House Of Rave .com Story Part 1
14 Dec
When I was in high school I decided to start an online business. I started making several hundred dollars a month doing very little, and I never saw a single product I sold until 5 years later.
The store was a rave/club party store called HouseOfRave.com. It still exists today and is going stronger than ever.
The store made between $500 and $1,000 per month all through my college years, and when I started taking it seriously, the profit started to reach over $4,000/per month.
This is the story of how I started this business from the very beginning:
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Curious about eCommerce back when I was in high school, I decided the best way to learn was to create an eCommerce website of my own. I had no clue where to start, so my first step was NOT coming up with a product to sell, but HOW to start an eCommerce business. I voraciously read every article, how-to and software review I could find about eCommerce, mainly hitting upon the topic of eCommerce software, merchant accounts and marketing techniques.
I was already pretty computer savvy and knew the ins and outs of building regular .html web pages, but the ‘Add to Cart’, Shopping Cart and credit card transaction functions were well beyond my knowledge. I decided if I was to launch an eCommerce store soon, I would have to use pre-made shopping cart software.
I started downloading evaluation versions (and illegal downloaded copies if I could find) of different shopping cart software. I started creating sample stores, changing templates, adding sample products, placing test orders and playing with every possible facet of each shopping cart software. I now knew the in’s and out’s of creating and managing an eCommerce store.
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ACTIONS TO TAKE:
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If you’re a slightly more web-savvy person, you can experiment by installing OScommerce or other open-source shopping carts on your own. While these are free, you DO have to know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what FTP or DNS is, this might be a little advanced for you.
If you’re not extremely web savvy enough to install programs on your own server, take the free demo-trials of some fully-hosted eCommerce solutions like Volusion. Hosted eCommerce solutions like this make it very simple to start a full fledged eCommerce store….but it’ll cost ya. The bad part is they charge a monthly fee for your store. The good part is they make creating products, pages etc. very easy, and they do most of the work for you.
The key here is to just take the first step and start playing around with the systems. Place test orders, add products, try re-designing the templates. You’ll start learning a lot quickly.
NEXT >>> Part 2: Finding Something to Sell
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The House Of Rave .com Story
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Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: Finding Something to Sell
Part 3: Finding A Drop Shipper
Part 4: Getting A Site Setup
Part 5: Pros and Cons of Drop Shipping
Part 6: How It All Works
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Thanks Neville for the peek in your ecommerce site. I’m featuring this post in this week’s Sunday Seven!
Sweet! Glad you liked it :-)
Instead of Volusion, I would have recommended BigCommerce… but that’s just my opinion. Volusion sounds totally awesome until you get to their templates which are an epic fail compare to BigCommerce highly professional templates.
BigCommerce is a very agressive company when it comes to adding new features…and nowadays I think BigCommerce might actually be better!
First all thank you for the sharing of valuable knowledge and experience. (I went through the 3 steps thoroughly)
1) How is this different from affiliate marketing? Isn’t it the same only without the daily “bi***-work”?
2) What’s the estimated initial investment? (Buying products, hosting, templates, etc’) and what was your ROI?
Thanks in Advance, Ron
1.) It’s somewhat similar.
However in affiliate marketing you have less control over the whole buying process, so it’s harder to build up a long-term brand.
Far as HouseOfRave customers know, they ONLY deal with me and no one else.
2.) I spent a grand total of zero dollars to initially start..then spent $200 to get a merchant account. Other than that, very little investment since I collect money BEFORE paying the supplier. No inventory costs the way I did it.