It started as a side hustle. Will Basta was working in corporate healthcare tech enterprises and startups when his love for alternative investments led him to an underserved niche — people who want to invest in the booming eCommerce industry, without having to build their own eCommerce store.
“I’ll always believe in real estate long term,” Basta, founder of Ascend E-Com, said to Ricci Truong of the CamaPlan Podcast, “but at the end of the day, it’s a very inflated market. And the stock market is obviously volatile. [But] what is constantly growing through economic downturns is Amazon.”
“Who doesn’t want a piece of a $4.8 trillion eCommerce market globally?” he said.
Basta, who owns several Amazon stores in his own right, now helps investors diversify their portfolios and expand into eCom by building their Amazon stores for them, from the ground up.
This isn’t a fly-by-night operation. Since quitting his job to make his side hustle a full-time business, Basta grew Ascend Ecom from 10 clients to 350 clients in roughly a year and a half, pushing over $30 million in revenue to client businesses.
And with a Texas-based staff of 80, that’s a lot of boots on the ground. Basta deploys those boots to add value to his clients.
“We go to liquidation centers throughout Texas for products that you cannot find anywhere online,” Basta said, “just to sell for our clients at 70% margins. Things like Dyson Vacuums and Sonos Speakers and things that are insane.”
Basta encourages his clients (who range in age from 22 to 70, from their first eCom store to their 50th) to think of their eCom stores this way — as “alternative investments.” They get a “done-for-them” passive investment solution — including training on how to use business loans to leverage their equity.
“They’re essentially paying a premium to get a head start and skip the line in the industry,” Basta said, “and then have a team of experts handle the entire investment for them.”
