I started selling ... products as a mail ... in 1996, however, a month later, after buyinga computer and ... the Internet I decided toopen an online store. Very soon I found ou
I started selling different products as a mail order
business in 1996, however, a month later, after buying
a computer and discovering the Internet I decided to
open an online store. Very soon I found out that
selling books and information online in general was a
hit and also a very convenient way for an extra income
home business, considering that my personal life had
very little money, little space, a lot of work and a
family to support. Therefore I registered a domain
name, I sign up for an Internet connection and then
finally opened my bookstore named QualityBooks.com.
Setting up the store at the beginning was very hard, I
had to design my own pages, plan and put in action my
own marketing strategy, take orders, ship the books,
and do by myself whatever else came up.
At first, I only had a few books for sale
(approximately 20), after two months there were
absolutely no orders, I even sent out a catalog by
mail to possible clients with zero response. I was
completely frustrated and seriously considering doing
something else. I decide then to sign up for a book
drop ship dealer program with the idea to increase the
number of products to offer and consequently the
chances of sales, and also started advertising at the
pay per click search engines. That is when orders
finally started coming in. But don’t think that there
were many, only two or three per week. However this
was only what I needed in order to keep working on
this project.
Out of 700 books that were being offered at
QalityBooks.com (mostly from the drop shipping
program) about three were very good sellers. I decided
to place more time and money marketing these books,
soon later, I realize that I was making a pretty good
monthly income.
The final step taken, was to decrease the cost of the
books, instead of drop shipping the orders, I
negotiated low prices for my best sellers and ordered
more at wholesale price, these books when ordered were
shipped by from my home office and not drop shipped as
before, of course I had to reserved an extra room for
book stocking but it was worth it. The advantage of
shipping yourself is that you have more control of the
postal cost and better tracking of the orders.
I also decide to sell books of my own which doesn’t
mean books written by me, but books and information
that I had reprint rights. I started buying books with
reprint rights and soon a whole section of the
bookstore was dedicated to these informational
products. Every time an order came in for one of these
products it was practically 100% profit, little or
almost nothing was spend on the cost of printing the
book.
Currently the bookstore has two permanent employees
and sometimes up to five part times working at the
high season. A high steady annual income in the last
five years and the fascination of the bookselling
business has been tempting me to abandon my current
job as a science teacher and take selling books online
as a permanent job. Will see.
