The wife quit her job...to do full time e-commerce store

Yep, that is correct. My wife gave her 2-weeks notice and now its time to get serious about our little company. At first, we thought of just selling stuff on eBay, then we had a consultant "Bright Builders" call us (after my wife filled out some forms for stuff on the Net).

Ok, now starts my journal. I will try to keep it up-to-date. My goal is to describe for you, our process from going from concept to full company. We're not there yet, but we're working on it. I'll keep you all informed on our findings.

In the beginning...

These Bright Builders guys were nice, convincing and had some great concepts. Basically, you sell your stuff on eBay and setup shop (which they host for you) and push your product website to the losers of the auctions. There are more people on eBay buying random stuff than anyone would imagine. It's crazy. And you know what, they pay stupid prices for stuff.

So, with eBay as our primary source and a full web site hosting with shoppingn cart, paypal, visa/mastercard, and all major credit cards it was time to think of "what to sell."

As you can imagine, we decided upon techy stuff. Why? My wife and I have more tech gadgets then we know what to do with. Two HDTV's side by side (widescreen) with two Xbox 360's, two PCs for gaming, two DS's, two GBA's, four laptops (or so), a Linux server, three other powered off PC's, etc. So - we went with what we know.

The website will hold the inventory for games, consoles, pc upgrades (video cards, sound cards, speakers, wireing, etc.), HDTV's, DVD Players, portable players, hand-held gaming, mp3 players, and more.

Part of Bright Builders consulting was to teach us stuff about how to sell fast and effective on eBay along with tools to scan sales and figure out what is hot and what is not (for those World of Warcraft gamers - Auctioneer tool). So we look for trends, good selling days, etc. They also teach us a bit about marketing the website, and how to understand what our customers want.

We had our consultants, we had our concepts, we had incorporated ("Vollzeit, LLC") in New Hampshire, we were all set to go.

Problem 1

We had to build a website! With the help of "Broken Design," one of the 2o2p Magazine designers, he drew up a site graphic design while I drew up the style sheets and got the base site up and going. So, from there I worked a bit with Doodi to give us ideas on what looked good and what didn't. DSmooth and Sgreth told us to get a good store name (as the company "Vollzeit" was hard to remember).

So, site was going (bare bones), godaddy.com registered domains (let me tell you that site is SO HARD TO NAVIGATE) and we were ready to rock. Now, I had to get a final design color scheme (which we just finalized last night) and finish the main site design.

Problem 2

This inventory costs money, and we have very little money to spend on stocking the house with stuff to sell. So, I talked with my financial guys, my CPA, and others about financing the business. It turns out, a startup e-commerce site, will almost always require your home to be involved in the company (which I wanted to avoid). But alas, we re-financed the house, which got us about 45k for the company (which includes paying some expenses for the consultants at Bright Builders).

We closed last Thursday and now we're waiting for the check to come in for the 45k so we can put it in the account. Sure, I skipped a few steps in here (such as all the paperwork).

Now, with money we need inventory right? Yeah, right. So Jen, my wife, has scrapped many sites for distribution information. Hitting up Microsoft to find out where they distribute their game products, Nintendo as well, and a few others. So, with a few distributor contacts we started faxing out applications....

...and buying a fax machine.  Ooops, so there is some company expenses before the money was even in. Nice fax though.

Anyway, we've got our first distributor relationship and we're ready to start gathering products and prices. Now we're spinning our wheels at night plugging in potential products and putting them in the store database. Then, we'll make sure the products are "hot" and start putting in orders (once the check comes in for the money and we get it cleared).

So here we are...

Let me tell you, finding hundreds of products for a store is tough. Which HDTV models, which games, which consoles, accessories, DVD players, branding, prices, incentive options, high margins, low margins, etc.

So, each night its toiling through distributors product database and building our own subset. Then, we'll worry about what we can actually afford to buy.

Next update...

We'll talk about drop-shipping, using ebay to help us and explain how buying a DS from a distributor will net us $1.00 in profit (and an Xbox 360 core costs more to buy then to sell). Yeah, the true life of gaming retail...

CodeMonkey