Club Shop

[goz_83]

I was just looking at the fto ireland shop and was wondering if it is even possible to order from it. The prices are in dollars and the club calendar is from 2009, so was wondering what the situation is there. I'm liking the BBQ apron . It would be great to see a selection similar to ftooc, but understand this might not be possible with the fto count in ireland. However, there are plenty of mitsubishis and there is a great potential market/revenue stream that could be tapped into.

There could be a new "for sale" section, where members could list all their bits by category (no jokes). I think a 10% club fee on sales would be fair for items sold via the club shop (maybe excluding the sale of a car and instead asking for a 5%, or set fee, or voluntary contribution in those cases).

I run a national hypnotherapy register and it's free to be a member for trained hypnotherapists. However, the website fees were about €150 per year when I first launched and this had to be recovered. Members were given options to upgrade their memberships for better listings. 3 paying "Gold" members (€50 each) covered the hosting and web fees. I now have a different hosting plan, allowing me to host multiple websites under one plan, so it's basically free to run the register, with the exception of my time spent adding content and new members. Well over 1k per year is generated from less than 30 paying members of various levels. This is small fry for my time spent updating the site, but it still more than covers the expenses. There could be a very rewarding way for both sides to benefit from upgrading and promoting this part of the website. Also, if we all put the fto-ireland url on our rear windows, it would bring more people to the site. It is after all how i found the site in the first place. People come here mostly for information, so when it comes to the fto-ireland shop...."if we don't have it, we point you to who does" and link to the place that sells the best quality at the best price. I foresee camskill being linked a lot, but they don't have everything. I am sure this idea can be grown and adapted for fto-ireland. Revenue=growth.

[CJ]

Goz, firstly, thanks for the suggestions, its encouraging to get this sort of input and I welcome more of it.

The Club Shop is very much open for business, however, its with a US based provider which means that items are listed in USD. It hasn't been updated in some time but most of the items are pretty timeless. I can vouch for the quality of the prints, quite a number of members on the forum have bought from the shop in the past. Muad used to maintain the shop but he's been not been on much in recent times. Theres the potential for a full revamp and move to a European supplier - anybody interested in taking on the challenge?

Revenue generation on an individual basis is somewhat limited given the number of unique site users - 50 in the last week and 95 in the past month. A quick and easy approach is to offer up 2 or 3 advertising slots to select vendors for a set fee, this would easily cover hosting costs and provide a surplus.

Personally, I'm not sold on asking private sellers to pay for advertising, I believe this could do more harm that good. Our main competitive advantage stems from our monthly site traffic - 8,000 unique visitors, 130,000 page impressions and 400,000 hits - selling advertising based on these figures is most certainly possible.

Keep the ideas flowing....

[goz_83]

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. That all makes sense to me. There is potential for quality advertising, from quality sellers and the risk of any harm would be almost eliminated by having the choice of who is advertised. I think the likes of camskill would be happy to pay a reasonable fee for annual advertising. It does not need to be a pitch for profit, but one to cover running costs. €20 per month would be a snap up price imo and the hosting fees are covered. With hits like you quoted, a google advertising banner would sit nicely into a corner of the page and could generate additional revenue via ppc advertising. I'm all for keeping the website free of clutter, so I would say limiting the area to two, or even one advert space. When people see google ads, they know the website does not choose the advert shown, but it is usually somewhat relevant. Personally I think a reasonably priced sponsored ad would make more sense. 95 unique visitors may not sound like much per month, but that's 95 potential customers for whoever has an ad with us. If only one person bought an exhaust, that would pretty much cover advertising costs for a year I would think.

Some registered therapists consider €50 per year expensive to be listed on my register, but one client pays between 1 and 10 years of listings, depending on pricing structure. Every extra sale is profit from a customer they might never have attracted. Plus, there are residual and referral sales to be considered too. Businesses only have to be told once for that type of figure to make sense.