wholesale & retail, online or physical

Since I started my own business, I have flipped back and forth between online sales and a brick and mortar store, between so-called "passive" income opportunities and getting into sales of some sort of product. Perhaps the real winning recipe is a mixture of both, assuming that you have the time, finance and energy.

Just like your favorite pay-per-click opportunities, some of the best sales solutions are still the arbitrage-enhanced "buy low, sell high" products. For example, when I was looking at starting my own record store several years back (a dream that was killed by the bank and by MP3 technology), I was looking into stocking several items in the store that brought bring a higher profit than the music, because everybody knows that record companies don't give retailers a very good wholesale price on CDs. One of the items that I had run across was sunglasses. You've seen them in music stores - the $15 special that looks like a $50 name brand. In most cases, people have no reservation snatching these up, because they are getting a great deal when compared to the real, overpriced thing.

You can still get great deals on wholesale replica sunglasses, some selling as low as $1.33 a pair. Best of all, you're not selling illegal knockoffs as long as you don't buy anything fake with the real products brand name on them. Everybody loves a deal, and I've had generic knockoffs that outlasted the real thing two or three times over. Buying products for their "name" is ridiculous in this age of global consumer markets.