auction listing urls: http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/53200
estimated purchase price: $20,000
BIN: $
slots: 20
each slot: $
Organizer: tbd
Webmaster: tbd
Pledges Remaining: 0
PledgeList:
WaitList:
established date:
email list count:
alexa:
compete: uv
monthly uniques:
monthly gross: $
monthly net: $
status:
details:
Very profitable e-commerce store,
40K visits/mo,
15K sales on first year
Unique hair accessories store,
high profit margins,
Entire site is bi-lingual - English/Spanish,
Great SE rankings
Established: Fri Dec 29 2006
Uniques/Month: 40,000
Page views/month: 100,000
Monthly Revenue (USD): 1,250
Google Pagerank: 3
Listed: Fri Dec 12 2008
Description:
Introduction
HairstyleCITY is a hair accessories online store selling real hair extensions and hair jewelry.
HairstyleCITY was designed as a beauty magazine that also offers its own beauty products.
We have very warm community of readers that constantly keep in touch with us regarding various hair/beauty related questions.
We have over 13,000 subscribers to our newsletters.
All our products are imported by us from
two manufacturers in China
.Our relationship with the manufacturers is great and is a result of hard work to establish the high level of trust – the buyer of this site will greatly benefit from these commerce relationships.
Importing the products from China is a very easy task – just let them know what you want, pay and expect a DHL/UPS/FedEx delivery to your door with all your products.
We have special agreements with the manufacturers and they allow us to order very low minimum quantities and still get the low wholesale prices.
The biggest advantage of buying directly from the manufacturer in China is the great prices that you get.
This enables us to achieve very high profit margins in this market.
In general, our retail prices are a multiplication of the wholesale cost by a factor of 3-5.
We sell our products under our own brand name and all the retail packaging and branding was done professionally.
The manufacturers use our professionally created graphics to print and prepare our retail packages and the products arrive to us ready to be sent to the customer.
Language Advantages
The entire website is bi-lingual – all the content was professionally translated from English to Spanish. This move has proved to be very successful to us.
The Spanish speakers market in the US is one of the most sought after markets.
Our vast majority of orders are from the US but a good number of these customers land on our Spanish articles.
An interesting side effect to having our site and products sold also in Spanish is that we get customers from Latin America order wholesale quantities from us because they can’t easily do it in English.
Website Content
To attract search engine traffic we have heavily invested in premium content, articles and videos.
We had professional beauty writers write for us dozens of long, high quality articles which we were professionally and carefully search-engine optimized.
These articles are our number one source of traffic!
*** NOTE: Some of the articles include celebrity pictures which we purchased the license to. This license is a monthly subscription that costs $50/mo for up to 100 pictures.
The buyers of this website will have to continue and pay for this license if they wish to continue and use the pictures.
What’s Included
Included in the sale are:
Domain name
The site files & database
List of over 13,000 email subscribers. The list alone can bring years of residual income
All the product retail branding graphics and video
*** We have created 3D videos for each piece of hair jewelry that we sell
What’s NOT Included
Existing inventory which will be sold to the website buyer and cost price that we paid. I estimate the current inventory to be around $5000.
We have 5 instructional videos that a hair professional had created for us. These videos are features on the website and on YouTube.
The buyer will have to get the consent to continue to use these videos or just remove the links to them from the site.
Revenue Details:
Unfortunately we weren’t able to invest a lot in marketing and promoting our products;
All our sales grew naturally and organically just by presenting them on the web.
Having said that, we still got about $15,000 sales since we started selling our products on Nov, 2007.
(The website was launched, 12/30/2006, but served only content to the reader and was used to build the big subscribers list)
Expenses:
Hosting: $177/year
Pictures license: $50/mo
Email list hosting: $29.90/mo
Traffic Details:
Traffic comes from all the major search engines, mainly from Google.com.
All the traffic is from natural searches.
The traffic has been steadily growing over the months and is now about 40,000 visits/month.
This is a growth of about 40% since Jan 2008.
Seller's Comments
Products cost: about 25%-30% of the retail price
1. We hold all the inventory. It doesn't take a lot of space, everything can probably fit inside 2 suitcases
2. We do the shipping & packing - It's a very simple process. The hair package is shipped in a padded envelope
3. Very little time is spent, not more than a few hours a week to answer emails/questions & shipping
Shopping cart: We bought the source code from www.vevocart.com and customized it to our needs
Reserve price: I am not willing to disclose my reserve price at this point. I will consider any serious offers that take into account what we have achieved so far and the potential of this business
No you don't.
I am actually located in Canada
Bounce rate: Indeed 66% is high but this is the site-wide average. I've just added another screen shot from Google analytics with the homepage stats. The bounce rate on the homepage is 39%. (On the Spanish version of the homepage the bounce rate is even lower, around 33%)
All the traffic is natural.
Most of the orders are from regular people. We did get some bulk orders from hair stylists, mostly from Spanish speaking countries.
Reason for sale - We need to raise capital for another investment.
For your convenience, I’ve uploaded a picture with the monthly sales of the last 12 months
Shipping from UK: I don't know how much it would cost but I am sure you can find out - The shipping envelope is about 25cmX35cm. Typically, a shipped envelope weighs under 200g and we use the postal service for most of our shipments.
Import taxes: It all depends how you classify your shipments but in Canada and in a couple of other places that I checked, there are several hair categories that charge you 0%-5%. The manufacturers are aware of this and will work with you on how to classify your shipments - they know their job.
looks like he's asking too much.
But looks like a niche that has some potential.
But looks like a niche that has some potential.
