POLO SHOP ?

JoeG07 · Post by **JoeG07** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 9:37 am

Well, i'm getting a bit tired of delivering pizzas for a living, and have recently come into a fair bit of cash inherited of my grandad. So i was thinking of setting up an online polo shop - selling all types of polo goodies for probably a bit cheaper than what other places will sell them for due to the lack of overheads. Im sick of looking through car mags and seeing every thing youd ever want for a golf, but nothing for polos!

So people i need your opinions please is there a market for this? And of course you'll get your group buy discounts

willriseley · Post by **willriseley** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 11:05 am

well id guess there wouldbe but yur main aim would be to be able to beat the prices of all the other dealers and also maybe you could offer differnt parts from say germany and stuff???

JoeG07 · Post by **JoeG07** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 12:18 pm

well yeah ill take a trip over to germany and import back loads of cool sutff that you can't buy here like the blue heater dials etc and plus ill be able to get it cheaper as its made there

dino · Post by **dino** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 2:32 pm

Sorry to hear about your Grandad, just a few things that pop into my head firstly (without sounding harsh);

*Where would you be sourcing you products from as you say there's never nothing in mags?

*What sort of products are you going to be selling?

*Do you have adequate storage?

*Do you have any business, audit, accounts, marketing knowledge?

Again, don't want to put a downer on your idea, just putting my work brain in and these are things I'd be asking.

PD · Post by PD » Sat Jul 07, 2007 4:58 pm

Its simple enough to set up a website to sell products.

I think first of all you have got to do a bit of market research and just make sure there is some kind of demand for the type of business you want to set up + look at your target demographic. So best place to start is on this forum/club polo.

then you have got to think about stuff like

finding a reliable supplier.

(As mentioned) you need some place to store products, unless you can cleverly get the products to be shipped direct from the supplier, however i see plenty of problems doing it this way.

If your business is going to be internet based, you need to find a good web hosting provider, You will need a lot of disk space and bandwidth! which doesnt come cheap!
Obviously the site is going to be database driven so make sure you have a good backend like oracle or mySQL. There are plenty of ready made database driven shops, so its not going to be much of an issue. You might want to think about employing some one to make sure the site is running smoothly if you dont have a clue about common internet programming platforms like PHP, ASP(.net) etc...

Most importantly you need to create a good image for you business, so getting some pro logo's for your business, letter heads, also web design.

theres loads of stuff to think about, obviously you want to keep your overheads as low as possible and not be scared to spend a bit of money to get your business off the ground.

no doubt you will learn loads as you go along, just dont be scared
and dont rush into it, theres no quick way to make money so you will still need that job youve got.

i hope i have made sense lol, good luck

Ollie_R · Post by **Ollie_R** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 5:24 pm

It really depends on how big your operation will be. I'm not sure the novelty of a Polo-only parts place would last though. Maybe you could sell universal ancillaries like pedal covers, air fresheners, car cleaning bits etc. on the side. You could set up a trade account with a big distributor like Maccess and buy bulk from them and sell at a higher retail price. You can get a pack of 35 magic tree air fresheners for Â£20, sell them for Â£1.50 a piece, that's Â£52.50 if you sell them all (profit of Â£32.50

) and don't forget postage, say 50p-Â£1.

Ebay do a good shop set up, but you do have to face their fees though.

PD · Post by PD » Sat Jul 07, 2007 6:01 pm

Ollie_R wrote: Ebay do a good shop set up, but you do have to face their fees though.

it might be worth seeing if ebay fees will work out cheaper than hosting a website.

david burton · Post by **david burton** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 6:04 pm

PD wrote:
Ollie_R wrote: Ebay do a good shop set up, but you do have to face their fees though.
it might be worth seeing if ebay fees will work out cheaper than hosting a website.

no chance if you find the right host, I pay about 15 quid a year.

ebay, however, has much bigger traffic.....

PD · Post by PD » Sat Jul 07, 2007 6:18 pm

david burton wrote:
PD wrote:
Ollie_R wrote: Ebay do a good shop set up, but you do have to face their fees though.
it might be worth seeing if ebay fees will work out cheaper than hosting a website.
no chance if you find the right host, I pay about 15 quid a year.

ebay, however, has much bigger traffic.....

yes, which is ok for a personal site,
you probably dont use a lot of bandwidth. My site hosting uses probably 10-20gb a month which is nothing.
I think a popular online store could use quite a bit of bandwidth. Also with ebay you dont have to spend time setting up a website, its all there for you.
In my experience cheaper web hosts often are unreliable (down time/no back up policy, last thing you want is to loose all your customers details) or dont come with tools needed to run a store or not secure which is very important!

Just out of interest does your hosting have HTTPS ?

Biddle · Post by **Biddle** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 7:34 pm

I think that like others have said it will be a while before you can live off the money you'll get from this type of thing. It could take off and mae you a tidy income but by the same straw it could nose dive and you could lose quite a bit. Just be careful and Id suggest not investing lots in specifically polo parts as if you have parts tat are universal you have a wider market to sell to.

Post by **alexperkins** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 7:59 pm

my hosting has HTTPS

probably because I run my own network with a fully blown server

JoeG07 · Post by **JoeG07** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 10:34 pm

hey thanks 4 all your comments! I'm a graphic design student so proffesional looking flash websites with photoshop graphics are nothing to me lol. I took a pretty intensive IT course last year that covered all the back end website stuff like shopping baskets etc so again web hosting shopping baskets all that are no problem. My business knowlage is an Alevel in applied business (shup gotta start somewhere) plus my dad runs a succesful business so he'll give me a few pointers.

My target market would be people probably with a polo as their first car breaking into the dub scene like i myself was with my 1st polo. So all the things people 1st do to their cars like induction kits pedal covers etc. you know the cheap tacky things every1 does nothing heavy! I'll pick up some stuff in germany when im over there that you cant buy over here and if it sells well ill import a bulk load over. I could do a range of universal accesories but theres are thousands of shops like this on the web! I've had real difficulty locating certain parts of my polo before, id basically be sourcing everything together in one site so everything from 16 valve bumpers to audi tt pedal covers, ive yet to find a polo specific shop.

I know its a risk, but at the end of the day its not a great deal of money to lose, and if you don't take risks here and there, wheres the fun in life?

david burton · Post by **david burton** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 11:44 pm

PD wrote:
david burton wrote:
PD wrote: it might be worth seeing if ebay fees will work out cheaper than hosting a website.
no chance if you find the right host, I pay about 15 quid a year.

ebay, however, has much bigger traffic.....
yes, which is ok for a personal site,
you probably dont use a lot of bandwidth. My site hosting uses probably 10-20gb a month which is nothing.
I think a popular online store could use quite a bit of bandwidth. Also with ebay you dont have to spend time setting up a website, its all there for you.
In my experience cheaper web hosts often are unreliable (down time/no back up policy, last thing you want is to loose all your customers details) or dont come with tools needed to run a store or not secure which is very important!

Just out of interest does your hosting have HTTPS ?

20GB a month limit, tons of storage space, 10 mysql databases, https, online shop software, lots of other stuff too. It's just one of those cheap auto-setup things.

* Webspace: 3,000mb
* Data Transfer: 20,000mb
* Email Mail Boxes: 2000
* Email Autoresponders: 2000
* Email Distribution Lists: 2000
* Email Forwarders: 2000
* Catch All Email: 2000
* Junk Mail Filters: 2000
* MySQL Databases: 10
* FTP Accounts: Master + 10
* Sub Domains: 10
* SSL Secure Server Access
* FrontPage Extensions
* eXtend Control Panel
* Webalizer & AWStats Graphical Statistics
* FTP/SSH Access
* Site Management Tools
* Massive CGI Script Library

Haven't had much downtime at all and run two fairly big sites on it. admittedly I design it to keep bandwidth low though, but there's no reason why a shop can't do this either.

hosting cost is a bit of a joke at the moment for most companies, can't wait for it to come down in price.

if you ran out of 10GB a month you must be doing good business and can afford to upgrade anyway at that time.

my point was that there is affordable hosting out there, and it'll be way way cheaper than ebay fees. I imagine if you were doing 30k of turnover a year to make a living, then ebay would take at least 3% or approx 1k, plus your paypal fees taking another 3%.

The only upside of ebay is the amount of traffic it generates. I wouldn't bother comparing it for cost - if you get ten times more sales on ebay then it's worth it.

I think the target market is too small, definitely needs to be a lot bigger.

PD · Post by PD » Sun Jul 08, 2007 12:16 am

my webhosting is used a lot for transfering files quite big files from other servers aswell as a torrent client on it and hosting loads of crap - hence 300gb bandwidth limit a month

but thats persides the point.

if you do need some web hosting i can provide some i am sure

You dont need qualifications in business to be sucessful. just got to be right minded

Also you obviously have the design skills that many people dont when they start a web business. If you can give yourself a professinal image then people will assume your good and trust you, where as if you have some rubish html shop with graphics made in paint people wont. ( you already know that ) lol

david burton · Post by **david burton** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 12:33 pm

definitely, the pro image is what counts - I'm sure tens of these shops I buy from are just one man bands but look pro so convince me to trust them

remember, whatever you do try to keep the image sizes low, don't be a graphic designer and make them 2mb each (my girlfriend does this and doesn't understand why they should be made sub - 30kb!)

lol.

good luck if you go ahead with it. you can start small very cheaply and go from there.