business-modelI am web and specifically an e-commerce developer. I have so far developed a number of online shopping sites. I now want to make a store of my own however I am afraid of investing up a fair amount on initial grounds.
My site would hold about 250 products. According to my plan I will upload all the products with none of them in my physical inventory. As soon as I get an order of a certain product I will buy it from the market and ship it to the customer.
However I will buy one extra piece to stock it. For e.g. if a person orders Product-A on my site, I will verify the order and next I will go to the market and buy two pieces of Product-A, one to ship to the customer and one to stock in my physical store. In this way I will build an inventory of the products which are more frequently ordered. Once I gain a considerable sales volume I will start building my physical store.
This approach looks a bit weird but I have advantage of the wholesale-market which lies in my city so I will not have any problem visiting the market on every order. Also I will have a dedicated person who will buy the products from the market. In this way, I will not have to invest huge amounts to build a physical inventory prior to the online store and I will invest a greater share of my budget on SEO, online marketing and advertising.
My products are sports’ goods with international shipping offered on all.
You have a lot of overhead buying one product at a time.
Unless you have 100% markup you don’t even cover cost. If you buy the item for $1 and sell it for $2 then you can buy an extra for inventory. But I seriously doubt you can get 100% markup. Other sellers have access the same wholesalers with warehouses, inventory, and volume purchase discounts. Check pricing but you are most likely going to be lucky to get a %20 markup. Yes it is a way to build inventory but it is not self funding unless you have huge margins. If you are making a trip to the wholesale market anyway it does not accomplish much.
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