With the growing list of our case studies our readers are likely to learn all dropship business know-how from online business gurus who describe their dropship business processes in detail:

- hot product market research
- reliable product merchants lists dropshipping goods to your customers
- marketing tactics
- growth strategy

Another valuable thing in researching our case studies section is that it is possible to choose products to dropship you feel personal liking to. I mean you are free to choose what products to drop ship from a wide variety of products available from verified merchants.

I do know from my personal experience that it is not so easy as described in the above paragraphs, that it is a trial and error way, but those who have set the goal to make money online with drop shipping are likely to succeed if they assign the time and efforts required.

So, enjoy another case study and make the notes what drop shipping made easy is

Profitable, Easy to run site, 2 years old

• URL: favortakeout.com
• Established: 14 Feb 2006
• Monthly Revenue: 2,000
• PageRank: 4
• Min Bid: $7 000

Description:

All our products are provided by a drop shipper (they’re a large, very professional company). It’s free to setup your own drop ship account with them (we’ll tell the winning bidder how to do this). When an order comes in to our site, we just log on to their website, place an order, and they’ll ship it for us. They also handle returns and will refund you the price you paid them for the items when a customer sends in a return.

Work Involved:

The amount of work involved is very minimal. A few minutes a day is about all that’s needed to answer email questions and place orders on the drop shippers website. It’s also a good idea to periodically check the drop shippers website for new, discontinued, or back-ordered products.

Why we’re selling:

Our core business is web design (out loud creative), so we’re selling favortakeout.com so we can focus on our core business. We’d like to invest the money from this sale into our core business. If we don’t sell the site, we’ll still keep it going though, as it’s a great site to run (easy and profitable).

What’s Included:
Professional Custom Design & Branding
Domain Name
CS-Cart Application ($195 value) along with our customized template files, settings, etc – basically everything you need to get favortakeout.com setup and running on your hosting account
Database of products, past orders, pages, etc
Opt-in email list (currently at 162 subscribers)

Revenue Details:

Past 13 Months of Revenue (wedding favors are seasonal so we’ve included the past 13 months):

jan 08 – 577.80
dec 07 – 262.76
nov 07 – 125.87
oct 07 – 1225.08
sept 07 – 2088.32
aug 07 – 1307.45
july 07 – 3133.69
june 07 – 3935.5
may 07 – 1990.89
apr 07 – 1780.55
mar 07 – 2526.73
feb 07 – 3398.14
jan 07 – 2537.25

We can provide the winning bidder with a login to view proof of our sales.

Profit: Our profit per item is about 40% on average, but the buyer would be free to adjust the pricing of favors.

Our costs:
$20/month hosting (via Media Temple) – we were with A Small Orange ($12 / month) but recently moved to MT – they seem to be a bit more stable. Currently our SSL is not setup at MT since we just recently moved the site, so an error may be shown if you visit a secure page. Pretty much any shared hosting account should work just fine for this site.

Our time to maintain the site and process orders (a few minutes a day).

Traffic Details:

The majority of our traffic comes from search engines. Since we began the site, we’ve only spent a few hundred dollars on google/ yahoo ads, plus a couple inexpensive banner ads. With a little bit of SEO or google advertising, this site could really take off. Unfortunately this site has been a side project for us and we haven’t had the time to devote to it that it deserves.

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.

Dropshipping health products is a good idea – the end of illegal online pharmacies promises a big market and demand for dropshipping vitamins, nutritional supplements and other related products.

One aspect of starting a dropshipping business is the proper choice of products to dropship. In the previous posts you could read success case studies of online dropship businesses that deal with a wide variety of products.

No doubt it is more profitable to sell and easier to market some product lines. To find out what to dropship, you need at least simple demand / supply research, but you should take your time to carry out a much more extensive market research if you are serious about growing your dropship business as your main source of income. For now, enjoy the new case study, make notes to implement best practices with your dropship ventures.

• URL: vitaminbungalow.com
• Established: 9 Sep 2004
• Uniques/ Month: 4,500
• Page views/ month: 15,000
• Monthly Revenue: 8000
• PageRank: 4
• BIN: $14,000

Description:

4 Year old drop ship fitness product website (with sister 3 way link site) for sale. 5-8k visitors a month over 4k in customer database and newsletter subscriber list. Repeat customers , low overhead. Professional SEO and link work throughout

Revenue Details:

Product sales, adwords, affiliates

Traffic Details:

Direct repeat customer, site referrals, Organic search engine we do not do paid search engine listing all traffic is organic. We also use MS product upload and google base uploads for products