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Employed and starting own business (import/resell) - few questions
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Thanks for the advice! Any product I add will be somewhat related as I don't want have a shop where I sell bananas along with car parts
. I think the next few months will be very interesting, for sure I won't get bored!
What I could try to do is to keep my shop in English only and test out some of the product by selling them on Amazon .it, .fr, .es and .de, that should be pretty straight forward and would also give me an idea of where I could get more business from and then decide how to enhance the website based on that. I am sure I will learn more in the next 12 months that I probably have in my whole life, really looking forward to this, it's a bit like playing a strategy game for me
I think it's definitely worth just focusing on the home market still. You may as well get as much value as possible out of the market you know and share a language with before trying to enter a market you don't know in a language you don't know. Unless it's something insanely niche (which it doesn't sound like it is) then there should be enough of a market here for you to make more than enough money to justify just focusing on that at least for now.0 -
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Hi,
sorry I won't be sharing for now until I get more established for many reasons that you can imagine, I really don't want to induce more competition of any sort or give inspiration to start something specifically in my niche of choice.
But if you have question not related to the specific products I sell I will be happy to answer
What's the site?
No one is going to steal your idea, it's all about implementation anyways.
Probably buying off alibaba, would be nice to see what prices you have or what the site looks like etc.0 -
Hi,
sorry I won't be sharing for now until I get more established for many reasons that you can imagine, I really don't want to induce more competition of any sort or give inspiration to start something specifically in my niche of choice.
But if you have question not related to the specific products I sell I will be happy to answer
I think its fair to say that there aren't going to be many people casually browsing boards, who will see a link to a website and then on a whim go and source the products, set up the website and all the other time consuming things required to set up a business. Not any more so than they would if they randomly stumbled across your site or if they found you as they were looking for your products. Posting your web address is not high risk, trust me0 -
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Hi!
I have been receiving quite a lot of private messages in the past few months asking for an update and advice, so I figure I will just update on this thread directly.
Business is growing well, November and December really boosted my confidence and those two months combined counted for over half of my yearly sales. I sell mainly via my website now and only sell very specific types of products, I want to keep growing my brand and selling many unrelated products would just make the business look cheap. I do still sell a couple of other products via eBay, however I will probably stop soon in order to only focus on growing the actual products related to my business.
If you want to make some quick bucks then importing from Alibaba/Aliexpress/etc. to resell on eBay or Amazon is good, however if you want to build an actual brand/business for the long run then build a brand and sell via your website and keep full control.
My main marketing channels are Facebook (count for about 75% of my sales and have about 23k page fans now), Google Adwords (about 20% of my sales), Instagram and Twitter (combined count of about 5% of my sales and around 6k followers). I learned a lot on Facebook marketing and managed to get cheap likes at about 10c/likes via Facebook Ads, not investing in Facebook in 2017 is crazy and I am amazed when I see small/medium size business not investing on Facebook. I am pretty sure that in the next 2-3 years when business will start understanding the value of Facebook the price of advertising will surge.
Instagram is also good for certain type of product, while Twitter is almost dead but there is no harm in trying to get something out of it anyway. I will look into SnapChat soon but I am still not sure how to use it in a way that benefits the business, I am new to Snapchat. Will need to play around a bit.
About 80% of my website sales come from UK and Ireland, 20% from rest of the world. I ship worldwide, no reason for any online business not to do so, especially considering the size of Ireland unless you ship outside Ireland you can't scale the business too much in most cases.
In terms of profit there is none. Everything I profited during the year I re-invested in Facebook Ads in November/December to grow my following and to place a couple of large order towards the end of the year to increase my inventory. The same is planned for 2017 and 2018 to grow the business as much as possible, I want the company to become huge. My yearly balance is just about 0. From 2019 we can start talking about paying myself something, but for now is far from being a priority.
On the downside my SEO is not good yet, I wasn't even ranked on Google until recently and then a couple of weeks ago I went through some webmaster and Yoast tutorials and found out that I could have waited forever and never been ranked the way the back-end of my website was. Now I have fixed a few things and I am on page 4 for the main keywords. I will keep working on it and try to rank on page 1/2 in the next couple of months. This hasn't affected sales as I was always on page 1 with Adwords anyway, however Adwords doesn't come cheap!
If you have any questions just fire away and I will reply, I don't connect to Boards very often lately however I will answer any question you may have here, it will save me from getting too many private messages 0 -
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antoinolachtnai wrote: »That is great news to hear. From an accounting point of view, I would just like you to make sure you have a clear grip on what the word 'profit' means. Money reinvested in inventory is not a 'loss'. It is the reinvestment of profit to buy an asset. At the stage you are at, it is worth asking an accountant to explain this to go through this with you to make sure you understand it. The reason I say this is that it is important for you to understand whether your business is what people call 'profitable' or not. I would say by the sounds of it, it is not profitable, but only because the volume of sales isn't high enough to allow the margin to cover your 'overhead' (principally your own salary).
It is very important how to do management accounts for your business, to understand how much 'contribution' each sale delivers to your bottom line. These are words that are bandied around but used properly, they have very specific meanings.
I don't want to know your awful commercial secrets, but can you give some idea of what proportion of your gross profit on an item (difference between what you buy it for and what you sell it for) goes on Facebook marketing and on other costs?
Hi,
sorry I didn't express myself well. For "profit" I simply meant cash left over at the end of the year (sales-expenses), excluding the stock though. Terminology may not be correct, you are right. Also I probably used some other terms incorrectly, so if something is not clear just let me know
My margin is high, if I exclude money spent on advertisement I sell each product at an average 5x B2C and 3x B2B (I do wholesale to some shops abroad, but number is very small for now. I will use customized Facebook Ads to target shops for resale next month, once the orders I am waiting for arrives. I use pdf catalogues for resellers who contact me for now).
Just a consideration on money spent on Ads: in 2016 I spent around 3k in Facebook Ads, however not that the 23k followers I have now will stay with me forever. Technically I could spend 0€ in Ads this year and still reach a large number of people every time I post (have a big organic reach whenever I post pics on Facebook). As of now my Facebook page is probably my biggest asset. As a note until October my Facebook page only had 1k followers, and Sales have been really spinning up once the page started growing fast. I didn't want to invest much on Facebook at the beginning because I only managed to get it down to 25c/like which was pretty expensive, but now with 10c/like quite the opposite is really great value!
Said this I have no intention of stop investing a lot more in Facebook Ads this year, by December I want to have 100k fans on the page and use it to grow other venues such as Instagram, Twitter and gather emails as well.
Also in 2016 I had plenty of one-off expenses as I was starting up, I purchased tools for office and also web-tools to automate Instagram/Twitter, etc., etc.
In 2017 a lot of these start-up expenses won't be there.0 -
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Hi,
sorry I didn't express myself well. For "profit" I simply meant cash left over at the end of the year (sales-expenses), excluding the stock though. Terminology may not be correct, you are right. Also I probably used some other terms incorrectly, so if something is not clear just let me know
This is really important to growing your business! You need to speak the language of business for a load of reasons. What you are describing is 'cash flow' or 'discounted cash flow'. Profit = sales - expenses -opening stock + closing stock)My margin is high, if I exclude money spent on advertisement I sell each product at an average 5x B2C and 3x B2B (I do wholesale to some shops abroad, but number is very small for now. I will use customized Facebook Ads to target shops for resale next month, once the orders I am waiting for arrives. I use pdf catalogues for resellers who contact me for now).
Your 'gross' margin is high!
But I am wondering, as a proportion of your total gross margin so far, how much of that gross margin has been spent on ads?
Or to calculate it another way, if you take how many orders you have sent out so far, and divide it into the total spend on ads, what number do you get and if you divide this into the average gross profit for each order what sort of number do you get?
(I am not asking you to necessarily tell us all the numbers, but it would be interesting to get an idea.)Also in 2016 I had plenty of one-off expenses as I was starting up, I purchased tools for office and also web-tools to automate Instagram/Twitter, etc., etc.
In 2017 a lot of these start-up expenses won't be there.
If these tools really work, you will find yourself investing in upgrades, new versions, etc. Nothing wrong with that, that's 99 percent of business is all about. You re-invest your profit in your business. That's why profit is such a good thing.0 -
Not really, as long as you know what they mean and apply them correctly it is certainly not one of the "most important" factor to grow your business. I pretty much don't need to speak about my business figures with anyone (never looked for funding, sponsors, etc).antoinolachtnai wrote: »This is really important to growing your business! You need to speak the language of business for a load of reasons.
What it is really important for growing a business is:
- Continuously improve your product.
- Market it well.
- Sell it.
- Ensure your customer is happy.
Too many people get lost on the little things and don't focus of what is key. Maybe if one day I need to present all my figures in public then I will study all the accounting terminology.Your 'gross' margin is high!
But I am wondering, as a proportion of your total gross margin so far, how much of that gross margin has been spent on ads?
Or to calculate it another way, if you take how many orders you have sent out so far, and divide it into the total spend on ads, what number do you get and if you divide this into the average gross profit for each order what sort of number do you get?
Let's say on average I buy a product for 1 and sell it for 5. With Google Adwords I spend about another 1 for conversion.
With Facebook Ads again the figures cannot be calculated correctly. When I advertise on Facebook I don't advertise for "Conversion" (I will in future). I advertise for "Likes". The difference is key: if you advertise for conversions you use Facebook Ads pretty much like Adwords, focusing on that one day sale (even though you also get the occasional page like), if you advertise for "likes" you build something that not only gives you a potential immediate sale, but each "like" is an asset for the future that can bring sales. On top of that in the value of a big Facebook page we should also consider the fact that if one day I decide to sell the business the price will also include the Facebook page.
Of course if some short-sighted Corporate CEO looks at the figures will probably be super-happy with my Adwords campaign results and disappointed with my break-even Facebook campaign but this is exactly why most corporations are blinded by short-term figures and don't grow. The reality is the exact opposite, my Adwords campaign have been just about OK, whereas Facebook has been delivering great results for me.
Obviously to make the CEO happy I could have stopped my Facebook campaign at 10k likes and show some nice figures with profits/product but again that is not the right move long-term and fortunately I don't have some corporate CEO to report these figures toIf these tools really work, you will find yourself investing in upgrades, new versions, etc. Nothing wrong with that, that's 99 percent of business is all about. You re-invest your profit in your business. That's why profit is such a good thing.
They do work and come relatively cheap. No upgrades required, all included in the initial price. They already paid for themselves many times around and can also be used for other websites in parallel. Again, in my opinion every small business should use automation tools to grow their Instagram/Twitter presence at some level, and at the same time ensure to interact with their customers whenever comments are received.0 -
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_feedback_ wrote: »Well done, very interesting thread
Are you still working full time? In previous posts you mentioned leaving your job when you were earning twice your salary with the business. Is this still a realistic goal?
Yes, still working full time. I am re-investing all profits to grow the business and the website has been live for less than a year, I am still very far for making enough to support myself full time with it. My goal is to be full time on this business (and potentially a second e-commerce?) by 2020. To be honest at the moment even though I spend a good amount of time on the business I can do both without major problems, automating as much as possible and outsourcing easy/time consuming tasks is really key for the long run though.
I don't feel like I am really working when working on my business to be honest, I feel more like I am playing a game where the more effort I put in and the more rewards get out of it.
Of course some tasks (ie. recording purchases/sales at the end of the month, editing pictures of new products, etc.etc.) are boring, but I can live with it.
I am not in a hurry, and I am enjoying the process. 0 -
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With Facebook Ads again the figures cannot be calculated correctly. When I advertise on Facebook I don't advertise for "Conversion" (I will in future). I advertise for "Likes". The difference is key: if you advertise for conversions you use Facebook Ads pretty much like Adwords, focusing on that one day sale (even though you also get the occasional page like), if you advertise for "likes" you build something that not only gives you a potential immediate sale, but each "like" is an asset for the future that can bring sales. On top of that in the value of a big Facebook page we should also consider the fact that if one day I decide to sell the business the price will also include the Facebook page.
I think you can calculate this, certainly. You can certainly calculate how much you are spending building your brand and you can calculate how much cash your brand is generating. There is not really a lot of need for gut instinct.Obviously to make the CEO happy I could have stopped my Facebook campaign at 10k likes and show some nice figures with profits/product but again that is not the right move long-term and fortunately I don't have some corporate CEO to report these figures to
You are building a list for yourself with Facebook, sure, but mainly, you are building the list for Facebook. Facebook can and will sell access to your Facebook follower base to the next competitor at any time. In my view, you need to make your money from these people and consolidate them as customers fairly quickly.0 -
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