And yet I had a feeling it was successful (as far as small businesses go), mainly because I feel like I’ve seen the site before (or something similar). That and my friend hawking the site on FB for some reason. So then I looked up the owner of the site through DNS tools, and voila, the address of a very nice, large home in Yorba Linda came up, occupied presumably by a woman (if you want your info public, hide it when you sign up for sites, or use an alt. address). It sounded like my hunch was correct.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is to invoke some confidence in my peers who may be thinking about starting a e-tailer business, one of the easiest types to start it seems like. The hardest part seems to be securing suppliers. I wonder where she gets her stuff. But the website and cart, those are all easy to build these days. And she proves you don’t need a enterprise level site to pull it off. Order fulfillment from a warehouse can be contracted out, too.

Cursory cost rundown:
Website: Cheap.

Design: Use Joomla or some other framework. Free, and fast to style. Probably as easy as configuring WordPress.

Cart: There are free plugin’s for joomla I think. CC processing can be done by Google or Paypal. Or the commonly used Authorize.net. Yahoo has a cart, too. Business minded coders could make their own pretty quickly.

Advertising: Google AdWords. This could get pricey, but you control your spending limits.

SEO: This has been made into some kind of voodoo art form. Find a guy, or try your hand. I’m not really sure what the “best practices” are these days, but I think the gist of it consists of fresh content, no duplicated content, keywords, and inbound links. I think hiding keywords in code gets you punished.

Warehouse: Your house to start off. That seems to be the most common until one can transition to a real warehouse.

Fulfillment: Yourself from your house. But there are lots of companies that specialize in fulfillment. Or you can have FedEx come by. From what I recall, FedEx is not unionized, UPS is, hence FedEx is cheaper, when dealing with negotiated rates. And then there’s USPS. Cheap, but the tracking blows.

DSLR (or whatever you got lying around): $500? So you can take your own photos of your products. Pretty sure that’s what this woman did. My old boss did that, too.

A white board and photo lights: No idea. $200?

Great products: That’s a tough one. Selling spoons will probably get you no where.

Suppliers: Better get your charisma on.

Those are the basics to start. The tech-minded person will probably have an advantage. If you’re not tech savvy, find someone who is. Things seem to get more complicated once you try to scale further. Order management software, product management software, accounting software, integration, reporting, personnel, blah blah blah.

Why haven’t I started a business? Because I suck. And I have nothing to sell. Well, I did find a supplier for digital photo frames, but I don’t really have faith in that market. Especially now.

A contest was held to design a new Dutch 5 Euro coin, and a guy named Stani won, using fairly geeky methods and only free software to come up with something that’s actually quite beautiful and modern.

You can read about his detailed methodology and his rationale at his blog.

http://pythonide.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-to-make-money-with-free-software.html

Here’s the executive summary if you’re lazy and don’t feel like looking at diagrams, but I really do suggest reading it:

A list of names of famous Dutch architects are listed radially using a custom font, from most famous to least, as determined by Internet search results, to form an image of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. The reverse side depicts books written by architects, also arranged radially to form a general outline of the Netherlands itself. Birds represent the capitols of each province.

Unfortunately I think his design is better than the actual creation (which you can see at his blog), but that’s what typically happens when things go from concept to production, eh? The coloration is just a bit different.

http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/smartspending/archive/2008/10/06/they-tried-eating-on-25-a-week.aspx

Eric wants to try it, but with “a lot of fried rice.” Day in, day out.

But seriously. Bargains right now. It’s possible they could go even lower, but the prices are pretty good right now. As a disclaimer, I am a complete amateur who prefers to hold things long term. If you follow my “advice” and find yourself in financial ruin, it wasn’t my fault. I recently bought Wamu, and that didn’t turn out so well. But that was my most reckless purchase, ever. It was trading at $2.5 and I figured the worst that could happen is that it went bankrupt. Which is what it did. Oh well, I only put $30 in that.

Anyway, stocks I’ve been eying:

Intel (INTC). Currently trading at $16.38. These guys aren’t going anywhere, and that’s a very good price. A 5 year low actually.

Google (GOOG). If you believe in the Google craze, $360 is pretty good for one share of Google. I’m still sketchy on its long term price though, but it’s proven me wrong.

AMD (AMD). Intel’s main competitor. This isn’t a strong pick at all. It’s better than Wamu, but still. It’s going for very cheaply, $4.04 at the moment. If you got a reserve for “wild gambling”, this would be the place. I don’t think it’ll go bankrupt anytime soon, so I feel like it should go back up, but…who knows.

NVIDIA (NVDA). Graphics leader for quite some time. Going pretty cheaply, too. $7.41. I would normally say “BUY BUY BUY” with this one, but it’s facing a lot of uncertainties (this may or may not be obsolete, since I haven’t looked into it in awhile). 1) AMD. If AMD manages to get its shit together, NVDA will have some strong competition, especially in light of 2) Intel is joining the graphics fray, and recently cockblocked Nvidia from using certain motherboard technologies with their processors. This two-pronged attack could go badly for Nvidia. Although, I think it all hinges on AMD. If AMD keeps dying, Intel will have no motivation to help Nvidia. If AMD rises again, Intel may want to get buddy buddy with Nvidia.

ArcelorMittal (MT). Steel. BIG steel. I’m not too familiar with this industry, which usually should throw a red flag, but it’s going pretty cheaply, too. Demand around the world has fallen, but eventually should go up again. Who knows when. 5, 10 years? $36.70.