Gunstore Business

I started my firearm manufacturing business in 2013 after a decade fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea was simple in theory. Spin up this new AR15 design that we had come up with and sell it online. I had zero experience in the firearms business and even less in manufacturing. Not a good place to start but I didnt feel like I had a choice and had nothing to lose. I had a almost no money and a few thousand more in credit card debt. I had a ex-wife and two kids to support and a mortgage to pay. I had to make this work. I had to make it work fast with no money. I admit, probably not the best place to start a new venture but you have to start somewhere.

We live in a small town in Nortwest Tennessee. Way too small to support a firearms factory using local sales. That much was obvious right from the very start. We were also in a crowded market that has only gotten more crowded since then. I had to figure out how to sell to people outside my local area, and I needed to do it immediately.

So if you get nothing else from this guide then please understand this. Your local area has a limited number of people and a limited number of dollars. The United States has 330 Million people and a lot more dollars. So the question you need to be asking is, "How do I get my inventory in front of those people?"

So how do you sell to people outside your area? Online obviously, but how and what does that look like when you manufacture or sell firearms?

Almost Impossible Challenges

The Gun Business has its own set of challenges unlike most US businesses

The gun business has many limitations on basic business services and vendors. They simply will not do business with anyone dealing in firearms. The scope of the industries with restrictions range from banking and finance through insurance and advertising. The list is long and the restrictions are many. Youll have to start asking yourself questions like, "How do I get a bank account?", "How do I get a credit card processor?", "How do I get insurance?", "How do I advertise?" You have to be persisitent.

This cold censorship has limited my growth and increased my problems more than anything else in the business. You just dont realize how many services are against the firearms business until you are already in business. I have had many of my suppliers and manufacturers simply refuse to do business once they found out I was in the firearms business. I have had my bank account closed and my credit card processor shut down. I have had my insurance cancelled. I have had my advertising accounts shut down. I have had my social media accounts shut down. It's a nightmare. You learn to be incredibly persisitent and resourceful. Outside the box thinking as a way of life.

Business Risk

A local gunstore has some limitations and risk just like any business but the potential liability increases a bit when you start selling out of state. Every state has different legal limitations on accessories and firearms and those regulations are often written in a way that is open to interpretation. You have to be very careful and knowledgable about the laws in each state you sell to. You also have to be very careful about who you sell to. Hopefully you will be shipping to a local FFL dealer that is familiar with the local laws but accessories like magazines and ammo can be shipped directly to the customer so you still need to be careful. Thankfully, the stupidity is mostly limited to the coasts, Colorado, Illinois and the northeast.

Taxes

We are living in the days of internet sales so thankfully the sales tax issue is ( at time of writing) not a terrible problem unless you are doing around 100k of business in that state. Sales made in your home state are treated just like any other sale as if they are standing in your store except for any local taxes. The idea is that when you make a sale in you own state even on the far side of it you are still on the hook for state taxes but not local sales tax. When you sell out of state you are not responsible for any sales tax. Your local customers, even if they buy online, are still paying state and local taxes as if they bought inside the store. This is a good thing. It allows you to compete with the big box stores and online giants. If you are over the 100k mark in a state you might have to start collecting sales tax for that state and typically register with the state's dept of revenue as a business entity, this is called tax nexus. If you ever get that big you will have to hire a tax professional to help you navigate the tax laws. Honestly, its not that big of a deal.

A few of the more conservative states got together and standardized the out-of-state sales tax issue and created a system called the Streamlined Sales Tax Project. This is a system that allows you to register with the SSTP and collect sales tax for all of the states that are members of the SSTP. This is a good thing as it allows you to collect sales tax for all of the member states and then pay it to the SSTP and they distribute it to the member states. Sadly, only 25 states are members of the SSTP so you will still have to register with the other states individually. The SSTP goes a long way toward simplifying sales taxes and I hope more states join. Again, this is only an issue if you are doing around 100k in annual sales in that state or hit a certain number of transactions in that state. Yes, every state has different regulations and it's a pain in the ass.

If your sales are similar to mine, which they will be if you are in the gun business the majority of your online sales will be concentrated in the South, Pacific Northwest, and ... Texas. I swear you cannot stand anywhere in that state without being in range of three of my rifles. They do love to shoot out there, wonderful people. Anyway, those states are typically fairly easy to do business with and the more difficult ones in the Northeast, California, and sadly Illinois are some of the more difficult ones to handle as a gun dealer in all aspects not just taxes.

Marketing

Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. You can have the best product in the world but if no one knows about it you will not sell anything. The gun business is "once again" hampered by limitations on advertising as you wont be allowed to advertise on many of the major platforms. You will have to get creative and find ways to get your message out. You will have to find ways to get your message out to people outside your local area. All the big names like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, etc will not allow you to advertise. The best way I found is to use Email marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You will have to build a mailing list and send out regular emails to your customer list. You get those emails from previous orders ( as long as the customer gives permission) and from people signing up to get emails on your website. You will have to build a website and optimize it for search engines. Social Media and Youtube are still good ways to get your message out but you will have to be careful and not mention firearms or accessories as even if they dont ban you out right they will shadow ban you and limit your reach.

This is where things get tricky. You have to remember this is a marathon not a sprint. Email marketing and SEO are long term strategies that will take time to build up. You will have to be patient and keep working at it. I promise that once you get it going it will be worth it. You will have to be consistent and keep posting good content even though you arent getting much traffic. It will come. Its like screaming in the desert. You have to keep screaming until you look around and find that people are listening.

Your average consumer is hit with thousands of advertisments every day. We are so numb to them that we dont even notice them anymore. The best strategy in your online marketing is to use a method developed by Gary Vaynerchuk called the "Jab Jab Jab Right Hook" method. The idea is that you give your customers three pieces of good content for every one piece of sales content. What this does is shows that you offer value to your customers and that you arent just trying to sell them something. You are building a relationship with them and that is what makes the difference.

Website Options

This choice is going to depend if you want ecommerce sales or not. This isnt as straightforward as you think it would be. If you were in a normal business then the choice is simple. Almost any website builder will do and most have some limited Online Store capability although that will vary wildly in quality and features. If you are in the gun business then you have to be careful. Most website builders will not allow you to sell firearms or accessories. Are you guys starting to see a trend here? So if you arent selling guns then some will even limit you for showcasing guns. You will have to be careful and read the fine print. You wont have nearly as many issues if you arent selling anything but expect there to be issues that come up occasionally. If you arent interested in selling anything you best option is to do with a Wordpress Based website that has a robust blogging feature. You can get some pretty fantastic templates that will showcase your business and if you blog regularly you can generate some pretty impressive traffic in a relatively short time. Depending on what you are writing about you can occasionally sneak it past the social media censors and start getting some organic traffic.

How this might work in practice is lets say you have a gunsmithing and Cerakote business. You CAN build a website that showcases your work and offers practical advice on how to go about the process. They will censor you depending on the level of firearms viewed in the post and how hard you push that it is firearms content. The censorship is built directly into the search algorythms so it is hard to predict what will get through and what wont. You can also use the website to post video content from Youtube and/or Rumble and link back to your website but the same censorship issues will apply. By posting the video on your website and linking back to the website on the Youtube listing you can start to generate some organic traffic but dont be suprised when you find out it was pulled for no reason whatsoever. They will never tell you why and you will never get it back. Its just how they play the game. You can never violate any stated rule and they will never care. It will just be gone.

I would recommend if you are going the no-commerce route to stick with a Wordpress based website and hopefully one that is Open Source ( cant be taken from you) as the worst that will happen is you might need to move your website from one hosting provider to another. This leads me into my next point. As the tech industry is so cancel happy about the gun business it is a best practice to never use the same provider for your domain name, hosting, email, blogging software, ect. Im aware it is incredibly inconvenient but it is a best practice. If you use the same provider for everything and they decide to cancel you then you are out of business. If you use different providers for each service then you can just move the service when one of them decides to get squirrely on you. Do not under any circumstances use a website builder with the domain name, email, and the Drag and Drop builder all in one. If and when they decide to cancel you all that hard work will be for nothing.

The absolute best case would be to have your own website hard-coded and to own and maintain the code yourself. Big Tech CAN limit how you show up in search results but it cant do anything about you existing on the internet. As long as you maintain your domain name and hosting you will always be able to be found. This is the best case scenario but it is also the most expensive and time consuming. You will have to hire a web developer and pay them to build and maintain your website. Building your own is very possible and really isnt very hard. There are several courses on Udemy that teach it and MANY free resources on Youtube. Realistically you can learn to build and maintain a static website in a few days at most. If you arent selling anything then this is the best option. If you are selling then you will need to hire a developer to build the ecommerce portion of the website. This is a bit more complicated and you will have other options to consider.

E-Commerce

This is going to be a longer section as there is simply more to it and way more ways of screwing it up. First thing is you need to understand the basic pillars of ecommerce and why they are important.

Three Pillars of Ecommerce

The first pillar of ecommerce and online sales is Website Traffic. Your traffic is the amount of people who wander to your website from all of your traffic sources. Some may link in from Youtube or from an email you send out or they simply find you on a search engine. Your traffic numbers will be pretty low at first but grow over time as search engine bots crawl your website for content and you post more content from blogs and products. You will have to be patient and realize that this is a marathon not a sprint. You will have to be consistent and keep posting good content even though you arent getting much traffic. It will come. Its like screaming in the desert. You have to keep screaming until you look around and find that people are listening. Your traffic will always be measured as a flat rate and a percentage. The flat rate is the total number of people who visit your website. This should be tracked daily weekly montly and yearly to establish sales trends. This number is very important but it is not as important as your conversion rate.

Your Conversion Rate is the second pillar of ecommerce and is both the holy grail and most ignored metric in online sales. People tend to concentrate on traffic numbers and not on the most important metric that measures how many people are buying. Does having a thousand people on your site mean anything if nobody ever buys anything? No. You have to have a good conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and actually buy something. Typically, a decent conversion rate is around 2% to 4% of your traffic. This means that for every 100 people who visit your website 2 to 4 of them will buy something. This is a good conversion rate. If you are getting less than 2% then you need to look at your website and see what is wrong. If you are getting more than 4% then you are doing something right. You need to figure out what it is and do more of it. All of these numbers are going to be different for every business and every market. Mine has ranged from less than 1% to almost 10% depending on what the market is doing and what I am doing. I like to keep it around 4% to 5% and I am happy with that.

Why are all these numbers important you ask? Fair question, I'll explain. So you have 300 people a week hitting your website. You didnt pay much attention to your website so your conversion rate is around .25%. This is the number most people are at who dont watch their numbers. So you have 300 people a week hitting your website and about 1 person a week buying something. So the next week you clean your website up just a little bit by taking better pictures or being just a little most descriptive on your website and your conversion rate goes up to 1%. Now you have 3 people a week buying something. You didnt change anything else. You didnt get more traffic. You didnt change your prices. You didnt change your products, but you have increased your sales by 300%. You have tripled your sales by making a few small changes to your website. This is why you need to pay attention to your numbers. Conversion Rate changes are the biggest contributor to your bottom line every week. Typically we are talking about small changes that can have big results. Even half a percentage point can equal hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra sales every year. It did for me.

I didnt always watch my conversion rate like I do now. Prior to me writing our website from scratch our conversion rate was hovering at a somewhat reliable 0.94% but we were still doing around 600k in business every year. We were still making money and I had always told myself that those numbers were just a part of the business. I was wrong. I was leaving money on the table. I wasnt paying attention to the numbers. Once I moved the business into a website that I wrote from scratch that was optimized for the gun industry and I started paying attention to the numbers I was able to increase my conversion rate to around 4% and my sales went up exponentially. Sounds like a big change but when you think about it I just had to convince three more people out of every hundred. That was the difference between 1% and 4% and it made all the difference in the world. Have you ever been on a website that was hard to use or had old pictures and you just gave up and wandered off? That was that owner leaving money on the table. I was that owner... For YEARS. Please dont be that guy. Pay attention to your numbers, the numbers matter.

The Third Pillar of ecommerce is Average Order Value or "AOV". This is the average amount of money that each customer spends on your website. This is a very important number and you need to pay attention to it. This number is going to be different for every business and every market. You should figure your average order value with your individual item economics. So if you have a product that costs you 10 dollars to make and you sell it for 20 dollars then your average order value is 20 dollars. You made 10 dollars on that order. If you have a product that costs you 10 dollars to make and you sell it for 100 dollars then your average order value is 100 dollars. You made 90 dollars on that order. Average Order Value should be tracked along with your item economics because it will end up being linked with your Shipping Cost. Often you will find that by tweaking your shipping cost you can increase your average order value. This is a good thing. Most customers might add a little bit onto an order to get free shipping or to make the shipping cost more palatable. You will have to play with this number to see what works best for your business.