Drop Shippers/personalisation websites

[socialgiraffe]

Hi Guys

For you all that own personalisation websites have you thought about contacting someone like Groupon?

I am sure that they would be interested and it could potentitally lead to hundreds of sales.

Just a thought and I wish you all luck

[WorthDoingRight]

I have used KGB for legal services promotion. Always plenty of iphone cases, canvases etc on the various sites.

[pisquee]

Basic Groupon price breakdown for phone cover...

Your normal advertised price on your website = £10
Groupon offer price to customer = £5 (i.e. 50% off offer)
Groupon's cut = £2.50 (i.e. 50% of the offer price)
Your cut = £2.50

It all depends on what your advertised prices are, and what your profit margin/markup is as to whether you will make any money from doing a Groupon - although your profit will be less per unit, you can sell a lot of units in a short space of time - so you need to be prepared to be doing a lot of printing!

[purpledragon]

I helped a member out on here with a groupon type order when they dropped in the deep n smelly cause their printer went down . I cant remember who it was now but they had a helluve a lot of jigsaws sold through them it 2 days to print them all. They did have a helluve a lot of orders but did a slightly dodgey thing they more than doubled their price then it was cut in half by the groupon type company and obviously their cut was taken out i must say i was amazed that so many people bought the jigsaws at what i thought was a ridiculas price im not sure how many repeat orders they got though. Personally if you sell your stuff at the same price as normal then halve it as pisquee pointed out well i think you'll be doing a helluve a lot of work for very little reward id beware of these sites if i were you

[socialgiraffe]

Interesting points guys especially pisquee's breakdown

i did presume that someone had already done it.

Out of interest purpledragon, how many roughly did they sell?

I am not interested in going to Groupon as it is not my business channel (My website was last touched in 2007 and that was only to change the address!!!), but am just curious thats all

Regards

[pisquee]

Things like Groupon work best for businesses where there are mostly fixed costs for running, not dependant on how many sales you make - like a Cinema for instance, where the cost are the same for screening a film whether there is one person in the audience, or it is a full house. It is obviously better to have all the seats filled on half priced tickets, than only 10 people paying full price. On top of this you still have the extra revenue streams of F&B and maybe the arcade etc.
For products, it works best for clearing over-stocked items fast, to turn your money back into cash, instead of being tied up in a load of teddy's you bought in from China but aren't shifting as quickly as you thought. This works even better if it's an item that you've bought in already printed up, so the stock is just ready to go, rather than you having to spend your valuable time printing them as well as time packing and posting them all out as single orders. There are some flash-sale based website where once the sale period has ended you package up all the goods/orders, and send them to the sale company in one shipment, and they handle the distribution, rather than you, which if we were going to go down this type of route, would be the way we go.

[pisquee]

Also, if you can find a sale site which will allow you to up the original price (rather than having to match your normal website prices) to allow you to actually make a profit, then it has more chance of actually working out well for you.
But, for some items, where you already have minimal costs, and very high margins, then it can work straight away.

[ASLCreative]

From what I have heard it is best to stay away from Groupon.

1 - The people that buy through Groupon hardly ever buy again direct from the Merchant.
2 - You have to be set up to deal with potentially 1000s of orders over a period of weeks or months.
3 - If people don't redeem the voucher the Merchant gets nothing (Groupon keep it) - unless this has changed.
4 - Can cause cashflow problems - you get the money after you have sent the items out.
5 - Profit margins are not great unless you inflate your prices prior to the deal.

[purpledragon]

Interesting points guys especially pisquee's breakdown

i did presume that someone had already done it.

Out of interest purpledragon, how many roughly did they sell?

I am not interested in going to Groupon as it is not my business channel (My website was last touched in 2007 and that was only to change the address!!!), but am just curious thats all

Regards

they had orders for about 200 jigsaws i have to be honest and im happy to say this as i said it to the guy at the time but the price of the jigsaws were unbelieveable something like £60 for an A3 cardboard jigsaw then obviously this was halved tho £30 for groupon even at £30 i thought wow wish i could get prices like that i do wonder how many came back

[pisquee]

If you can make the numbers work to make a profit on a Groupon, and enough profit to make fulfilling the big order worth it, then it doesn't matter if the customers come back to you or not really. You get a large injection into your business through it, and then in the future can do it again if you want.