pacintl,
I own GigaPal.com, a software and hardware retail site. After months of development, and a five-figure investment on our part, GigaPal.com was launched April 1st, 2004. It has a professional custom-designed logo, front-end interface, and dynamic backend administration. Visit
www.gigapal.com if you like, sign up for a free account to see the ease and user-friendly process of using the site.
GigaPal.com has been profiting an average of $1500 a month. Last month alone, GigaPal.com made over $3000 in profits. Right now, GigaPal's main venues for advertising are at
www.shopping.com, www.shopcartusa.com, www.froogle.com, www.froogle.co.uk (we will be integrated in the site within a week. it was just launched this past week), Google Adwords, Overture Advertising Network, and
www.trafficlogic.com.
We currently have a $1500 account with
www.trafficlogic.com. Check out the site for an overview of its unique marketing approach. We have a pay-per-performance account with them, which means that we only pay Traffic Logic when a sale is made on GigaPal.com from a user sent to GigaPal by the trafficlogic network. Traffic Logic pay-per-performance fees will be deducted from the $1500. Traffic logic's system is long term, because they use actual search engine ranking to bring GigaPal traffic. We've only had an account with them for about 3 months, so the site will not see sales for another 8 or 9 months.
The majority of our sales come from Froogle (which is free), and the rest have been coming from shopping.com and Google Adwords. Overture and shopcartusa are new accounts of ours so we have not had enough time yet to determine their value in advertising. I'm eager to see how Froogle.co.uk does once we are live on that site.
We spend an average of $500-$700 a month in advertising, so actual take-home profits are around $800-$1000 a month.
Last month we spent $1000 in marketing and it generated $3000 in profits, which gave us about $2000 take-home profits. The site could be doing even higher sales if it was not only 7 months old, launched during the slowest time of the year, and started around a recession. It has been consistantly growing, month by month. We went from getting 100 unique visitors a day to over 300 a day, and from getting 1 sale every 4-5 days to getting multiple sales a day.
So, as you can see the site is doing consistantly well.
Right now the site has 262 registered customer's. All software/hardware sites experience fraudulent ordering attempts, and we have routed out all of them and deleted the customer accounts associated with the orders. So, the 262 registered customer's in the sites database are actually legitimate customer's. The site has an additional 60 people in a separate database who have signed-up for our newsletter without creating an account. Our newsletters go out to over 300 people right now.
I literally have hundreds of man-hours invested in GigaPal. When it was launched, I hired 3 part-time employees to help me give the site 300+ individual products consisting of professional descriptions, 2 different sized pictures, prices, discounts, related products, etc.
We also spent dozens of hours custom-building marketing campaigns and datafeeds that are sent to froogle, shopping, and shopcartusa.
What makes GigaPal.com so successful is the marketing, supplier's, business model, and website design (front and backend) strategies I put in place.
Before I launched GigaPal.com, I was buying regularly from a trusted vendor for my local Computer Restoration company and merchant america store
www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug. The vendor retired in March and I paid him an undisclosed amount for his list of over 400+ regular resellers, and 200+ software/hardware vendors. That information gave me an edge over my competition.
We've since developed tightly controlled relationships with 9 trusted vendors in the US who dropship orders for us. They are not "dropshippers" by trade but have agreed to form a relationship with us per a laid-out system that we developed to make the site's sales and customer service of high quality.
By establishing a fulfillment system with our vendors we have enabled GigaPal.com to grow faster and more profitably than trying to stock everything on the site.
The vendors we use depend on the order placed. We have separate vendors that we use for wholesale orders for our reseller's. In addition to that, we have fulfillment relationships directly with a few manufacturer's.
I've accumulated strong connections with manufacturer's in Korea and China for wholesale hardware; however, we have not had the opportunity to pursue that avenue because we are beginning to focus on wholesale software.
In addition to all of this, we own the following store:
http://www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug
The above store gets incredible placement in Froogle because it is affiliated with the Page Ranking of
www.merchantamerica.com. We arranged to have Merchant America automatically submit our feeds to Froogle every night.
http://www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug has been generating an average of $1150 a month since March 2004, and the best part is, we have NEVER spent a single penny in advertising the site. The only expenses
http://www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug has is the $20 a month hosting we pay to keep it live. That's it. We figured out a system that gets our products awesome placement in Froogle.
Here are some examples where
www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug (displayed as "Merchant America Stores) and/or
www.gigapal.com (displayed as "GigaPal.com") come up on the first page search results of Froogle.com:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...me+coa&as_qdr=
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...s+2004&as_qdr=
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...nti-virus+2004
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...ring+Visor+Pro
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=mcafee+virusscan+7
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=mcafee+virusscan+8
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...ndows+2000+coa
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=panda+antivirus
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...nfax+Pro+10.03
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=Back+Up+My+PC+Stomp
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...siness+edition
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...siness+edition
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...oft+windows+me
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...+2003+Standard
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...antivirus+2003
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...rminator+stomp
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=HP+PhotoSmart+720xi
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...windows+xp+pro
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...oft+windows+98
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...0+Professional
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...ro+6.0+Suite+1
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...icense&as_qdr=
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...t+windows+2000
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...ve+2.0+Pro+USB
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...+Security+2004
There are many more products that show up on the first page, but I think the above links give you a good idea of the type of placement we get.
www.gigapal.com averages about 317 unique visitors (14,000 hits a day).
http://www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug averages about 200 unique visitors (we are unable to track hits) a day.
Both sites have an awesome conversion to sales ratio. With the growth of Froogle (which launched around the same time Gigapal did) and our traffic logic traffic on the rise, in addition to the growing list of loyal customer's GigaPal.com receives, GigaPal.com and
http://www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug will continue to grow in profits as time goes by. What is unusual is they are both less than a year old.
The success of GigaPal.com and
http://www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug , and the cash flow they have brought me has inspired me to move into the wholesale software market (which takes a great deal of capital to launch).
My current plans are to wait until after the holiday season and then sell
www.gigapal.com and
http://www.merchantamerica.com/crunchbug, who combine make over $1800 a month in take-home profits, as a packaged deal.
I am open to the idea of selling them now if we work something out that is worth not waiting.
There are so many features and other details I'd love to articulate, but it would literally take to much time. If you are interested, you are welcome to PM or email me.
Thank you.
Linear Mode
