There’s a new ad circling around from Jay Jones that promotes his website OnlineAssets.com . As you might remember, it starts off with “If you are looking to buy an already cash flowing business, like Amazon stores or Shopify brands, you are in the right place. Here’s an overview of our online cash flowing store inventory. A look under the hood of our digital assets, if you will. We have multiple existing ecommerce businesses for sale that are one to two years old and already making money.” I’m sure you’re looking for more business details on this guy, so scroll down for my full Online Assets review.
While it might seem pretty crazy, some of these stores do actually pull in 10k per month in revenue. So you can’t really expect something like that to be cheap. In fact, Jay is pretty upfront when he says that he basically doesn’t want you to reach out to him unless you have 50k to hand over: “We do not have anything for sale for less than that,” Jay stresses. “Our ecommerce stores are real businesses, not internet automation marketing schemes. If you do not have at least $50,000, you will not be able to work with us or buy a functioning business.” At least he’s honest. But hey, I don’t believe you need $50k to have a functioning business. In fact I know that’s not true because I personally started with less. But more on that later.
So look, there’s no way around this next part. Jay says that to work with him, you have to have some kind of business line of credit. After the initial investment, you’re going to need to fund the ads and software products that are needed to operate. If you’re relying on cash and debit, that’s just gonna move too slow for Jay to keep his attention. He demands that you have 20k minimum in business credit. If you don’t though, he will be patient with you and create a plan to get you the right types of cards.
These guys seem to focus quite a bit on quality control. In fact, when you reach out to them, they might not even have any stores available because they’re so focused on keeping all their current stores dialed in. Because of this, they believe you are way less likely to fail here as compared to creating an ecom store on your own. And remember, these stores are already producing sales as well.
“Studies tell us 99% of (small) businesses fail within the first year,” Jay continues. “Which is why we don’t buy anything that’s less than 12 months old. Everything we acquire has a proven process in place that we can improve upon with our team and network. Because we buy this way, all businesses under our management have a 100% success rate. If not, we will buy the store back from you within a 24 month period. Meaning, if the store you buy does not make your initial acquisition price within the first two years, we’ll buy it back from you for the difference not generated.”
Realistically, Your ROI on this as a business owner should be about 5-6 months assuming the 10k per month cash flow and 50k starting cost. However it could be a little longer or shorter depending on how quick everything picks up once you buy. So now this begs the question: if these stores are so good, why sell? I guess you have to look at like house flipping. They’ll buy a store, service it with the work it needs, and look to sell it to someone for a significant amount and move on to the next store. Apparently they’ve done this over 100 times now, so they’re pretty confident in their results they can get for investors like yourself.
I won’t lie to you though. The end of the ad is pretty shady and this is a major key of your decision right? So Jay goes into the back of “his” Shopify account to show you some of the stats about the stores. And sure, while I do believe privacy is important…something just seems off. Why can’t we look at just one digital asset? Surely that’s not too much to ask for right? Something else that makes me scratch my head is that on their landing page, they say they’ve been featured in news outlets like NBC, FOX, and Medium, but upon further investigation…I found them nowhere. To top the sketchiness off, their one an only testimonial is from a guy named Igor. And that testimonial wasn’t really confidence inspiring. He said he might have a six-figure payout in 2 years from these e commerce businesses…keyword MIGHT. Yeah I don’t think I can really recommend this to anyone.
