No Website, no product & no customers - but you can still start your own business!

Photo courtesy of pixabay.com

Starting a business from scratch takes a website, a quick selling product, and of course customers. The problem is that to develop all those things takes time, and more importantly money. When you are just starting out with a part-time home-based business you have little of either. What if there was a way to start a business without having all those things up front?

There is. Actually, there are many: eBay, Etsy, Amazon, to name the biggest ones. OK, you have heard all the get-rich-quick sales pitches online about starting your own business and yes, they are all false. None of these services will make you rich overnight. What they will do, however, is allow you to get started with your own business.

Yes, it will take time and dedication, but the goal is to learn from it and the beauty about these services is that they allow you to start about as small as you need to meet your requirements. Even if you already have a busy home life and you have very little money to start, you can build an online business with these services.

I am not going to single out any specific platform as the best. Nor is this going to be a tutorial for any specific one. The fact is, they all have pros and cons, and some are better suited to certain businesses than others. What I want to lay out below is how these services will build a web presence, select products to sell and find customers for you.

A Web Presence

Let’s face it, having a website is a lot of work and/or expensive. If you have someone create it for you, it could cost up to $2500 for a very basic commercial site. You could opt for a make-your-own site like Wix or SquareSpace, but that will take a lot of time to learn. The biggest issue is that while you are learning, you are not generating any income, yet you are already paying for the service. You would be starting with debt no matter how you set up the website.

Of course, you could skip a website altogether and just set up some social media accounts. You have heard about those “influencers” making money hand-over-fist selling shirts and jewelry through their Instagram accounts. It is so easy even a teenager in high school can do it, so surely with your college degree you should be able to do this as well. Think again. The part that is always left out is that they already have a large following by the time they start selling, but you do not.

This is where selling platforms can really help. They are already online. They have social media already figured. Most importantly, they are using sophisticated metrics to maximize their online presence using teams of programmers. They have already figured it out, and they get better at it every day.

Perhaps the key factor is that they want you to be successful online. Because they take a small share of your profits every time you sell something, it is their interest for you to succeed as a seller. Considering all the resources they have, that is one wonderful friend to have on this journey.

Finding your first products to sell

OK, so this will require some investment. You must purchase items that you plan to sell… Actually, let me backtrack on that point as well. You could search your house for items to sell. This is not exactly a bad idea, at least to get started. The advantage about this is that you do not need to stock any inventory (you already have it) and you are getting rid of things more profitably than trashing them or giving them away.

This, however, is not the path to riches. Most things people have laying around the house is worth perhaps 1/10th what it cost when it was new. Yet there are exceptions. Let me name a few that I know about:

There is a famous story about a large family that started selling the clothes that all the children had outgrown. This went rather well, so then they started collecting clothes from family and friends. When that ran out, they started collecting clothes from everyone in the neighborhood. Then they started hitting garage and estate sales buying boxes of clothes at a time. Their income continued to grow year after year until they had an efficient system that generated millions.

OK, so that sounded a bit too much like a sales-pitch, I know. But it is a true story and there are many like it. There are also examples closer to home. I know an electrical engineer who was downsized out of a job. He was not much of people person and an immigrant who spoke little English. However, but he was a very good engineer. He started buying up vintage electronics in bulk at goodwill stores and estate sales. He would repair them and resell them. He now makes more money doing that than he ever did as an engineer.

One final example, because it shows that age does not need to be a factor. I know an older gentleman who had a large stamp collection from when he was a young boy. He started selling the stamps individually and made a nice little side-income with a commodity that very few people even think about anymore. The last time I spoke to him he was still doing well. Good for him.

So why did I bring up these examples? This is because they all have two key details in common: (1) they all started with a product that they had easy access to, and (2) once they started, they began to buy in bulk and sold items piecemeal. Those are two key points to keep in mind about finding products to sell.

Finding other products to sell

Now for those who live in a home after a Marie Kondo make-over, or who really do not have much of anything at all, there are still options, but they are not free. So this will require an initial investment. Staring a reseller business can be very inexpensive, but if there is one area where you should invest it is in finding good products to sell, after all, you are not spending it on a website…

So where to find products? Quite simply: from the same service that you are planning to use. Almost all major services sell products in bulk. Better yet, you could buy in bulk on one platform (i.e., eBay) and then resell individual items on another (Amazon). This works well for mass-produced products like music CDs for example. The engineer that I mentioned above sometimes buys broken items on eBay and then he fixes them, but he is always on the lookout for lots of bulk items too.

Also consider that some products are more in demand in different markets. For example, the second largest online marketplace is Ali Baba, and focuses on Chinese and Far East customers. You could for example sell unique American made products there. International commerce does require a little bit more work, but most of the major sites try to make this as seamless as possible. Some of the Hi-Fi products I have sold were sent overseas and while there is more risk, there is also greater profit in selling unique American products abroad – and doesn’t it sound cool to be able to say you are an international exporter of exotic goods?

You could also sell more mundane products like shipping supplies, phone cases, or hand sanitizer. Again, the key is to buy them in bulk and resell them piecemeal. I know one seller that sells plastic bags (no kidding). She buys them in pallet-sized quantities and then repackages them into smaller bundles for resale. “It ain’t Zuckerberg money, but it pays the lease on my Lexus” as she put it so eloquently. By the way, the Lexus is on a business lease, so that is a tax write-off as well.

Of course, buying inventory in bulk is an expense that cuts into the profits. It is not the best place to start, but it is a start. As I mentioned above, this process is not so much about generating huge profits, but rather for learning how to get started. Even if you just barely break even, you gain two other important benefits besides a hands-on education in running your own business: a convenient source for tax write-offs (every business has write-offs), and a better understanding for what works, thus allowing you to fine-tune the process to increase revenues.

Finding Customers

Amazon is the largest online shopping site in the world with 150 million Prime members and about as many mobile users. No to be outdone, eBay has over 180M shoppers world-wide. Etsy is no slouch either with over 45M users. Now how likely would it be for your website to have hundreds of millions of eyeballs perusing your products? Exactly.

When using these services, you do not have to search for buyers because they are already there. Of course, you are also competing with other businesses for those customers, but with millions of shoppers, some are bound to fall on your online store as well.

What is even more interesting is that when you put your products up for sale, the entire service is queried to guide you with appropriate pricing and selling strategies for your products. This helps you find more customers and makes your items stand out. This is because, as I mentioned before, these services want you to succeed because if you generate more income, so do they.

Finding customers, then, is already baked in. You don’t need to worry about it, and that is a very nice thing to be able to say.

Conclusion

Starting a business online does not need to be expensive or require a lot of startup cash. As a matter of fact, much of the work has already been done. It is just a matter of getting started and even that is a guided affair with lots of help along the way.

Personally, I have used eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and several smaller niche sites for specific products. I also have a couple of e-commerce sites that are for specific products. I consider each one a separate revenue stream which helps me hedge against unforeseen downturns in specific product lines or entire industries (as we have seen with the pandemic).

No, I have not earned massive amounts of income, but I have learned a tremendous amount about what I am able to realistically do as a small business. I have leaned heavily on the help that these services provide which has helped me streamline and focus on the most profitable areas of the business. This has also helped me develop my own e-commerce sites to be leaner and more profitable. That is one more advantage of building a reseller business with these services: the information we gather and the skills we develop carry over into other areas of our lives.

Even if the income does not generate millions overnight, it has tremendous value to start a business using these services. Perhaps the most important lesson you will learn is how to improve over time. This in turn can become more profitable over time, too. Whether you just start a reseller business to learn from it or stay with it to generate very real income, you cannot ignore all that you will learn along the way.

If anything, you can no longer use the excuse that you do not have a website, products, or customers.