Would this work as a membership program?
Hi all,
This is my first post on here but I read a lot of threads and have been very impressed with the warriors willingness to help people out so I thought I'd pose you this question.
I've been selling online for about 5 years now, and am currently working it full time. I'm in an underserved, extremely passionate niche, and focus on only serving the local market (New Zealand). I basically run a 'special order' service, where customers log onto my site and can order products, and in turn I order them in from suppliers, who ship them to me and then I forward onto the customer. I currently offer about 6000 products to order, and have one employee\part time contractor who does all the new product loading, and also checking through suppliers catalouges to ensure products I offer on the site are in stock.
Now my favorite concept in the world is 'leverage' (thank you Jay Abraham for hammering home how important this is!) and realised today that my site concept could be applied to any country in the world where members of my niche live (pretty much every western country I'd say).
What I could offer people in other countries is a true 'out-of-the-box' business where I could just clone my whole site code onto their domain, and then every week I could send them an updated product list that my employee has prepared, that includes updated supplier stock levels and any new releases. I also had a custom piece of software made that handles all the backend ordering system, so it is very easy to see which products need to be ordered from which suppliers. All the person would need to do is handle emails from customers, orders products from suppliers, and ship them to customers when they arrives. Of course I have a roledex of all the wholesale managers at the appropriate suppliers too (something that has taken me years to build) which the person would have access to so they can make their orders. No knowledge is required in the niche either as I will be providing them with all the product info they need. I also use aweber and am building an email list which I send updates to whenever new products are added. Members could also use my newsletters to send to their lists as they build them.
Now as you can imagine, this could be very valuable for people. If I'm able to do this full time in a country as small as New Zealand, imagine the possibilities in bigger countries.
Right, now that we have the lengthy details out the way, what would be the best way to offer this? Should I charge people a one off fee for the site code and the intial product list of 6000 products, and then a monthly membership fee to receive updated product lists and new releases? I would probably limit it to one member per country, and somehow have an agreement that they only market in their local country.
Should I attempt to control the whole process by maybe setting up the domians\hostings\aweber\site setup for people myself, and if they stop paying their membership fee they lose all rights to it, or have a high upfront fee and if they stop paying their membership they no longer receive stock updates, but can continue to use the site design?
Another issue is my hosting is with a New Zealand company, who also own the sites shopping cart software and I pay them to use it, so technically at the moment I couldn't sell my site code, rather just refer people to my hosting company. Should I maybe be looking at hiring a programmer\web designer to attempt to recreate my sites backend so I am no longer reliant on my hosting company? Plus, if people in other countries are using it, they would ideally want the site hosted on local servers so it showed up higher in local results.
Anyway, thanks for reading through looong post, and any ideas\comments would be very much appreciated!! I promise I'll try help out other warriors wherever I can!
Cheers,
Jeremy
This is my first post on here but I read a lot of threads and have been very impressed with the warriors willingness to help people out so I thought I'd pose you this question.
I've been selling online for about 5 years now, and am currently working it full time. I'm in an underserved, extremely passionate niche, and focus on only serving the local market (New Zealand). I basically run a 'special order' service, where customers log onto my site and can order products, and in turn I order them in from suppliers, who ship them to me and then I forward onto the customer. I currently offer about 6000 products to order, and have one employee\part time contractor who does all the new product loading, and also checking through suppliers catalouges to ensure products I offer on the site are in stock.
Now my favorite concept in the world is 'leverage' (thank you Jay Abraham for hammering home how important this is!) and realised today that my site concept could be applied to any country in the world where members of my niche live (pretty much every western country I'd say).
What I could offer people in other countries is a true 'out-of-the-box' business where I could just clone my whole site code onto their domain, and then every week I could send them an updated product list that my employee has prepared, that includes updated supplier stock levels and any new releases. I also had a custom piece of software made that handles all the backend ordering system, so it is very easy to see which products need to be ordered from which suppliers. All the person would need to do is handle emails from customers, orders products from suppliers, and ship them to customers when they arrives. Of course I have a roledex of all the wholesale managers at the appropriate suppliers too (something that has taken me years to build) which the person would have access to so they can make their orders. No knowledge is required in the niche either as I will be providing them with all the product info they need. I also use aweber and am building an email list which I send updates to whenever new products are added. Members could also use my newsletters to send to their lists as they build them.
Now as you can imagine, this could be very valuable for people. If I'm able to do this full time in a country as small as New Zealand, imagine the possibilities in bigger countries.
Right, now that we have the lengthy details out the way, what would be the best way to offer this? Should I charge people a one off fee for the site code and the intial product list of 6000 products, and then a monthly membership fee to receive updated product lists and new releases? I would probably limit it to one member per country, and somehow have an agreement that they only market in their local country.
Should I attempt to control the whole process by maybe setting up the domians\hostings\aweber\site setup for people myself, and if they stop paying their membership fee they lose all rights to it, or have a high upfront fee and if they stop paying their membership they no longer receive stock updates, but can continue to use the site design?
Another issue is my hosting is with a New Zealand company, who also own the sites shopping cart software and I pay them to use it, so technically at the moment I couldn't sell my site code, rather just refer people to my hosting company. Should I maybe be looking at hiring a programmer\web designer to attempt to recreate my sites backend so I am no longer reliant on my hosting company? Plus, if people in other countries are using it, they would ideally want the site hosted on local servers so it showed up higher in local results.
Anyway, thanks for reading through looong post, and any ideas\comments would be very much appreciated!! I promise I'll try help out other warriors wherever I can!
Cheers,
Jeremy
Len Latimer
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