What do I need to know about starting an on demand inspection company?

I am the founder of a cosmetic company that bootstrapped from nothing to a 7 figure business. It sounds like you are really at the beginning stages of business and there are a lot of opportunities for you. You've got a lot of work ahead of you and you need to build some infrastructure. Your brand is going to be one of the most important things to establish and you won't be able to sell to distributors, salons, or consumers without a clear message of what your company is about. When it comes to distribution of your product, you can either work with a distributor, sell directly to resellers, or sell directly to consumers. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. You'll have the most margin with direct to consumers - but you need skills on ecommerce. When you sell through a distributor you lose tons of control, but you can expand your reach quicker. You also have the slimmest margins; but you don't need to invest as much into sales. Selling direct to salons is a time consuming process; but you have more control of how your product is displayed, and the perception the consumer has of your products. So much of cosmetics is where your product is currently sold. If it's sold in mass market retail, no salon will want to carry it. But the direct answer of your question is you simply need to sell your product to anyone who's willing to buy it. Pick up the phone, hustle, and win over those customers.

Depending on the specs of your boxes, there are many different great options out there for custom printed boxes, at reasonable prices. From my experience working with online retailers, here's some of the best that I've come across: https://packlane.com/ https://pakible.com/ https://www.boxup.com/ https://packhelp.com/ https://www.companybox.com/ http://brandincolor.com/ Some specialty suppliers: https://www.ecoenclose.com/ - eco-friendly http://www.instabox.com/ - Canada http://www.glbc.com/ - Canada + US https://www.packqueen.com.au/ - Australia Hope that helps and gives you some options to consider! Custom packaging is an important part in building a great brand, so it's smart to be looking into this. If you need any advice around creating an eCommerce brand and driving online retail sales, schedule a call with me and we can dig into it!

I've been in ecommerce for over a decade and have co-founded and helped start companies collectively driving over $10MM in ecommerce sales. I've consulted for Fortune 500 ecommerce stores. Here's my advice if you're just getting started without a big budget. Note: Some of this is copied from my answer to a similar question. #1) PROVE THE ASSUMPTION: Start with a dropshipper's existing products to figure out what sells best before you spend money on manufacturing and warehousing. Amazon is perfect for this - they will pay you 4%-10% to promote 253,000,000 products (http://bit.ly/1q2M85R) - you can sign up at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ Alternately, get very small amounts of the product (maybe even just buy some from a competitor) and try selling them on ebay and amazon. Nothing hurts more than having $50,000 of imported product gathering dust in your fulfillment warehouse while listening to a voicemail from a debt collector. #2) SOURCING There are several options here. Many people prefer Alibaba.com. Warning - if you use Alibaba, you are stepping into a tank of pirahnas. There are more scam "manufacturers" on Alibaba than real ones. Use Escrow or AliSecure Pay if you buy. If the supplier says they only take T/T, Western Union, Moneygram - just say no! I prefer American Made when possible. If you're like me, try Ariba's Discovery Service - http://bit.ly/1q2NFZu - which will allow you to find suppliers with a physical presence in the USA. Note: Many things can be made on demand (someone purchases, one gets made and shipped) instead of in 500+ manufacturing runs. Start there if you can - Books on CreateSpace.com, Clothes on CafePress.com, Playing Cards on MakePlayingCards.com, etc - to test out your exact product. If you decide to source by purchasing product in bulk, find a fulfillment company to store and fulfill (ship) your orders. Amazon does this - http://services.amazon.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm - but they might decide to crush you like a bug if you're successful (http://bit.ly/1q2V7DX). Other fulfillment companies for e-commerce include http://www.shipwire.com/ and http://www.webgistix.com/ #3) LAUNCH YOUR SITE This is an entire topic in itself. One of the fastest ways I know for newbies to start in e-commerce is with a SquareSpace.com store. Other options include GoDaddy.com and BigCommerce.com. If you can stand to use the templates they provide instead of trying to customize them, you'll save yourself a lot of hassle and expense - customization usually looks terrible unless a designer/coder was hired to do the work. If you do customize, find someone on odesk.com or elance.com. If you're not hard up for money, just build a custom store from the start. If you can't do that, save up some money and then go for it. Focus on increasing conversion rate - for every 100 visitors, get 1 to buy. Then 2. Then 4. Then 8 (8%). #4) MARKET Figure out where your competition is advertising. Are they getting free, "organic" SEO results on Google? Using social media to drive billions of dollars of sales? (NOTE: That was a joke - don't count on social media as the nucleus of your marketing campaign. Please!) Are they paying for Google ads ("PPC"), buying email lists, using strategic partnerships for promotion, relying on shopping portals, using banner advertising, or something else entirely? There's probably a good reason - figure out what it will take to play in those waters. At the same time, try to find a small enough niche that you can win in it. #5) BEWARE Be careful about artsy things. If someone is attracted to something artistic, it's usually because there is a story behind the art for them, or because it's cheap. If you're going to try to sell artistic things, you may want to consider doing some serious research first about who has been successful in that area. Look at etsy.com to see handmade artsy items (very cool). #6) WORTH A LOOK Worth checking out as you start your journey: Art.com, yessy.com, Artfire.com, ArtPal.com #7) DEEP FOUNDATION If you need help, reach out for a 15 minute call and we'll discuss a go-to-market strategy specific to your goals.

If you have your CAD design done, you can get it printed in plastic first using inexpensive printers at 3DHubs for example. Do tweaks to the design and reprint. This can't cost more than $5 or so per print. Once you're happy you can then send your design to shapeways or i.materialise to be printed in metal. These services will likely charge a fee $100 for a metal print.

There are a few online B2B marketplaces in the US to consider and which one you go with will depend on your requirements. Amazon Business: This is a very legitimate option now as Amazon looks to expand its offering away from just a B2C model, with a greater focus on B2B. You can offer unique discounts for businesses and a host of other features to drive your B2B business. ThomasNet: This is more for a traditional supplier/purchaser business relationship but may be a worthwhile avenue if you sell high volume or recurring use items Alibaba and eWorldTrade: Both Chinese based business so I am unsure of any implications on trading here from the US however there are a huge number of US businesses looking to buy on here and so they are atill some of the largest B2B platforms.