For today, we will be reviewing an e-commerce drop shipping website that makes around $315.67 a month. The site is about a year old but is already making good income in a very competitive niche. From the looks of it, it seems like the website is managed by a single person who might also be the owner of the site.

Basic Information

Business Type Niche Platform Age of the business
Drop Shipping Kids products Opencart 1 year

The website drop ships various high-end kids bedding and bedroom décor. Their focus is on hard-to-find high-end beddings and bedroom décor for infant, toddler, and kids’ bedrooms. This niche is a little bit competitive as various bigger names are already leading in the industry. Also, the niche would require you to keep a very big inventory because you may have more than 100 items up for sale at a time. For bigger companies, this is just fine because a warehouse or stock room is a normal occurrence for bigger brands.

This problem is negated with the mere fact that the site itself is using the drop shipping method. With the drop shipping method, the owner does not need to keep an inventory in stock. As a matter of fact, the owner will never ever need to hold the items. All the items are delivered directly to the customer from the supplier. No more need for a warehouse. More information about drop shipping here.

As a starter website, this is a good way for anybody to enter the e-commerce scene. The website is built with OpenCart which is one of the more popular e-commerce platforms out there. It is newbie-friendly and can easily be customized to your needs.

Traffic

[wpdatachart id=11]
The site itself gets around 1,233 page views a month which is not bad considering there is a very stiff competition with the other bigger brands. The big difference between the number of visitors and page views is good indicator that most of the visitors are targeted and they are interested in products in the website.

Traffic Channels

[wpdatachart id=12]
Out of the 1,233 page views per month, up to 64% of this comes from organic search. This connotes that the website owner has a healthy SEO campaign in play or has paid for ad placement in the search results. Personally, all he has to do is just continue what he is doing SEO-wise. It seems to be the number one traffic source and it’s proving to be a good one at that.

Direct traffic also accounts for around 25% of the inbound traffic the website gets which basically means the site has a lot of returning customers or other people who have been directed towards the site through word-of-mouth. This is good news considering direct traffic is hard to control unless you set forth a massive offline marketing campaign. This can also mean that the product they sell are really good because people are either returning to buy more or are telling other people about the site.

The remaining parts (about 10%) of the traffic are from referrals and social sources. This might not be totally alarming but this is a sign that you might want to increase your social media presence. The site has its own Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest account so at least you know there is a foundation. You just need to focus on it a little bit as social media is a good source of traffic if handled correctly.

Financials

[wpdatachart id=13]

Month Revenue Costs Profit
May 14 $275 $26 $249
Jun 14 $880 $26 $854
Jul 14 $150 $26 $124
Aug 14 $50 $26 $24
Sep 14 $275 $26 $249
Oct 14 $0 $26 -$26
Nov 14 $0 $26 -$26
Dec 14 $75 $26 $49
Jan 15 $945 $26 $919
Feb 15 $855 $26 $829
Mar 15 $0 $26 -$26
Apr 15 $595 $26 $569

The site generates money from selling high-end and hard-to-find kids bedding and bedroom décor. Like what was mentioned above, this is a competitive niche but the owner found a good way to sneak through the competition by focusing on specific products that aren’t available with the competition. I believe this is the best part about the website. Of course you can say that the owner had SEO done or maybe some form of marketing done but it all boils down to the owner’s impeccable choice in niche. He took a very general but competitive niche and zeroed in on specific items that are hard to find.
With this strategy, the site owner penned a profit of around $315.67 a month. The owner also made a good decision by adopting the drop shipping scheme. It saves him time and effort by not bothering with inventory.

Conclusion

If I were to rate this website overall, I would give this a 7/10 for a starter website.

Here are some reasons why:

  • The niche is very specific therefore you can easily sneak through the competition using a highly specialized SEO campaign.
  • The site uses drop shipping which is a hassle-free and stress-free way of handling doing business. No more worrying about inventory.
  • The site itself was created through OpenCart which makes it easy to use both for the seller and the buyer. It can easily be customized to your liking by yourself or through the help of a seasoned programmer.
  • It also has a solid foundation on its SEO campaign as we can see from the organic search data. You might need to beef up your offline campaigns a little bit but the data on direct traffic makes us believe that the site has good reputation offline.

Now that we have listed down the best parts about the site, here are the negatives:

  • The niche the owner selected is a bit of a double-edged sword. Although you can get good income from it, there is no telling when the trend will change. The owner must constantly be on the lookout for new trends to adapt for the business to survive.
  • The site has little to no social media presence. Social media is the best and easiest way for small and medium sized businesses to acquire new customers and increase the loyalty of the current ones. The owner needs to ramp up his social media campaign to be more popular in the various social media platforms.