We have a small office, too much stock to have at home, I wish I had a big enough place, but with 2 kids plus a wife and living in Central London its not an option, yet! But yes I could replicate it somewhat in the States easily, it would however need to be someone I trust, I know lots of people in the States but all dont appear to be right fit

Depending on the volume of your US based business, it may be worthwhile developing a dependable fulfillment relationship. They are surprisingly affordable. When I moved to using one domestically it literally changed my life. I also had a relationship with a UK fulfillment center when our UK and EU business was stronger, but we lost the relationship with a few EU affiliates that pushed most of our volume and eventually the drop in volume necessitated shutting down that center, but it was definitely easier and faster to fulfill orders in the EU before...

If you're interested in specifics and are willing to share some details privately, PM me and I can share my experience with you and make an introduction to a very dependable operation in the US if you are interested.

Selling women's clothing means you have pictures of beautiful women in various poses and various amounts of clothing.

Some guys on social media are not very good at conducting themselves. To say the least, I have a lot more respect for the girls who put themselves out there like many do.

PM’d thank you

Seeing that other's here use Shopify, I'd like to share my general experience with them because I'm not sure if it's just happening to me.

When I first opened this store, there was some odd-ball product imported. I got a nasty email about selling products that violated the TOS of Shopify. They didn't indicate which product, but I assumed it was one single product in the store (which I wasn't interested in selling) and removed it.

I sent them an email and they told me that I cannot reopen Shopify payments, and here is a list of processors I can use...

I asked why they didn't include Stripe on this list and they told me that it was because Shopify payments was Stripe and, in reality, I violated Stripe's TOC and therefore, I wasn't allowed to use Stripe anymore.

This didn't ring true to me, so I contacted Stripe, showed them my store, Pinterest, and so on. Stripe said Shopify was nuts and that they were lying about Stripe's policies. Stripe also said that it was up to Shopify to reinstate shopify payments, and it's on them.

I contacted Shopify again and they told me that it was Stripe who wasn't allowing them. I sent them the email chain and they STILL claimed it was on Stripe. I use Stripe as my processor now (I don't like them either, but whatever).

And this has been the pattern of Shopify. A problem arises all the ****ing time, they pass the buck to some other entity (eBay, Amazon, some app), I call bull****, and they keep denying it, and after many hours / weeks, I send the proof and they still act like this wasn't anything on them. It's super irritating.

I was thinking of building up an app for Shopify, but I truly despise the company and refuse to do any more than the minimum I need to run my store. Why would I ever want to put my app into an ecosystem that defaults to throwing me under the bus and making me look bad? It's astonishing and I've seldom dealt with this before.

really interesting thread guys...thanks for creating it and all the info

hey, de captain;

One of my suppliers has a great deal with DHL. I was looking up a price on shipping to Canada via their site and it was holy **** expensive. I asked the supplier for the price and it was very reasonable.

I'm not sure if that's a volume discount, a business contract, or etc. In any case, maybe try calling DHL and see if they are able to work with you.

When I used to import from China, DHL was amazingly fast and efficient, and I've never had anything stopped at the port... well, you probably know how that rolls. Of course, they were pretty expensive, but considering I was pulling in 30 lb boxes, I suppose it wasn't that bad for air ship.

And the most recent example of Shopify being dotes.

Once upon a time, I liked Shopify. I was going to start building out an app to integrate with their store and planned to put it on their marketplace. It was one that I needed and there was no other solution available, so I feel like my odds are pretty good with it.

In order to start developing an app, you have to open a developer account, which comes complete with a sandboxed store to test with.

So, there was a billing problem with Shopify and an app I use. Due to some stuff I rather not talk about, I had to go offline for a few weeks, so when I came back online, I had a few bills to back pay. I paid what I thought was everything, but one app still didn't integrate. Shopify said that this app had a strange billing cycle, and I owed them a few months of back pay. Fine, whatever, I need to sell product so I coughed up the extra month.

Two weeks later, this app is offline again, and this is causing problems with my inventory. I contact the app (who has horrible communication) and after ignoring my first email, they finally respond to my second email.

They said that Shopify never shipped them the funds and I owed them in order to continue using their service. So, I sent them a screenshot of my charge and said that they were paid, so please fulfill my orders because I can't be refunding customers on eBay.

Today, I get a message from Shopify: "Hello {davet's app}; Please rater your customer service experience with other app."

Wait, what? So, instead of linking to my store, they linked to my app! That shouldn't even be possible!

Now that I finally figured this out, I'm going to raise absolute hell with Shopify tomorrow. I'm pretty sure Shopify has lost money with me since they started, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Subbed!

I'm torn between Shopify and Wordpress. I have the skills to maintain a decent Wordpress shop, but man I hate the workload. Meanwhile on the Shopify site, I hate that they have so much control over me. It's wild that they could get a cease and desist letter and shut me down with a click of a button.

So yeah, still torn on platforms. Something tells me we'll see another big player in this space though. Plugin costs on Shopify are so out of control if you want a half decent site.

Shopify is very trigger-happy to remove your site and payment processor, as I found out about the hard way.

I actually just spend 1 1/2 hours on the phone with them today, and even they agreed that the "frauds" team went a little overboard on my account. I also had to talk to them about horrible integration issue with different apps, which isn't surprising. The Shopify API is plain awful, and nearly every app that I've installed has broken in spectacular ways. I had to re-import all my products two weeks ago, which was just perfect timing for Christmas. These app issues also caused me to do too many refunds, caused fees from eBay, and generally made this month a wash.

Working with the Shopify ecosystem really isn't so different from working with WordPress. To get a good design cost a lot of time and money due to broken plugins. What's funny is a lot of those plugins require you to do your own custom coding to get them to work at all.

Facet sorting by color, size, price, etc, is either totally impossible or very expensive as well, but BigCommerce has the same issue. A facet-enabled site on BC is $300 / month.

Reality is that ecommerce at any appreciable scale (more than 1k / mth in sales) is completely broken, and it's only made worse that few developers in this space are worth much. That's a function of trying to sell apps to an industry where about 10% of people work in the black, but then again, most apps, plugings, channels managers, and so on, end up causing massive issues (and can even blow out entire month of profit), so the cycle continues.

The other problem is that selling online is a revolving door. It take extraordinary work and knowledge to get the levels I'm at even. I'm a small dog compared to a decent-sized eBay or Amazon seller, but compared to the typical Shopify person, I'm a total beast. Everything is optimized to the smallest common denominator.

I would love to continue working on my idea, but reality is that I know there aren't many devs who have knowledge of the space, plus it's the same issue one finds when trying to build for the restaurant industry: how do you turn a profit in an industry no one earns money?

I find wordpress plugins way more reasonable. The 1 time costs to buy many are far more agreeable than the monthly ass rape that Shopify uses.

I guess one thing I haven't considered is hosted wordpress.

WooCommerce is WP, which is about the same price as Shopify.

I only need two plugins from Shopify to have salable products, which makes the total to about $100 in base fees per month. If I left Shopify, I'd either have to go to BC or I'd have to manually export csv files from the suppliers to track inventory. I have a sitemap generator that's $3 / month, and it's much faster and easier to pay that money.

What's crazy is the wide variation in subscription fees. The same thing can be free, $5 / month, $15 / month, $399 / month, and none work any better than the other (if at all).

Impressed you can only use 2 plugins. If I was on shopify I don't think I could get away with less than 7-8. You sure you're getting the most out of your site? Seems like a weird thing to say in your AMA, but some of those plugins are serious profit boosters.

Which 2 are you using?

I use more than 2 plugins. I have two that keep me locked into choosing either Shopify or BigCommerce and those aren't negotiable. The rest of the plugins have analogs to pretty much any other storefront.

I do run a lean store, plus the risk is the same as using plugins on WP or anything else: get the wrong one and full collapse, you're next week is blown.

What 7 or 8 are you thinking about? There's a lot that I've used that were "good for sales," but they didn't work out very well. I either have a strange clientele or everyone else is misinterpreting their clientele.

I haven't been in the Shopify ecosystem for a while now so really top of my head is stuff like abandoned cart, suggesting things to add at checkout, offering small discounts in exchange for social shares or customer loyalty, heat maps, crm's, shipping, currency, pop up. etc...

I'll probably also need a few others like private area and maybe messaging app. This excludes all the really obvious apps they use for integrations too (mailouts etc...).

I wasn't asking specifically about Shopify, but in general.

I get a decent amount of traffic at my store (for it's age) and have a healthy conversion rate. I'll tell you what my experience has been:

abandoned cart -- I just started this one and don't have enough data

suggesting things to add at checkout -- Eh, if it's random, that's not going to work at the size of my store. There is a "see similar" at the bottom of the product pages, which is good, but I'd be impressed if an app would know that a silver bangle w/ ruby is going to go well with a beige bodycon dress and yellow straw hat.

offering small discounts in exchange for social shares or customer loyalty -- This actually had the total opposite effect. Not only did no one bother signing up, sales fell to zero. In fact, all discounts that I've offered have resulted in negative sales volume. I encourage you to do your research on social buttons, share buttons, and so on. There is a lot of information on this, but more often than not, it ends up killing your shares and conversion rates. I already knew what to expect since I've seen the patterns many times, and even with Shopify's "optimization" (LOL, but okay), it was the same result.

heat maps -- This is part of general analytics (or google analytics), so not really relevant.

crm's -- baked in (somewhat. I have an email list and customer list, but nothing complex)

shipping -- I pay for shipping to the US and don't really worry about it, personally. When I held my own inventory, I just used basic shipping w/ tracking or flat rate. USPS is more than enough for most businesses, otherwise open a business account with UPS / DHL.

There is little to no reason a company doing less than $20M / year needs a complex shipping app. That percent they take off of the top is a Kevin from Shark Tank deal in disguise. Absolutely devastating for low-volume / low-income companies.

Okay, I know some offer discounted rates by pooling everone under a single umbrella, but Shopify, eBay, Amazon, and everyone else offers this as well. If you are using Magento, then I suppose give a shipping app shot.

currency -- I don't deal with international, but I think this is baked into Shopify, Stripe, and Paypal. It isn't shown on my website because I'm not really encouraging it. Shipping to Hawai'i', Alaska, and PDX is bad enough that I don't like to do that even.

pop up -- I don't use pop-ups at all. I know that people follow other marketer's leads, but it comes down to magnitude as well. I have a small mailing list, but that list is all very much voluntary, not something that blocked people from using my site.

Took step one away from Shopify. Called up BigCommerce and to put it lightly, I have a very poor first impression of them. The phone "dropped" according to them. I was able to hear all the background noise, I kept saying "hello?" to no response and there was no "hello?" back.

Sorry I ask questions.

#1 pet peeve:

If you do this, please stop.

One of my suppliers is selling items while they are still on the water.

It seems that people who do this have a pattern of horrible customer service, **** quality product, and a constant line of excuses about this or that.

If you don't have it in stock, don't put it on sale, and even worse, don't tell your sellers that you have it in stock when you don't.

Truly, the sellers have to eat all the dust and ****ty suppliers can all go **** themselves.

I got a bit of promotion running on eBay. I'll let you all know how that one works out. It's interesting because they just take a percentage of the sale via ad-click.

Speaking of promotions, my Instagram is up to 100 followers. I just started doing it again and there was about 20 a week before Christmas. I had 70 or so back in September, but neglect, ha!

It's interesting to see how much it swings, but doesn't really deviate more than 5 each way. It's also interesting to see the demographic breakdown. It's a 60/40 m/f split, though it was about 50/50 a few days ago. In any case, the engagement and product detail clicks is pretty good.

This is what I meant about having $3,000 to spend on ads before. I'd probably hire a cute local girl to just post pics on Instagram.

Big Commerce sounds terrible, does that mean your staying with Shopify or still looking around?

I'm going to stick with Shopify for the time being. I don't really have any options, unfortunately. BC would be the only other platform I could use, but for what you get, their prices are awful.

A big issue is hooking my eBay and Amazon stores back to my store. BC only pushes products, and can't pull. The option is to remove all eBay listings and repush (this would end up costing me $1000 or so), or I'd have to pay for a channels manager, which is a bad deal when you aren't at least $20k / month, give or take.

Long term, I would like to start doing my own branded stuff, but that's at least a few months off, and I'd be surprised if I could even do that this year.

Another option is buying product wholesale, but that will be too risky today, as I'm still not sure what products will sell. It would give me considerable edge, as I'd be able to sell it for less.

So, if I can either start buying wholesale or start building up my own brand, I could definitely move off Shopify, host my own site on the cheap, and use a channels manager to really up my game. Baby steps though.

On a positive note, I'm almost at the same sales in January as I was in December.

I'm not sure how the eBay marketing thing works at all. All I know is that I would give a percentage of the sale for every product that is clicked on and bought. I get to name the percentage.

Since this is all csv-based, it's pretty quick to do by copy/pasting down whatever I want. I started at the minimum, 1%, and didn't get many clicks. I upped it to 2% with more clicks but no sales, and now I'm running at 3%. I feel like the magic number is going to be 10% or something, which is pretty tough to fade on top the 9% eBay already takes from me.

***

I've also been working with a few other people on their stores lately. To put it lightly, they have very unrealistic expectations, not only in sale potential, but in the products they are selling.

Despite all the missteps in the listing itself, everyone wants to start up by selling a high-priced item. It doesn't work this way. If you are selling on eBay or Amazon, you have to get sales to get a seller rating so that a) your products will show up along with everything that is 1/10 of your product price (sigh) and b) customers will make that first purchase. Think about it: would you drop $100 on an unknown if you know there is a brand-name item for 1/2 the price?

The old school strategy is sell everything at a 10% loss to amass brownie points with the channels and the sellers, but that isn't really necessary.

Keep up the posts Dave, I enjoy them. Just wanted to say that sometimes I may not have questions, but the content is valuable.

Any recommendations for someone getting ready to ship their first test product to Amazon? I signed up for an individual item seller's account at this point. Product is something I'm buying in bulk, bundling, and then listing. Trying an eBay purchased barcode (good luck right for something you get 1,000 of for $1.45). If this goes okay, I might open my own Woocommerce wordpress site, along with selling the same product spread on eBay (very experienced there, just as an individual seller-I made good money selling car parts on eBay before everyone else did it).

I guess be careful with the UPC stuff, but I imagine Amazon wouldn't notice for the most part. What are the odds that you end up with a collision from another seller?

I think FBA is pretty much common sense: just make sure you have top-notch QC before you send it out the door.

It's been a while since I've dealt with FBA stuff, but I know Amazon will charge storage fees for unsold and damaged product. I feel like I don't have to tell you this, but really make sure you do the math. The storage fees, listing fee, and selling fees add up fast. Of course, you have accept some quantity of shrinkage, which is why the QC at home base is so important.

I'm not sure the time limit on how long they will hold a product, but I'm pretty sure an unsold product will be returned, and you wouldn't want to pay to store a product for months on end anyways. So send a small amount of stuff at first, until you have some sales data to work with. Converting a starndard listing to FBA will get an uptick, but for a one-off listing where you are the only seller, I wouldn't expect more than a 25% increase. A listing with tons of competition will do much better, of course,

And... If you have the opportunity to convert your account to Vendor Central, I'd suggest sticking with Seller Central for the time being. Vendor Central is a total PITA to deal with and, honestly, I'm not sure what the point of it is.