Getting Started with Trinity · Chapter 1 of 15
Where the orders come from
Before you set anything, it helps to know where sales actually come from on a Trinity store. These are the last 90 days on our own store, which sells firearms, ammunition, optics and accessories and lists on GunBroker.
| Channel | Orders (90 days) | Revenue | Average order |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website | 996 | $643,350 | $646 |
| GunBroker | 1,720 | $971,168 | $565 |
| Phone orders and invoices | 12 |
GunBroker brings more orders than the website on our own store. That surprises most new dealers. The website brings the better average order and the repeat customer, and it is the one you own.
Where the website orders come from
Every website order on Trinity records where the shopper came from. On our own store over 90 days:
| Source of the order | Orders | Share | Average order |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search engines, direct visits and everything else | 579 | 58% | $648 |
| gun.deals | 285 | 29% | $658 |
| WikiArms | 109 | 11% | $635 |
| AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini) | 23 | 2% | $503 |
Two price comparison sites bring four of every ten website orders. On a new store they bring seven of ten, because search engines have not caught up yet. The AI assistants are new, small and growing: 23 orders in 90 days came from someone asking ChatGPT where to buy something.
Where the visitors come from
People sessions on our own store in the last 30 days, by the site that sent them (robots removed): Google 6,053, gun.deals 5,201, WikiArms 1,739, DuckDuckGo 417, Bing 325, ChatGPT 119, Yahoo 105, Reddit 66, Brave 57. About 49,000 people sessions in all, 354 web orders. Roughly one visitor in 140 buys.
Visitors from gun.deals and WikiArms are 60 percent on a phone. They arrive on a product page, already knowing the price, and either buy or leave. That is why the price has to be right before the visitor arrives.
What kind of orders
- 45 percent of our website orders need an FFL transfer. The rest are accessories, optics and ammunition.
- 68 percent of the lines ship straight from the distributor to the customer or the customer's FFL (drop ship), 27 percent ship to our store first, 4 percent come off our own shelf.
- About 10 percent of website orders end up cancelled or refunded: declined cards, customers who change their mind, items that sold out at the distributor between the order and the pull. Plan for it.
Three kinds of store, three kinds of result
The dealers we host run their stores very differently, and the results track the choices, not the size of the shop.
| The store | What it does | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| A firearms only dealer who drop ships | Sells guns only. Prices at distributor cost or a few dollars over it, per distributor fees of about 1 percent plus $12.50 to $20 on some, one flat shipping rate per gun stated in the feed, no card fee, 89 percent drop ship. Moved an existing following to Trinity this fall. | 1,320 orders and $964,000 in his first 23 days, about 57 orders a day, average order $730. 52 percent of orders came from gun.deals. 71,000 people visited in 30 days, most of them from gun.deals, Reddit and Google. |
| A new store that launched in early October | Full catalog (80 percent accessories, ammo and optics by count), seven distributors, gun.deals, WikiArms and AmmoSeek feeds. Started with markups of 20.5 percent on items costing $100 to $500 and 14.5 percent on $500 to $1,000, trimmed to 15.5 and 11.5 a week later. | 11 orders in the first eight days (1.4 a day) while priced above competing stores on the same items. Cut the markups to 7.5 percent: 98 orders in the next 12 days (8.2 a day). 71 percent of orders came from gun.deals and WikiArms. |
| A store that leans on GunBroker | 67,000 GunBroker listings from its distributor feeds, website with gun.deals. | In 30 days: 225 GunBroker orders ($29,400, average $131, mostly accessories) and 34 website orders ($18,700, average $551). 65 percent of the website orders came from gun.deals. |
| A store that relies on search only | Never signed up with gun.deals or WikiArms. Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo send its visitors. Card fee on, pay in person on. | 51 website orders in 90 days ($27,600, average $541), growing from 21 to 30 orders a month. Google 857 sessions, DuckDuckGo 480, Bing 398, Facebook about 210 in 30 days. |
| A store with the highest shipping in the fleet | about $30 per gun, $20 per accessory, and $21 plus $6 a box for ammunition. Built its gun.deals feed but never applied to gun.deals, so it was never pulled. | 3 website orders in 90 days. Its sales are GunBroker (36 orders). |
The pattern is not subtle. The stores that sell are competitive on price, keep shipping fair, and are listed where shoppers compare prices. The stores that do not sell are expensive, charge high shipping, or are not listed anywhere.