Online shop/Trading/how to make a living

Hellotree

Hello all,
I have been researching different ways of trying to make a living from online trading. I essentially want to open a shop online. What area would be best to try and make a living out of? Does amnyone have any ideas? A growth area

_Brian

Hellotree wrote: »

Hello all,
I have been researching different ways of trying to make a living from online trading. I essentially want to open a shop online. What area would be best to try and make a living out of? Does amnyone have any ideas? A growth area

I think you need to do the legwork yourself, it's not as simple as coming onto a forum and asking people to spoonfeed you a profitable idea

Personally the fact that your asking such a basic idea means the whole project is dead already.

Corvus Libros

You can make money selling anything that people want to buy. Whether you can make a living at it just depends on your profit margin and volume of sales, in other words sourcing quality stock cheaply enough and putting in the work.

Start by selling something you know about as a consumer, so you know what buyers are looking for.

Hellotree

Thank you for the input

Digital_Guy

What research have you done so far Hellotree?

JMR

Hellotree wrote: »

Hello all,
I have been researching different ways of trying to make a living from online trading. I essentially want to open a shop online. What area would be best to try and make a living out of? Does amnyone have any ideas? A growth area

Sorry, but this is ridiculous

If somebody posted something like the following....
"Hi, I am thinking of opening a shop, what kind of shop should I open and what should I sell?"
it would seem blatantly ridiculous to all!
An online business is no different than any other business, it is a business that happens to trade online

CeilingFly

Hellotree wrote: »

Hello all,
I have been researching different ways of trying to make a living from online trading. I essentially want to open a shop online. What area would be best to try and make a living out of? Does amnyone have any ideas? A growth area

Online retail is extremely difficult.

The general consensus from those who like the idea but don't have experience in the area is that its "easy". Stick up a few products and they'll come in droves.

The reality is different.

Imagine a shopping centre 100 times the size of Dundrum 20 floors high and all customers must come through the doors of the first floor. Let's call it Internet Town Centre (domain internettowncenter.com is available )

The big name retailers who have massive resources, buying teams, marketing teams, merchandise display teams, factories etc etc have all the best locations on the first three floors, (think amazon, boohoo, asos, ocado, tesco, debenhams etc etc) then the next set of guys with good resources, buying teams etc but not as big as the top guys. They will take the next 3 levels.

Then you have the specialist smaller guys who know their product inside out, have good social media following, good blogs, good marketing skills and are in this for the long haul. They take up the next few floors. One of these floors is probably rented by Ebay and they put their "farmer's market" on that floor.

Then you have those who have very little experience who think its a good idea because some poluticians with no experience said it was the future or some local in the pub thought the auld internet thingy was amazing, or some "journalist" wrote a piece that all business should be online - these stores are on floor 18, 19 & 20.

A few, very few will travel up to those floors, bypassing all the slick megabucks stores below, mostly they will do it out of altruism or because they are part of a small minority that look for something different and decide to trawl the upper levels of this huge shopping centre.


I work with a company that has a strong online store in conjunction with a major brand. We're probably on floor 8 / 9 in above scenario. We do good turnover, we make a small profit. We're 8 years at it. Its BLOODY hard work and I mean really hard. Site always has to look fresh, new products always need to be added. Delivery systems have to be foolproof. Prices must compare well with every store selling the same product in Europe - particularly the UK.

In another thread you are thinking of Jewellery - that's the LAST product I'd sell unless I was a superb designer selling my own designs. With jewellery you are competing with stores worldwide due to how small the package is and thus low shipping costs.



So the thought is sound, but the execution of the tought will almost certainly fail as you need a lot of skillsets to make online retailing successful.