Anyone on here have any success with running an online business? I keep researching and what seems to come up most are the following ideas:
Drop shipping from supplies, and selling on Ebay or Amazon
FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)
Direct Sales
Affiliate Marketing

Anyone dabble any of these and have success?

Thanks Ags

Are your customers needing those things?

Hey agpower,

I have done all of those, and thankfully was able to transform it intl a succesfull business. Here are my comments.

1. Dropshipping - its not really a business, its more and opportunity / atm machine if you do it right, but anyone can do it, so it ends up being the wild west in ecommerce. The real value is creating a brand / private label some products, and start from there.

2. Amazon - time to market is about 2-3 months, and you need to know what you are doing, you will get sales but its a slow start.

3. Affiliate marketing is the same as #1 in my opinion, no real value, you dont own the customer.

My recommendation, would be to do #1 to start but develop into a private label brand, even if its soap or whatever, get your customers and then sell them more.

I have a friend that makes a really nice living running an Ebay store. I won't say what sort of the core of his sales are (nothing illegal). He said supplier relations is the key to making it work.

I know he tried drop shipping for a while in addition to his store and said it wasn't really worth his time.

I have a friend that has started Amazon based businesses and created private labeled products... can't say he is Super wealthy, but he makes a very good living and he is constantly growing it. He has been doing it for a couple years now and he said the biggest problem is working within the constraints of Amazon itself.

I have another friend that got incredibly rich doing affiliate marketing. He started about 10 years ago and has now left the industry to start his own privately backed private equity company. He said that while competition has increased a ton in the affiliate marketing space, that it is still possible to get wealthy. He recommends charlesngo.com and stmforum.com for resources to get started. He also recommends that you probably need $10k and not to expect to make money for 6 months or so.

If I were looking to do any of this, I would probably start with affiliate marketing.

Website flipping?