Building My Own eCommerce Platform - How Losing Everything Forced Me to Start Creating

If you haven't read part 2 yet, The Hard Truth About Dropshipping – Mistakes, Losses, and Learning to Adapt, you might want to start there first so you don't miss where we're at in the story. If you're just joining in, I recommend beginning from the start, it's been a decades-long journey, and each part builds on the lessons learned before it.

In this article, I'll share my journey of building a platform that could manage eBay listings, my website, and eventually much more. Along the way, I faced countless challenges, learning multiple programming languages, diving into server and database management, figuring out APIs, and so much more. It was overwhelming at times, but without tackling these hurdles, I never would have gotten to where I am today.

Challenge #7 | How My First Website Went

In my last post, I left off after spending 8 months building my first website, packed with custom extensions and a bit of coding so I could import products from my suppliers. I tried to replicate the workflow I had with eBay Blackthorne, but as I got deeper into it, I realized there were plenty of improvements I could make. I could streamline the process and make it more user-friendly for my needs. By the time I was ready to launch, I had set up a system that could automatically pull inventory from my suppliers and upload it directly to my Magento website. One of the extensions I used, M2E Pro, was actually excellent for its time, with features that let me accomplish my goals. During this period, my eBay revenue dropped to just a few thousand per month, a significant decline from where I had been a year earlier.

Once the new site went live, I managed to get up to about 60,000 active products on eBay, spread across roughly 15 suppliers. This brought in about $200k per month in gross revenue, putting me back over $40k per month in profit just from eBay. Life was looking good again, and things stayed fairly consistent for the next couple of years. I tried to push past the 60k product mark, but every time I got close, something would break. I was happy with the money I was making and didn't want to risk losing it, so I mostly left it alone, until I was forced to change.

"This brought in about $200k per month in gross revenue, putting me back over $40k per month in profit just from eBay"

I was using Magento 1 at the time. Magento 2 had been released shortly before I launched my site, but I figured I was safe since Magento 1 was still being maintained. That changed when I got an email saying all focus would shift to Magento 2 and Magento 1 would be phased out. I knew I was in trouble. I was exhausted from constantly having to migrate software or risk everything breaking. The electronics website I had launched wasn't generating much, maybe 2–3 orders per month, which was frustrating, though I'd never done any marketing for it (another lesson learned). This forced shift completely changed how I viewed my business and how I approached my software strategy moving forward.

Challenge #8 | My First Major Business Model Shift

This is the point in my story where things really began to shift, in ways I never saw coming. After making significant profits, rebuilding instead of quitting seemed like the easy choice, though I wasn't exactly thrilled about it. Since Magento 2 was still relatively new and had been acquired by Adobe, I figured I was safe for a while, thankfully, I was right. But only a few weeks into the new build, I received an email from M2E Pro announcing that they would no longer offer their extension for free. Pricing would now be based on the number of active listings and sales volume. After doing the math, I realized it could cost me tens of thousands of dollars per month at my current scale.

That was a wake-up call. If I didn't find an alternative, all my profits would be wiped out. eBay was tightening its rules, brands were cracking down, and yet I still wanted to continue dropshipping. I had two choices: build another retail website or think outside the box and try something different. Around this time, eBay got a new CEO and rolled out a slew of seller-unfriendly policy changes, likely a response to Amazon's dominance and rampant fraud issues. I decided to shift my full focus to a website, abandoning the Magento 2 build I'd been working on.

I already had the ability to keep inventory in sync across multiple suppliers, a capability most dropshippers were missing. I envisioned a website where customers could buy wholesale in bulk or access a CSV feed for dropshipping. I spent about $2k on marketing and was thrilled to see thousands of visitors on day one. But my inbox told a different story: over a hundred emails, almost none asking about bulk purchases. Every message was the same question: "How do I get these products onto my website, eBay, Amazon, or Shopify?" It reminded me of my first supplier, who had said, "We provide the inventory feed; you figure out the rest yourself." That experience had been disappointing, and I didn't want to repeat it. I told everyone I needed a few days to think it over, but the emails and visitors kept coming, thousands of them daily. Clearly, there was a real demand I couldn't ignore.

At that moment, I knew that solving this problem could make my website-based business fully sustainable. I went back to the drawing board and started building my own software. I packed it with every feature I could imagine to make it easy for customers. They loved it. I charged a small monthly fee and added just 1–3% to product prices so it wouldn't eat into their profits. Within the first year, I had over 50,000 registered members, and orders were coming in so fast that manual processing was no longer an option.

This is when it hit me, another lesson learned. Even this way, I'm still dropshipping, but with a completely different approach than most people imagine. When most think of dropshipping, they picture launching a retail website or selling on marketplaces, tossing a few products up, and calling it a day. But that's not enough. Thinking outside the box and exploring alternative methods is what really drives success. And if retail is the path you choose, remember this: volume is key. The more products you have available, the more opportunities you have to make profit.

Partnering with us means we'll dig deep into your niche, business model, and goals to craft creative, alternative strategies for showcasing your business to the world. We'll also focus on volume, because the more you move, the more your profits and growth potential increase. We help make your business work smarter, not harder.

Challenge #9 | How I Stayed Afloat With Thousands of Orders

Up until this point, I had always ran everything all by myself. But I was getting exhausted trying to keep up with it, and I was still gaining hundreds of new users every day. I went and rented an office, hired a few people, and had them help me with placing orders, answering customer questions and uploading tracking from the suppliers to the website. This took a huge load off, but still wasn't enough. I was still going everyday until I just had to stop and sleep. There were days when I had to ask my son to help me place orders as I was really getting behind on them even with several of us placing them one after another.

One day my son came to me and was "I built a bot to place the orders for us from Python, you just have to feed it the order details. I was a bit skeptical at first, and I was like "let me see it work", placing orders is complex and requires a lot of choices, there is no way this is going to work. He said feed it the order details and watch. Thats exactly what I did, I programmed my software to send the bot order details, and sure enough, that bot opened the browser, went to the suppliers website, placed the order, and updated my software with the order details. This was the moment in time, I was determined to learn the python language, fast forward, and I have built bots to do all sorts of tasks including placing orders. They have evolved a lot over the years, and have become super efficient and smart.

Next thing on the agenda was to build bots to go get tracking numbers from suppliers and add them to the software, as well as check for order status updates, which lets me know if an order has been sitting too long, canceled by the supplier, and much more. As you can imagine, with this huge uptick in orders, we had a huge uptick in returns and order issues. This is where the next challenge reared its head as we were spending way too much time dealing with these problems. For anyone starting out or looking to scale efficiently, our Comprehensive Training Service provides personalized, one-on-one guidance to master the portal, understand order management, and learn strategies to handle these exact challenges.

Challenge #10 | Handling And Tracking So Many Returns

Yep, you guessed it - another challenge! Returns quickly became one of the biggest headaches to manage. The main issue wasn't just receiving the returned products - it was getting the suppliers to follow through with updates. Far too often, weeks would go by without a word from them. Then, out of nowhere, I'd get a message from a customer saying, "Hey, I sent my return back a month and a half ago. Where's my refund?" In some cases, I had already refunded the customer but hadn't received my credit back from the supplier. Frustrating doesn't even begin to describe it - but that's just how many suppliers operate.

"Hey, I sent my return back a month and a half ago. Where's my refund?"

To fix this, I built another system into my software specifically for returns. It allowed me to track the reason for the return, the resolution (refund, exchange, replacement, etc.), and to monitor incoming returns so I could follow up as soon as they were delivered. I also added tracking for both customer and supplier refunds, so I could instantly see who had been refunded and who was still waiting. The software even sends me daily reminders when a supplier refund is overdue. It completely transformed how I handled returns and made for much happier customers across the board.

In the latest version of my software, AI now takes this to a whole new level. It can communicate directly with suppliers and customers, coordinate return details, update my system, and ensure everything is handled efficiently without me needing to step in. My ultimate goal has always been to automate everything possible - and this was a big step forward in that direction.

Of course, the story doesn't end there. The market kept shifting, and we had to adapt yet again. In the next post, I'll go over how changing brand policies and tighter marketplace restrictions pushed us to reinvent our business model one more time - and how that led to what my company is today.

Next Post In Series

I hope you have enjoyed this post and maybe even picked up a thing or two. In the next post I will be going over the following topics:

• The Next Business Shift
• A New Path Found
• Software Evolution

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