| You sound naive but hopefully well intentioned. You need an edge, I do not think your skills in making a modern website are enough of an edge (when eBay and Amazon already make purchasing very easy) when it comes to selling products. If you do not have an edge you need to find a rising tide (from rising tide lifts all boats). At this stage Justin Bieber or phone cases are not a rising tide. Let me give you an example of an edge: In 2000 before the first internet bubble popped my Japanese-American friend made $3k net monthly selling hentai DVD boxes on Yahoo Japan. How did he do it? I hooked him up with a distributor in Florida who was dumping a large quantity of $49.95 retail price 3DVD hentai boxes for $7-8ea if taken in quantity 100+. My friend sold them for $90 each on Yahoo Japan and he sold about one a day. So why did this arbitrage work so well? Because of 2-punch, my access to the liquidator and my friend's access to Yahoo Japan and realization that $90 for average hentai series without pixelation would be a good deal in Japan (surely breaking a few decency laws in Japan). It was the realization that the Japanese release of the DVD was censored and the American was not was what gave the extra pricing power. By comparison my US based anime store sold only a few copies at $20-30 in US because it was a very average series. So theoretically my Japanese friend could have made money even buying at American retail and selling in Japan albeit the risks would have been greater. I think Yahoo Japan cracked down on this and also the low price DVDs also dissappeared. Another story: There was a kid from Australia here on HN a few years ago who made very good money in mid 2005-6 selling imitation iPods (buying wholesale in China) on eBay. He was not misrepresenting them as iPods but people though they were. Eventually Apple enforcement got stronger + Chinese sellers started selling them themselves and the business dried up. His edge was the rising boat of people still clamoring for iPods pre smart phones + average buyers confusion that iPod was not a generic term. This is Economics 101 whenever there is a huge value capture, there will be new entrants in the market. The darker side is tha often the value capture comes from breaking a law somewhere. You need to ask yourself whether you can live with this. |