This listing is for an ecommerce and dropshipping business created in June 2014 in the furniture niche. The BigCommerce site features a variety of high-end outdoor furniture and accessories. While 90% of the traffic comes from Craigslist ads, the site also gets traffic from a variety of other channels. With prices far lower than competitors, this business has cut out the middlemen and the overhead and kept their product lines simple which has lead to year on year growth.

The Sellers have established a brand focused on customer service and product development, combining everything together to form a company ripe with future potential as the groundwork and framing is complete.

There are three suppliers for this business, one in France and two in China. There are around 50 products for this business with around half of them dropshipped. The business fulfills the other half of products from both a Los Angeles warehouse and a San Rafael warehouse. Inventory is split between these locations but could easily be focused on one.

The Sellers have spent a lot of time growing the business. As they have enjoyed this process, they put in around 15 hours a week each. They both feel this number could be lowered, as they do the bulk of work themselves and many tasks could be outsourced.  Much of the work is posting Craigslist ads or Facebook ads — the main sources of sales. The Sellers also update the website to reflect sales, changes, etc. regularly and also have a monthly blog that the Sellers write and publish on the site. (The business uses VAs for graphic design, advertising, and HTML.) The Sellers spend the rest of the time on growth and advertising.

As the company has grown and gotten more reviews, better branding, and a larger e-footprint, the sales time requirement has decreased as 95% of customers purchase through the website without ever speaking to the Sellers. This was accomplished by dedicating more time to making the purchasing process easy and having the answers to every possible question available to customers via ZenDesk Help Center.

Since installing ZenDesk, customer service has also become much more manageable and simplified. All customer service issues like replacements, warranty issues, etc. are forwarded to a fulfillment employee at the warehouse who handles the issue.

The business sells very large products that require freight shipments, so fulfillment is a large piece of the puzzle. Each order is palletized and picked up by the freight carrier, FedEx, or the 3rd party freight carrier (Wayfair & Hayneedle), so this takes time to prep. The fulfillment employee handles this on his own.

The Sellers have put limited energy into marketing as this is not their expertise. This means there is a good opportunity for the Buyer to improve upon this part of the business. Traffic sources outside of Craigslist include Facebook ads, social media, Yelp, Wayfair, and Hayneedle. The Yelp pages have many 5-star reviews and since the business sells products with high price points, potential customers are far more willing to buy when they see the great reviews and that the business has a sterling reputation. Also, the Sellers have recently started regularly posting on Instagram and doing deals with influencers that have yielded sales. Email has also recently been monetized and is growing.

*The business has an employee that handles sales only. She is paid commission only and could be phased out as the business has gone from a more direct sales approach to a more passive one.

*This business is pre-qualified for an SBA loan.