Issue#47: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around E-commerce & Online Stores
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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.
This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.
Let’s see some of the products around E-commerce and Online stores. Most of the things that will be covered here don’t intentionally talk about Shopify as the Shopify ecosystem is covered separately.
Spyne: Power marketplace imagery with AI. Spyne provides AI-generated studio-grade photos for your Marketplace. Raised $600K in funding. The estimated revenue is $70K/year. Trusted by 500 paying customers.
WooMetrics: A Simple WooCommerce Sales Dashboard WooMetrics lets you see your valuable WooCommerce sales data in a simple, easy-to-use interface. Review your latest orders, sales data, and best sellers as well as weekly, monthly & year-to-date comparisons and insights.
Verloop: Conversational AI for Customer Support. Verloop helps businesses deliver delightful experiences across channels. The conversational AI platform uses advanced NLP and ML to automatically resolve customer issues with natural language. The estimated revenue is $900K/year.
Swell: Swell is the most powerful headless e-commerce platform for modern brands, startups, and agencies. Swell raises $3.4M in funding.
StoreHippo: Feature-rich, multi-seller marketplace for B2B or B2C business model that brings higher traffic and conversions. Easy management of vendors, orders, shipping, and commissions from feature rich dashboard. The estimated revenue is $6M/year.
Rutter: The Universal API for Ecommerce. Companies use Rutter’s API to read and write store data across any platform. Use real-time webhooks to sync store data with Rutter and get event-driven notifications. Started in 2019 and raised $1.1M in funding.
BranchBob: Build your Online Store from your Smartphone for free No matter what type of business you run, Branchbob allows you to get your business online in minutes.
CopyPad: AI-Generated Product Descriptions. Generate AI tailor-made product descriptions for eCommerce products with the click of a button — quickly and effortlessly.
SparkLayer: Powerful B2B eCommerce, simplified. SparkLayer converts your website into a feature-rich B2B ordering platform. It's rapid to set up and beautifully connects to the systems that manage your B2B operation.
Gorgias: The best merchants grow through exceptional customer service. Gorgias is the e-commerce help desk that turns your customer service into a profit center. The estimated revenue is $11M/year.
JungleScout: All-in-one platform for selling on Amazon. The estimated revenue is $24M/year.
Affise: Affiliate Marketing Software to manage, track, analyze and optimize online advertising campaigns in real-time. Raised $9M in funding.
UltraCart: Build your perfect store with all the premium e-commerce features to enhance your business. The estimated revenue is $400K per year.
Oberlo: Oberlo membership unlocks the digital courses, podcasts, ebooks, and dropshipping tools to build your own online empire.
BigCartel: Easy online stores for artists & makers. BigCartel makes it simple to build a unique online store, sell your work, and run a creative business. The estimated revenue is $6M/year.
OpenCart: Free and open-source eCommerce platform Everything you need to create, scale and run your business.
Volusion: E-commerce for everyone. Everything you need to sell online. Easily add advanced functionality to your site with dozens of powerful apps and integrations. The estimated revenue is $22M/year.
E-commerceCEO: Newsletter that sends hype-free e-commerce guides and tips straight to your inbox.
Shift4Shop: Turnkey eCommerce solution makes it easy to build a website and grow your business.
DelightChat: Grow your Ecommerce brand with delightful customer service. Reply to customers across all channels, view order data from Shopify at a glance, and collaborate with the team on customer issues. Profitable from day one.
Negative Nancy says - “There are already several solutions around E-commerce and Online stores”
Me - E-commerce is popular and is here to stay for several years and there is a high demand for tools around e-commerce as more people are building online stores and selling stuff.
Negative Nancy says - “Shopify solves all problems.”
Me - Shopify is not the only e-commerce platform. There are multiple other platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Prestashop, etc and each has its own pros and cons.
Deep-dive & Some niches
‘Cart recovery’ based solutions: One of the biggest problems for any e-commerce store is to bring back a customer who added items to the online cart and didn’t finish payment and stopped. Create an automated solution that can fix this by sending and a reminder to the users who adds items to the cart but did not finish the payment step. The automated solution should also send pre-configured discount coupons via email. Make sure that any solution that you create works across various e-commerce stores as almost all popular e-commerce stores provide an option for Marketplace plugins where you can upload your plugin and charge for the usage.
Create a simple online store: Create a SaaS solution that helps users create online e-commerce stores. There are many big players in this space like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc but most of these big players are bloated. Make the solution as simple as Gumroad but for e-commerce. Users should be able to create the products, add product descriptions, upload pictures as simple as drafting and sending an email. Make sure the app is not bloated and just do what it promises - creating a simple store to sell items online. For the payments, see to integrate as many payment options as possible. Some of the payment options that you could think of are Stripe, Paypal, etc. UltraCart that started as a simple online store creator is now at an estimated revenue of $400K per year.
SaaS to create niche-based stores: This is the same as above except that here you would concentrate on a specific niche. For example, see BigCartel specifically catering for artists and makers. Pick any niche that has a good number of sellers. Use tools like KeywordsEverywhere to understand the demand for those keywords. Make sure you look at all prominent online stores and see the best-selling items and niche down to specific seller segments. BigCartel niched down to create stores for artists/makers now stands at an estimated revenue is $6M/year.
Affiliate links for various E-Commerce stores: Affiliate links are a major source of revenue for many bloggers and website owners. Affiliate links are popular because they give direct revenue to stores without spending a lot of money on marketing but by providing a share on the actual sale to the referrer. This is a great model where the store owners have to pay only when there is a successful sale. It’s a win-win for both store owners and bloggers who write about products with affiliate links. Create a SaaS-based solution or even a plugin-based solution that can be used by online stores to add affiliate/referral link functionality into their stores. Make sure the solution you create would work with multiple stores like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, etc so that it can be used by a lot of store owners at the same time generating more revenue.
Products around Headless Commerce: If you have never heard of ‘headless e-commerce’, start here. In its simplest form, headless commerce is a separation of the front end and back end of an e-commerce application. This architecture offers brands freedom of expression to build whatever and however, they want. Most importantly, it enables brands to enrich the customer experience. The concept is simple - instead of using the same frontend, ‘headless commerce’ stores provide only the back-end functionality that a store requires and provides APIs to access this data. For example, a typical online store required functionalities like ‘create a product’, ‘update a product’, ‘create invoice’, ‘initiate a payment’ etc. Your SaaS solution provides the complete backend functionality in the forms of APIs and your customers would use these APIs and build their own frontend based on their choice. This is getting extremely popular and solutions like these are adopted by more companies. See here for an example. Swell solving a similar problem raised $3.4M in funding.
Whatsapp/Telegram/Facebook-based communication for customer support: These days, customers want to get support from the tools that they use. When there are no tools like Whatsapp/Telegram, people were asked to either email or call the online store help desk for any queries. But now customers prefer to reach helpdesk from the tools they use like Whatsapp/Telegram/Facebook etc. Create a solution around this that can connect the help desk to external tools like Whatsapp/Telegram. The helpdesk support staff should be able to use their own internal tools and still be able to communicate to users on their platforms from where they initiated the chat. Super Lemon crossed $25K MRR in less than 2 years with a solution similar to this just for Shopify.
Tools around Amazon Sellers: Amazon Sellers make huge money by selling on Amazon. If you are new to the Amazon Seller side of things, just check here. Selling Amazon is different from successfully selling on Amazon. Successful sellers on Amazon make several times higher revenue than normal sellers. To be a successful seller on Amazon, the seller needs a lot of tools around data, marketing, advertising, etc. JungleScout making $24M/year in this space by solving problems for Amazon Sellers. See here for various tools built by JungleScout around Amazon Sellers to help them pick the best products to sell, analyze the data, provide tools to automate reviews/feedback, and manage the inventory. Create a SaaS-based solution around Amazon Sellers. In most cases, Amazon Sellers would be happy to pay as you are directly helping them generate more revenue.
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