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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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eCommerce entrepreneurship
Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 3)
Sramana: Does your business model still rely on third party logistics? Tony Ellison: Yes, by and large. We have a lot of 3PL relationships as well as a lot of private brands. Today, we offer over 600,000 items. We are in close to 16 different major categories. We started in CD-ROMs and then moved into
Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 2)
Sramana: You decided to go to market with 1,000 of the most popular products in your market segment. Did you buy that inventory? Tony Ellison: No, everything we did was drop shipped. We bootstrapped the business, so our only way of making things work was to partner with a distributor out of Chicago. For example,
Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. The Shoplet case study is interesting because it illustrates how an entrepreneur has bootstrapped a category leading e-commerce venture by trading off margins in favor of minimizing logistical challenges. Sramana: Tony, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where were you born and raised? What
