[aarondkeogh]

Hello everyone my names Aaron, I joined the forum to get in touch with like minded people with like minded problems to overcome.

I'm currently selling arts and crafts supplies on ebay, I started the business of early this year in February with £40 capital investment selling 2 products. I wanted to grow only using natural profits made, but since February this year to present the business has generated about £2500 profit from now 3 products. This has since been reinvested back into the business to import goods from China to diversify the product range.

In the mean time, I have been researching more products to stock. The 5 main areas of arts and crafts I intend to cover firstly are:

Screen printing,
Graffiti arts,
Painting,
Drawing and sketching,
Cutting and adhesives.

I was considering going through one group at a time and working my way through them. At least this way I could get everything little thing a customer is going to need to do each craft.

I have been to a meeting with a website design company and had a price for a website of £1000 for the website and £125 a month e-commerce hosting fee. As I grow and hit the right turnover to sustain a website profitably, I do intend to set up the site alongside Ebay.

Within these 5 groups their is probably about 700+ products. This is where it gets me with my business planning. I want to go about raising some outside finance, and to do this would mean going through every product and realising the profit margin on each product to calculate my sales forecast (to maybe repay a loan).

The research I have done so far on the products I intend to sell is looking at the competitions sale prices, this I intend to contend with by ether a superior product or a undercutting strategy by getting the products cheap enough and offering better postage (as I live next door to a post office ).

I would really appreciate some help here with regards to doing my business plan, I'm sure someone else has been through this dilemma before concerning the amount of products and how to raise finance for this type of business.

Thanks Aaron.