Robert J Miller is the founder of Automated Retail Commerce, or ARC for short. As the name suggests, they build automated ecommerce stores that generate passive profits for their clients.
All without being held hostage by the marketplaces for your money. Robert’s looking at you, Amazon and Walmart. Both of which are notorious for suspending seller accounts and freezing their funds.
This makes investing in an Amazon or a Walmart automation service risky business.
Robert’s best known for his ecommerce growth agency, ScaleBold, where he’s worked with hundreds of ecom brands over the last few years, helping them generate more than $50 million in sales.
The big opportunity he sees is something Forbes calls social commerce: the convergence of ecommerce and social media.
“And there’s one platform at the center of it all,” Robert says. “And maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called Shopify, and they’ve seen explosive growth fueled by digital entrepreneurs.”
“Shopify figured out something early on,” Robert continues. “And this one reason is why most Amazon stores aren’t nearly as profitable as Shopify stores.”
“It’s because data is king. See, with Shopify, you get the customer’s email and phone number to use in your marketing efforts,” he explains.
“On Amazon and Walmart you can’t do that because they wanna protect their customers.”
“So it makes you dependent on new sales every time instead of having repeat customers purchase from you over and over again.”
By working exclusively with Shopify stores, ARC’s been able to produce some pretty impressive results for their clients.
- One store was able to scale to $232k in revenue, with 44% profit margins, in less than five months.
- Another store leapt to $104k in revenue, at 30% profit margins, in just the first month.
Hard disclaimer: Robert admits, not every store they manage is gonna have stats like that. But ideally, in 6-9 months, you’d be doing at least $6k per month in net profit.
One to two years later, you can potentially sell this store for a nice payday.
“With this Shopify dropshipping model,” Robert picks back up, “we’ll set up a branded store, get orders, and only have to pay for the cost of goods sold once the orders have actually come through.”
“So the customer comes to your website; buys; our team will fulfill the order by contacting the supplier; and the supplier’s gonna send it out to your customer.”
“So there’s no upfront inventory or warehousing costs associated for you.”
“And since we’re running social media ads to your store to get more orders, we’re even gonna introduce other models that’ll make those ads more profitable, such as a recurring revenue model for your store,” Robert says.
“And that generates true passive income.”
“So if you’re a smart investor, you’re probably asking yourself what you’d actually need to get started. Well, there’s store costs; software needed to run everything; advertising budget; your COGS; and then a team to run and manage it all, right?”
When it’s all said and done, ARC asks you to pay $35,000 just to get the ball rolling, then have at least $10- to $30k in available credit for ordering products and running ads.
And then they want 50% of the profit each month.
Good lord.
I don’t doubt Robert and company are great at what they do, but I’d personally rather be doused in gasoline and set on fire than risk that kinda money on a done-for-you Shopify store.
Also, it seems like they’ve recently pivoted to Facebook Shops. I wonder how come, if Shopify’s so amazing.