What I did differently was I wrote everything from scratch, built the product databases, designed the graphics, wrote the front and back ends etc. I did it mainly as a learning exercise.
It never made enough money for me to live on, but for someone with modest outgoings it could have replaced their income. Sales started to drop off as the site design started looking dated and due to no mobile device support. I was busy with my better paying day-job at the time, and had no impetus to fix the problems.
I'm about to do the same again, but this time using dropshipping for stock and delivery, and I also intend to blog my journey (mainly as a record of what I've done) as I create each element of it, once again as a learning exercise using more modern tools/platforms.
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