Seller's Notes
ABOUT THE BUSINESS
Up for sale is a profitable easy-to-run and long standing drop shipping based 3Dcart e-commerce platform that sells various leisure and tailgating items. Over the past 12 months, the sites have delivered $39,000 in revenue and $7,000 in bottom-line net profit... and both sites have amazing long-term growth potential (see 'Growth Opportunities' section below). The stores have a long and successful track record and are fully turnkey, a complete business in a box.
No expertise required. Would suit a complete beginner or experienced business owner.
NOTE: This is NOT a drop shipping store associated with AliExpress, eBay or Amazon. This business is partnered with 18 US suppliers who will deliver direct to your customers, no stock inventory is needed.
The business was originally established in 2003 and we purchased this business from the original owner at the end of March in 2015 (official closed April 1, 2015). Since the purchase, the stores have had a complete overhaul in design to become fully mobile responsive. There has been no paid advertising, retargeting, or third party SEO efforts made.
What websites are for sale?
A. www.Picnic-Basket.com (PB) & www.Tailgaterzone.com (TGZ)
Picnic-Basket.com has grown to be one of the largest online resources for everything picnic and outdoor leisure. Visitors to the site can browse through our large selection of over 14k SKUs of picnic, wine (no alcohol) and tailgating products. Picnic-Basket.com is in its 14th year, is a well-established niche site that has consistently shown a profit. It is very low cost to operate. The products have MAP (minimum advertised price) policies protecting seller profit margins and 100% of our items are drop shipped.
TailGaterZone.com is in its 7th year, is well established niche site that has consistently be profitable. It is a very low-cost site to operate. The products have MAP (minimum advertised price) policies protecting seller profit margins and 100% of our items are drop shipped.TGZ specializes in college & NFL team logo gear for the “Party in the parking lot”. With over 125 college teams and all the NFL teams represented there is a huge selection of tailgating supplies from pop-up tents, tables, chairs & coolers to personalized team flags, flag poles, car decorations, plates, napkins & cups and more.
General Information:
The sites serve as automated sales system and are hosted by #1 Rated eCommerce platform 3dcart, the system notifies drop shipper via email of new orders, and the system emails buyers a receipt of their order, the drop shippers email you tracking numbers when an item has shipped. You enter the tracking number into the system and the customer is emailed the tracking information. Typically once a week, vendors will send you an inventory file with available inventory and stock levels, you upload the file into 3dcart and inventory levels are adjusted automatically. Although some vendors add products throughout the year, most of the new product updates will take place annually. The vendor mix is well diversified with 18 suppliers utilized.
No stock, No offices, No warehouse required!
No stock is held by the business, the suppliers hold all the stock and deliver directly to the customers; you can manage this business from anywhere in the world, all you need is a laptop.
Ordering is fully automated and sent directly to the suppliers who send product directly to your customers. No need to talk directly to the supplier to add delivery address of your customers like other sites as this process is fully automated.
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HOW DOES THE BUSINESS MAKE MONEY?
The business makes money through the 'drop shipping' business model selling products that are supplied by US suppliers that will ship the products directly to customers who purchased from the website. No actual stock is held by the business, this means that you do NOT have to pre-purchase any inventory, store products in a warehouse, or manually ship out orders yourself. All that is required to manage and maintain this business is customer service and after-sales support.
The purchase and supply flow is as follows:
Customer visits the website
Customer places an order on the website at the retail price
System sends order to the supplier
The supplier ships out the product directly to the customer
Suppliers send you shipping notifications
You keep the profit – THAT’S IT IN A NUTSHELL!
Is the site easy to manage? Can somebody non-technical run & maintain the site?
Absolutely, anyone can run and maintain this website, from a novice to an experienced business person. The site is extremely intuitive and easy to manage, it is built on the hugely popular 3dcart platform so there isn’t a lot of technical knowledge required to run and maintain this site as 3dcart makes it so easy.
The custom website themes were built by 3dcart, so they can be easily updated and configured from within the 3dcart backend of the website.
Uploading and editing products are done through 3dcart’s simple web interface and can also be done in bulk via CSV file uploads.
If you are not sure what 3dcart is or has never used 3dcart, you can see in this video just how simple and user-friendly it really is: https://www.3dcart.com/build-an-online-store.html
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SUPPLIERS
All of the products the store carries are advertised with MAP pricing (Minimum Advertised Price), which means that the suppliers set the minimum price the products can be listed for. MAP pricing is great for any drop shipping business because it ensures that competing retailers can't undercut each other’s prices, which would lead to "price wars" and shrinking profit margins. So this means the store can compete on price at the same level as any other retailer no matter how big or small the competition every store will have the same price.
There are currently over 14k products for sale from 18 suppliers, all of the suppliers are easy to work with and I can confirm that all supplier accounts can either be transferred over to the new owner or that the new owner can easily set up a new reseller account with the same pricing and terms. All supplier information will be supplied to the new owner as part of the handover post-sale. All the suppliers are US based, thousands additional products can be added and new product lines from Harley Davidson to Coke are available from our suppliers.
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PRODUCTS
As mentioned above there are currently 14K products uploaded to the site, the products have been optimized for on-page SEO with customized H1 and H3 titles, SEO meta titles and descriptions, customized URL’s and image alt tags. The product images are optimized for size, shape and zoom for a unique customer experience.
Gathering and uploading the product data is what has taken the majority of time building and optimizing the store, so as the new owner you will have saved yourself hundreds of countless hours of work to get the website to the position is it currently at. The products listed on the site have all been painstakingly manually uploaded and optimized; this task alone would cost hundreds of dollars to outsource. The sites are both aged and benefit from 100% organic traffic.
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TRAFFIC
All traffic is non paid and fully organic. Picnic-Basket.com had 105,650 Visitors in 2017 and TailGaterZone.com had 22,639 Visitors in 2017. Blogging and social media posting would add additional traffic. There are many opportunities to add paid traffic sources that I have highlighted below.
We have not invested in Google Adwords & Bing - Shopping and Search Advertising campaigns or Dynamic Product Retargeting with Facebook Ads (Basically showing the product again to a customer in Facebook if they did not purchase or added to cart). Anyone familiar with e-commerce will know that many customers don't actually buy on the first visit and so the Facebook retargeting has been very effective in bringing back what would otherwise have been a lost lead.
Google Adwords - Shopping: No time has been spent with the setup and configuration of any AdWords Shopping Campaigns (PLAs) to target traffic with low, medium and high buying intent searches. No effort has been spent building negative keyword list
3dcart’s platform ensures the products on the website are fully configured and ready to comply with Google’s product data specifications. The platform easily connects to Google Merchant Center and will periodically upload all product data to Merchant Center automatically.
AdWords retargeting code can easily be added on the sites to record all visits to the website, what products, the price and category, which means dynamic product retargeting, can be easily set up in the future (this means you can retarget the same product somebody viewed again via ads on the Google Search network and its partner websites).
Facebook - Retargeting: Retarget customers that have either viewed a product or viewed and added to cart. These Facebook ads will display the actual product in the Facebook feed of a previous visitor and have worked very effectively for many websites in bringing leads back to complete their purchase. Setting up retargeting on the sites would be a significant growth opportunity. Additional marketing could be done by building lookalike audiences and running ads to those audiences.
Youtube Channel - The store has access to videos that could be added to a Youtube channel with videos posted from suppliers, we have the permission to post those videos to a YouTube channel from those suppliers. Each video could have a store link in the description and pinned comment and open up a great way to get attention and free traffic. This is something that really should be explored more by the new owner.
Affiliate Program - This is also an area that could be explored as we have the system in place to allow affiliates, we just have not created the supporting commission structure, marketing, banner ads, etc.
Google Loves E-commerce Websites!
As we’ve already stated, a lot of on-site and on-page SEO work has been implemented throughout the site and as Google fully indexes the site the organic traffic should continue to increase, and more organic sales opportunities will result.
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SALES
For the year 2017, Picnic-Basket.com had 141 orders with the average order value at $215.72
12 Months Revenue: $30,417
105,650 Visitors
Conversion Rate of 0.13%
12 Months Expenses (product, hosting, payment processing fees, phone, etc): $24,715
12 Months Net Profit: $5,702
For the year 2017, TailGaterZone.com had 86 orders with the average order value at $91.06
12 Months Revenue: $7,831
22,639 Visitors
Conversion Rate of 0.38%
12 Months Expenses (product, hosting, payment processing fees, phone, etc): $6,464
12 Months Net Profit: $1,247
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STORE OPERATIONS
At its current profitability level, the store only requires about 1-2 hours per week to run. Here's a list of the operating tasks required and some recommendations to grow the sites (most/all of which you could outsource if you wanted to)...
Process Orders - As mentioned above, 100% of the store's orders are drop-shipped. When the supplier ships out the order, they'll provide a shipping tracking number for the shipment, which you simply pass along to the customer (via the store's simple admin panel). Over the past 12 months, the store has averaged ~ 4 orders per week, so you won't have to spend a whole lot of time processing orders.
Customer Service - The stores have an active phone number which are no longer manned due to other various commitments but when they are manned they do result in higher conversions and sales. It would obviously be your choice of whether you want to continue this way or "ramp up" customer support during business hours, which would no doubt increase sales and profits.
Product Uploads - Like with any store, you'll want to add any new products released by the suppliers as they become available. This doesn't happen a lot but if and when suppliers do release new products they will email out details. Obviously being first to market with new products can give you a competitive edge so being proactive with this task is advisable. Uploading products takes around 10-20 minutes per product depending on the complexity of the products.
Inventory Management - Stock levels are generally easy to manage as each supplier either has downloadable spreadsheets or they email out regular updates. As with any drop shipping store you’d generally keep all items in stock unless you know they will be out of stock for a long time. This gives you an opportunity to capture a sale and have the customer wait for new stock on backorder as if the supplier is out everyone is out. Or you could provide a suggestion for a different product if they’d rather not wait.
Paid Traffic Optimization - Adding paid traffic campaigns would add to the day to day tasks and would involve checking keywords and adding any negatives plus keeping an eye on how competitive your bids are in relation to your competitors.
Social Media Marketing – Adding social media campaigns would add an hour or so a day, managing posts, comments, and likes.
Blogging – Adding a blog post or two a week would add about an hour per post.
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WEBSITE DESIGN
The websites run on a 3dcart custom template with a few feature enhancements build by the 3dcart team to allow bulk orders and quantity discounts to be handled automatically at checkout without the need to speak to a person. This custom theme has a lot of design enhancements to enhance the user experience, credibility of the store, and build trust with our customers, such as: