What are the pros and cons of buying a pre-loaded website?

Does anyone have any experience with a pre-loaded store? There is an intriguing opportunity to grab one from an experienced vendor I found here at Salehoo. The company is well, or has been, well regarded for drop shipping and wholesale previously, and has apparently been vetted by Salehoo.
Thank you,
George

Hi George,

You mean it's a wholesale or drop-ship business website you are speaking about?

It is drop shipping. In fact, from what I can tell, it is what this supplier is doing instead of drop shipping. They seem to offer either wholesaling or these preloaded store/sites

OK, so if I understand this correctly. This isn't a working business that you are considering purchasing, this is a company selling websites pre-loaded with stock for you to start selling?

Yes. That is correct. The supplier has a preloaded website that they charge a monthly fee to maintain. The site comes preloaded with their inventory at their wholesale costs, and is customizable for not only pricing, but to either include our own products, or to be incorporated within our own web sight stores

OK, a couple of really important factors to consider with this type of purchase. Value is of course a big one and by value I mean everything from product prices right through to the level of customer service they provide to you, not forgetting things like good shipping times and inventory management structures ensuring that what is showing as available on your site is in fact available and no possibility that it is out of stock.

On top of those concerns, marketing is a big one. Remember, platforms like this make their money from the sale on and ongoing fees of maintaining your website, they aren't so much reliant on you selling their products, so many of these platforms don't care if you are generating traffic to your site or not. So you need to go in to these things with your eye wide open, knowing what level of marketing do they provide to generate traffic for you, if in fact any at all.

It doesn't matter what you actual sell, marketing is the key to generate traffic to even give you a chance of making sales. So look past everything else and focus on issues as outlined above would be my advice. If you can tick all the right boxes on those issues, then and only then would I personally show any further interest.

In regards to being SaleHoo verified, just remember that our verification is in no way an endorsement of any supplier's services and/or products. SaleHoo verification only identifies a supplier as being trustworthy to deal with as they have passed our safe trading partnership criteria guidelines for approval.

You can share the supplier's name if you like and I'm happy to look closer at what they are offering for you and I may then be able to offer further more specific advice for your consideration.

Cheers

Thank you Mark.

The supplier's name is Tatiana Fashions. They apparently have designed an estore using myshopkart.

Any insights or wisdom that you could share is greatly appreciated.

Nothing further I can add than above George, support has no feedback from any members in regards to this supplier whatsoever. That's no negatives or positives that I can pass on for you unfortunately.

I would just encourage you to focus on the points I made above to gauge what sort of value the platform is offering you before signing up for anything.

Cheers