91–100 of 139 posts
Pat, you should be marking your topics as Show HN: Promotion of your blog should be clear to readers.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got down to where he said he paid $10 for shipping and instantly clicked that it was a watch from Aliexpress and it was a classic dropshipping gig. There were some people a few years ago that managed to sell off a few hundred Hawaiian shirts that were most likely drop shipped from China by using some well targeted FB (and probably Instagram) advertising, and giving the shirts funny names (named after local alcoholi…
> Morally it's murky, but it's clever. No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that holds back people from succeeding in business. I see it a lot from non-biz engineering types. There is nothing, nothing “morally wrong” with dropshipping. The main value you provide is discoverability; if the customer finds a product through you that they would not have found otherwise, then you added value. Also, you provide cus…
On the other hand, there are some complaints you can level at the industry. One is that they're exploiting an information asymmetry between the buyer and the seller; buyers as of yet haven't realized just how cheap and available things are on Aliexpress, and the sellers do their best to hide the source of goods. I think this will resolve itself over time as buyers get more savvy.
There are also some questionable practices. "Free, you just pay [$10+] shipping" seems aimed at some sort of psychological defect in the part of the human brain that calculates value. And digital marketers often are often rather indifferent to IP rights.
I guess my biggest complaint is that there are an awful lot of online marketers that really just don't seem to care all that much about the customer. They're often selling one-time impulse buys which are priced too low to be worth the trouble to return and they don't expect a repeat customer, ever. They've never even seen the products they're selling. I guess I want a little more value-add from my vendors - I've gone back to buying things offline where I can.
(I'm sure the article author is in a very different category of seller, which is heartwarming!)
My wife runs a small little shop in the creative space too: the margins can be quite high for nice, high quality stuff and customers are easy to draw in for multiple purchases. (also it helps I do the tech side of things and there is so much open source, free or cheap stuff available tech-wise)
The danger here is that it's easy to get sucked into doing tech stuff, and not focusing on directly revenue generating things. I see so many people spinning their wheels with "free" things when low cost subscriptions would save them hours and hours and hours of effort.
My wife runs a small little shop in the creative space too: the margins can be quite high for nice, high quality stuff and customers are easy to draw in for multiple purchases. (also it helps I do the tech side of things and there is so much open source, free or cheap stuff available tech-wise)
A friend of mine's wife started a very high margin business selling scrapbook grabbags on eBay. She'd buy up clearance items and local craft/hobby stores, and bundle them up to sell on eBay. She made enough money that after two months, PayPal came along and froze her accounts, cutting her cashflow off, effectively killing the business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> She made enough money that after two months, PayPal came along and froze her accounts What does that mean?
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.
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.
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…
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 :)
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.
“Knowing I had another year-long maternity leave on the horizon...” said no American, ever.
Given the choice I know which country I'd rather have a career in.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, that's good to know because in Finland, your employer does pay it.
Hey, serious question from an American. How does this policy not cause massive hiring discrimination against young women, especially recently married women? I asked my Canadian relatives this question, and their answers basically boiled down to 'well that would be illegal'. But from what I can tell enforcing anti discrimination in hiring is next to impossible, especially if you interview and hire even a slightly more…