Ask the co-owner of a 500k annual net profit e-commerce company anything

Ask the co-owner of a 500k annual net profit e-commerce company anything
>nothing that will identify the product or the name

Attached: 8F6F59CC-0C7C-4C4E-BB82-AFF1F66A2F7E.png (1170x2532, 723.79K)

I don't have any questions but I want to support this thread and let you know that I appreciate you contributing high quality content to Business & Finance

Attached: bladerunner.jpg (1920x800, 392.11K)

Do you think opportunities to build such a thing are common? Did you discover it by prior experience or trial and error?

Here’s some info:

>50/50 co-owner
>2 man operation
>he does inventory, order packing, shipping
>I do website, customer support, marketing, design
>he works about 70 hours a week
>I work about 28 hours a week now that things are up and running
>100% ecommerce. Wish, Etsy, eBay, website, bonanza (gay), mercari (also gay).
>product sells for $95, costs us $18 for materials plus $7-$10 for shipping
>approximately 40-50 orders per day

No, not common. But absolutely doable. We started 2 years ago. Product is just the one in a million winner. We were lucky to discover it, and actually first found it by need (but the person selling it was very low effort and low quality, we did it bigger and better and took over the market). There are no original ideas, only people who do it better.

That makes sense. Thanks, user.

are you investing in Russian stocks and if not why not?

Based onahole vendor

Is the operation under a formal LLC or something of some sort? How do the accounting and taxes work?

You using an order management service yet to collect them all in one place? It's a fucking pain in the ass to go through a bunch of different carts

Impressive stuff, user
How do you market/what's your marketing budget?

Attached: 1645893633956.png (985x985, 938.72K)

Yeah LLC. Last year we filed as partnership but this year we have an accounting firm and they told us to file as S-corp for 2022, so we pay ourselves a base salary ($70k) and then take the rest as weekly distributions (not subject to self employment tax) which will save something like $12k in taxes and the accounting firm only cost $4k a year so it worked out. Now I don’t have to care about bookkeeping which is a weak area for me anyways.

Why are you gay

Sort of. Our shipping software connects to each of the marketplaces. We use the same SKUs on each platform and the shipping software brings all the orders in as one list. We map the sku to blank space at the bottom of the label so all my partner has to do is hit print and bring the long trail of labels to the bench and start slapping them on the right boxes. Shipping software auto updates tracking on each platform.

However when I do my customer support I have to go into each platform and answer messages

Do you manufacture your products, or is it something you source from a supplier? Do you have a lot of competitors or did you find an exclusive niche?

YouTube videos drive a lot of traffic to my website. Etsy also has an amazing reach and brings in a lot of its own traffic just by listing things in Google search (through the Etsy offsite ads). It also places products near like minded products on the Etsy website “customers who like this are also interested in……”

I actually love Etsy, it’s a great platform and the fees are less than eBay. I do use Etsy ads which I pay about $20/day for.

We buy individual components from alibaba and a couple US sellers and put them together to create the product. I have had great experience with alibaba.

Also, don’t confuse alibaba with AliExpress. AliExpress is a bunch of shady chinks running ghetto little chinatown shops. Whereas alibaba is legit suppliers who have sales team members who make commission, and want to sell to you. They will negotiate to get your business, make custom changes, etc.

Also, don’t be afraid of minimum order quantity on alibaba. Most of the time they will sell you less than the MOQ. They just put a big MOQ on the product page so idiots who want quantity:1 don’t waste their time.

Yeah, that's just how customer support works, nobody puts those messages in their api. I just pushed my company to start doing this, and I honestly struggle to understand why nobody suggested it before me. We were literally printing off packing slips from eight different sites and using those as instructions on what to produce. I'm still trying to unify all the SKUs, which they weren't even using until a few months after I started. I envy your ability to have built the whole thing from scratch

Yeah, it’s much easier now. Originally we didn’t do this. Shipstation will interface with basically any website service out there. I don’t like shipstation’s interface as much as pirateship but pirateship doesn’t have as much integration.

When I first started I truly didn’t think there was any need for skus so I would just leave them blank or put something basic in the field. But now that I map the sku to the ship label it makes it so my shop partner doesn’t even need to log into the marketplace he can just print the label and use that as a sort of ticket system

Dragon dildos?

lmaoooo dis nigga gay as fuck being kind an shiieeet

word of advice, set up a second shop and grow it a little bit, even make the illusion of choice. etsy WILL suspend you one day and youll be scrambling but if youve got a backup its no problem

Shipstation was one of the options i looked at, but it actually doesn't interface with Zazzle, which is a big cart for us. Ended up going with order desk, which i think it's just generally better for what we do anyway since we're pretty much entirely print on demand and need to do a lot with orders in between receiving them and shipping them

op do u have any tips for an ADHD brainlet neet like myself? I want to start an online E commerce business selling survival and prepper gear to schizos just like me. I have 3k start up cash. Where do I start? Is shipping expensive for you?

Also do you see any complications in the future if supply line issues keep getting worse? Have you had any problems so far? Increased prices? I've noticed little things like double edge razor blades that i was going to buy go up a dollar while it sat in my cart for a week on amazon.

No but legitimately dragon and animal dildos is on my list of businesses to start next. They do remarkably well on Etsy and eBay. And the markup is huge.

Not op, but supply chain has mostly steadied out for us. Last year was fucking horrible, there was a period of like two months where something new would suddenly be impossible to get and we had to scramble to find a different supplier who could tide us over. Between logjams at the ports and Texas freezing, plastic was so fucking scarce

I got some experience through dropshipping but since its dead now i want to get into e-commerce. Any advice on picking products? What do you thin about reselling popular asian products such as skincare?

Good info, thanks man. I haven’t looked into zazzle, I’m gonna see if it might work well for our product.

Start with something simple and in demand. Like metal jerrycans gas cans. Sell to preppers and automotive guys who like to mount their gas cans outside their jeeps.

Yes we raised our prices recently by $10. Our suppliers on alibaba keep good contact and let us know if any interruptions might be coming. Most of the stuff we order ships by air anyways, not by ship, and that’s where most of the problems are.

this is actually brilliant advice. white label your own product, make a nominal "improvement," sell it for the same price and manufacture a culture of rivalry to kick up sales. kek