Jumpstart your ecommerce journey by buying an existing Shopify business

Just a head's up: This post contains affiliate links. If you click some of the Exchange Marketplace links in this post, Out of the Sandbox may receive a small percentage of the sale price. 

Although starting a Shopify store from the ground up with your own products or services can be a great way to begin a side hustle or even a full time job, there’s another way to get your piece of the ecommerce pie — by purchasing an existing ecommerce store.

While there are a number of ways to do this, Shopify owns and operates what it calls the Exchange Marketplace, which is designed to make it easier for stores to be bought and sold with transparency and security.

• In most listings, you can see the actual store for sale so you know what you’re buying.
• In some cases, store owners like to keep their stores private, but once you get into more serious negotiations, it’s possible to get a look at the actual store.
• Each listing indicates what’s included in the sale of the store — whether it be social media accounts, inventory, customer lists and more.
• Traffic and revenue data is pulled directly from the store’s backend admin and can’t be modified, so you can trust the stats you see. Data also typically includes trends over time, showing any growth in the business.
• Owner-provided data on expenses for running the business as is.

Here is a current selection of stores we spotted (as of the time of this writing — Oct. 15, 2018) that were built with Out of the Sandbox Shopify themes.

As time goes on, some of these listings may become inactive as they are either sold or removed, so if you encounter a dead link, you can still browse all the stores available here.

• Bolder Bands Headbands (Turbo)
• McdodoTech (Parallax)
• Glamour Heights (Turbo)
• Crocodile Wear (Retina)
• Shop Fragola (Parallax)
• Curve Chic (Parallax)
• Red Label Eyewear (Turbo)
• The Stockplace (Responsive)