How Curbside Air Makes Money
By Richard
A very interesting case study for us and, one I only happened upon recently when reading Andrew Youderian’s very kick assy blog on all things ecommerce, eCommerce Fuel.
So here’s the deal…
Two guys with full time jobs partner up to create an ecommerce businessin their spare time.
They have no freaking idea what to start, but are definitely gung ho.
Sound familiar?
They then spend a month searching for their product niche. Every day consists of a notepad and always being on the look out.
Eventually they come up 300 different options. Oh the pain!
They whittle the list down.
Then once they have a shortlist they run each idea through a 4-step test. Here’s what Kamal, from the company, said they did – paraphrased of course in my gypsy pikey style…
1) Get Google monthly search volumes
2) Check out competition too using SEOMoz
3) See the average selling prices on Amazon for that product
4) Then assume you can get 5% of the search traffic and convert 1.5% of that into sales, and multiply it by average Amazon sales price
Now you know (very roughly) how much this passive income idea is worth.
Their calculations said it was over a million!
An ecommerce store on de/humidifiers and purifiers was worth over a million potentially…hells yeah!
I think you should buy a notepad now and follow their idea process. It rocks.
Obviously they decided that their Google research paired with reasonable assumptions was good enough as far as testing goes, so if you can extend their testing a bit more to really validate your idea before you begin that would rock. Hello landing page + google adwords!
So what else did Kamal share with Andrew?
Drop shipping ain’t hard; just call some manufacturers and ask them who they know that drop ships. And to build trust, show them your basic website or mockups.
Also, the real work only begins once you launch…hello marketing.
I guess this really shows you why it’s so important to pick a passive income niche where you’re pretty sure you can rank high for the major keywords, or for dozens of strong long tail keywords.
Of course the guys at Curbside Air also mentioned how they would make use of directories, guest posts, etc to push their online presence.
If you’ve got time now I would jump over to Curbside Air just to see how many different products they sell! Who knew there were that many different offerings in this niche.
Also, look at the prices. Lots of nice big fat $400 priced products, which I’m sure are yielding 25-35% profit margins for the guys.
If you can build an ecommerce site that looks as good as theirs you’ll gain trust of new visitors, and I’d say instant trust is the number one driver of conversion for online stores.
So consider following Kamal’s lead and hiring a designer to help you build your store. Orrrrrr pick a professional $100 Shopify theme – the kind you love straight out of the box – and DIY it all yourself.
As a Shopify addict, I’d go the latter personally given how freaking beautiful some of Shopify’s themes are and how easy they are to use.
Visit Curbside Air or check out eCommerce Fuel where case study originally spotted