For the period of 2008 to 2014 I built and ran an online webshop[1] selling Bath bombs and soaps - the product was specifically picked because in 2008 there wasn't that many online shops selling low cost bath products in the UK.
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.
A little bit of social media (twitter posts, product page on FB), and a big push via Google AdWords at Easter and Christmas. Sales tended to be fairly seasonal so we focused on those periods.
Also, spent a lot of time getting the meta tags on every product page exactly right - which I felt (at the time) was the benefit of rolling my own shop front-end instead of using one of the pre-made big name shop engines.
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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[1] http://www.jaruzel.com/files/fuzzybuttons-2012.jpg