Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

starterstory.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 139 posts

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#121

Post by fabricexpert »

goodmachine wrote: post #119
fabricexpert wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - how are your margins higher even with an employee? I'm guessing your markup is way higher? I'm in the UK - I don't think our market can support higher margins (cost to import fabrics is relatively high), so just curious.

I'd be very interested to know how customer sales typically break down between design categories: solid colours, geometrics, florals etc. Do you have any insight you can share there? Context: trying to understand the design market.

We stock a lot of florals and dressmaking fabrics, I don't think the data is large enough to derive any insight on market trends though.

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#122

Post by [deleted] »

JackFr wrote: post #95
lobotryas wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that PayPal (incorrectly) suspected her of fraud and took her money (froze her accounts). If this all sounds weird to you then you should search for more info because PayPal loves screwing over sellers on their platform. Alternatively, she could have had a wrong account type (personal instead of business), but my charitable assumption is that GP took care of that.

> PayPal loves screwing over sellers on their platform That makes no sense. I think a more sensible take is that PayPal's AML/KYC process is a little too coarse-grained and poorly implemented.

[deleted]

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#123

Post by jimnotgym »

swalsh wrote: post #82
fridaysoff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your insight. You're not too far off, but my margins are much higher - thank goodness. I've been at this for 5 years and also have an employee who helps with all the cutting, packaging and shipping. I offer a flat rate shipping fee for small price orders anything under $45. Sales above $45 ship with a Canada Post calculated shipping rate. Good luck with your business :)

Just out of curiosity, have you tried building the price of shipping into the product, and marketing with free shipping? From my own experience in eCommerce, it really boosts conversions.

This is good advice. We do free shipping once your order is over $x. Interestingly when we email offers that are above x and will attract free-shipping the response is significantly better.

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#124

Post by gbersac »

justaskin134 wrote: post #46
fabricexpert wrote: post #26

I run an almost identical fabric shop online. 20k/month revenue is great but remember this is not a SaaS with unlimited scale and low costs. It's actually a very traditional business model, and margins here are only going to about 20-30%, potentially a lot less if you have to pay for your storage space. You buy the fabric, typically you'll double the price when selling to customers. Then you take off additional posta…

> If you're good at marketing you can shift quite a lot of fabric For me marketing is always the toughest part . How do you do your marketing ? What tips can you offer us that save the most time and money spent ?

The bible of marketing : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC10HA/?coliid=I2YIAW7ADWWUPH&...

Simple straightforward and so insightfull !

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#125

Post by jimnotgym »

fabricexpert wrote: post #87
fridaysoff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your insight. You're not too far off, but my margins are much higher - thank goodness. I've been at this for 5 years and also have an employee who helps with all the cutting, packaging and shipping. I offer a flat rate shipping fee for small price orders anything under $45. Sales above $45 ship with a Canada Post calculated shipping rate. Good luck with your business :)

Thanks - how are your margins higher even with an employee? I'm guessing your markup is way higher? I'm in the UK - I don't think our market can support higher margins (cost to import fabrics is relatively high), so just curious.

Firstly accounting. Almost anything can be included in your margin (as long you are consistent). I think you atter talking more in terms of net- profit margin (all costs included) whereas fridaysoff seems to be talking about gross-profit (sales minus cost of the goods that you sold). As an online retailer I would suggest that you understand your gross-margin (how much you make on the product) separately from the costs of warehousing and shipping and separately from the overheads of accountancy, banking etc.

The reason for this is that by just summing your costs you louse sight of how various areas are performing, and you also lose the ability to compare. If you become a better buyer your gross margin improves, but by employing a picker it stays the same, however type warehousing costs do increase.

So in essence when most people say 'margin' they mean a simple sales-minus-cost-of-goods-sold.

Disclosure: I'm in finance at a retailer/wholesaler who is doing around 5x what the article is doing on ecommerce, it's smallest channel (about 1/20th of the company, but growing)

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#126

Post by sireat »

Descartes1 wrote: post #23

I've always hated the concept of "revenues" in commerce. Honestly, who cares what your revenues are? Profits are all that matters.

Revenues are necessary but not sufficient for profits.

Personally as a sole operator i'd prefer 10k revenue and 5k a month in profits over 100k in revenue and 2k in profits. However the last is more preferable for expansion.

To expand if you have 2M in gross revenue and only 2k in net profits this surely means that there is demand for whatever you are selling and some sort of optimization/innovation would bring you greater profits.

If you have billions in revenues then profits matter even less as long as the company keeps getting external financing from the markets and there is perceived need/potential for company products. Look up on how AMD, MU etc has been operating for 30+ years.

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#127

Post by mkirklions »

chatmasta wrote: post #91
mkirklions wrote: post #51

Pat, you should be marking your topics as Show HN: Promotion of your blog should be clear to readers.

So nobody can submit their own content unless it has a Show HN on it? Come on that’s ridiculous. Also, “Show HN” is specifically for products we can play with after clicking the link. Please do not pollute Show HN with blogposts; I will flag them and I’m sure others will too.

Maybe this is just spam then

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#128

Post by jccooper »

Fredej wrote: post #120
jccooper wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar-ish product. For non-discrete items sold at a single price per unit, and where people buy a wide range of volumes, baking the shipping costs into the product leads to strange prices outside whatever sweet spot you choose, because shipping prices don't scale linearly with your product. The flat rate shipping under $45 in this example is probably because it costs nearly the same to ship half a yard or…

Can't you just give a lower price at 10 yards and again at 50 yards for example? Then you solve your baked in price issue and get to offer discounts on high amounts, incentivizing buying more.

Depends on your range of purchase sizes and industry expectations. My product will sell regularly in quantities from 1 to 10,000, and my shipping costs on those vary from about $5 to $50, so I'd have to have a lot of price tiers. That's kind of absurdly broad, though. I'd think fabric and other categories should have a few orders of magnitude less, but I might be surprised.

But, you can do that if it doesn't fly too much in the face of customer expectation. In some industries, like printing, it's common. In fabric I think there's a strong expectation of a single price per length unit, though I suppose you could challenge it.

I don't think lots of price tiers is a good customer experience, so I decided against it as a long-term customer satisfaction strategy. I do wonder if it's costing me sales. Maybe I should set up an alternate brand that does tiered pricing and free shipping.

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#129

Post by patwalls »

mkirklions wrote: post #127
chatmasta wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So nobody can submit their own content unless it has a Show HN on it? Come on that’s ridiculous. Also, “Show HN” is specifically for products we can play with after clicking the link. Please do not pollute Show HN with blogposts; I will flag them and I’m sure others will too.

Maybe this is just spam then

Why are you so adamant that my website is spam? You've made multiple comments about it.

I spend a lot of time on it and it provides a lot of value to a lot of people. Maybe the content is not super relevant to you and that's fine. You don't have to read it.

Why are you leaving so many comments about this?

Re: Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

#130

Post by patwalls »

Descartes1 wrote: post #24

Revenues are irrelevant. Profits aren't.

It's not so black and white. They are both valuable. However, sharing revenue is a consistent theme of my website, like IH.

If you read more into the many interviews I've done - you can find many founders talking about profits/margin.

Post reply on HN