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Comment by wriggler | Hacker News Reader

I built and run StoreSlider[1]. It made ~$700,000 in 2016, mainly in affiliate revenue from eBay. Costs are essentially hosting (between two and five $10 Linodes, depending on load).

Took me some effort to built, but it's on autopilot now.

[1] https://www.storeslider.com

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Sorry for questioning the legitimacy of your revenue claim, but according to Similarweb your site gets less than 5000 visitors a month. [1] Alexa's estimates seem similar, putting the global rank at 6.5 mio. [2] Wouldn't you need millions of yearly visitors for that kind of revenue? I know those traffic estimations aren't perfect, but this seems off by a lot. Am i missing something?

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/storeslider.com [2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/storeslider.com

I block all bots and crawlers except Googlebot and Bingbot (the others bring no users but can hit the servers hard), so I'd treat Alexa etc with a pinch of salt.

Nonetheless, the figures I gave are for 2016. Since then, there has indeed been a fall in all numbers, largely because a site like this will always be overly reliant on Google and, for whatever reason, Google favours the site less this year than it did the year before.

At its peak, the site had approximately 53,000 daily visitors.

What tech do you use for the site?

Lumen (from Laravel) with Nginx on Linode.

PHP 7.1 has given a huge boost in terms of the performance you can get from a cheap VPS.

I listen to the Mixergy podcast and Andrew always quotes Similarweb to the interviewees. It always goes "According to Similarweb you get 90% of your traffic from X site?" And the interviewee is usually like "I've never heard of that site." I don't really trust the data coming out of similarweb.

This looks great and nicely built. Once you've created something like this how do you start getting traffic? My assumption is you also need to market it somehow but the specifics of how to do that always eluded me.

Any suggestions or strategies you could share?

In my case it was word of mouth, social sharing, and the good graces of Google. Each individual user is simply worth too little to make a paid marketing strategy viable.

With the traffic I had, I did a lot of A/B testing to maximise conversions.

How do you handle scraping the products, do you just fetch all new products once per day? Or do you fetch them all in real time as the user searches

Everything is done with real time calls to the eBay API. eBay's catalogue is too large to make it realistic to fetch it as a whole and, anyway, as far as I remember they don't offer a data dump (it's been a long time since I checked).

Luckily, eBay's API is very fast, but I also worked hard to keep the total response time of my code within a reasonable range.

Ah interesting, that makes sense. Thanks

not making any claims whatsoever, but do keep in mind a very typical strategy of sites and businesses like that is to go on forums like this and brag about their apparent success when it's not true, because perceived success sometimes begets true success. i know because i've done it myself successfully - for my last 2 startups i went to reddit and told long form stories which are ultimately nothing more than hyperbolic origins of my startup intended to drum up interest, and both instances brought a sizeable wave of initial traffic.

So... "fake it till you make it"

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