| I dropshipped from 2001 to 2004 in the jewelry market. I never really set out to do it, just stumbled into it. I had a friend in the jewelry business that tipped me off on the potential so I started exploring the opportunity. I was in college and thought it an interesting real-world challenge compared to what I was working on in my classes. It ended up paying for my graduate degree and then some. This was years and years before turnkey solutions. So I built my own. Everything was held together with ColdFusion MX 6, which I was a big advocate at the time and into that dev meetup scene. After 6 months of development putting in tons of late night hours, things were fairly automated. I would scan daily email reports and any process exceptions, too, were emailed to me. I never achieved astronomical volume, but it made a decent chunk of change. Just ran on cruise control sustaining me and my family through graduate school. I was an early integrator with the jewelry dropshipper. Orders and order status was communicated over FTP. Cue batch processing jobs. They are still around btw. At the time, they supplied most brick and mortar jewelry shops. Probably still do. This, of course, was before social media of any kind, so my channel was eBay. I was an early integrator with eBay's new API built on something called SOAP. :) I hated it, but after complaining in their dev forums, eBay paid for travel and hotel to their conference in 2002(?) to give feedback in a private session with their developers. I have to give them credit, they were really trying hard to keep things simple and were sincere. There wasn't anything like Stripe at the time, so I was one of Netsuite's first (very) small business customers just as they were beta testing online payments (iirc backed by Authorize.net). NS had a comprehensive CRM, order fulfillment, etc. solution. It is funny to think that NS was actually cheap relative to other offerings. Open sourced a ColdFusion implementation of the integration and a ColdFusion framework ( bothhosted on tigris.org... anyone remember that?). Both had users for a few years. I built an e-commerce website (I sometimes go browse it still on WayBackMachine to reminisce) to try to steer purchases away from eBay to avoid fees. Was navigating the gray area of auction, buy it now, and linking back to my site. Sometimes would get reported for policy violation. In the end, I didn't have budget to market outside of eBay, nor the entrepreneurial spirit to grow it, nor the inclination to bring in investors. My heart wasn't in it once the technical challenge wasn't there. A pattern I've unfortunately repeated over my career. After my graduate degree, I sold it all to a local jeweler and transitioned it to them. They ran it for a few years to supplement revenue that their brick and mortar store was starting to lose because of online jewelers. I got paid for periodic work to fix a bug here and there. They shut it down in 2009 when their store went under. :( Overall, it was a fun run. I learned a heck of a lot early in my career. |