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PPL equipment costs

I suspect most people who sell from a website shop get a specialised firm to set up their online shop for them.

There is a free open source product called Magento which, if you have IT expertise and plenty of time, you can do all yourself. The company makes money by setting up shops...

It is also possible to just sell from a website but "modern public", especially the part looking for a bargain, is probably not going to bother. It still works fine for business customers (it's what I have been doing for many years) but it's also changing there, and we are setting up our shop (using Magento).

Paypal is a horrible company - a law unto themselves, doing all they can to avoid human contact with users, and facilitating various scams (the NAD - "not as described" - scam being particularly easy) with their refund policy.

Re headsets, I think D-C trade on their reputation and being well built. I have flown with many and all the lower priced ones are uncomfortable and it should be easy to build a much better headset for far less money.

The Bose X and more so later the Bose A20 are so far ahead of anything D-C make, on both comfort and performance, there is not even a remote comparison, which presumably is why Bose can charge those prices. £800 is just a silly price for what is inside the headset. But you can't use Bose headsets in a club/school scenario - it will get trashed quickly, or stolen.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Thanks for the info Peter.

Ive spent several hours this evening re-doing the whole store. Its had a complete revamp with assistance from my internet savvy bro (Thanks Dave).

Ive removed all mention of DC. Prob not a good idea to slate other manufacturers stuff.

Shopify is the platform im using. Its so so user friendly. The hard work is trying to find a Card Merchant that will provide services to me. Most require a business bank account and i am nowhere near that stage as yet. I am awaiting response from Nochex, as they seem quite reputable.

And yes there are several ready-made-just-add-products shops up for sale on shopify, along with web developers offering setup services. The average is about $500 USD.

The next stage is advertising. Flyer Magazine want £50 odd notes a month for a tiny box on their website. I cant get a response from their hardcopy section.

Facebook want $10 USD a day (YES a DAY!) to promote and place a small ad next to potential buyers.

Anyway, like i said, shop revamped. If you get a min, i accept all comments and criticisms on the chin from anyone.

Regards

Andy

I am puzzled why you think advertising should be free. The magazines are doing exactly what you are trying to do. they have a product to sell and believe the price is justified. As in any relationship, once it is established terms change but getting to that point is just plain hard work. A classified ad in your local free newspaper may be much cheaper but is it getting the targeted audience?

PayPal have positive and negative sides. In comparison with many card processing merchants they are actually fairly easy to deal with and no more difficult than most banks.

Good luck with your venture

EHLE / Lelystad, Netherlands, Netherlands

If your website contains phrases that are relevant to web searches people do, it will come up fairly high up in the rankings on google - all by itself.

At work I pay £300/month to google and it seems to help a little bit but I also run another flying website which I pay nothing for (it isn't used to advertise anything, except lately EuroGA) and that comes up on the first page of almost any search for anything aviation-technical that's relevant to GA or the TB20. That site gets 20-30GB/month in hits. Google is pretty clever these days in determining relevance; the old hacks mostly don't work anymore.

So you can get quite a lot of exposure for free, just by having a website with clear, relevant and detailed text.

Yes... not many websites contain clear relevant and detailed text about anything whatsoever which is why googling for anything is like eating soup with a fork But this also opens the chance to somebody who can write clearly.

The problem with paypal is that most businesses can't or won't use it - unless your product is so desirable they cannot resist and then they will get an employee to buy the thing and claim it back on expenses. You need to take credit cards (Visa and MC is all you need, nobody uses Amex).

In your business, I suggest flying schools are a prime market because they all have to use cheap headsets, no matter how crappy they are (don't get offended - it's a fact) because they are constantly getting smashed or stolen. They even get stolen by people who turn up for a trial lesson (usually this is a birthday treat for somebody and the whole family piles in). If your headsets are cheap and last more than 5 minutes, you have a good line there.

One should not negatively mention other products but publishing a table of say attenuation, using published figures, should be OK. But then many manufacturers or retailers lie; for example a certain well known UK company has been listing an ANR headset which has 20db passive and 27db with ANR on as offering "47db total attenuation". I bought that headset and it was useless crap.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I would imagine that for LOC the target market is B>C not B>B so PayPal is an ideal medium.

EHLE / Lelystad, Netherlands, Netherlands

I am puzzled why you think advertising should be free.

Whoa! Are we back on PPrune?? Where did i say advertising should be free??

My assumption - possibly false - was that if you complain about £50 for an ad reaching a targeted audience being excessive then you think it should be much cheaper. I then argued that every product has it's price and pointed out that once you establish a relationship with most media, you will find the terms offered can change dramatically.

And no - we are not on prune - thank goodness - as already stated I wish you well with your venture - from what you have posted I am not sure you have thought through all the pitfalls but that is not my problem. JOLLY GOOD LUCK TO YOU - I HOPE YOU DO WELL__ - clear enough?

EHLE / Lelystad, Netherlands, Netherlands

£50 for any ad seems quite cheap, but then I have no idea whether it generates any business.

At work I pay (in a trade mag) 150 quid for a 1/4 page (list price 400-800 but nobody pays the list price), 100 for a 1/4 page "advertorial" (every article in the trade mags is an advertorial - nobody actually writes any content these days). 500 quid for a 12x12cm wall chart advert with 5 6x6cm ads in a mag.

With almost nobody actually reading printed mags these days, one has to be selective in this area, and spread it around. I get maybe 5 calls a day from advert salesmen...

The problem is that with the info being on your website, and everybody hitting the URL (or hitting google to find the product, if the advert doesn't contain the URL), instead of phoning you up for info, there is no longer any way to tell if any printed advert is working. Which is just as well because I am very sure that if one really could tell (like many years ago one could, with the "bingo cards" etc and pre-internet, you could ask callers where they saw it, but nowadays the first and only contact is from the buying office which hasn't a clue who actually wants it or for what) all the printed mags (retail and trade) would go bust instantly.

Same with most exhibitions...

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I shipped about $150K of product through the mail over a 15 year period, $100 at a time - my 'lemon aid stand' or sideline micro business. At that low level, I was completely amazed by how well word of mouth works. For a while at the beginning I had one little advertisement, but for over a decade I had nothing: no website, no print adverts, nothing!

My stuff was shipped worldwide immediately after receipt of payment, no invoice, no paper whatsoever, entirely done on trust. Worked fine for everybody concerned. I made the customers mail payment: there is a interesting psychology that when something is harder to obtain, people perceive it as valuable.

I don't want to discourage you but in that case it may be best to get a job at Tescos

Or just keep my main day job. Working at Tescos (With no disrespect to anybody that works at Tescos), wouldn't pay for much enjoyable flying time :-)

I think Philip Clarke would disagree with you on that point...... ;)

EDL*, Germany
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