The idea for FantasyJocks came up one day after work while enjoying some fish tacos & cervezas in sunny San Diego. Fed up with our current jobs & wanting to start working on our own business, we began spit balling ideas. We began listing out some of our potential ideas for a fun niche we could enter.
After sleeping on (or lack thereof), the idea for creating a Fantasy Sports Superstore took hold and we were off and running. Our initial site was created within 3 weeks and we were off to the races. Once our first order showed up in the inbox, we realized that this was our fantasy turning into reality.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Once we had the site up & running we quickly realized that we needed to figure out how to drive visitors to the site. We launched a Google Adwords campaign and within a few hours had our first sale. Today the majority of our traffic still comes from Adwords, however we are now advertising with reddit, affiliate marketing, Microsoft Advertising, and through email campaigns. We also expanded to eBay and Amazon to extend our reach, however Shopify continues to be our primary sales channel.
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
One of the first apps added to our business was ShipStation. It is a integral part of our business operation and makes selling on multiple channels a breeze.
Recently we decided we needed to streamline our bookkeeping a bit, so we transitioned away from Quickbooks Desktop to Xero and have never looked back. Having a cloud based Accounting platform that integrates with Shopify has saved me hours of data entry and allows us to stay on top of the numbers.
What are your top recommendations for new ecommerce entrepreneurs?
Get started! An ounce of action is worth more than a ton of planning. It's all about momentum and more important to just get the ball rolling than spend your life planning for tomorrow.