Hello !
Your name?
Philipp Kostin
URL(s) of site?
LINK TO WEBSITE
Age of site?
8 months
Approximately monthly page views and/or unique visitors?
8,000-15,000 uniques, 40,000-80,000 views, see
stats and read below
How does the site generate income? How much?
Selling watches and AdSense, on average $1200/month
Who develops content and administers the site? How much time does it require?
Dropshipper provides datafeeds, the update takes 5-10 minutes and is pretty automated
What is the monthly cost of running the site?
Hosting costs and i have an text & banner ad on watches directory for $50 per month
Reason for selling?
Really, no time to spent with it and i nedd money for my other projects
Will you help with the transition of the site to the new owner?
Sure, i can set it up, host it for a month or so at my server and you will get my full support until you see how it works.
Does the site have an ezine or newsletter? Number of subscribers?
Well, i have 520 customers and some of them have leaved the newsletter checkbox checked (maybe a third of them ? but i have never sent a newsletter out.
What all does the site include?
Domain, all scripts, images, database and customers
Asking price for the site?
Bidding starts at $12,000, BIN $20,000
LINK TO WEBSITE
I have decided to sell my watch dropshipping business. This website has been a steady moneymaker for the last 8 months for me and actually i am really sad to give it away but i don't really have time to bring it to the next level and need a lot of funds for my new projects.
For all those who don't know what dropshipping is - your visitors place an order on your site, then you go to the dropshipper's website and place an order there. They ship the watch to your customer and you keep the difference as profit.
The dropshipper has about 3,000 watches for sale. The update for the new products is pretty easy - you download the datafeed from their site and upload it to your site. I have wrote an update script that adds newitems, download images, updates quantities and prices etc. All is pretty automated, it takes about 5 minutes to update all products. I always wanted to completely automate it, but never had time to do that. Actually, with some PHP knowledge, you can get the datafeed directly from your server and let the script do an update every 24 hours via cronjob.
All in one i spend about 10-20 minutes a day with it to place the orders, update orders status and respond to the emails.
The site is based on OS Commerce with some custom changes (like static URLs etc). Customers can pay with PayPal and you can also connect 2checkout if you wish. The dropshipper accepts PayPal and credit cards. The easiest way is to accept PayPal payments from customers and pay the dropshipper with PayPal also.
Now on to some numbers.
Traffic.
Here are some stats screenshots:
Statistics
The most of the traffic comes from Froogle. As you can see, the traffic decreased in the last time, because i have spent no time with the site at all in the last two months.You should take 2-3 days and change the product names for the new items. Right now, the new items are like "Invicta 2233". But who does search for it ? So you should change the Product name to something like "Invicta 2233 Mens Automatic Dragon Lupah Watch" or something. I have a script for that where you ebnter the Item ID, then you do a search in Google for that model and change the name with that script. It takes some time though but it will be worth it. The site used to get 500-600 daily visitors when i did that for every update, now its like 200-300 daily visitors.
All pages are in the Google Index (about 15000). there was a time where i was on the first page for "Discount watches" and "Watches Outlet", but the site seems still to be sandboxed for now. Yahoo don't like my site for some reason and MSN sends some traffic in too.
An automated reciprocal script is installed on the site and all sites you can see under "Resources" links to the site. There are 2 PR6 links and several PR4-5 pointing to the site. The site screams for more link exchanges (The categories are ready & have PageRank and i have a list for the potential sites to exchange with. I have bought an advertisement (Text link and a small banner) for $50 monthly on a large watches directory site - that's the only advertisement for it.
Revenue.
Since this website has been optimized for "discount watches", the prices are also set to discount values. You make anywhere between $10 and $60 for each order depending on the watch price. The PayPal fees and the shipping is INCLUDED in the price, so i mean $10-60 PROFIT per order. On average you make $15-$20 per sold watch. If you get an order for several watches a once (i had some orders from watch resellers) or the customer chooses any faster delivery method than UPS Ground, you make more because the shipping ($7 on average) is included in each price
Here are some numbers from the past 8 months:
425 orders from 527 registered customers
$71,969 order value
$7,190 profit
$2,496 Adsense revenue
So on average you get $800-900 per month from sales plus $300/month from Adsense - around $1200 in total.
Surely, you can easily raise the prices (i have a custom script for that) as they are very low at the moment. Also you can charge for the shipping if you wish, but i think its a good thing to offer free UPS delivery and it seems to work well.
Potential
Yeah, i hate all these newbie posts about sites with no revenue at all but with "potential", but this baby NEEDS some care to bring more money. Keep in mind that i do NOTHING at the moment.
So here is what you should do to bring it to the next level:
- Change product names from simple "Brand Model#" to something like "Brand very nice watch keywords Model#" to get back the once great Froogle traffic
- The dropshipper dropships ONLY to the US. However, i am getting a lot of requests from Other countries asking if they could order. No, i can't do that since i am in Germany and it would be too expensive to send the watch over here and then send it worldwide. But if you are in the US, you could order the watch to your address and then send it to the customers.
- Open a Yahoo store. This one should bring in a lot of orders but never did that due to the lack of time. My prices beats a lot of Yahoo store competitors.
- Sell at Ebay. Yes, it needs some time but could be semi automated with some third party Ebay tools. Again, my prices are pretty good.
- Adwords - If you are good at them (i am not), they should bring in some good traffic. there are enough terms for $0,05 (like "Discount invicta watches" and such - no big money terms like "Tag Heuer" etc.)
- Get more link exchanges
The script and a list of prospective sites to exchange with is there.
Actually, this one should be a full time venture and i should do all this stuff myself before the sale, but i really don't have the time at the moment and i need the money now, not in a month or two.
Price.
Looking for a quick sale. Bidding may start at $12,000. BIN $20,000. I will post it for sale on other boards, so please bid here or via email: support at watches - outlet . com (remove the spaces and replace at with @). Please do NOT PM ME !
The domain is registered and hosted in Germany, i can host it for a month or so for you if you wish.
If you have some questions, please EMAIL ME either - this is the fastest way to get a response.
Thank you and happy bidding !
