Why shouldn't I just buy a Shopify business?

Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

- Otto Von Bismarck

I messaged David one fine morning: "Dude, why shouldn't I just buy a Shopify business?". I was mostly drawn to the idea of something that would force me to learn about logistics, drop-shipping and marketing. I am a software engineer, first and perhaps always, but I was curious about the way that other parts of a business run. I picked out one particular Shopify business. There are quite a few sites like flippa which enable buyers and sellers to meet, exchanging 'authentic' data derived from a Shopify integration.

David's assumption right away was that things were too good to be true. This person wanted to sell a business that made $4000/month for $25,000. With that kind of earnings, you could easily charge a lot more for the sale. Well, heck, with that kind of earnings why would you even want to sell? There is a strange Groucho Marx ethic to buying Shopify businesses - any which are trying to sell to you are not ones that you want to buy, perhaps.

We set up a WhatsApp group call and got talking to the guy. The store sources smartwatches from Chinese manufacturers that are copies of more expensive Android Wear devices. Much of the market was in the US, and the owner seemed to have some kind of relationship with a manufacturer which allowed him a modest discount that he assured would transfer over with ownership rights. "Why did you want to sell?" "I want to focus on another business - cardboard." It very well might be that there's a killing to be made in cardboard, but it didn't strike us as a very solid explanation.

He shared some screenshots of past revenue and we took to critiquing the site as well. It seemed to be a bit of a slapdash operation, with typos and incomplete sentences strewn about. The revenue graph however, seemed quite promising - up and to the right. The problem was we don't know the expenditures required to do this and how sustainable the revenue is. The product was fairly undifferentiated and probably dependent on Facebook ads.

We decided it was too large a sum of money to try out on an experiment and passed on the deal without much regret.