RMRB 1386 – Building an eCommerce Business Making $163K per Year in the Business Niche

In this episode, Lauren talks to the seller of an eCommerce and DropShipping business created in September 2024 in the business niche. Listen in to find out how the business makes an average of $163,146.00 per year in net profit, why the seller has decided to sell, the lessons learned from running the business, and much more.

Visit https://empireflippers.com/listing/97550 to learn more about this business.

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Transcript

Forget gurus. Forget anyone claiming to be an online business expert without going through the challenges of entrepreneurship themselves. The Real Money, Real Business podcast is here to prove that the best insights in online business come from your fellow online business builders. We dig into the stories of entrepreneurs selling their businesses on the Empire Flippers marketplace so that you can learn how they made their businesses profitable, how they overcame obstacles, and what lessons they learned on their online journeys.

If you want to take your business and your knowledge to the next level, you’ve come to the right podcast. Let’s get started.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Real Money, Real Business podcast. We record these interviews so that potential buyers can learn more about the business and the seller to help them make an informed buying decision.

If you would like to learn more about this business, including details like what type of business it is, how much revenue and profit it makes, and all of the assets included, simply visit empireflippers.com/marketplace and search for this business’s listing number, which you can find in the video thumbnail and description. Or, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can click the link in the description to go straight to the listing.

So, without further ado, let’s get into this interview. First up, let’s learn a little bit about you. Can you tell us about your background in building and running online businesses?

Hey, just here to introduce myself. I’m Matt, obviously the founder. Basically, it’s a multi-brand design and brand house that services mainly online retailers.

Why are you selling the business now instead of keeping it and growing it further?

I’ve been doing this kind of thing for the best part of the last decade with all sorts of different brands, usually focused on a single-brand product. But through working on those products and projects over the years, I came to realize that a lot of these retailers I was working with represent not only a blue ocean and an opportunity that a lot of people don’t even realize exists as brand and product owners, but also a largely underserved niche for the buyers who actually work at these retailers.

They’re very hungry for products, but they have a bit more of a strict focus on what they put up. I’m not really talking about marketplaces like Amazon or competitors to it. These are online retailers that generally have 500,000 to upwards of 3 million followers, email addresses, and customers. They’re looking for a bespoke selection of products to offer at any given time. So they look for quality, branding, reliability, and things like that.

The opportunity I saw was that these brands have huge audiences and massive customer bases that they can basically send an email to and instantly deliver products to. They’re looking for viral products and things that are popular, and they’re usually the last places that actually sell them. If you go on TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram, you’re seeing these viral products. Then, six months down the line, finally someone has managed to get in there and serve those retailers. That’s where I saw this opportunity.

I was talking to those retailers every day, and they’d say, “Hey, can you find this product? Can you find that product? Can you do this? Can you do that?” That’s where this came out of. The idea is to serve those brands and work with them, taking advantage of their massive audiences, which are underserved in a huge blue ocean. But it’s also about keeping things nice and lean.

Can you describe the amount and the type of work that you do on this business to maintain it?

The business itself is predominantly a side hustle for me. I spend 30 minutes to two hours a day running it, depending on what else I’m doing. In that time, if it’s 30 minutes, I’m just checking emails, ensuring sales have gone through well, making sure there are no issues coming back from retailers, and responding to new retail opportunities with buyers and things like that.

On a longer day, when I might spend an hour or two, I might pitch new products to a different retailer or a new retailer, find new products to pitch, vet new brands, and make sure everything is running smoothly and orders have gone through smoothly.

If you were to keep this business, what are some of the ways you would try to grow it?

It’s a lean business model in terms of time. Also, there’s no stock held and no money tied up in the business, so profit is profit.

The way sales events work with retailers is that they typically come to me. We’ll have a discussion with the buyer at the retailer, work out pricing and terms, and things like that. Then they’ll generally do one of two things. They’ll either add the item to their page—to their website—as a constant listing and promote it when opportunities arise. You’ll see peaks and troughs in sales, so the sales don’t cannibalize themselves. They don’t really take the item off, but you’ll only see sales specifically when they market the product.

Or, by design, they’re a website with a smaller selection of products, but they’ll run your product for, say, three to 10 days as a flash sale event. This way, they only really sell one type of that product or niche of product during that time. It keeps things from cannibalizing themselves and allows for better sales.

After the sales event or promotion ends, they typically send a purchase order. You send the invoice, they pay the invoice, and shipping is usually included. Shipping might be invoiced separately, or they might manage shipping themselves with a third-party provider. The goods are then ordered and shipped to them.

It’s a very, very simple process. You never touch the product; it’s not hands-on. With that, you’re shipping in bulk to these retailers, which means they manage the shipments, customer service, and everything else. For the most part, if you’re answering customer inquiries, it’s usually a question their support team doesn’t currently have an answer to. Once you answer it, they add it to their information and lists so their team can answer that question again when it comes up.

The second way retailers operate is traditionally through a direct-to-customer approach. You would essentially do the same thing, but sales would come in and you’d go to their vendor portal to manage the shipments directly to the customer. This is pretty easy. It’s usually just a matter of downloading a CSV file, working with your supplier to ship the products, adding the tracking number, and re-uploading the file. Those payments are usually made on a monthly basis.

Right. And what would you say are the biggest risks with this business that buyers should be aware of?

There’s not really any cash tied up in the business. It’s very, very lean. There are no products or stock held, and you never touch the product, so you’re able to test very quickly without any real risk. You’re able to test with basically almost a guarantee of profit. The only thing you’ll have lost if something doesn’t get traction is the time it took to get that product built, promoted, and pitched to the retailer.

How much support are you willing to offer the buyer who acquires this business?

The process is very, very straightforward. I’ll be here for usually up to about 60 days post-sale for frequent calls and support. That said, I’m happy to answer texts and emails and any questions you have for as long as you need.

The business is pretty simple. It might look pretty cool and complicated from the outside—40 brands, 100-plus products, things like that—but it’s not as crazy as it seems. It’s a simple business with a simple system that’s very teachable. Anyone with a basic amount of intelligence and computer know-how can make it work.

On to the actual website and the brand. Just a bit to show here: these are some of the retailers that have worked with Elmerico Brands over the years. This website, as a whole, is mainly for retail buyers to come and see the brand and the products, and what the benefits of working with us would be. It’s great to show off who we’ve worked with over the years, and these are some of those brands.

Okay, final question. If you had to put yourself in the shoes of a buyer, why is your business worth buying?

The portfolio is obviously large and growing. There’s everything from drones to Bitcoin mining gear. We’ve got print-on-demand products, children’s smart AI toys, mystery boxes, pickleball kits, heat resealers, a tool brand, a pet brand, little pop-up chairs and Christmas trees, matcha, gym gadgets, shelf dioramas, and a retro late-’90s and early-2000s throwback brand, because that’s a huge niche at the moment. Aspen Ice does saunas and spas, and the list goes on and on. There’s absolutely everything covered here.

Again, while this might look complicated or like a lot, it’s really not. These are brands that I’ve probably spent a couple of hours each on. They’re being tested, will be tested, or have been tested on retailer sites and with retailers. Not all of them are active. Obviously, there’s a lot here, and retailers tend to be more focused on certain products. There’s always a pipeline to test them.

Another factor is that it’s a side hustle for me, so not having the time to really drive every single product down the line with each and every retailer, new or current, is a factor. If you can put in extra time each day, that obviously grows the revenue very easily.

As a result of all the brands and the work with retailers—and the people they work with for advertisements and things like that—we’ve had products featured in all these editorials and publishers here.

It’s currently October 8. Last week, in late September, one of our pet products, a CEO pet bed, was featured on Fox 13 Tampa Bay. It’s actually part of a brand I’m currently under, Petopia, which I’m separating out into its own brand at the moment because of that. It was featured in a pet product segment on live TV. Obviously, that’s pretty cool, and that segment will be live on that website pretty soon, too.

It’s a fun business. It’s something that can be run with the expectation of the revenue staying where it is with just a couple of hours a day. Obviously, if you’re willing to put more time into it—and by more time, I mean just an extra two hours a day doing the same activities, like reaching out to retailers, following up with them, finding products to pitch, and working with them on products specifically for their audience—you’ll see movement. That’s been a factor for some of these brands as well.

If you have any DTC background with marketing, Meta ads, TikTok ads, or even organic marketing, whatever your experience is, this should get you excited because none of that has been pushed here. Like I said, I’m useless at that. It’s not something I’ve focused on for Elmerico at this point. I’ve literally just been focusing on retailers and the blue ocean I see that exists with online retailers.

Going on to the numbers, generally speaking, this is the trailing 12 months. I have the year before that as well in the documents and files, but I can obviously send that to you if you can’t find it or don’t know where it is. As you can see, there have been ups and downs as different things have occurred over the year, but generally speaking, things have been sitting pretty solid these months. Obviously, there’s been a retail downturn, as you might expect, and then coming back into Q4 and the holidays, we’ll see numbers increase again.

Another factor of the business is that people come to you and offer to buy these brands, which is a great way of generating extra income—a little income boost. One of the brands was sold to a buyer, and there were also some sales in the trailing 12 months before that. So it’s something that can add a nice little extra payday. If you’re relying on this income and want a bit of a boost, you’ve got lots of brands to sell off. Even if they’re low-income or not earning, they’re still something people may want to buy. And especially if they are earning income, you can add in at least a one- to two-times multiple for yourself as well. That doesn’t have to be something you do, but it can be a factor.

Essentially, I think if you’re looking for something that’s low-maintenance and not very complicated, and that doesn’t require a huge amount of money to be tied up in the business, this is a good option. You don’t need to worry about stock being held at a 3PL, and you don’t need to touch the stock. You can be sitting on a beach in Mexico running this. You can hang out with your kids all day or do whatever you want. There’s nothing tying you down. You’re basically responding to emails, sending emails, and things like that.

Another thing I’ve started doing recently is leveraging AI to speed up and scale the process of cold outreach. It’s something I probably should have been doing for a while, but that seems to be coming along nicely. It just makes things a little easier to manage overall.

Even just running it myself, like I said, half an hour a day to one or two hours is more than enough to maintain its current financial position. Coming into Q4 and the holidays, this changes massively. You’ll see the same thing in the last year as well. If you’ve had experience with this period, it’s not unusual; it’s just how things go. It gets a bit stagnant, especially this year, as there’s been a financial downturn globally. But coming into the holidays in Q4, things go up, and there are loads of sales events and potential opportunities.

I’ll show you back here in December and October as an example. We go from 10,000 back in September last year, as opposed to, say, six here, and then we go to 42, 17, 39. What we’re seeing there is just massive orders coming in ready for the holidays. It’s as simple as that. You’re seeing large volumes come in and ship during that time.

It’s a really good little business. It runs very lean, and it can be run creatively. If you have experience with DTC, organic, or paid ads, brilliant. If you don’t, it’s still a great business with great opportunity. You can hand this over to a VA to run. It’s very, very simple. The documents and training I provide will cover all of that for you or anyone coming in. It could be a husband-and-wife team or whatever situation you want. This is a great little business you can run from anywhere.

I hope that answers a lot of your questions and serves as a great introduction to what this is. Obviously, you can reach out to me whenever you need to with any questions, and I’ll be more than happy to help. Thank you so much.

All right, everyone, thanks for listening. To learn more and see if this business is still for sale, head over to empireflippers.com/marketplace and search for this business’s listing number, which you can find in the video thumbnail and description. Or, if you’re watching this on YouTube, click the link in the description to go straight to the listing.

Once you’ve unlocked this listing, you’ll find everything you need to know about the business. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.