Family Rations

Prepping and emergency survival is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States, people are actively seeking these products. I discovered that except for a few national companies, most survival websites are small and under-developed - easily beaten by even the most simple social media promotion and professional-looking website.

I am getting out of the eCommerce business and doing search engine optimization full time.

What's involved in running this business? The business is 100% dropship so you do not need to hold any inventory. You simply find products on Aliexpress or my other dropship suppliers and post the products on the website. Mark them up to whatever profit margin you want, I generally do 20% for products over $10, and 100% for items less than $10. When someone orders a product on your site, the process of ordering the product from the supplier is mostly automated, you only need a few clicks of the mouse to have the supplier ship the product directly to your customer.

How do you generate traffic? Most of my traffic has come from Facebook ads. I create an ad and have Facebook run it for people who have expressed interest in survival, outdoors, SHTF and similar. My cost-per-click has been as low as 3 cents, which is the lowest my Facebook rep had ever seen. You can run Google ads the same way. You can experiment with different products and images in your ads and find what works best. You can also create product video on YouTube with links back to the website, for example, this video that has over 6,000 views: [REDACTED]

How do you convert traffic to sales? I reduce the number of steps required to make a purchase. A visitor should only need to make a few clicks and fill out a few fields in order to complete their purchase. Great product images are also important, it is perhaps the most effective method of improving the conversion rate. I generally touch-up each main product image in Photoshop, but it is not required.

How do you fulfill orders? The site comes with fulfillment software called Oberlo. When a customer orders a product, I am alerted via email. I log into the back-end of the website and approve the order, and it is mostly an automated process from there – Oberlo creates the order with the product supplier and provides the customer’s shipping address. Because all the products on the site are dropship, the fulfillment process is VERY easy, it probably takes less than a minute to completely fulfill an order.

Customer relations and repeat customers Here is where there is A LOT of opportunity for you. I have done nothing to maintain customer relations or go after repeat business. It would be very beneficial to send follow-up emails with special offers to people who have previously made purchases. You can use email software to automatically ‘drip’ emails to people who have previously made purchases, and people who provided their email but did not make a purchase.

Product research I simply browse my supplier’s catalogs for products I think my customers would find interesting and can’t easily get anywhere else. I try to find products that are not being sold on Amazon. There is no limit to how many products you can post on the website – the more the better. There are over 100 products on the site now.

This is a 100% drop-ship business, no inventory is held – the entire business can be operated from a laptop computer. Thus far, 90% of sales have come from Facebook and Google paid ads, but if you continue to add products, blog posts and articles the site will generate at least 50% of sales through Google organic within the next 12 months. In 5 years the rate will be 80% or more. Much of the difficult SEO work has already been completed.

Intermediate knowledge of how to run Facebook and Google ads, and basic search engine optimization abilities.