Is this a success story you decide?

bytommo1968

3.8K followers

7 years ago

A bit of history for the guys who don't know,

I came into WA in 2011. I was being paid off from my day job and searched online to see about how to make some money. One website led me here and I signed up back then I think for $7 for a week. I started to learn and build my website in the fishing niche which was also my day job back then.

As it happened I was paid off and through a blessing from above landed another day job the following week. I was at least paying the rent but now I was hooked (sorry for the pun) in WA and the thought of making a passive income.

Also as part of being paid off held onto one account who were happy to let me sell their products on eBay. So I was working a day job, building listings for eBay and building a website to promote the eBay shop and drive traffic to it at night from the training in WA.

All the profit I was making on eBay sales were going straight back into buying new inventory to sell. It was slow going but I was making sales and thinking if I keep building I will have enough inventory to be sustainable.

At that time I was only able to work on the project about 15-20 hours a week sometimes less but I always thought the cumulative effect will someday pay off. I was still working the day job so wasn't worried about paying the bills so this was as my wife called it "my hobby". We would jest back and forth that someday my hobby would take us on a holiday or pay to change the car.

Joint venture Offer! Outsourcing and International sales

So move on a year or so and I get the offer from a tackle dealer to join together to see if we can make a better go of things. He had access to other supplier accounts so we set off adding extra items to the inventory. What I had accumulated to that point he matched in value so now our eBay store had doubled in value.

So we worked away adding items and building the website, building social networks and adding traffic. Move along a year and we decided to outsource to get more help with listing. We changed the storefront and used a listing template to give a more professional look to the store. We spent about $2k getting everything moved over and things were starting to move on the traffic and sales.

We also signed up to Webinterpret who translated 600 of our listings into 6 international sites free of charge. They take 5% of the sale which they build into the price so the end user doesn't know the difference or we don't lose any profit. The way we seen it was if we make a sale or not it's not going to cost us and it's going to promote the store across internationally.

Sales were improving and we were getting to the point where we thought we could start taking a salary from the business as up to this point it all went back into inventory outsourcing and TAX. (by this point we had went to a limited company set up a bank account and were paying corporate TAX).

Anyway a big U-turn for me,

I was offered another job (I was headhunted) a fishing tackle wholesaler wanted to build a B2B (business to business) platform so their customers could buy from them online rather than by the normal manual ways they were doing.

Tackle dealers are busy during the day and most of them have only 1-3 personnel and time to do ordering is of a premium. It would be more beneficial if they could do this in the evening when it was quieter. In fact a couple of possible customers refused to sign up because the lack of such a platform.

With my background in the fishing trade and my e-commerce skills they thought I would be a good fit. WOW! I was excited. My day job at the time was mostly office work and accounts so the chance to work on something I was passionate about was too good to pass up.

A dark cloud to the offer!

There was a downside however, as I would be dealing with competitors of mine in the eBay and Amazon markets I was asked to give up my selling of physical products. I was in a dilemma the new job sounded great but to give up my stores oh no!

I thought about it and decided to do it, If I was honest the evening work was more about checking over inventory and other administrational activities not really what I wanted to be doing. The new day job I was better suited to and a chance to get back to work on the Affiliate Marketing thing I found out about all those years ago seemed to good to be true.

So I spoke to my business partner who agreed the new job was too good to pass up and that he would continue to keep the store running. We just had to work out a timetable and get everything passed over to him.

Loads of things had to happen, change over all the accounts, bank accounts TAX affairs etc. So the next few months were involved in sorting stuff out. I had started my new job and learning how the company worked my first task was to categorize the inventory into bin locations and update the database.

Next was to work at the best option for a B2B platform for our needs. As the company was using a Sage accounts system the options were somewhat limited but that is something for another time to discuss.

Stiffed by the outsourcing

On my affiliate side we had come into a problem with eBay as they had changed their terms and active content was no longer allowed we had to physically go in and up date over 1400 listings. Unbeknown to us the guy we hired to build new templates had put in loads of links to websites that Google had now found in violation and I had to remove 36 urls for each listing also.

What a chore, I contacted the guy for advice and he said it was down to the active content and new terms with ebay which was a load of BS he wanted us to pay him more money to fix the problem he created but we thought we would fix it ourselves.

I know a bit of html and got to work using the bulk editor tool to find and replace code. Took about 4 weeks of evenings and weekends to get the task down but thankfully we are there now.

So now the only task I have left is to complete the last TAX return for the 12 months prior to me finishing. It was my remit to do that anyway so I thought once more wouldn't kill me right. So anyway after about 1.5 years on my own plus 3.5 years with a partner I had a profit coming back to me.

Holiday with the family

I took $2000 there and then and took the family on holiday (hey missus told you it wasn't a hobby) and have still about 3 times that to come, just waiting to see how much the TAX man needs first. That plus we did spend about $4000 outsourcing the company had made about $20K since conception for the two of us.

Not bad for an evening and weekend hobby but I know we made a few mistakes and could have been better prepared in certain areas. However I have learnt a lot about eBay and Amazon and their marketplaces. Things that I can now use in my day job right.

So now I'm back to reworking my website. I'm not going to go into that now as this post has gone on a bit but I have to re-work to promote affiliate programs instead of physical products as before. I have loads of ideas and have some money to invest so hopefully I can make a go of things and will see the traffic which has stalled move back up with more CTR's and the all important sales.

To be continued....

BTW the image is of a goose taken at Kensington Gardens London on the family holiday!