching a dropship business product category.

The dropship business case in question is a dropship business that sells cremation urns for both – humans and pets. I am not familiar with the niche, but this sort of product sounds weird to me… On the other hand one can be sure that people always need this sort of product… Another question is that I strongly doubt that people turn to the Internet to buy stuff like that. Most people do not – I am certain.

Unique Niche e-commerce Dropship Website

Easy to maintain, low competition niche with huge potential

•    URL: www.holyurns.com
•    Established: Sun Feb 17 2008
•    Uniques/Month: 916
•    Page views/month: 7,700
•    Monthly Revenue (USD): 1,215
•    Google Pagerank: 0
•    BIN: $15 000

Description:

Holy Urns is a unique niche site that sells over 700 different cremation urns and accessories. It is built around the x-cart shopping cart script. The sale includes the transfer of the x-cart license to buyer. This is a very powerful program with many features and options. It includes the following options:
1.    Advanced Order Management
2.    X-Magnifier
3.    Fancy Categories
4.    X-Offer
It has also been SEO optimized with XC SEO v1.4.0 and the latest x-cart update has been installed. If you’re not familiar with x-cart, the back office is very powerful with many features.

All the information on the dropshipper is included. The sales & ordering process is fairly easy. You just log-in to their shopping cart, select the product and place the order. They take care of the shipping, stocking and returns.

I spent many hours in researching what the competitors were selling the same or similar items for (Sales price) and what the funeral homes sell them for (list prices). So the prices listed are fairly competitive. The gross profit averages about 25% per sale based on my present sales price listing.

I advertise with Google Adwords and about 50% of the traffic is pay-per-click. My average monthly PPC is about $95. I also did a linking campaign to get listed in about 530 directories.

It is set-up to accept payments from PayPal, Google Check-out and Merchant Account. You’ll need to provide your own API’s but it is simple to set up. I also upload the data to Google Base on a weekly basis (recommended) as well as sitemap generation. Both are included in the x-cart back office.

I also have contacts in Asia and India to purchase wholesale products if desired.

Another upsell is the potential to split this into two separate markets. Right now I sell both human and pet cremation urns on the same site. If you split them into two separate markets as most sites do, you could potentially double your income. I already registered a website for the pet products (which I’ll include) as I had intended in building a separate site (ascendedpets.com).

Reason for Selling

I presently have two other business ventures that require my immediate attention and focus. They both are doing very well to date and have very large profit potential compared to this market. The major venture revolves around building a local search directory network.

There is definitely a huge potential with this site to generate a nice income. Most of the hard work is done. Just needs more content, back links, better PPC campaign, and creative marketing.

Traffic Details:

About 49% of traffic is PPC, 18% is Google Organic, 15% is Yahoo Organic, 5% is direct, 3% is MSN Organic and balance is from referral sites. I only bid on four main keywords in PPC (cremation urn, cremation urns, motorcycle urns and NASCAR urns). With a good adsense campaign your traffic should greatly improve.