Website Closers® presents an SBA Eligible eCommerce website with 5 million SKUs, offering popular, best-selling novels that span the fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books genres, as well as toys, movies, and video games. Two aspects of this business have been instrumental in making this one so successful over the past decade.
First, the company’s virtually unlimited number of SKUs has given it the ability to steadily increase sales and build a loyal customer base. The company now averages 400 orders per day, a good indication of how strong sales are for this company.
Second, the company does not stock inventory – it dropships from a larger wholesale book retailer, which also handles the shipping after a customer places an order. This has enabled the company to process hundreds of orders each day without needing a warehouse to stock items, alleviating themselves of the costs associated with warehouse space, warehouse employees, cash flow constraints from inventory buildup, and more.
The company developed its own software which is attached to their seller’s platform on eBay. Once an order is placed by an eBay customer, the brand’s software downloads the order from eBay, then orders it electronically from the vendor, and the shipment is made both seamlessly and rapidly. If it sounds like an ingeniously simple and effective system, it is. This is a company ideally positioned to scale rapidly, and the most effective means of doing that would be to expand onto other popular eCommerce sites, such as Amazon, Target+, and Walmart.
Listing the brand’s best-selling books – already familiar to buyers because they are established top sellers – would enable the brand to dramatically increase profitability virtually overnight. The company could use PPC ads on Amazon to promote their products and drive traffic. Opening their own Shopify eCommerce store to sell directly to customers could also deliver additional revenue. eBay has proven to be a solid platform for this company, since there are an estimated 187 million eBay buyers worldwide, the eCommerce hub has served as a massively lucrative audience. However, diversifying the sales platform is a proven method for expanding sales, and reaching people who don’t frequent eBay.
Establishing a Shopify sales platform allows the owner to boost traffic by introducing an SEO program that would include keywords in product descriptions, and a blog on the site to highlight their SKUs. The Shopify site could additionally be used to allow customers to register their email for updates, promotions, and upsells. The company already carries a 2,000+ subscribers in its email database, ideal for active email marketing campaigns, and those numbers would definitely increase once the company had its own website with an easy email subscription option. Having a Shopify site would also enable this company to run PPC ads on Google to drive traffic to it and help expand the customer base.
The business was launched in 2010 to market books and other items through a high-level dropship model, with all transactions being fully automated. While the company has added on different SKUs such as compact discs, toys and video games, the primary items being sold are popular books. At an average order value of $19, sales have soared. That’s particularly true in late summer, when the company experiences an August rush as students gear up to go back to school. The weeks between Black Friday and Christmas have become their busiest season with gift-giving a crucial part of sales.
Their customers share one common characteristic: they are all frequent shoppers on eBay. The company has received multiple purchase orders from repeat customers, and the brand gets plenty of 5 Star reviews from customers who note how quickly the book was shipped and delivered, the excellent customer service they received, and the great condition the book was in upon delivery. Those reviews have helped the company get rated as a top seller on eBay and has provided excellent free advertising for them.
The company’s marketing plan has mostly taken advantage of eBay’s Promoted Listings program, where eBay boosts items from their normal positions in search results to the four top spots. The company has a social media marketing plan as well. Their Twitter account, used to promote new books that have just become available, has 8,800+ followers, while their Facebook account has nearly 1,000. Both accounts are used to help drive organic traffic to their eBay platform.
There are clear ways to use digital marketing to scale this operation. One would be to expand onto other popular social media sites such as Instagram and use the heavy volume of users on these sites to attract new customers. The company could expand into video marketing as well, which has proven to be highly successful for other companies. This brand could post those videos on their new website as well as on popular sites such as YouTube and TikTok.
By marketing products that customers clearly want and continue to purchase in high numbers, this brand’s track record of success puts it in the ideal position for rapid growth.
The company’s unique software has truly helped propel the brand to the status of top seller on eBay since it guarantees that the customer gets a quick delivery.
That same software has made this a fully automated business as well. The current owner spends 20 hours per week managing customer service inquiries.
The company receives an average of 25 customer messages each day, which are handled through eBay’s messaging system.
Working with a developer who manages IT, this company’s software systems are seen to for 1-2 hours each day for monitoring and maintenance in normal conditions.
This is a successful business with a proven product, and an innovative framework that is fully automated. Offering an unshakable foundation of sales and terrific growth potential, this company is primed and ready to scale quickly.
