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Comment by il | Hacker News Reader

These types of e-commerce businesses are not something you hear

I'm trying to do something similar right now as a side project. I'm not selling t-shirts, but the economics are similar. If you actually research it, it takes very little startup capital(several thousand dollars) to go to a manufacturer and create your own product, even professional-looking consumer packaged goods.

These types of business may not attract investors or get acquired, but it's a great way to generate easy, automatic income streams while you work on something bigger.

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I've been wanting to hear more about this type of business, but don't really know a good source that covers it. For example, the other day there was a story on here about a site that had just reached 200 subscribers paying $10/month after I believe 2 years. It was a lot of work and more successful than most apps will ever be. It was a really interesting read, but got me thinking: wouldn't it have been easier/more profitable to get into e-commerce?

I battle with this every day. I've done e-commerce in the past, and would say I did pretty well (over £70,000 turnover in the first year). I've also built dozens of e-commerce sites for other people and advised them on how to achieve success. With my existing code, I could probably build an e-commerce site by this time tomorrow, then spend a few hours populating the site and bang... with PPC advertising I could have orders coming in by the end of the week.

The problem is, it's too easy - there's no challenge there for me and running an e-commerce site is a lot of hassle, especially if you ship products yourself, hold inventory etc etc.

That's why at the moment, I'm focusing on my stock photo startup, it's more of a challenge, and if it works how I hope it will, it should require less physical work on my part (no shipping products etc).

Fulfillment is relatively cheap and you benefit from significant postage discounts. There's no reason you should be shipping products yourself.

It's difficult and usually becomes more about managing business finance than the products in my opinion. It seems like this type of business is mostly covered in Entrepreneur magazine, or Inc, but they're always feel good success stories.

I helped build a fairly successful online business that sold a single laptop accessory which we had produced, packaged by hand, and sold directly to consumers. The site generated 60k in yearly revenue on somewhere between 5-10k (Christmas peaked at 20k+) unique visitors per month. The margins were really good since we had it produced ourselves and priced high. It was great business while it lasted but I ended up walking away from it because of partner issues.

My old partner still operates it today and it's nearly 4 years later! She tells me that it still generates about half of what it did at peak, but it's slowly fading away because of bigger companies that deliver a better, and cheaper product.

It's great experience and takes time but isn't hard to do.

I've read both magazines and agree that there is not much depth to their coverage (or most business magazines for that matter). My background is in math/business, so I do enjoy the logistics and finance aspects. The interesting challenge seems to be the initial market research/product development. Finding the right thing to sell and then putting together that thing seems to be the toughest part (someone correct me if I'm wrong because I have no experience in this).

The web in general is flooded with stores selling the same dropshipped products, so to stand out I believe someone has to take the path you did and have something unique produced, otherwise you're just competing with Amazon and the like.

I remember reading an article in Business 2.0 about "micro-multinationals" [1] and the thought has always been in the back of my mind to try creating a completely distributed company, with ecommerce being the initial distribution channel. Work and grad school kept me too occupied to give it much thought, but reading about things like this always reminds of the article.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

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