Forum Moderators: buckworks
I plan to start out with one or two related items. My cost wholesale to my door is about $40, think I can sell them for $89 or so. People on ebay charge about $20 for UPS ground shipping...it's kind of heavy, but (at least where I live) it is hard to find a product like this locally. My goal is to sell them at a profit when all is said and done (duh.) My initial net income target is $2k a month, which breaks down to around $65 net a day. Is this realistic?
Web site would essentially have one page, and be a subdomain of, or page inside one of my affiliate sites. I'm not sure what content and or design aspects I need to get people to buy, since my experience is in sending a qualified lead somewhere else, and not actually closing deals myself. I would be a one man part-time shop, which I would expect people would be leary to buy from.
Payment: I am currently thinking of PayPal "Buy Now" as the purchasing "cart/checkout" until I know this is worth the trouble of getting a merchant account and cart setup. Anything I should know about PayPal or this method of market testing?
My intial marketing would probably be AdWords, and Yahoo SiteMatch or whatever it is called. An AdWords Image I would think would work well on AdSense sites if targeted well. I don't know if the PPC ROI will work out, hence the single page and PayPal setup.
Initialially I would purchase a single case of the item (qty 5) and try to sell them all before taking on any more inventory. My cost of a single case is higher than a larger purchase, but I can use the results to estimate ROI at the lower larger purchase costs.
This seems to me to be a simple, but workable way of dipping my toe in the ecommerce waters while having a decent chance of success.
Please shoot holes, inform, and provide any insight you see fit.
You may also check Overture's keyword suggestion tool and look at bids on various keywords to give you a better idea of the cost and amount of traffic.
As for sales... it might work better if you could enter a credit card number in a virtual terminal, so you could advertise your phone number, even a 1-800/toll-free one, and take down their cc# on the phone or by fax.
wattebaellchen- That's a fairly poor conversion rate. I would be trying to at least double that!
