« Side Hustle School

#579 - Online Bike Store Owner Gears Up for Hands-Off Profits

2018-08-02

After following his wife around Italy, an Irishman takes life by the handlebars—breaking the cycle of new jobs by learning how to drop-ship e-bikes.

Side Hustle School features a new story EVERY DAY of someone who started a hustle without quitting their job. You’ll learn how they got the idea, how they overcame challenges along the way, and what the results are.  Share: #SideHustleSchoolShow notes: SideHustleSchool.comTwitter: @chrisguillebeau

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This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
No one likes to feel stack, especially by your cloud, but the IBM cloud is the most open and secure public cloud for business. It can manage all your absent data anywhere. Smart loves problems, IBM, let's put smart to work. IBM Dot, com, slash flexible, hey, hey, what's office is critical about with side us will score. I've got a really strong story for you today. It's all about drop shipping. We talked about dropping a bed. I'll, explain it here again in this episode for those who are familiar with this story of particular after following his wife around ITALY, an Irishman takes life by the handlebars and breaks the cycle of new jobs by learning how to drop ship E bikes, what our e bikes, while e bikes, our electorate, bikes. But you know what
It doesn't actually really matter what they are, because with the drop shipping model, he actually never has to store any bikes never has to handle any inventory. There is another company that does all that all this guy does is create a website and market that website sell the e bikes. Somebody else handles everything that is the beauty of the drop ship model, which is why it is a popular subset of sight. Hustles, at least for a lot of our listeners. We'd had several episodes in the past are looking at this indifferent ways. One of my favorites is the bounds House empire this guy, who make something like three hundred thousand dollars a year: drop shipping, bouncy castles or bounce houses episode. Three hundred and twenty four of the show definitely go back and listen to that. If you're interested in this kind of thing that we've also had somebody doing it with live, crickets and other famous or infamous side hustle school episode episode number forty
ex when you one more example, astronomical gifts, episodes Reynard and seventy four. Those are just a few examples that come to mind if you listen to those you'll get a general idea. What this is about and, of course, will continue to dive in as we go along, but today story. This online bike store owner gears up four hands off profits. I'm also include a mention of a free trial. You can get from shop. If I that's the same platform, this guy uses to make a lot of money. How much money does he make it's a lot of money? Ok state here, not tell you exactly how he does it and how much money that is Irishman, Jain Murphy, dreamed of a job, and he can do from anywhere. His wife was italian, They moved around ITALY a lot for her career each time John, had to quit his job and look for another.
Another move on the horizon. This time, with a less than ideal job market John decided to ask his current boss. If he could work remotely, his boss said yes but this victory came with a no going back realisation as soon as John started working from home. He knew he'd never wanted to stop with his interest Peak John, and looking into other ways, he could make money online, while looking around for aid Is he came across a business model? Cod drop shipping if you are familiar dropped shipping? It's when someone sets up an online store to sell other people's products exchange for marking the items in running that store, the drop shipper gets a percentage of the prophet drop. Shepherd doesn't have to deal with producing handling or shipping what they sell to John. It seems too good to be true, it was true. He was ready for his turn. Where was this free money button on the internet? It hurt people about using the shop if I platform, so he made an account and linked products from a big retail website called Ali Express then John waited for his bank account to inflate. Unfortunately, he discover that here
hit the free money button. After all, after spending three dollars and marketing, it may just fifty dollars and sales resulting, What is that but see to it our loss? That's three minutes, fifty see what I did there. There's only May John more determined, he knew that drop shipping was a successful business model. The proof was all over the internet. He just had to figure out what he was missing so his time for me, research early on John decided he was gonna, build his store with zero dollars at a time Learning, how to hack a competitive business model for free was easier said than done. He spent hours watching Youtube video. Reading articles, a majority of which gave it as the giant now knows to be totally useless and one point John was tempted to give up his. Dollar startup ideology to take a paid online video course, but had already done is studying. So he was confident that round who would be different? This time he picked a more specific niche guitar.
People who were afraid of an impending apocalypse, actually pretty big match these days for all kinds of reasons. He found more success this time with a survival kit store, but it still wasn't quite what I was looking for. He knew he could do better, Self, around three John focused on being more deliberate about the products he was going to sell, like one of our other features dead. Many episode to go. He starting with a hundred random products Began to eliminate them one by one, with a list of criteria he looked at weight. Is it really heavy and less expensive to ship? He looked at price. Is it more than five hundred dollars you? That was important, because if a twelve hour product yields afford our profit yet to sell hundreds of those units each might before you start making any real money, and if you're selling hundreds of units, that means hundreds of emails, hundreds of track,
numbers all kinds of stuff, but if you sell high ticket items with a profit margin of a few hundred dollars or mark, you wanted to sell as many to make a lot of money and just as important you'd have that much back in work to manage it number three: you looked at the number of suppliers. Are there many suppliers it sell this product if you're only a couple of suppliers of a certain product in one or both refused to work with. You, then you're out of luck, ideally having a pool of twenty or more suppliers to choose from his best number four drop ship compatibility. Are the products dropped, shit friendly? Basically, is this product already sold online by resellers without bricks and mortar establishments? If, yes, then likely you can get in on the action if not it's possible that this particular market does not lend itself to online retail success and, last but not least, market competition. How many online retailers are already in this market? There are already fifty on install a that same exact product is gonna, be hard to carve out a large enough portion of the market. For yourself, Sir John recommend, you go to Google shopping in search of the product, see how many other stores or selling it and then check each
site to verify that they are only online and not a brick and more restore that will call you into the world of drop shippers in any market. Ultimately John chose to start selling e bikes, which he hoped would break him out of his old site. There is already an online presence for them, so he knew people would be willing to purchase them online, plus the average cost of the brand he chose was roughly two thousand dollars each. That meant that China to sell your products to make more profit if he saw two to four bikes. Might he be making anywhere from an extra one thousand to four thousand dollars high profit margins? He launches Ebay store on July thirty. First, twenty seventeen over the next six months, John only made a couple sales, but just ass. He was giving up hope the store that dominated the e bike market shut down the honor. I decide to move on pursue a different career joint set up a one hour phone call with him adopted a number of tweaks and tactics and since then has been making up to twenty five thousand dollars a month from his store. That is correct.
Twenty five thousand dollars a month from his online store, no inventory. So what was the secret? Well, the owner had gone through a drop shipping coarse and knew that a key element to a successful store was trust. Jai made a number of changes to restore fry. One of the most popular was implementing a pop up on the website that show people when other people. Were purchasing, and you might have seen this elsewhere on the internet when your browsing around it will pop up comes up. It says no. John Murphy bought a mega, we all three thousand today. So it's both trust and also social proof. As I said up to twenty five thousand dollars, and my John is now making more money from his side, I saw that he ever could have anticipated. Most excited of all about. Finally breaking the cycle.
During the skill of drugs. I want an amazing story. What a tremendous success he's gonna drop! Shipping models are, you know. Sometimes they sound just like a sudden, a story. They sound like they're too good to be true, but they archer like this is legit. People are doing, it doesn't mean it every person who tries it's gonna be successful. Often there are multiple failed attempts that precede the success
like you, see in this story, so I never want to tell you or any one at this is super easy. You should go out and do it in ignite twenty five thousand dollars a month. It is not my message at all, but I d like to highlight people who, through struggle through perseverance through some creativity and research and and hard work, have been able to succeed to a pretty successful, pretty amazingly successful level, and that's what we see here which, on this guy, who is a corporate employer, intellectually still works for a major multinational corporation, not a hundred percent sure about that. But the point as he started this while he was doing that for sure and by tweaking in adjusting I researching as it goes along, is able to to create this hugely profitable online store. Will it continue forever? Who knows but he's learn the skeleton probably apply to a different market next, which is also critical. I mentioned shop if I briefly, acts have talked about them in a long time, but I have a number of friends at shop if I and a lot of our stories have featured shop, if I just in a completely organic way it or not, a paid sponsor.
But we do have a deal with him if you'd like to get a twenty one day trial when it check it out for yourself and see other software works, are you can just go to side us all school dot, com, slash shoplift? I! This is better than any other public offer they have out there. I think they have a seven or a ten or maybe a fourteen day offer somewhere, but this is a twenty one day free trial offer you can check it out for yourself. I see if you like the idea of building this kind of online store, and if you do great, you keep it. If you dont, then you can't let Europe anything so again at link is outside US school dot. Com, slash shopping are my friends. Thank you so much for listening, don't forget. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Our show now it's for today, including links to everything I mentioned, are a sign of school doc five hundred and seventy nine a comment or question for the show give me a call on a hustle hotline. That number is eight hundred and forty four nine hundred and forty four eight hundred and forty four eight thousand nine hundred and forty eight seven thousand eight hundred and fifty three my name is critical about. I am cheering you on and I will be back tomorrow with another story. You are listening
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Transcript generated on 2020-04-28.