[joshvm]

I made a bit of money flipping things during the Black Friday sales - a bit of retail arbitrage. I didn't make much, but I got a lot of airmiles out of it.

My experience with FBA was very positive and actually made me consider finding something to sell. For me the main advantages were a) if you sell on Amazon using FBA, you get to use Prime services and people will preferentially choose that over 3rd party sellers on their own b) Amazon will (for a small cut) deal with all the shipping, packing, returns and so on. Shipping was pretty cheap and the UPS van picked up the stuff directly from my house.

It's so heavily automated that aside from the initial shipment to the warehouse - I don't believe you're allowed to dropship direct to them from China - you can sit back and forward parcels to them and they'll do absolutely everything else. The small overhead in warehouse and handling fees is well worth the peace of mind I think.