Hello, I have been a fan of online e-commerce stores for some time now. The great thing about them is they are cheap to start and can potentially earn you a lot of cash!!!
In my experiment I am going to see if its possible to generate $5000 in sales a month, starting with only $150.
Now, first thing is first I need to chose a niche to go in. From what I have learned in the past, anything that women buy, will do pretty good in the web simply because Women love buying stuff. I thought that fragrances would be a great niche to start in.
I started off heading to godaddy.com and trying to get the best domain I could (not much in the fragrance niche) and ended up finding www.cologneandperfumez.com - I thought this was a good domain because it has my two main keywords in it, “cologne” and “perfume”.
Next I needed to find a good e-commerce platform to hold the structure of my store. I have used many e-commerce solutions from aspdotnetstorefront to oscommerce. One that I havent tried was volusion so I headed to www.volusion.com and chose a plan. Now, their prices are a little high for only a $150 investment, but I thought I could start out small and maybe expand if I needed to. I ended up buying the bronze package which allows 100 products (good start). The bronze package was $90. So that puts me at $60 left in my budget.
Now that I have my store, I need products! I found a great wholesaler of designer fragrances and got the top 50 mens products and top 50 womens products. I easily downloaded the products and imported them into my store. Since this wholesaler was so good, the prices were amazingly low. I was able to add 20% to the cost and still have the lowest prices out of all my competitors.
Most people know that without traffic there are no sales so i need a way to get some decent traffic to my site to start making some cash!! I headed to yahoo products and set up an account for my store. I put $50 in the yahoo account to see if I could get some good qaulity traffic from that. So $90-$50= $30 left in my budget (getting low!).
The rest of the $30 was used for adwords advertising which as you can see from the screenshots below didnt really do crap. This is probably my fault because I am not to good with adwords advertising.
It has been about 2 weeks since I started getting some traffic from yahoo and here are some stats for my store. I have easily already made the $50 back from advertising along with a couple hundred more.
Here is a recent screenshot of my sales.
Here is a screenshot of the stats from yahoo search marketing (yahoo products) sales. Not bad conversion ratio!
Here is a general look at my ROI tracking.
As you can see I have done some craigslist marketing (didnt seem to work or be effective. I also wrote a couple of articles about buying cologne and perfume and some reviews of cologne and perfume. So far these have not been effective but I will keep writing articles to gain some SEO for my site.
I will be updating this thread periodically and updating you on my challenge and whether I can do it or not.
